Καλημέρα!

While most of my friends are saying good morning, I am saying goodnight, here in Athens. Although the day itself consisted of pretty mundane things, nothing is mundane when you're thrust into a country with a crazy cab driver and 100+ lbs of luggage, knowing neither the spoken language nor the written language (btw, when they say signs are normally in Greek and English, totally untrue. OMG). Today's entry will be narrative-heavy, but that's only because everything happened so fast that I didn't have much time to document it in picture form. And suddenly, I'm blogging from Greece. It's so surreal that I can't really believe I'm here.

May 28, 2010; 3:00 AM:

Day begins in Los Angeles, with some last minute stuffing of things in suitcases. Toothbrush, check. Hats, check. Passport, check. I say goodbye to my grandparents who have gotten up to see me off. Bye bye, Gong. Bye bye, Po. 

You may notice that I'm wearing more clothes than I should be wearing in Los Angeles in the summer. That's because it's freaking cold this morning. 3 AM is not a time to be dabbling about in the wilds of LA. Brrr. That's why I have my panda socks on.

Mommy and I head off to LAX and I stay awake the whole time. My genius plan is that I'll sleep a little on my first flight to Newark and sleep the whole nine hours from Newark to Athens, arriving at 10:20 AM, so that I'll be nice and rested and be able to be awake the whole day and go to sleep at night, avoiding jet lag. Brilliant plan, huh?

We get to LAX and I say goodbye to Mommy. Bye bye, Mommy!! Super duper hugs!!!! *Waves* And then, I get on the plane.





7:00 AM

The flight to Newark commences and it's not too interesting, except that apparently, on this flight, you had to pay for all of your entertainment. Say wahhhht? Luckily, I had my own entertainment. It's been a good long while since I've flown in the daytime, so as we were flying over the Rocky Mountains and the flatness of Middle America, I snapped some photos.

   

5:40 PM

So we begin the flight to Athens and it's time to go to sleep. Except not, because I'm in this horrific pain and can't find my little bottle of emergency Tylenol. Just as I am mentioning this to my mom, the captain begins rolling the plane to the runway and the guy next to me offers a little bottle of Advil. Yayyyyy mystery person. Angela sleeps to the tune of When in Rome (EXCEPT NOT AT THE PART WITH LEE PACE!! omg. meep.), eats penne and meatballs, sleeps to CSI: NY, eats a croissant and some fruit, listens to a baby waaaail (and not a cute one either), sleeps to House, and finally, finally, finally after 9 hours and 10 minutes, lands in Athens, Greece.

May 29, 2010; 11:00 AM

Marj and I get off the plane and get our luggage and go find a Germanos store that sells cell phones. After meeting a nice man who pointed us to the way, we discovered that they were sold out of the Cosmote phones that have this terrific plan throughout Greece. So, we decide to wait until we get into Athens, which turns out to be important later in the day. We find a cab. The cab driver is quite young, but also quite greasy, and for some reason, did not like to drive with his hands. As in, he didn't drive with his hands for the first couple minutes on the highway. We would drift into the left lane as he was looking at his map and he would realize, and pull us back. He then used both hands to adjust his headrest, then decided he liked them there and again, we would drift. So exciting, it had us holding on to our seats for dear life.


12:00 PM: Arrive at Arrianou 17. Where is Dionysis?

It's actually a beautiful neighborhood, but we were too focused on finding our contact, Dionysis, who had our keys. Because we didn't have phones due to the Germanos situation, we couldn't call him and we didn't exactly expect him to magically appear, but kinda hoped that he would. We tried to go find the four boys who were living next door, but none of them seemed to be in, so we waited, waited. Marj tried calling via Blackberry, no go. Texting?

Dionysis: I AM COMING THERE NOW!!

Yay!! We get our keys, which are actually quite awesome looking. And immediately after we lug our stuff up, we go shopping for foodstuffs. 8 boxes of pasta, a carton of orange juice, some cornflakes and some intense sauce later, we decide to take a trek up to the Germanos store in Athens central. Luckily the nice ladies at the store let us store our food there, behind the counter. Unfortunately, neither of us had brought the unlocked phone to get the SIM card for the plan, so we walked back, got our food, put on some sunscreen and some hats, and some better footwear, because it felt like 90° and humid, and walked all the way back to Germanos to get our SIM cards. 2 hours later, I discover that my phone is not unlocked and Marj finds out hers has no signal, anywhere. Task on Monday because the stores of Greece are closed on Sundays: get a phone.

3:00 PM: Grandma Nona

On the way back, we find that trying to get it is impossible to get into our apartments with our fancy keys. We twist and turn and twist and turn and lock and unlock it about a billion times. The thing to realize, is that our door has no handle on the outside and two locks, so you have to use the long fancy key as leverage to push the door open. But for some reason, we couldn't. About 20 minutes later, an old granny hears our wailing and pokes her head out to see what's going on. She doesn't speak English and we don't speak Greek so we mime to her that we can't open our freaking door. She yells at us some more and I imagine it going something like this:

Grandma: You stupid girls! How can you not open a door? You just take it and turn it. Stupid stupid stupid.

Us: We can't open the door. See? Door? Open? No?

Grandma: Y'all are so stupid. You just take the door and turn. GAH. Let me see!

And Grandma saves the day. And I give her a BIG hug. And then she gets all smiley and tell us to call her grandma. Go Grandma!


5:40 PM: Shivani arrives and the internet crisis gets resolved.

As Shivani, Marj's and my other flatmate, lets call her, arrives, I am frantically trying to get the wireless to work, but no dice. We have a router with an ethernet cable and so far, all we can do is get internet off the ethernet and neither of us has a phone to call tech support. Luckily, Shivani does and we call tech support who happens to be this middle aged Greek guy who keeps telling me to do the same thing and won't listen when I tell him it doesn't work. He eventually tells me to reset the router and then tells me my internet is on. I know my internet is on, but I can't use the WEP Encryption Key to get to the network I want to get to. But your internet is already on. It says right here. Go to your router's page. It won't let me log in with the information you gave me. But go to the page. I can't go to the page!

This goes on for awhile, and eventually, I decide just to cut him off and reset it again, making everything anew. And after some fiddling, Angela did techy things and got the internet working, so we have internet in our apartment!!

11:27 PM

I have stayed up a whole day in Athens, dealt with people who couldn't speak English, dealt with people who speak limited English, baked in the sun, and took a shower in the smallest shower ever. And washed my clothes in the sink, which are currently hanging to dry on my doorhandles. And ate Cheetos for dinner. It's been pretty much the most excited first day in a foreign country ever and I am ready go to sleep. Look at my bed. Doesn't it seem inviting? Of course, the people outside talking and yelling at each other might put a damper on that...





Peace from Greece,
Angela