It is now 6:30 AM and its time to get going. My flight leaves at 2:45 PM for New York, then I board another plane for a 10-hour trip to Athens. I will be arriving there at 3:00 AM my time but 10:00 AM Athens. It will be a shock for me to be walking around at 10:00 AM but feeling like I should still be deep asleep. They say that you adjust very quickly, but when you return home the 8-hour time diference takes many days to overcome the other way. Swell.

I arrived at Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI) at Noon expecting a 2:45 PM flight to New York to catch my plane to Athens at 5:30 PM. Everything seemed to be going just fine until the Departing Flight monitor suddenly reported that the flight would not leave until 4:00 PM. My flight to Athens was supposed to leave at 5:30 PM so this was a disaster. I went to the ticket counter and was able to get a seat on the 5:50 PM flight to Athens. All seemed OK until the flight to New York arrived and there was a 30- minute delay before we could take off for New York. The guy at the Delta ticket counter said that we would be able to make a 5:30 PM connection to Athens, but in fact by the time we arrived at New York's Kennedy International Airport that flight had already left, along with the three people I was hoping to meet from the Exploratorium. We were all planning to take the 5:30 PM flight and to meet in Athens to take the Taxi to the apartment. Well, this was not going to happen. Here I was on Delta flight 120 and we would be arriving 40 minutes after the flight my companions were on. Since I couldn’t contact them, I could only hope that they decided to hang around the Athens airport to wait for me. This is a tall order. I had just received an email saying that we should all travel together. If not, I would have to take my own taxi to the apartment. When I get there, there is supposed to be a superintendent for the apartments that will give me the key to the apartment. Fortunately I have the address for the place, so I am hoping my Taxi driver reads English versions of Greek addresses!

So, here I am in flight 120 somewhere over the ‘Big Pond’. It is now 3 hours into a 9 hour flight. We have all had our dinner and watched a movie on this cavernous Boeing 767. I never watched the movie because I had to work out the detailed timeline for what would be happening every minute of the transit web casts. A fun process let me tell you!

The dinner was actually not too bad. I have taken at least 6 flights this year and never have I had an actual airline dinner, so this was something of a treat. It was a pot roast and some green beans plus a chocolate mousse with a sad looking dollop of whipped cream smashed into it. I also had three small flasks of wine at $4.00 a pop. My theory is that when I have three glasses at home I often wake up at 3:00 AM ready to go. Coincidently, my flight will arrive in Athens when my ‘clock’ says 3:00 AM so perhaps these drinks will help me wake up at the right ‘time’. Time is such a complicated thing to figure out when you are flying across time zones.

Well the flight got in to Athens and the Exploratorium group was there to meet me after all. Noel Wanier also showed up with his van to drive us to the apartment in Kifissia. It was a good thing too. A taxi driver would never have found our apartment building, and I would have been convinced that the address I had was a bad one too! Take a look at the photo below.

What do you think? The website gives the impression it is in an elegant neighborhood and the picture shows a gorgeous interior. In reality, the apartment building is right in front of a very busy freeway and the apartment itself is very modest in terms of furniture and appearance. It lacks a street number and it is next door to a tile and ceramics store in a part of town that is far from elegant, though Kifissia is touted as a very upscale and elegant neighborhood. The website for this apartment also shows the following photo for this apartment:

which does make it look very elegant and spacious. Notice the coffee table and couch! In actuality, here is what you would see from approximately the same viewing angle in the apartment:

Oh well, we ARE in Greece afterall, and for me I didn't have to pay a single dollar to get here, so I don't plan to complain much about the extraneous circumstances. Heck, to be here for the Transit I would put up with a lot worse accommodations!

Other than the language, you would not know that you are in a foreign country. My view out the window could be from Pasadena California looking up at the San Bernardino Mountains for all I could discern, yet upon closer scrutiny, the ubiquitous white houses marching up the mountainside would tip off the viewer that this is surely a Mediterranean or Aegian locality. The streets and sidewalks are in poor condition and this makes it look like everything is run-down, but there is no litter on the streets and sidewalks. Not a scrap!

The people I encounter in the Supermarket are a more homogeneous group than what I would find back home. There are no Indians, Chinese, Latinos or African-Americans, though the Greeks themselves run the gamut from dark hair and skin to blond and fair. All products in the store are in Greek, so only the shape of the packaging tips you off about what’s inside. Cans of soft drinks come in 330 ml sizes not 12-ounces. The set of drinking glasses in my kitchen are smaller than what I have in my own kitchen in Kensington Maryland, and have a 6-ounce capacity. They don’t ‘Supersize’ here, and few of the people I encountered would be called overweight, unlike the 50% of the folks I see in an American Safeway store. The dinner we got last night for 350 Euros for five people had modest serving sizes, not the huge heaps of food I would get at, say, Bennigans or Bertucci’s restaurants in Maryland. The advertisements on TV are seldom for food. In fact, I have yet to see any advertisements for food anywhere. There are no billboards lining the highway outside my window. The apartment also has no phone book, so I am clueless how businesses work here. Is it by word of mouth?