Suddenly it’s summer.
After four cold months in Europe, we are wearing shorts. Oh, yeah, we are in Athens!
It is surreal being in Greece. Gone is the beauty of France, the orderliness of Germany and
the familiarity of England. We have no one to visit; we don't know a soul. You
can drink the water here but you can’t flush your toilet paper. It’s not that I was fluent in Spanish,
French or German, but I could get by.
I don’t know a word of Greek. Heck,except for TKE, my college fraternity, I can barely identify the letters! This is the beginning of a whole new adventure.
Why Greece? you wonder.
Well, we are running out of time on our Shengen visas, which allow us
only 90 days in the EU in a six-month period. Since we plan on spending the winter in the Balkans, Greece
seemed like a natural. So we have
four weeks to spend on the mainland, beginning with Athens.
We arrived around midnight from Munich and spent the rest of the
night at the airport. Seems there
was a taxi strike and the trains stopped running at eleven. The floors were just as hard as we
remembered them in Kuala Lumpur. We
barely slept at all and caught the first metro downtown where we found a
reasonably priced (for Athens) hotel with a view of the Parthenon. We set out immediately to reconnoiter
the nearby Roman sites before returning for a much-needed nap.
