Day 0 in Athens

First, an apology. No travel photos. Sorry. Next post. Scout's honour. Thought, as I typed the first entry, that it would be best to elaborate on the process.

Travelling all day, I should begin by saying, is not a lot of fun. Airports are stressful and unpleasant. And London airports in particular have developed an awfully nasty peculiarity: all flights have unknown gate locations. So you arrive and check in for your flight. You go through security. And then you sit by the panel waiting in eager anticipation until flight time minus 10 minutes when they finally publish the gate number. There's a mad rush from the mall-areas to the gate which begins boarding almost immediately.
Also, we had not appreciated that the econo-air company we booked the tickets on don't do assigned seating. So it really was like a very expensive bus. First come, first served. Alyssa and I were lucky to get to sit together both ways.
Nonetheless, direct flights were never priced so nicely, and we managed to make it to Athens without incident.
Thanks to the nail-biting vigilance of our parents, we knew to steer clear of Syntagma Sq: the central urban square in front of the parliament buildings where it was that Greece's first constitution - the syntagma - was granted by the then-king to an angry mob just like the one we'd been warned to avoid. The lady at the ticket office at the airport gave us advice: the station at the square would be shut down so we had to do a funny little loop with two transfers to get on the line that dropped us off by the next most convenient station to our hotel.
Now, my parents read this blog. I don't people to be worried about us. We didn't take stupid chances, except maybe the one where we came to Greece in spite of riots in the first place. The plane tickets were non-refundable. So we stepped out of the train station at the southwest corner of the Acropolis and looked up above the city lights and orange trees at the Parthenon, illuminated in all its glory. We were nervous about the walk to the hotel, but we were in Athens. We felt way more like globetrotters here than we did in Paris or maybe even London. This was a world away from anything we'd yet known.
Turns out, people are right about Greeks. Their politics and riots are crazy. But everyone, and I mean all of them, likes tourists. Rioters, their faces dusted with tear gas residue, on their way home from the fights with riot police and setting starbucks stores (it's not foreign presence so much as foreign business intervention they resent) on fire, stopped and asked if they could help us find our way through the windy and dimly lit streets of the Plaka. It was a little surreal, and if I hadn't still been on a high from seeing the Acropolis and orange trees and strange greek letters everywhere, I might have been more than a little frightened. We found the place, got checked in, popped out for some late night souvlaki and called it a night.
Kinda funny how you go away precisely to have an adventure, but when it shakes out differently from how you plan and timetable it, you get derailed a bit. This was good for us. And it'll make a wicked story for our kids someday. Maybe I should find video of the riots and save it to an external somewhere so I can keep an artifact.