Arrival
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2009
1
13
Trip End
Jul 03, 2009
Athens, Attica, Greece
Monday, June 15, 2009
We made it to Athens!
We left Sacramento at 8:30 AM Sunday on route to Philadelphia. During the flight I took out my new Acer netbook computer, and I thought I put it back in my backpack when I was done. When we got to Philadelphia we had about an hour to get to the next gate in the international terminal for our flight to Rome. We made it and had just enough time to grab a sandwich before boarding the plane. After everyone was on the plane they announced they were working on a minor problem with the intercom system and we should be taking off in a few minutes. A few minutes turned into two hours. Everyone was compensated by not being charged the $7.00 for the headphones to watch the movies. Vicki and I watched Gran Torino and I watched some old episodes of HBO TV shows. During the flight I opened my backpack to get my Acer netbook out. It wasn't there.
Due to the delay in Philadelphia our 2-1/2 hour layover in Rome turned out to be a 20-minute dash through the Rome airport to the Aegean Airlines gate. When we arrived I walked up to the check-in desk and they said they'd been waiting for us. I asked about our checked luggage, and they checked our luggage tags and said, "No problem". The flight to Athens left a little late because they had to wait quite a while for a runway to be available. We arrived in Athens at about 2:30 PM Monday (4:30 AM California time). We went to baggage claim to wait for our luggage. We watched everyone else pick up their bags and finally realized ours were not coming out. I found the baggage tracing desk for Aegean and they said, "Oh, we have a message for you. Your bags will be coming on the Air Italia flight at 6PM." They said they would be delivered to our hotel at 8:00. Vicki didn't want to take a taxi to the airport and the metro (subway) is closed between the airport and Athens due to construction so we took an express bus (3.20 euro each) into Athens. It dropped us at the metro station at Syntagma square. We took the metro one stop to the Acropolis station. The metro system in Athens is excellent. The trains run every five minutes during the busy times, which seems to be most of the day. When we got off the metro we wandered around for a while looking for the hotel since I had the directions very conveniently stored in my Acer netbook. After asking around a few times we found it after about half an hour. It turns out it is right around the corner from the metro station.
We checked in around 5:30 and went up to our room. We went out to the balcony
and saw the view -- spectacular. We were right across the street from the Temple of Olympian Zeus and we could see Lycabettus Hil in the distance. Then we collapsed on the bed since I'd had maybe 2 hours sleep in the last 32 hours. We woke up about 8:30 and decided to go out and explore and get a bite to eat. We found a very small cafe that we had heard about called Aspro Alogo. There are a couple tables inside and a few more in front. A guy named Marco saw us looking at the menu and came out and greeted us and rattled off all the specials. It turns out he is the manager/waiter/busboy and part cook along with his wife who was holding their baby and working at the same time. We sat down and they brought out Greek salad, tzaziki and toasted bread with garlic and olive oil. I ordered a Mythos beer and Vicki a frappe (sort of a Greek cappucino). I ordered meatballs and saganaki (fried cheese) and Vicki ordered
roasted chicken with potatoes and rice. Everything is brought out family style and you share. It was way more than we could eat but all delicious. I asked for the check and with it Marco brought out some cake and two Greek coffees. After that he wanted to bring out two ouzos on the house but I declined so he brought us some kind of blended fruit juice. It was 30 euros for all of this. We made it back to the hotel about 11:30 and our luggage was in our room. I spent about half an hour on the phone with the airline filing a report about my missing netbook.
