2002-08-31 16:57 UTC Greece
- The Good
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The alphabet rocks.
The people were relatively helpful and pleasant.
The new airport in Athens is very clean and perfect. Indeed it really looks like they bought a template motorway-and-airport and just dropped it there. There are still signs that have to have details, like the name of the airport, filled in.
The wedding ceremony was quite... ceremonial. Lots of singing in monotone voices and stuff. Very traditional. Sad, though, that most of the people there were totally ignoring that and just trying to get a "decent photograph". It looks like as a race we've stopped realising that the photograph or the film is not the object itself, but merely a tool to record the object. Instead of trying to record the event so it can be enjoyed later, why not just enjoy the event itself?
- The Bad
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The signs to the new Athens Airport are useless. The few signs that do exist are actually after the relevant junctions, in many cases. On a motorway, that's no good. Not to mention on a three lane road when the sign pointing left is posted on the far side of the junction and you're on the rightmost lane. (Especially ironic in that particular case is that if you missed the turning and kept on going, you would get to the same place, since the recommended path brought you straight back to the same road but one junction later.)
Public transport sucks. The village whose closest town was the capital of the country only gets about two busses a week, according to the taxi driver who brought me there.
It rained quite heavily.
- The Ugly
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It's almost as dirty as England. That seems quite typical of mediteranean countries, though. Dust everywhere, unfinished road surfaces, scrawled graffiti, run down houses next to sky scrapers...
Greek food is quite bland. At least, all the meals I had basically consisted of the same four dishes. Maybe Δομνιστα is just too far from the rest of civilisation to get lots of foodstuffs.
- Chuckle
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I saw a bus that appeared to have been lost, abandoned down a side street. Its bus number was 404.