Last Leg: Athens and the Trek Home

We flew from Sofia to Athens on Tuesday. We were a little bummed to not have more time in Sofia, but of course we were all excited to see Greece. After landing at the main airport, we took a 45-minute subway ride downtown. The ultra-nice subway was clearly the result of the 2004 Olympics - it was probably one of the nicest I've been on in Europe. We rode it to Akropoli, which should give you a hint as to where our hotel was located - right by the Acropolis! That's the name for the mountain with ruins, most notably the Parthenon, overlooking Greece.

Our hotel wasn't the nicest I've ever been in, but when we first got there and saw the Acropolis from the street, we were all pretty excited. Zeus' Temple was also a block away. We also had a rooftop terrace that made the whole thing worth it. We were in the Plaka district, which is quite touristy but also really pretty with winding streets and cafes. Everyone dropped off their stuff and got ready to go exploring right away.

Pre-Exploring

We headed up towards the Acropolis with the intention of seeing everything, but unbeknownst to us, all the monuments in Greece close at 3:00! Geez Greece - maybe you'd make more money if you stayed open until reasonable hours! We griped about the situation and teased Greece a bit more (being EU nerds as usual) before moving on to find something else. We ended up walking around the base of the Acropolis and finding a good rock from which to view the city. Athens is absolutely enormous, but we found our bearings a bit and noted some sites we wanted to check out later. The sheer number of preserved ruins in that city is incredible.

We ended up getting some ice cream and wandering around town after that. We checked out the Parliament buildings and took our usual pictures of the Changing of the Guard. The Greek ones definitely had the best shoes compared to guards in the other country. I can't imagine standing for hours in that heat in a woolly suit with big felt balls on the toes of each shoe. What a good life. There was a nice park next to the Parliament where we walked around and viewed some animals in the petting zoo. By the time we got back to the hotel, we were all tired from a nice long day of walking around and enjoying the city.

How many people are in this picture?

The rest of the trip was just as fun. We had academic meetings as usual, but we had plenty of free time to go exploring and to go out at night. My favorite academic meeting was at the Foreign Ministry. We spoke to a knowledgeable and eloquent woman, Ms. Irene Riga, about Greece's position on major EU issues such as enlargement. We had lots of time for questions and I asked one about enlargement in the Balkans (my theme of interest for this trip). Our meetings are almost always better when we have lots of question time and when we discuss policy rather than lofty EU goals. I would consider this one in Greece one of the best academic meetings from the whole semester.

Our entire time in Athens was great, but of course there was a small incident involving Iceland and a rogue volcano. We found out about it on Thursday and weren't too worried initially since we weren't scheduled to leave until Sunday, but when some of the people trying to get back on Friday had their flight cancelled, we started to wonder how bad it was going to get. I'm sure everyone saw the emerging news stories about the thousands of stranded travelers. Little did I know we would be joining them soon...

We put the volcano out of our minds and took a trip to the beach on Saturday. This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip - beautiful weather, lovely beach on the Aegean, great friends, and nothing to do except relax and enjoy the experience. The water was a bit cold, but we went swimming anyway. There weren't too many tourists on the beach, but there were quite a few well-oiled Greek men playing some cross between badminton and tennis. It was great to relax on our last (or so we thought) day in Athens with a good group of friends.

One of my favorites of us from the beach

The last thing I'll say about Athens before going into our travel adventures is that the food was DELICIOUS. We ate so much Greek salad, feta cheese, olive oil, lamb, and fresh fish accompanied by good wine at nearly every meal. We also found a local hole-in-the-wall pita shop that sold the absolute best beef pitas we've ever had. An old Greek man told us that they were the best in town and he was completely right. This was off the beaten path, but they were even better than some of the dinners we had in the more touristy parts of town. All in all, we ate well for an entire week and couldn't have been happier about it.

It wasn't really until Sunday that s*** started to hit the proverbial fan. One of my friends and I were scheduled to fly out together around 11:00 am. We knew that wasn't really going to happen, but we had to go to the airport anyway to talk to the ticket desk and figure things out. This entailed getting up at 5:30 a.m. in order to make it on time. Sure enough, our flight was cancelled and we found ourselves in a long line waiting to talk to Aegean airlines. The best offer we could get was a flight to Berlin the following morning which "might take off" or a flight to Frankfurt (our original destination) on Thursday. We took the crappy Berlin option knowing that we wouldn't be able to get anything better before heading back to our hostel to meet the others. We spent a lot of the day on the Internet trying to figure out our rights as travelers under EU law and the like before things really got crazy.

Around 5:00 p.m., when the rest of our friends figured out their flights were all cancelled too, we were all sitting around the computers doing research on potential ways to get back. One friend's dad had recommended that he look into taking a 32-hour ferry ride to Italy and then taking a train back to Germany. We all scoffed at the idea, but he continued to work out the details. Meanwhile, news surfaced about German airspace being closed for longer than initially planned, meaning our flight to Berlin was definitely going to be cancelled. Everyone was starting to get anxious at this point because we really wanted to get back to Freiburg after travelling for nearly two weeks. Finally, our friends figured out all the details for the ferry and asked if anyone wanted to go. Some people said yes right away, but the rest of us were a bit skeptical and asked how long we had to decide. The answer? "We'd have to leave in 15 minutes." WHAT??? That really upped the stress level and people began to frantically weigh their options. No one wanted to be the one person to stay behind and then get stranded for a week, but there was no guarantee whatsoever that we could even get on the ferry or on a train in Italy. We also didn't know if our flights would be cancelled for sure and we didn't want to lose money. Ultimately, most of us decided to go for the ferry and we sprinted upstairs to get our stuff before coming back down to cancel our night in the hostel. Then the epic journey began...

We had to take a three-hour train, bus, train combination to get to Patras, a port town on the other side of Greece. That part was no fun at all as everyone was still super stressed about whether or not the plan would work, but it was also very exhilarating. Our motto was basically, "This will either be the very best or the very worst idea we've ever had." It turned out to be true. We got there and started looking for the ferry office with about fifty other people with the exact same idea. It was basically chaos/Amazing Race as everyone started sprinting towards the office: "There it is! Run! Go go go go go go!" We bolted in and asked for eight tickets and a cabin. We got the tickets (thank God), but we told that there were no cabins available. No matter - we were more than happy to sleep on the floor if it'd get us out of Greece.

We got on the ferry at about 11:00 pm and quickly staked out a corner in the lounge for the eight of us to occupy for the next 32 hours. This turned out to be a smart move as the ferry became more crowded than it had probably ever been. There were literally hundreds of stranded travelers camping on the stairwells, in the hallways, and even on the deck in the rain. Apparently we weren't the only crazy ones after all! We made makeshift pillows, blankets, and eye masks out of our clothes and went to sleep on the carpet.

Our "beds"

Believe it or not, we slept well and had an enjoyable ferry experience. After the craziness of the dash to Patras, it was really nice to sit back and know that we couldn't do anything to change the situation anymore. We just relaxed and read books for the whole next day. My book? The first Harry Potter in German! I read much slower in German than in English, but I was really happy to be able to understand everything. Besides, it wasn't a problem to be reading slowly with so much time to kill.

It was cold and windy outside, but we went out to enjoy the view and take some pictures. It was also a relief to hear that my flight to Berlin was in fact cancelled, meaning that I was guaranteed a refund. Most other travelers on the ferry had theirs cancelled as well. At one point, someone posted a sign near the massive line for the computers saying "If anyone knows how to get back to the UK, write it here!" That sign remained blank for the entire ride.

Just a bit windy...

When we finally got to Venice after a day and two nights on the ferry, we discovered that there were no trains to Germany. They had all been completely booked. We had one option of taking a bus to Karlsruhe, which is farther north then Freiburg, but it would have been quite expensive and inconvenient. We sat there in the train station in Venice, finally feeling utterly defeated. Luckily, IES decided to send a coach to pick up the other people still in Athens, the other trip that was stranded in Rome, and us (we were going to meet them in Bologna). The other people in Athens boarded a ferry to Italy as well and we went to Bologna to get a hostel for the night and wait. We didn't even leave the hostel when we got there - everyone was too burnt out to even consider going out and exploring.

The next day, after about eight hours on the bus from Bologna to Freiburg, I had never been so happy to get home in my life. We started traveling at 6:00 pm on Sunday and got back in Germany at 2:30 a.m on Thursday. We went through Greece, Croatia (territorial waters), Italy, and Switzerland before making it back home. Overall, it was the best rather the worst idea ever. We had an epic journey back, but we made it in one piece and with a little bit of sanity left!

That's all for our adventure. Check soon (as in later today) for my next post about the wonderful weekend I just had exploring Germany! Bis dann!