Dean Christakos« Evidence That I Actually Did Work | Main | The Summer Spike In Gas Prices »
June 7, 2006
Some Thoughts at Athens International Airport
After having arrived in Athens at 9pm this evening and evaluated various lodging options before determining that the most economically and time-efficient thing to do was to spend all night at the airport waiting for my 7am flight to Zurich, I've had a few thoughts about my recent travels:
I feel that 3 days in Mykonos have atrophied my Greek skills. First of all, those days were spent at an English-language conference. Yes, I was in Greece, but I spent all day (and sometimes the evenings) speaking English with my fellow conference-goers. Plus, I swear, I almost felt embarassed speaking Greek on this most touristy of islands in which the shop owners greet me in flawless English which they speak much better than I'll ever speak Greek. When I ordered a gyro in Greek in a restaurant located in the center of the touristy main town right next to an American tourist who just ordered in English without a problem, I felt like a pretentious lout ("look at me, I can force the clerk to listen to me practice my Greek skills while I order!")
The island is damn expensive. After 2 weeks of staying in various low-rent hotels, hostels, and boarding rooms of monasteries, paying through the nose for mediocre rooms in Mykonos felt extravagant, not to mention wasteful. They don't exactly have youth hostels on this island, which caters to well-heeled tourists. But what could I do? That's where the conference was.
The effective range of a small motor scooter is about 5 miles. Driving such a small scooter on a trip any longer than that is a "big trip," especially when you're putt-putt-putting up and down hills.
There's something that you don't notice about the USA which becomes blindingly obvious when you leave for Europe-- the rooms in the USA are covered in wall-sockets, while in Europe (particularly Greece), each room has, at most, a couple power-sockets at their extreme ends. Everyone was jostling for a spot near the one wall-socket for their laptops during the conference talks, while in the USA, hotels typically have power-sockets all over the place, knowing that people need to keep their components charged. Also, there's little concept of going into a public resaturant or café, ordering some coffee, and doing work at your laptop (e.g., as in The Onion's, "Everyone in Coffee Shop Billing for Their Time" or the days I've spent doing work at the Central Square 1369 Coffee House in Cambridge). I had to finish writing another paper while I was on the road, and I confined myself to my hotel room to finish up my work. This was related to the lack-of-wall-sockets issue: it's not as though there was a public place I could plug my laptop into. (On the other hand, I did manage to get free wireless access to upload my photos and other work at the corner of Ploutarchou and Mitropoleos in Thessaloniki and from room 209 of the Hotel Acropol in that same city, you can get free wireless access courtesy of someone whose router's ESSID is called "giannis")
Finally, there are no easy solutions when you have a 7am flight out of Athens. There are a couple of nearby hotels that charge between 150 and 200 Euros a night. There are a couple more in the sub-100 euro range, but you're stuck blowing money on a cab at 5am the next morning, because there are no airport shuttles at that time. Going into the center of the city is a waste because, once again, you're stuck having to get a cab out to the very-distant airport, and by the time you get to the center of the city and get a hotel, you're paying that money for at most 4-5 hours in a hotel room. It'salmost 1am. I figure there are 4 hours until check-in. I can handle that wait.
Posted by Dean at June 7, 2006 5:53 PM
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