(a) Athens

    This is where our cruise started and ended. We had decided to come a day early to recover from the jet lag and booked a room in the Hotel Plaka which, as the name aptly implies, is located in the Plaka district. It should be easy to get there. Take the underground from the airport to Monasteraki or take the bus from the airport to Syntanga Square. The fare would have been around €12 for the two of us.  In either case, it would have been just 2-3 blocks away from the hotel, obviating the need for a taxi. Taxis in Athens are notorious for fleecing the wary, the weary and the unwary tourist. Just look at my earlier chapter on Ελλαδα (Greece) in this website.

    On the plane we received the discouraging news that in Athens both the underground, as well as the buses, were on strike that day. We could take the train, but that would have been a major hassle, including changing trains somewhere. So there was nothing left but taking a taxi. To our pleasant surprise, the local authorities had apparently reacted to the taxi problem. Now, there is a sign at the taxi stand that all trips to downtown Athens would only be €35. Which was actually quite inexpensive, because with the traffic jams it took the taxi driver 70-80 minutes to get us to our hotel in his fairly new Mercedes taxi. Compare that to the day before, where we paid $75 to get from our home to San Francisco airport, a 40 minute drive in a ramshackle 10 year old Buick. .

    Hotel Plaka was a very nice 3-star hotel. Rooms were clean and small, but  adequate. The elevator was small;  the staff was very friendly, even though our Greek was limited.  The breakfast they served was very good, with a large variety of dishes. We had asked for a quiet room high up and they gave us one on the 5th floor, with a good view of the Parthenon on the hill. On the 6th floor was the roof garden, with an even better view of the Parthenon. There you can order a beer from the upstairs bar, enjoy the Parthenon lit up in the dark, and allow your butts to freeze in the chill of the evening.

left: Graffiti is found extensively in the Plaka. A blank wall is an open invitation for self-expression and unasked for public adornment

    The next morning we walked around the ancient agora and walked up the hill to get to the entrance to the Parthenon complex. We were told to be more careful because the crime rate was up. It seemed that there were fewer tourists around; also because it was the end of October and the tourist season had dwindled away.

right: there were not many tourists in the Ancient Agora.

    People on the street looked unhappy. Unemployment in Greece has hit 16 %. Everybody was mad at the Government for a litany of reasons. The economic crisis was taking its toll. I suppose you would be even more mad if you were a German, seeing that they are the ones who have to bail out the Greeks..

    Not all Greeks are in dire straits. Just like the opulent top 1 % in the USA, the Greeks also have a nice upper class sitting pretty. They don’t pay their taxes; they have never done it before and they know how to evade this pesky issue. There are the highly paid Government employees, who don’t do very much, but have negotiated cushy positions some time ago already. They are not going to let go of these perks. Some of them have jobs, which pay €70,000 /year, while a similar job in Germany pays only €50,000.1 They circumvent the problem by reporting the same monthly salary, but creating an additional 13th and 14th month paycheck per year. Nifty, eh. .

    (b) Piraeus, Athens.

    There is actually no easy way to get to the Piraeus cruise terminal from downtown Athens except by taxi. We could have taken the underground to Piraeus, but then it would have been still quite a distance to the vessel. And it looked like that there were many cruise ships docked in the harbor at that time at different cruise terminals. That would have created a problem just figuring out where we should be.

    So we took a taxi again, the same guy who took us from the airport to our hotel. We agreed on a fare of €20 and he picked us up at the agreed time. it was worth it. With the heavy traffic it took him 30-40 minutes to get to the cruise terminal. It was no fun driving in Athens when we were there a few years ago, it was still no fun driving today, even though it was somebody else who did the driving. Also, I had lost my pen the day before, and I found it back on the seat in the taxi going to Piraeus. It was a good omen. The Dow was also up that day.

    We rather liked the taxi driver, so we made arrangements for him to pick us up and drive us from the cruise terminal back to the airport at the end of the cruise. We agreed on a fare of €50, which was still less than what the cruise ship would have charged the two of us for this trip in their tour buses. And with the taxi, we were more flexible with the timing. He was there in time, when we stepped out of the terminal with our luggage. It was still a good hour’s driving to get to the airport, even though we went around the city to avoid the heavy traffic.