Rising early, very early, we packed up the rest of our things, checked out (each going down the lift separately) and wandered across the road to port E7. We had been told to get there half an hour early, which would have been 6.55am, but being the kind of people we are, we got there about 6.30am instead. When we arrived, a lot of people were milling about aimlessly, and there were two men standing where the cars would normally enter the ferry. Something wasn’t right.
We found a place to dump our stuff and survey what was going on around us. A young woman came up to us and said, “Have you heard about the strike?” The what? No. I was initially sceptical, you know, often when you’re in foreign places someone will tell you a thing isn’t open but instead come this way and they’ll be able to help you! So it wasn’t until an old American gentleman came up and said the same thing that we realised that this wasn’t a joke or a scam, and that there was an actual problem.
The big screen above our heads was no longer showing departures, and the queue at the ticket office was getting longer and longer. Dan went to join that queue to find out what was going on, while I looked after our mountains of luggage. A camera crew rocked up, and it was then that I realised that it was going to be very unlikely that we would be getting on a ferry to Santorini today.
As I stood there, passive aggressivley contacting Blue Star Ferries on social media asking for updates, that I noticed the camera crew edging closer to me, before thrusting the camera and the microphone in my face. At first I shook my head no and put up my hand, but he was pretty persistent so I just answered his few rapid fire questions anyway. I can’t completely remember what he asked, but it was along the lines of, “where are you supposed to be heading today” and “what are you going to do?”. With my response being something along the lines of “What can we do? I guess if the ferries aren’t running, we’ll have to find accommodation for the night here and hopefully make it there tomorrow.” I surprised myself that I wasn’t nervous with the microphone stuffed in my face (I didn’t really get a chance to think about it) and I wasn’t a ranting and raving customer, just tried to be logical about the whole thing. Also uncharacteristic of me!
Afterwards I laughed to myself and realised I must have llooked like the poster child of the disgruntled passenger when they came up to me - slouched over my phone, perched on the edge of a potplant, surrounded by our mountains of luggage.
The line Dan was in wasn’t moving, and so we messaged each other and decided to try another ticket office outside of the port area. This proved successful and it wasn’t long before Dan was back and able to update me on the situation. Our tickets had been moved to tomorrow (Friday 20th), with the hope that the strike would be over by 6am that morning. No guarantee, but as close as we could get. Bugger. Ok, well at least we had tickets for the next day. Now what?
Now we had to get a nights accommodation somewhere. I suggested returning to the hotel we were at. It was shit, but it was a known factor and close to the port. Dan had already done some searching on booking.com and it was available for €32 for the night, or there were a few others around with the same price range.
We returned to Hotel Delfini and waited for the woman to finish parking her car and serve us. I explained that we had just checked out and stayed there the night before, and our ferry was just cancelled so could we please have a room for tonight again? When she said, “That will be €60” I almost fell over. Excuse me? We just paid €30 for it last night, how can it be so much tonight? Also, on booking.com, it’s €32. “Will you honour the booking.com price?” I asked. “I don’t know why it hasn’t updated,” she said, “I can’t give you the room for the price on the app.”
This went on for a little longer than what I’ve written above, and I was getting pretty angry. In the end, it was basically, “Well, if you won’t honour the online price, we won’t stay at your really shitty hotel, there are plenty of others around and you’re getting a bad review.”
Can I just say I am so glad we left that place because the hotel we ended up at was just lovely. Once we were outside Hotel Delfini, Dan bought our room at a hotel around the corner called Eva Hotel. It was about an 8 minute walk away from this one, €30 for the night and looked quite nice. The walk was largely up hill, but that was ok - in the morning this would all be downhill.
We approached the hotel, and the moment we stepped inside, we were in awe. Beautiful glass paned ceilings, lovely couches - a far cry from the shithole we had stayed in the night before. A gruff but kind man was behind the counter, and we said we had just made a booking for tonight, explaining about the ferry. He looked at his computer system in confusion, and at that moment his fax machine fired into life. There was our booking! It came through as we stood there.
He was slightly perturbed as I think he was now overbooked, but he said we could leave our things and come back at about 1pm and he will have something for us. He said, “Don’t stay in Piraeus. Not today. Go into Athens, get away from here.” Which was sound advice - the pickpockets would be rife today with the confusion at the port.
We left with mixed feelings. Obviously very disappointed that we hadn’t made it to Santorini today, and no guarantee that we would on the morrow. But relived we had found a place, and what looked like a good place, to stay for the night. We would deal with anything else when it eventuated. We also didn’t really want to go back into Athens - what would we do? On the train to Monastraiki I looked up places to eat breakfast, and once we arrived we walked for a bit looking for it. It didn’t look like what I had hoped for when we got there, so we continued on. We thought - maybe we’ll have breakfast in that place we keep having drinks at! However we were too early for their breakfast. Walking a bit further, a man tried to have us eat in his restaurant - it was one of those all plastic, fake and shitty looking places and I was already in a bad mood so I said no.
We looked at the menus of a few places and settled on the restaurant next to the shitty one called Komikos. It had a separate breakfast menu but didn’t quite get the reviews I usually hope for - but we tried it anyway. It should have better reviews that it does! It was the most inexpensive of all the restaurants we looked at, and it was actually delicious. We both had the “mediterannean omlette” with feta and capsicum and potato, and it came with lovely bread and we also ordered a side of strawberries and greek yoghurt and honey - to get some much needed vitamins. We wanted a big breakfast so we could power through the day as much as possible, and this fit the bill!
We really weren’t sure what to do with the day, so we thought we’d go back to the botanic garden. As we sat there, I realised we were near the Olympic Stadium and I googled whether it was in fact worth it to go inside for €5 each. Seemed to be, so now we had a plan! At some point around here I had a horrible coughing fit (I’ve been fighting a sore throat for a few days) and something wasn’t feeling good from breakfast. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself.
Suddenly, we heard BANG bang, BANG bang, and out from the street next to us marched a whole troop of greek soldiers! Dan grabbed his camera and ran to catch up to them - I was considerably slower and happened to hear a nearby tour guide mention it was the soldiers doing their drills. I eventually pulled myself together enough and we took a few photos of them, all the while saying to each other, “Marching up and down the square!” from the Monty Python sketch.
Because that’s exactly what they were doing. Marching up and down the square. They had an interesting march pattern which involved slapping the right foot hard while the left foot took a normal step. Occasionally they would march with their heads turned to the right, and in sequence return to the frontwards position. Up and down the square.
We left them to their marching and continued on to the Olympic Stadium. I was feeling pretty poorly, so we bought our tickets, went inside, climbed the huge amount of steps to the top of the stadium (that didn’t help how I was feeling!) And sat in the sun for a little while, Ssurveying the scene. Dan read out some facts from the brochure about the stadium - the most interesting to learn was that, while it had been built for the 1896 first modern Olympic Games, there had actually been a stadium on this spot since anceint Olympic times, so that made it considerably more interesting!
We circumnavigated the top of the stadium, stopping for a selfie (realising a bloke had chosen the perfect spot for it and waiting for him to complete his selfie) before meandering down the stairs. On the way, I spotted two “throne” like chairs built into the marble with clawed feet, so we spent some time sitting in them. And ultimately sliding off the seat, because it was polished marble.
On the right of the stadium was a door way, which I presumed led underneath the stadium. In fact it went up, and into the hillside that the stadium was built into. Inside was a really interesting overview of the Olympics and athletics in ancient times, before a display of all the modern Olympic posters and the actual flame torch for each year since it was introduced for the Berlin games of 1936. Of course the Nazi’s introduced the flame - they loved their pomp and circumstance.
It was really interesting seeing the progression of design (and design tools, the last few obviously computer drawn, whereas those early in the 1900’s were, well, obviously hand drawn…) and the evolution of the torch (as it became more and more wind resistant).
Back outside, we opted not to run on this track as we had run on the Ancient Olympic track just the day before (was it really only the day before?!) and that was probably all the exercise we needed for a while… On the tracks were some interesting statues - notable for their face at the top of a rectangular marble block , and then about halfway down a set of genitals. One was flaccid, and on the other side, happily erect. I had stood here taking photos of their faces for quite some time before I noticed the willies, and was probably quite childish about it when I did.
What I had really wanted to so was have my photo taken on the winners podium. We waited patiently as a large Indian family did the rounds with each family member, and when it was our turn another couple waited in line after us. I asked if they could please take a photo of Dan and I, as my normal selfie wasn’t going to work (too low), and offered photos in return. This was all good - I wanted Dan and I to both stand on the number 1 position as we are both equal! This mostly worked, except we held hands above our head and with Dan so tall, I had to stand on tippeytoes. It makes for quite a hilarious photo, at least! We returned the favour and stood having a bit of a chat with this couple.
It was now well and truly lunch time so we headed back to Tylixto Greek Wrap to try the gyros this time (pronounced “yiros”, like they do in SA). After lunch and some people watching, we returned to Piraeus to check in. On the way, we stopped past the ticked office to see if they had any updates and they told us to come back at 5pm.
Now we just collapsed for the afternoon. Our room was really nice, considering. It was still a cheap hotel, but my god it was a 200% improvement on the night before. We had running hot water, door handles that stayed on, air conditioning, little shampoo bottles, wifi, and a comfy bed and delightful purple decor. We spent the afternoon doing a lot of research for New York accommodation, something we hadn’t had a chance to do yet. So maybe this spare time was fortuitous?
After 5pm, we returned to the ticket office and got the all clear for the morning - hooray! That was excellent news. Boyant by the news, we wandered to the port to take photos of all the ferries and boats with the lovely green blue night sky.
By now I was getting very hungry, and had researched a place not far from our accommodation that received good reviews. It was called Stoa Rakadiko and it was slightly pricier than others, but the menu online looked lovely. We had done a walk by on the way to the ticket office and found it so we knew exactly where to go on our return. The inconspicuous doorway was surrounded by bougainvilleas, and once inside the space was quite large and broken up into different areas. We sat in the half-outdoors area with umbrellas on the roof. It was lovely.
Our waiter was very charismatic, and as I had looked online at the menu we were quite quick to order. Dan and I each ordered a different kind of pita wrap which were quite inexpensive, so we ordered a couple of local mains as well, namely dolamades and a dish of gruyere cheese with drunken figs. To top it off, we had red wine and crusty warm fresh bread. It was. Delicious. Our waiter laughed at me when I took some photos, “Thank you for taking photos of our food!” He said, but you never know - my photos may bring some more people there!
Piraeus is not an amazing place to be, but if you do have to go there, definitely try this restaurant!
We knew we had an early start the next morning (when don’t we have an early start?) so we headed back, packed (we are getting really good at repacking!) and went to bed.
Til next time,
xx
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