Chapter 14: Five days in Greece

If you're reading these blog posts in search of vicarious fun, skip this one and return next time. Nothing drastic happened: nobody died, went to jail or got robbed of all their valuables. Each setback was in itself minor and manageable, but tie them together and it was pretty miserable. I'm writing this because skipping an entire country would be weird, but also because it would be dishonest to filter out all the bad experiences and simply pretend that this trip is an endless procession of perfect days. Some of them are bad.

The trouble started back in Bulgaria. My hostel in Sofia was great: on the first night I had an entire apartment - next door to the main building - to myself, there were eggs for breakfast each morning, the wifi worked, the bathrooms were spotless and the ukulele-playing was minimal and easily escaped. It even had nightly vegetarian dinners, which weren't very good but were free and convenient. And it all cost only €13. Oh, and it had bed bugs.

I had no problems until I was en route to Plovdiv, so they must have turned up on the last night. At first I thought they were mosquito bites, prompting me to hurriedly research whether Sofia has malaria or dengue fever (it doesn't). I was pretty itchy that evening in Plovdiv, but that was nothing compared to when I woke up the next morning with at least 30 bites, including several up and down my back, where I'd been wearing a shirt. Not mosquitoes, then. Bed bugs. Horrifying, but also somewhat inevitable. I've now racked up well over 100 nights in hostels over the past three years, and they are a known risk. Just not what you want on your 15 hour commute to Athens. 

The first leg was a seven hour bus ride from Plovdiv to Thessaloniki, and it was comfortable enough (itching aside) but had some very warped priorities. The bus had wifi access and TVs in the back of the seats, and in addition to the driver there was a second staff member on board, whose job it was to occasionally walk up and down the bus offering people croissants or soft drink. The only thing this bus didn't have was a working toilet, but who wants one of those when you can have croissants and Bulgarian soap operas instead? Besides, the bus made regular stops for bathroom breaks, and I knew everything was going to be great when we pulled up on the side of the road, shortly before the Greek border, and the toilets were free:

Maybe paid toilets aren't such a terrible thing after all.

Strangeness aside, the bus got me safely to Thessaloniki, where I had a three hour layover before a train to Athens, and where graffiti outside the station declared it to be Antifa territory. Welcome to Greece. While I waited I chatted to a German fellow, Christian, who works for the German opposition leader - so the German equivalent of the ALP - and was on a quick holiday before descending into election season hell. I wished him all the best: they'll be up against it.

The second leg started well enough. I began talking to Dimitras, an elderly Greek man who saw my discomfort and offered me cortisone cream to treat it, after calling his wife - a professor of medicine - to find out if it would drastically affect my diabetes. That was the high point of the ride, as we quite rapidly segued to a screed against immigration and the EU. My visit was fine, apparently, because I wasn't there looking for work, but with such high unemployment why should there be 'Pakistani boys' and 'Bangladeshi boys' in Greece? His legitimate concern about jobs doesn't mean he supports the EU, however, or the access it provides Greeks to opportunities across the continent. Young Greeks should be living in Greece, regardless of whether they can make more money elsewhere. 

The EU was solely responsible for Greece's financial woes, apparently, because they have always taken money out of Greece and given it to Germans. Not quite how it works - in fact, the opposite of how it works - but I kept my mouth shut.  I tried to pay him for the cream, as he had said he only earns €600 a month, before he clarified that that's what he tells the tax department and the true figure is €4000. The EU hasn't helped matters in Greece recently, to be sure, but if Dimitras wants to find the original source of their problems I could have told him where to look. He said that he used to vote for the conservative New Democracy Party, but has switched away from them, and I avoided asking who to out of fear that it could be Golden Dawn, a fascist party. The cortisone cream helped a lot, and yet still my skin was crawling. At least I only had five hours on the train. 

Then the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and the lights went out. Welcome to Greece. Dimitras disappeared to have a smoke outside (despite rain so torrential that I wonder how he lit the cigarette) and while he was gone they made an announcement over the PA system (apparently still working, despite the darkness). I had no idea what they said until Dimitras arrived, and told me that the locomotive had broken down and they were sending a new one. How long, I asked? Maybe an hour. Maybe more. I had already been due to get to the hostel around midnight. Excellent.

I had to switch off my devices to save battery - who knew how long I'd be stranded somewhere in the middle of Greece - and sitting in the darkness I might as well try to go to sleep. Waking up three hours later, we still weren't in Athens, but Dmitras had disappeared so we had to be close. We arrived at 2:40AM, in pouring rain, and I jumped in the first taxi I saw without remembering to check that it had a meter or that it displayed its prices. Thankfully I got away with it for only €10, perhaps twice what it should have been.

I had another solid three hours of sleep at the hostel - enough either side of a very anxious taxi ride to get me through the next day without falling over - and decided I'd start at the National Archeology Museum (apart from a surprisingly good zoo, my entire time in Athens ended up revolving around the classical period). As I walked to the museum I felt as if I'd seen Athens before, just not in Europe. It reminded me of Bali, with its chaotic scooter and car traffic, and open fronted shops that mostly sell tourist trinkets or whatever other odds'n'sods they can get their hands on. Like Bali, there are potholes in the streets, songbirds in small cages and touts everywhere. Athens isn't Southeast Europe. It's Southeast Asia.

It was also en route to the museum that I met this snappy dresser, who works as a doorman for a pet shop:

I didn't catch his name but he's one of the very few things that made me crack a smile in Athens, so I'll call him Aristophanes.

The museum is, of course, exceptional. It would be impossible for a national archaeological museum in Greece not to be, and the treasures here include some of the most famous artefacts ever found. The Antikythera mechanism - a device used for astronomy that is essentially the world's first computer - is here. So is the golden death mask found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae: I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon (except it isn't Agamemnon). 

I only had one dorm mate: I had disclosed the Bulgarian bed bugs to management, who were having a bit each way by not putting any new people in the dorm, but not moving out existing guests either. But this one dorm mate was one too many. She woke up at around 5AM and starting packing her bags. I knew she was checking out and assumed she was leaving for an early flight or train, so I tolerated the disruption. She started to annoy me when, after about 10 minutes of flashing her mobile phone torch in every direction (but mostly at my eyes) she refused to turn the main light on in order to do whatever she was doing faster. And then she made me downright furious by turning off the phone light and getting back into bed.

She wasn't checking out early. She had merely woken up, so decided she might as well pack. At 5AM, when she was checking out at 10. I'd been woken up, and kept awake long enough that I would struggle to get back to sleep, for no reason at all. I gave her both barrels, asking why she had done it then - she had no answer - and whether she was concerned that she had disturbed me: again, no answer. So I gave a lecture about how dorms only work if people show mutual respect and mutual courtesy, before she put her eye mask back on without an answer.

I was well and truly awake so there was no reason not to start my day, but the shower was directly on the other side of the wall to her pillow and I was worried I might prevent her from getting back to sleep. But as I said, mutual respect and mutual courtesy. Instead I gave her 10 minutes to make sure of it, and *then* ran the shower. I hope I gave her bed bugs too. 

The day had gotten off to a stressful and premature start, but I wanted to make the best of it, and so I headed back in time to the heart of classical Athens: the Agora. This *should* have been a profound experience: these couple of hectares are where democracy started, where for the first time in civilised history people came together in their thousands to share in decision-making for their community. It wasn't what we recognise as an inclusive democracy today - women, slaves and immigrants had no voting rights - but it was truly revolutionary for its time and one of the most important achievements in the human story. 

I didn't get to enjoy being in this very special place for all that long, though, because I was suddenly having a lot of trouble standing up. I was halfway up a steep set of stone steps when Athens began rocking back and forth beneath my feet. I've never been prone to vertigo, and this was one of the scariest things I had experienced. I climbed - staggered, crawled - back down the steps, holding onto whatever I could find, and sat down on the first available bench. I didn't know what was happening, and even as common sense told me it was probably heat stroke, my mind kept zeroing in on that second word - stroke - until Athens eventually stopped rocking back and forth. I retreated back to the hostel, shaken but relieved it was apparently over.

For the first time on this trip I felt like going home, but that wasn't an option. And a couple of hours rest was enough for me to assume it really was heat stroke and to tackle the second, more prominent half of Athens' ancient core: the Acropolis. With plenty of water, to be safe. In the end I got up there and back alright, minus a brief showdown with an Acropolis employee who wanted to stop me drinking some juice to deal with low blood sugar. I explained it to her, but she didn't care. I finished drinking the juice: I didn't care either. After descending I went up to the roof of the hostel, which has a rather enviable view of the Acropolis at night:

The next day I woke up with more cold symptoms, which felt a little unfair given I'd last been sick only two weeks earlier. The vertigo was back too, though only as I got in and out of bed. Ready to call time on a miserable few days, I decided to make a quick visit to the Acropolis Museum and then catch an earlier bus out of town. The Museum is fantastic, but it's let down by something out of its control, that what should be its centrepiece exhibit - the Parthenon Marbles - are in the British Museum, not here. It has plaster casts in the niches where the real Marbles would be exhibited. I understand the British are concerned about the precedent if they repatriate artefacts, and I wouldn't want museums to end up stripped of everything but their own national history. But the marbles are as significant to Greek history as the crown jewels are to England's. Send them home.

There hasn't been a country so far where I had a less enjoyable time than Greece. It wasn't Greece's fault (ok, maybe the train was. Don't know what happened there): bad luck can happen anywhere. And I already knew before arriving that I was massively short-changing Greece by only going to Athens: I'd love to come back soon and go to Mycenae, to Meteora, to Delphi and island hop through Santorini, Rhodes and Crete. There's a budget airline now that flies from Australia to Athens, so it might not be so far off into the future 

Declaring myself well and truly done with Athens, then, I headed to Patra, where I was going to stay the night before getting a ferry to Italy the next day. It's a city untouched by the hostel industry, so there was nothing for it but to stay in a hotel. For €36 I had a double bed. I had a balcony that looked out over the bay. I got little soaps and shampoo bottles. It had a bath.  IT HAD A BATH. I lay in the bath, listening to a torrential rain storm outside (between that and the vertigo I didn't have high hopes for the ferry). I had a 12PM check-out so when I woke up I had another bath. The stresses - if not the symptoms - of the past week washed away. Bliss. 

Of course, this was my time in Greece, so it couldn't possibly end that well. The Swans and They Who Must Not Be Named saw to that the next day, but within minutes of the game ending I was out of the hotel, on my way out of Greece, on my way out of the worst part of the trip, and on my way onto this thing:

I like big boats and I cannot lie.