Ten hours in a Greek airport: How to spend a day in transit
It should have been so straightforward, so quick: In under three hours, a jet can easily make its way from the island of Santorini over to Rome, the next big destination on my European itinerary. And yet here I was in the Athens airport facing the thing that travellers dread so much, the thing that can successfully demolish an entire day and replace it with nothingness: The layover. Thanks to an awkward combination of flight availability and the threat of an airport ground workers’ strike, I was facing a stretch of ten uninterrupted hours in the Athens airport.
7:45 AM: I’m standing in a depressing, grey-tiled room after the flight from Santorini dumps its load of tanned and relaxed passengers into some isolated and unidentified section of the Athens airport. There’s an information desk, but nobody’s there. There are signs, but they’re all in Greek. There are several escalators leading off in different directions, but I can’t tell where they might lead. Nobody else seems to know where to go, so the group consensus is to hover awkwardly around the empty desk, carry-on bags in hand. Eventually I decide to take action, and select an escalator at random.
8:00 AM: I seek out an English-speaking security guard and ask him where I should be. He takes a quick look at my boarding pass, then laughs. “Ten hours? Here? But you must be wanting to leave the airport and see the city! Ten hours, it is plenty of time!” I disagree. The Greeks are notorious for poor time management and scheduling, and ten hours can suddenly turn into no time at all when you’re throwing yourself onto random trains and busses into a massive city that you know nothing about. And as much as I’m not thrilled at the prospect of spending an entire day roaming the airport, I can sense that heading into Athens (heavy carry-on bag in tow) will end very badly.
8:30 AM: On a desperate mission to seek out caffeine (a lot of caffeine) and some form of breakfast, as the ouzo candies handed out on my 6:50 AM flight out of Santorini have done little to get rid of my hunger.
8:45 AM: The café I choose offers an option to purchase a cappuccino and a muffin for the price of the cappuccino only. In theory, this is a great offer. Thanks to a language barrier, I end up with a cappuccino and, inexplicably, a large chocolate cupcake (complete with mound of chocolate icing). I shrug and decide that I’m okay with the mixup. After all, is a sugar high at nine in the morning really so bad?
10:20 AM: Still sitting at the café. Have fallen into a pattern of dozing off to sleep, then jerking awake, then falling to sleep again. Clearly the cappuccino is not living up to the expectations I had for it.
11:45 AM: Aimlessly flipping through books and magazines in the newsstand, which is a lot less interesting than it might seem due to the fact that I can’t understand a single word.
12:15 AM: Lunch. A large, middle-aged woman piles a plate high with chicken souvlaki, then says something in Greek. I shrug. She adds two substantial spoonfuls of rice to my plate, then pushes it towards me. On the way to the cash register, I’m distracted by a glass case full of baklava swimming in honey. Mysteriously, one of them makes its way onto my plate. The meal costs fifteen Euros, which is twenty Canadian dollars, which is far too much to be spending on a pile of chicken and rice and some sugary pastry, all of questionable airport quality.
2:00 PM: It’s time to board, right? No? Okay, it’s time for another cappuccino, right?
2:45 PM: Get restless. March briskly and repeatedly up and down the concourse, overstuffed carry-on in hand, until a security guard stops me and asks me something undeterminable in Greek that I’m guessing amounts to “what on earth are you doing?”
3:20 PM: I discover a small balcony off the airport smoking room. I don’t smoke, but I do like the outdoors. From the window, the weather looks cloudy and cool, almost foggy. I can see some mountains, and a bit of sprawling city creeping up them. I push open the door and step outside, and a wall of unexpected, muggy, furnace-like heat hits me in the face. Perhaps the balcony was a bad idea.
3:30 PM: I become oddly fascinated with a display of potato chip packages covered in Greek characters. They look so exotic, and I’m tempted to buy a package just to see if they taste as interesting as they appear. Perhaps they have calamari and tzatziki flavours, or maybe lamb souvlaki. I ultimately decide that my expectations of Greek potato chips are probably too high.
4:00 PM: An American family hands their bored child a toy harmonica, and right away I know it’s time for me to get up and choose a new seat in the airport. Sure enough, the child decides that it’ll be amusing to stuff the harmonica into his mouth and breathe through it – loudly, repeatedly, annoyingly.
4:45 PM: Have fallen into some kind of stupor, possibly induced by the airport’s stale air or by the strange Greek-pop music playing softly in the background. At this rate, it’s highly likely that I will fall asleep and miss my flight.
5:12 PM: Gate number has been released. Time to power-walk to the opposite end of the airport, partially because I need to wake myself up after so many hours of inactivity, and partially because I am always gripped with an irrational fear that I’ll walk too slowly and miss my flight. Obviously I am the first person to arrive at the gate, where I fall back into my stupor.
5:55 PM: About to board, finally. Rome, look out: I’m headed in your direction.
Update: Flight delayed. May be spending all of eternity in this airport.
Another update: Made it to Rome, finally. And of course, I made my entrance in the most dramatic, problem-fraught way possible. More on this later.
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