Stay Hungry, Part 2

(Note: This is the 2nd part of a 4-part series.)

On our very first day in Greece, I was reminded of the immutable truth that pleasure is most intense when it follows a very unpleasurable turn of events. We arrived in Greece after midnight, having purchased the cheapest flights we could find, and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, which I thought I had booked. The cab driver rounded the 23 Euros on his meter up to 30 because we had luggage, luggage that he had watched us stack in the trunk and that, afterwards, he had handed to us with much unnecessary huffing and puffing. We reluctantly paid the bill and drug our bags up the steps, comforting ourselves out loud that we had at least found an affordable triple room to make up for that extra expenditure. We were then greeted at the front desk by two handsome teenage boys who insisted that, no, we had no reservation, but they could provide us with two separate rooms for the equivalent of $170 US dollars. I was livid. First the cab driver, now these guys. Was Greece conspiring against us?

Of course, we had no choice. We were on the outskirts of a new city in the middle of the night with no option for travel save disingenuous taxi drivers, so Rory and I plopped down our money with much unnecessary huffing and puffing, and we all climbed the eternal stairway to our rooms.

One thing I had resolved to do on this trip was to ask myself regularly what I wanted to do. When I sat down in bed to explore that option in my journal, the answer was, “I want to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick. And hey, while I’m at it, throw the taxi driver in there, too.” Yes, I am sorry to report that that was exactly what I wrote. In my defense, they were sickeningly smug and seemed to take great delight in our misfortunes. Still, although the fantasy intrigued me and although I had given myself permission to actually do the things I wanted to do, I could find no hockey stick, and I had never been athletic anyway. In addition to these things, I often praised the wisdom of nonviolence and would not be able to bear, on my future tirades, Scott reminding me, “but remember when you tried to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick?” So I decided that the next day, after a good night’s rest, I would return to the desk and recommend that they try smoked piggy ears at the earliest possible convenience. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.

The next morning rose bright and blue with that skin-tingling feeling that comes from being near a great body of water. I felt much less homicidal, even after trying to take a shower in a stall that was apparently designed for emaciated hobbits. We packed and breakfasted and turned our attention to the challenge at hand. Somehow we had to get downtown and find an affordable hotel. This involved many foreign things we hadn’t researched before: how to get bus tickets, how to figure out which bus to take, where to get the bus to stop, how to get the bus to stop, etc.

I’ll spare you the details of how we accomplished these things. It’s enough to know that it involved hopping a bus illegally because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets and then riding up and down 50 escalators until we figured out the metro system. About 4 hours later, we were still wandering the streets of downtown Athens with luggage that had somehow doubled in weight when a portly old Grecian recognized our vapid gazes and led us down a narrow side street to meet his good friend who was, of course, a travel agent. Enter the enigmatic Ulysses.

I don’t like being a suspicious person, but Greece had not exactly put its best foot forward, so we were anxiously waiting for this charismatic character to rip us off in some new and unexpected way. At the same time, we were so exhausted that we wanted to sit in his comfortable chairs for as long as possible. So Ulysses proceeded to weave his web of enticements until, hypnotized and fatigued, we caved, paid him for a very affordable week’s stay at the Hotel Moka, and left with explicit instructions as to how to find it.

We successfully found the metro stop, then the street, but when we located the precise spot where he had promised we would find said “very nice place,” Hotel Moka was simply not there. We circled the block once, then twice. Nothing. Nothing at all.

In all my paranoia, I assumed that we’d been had and that Hotel Moka didn’t even exist. Scott, in all his paranoia, took it a step further and assumed that, when we returned to the travel agency to confront Ulysses (I at the front with my hockey stick), we would find nothing more than an abandoned cavern with one remaining poster of Greece’s islands fluttering on the wall. Rory insisted (a bit naively, we thought) that setting up an entire travel agency just to trick 3 tourists and make 350 Euros would be a very labor-intensive way of making a profit. Little did he know. The only thing left to do was to find a bench and then wait to die.

Of course, it turns out that we were a block off, that Ulysses, the little trickster, had marked the wrong location and that we should have followed the address he had given us instead. We found Hotel Moka, discovered that our payment had indeed gone through, and began praising Ulysses for all of his kindness and foresight. How like the great Ulysses he truly was! How deserving of his name!

Then came the pleasure that only comes from a torrent of relief. We were in the center of downtown Athens in an affordable hotel, one block down from the most savory gyros and the richest and flakiest pastries I had ever known. It was going to be a lovely week after all.