Day 93 (Athens/Aegina)

Meeting at 9. Brent’s alarm did not do the job, I looked at the clock at 9:01, not good! We both jumped up and got ready pretty fast, Brent grabbed some sort of pastry at the bus stop, and then we went to the hostel in hopes they didn’t make other plans and abandon us. It was almost 10:30 now – but, they were there! After some chatting, we needed to get a move on and make the metro + busses we had to catch to get to the port. There was a bus + taxi strike at 11am… after hustling to the metro we were able to take it 2/3 of the way we needed. And then… it stopped… apparently this was a complete transportation strike. We were just standing in the metro with hundreds of other locals, everyone is disbelief. A few minutes passed and we realized they weren’t joking, and got off the metro – yet a fairly large number of people were still sitting on it, trying to will it to move again. This was only the start of a long and treacherous journey to the port…

So, on the map it looked like we were pretty close to the port. A few stops away, eh, no big deal. We asked about 4 locals on our first kilometer, they all said something to the tune of “don’t do it, you crazy foreign bastards.” We got multiple different estimates, “never, 4 hours, 10 km, 1 km…” Due to all of our stubbornness to not let the strike ruin our plans, we kept walking. After running into Chris randomly, he gave us some more directions, we went to person to person… km after km… and after 3 hours of walking, we were still not there. We finally made it to the metro stop before the last. The town we had to walk through was full of twists and turns, and with directions to go in three separate ways, we contemplated just walking the metro tracks (the signs ‘danger of death’ and ‘electric charge’ changed those thoughts). Again, back to walking… I might now mention that I have been plagued with some kind of death curse, headaches everyday for the last week, random stomach pains, finger and toe tingles and just a never ending tiredness (if you know what that is, let me know). Doesn’t sound good to me! Anyway, after another good hour of walking, we finally got some legitimate directions and the port was in our sights! It is 2:30 now… it takes an hour to get to the island, and the last boat comes back at 8… but we didn’t walk all this way to not go. We caught the ferry at 3pm, everyone napped on the way over, and I drank a redbull upon arrival.

It was great, we walked straight to the beach to start it off. No one brought towels though, and I only had basketball shorts… but, I was quick to go in. Since this is a sea and not an ocean, there are no waves, and the watch level was about knee high for the first 40 yards. It was kind of cold to start, but definitely do able. Brent came in after, we started a skipping rock competition. The girls then came in briefly, attempting to skip a few rocks with us as well. It really got to be nice after staying in for an hour or so… I found an arrowhead looking rock and then made myself a little spear. Only to be later eclipsed by a piece of wood and giant stick spear, with which I tried to go fishing with. I guess I was feeling caveman-ish. Or the redbull kicked in. The beach was a lot of fun, and after we were done with hanging out by it, we hiked up the hill a bit to walk along the coast and see what was left of Apollos Temple (one column). This led to a sea-side boat fruit vendor, buying 6 total oranges and devouring them. So good…so good! We just relaxed on the shore until our boat would get us at 8, a lot of fun after a marathon, I’ll take it.

On the way back on the Ferry, Thi took our her iphone and we started playing some sort of word game, which you had to make words out of a 4x4 block of scrambled letters, they all had to be touching. A little different than WordTwist and a little harder to get use to, but I got the hang of it. Thi dominated me, she won 7 out of 10. It only got worse throughout the rest of the night. Brent and Chow joined in, and we did some four player games. Brent and I lost all of them (I’m blaming Brent), I tried to get him a X3 handicap, but they wouldn’t go for it. PS: sorry I sold you out bro. We grabbed some food before heading home, some kebabs and pita. It was delicious.