In the last episode, Lucy and I enjoyed a visit to Amsterdam to meet up with my best friend’s parents, and we learned many interesting things, some historical, but mostly regarding drugs and prostitution. After we made a fateful decision to travel by train, ferry, and train again to Greece, things began to go south both literally and figuratively. Our time in Brindisi, Italy was especially unpleasant and caused me to question my newfound love of all things European. But that was only the beginning.
Let’s Maybe Not Stay Europe
I don’t recall how we endured what remained of the dreadful day in Brindisi, only that time stood still until late evening when we were finally able to board our ferry for the overnight trip to Patras, Greece. It was a large craft with multiple decks, and once again relying on the rose-colored suggestions of Let’s Go Europe we opted for the cheapest fare which meant sleeping on the top deck open to the elements. The guidebook’s description of course made it sound romantic, which it kind of was until nightfall dropped the temperature precipitously and it began to precipitate. That made falling asleep hard enough, but there were small groupings of other Let’s Go Europe devotees drunker than ourselves all talking and laughing loudly which made it much harder.
Making it impossible was that one such group was being serenaded by a guitar-strumming minstrel and having a kumbaya moment, singing along in an atonal fashion. Which made me want to smash the guitar to pieces like John Belushi in Animal House.
As you can imagine it was a long night and neither Lucy nor I slept much, but dawn breaking with the sun rising and no clouds on the horizon seemed to herald a new beginning. Until, without warning, cackling crew members began power-washing the top deck with a fire hose, sending us cheapskates into a frenzied panic. After frantically gathering our belongings, most of which thankfully were still dry in our packs, and scurrying past the swarthy swabbies to the safety of a lower deck, we sat down and laughed or cried, I don’t remember which. Likely it was both. Once our wits were again about us, our stomachs remembered that our last meal had been 14 hours earlier so the immediate order of business was to get something to eat.
The ferry had several snack bars, all of which offered a mouthwatering menu of classic Greek gustatory delights such as lamb or chicken gyros, spanakopita, moussaka and pasticcio. All of which sounded delicious to two starving wanderers, and all of which required we pay with drachmas, and all we had was what little Italian lira hadn’t been bullied out of us in Brindisi. And the only currency exchange on board didn’t open for another three hours until we reached the territorial waters of Greece.
So it was we spent most of the remaining ‘love boat’ cruise huddled on a hard bench lost at sea. And extremely ‘hangry’. Not until we were finally able to get our hands on some drachmas and gyros did our moods begin to brighten, and they stayed bright for the short time left until we got off the ferry and shuffled into the filthy station in Patras to begin a long wait for the train to Athens.
By this time, we had become convinced that the people at Let’s Go were paid a royal ransom to direct tourists along this trail of tears and that, until we reached Athens, we were not safe from further frustration. And we were right.
Throughout most of Europe you simply board any train and show the conductor your Eurail pass, but there are exceptions and unbeknownst to us Greece was one of them. That is why, when we were safely on board tucked into an empty cabin and were unable to show a burly brute the required boarding passes, he rudely informed us we would need to get up, get off, and get them.
The train’s scheduled departure was imminent, so we scrambled to gather our stuff and were escorted to an exit by our new friend. At the open door he helpfully grabbed my pack and tossed it onto the platform then shoved me down the steps after it. Whereupon, with a mournful whistle, the train started moving and he started laughing.
This Hellenic henchman had apparently decided that Lucy did not need a boarding pass since he made no effort to remove her or her pack. I assumed he had indecent designs, so I yelled for Lucy to jump off figuring we would go get the fucking boarding passes and wait for the next train. To my surprise, Lucy yelled for me to get back on.
As the train gathered speed, I switched into full panic mode and using my pack as a battering ram was able to fight my way to the top of the steps and past the surly steward to join my girl. And I was only able to do that because he was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up, let alone fight.
After another full day of Sturm und Drang, it took all of the agonizingly slow four-hour train ride to Athens for me to calm down but by the time we arrived well after dark I had been able to convince myself our troubles were finally behind us. Once again, I was dead wrong.
The cherry on the shit sundae of our hellish 48-hour trek appeared innocently enough as a smiling if a bit smelly cab driver who spoke broken but passable English.
Slowly learning the ropes, we had taken the precaution of writing down the address of another cheap let’s-not-go pension so after handing him the note, satisfied we were at last reaching the end of the ordeal, settled our tired bones into the seats to take in the ancient city and its sights as they dreamily passed by. After I noticed the same statue pass by twice, which made me suspicious, and then a third time, which made me mad, I demanded, evidently with convincing exasperation, that we be taken to our room post haste. Which he finally did but without ever wiping the smile off his face.
Exhausted from the trip and suffering PTSD, we intended to spend some quality time in Athens rocking the cradle of Western Civilization and sucking our thumbs. The city was foreign but fascinating to be sure, and its inhabitants were mostly outgoing and pleasant, as opposed to, say, Parisians.
The only sour note of our stay was the obligatory visit to the Acropolis and Parthenon which, aside from being very crumbly and underwhelming, were visited at the time by what appeared to be half a million tourists. The most memorable experiences, for me at least, were dining in one of the ubiquitous tavernas which line seemingly every street in downtown Athens.
I imagine this is the case in other countries as well, but if you’ve never been to Greece, you should understand that the proprietors of these casual and often open-air eateries do not wait for you to read the menu, eyeball the interior, and wander in to eat. They come get you.
These militant maître d’s are without fail friendly and enthusiastic, and never use physical force, but also simply will not take no for an answer. I didn’t want to be rude, and was still operating with a teenage metabolism, so I estimate over the course of our stay in the city I averaged six square meals a day.
The weather was fine in Athens but after three days of binge-eating we decided to execute our planned move to the island of Crete for some much-anticipated sun in a charming white-washed villa on the blue water of the Aegean.
We were understandably apprehensive about another ferry ride, but from the tiny map in Let’s Go Europe I judged the trip to be no more than a couple of hours. When we bought tickets and found out it would take 12 hours and require spending another night on a boat packed with other people, we became significantly more apprehensive. To make matters worse, those other people were predominantly Greek Orthodox Christians, and church canons strictly prohibit the sexes sharing a bed on any public transportation, even if they are married.
So I spent a long, sleepless night in a cabin full of inebriated men listening to them rant and roar, at me I assumed, and feeling sick from very rough seas combined with the body odor of my bunkmates and toxic level of methane from their formidable flatulence.
By morning the storm had passed, as had their gas, and the water was far less choppy. Once I was reunited with Lucy, who reported her experience with the ladies was polite and proper and far less smelly, the rest of the trip was rather nice. On deck at the rail, basking in sunshine and sipping strong coffee, we befriended a Cretan – not the kind we encountered in Brindisi, a real one – and in perfect English he gave us a quick history lesson of the island and convinced us the capital city of Heraklion where we were headed was not the best choice for the kind of rest and relaxation we sought. Instead, he insisted we head west to the town of Chania, which was about a two-hour drive away and happened to be where he grew up and was returning for a family visit. And he had a car.
Our angel of mercy dropped us off in the Old Venetian quarter of Chania and we were readily accepted at a not exactly white-washed pension offering a partial view of the waterfront with its mooring basin and fishing boats bobbing in the not exactly blue water. Despite the drab color scheme we were instantly charmed and thought we’d finally found paradise, and it quite nearly was at first.
The ancient quarter of course had several of the aforementioned tavernas with aggressively friendly owners who all delighted in competing with each other for our patronage. The food was perfectly fine and extremely affordable, and I immediately fell back in the habit of eating more than three meals a day. There was even a public pool which was almost deserted as it was now October and the children were back in school. We were able to relax and sunbathe while getting tipsy on 22-ounce bottles of Heineken sold for the equivalent of about fifty cents.
Within a week, however, paradise was lost. This was due to several factors, the first of which being that the pool closed for the winter shortly after we discovered it, abruptly evicting us from our semi-private sunbathing spot and cutting off a source of absurdly cheap beer.
This wasn’t Palm Springs, so parading around town in swimsuits was out of the question, and we tried to content ourselves with just easy living for the few days remaining before we needed to head back to mainland Europe and make our way to Switzerland.
We planned to meet up with our friend and a fellow Jake’s waiter Bill, who was literally flying around the world on a ticket Pan Am airlines sold for something like $700 which allowed him to go anywhere they flew as long as he went in one direction and never backtracked.
But living isn’t easy when you have nothing to do but eat the same food, drink the same beer and wine, and stare at the same view, which as the dirt in the streets and garbage in the water came into sharper focus wasn’t that pleasant to look at.
And before I forget to tell you, except in the finest hotels and restaurants, there are no toilets anywhere on Crete, or in Greece for that matter. When the need to relieve yourself becomes urgent, you do whatever business there is to conduct using a hole in the ground. Which is why there are bidets in every room. Which I, like any male American tourist worth their salt, used as a urinal.
The first of two straws that ultimately broke our bliss was that the Greek national elections were fast approaching and we had been bombarded daily, and sometimes nightly, with passing vans whose loudspeakers extoled the virtues of this candidate or that. Which was bad enough, but when we discovered it is illegal in Greece to sell or consume alcohol on the day of an election, and had to suffer the peripatetic proselytizing stone cold sober, it was much worse. As an aside, it was impossible to tell whether Greek men debating politics were drunk or not.
The last straw was when on our penultimate night, in an effort to impress the locals, I ate a large platter of fried Greek smelt in the customary manner by chomping the head and body off in one bite and throwing the tail to the scores of feral cats who are also regulars at the tavernas. And washed it down with a liter of retsina, the popular pine resin-infused wine. What ended up in the toilet hole was a phantasmagorical combination of the two, and the resulting hangover was the worst of my life. And why to this day I cannot tolerate even the aroma of retsina.
All that aside, the date with Bill was drawing near, so it was time to go. Our original plan was to reverse course and take the ferry back to Athens, the train back to Patras, the ferry back to Brindisi, and the train back to Switzerland. So, it will come as no surprise that we elected to spend an exorbitant amount of our limited funds to buy plane tickets and fly directly to Zurich.
When we deplaned at the airport, words cannot describe how stunned we were by the cleanliness of, well, everything. I vividly remember entering a spotless restroom with actual fixtures to use and the steel was so stainless and shiny it hurt my eyes. And the urinal I used was no doubt more sanitary than the plates on which our food was served in Chania.
On top of that, there was a palpable sense of order, method and timeliness. And people in the busy airport were strikingly slender with fine features, well-dressed, and smelled a whole lot better than your average Greek peasant.
Despite having a couple of days to kill before meeting Bill, we decided to move on to the appointed rendezvous point of Lucerne. Feeling relatively clean for the first time in a couple of weeks, we boarded an immaculate train and were escorted to our cabin by a gracious steward who required nothing more than a quick glance at our Eurail passes. And we left the station exactly at the scheduled time, headed for a happy reunion with our friend.
(to be continued)