It was raining when we landed at Athens airport. We had left Oulu at 6:30 for an unhurried journey to the airport, getting there in plenty of time. The AirBaltic flight left on time but landed 27 minutes late, giving us 3 minutes to get to the next filght.
I'm not always the best traveller - when there is no rush, everything is good, but when I think we are late then my deep paranoia of missing the connection comes to the surface. Must be some bad childhood experience. So I rushed through Rïga airport to get to the flight, and we promptly got in the wrong queue.
It's OK, we realised the problem before the flight left, and weren't the last people on the plane. :D
Then on to Athens, were it turned out it was Gay Pride weekend and there was a pro-democracy protest on as well, and we somehow managed to get off the metro system right in the middle of the pro-democracy protesters. Of course, they were very peaceful and we had no trouble from them, but you never quite know when peaceful pro-democracy protests can turn, do you? I didn't realise the irony of people protesting for democracy in the place where it was invented - although actual ancient Greek Democracy wasn't, apparently, that nice - they had slaves!!! We hurried through the protest with our luggage to the taxi rank and got the first taxi we could, and gave the driver the address of the hotel. He'd never heard of it. 10 minutes of searching on a map and a phone-a-friend later, and we were on a terrifying journey through the backstreets of rainy Athens to this little hotel we'd found on the internets.
The hotel was Hotel Proteas, and a very nice hotel it is too.
Would have been cool to have known about Athens Pride beforehand, we could have gone the day before and gone, but pride festivals are exhausting and we were already pretty tired so we didn't bother. "Maybe next year". Instead, as it was raining, we went no further than some restaurant nearby before settling in for the night.
