I haven’t been on a flight since I was but a little boy, only the one way from Florida to Toronto, after a trip to Disneyland having gotten there driving. I was reasonably concerned about flying, not about the flight itself, but everything else, like the baggage check, metal detector, and also whether I could fit into the seats on an airplane these days.
I met up with Alicia the morning of Day 1, as Murad was driving and picking up from there. I had packed the night before, one duffle bag with the clothing, and my backpack as a carryon. When we made it to the airport, we put our checked luggage into the system and claimed our physical tickets, and then had several hours to kill, so we went to Coras for breakfast. I was concerned about leaving the airport, since I figured once you were in, you were supposed to stay in, but I guess security is the point of no return. So after breakfast and spending most of the rest of my Canadian money, we went back to the airport and through security.
I get pretty paranoid about that stuff, so I put my belt and wallet and watch in my carryon in the hopes of not setting off the machine, and it didn’t go off so I guess I don’t have some previously unknown metal plate in my skull. Of course, we still have the rule about liquids and gels, where any such substances need to be small containers worth, and together fit into a clear baggie. At first I thought I didn’t need to even deal with that issue, until I thought of my little tub of lip balm, which I figured was gel-like enough to be part of that rule, so I baggied it as required, but it didn’t end up ever being a problem.
The boarding of the flight went smoothly, the three of us were all together in one of the 3-seat sections. The flight was empty enough for Alicia, the poor one in the middle, to go to the next section of seats in the center section in our row. Despite that, I was still massively uncomfortable. The flight lasted 9.5 hours, and it was quite tedious. We had 3 movies shown, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Vantage Point and Bucket List. After that, they showed various programs that did nothing to alleviate the boredom, including a show on truffles. None of this helped to drown out the incredibly obnoxious guy who sat near us.
Once we finally landed, the day started again as the flight left at around 3pm and took 8 hours, it was now 7am in Athens. Then we had to go through customs, and this was if anything worse than the flight. First we were herded onto a bus without explanation, and after a few false starts in trying to close the doors, were herded onto another bus, and made it to main terminal. Once at the passport line, it seemed to take forever, and there were only a couple booths open, out of the many that stood empty. As we started to get closer, it seemed someone wanted his family/tour group to all go through together, and about 30 people cut into the line a few people ahead of us. Though there was a lot of grumbling, no one seemed to challenge them on this. We got through the booth without incident, but feeling as if we were running late. We collected our baggage and found an Air Transat representative, who directed us to another one on the far side of the terminal, who then directed us to a bus where we affixed tags to our bags and got on the bus.
We spent an entertaining half hour making it down the to cruise ship. Entertaining because the traffic in Athens is shocking compared to what I’m used to. People would drive on what we would traditional call The Shoulder, and motorbikes would weave between cars in a way I can only describe as crazy. We made it to the ship docked at the port, called Aquamarine, and went onboard. Once there, we had to surrender our passports, which I thought was odd since you’re not really supposed to do that, but I followed suite. We got Boarding Cards which we had to scan when embarking or disembarking the ship, presumably to ensure they weren’t leaving people behind.
This is pretty much the entire room
The cabin was some kind of small. With the 3 of us, it was hard to arrange ourselves so people could move around. The whole room was basically an aisle leading from the door past the bathroom to the beds, one of which was a bunk-bed. If an airplane bathroom had a shower, that’s about how big the cabin bathroom was. It was a little before noon at this point, and we knew we had some safety announcement to come. The emergency procedures sign in our cabin told us to put our life jackets on for the thing, but no one listens to me. I put mine on, badly, once the test alarm had sounded. We proceeded to our lifeboat location where they ordered us by weight most likely in rows and then criticized our lifejacket fastening abilities. I think they put me at the back because it was clear that the jacket would never fit and it would be easier if they let me drown, but I figure I’m probably more buoyant that the lifejacket.
After the drill, we went for lunch, but we weren’t sure what was included and entered a pub and asked for the menu, and they gave us the drinks menu. After Alicia asked some other people, it turned out we just go to the buffet for food, and so we did and had lunch. I was starting to feel tired, and at 1pm we had our first meeting with Hugo, our Transat agent on the Aquamarine. We got some basic information and booked some of our excursions, the first of which was the Mykonos island excursion, which wasn’t really, it was just free time on the island. It would take some time for us to reach the island and so we went back to the cabin for a bit to rest. A while later, Laura and Alicia went to explore the ship further, but I was still tired and opted to stay behind and sleep.
When I was woken due to our arrival, I felt utterly terrible, which is usually how it goes for me when I take naps. We met in the main lounge to be called for us to leave the ship. Mykonos was our first island, and not part of an organized excursion, so we just wondered around. There was enough english around to keep us from thinking we’d have a problem, but the place is still a maze, made worse by night falling while we were there. We got a bit lost admittedly, and Laura asked a scary guy for directions. I honestly couldn’t understand much of what he said, but I did hear him call Laura a “Beautiful lady” in his very gravelly scary-guy voice. We escaped the maze and had a snack at a little taverna near the port. It was there that we had our first shots of Ouzo, little glasses filled with a milky white substance that smelled very much of black licorice. And it tasted like it too, that and burning. After that we went back to the ship for dinner.
Imagine a Large Scary Man here
Dinner that night was a-la-carte, but later we were to have the usual all-you-can-eat buffet of generic food that was not greek at all, and so the food at the taverna was our authentic-greek food memory for the next few days. We got seated with a couple who were from Montreal, the guy guy speak english, but his wife only a little bit, so he often translated the more difficult statements we made. It’s always fun when people ask what we do for a living, since most people aren’t quite sure what Grid Computing or Enterprise Workforce Management is. When we returned to the cabin, Alicia started looking for her camera which she didn’t bring with her to Mykonos, and wasn’t able to find it. After tearing her belongings apart, we figured it had been stolen. We had ‘bought’ the key to our little safe in the room (with it’s alarming stipulation of that if we didn’t return the key the midnight before the date of departure it would cost us 100 euros) but we had only put our money and such in there. We could only figure the cabin steward had taken it, but it seemed too obvious.. in any case, it put a little dark cloud over the trip.
We got ready for bed early that night since we had an early day tomorrow, since we’d be arriving at Kusadasi, Turkey the next day at 6:30am and the excursion would start shortly after. Alicia took the bunk bed, thankfully, since I would probably have broken it and killed whoever slept under me. The ship was starting to rock back and forth rather noticeably at this point, but I managed to fall asleep quickly.
To be continued
