Athens, a city full of smog and crazy, crazy drivers...

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Deciding to go on a Greek Island Hopping holiday, in an attempt to recreate the ‘travelling’ experience, was easy… The organization and planning etc wasn’t so easy, but when you’re going away with your sister (Chloe) who is an events manager and organization is her ‘thing’ it definitely helps. The Lonely Planet Guide to the Greek Islands quickly became our bible (or should I say Chloe’s bible…). The decision was taken to go to the Cyclades and in 11 days we would go to Paros, Naxos and Santorini. Probably not long enough, and indeed this did prove to be the case, but at least we should leave wanting more!

Day one of the holiday arrived and after an Olympic Airways flight to Athens with quite possibly the most unfriendly and surly air stewardesses ever - isn’t it a criteria of their job to always be happy, happy, smiley, smiley people?! - we landed to a very hot welcome (weather wise) in Athens. The flight was also notable for a yummy Mummy who sat in business class whilst her three children and two nannies ‘slummed’ it at the back of cattle class, and also a girl sat in the row opposite who halfway through the flight quite calmly brought her foot up to her mouth and started eating her toe nails. Yuck!

Everything that we had read had told us to take the Metro to Pireaus as this would be much quicker than the bus. In hindsight, we should have taken the bus because… The metro was absolutely fine until we got to Monastiraki where we had to change from the ‘blue line’ to the ‘green line’ to get to Pireaus, but the ‘green line’ wasn’t working that day despite no warnings at any point on the journey or from the man at the airport station who grunted €10 at us when we bought our tickets. The sign at Monastiraki station said (via a very kind translation from a Greek girl who helped the blank looking English girls) that we should go back one stop and take the ‘040’ bus, so we duly went back the one stop (to Syntagma) and couldn’t find the 040 bus nor find anyone of Greek nationality or otherwise who knew of this infamous bus… Therefore the only option was to find a Greek taxi to take us to ‘Pireaus Dream Hotel’ where we were staying for the night.

Taxi found, we sped at a very fast speed along the Athens roads in the direction of the port. Our kamikaze driver prompted me to quickly decide that I would never drive in Greece! We eventually found our hotel after being stuck in traffic by the port, our first glimpse of the madness that we would need to negotiate the next morning. In our hotel room, we worked out the air-con and sat outside on our balcony being v classy and eating pizza - with the ferries being spotted thorough gaps in the buildings opposite.

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