The six-hour boat ride from Naxos to Piraias, the main post of Athens, was quite nice; actually, it was preferable to the fast-boat because we had plenty of room to move around and go out onto the deck. People had been telling me for weeks about the incredible color of the water in Greece. It was much more of a blue than anything in the United States, but it was much deeper than the Carribean. Anyway, we were surrounded by it. I got a lot of my book done and caught up on some days of blogging.
Shit hit the fan when we got back into Athens. We had neglected to print the confirmation for our hotel, and we could not remember the address or even the name. Tom thought it was named Miramare, and we spent some time looking for a cab who knew how to get there. Unforunately, the Miramare hotel does not exist in Athens, which we found out after we found an internet café and looked up the reservation. The cab driver took all of four blocks and charged us 15 Euro, to get to the Athena Hotel.
Our hotel was fine, and we decide to proceed directly to the Acropolis, so our driver waits for us. We go do the Acropolis, and many good pictures are taken. We go down and meet our driver again, and he takes us to the Plaka district, for some shopping.
We tell him to meet us an hour later, but we have a good time and we want to stay. We go back to meet him, SPECIFICALLY TO PAY HIM OFF, because, I mean, we could have just screwed him. Tom goves him some cash, and the driver claims he only gave him a ten. Tom is at first distressed because he at first thinks he has misplaced his cash, but it finally dawns on us that the driver palmed Tom's 50 for a ten. I was about to esclalate the situation by simply walking away, but it was requested by other members of the group that I try not to get knifed in a foreign country, so I gave the driver another fifty, and that was that.
Whatever, then we got drunk. I also bought a bunch of gifts at the Plaka, which, by the way, is totally sweet and has cheap food. Our day concluded with shaving Tom's back in our hotel room (copious pictures were taken). Gross!
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
6-Day: OMG no travel
Up to this point, we have not had a single day without some major travel by boat or plane. It has been incredibly ridiculous. Today, however, we are spending the entire day in Naxos.
Tom and I woke up really early and went for a refreshing ocean swim. The trip to the beach is about five minutes, a walking tour which features angry cows, goats, chickens, and fields. There is a quaint restaurant next to the beach at which we had a fantastic lunch of Greek salad, calamari, chicken, tzatziki, and huge beers. Tom went back to the hotel at one point and we then proceeded to do a lot of naked swimming.
We went into town for dinner and retired, prepared but sad about our slow boat to Athens in the morning. Naxos had been incredible.
Tom and I woke up really early and went for a refreshing ocean swim. The trip to the beach is about five minutes, a walking tour which features angry cows, goats, chickens, and fields. There is a quaint restaurant next to the beach at which we had a fantastic lunch of Greek salad, calamari, chicken, tzatziki, and huge beers. Tom went back to the hotel at one point and we then proceeded to do a lot of naked swimming.
We went into town for dinner and retired, prepared but sad about our slow boat to Athens in the morning. Naxos had been incredible.
Day the 5th: Island Transition
Caroline and Hannah come into the room at 5:00 AM, after going to bars for several hours, and they pass out. I had gotten about eight hours of sleep, so I get up to a false dawn and no Tom. I soon found him, however, down at the beach talking to a couple of attractive Asian women. One of them went to Melbourne University and the other went to Cornell.
We talk and the go have breakfast. Tom goes back to the room and goes to sleep; eventually, the Cornell girl and I go swimming in the ocean. This ended up being one of the best mornings of my life (due, in part, to the fact that I usually sleep through them). I sat there, on the beach, under a small tree, and read my book and wathed the people. The people were awesome, especially in the morning; there were big, naked families snapping pictures, couples, friends, and people like me just enjoying the perfect temperature. I was overcome with a profound sense of contented happiness that is somewhat foreign in my experience; different than sitting by the fire with a dog and a good book, different than seeing someone you love do something great, and basically opposite in feeling to the enjoyment derived from personal success. It was more of a sense that everything was right with the world and all of the individual parts of it, and that it would continue to be right as long as places like that beach existed anywhere.
Anyway, I enjoyed this for at least five hours, and then I went and woke up my crew. We had to get to our next island, Naxos. We had some lunch, the legendary Gyro Pita snacks, and took our (again) crazily aggressive taxi back to the main port serving Mikonos. We had another fast boat to Naxos, but we were quite a bit more cramped on this voyage.
We arrived at Naxos without a hitch and took the taxi to our hotel. This driver was considerably less crazy, although he did seem like a character out of a Greek version of Deliverance. We got there fine, and we checked into our "hostel," which was actually a fantabulous resort. It had two absolutely pristine swimming pools, a small dining area, a bar, and wonderful architecture and bougainvillea growing everywhere. Our host, a large and happy Greek who constantly wore t-shirts with ridiculous English saying on them ("Talk dirty to me, please") , told us that they were actually at half capacity even though we didn't see anyone else. It reminded me very strongly of the Miracle Manor. We had dinner at their little bistro, surrounded by their seven mewing cats. The beds were incredibly hard but we had no problem sleeping.
At this point, some discussion of the sunlight in Greece is warranted. The light is completely different than anywhere else in my experience…it looks like something out of a movie. You may remember sequence in Gladiator with the main character dreaming of his wheat fields back home; the scene looks like it had had the contrast increased as well as a lot of other image processing. Everything looked shiny and gorgeous, with clear colors that all went well together. You can get the same effect if you are laying out in the sun and you close you eyes for a long time and then open them.
Everything actually looks like this in Greece. The landscape is gorgeously sparse. However, the light has a different quality; it is almost more blue and colder, but not like a fluorescent light. Everything almost looks like it's made of crystal.
We talk and the go have breakfast. Tom goes back to the room and goes to sleep; eventually, the Cornell girl and I go swimming in the ocean. This ended up being one of the best mornings of my life (due, in part, to the fact that I usually sleep through them). I sat there, on the beach, under a small tree, and read my book and wathed the people. The people were awesome, especially in the morning; there were big, naked families snapping pictures, couples, friends, and people like me just enjoying the perfect temperature. I was overcome with a profound sense of contented happiness that is somewhat foreign in my experience; different than sitting by the fire with a dog and a good book, different than seeing someone you love do something great, and basically opposite in feeling to the enjoyment derived from personal success. It was more of a sense that everything was right with the world and all of the individual parts of it, and that it would continue to be right as long as places like that beach existed anywhere.
Anyway, I enjoyed this for at least five hours, and then I went and woke up my crew. We had to get to our next island, Naxos. We had some lunch, the legendary Gyro Pita snacks, and took our (again) crazily aggressive taxi back to the main port serving Mikonos. We had another fast boat to Naxos, but we were quite a bit more cramped on this voyage.
We arrived at Naxos without a hitch and took the taxi to our hotel. This driver was considerably less crazy, although he did seem like a character out of a Greek version of Deliverance. We got there fine, and we checked into our "hostel," which was actually a fantabulous resort. It had two absolutely pristine swimming pools, a small dining area, a bar, and wonderful architecture and bougainvillea growing everywhere. Our host, a large and happy Greek who constantly wore t-shirts with ridiculous English saying on them ("Talk dirty to me, please") , told us that they were actually at half capacity even though we didn't see anyone else. It reminded me very strongly of the Miracle Manor. We had dinner at their little bistro, surrounded by their seven mewing cats. The beds were incredibly hard but we had no problem sleeping.
At this point, some discussion of the sunlight in Greece is warranted. The light is completely different than anywhere else in my experience…it looks like something out of a movie. You may remember sequence in Gladiator with the main character dreaming of his wheat fields back home; the scene looks like it had had the contrast increased as well as a lot of other image processing. Everything looked shiny and gorgeous, with clear colors that all went well together. You can get the same effect if you are laying out in the sun and you close you eyes for a long time and then open them.
Everything actually looks like this in Greece. The landscape is gorgeously sparse. However, the light has a different quality; it is almost more blue and colder, but not like a fluorescent light. Everything almost looks like it's made of crystal.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Fourth Day: To Greece!
We are happy to wake up at 4 AM, partly because we are heavily jetlagged, and because, after all this, we are finally going to Greece. Sweet deal! Anyway, we successfully take our jet into Athens, and then check out how to get to the isle of Mikonos, our first of three destinations in Greece.
Mikonos is known as the party island, and it is very well known for its large and intense collection of gay bars. Caroline had friends staying there at the same time, so we stayed at basically the same resort as them. It’s also known for its wide variety of gay bars and clubs.
We end up talking to a number of travel agents who book us the tickets for our island adventures. I had literally just traded my $180 for 102 Euros, and was happy to know that I could participate in group expenses, only to see all that money slip away to pay for the ferries. Ridiculous. We were going to have the convenience of taking two fast boats out of the three, which was a plus.
Getting to our boat of course required additional travel. Most ferries in the Greek islands come in and out of Pieraias, the main port. Ours, however, would be departing from Rafina, which was, we were happy to hear, a quaint port town with a beach that was actually closer. We spend about an hour waiting for the shuttle and then make our way down there.
Once there, we have a simply marvelous time at lunch and on the beach. We were finally getting our first taste of Greek sun and water, and it was great. Things were looking up. Our boat came, we boarded it, and had welcome uneveltful passage to Mikonos. I for the first time made the connection between how cool it was that I was reading the book that I am, a textbook on Classical philosophy, at the same time that I am actually here. It makes both experiences better.
After we got off the boat in Mikonos, we find the guy with the sign for our hotel/hostel and ride with him in his suburban. The drive was incredibly scary. There were winding ridge roads and people on scooters all around us, and our driver was sociopathically aggressive; par for the course in Greece it seems. Upon arriving at the hotel, the party nature of the island became more than apparent as bass from techno music poured out of the club not fifty yards from our room.
The first thing was did was go to the beach, and the moment we stepped on the sand we hit a brick wall of sound. The clubs line the beach on Mikonos, and each one is playing a different song, so that if you are actually on the beach all you hear is annoying beat interference and girls screaming. This was not what I needed. We had a couple drinks and then went to dinner. Someone stole my plate of food but the guy gave me another one.
At that point, my path diverged from the rest of my group. Basically, they all went clubbing, and I went to sleep. What a winner, huh?
Day 3: In Paris
Today begins exactly where the previous one left off, unpunctuated by sleep. We’re three hours late, and our bags (precisely: their bags; I did not check any) are missing, and there is nothing we can do about either of these realities. We decide to go to the hotel; there is a driver waiting for us, and he deftly wends his way through the capillaries of Paris to our destination hotel, where the Edwardses are waiting for us. We go have coffee, and the go to an awesome lunch on the parents, which is fantastic, and I instantly fall in love with our waitress. We then proceed to the Notre Dame and see that. Hannah Johnson is very excited about this. Lots of pictures and cigarette smoking proceed.
Hotel Jeu de Paume, where we were put up, is incredible. It seems that there are about ten rooms, and the rest of the hotel is devoted to being well-designed and open-feeling. The rooms were breathtaking, but the interior space of the hotel itself resembled a work of modern art. This was a boutique hotel, surrounded by restaurants, cafes, and foie gras specialty shops not a tenth of a mile from the Notre Dame itself. Incredible.
The rest of the day was spent in somewhat of a haze; we napped, got up for coffee, and went to the local mart and bought cheese and fruit. We took it back to the hotel and dined in their courtyard, wonderfully quaint and accompanied by a fine bottle of champagne that the Edwardses had left for us at the hotel bar for a gift. Tom and I then proceed to pass out, while the ladies go out and take in the Notre Dame at night. Our car will arrive at 4:00 AM, bound for Orly, to take the EasyJet to Athens.
Next Day: Accidental Intermediate Vacation Destination
The help roused us at 11:55, informing us that checkout was at 12:00. We ran around crazily for awhile and eventually found ourselves downstairs, checking out, with our flight to Paris departing at 5:50 PM. We had some time to kill and thought we would consider our recent questionable fortune as a surprise vacation to New York. So, what else does one do when you have all the equipment for being a huge tourist? go to the Empire State Builing! We set off down the street after getting our bearings. I plugged the address into my phone for directions, and it told us that it was about 1/10 of a mile
To make a long story short, we end up at the Chrystler building. Magnificent, truly, but it sadly was without an observation deck or even admittance for those who do not have legitimate business in the building. We had walked through a large stretch of charming street vendors to get there, and we asked some locals about how to get to our destination building, but we ended up just taking the subway there, to the place marked neatly by the red dot on my phone's navigation program.
We do the building, and then go to the airport. Everything goes smoothly, and we get on a plane; one of the large, two-row affairs that have a 2-3-2 seating arrangement, and I am in the middle row between some guy and some woman.
Dr. Clive graduated with his doctoral degree in observation astronomy from Jodrell Observatory, University of Manchester in England, and, as I was to find out from the Internet later, had subsequently won numerous awards in astronomy and astrophysics from institutions worldwide, including the Mchael Penston prize. He was currently working as a millimeter-wave telescope researcher at Caltech, and it was on business that he was speaking at a variety of conferences in Paris, Munich, and at the newly opened facilities of the Large Hadron Supercollider on the Franco-Swiss border. He had been on our plane coming out of Los Angeles, and was sitting next to me.
I had at that point what was certainly the longest continuous conversation of my life. The plane took off two and a half hours late, at which point he was explaining to me about exposure subtraction of galactic contributions to the microwave band in the context of interferometry, a subject about which he happens to be the world's leading expert. We talked about hyperinflation, the Higgs boson, and basically everything. We talked for about seven of the nine hours of the flight, straight. He was depressed about the closing of the Crown City Brewery. He liked to make a little money off nine-ball now and again down at Jake's Billiards. He hated Lisa Randall and the popularization of modern science, even though it paid the bills. He smoked lots of weed. He was 32 and was a charming Brit. We talked about chicks, beer, music and theoretical physics. What a dude, right?
Anyway, we both retired to watch Even Almighty, and we soon landed in Paris, at 10:30 AM, three hours late, to conclude day 2. I wished Dr. Clive luck on his conferences, and after agreeing that the best course of action would be to further discuss matters over pool and a pint at Jake's, we bid farewell. We then found out our luggage was missing.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Day the First: Snafubar
We begin as we begin all things in life, with a trip to the Edwardses, where I stay overnight in anticipation of the flight the next day. Hannah arrives early in the morning, and her father drives us to the airport. All is uneventful in the beginning of the flight.
We were warned of questionable weather in JFK, our connecting airport. I read the entirety of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and half of The Classical Mind, the first in a series of five books on the history of philosophy. The ominous weather predictions turned out to be true, and this is where our path diverges from the expected.
Originally, we were going to connect with another American Airlines flight to Charles de Gaulle airport, with an hour and a half layover. The ground conditions forced us into a holding pattern, and the holding pattern forced us into a low-fuel situation. We had to land at Logan. Not the correct airport, though we did try to stay on the sunny side by envisioning terminal-located Legal Seafood Crabcakes and Chowder in our future. We were subsequently told that we would not be leaving the plane for the next couple hours.
On the ground, we got a bearing on the status of our connecting flight. Never before had I hoped that one of my flights was grossly delayed. I was happy to hear that it was, and it became a race to see if we could get there in time.
By the time we left Logan, we were over five hours late, but our plane had not yet departed. We landed at JFK, finally, and were waiting with baited breath to see if we could actually make our connection.
We were on the tarmac for two hours. Waiting to get to our gate. This is when the frustration set in; the climax of which was to see our very flight to Paris, the one we were supposed to be on, taxi to the runway before our very eyes and depart without us. This was compounded by the fact that the total time we spent on the plane had already been equivalent to a direct flight to LA to Paris: 12 hours.
Needless to say, much discussion of emergency plans ensued. After departing the plane, we made extra-special care to confirm that our bags would, yes they promise, be passed on to our flight which we had already booked from the tarmac for the next day. We sat down to find accomodations, which would, in fact, not be comped by AA because it was weather related, and "not [their] problem, " as one passing flight attendant so tactfully informed us.We get on the internet and start calling hotels, but they are almost all booked because of the inclement weather. We keep increasing the radius of our search, calling every hotel we can.
Thirty-five hotel calls later, we find one. The lady told me that, sure, they would hold the rooms for me, but, no, they did not need my name. My desire for "faith that this would work" out did battle with my logical side that was "confused as to how they could hold the rooms without a name", but in the end, I told the lady that we would be there in an hour or so.
I had just read in Slaughterhouse Five that "the surest way to hear God laugh is to broadcast your plans aloud." I only think of this in retrospect, but, needless to say, minutes later we found ourselves wading through pools of urine to make it to the end of the long, long queue for taxis. So much for an hour or so, and Welcome to New York City!
Fortunately, an angel appeared, in the form of a trashy old New Yorker in a suburban who accosted us in line and said he would get us there for sixty-five bucks. We did it. And we got there, and found a pizza place catering to drunk kids to boot. It was 4:30 AM. We all ate pizzas, and went to sleep.
We were warned of questionable weather in JFK, our connecting airport. I read the entirety of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and half of The Classical Mind, the first in a series of five books on the history of philosophy. The ominous weather predictions turned out to be true, and this is where our path diverges from the expected.
Originally, we were going to connect with another American Airlines flight to Charles de Gaulle airport, with an hour and a half layover. The ground conditions forced us into a holding pattern, and the holding pattern forced us into a low-fuel situation. We had to land at Logan. Not the correct airport, though we did try to stay on the sunny side by envisioning terminal-located Legal Seafood Crabcakes and Chowder in our future. We were subsequently told that we would not be leaving the plane for the next couple hours.
On the ground, we got a bearing on the status of our connecting flight. Never before had I hoped that one of my flights was grossly delayed. I was happy to hear that it was, and it became a race to see if we could get there in time.
By the time we left Logan, we were over five hours late, but our plane had not yet departed. We landed at JFK, finally, and were waiting with baited breath to see if we could actually make our connection.
We were on the tarmac for two hours. Waiting to get to our gate. This is when the frustration set in; the climax of which was to see our very flight to Paris, the one we were supposed to be on, taxi to the runway before our very eyes and depart without us. This was compounded by the fact that the total time we spent on the plane had already been equivalent to a direct flight to LA to Paris: 12 hours.
Needless to say, much discussion of emergency plans ensued. After departing the plane, we made extra-special care to confirm that our bags would, yes they promise, be passed on to our flight which we had already booked from the tarmac for the next day. We sat down to find accomodations, which would, in fact, not be comped by AA because it was weather related, and "not [their] problem, " as one passing flight attendant so tactfully informed us.We get on the internet and start calling hotels, but they are almost all booked because of the inclement weather. We keep increasing the radius of our search, calling every hotel we can.
Thirty-five hotel calls later, we find one. The lady told me that, sure, they would hold the rooms for me, but, no, they did not need my name. My desire for "faith that this would work" out did battle with my logical side that was "confused as to how they could hold the rooms without a name", but in the end, I told the lady that we would be there in an hour or so.
I had just read in Slaughterhouse Five that "the surest way to hear God laugh is to broadcast your plans aloud." I only think of this in retrospect, but, needless to say, minutes later we found ourselves wading through pools of urine to make it to the end of the long, long queue for taxis. So much for an hour or so, and Welcome to New York City!
Fortunately, an angel appeared, in the form of a trashy old New Yorker in a suburban who accosted us in line and said he would get us there for sixty-five bucks. We did it. And we got there, and found a pizza place catering to drunk kids to boot. It was 4:30 AM. We all ate pizzas, and went to sleep.
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