We are here at the airport preparing for a very long flight to Toronto. And let’s not forget I have another 5 hour flight after that. This is, however, the worst one. If I heard the ticket agent correctly, there is actually no business class on the plane at all making it a flying sardine can.
The Air Canada folks have already been giving me crap. I got interrogated before I even got to the ticket counter. The lady asked me, “When is your return?” and I replied with, “Return? I’m not coming back. This is it.”. I guess that response sounded too ominous, so they gave me the stink eye before letting me continue. And to make matters worse, I was just on the Air Canada site and they say that on select flights from Athens on 767 aircraft (that would be us) do not have any personal entertainment systems. This could be the flight from hell.
As predicted, this Air Canada flight has no in flight entertainment. While they do have the screens in front, there is obviously no choice of film. In fact, they ran out of movies just 5 hours in to the flight. They almost repeated Man on a Ledge, but after I saw it once, I was able to verify that it is indeed about a man on a ledge. Of interest, however, was our flight path out of the Athens airport. We made a long, lazy curve during climb-out that took us over the city. In the center of this photo is the Acropolis, though a bit fuzzy.
Let’s consider this my last blog post of the trip. Once I have a little bit of time to recover, I’ll post my final reflections as I did with Vietnam. It is a country that has been in the news a lot lately, so I think that could be interesting if I can form coherent thoughts.
When I went to Vietnam, it was not the country I pictured from war films, and I found it difficult to believe we even fought a war there. Greece was also not what I was expecting, but in a much different way. Just my experiences as a tourist made it pretty obvious as to how the country became broke to begin with. So to the CNN/Fox News/MSNBC pundits who say that the U.S. is going to become Greece, I say this, “Perhaps you should visit a place before vomiting out nonsense as if you were on your way to Crete in rough seas.” After all, the “Greek” yogurt you buy at Safeway doesn’t even taste like Greek yogurt.
passports & pepto bismol 