I wiled the morning wandering the small streets of Chios Town, something we didn’t do much of when previously here. I even ate my first gyro – shaved pork wrapped in a fluffy Greek pita with lettuce, tomato, yogurt, onions and French fries (yeah, the last ingredient is a bit odd). I then parked my butt at a café with free WiFi and spent not less than 4 hours there. I wasn’t hungry – that gyro was big! – so I kept ordering drinks, moving from water to frappé to beer. The frappé was so caffeinated I actually feared for my life and considered telling someone I was on the verge of a heart attack, dash off my last will and calling my folks to tell them I loved them. With enough waiting and water, I thankfully deflated.
Because taking ferries would require a few days and overnights to get from Chios to Santorini, I opted to fly. The flght from Chios to Athens was a breeze, and I wanted to hug the Olympic Airlines flight crew for the service. A half hour flight and we even got snacks and beverages! I’m glad I didn’t; things changed at the Athens airport.
I had a three-hour layover and my cold was in full bloom. People on the plane moved away from me in fear of catching a bug on their retirement trip, despite my better efforts to hide the illness. I went looking for a pharmacy in the airport, but I was already behind security and no one understood me enough to let me out to get medicine. They kept telling me the Halls sold in the news shops is “medicine.” I don’t know how they do it in Greece, but that’s certainly not anything that would relieve me of the sinus duress I was enduring. So I plopped down and worked hard on this blog, just hoping I’d be in Santorini and bed soon.
Not so, kind reader. For reasons untold, Olympic decided to combine the Santorini and Mykonos flights, making it “free seating” (read: stampede) and refusing to tell Santorini-bound passengers when we would be arriving. It wasn’t until after arriving in Mykonos and waiting until taking off from there that they told us when we’d get in, about an hour and a half behind schedule. Now, I’m used to delayed flights. It’s expected in the US. But to add an entire other destination and refuse to tell us when we were getting in? Ridiculous.
I rolled into the bookstore at midnight, caught up with Pauline, a Parisian friend who I know from NYC, and her friend Sophie, a New Yorker living in Paris. I crawled into my bed (a lofted bed above a number of bookshelves) exhausted and happy to be done flying for a while.
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