Just when I had finally pushed myself to the point of work / travel exhaustion and was ready to ride out my last six weeks in Helsinki with time to say goodbye to my Finnish friends and reflect on the year…I was staffed on a due diligence in London for six weeks (hence the recent radio silence!) and have spent a grand total of two days in Helsinki since November 9th. There is definitely no way I’ll be gently easing out of Finland and landing softly back in the US as I had hoped! Instead, I will fly back to Helsinki from London this Thursday night for some long postponed meetings in Helsinki on Friday (with no option to further postpone!), finish my case that same day with me in Helsinki and my team scattered between Copenhagen and London, and then move out of my apartment at 6am on Sunday morning to catch a flight to Munich where I will enjoy the pleasure of a six hour layover before boarding a twelve hour flight back to San Francisco. I will land on Sunday night in San Francisco, the first time I’ll have been back since I left on January 6, and then fly out again twelve hours later to make the trip to Montana to see my family for Christmas. And did I forget to mention that I will have seven pieces of checked luggage with me (compared to a measly five on the way over – no shipped boxes this time) on the way back weighing in at around 500 pounds? Somebody should follow me with a video camera as it is bound to be an extraordinarily painful but highly entertaining train wreck spanning three international airport terminals and 24 hours. Makes the due diligence sound relaxing!And although I have been remiss with the blog updates as of late, I have not exactly been standing still (I know, I know, do I ever?). Had I not been staffed on this project at the last minute (and against my very strong will!) I would have spent two weeks in Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. Instead, I was able to spend a long weekend in Greece in early November and then another long, unexpected weekend in New York a couple weeks later.
Greece had been planned for a couple months and while I’d actually love to spend a month touring and hiking the country someday, I was again confronted with the problem of having too many great things to do and too little time. So, the month-long trip is still on the to-do list but I didn’t want that to keep me from Athens and perhaps a sunny island for a few days. (I forgot to mention how COLD and DARK it is in London let alone Finland these days! I’m starting to feel like I have been trapped in a snow globe…locked in the trunk of a car…parked on the side of the road in Siberia.) I flew from a conference in London to Athens on a Thursday afternoon and had three days to see the Acropolis and escape to one of the islands. Everyone told me this was crazy to do in three days but, as usual, I stubbornly refused to listen and stuck with my plan. I arrived on Thursday night to one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever stayed at (thank you, Starwood points!) where I was even assigned a personal “butler” who could be called for anything my little heart desired. Turns out this guy was more dazed and confused than he was helpful when my little heart desired some fluoride dental floss and to borrow a yoga mat. (It was clear that he was wondering why the hell I couldn’t just be normal and ask for a dinner reservation like all the other tourists!) And for the record, I didn’t get either.
What I did get that night was the best salad I’d had all year (I’ll never take warm climates and good produce for granted again!), cheap wine, and the opportunity to drop ten pounds of clothing off of my body before heading outside. Given that we’d been getting snow in Helsinki for about six weeks by early November, the 75-80°F weather in Athens was heavenly! (In all fairness, I think I lucked out on the weekend I was there. It had apparently been cold, windy, and rainy before I arrived and then was so again after I left.) I spent a lazy evening wandering around central Athens, eating as many vegetables as I could get my hands on, and enjoying the wine before calling it a night.
In order to get to Hydra, a no-vehicle island about two hours by catamaran from Athens, and have some time to enjoy it I had decided I’d leave on the 1pm ferry on Friday…which meant I only had half a day to see the Parthenon and Athens in general. This is, of course, completely insane and I only had time to see the Acropolis, but I had been told by a few people that Athens was a dirty, hectic, one-day-is-enough city and in keeping with my I-think-I-can-do-everything-in-half-the-time-of-a-normal-human mantra, I gave it, oh, about four hours. I certainly didn’t see everything one should see in Athens but I still have that month-long trip to Greece somewhere in my future so I figure I will be back.
In the four hours I did have I shot straight to the Acropolis and was greeted by the imposing, impressive, and brilliant ancient masterpiece that is the Parthenon…as well as by about 500 American tourists who had just descended en masse from the berth of their cruise ship and onto Athens (and me!) for a day. Few things are worse than looking for some solace in a mythical, magical place like the Acropolis and instead running into Donna from Oklahoma tightening her husband Jim’s fanny pack while telling him that he will need new odor-eaters for his tennis shoes after this trip – Wow, had they been a-walking! If it wasn’t Jim and Donna from Oklahoma then it was Beth and Dave from Minnesota having another variant of the same conversation…usually while sitting on the steps of some beautiful monument and smack dab in the middle of the picture I was hoping to take. But, in the end, what can you do? We were all there for the same reasons. It just turned out that there were too many of us there for the same reasons at the same time (and I’m sure this wasn’t even bad in comparison to what it could be during the high season)!
The Parthenon really was incredibly impressive as were the many other beautiful, marble temples stacked upon the same hill. I realized though that after seeing Ephesus in Turkey that I had become a bit of an ancient ruins snob – it was tough to get excited about a handful of temples (albeit collectively considered one of the world’s most precious and perfect ancient treasures!) after seeing an entire, amazingly well-preserved marble city just across the Aegean Sea (although I think I’ll bow out of publicly saying who has the best ruins for the sake of already strained Turkish / Greek international relations). I did enjoy wandering around taking pictures though and, perhaps except for the visible air pollution hanging heavily over the Athens skyline it was really a gorgeous day to be seeing one of the world’s wonders.
I raced back to my hotel, bid a fond farewell to my butler (not really), and hurried to catch the train to the Piraeus port to catch my ferry to Hydra. I was actually on time for the ferry but, quite unlike Finland where even when you’re on time you’re considered late, it didn’t seem like there was much of a schedule let alone adherence to it when I arrived at the port. The ferry showed up nearly an hour late (no announcement, no reason given), took forever to de- and re-board, and we finally took off about two hours later when we should have been arriving in Hydra Town. But, again, this kind of delay is par for the course in southern Europe so I wasn’t too surprised!
After being packed like sardines on a ferry for a couple hours, I arrived in Hydra Town and found it just as expected – quaint, beautiful, and low-key, tucked into a very pretty little cove on the island. As mentioned, there are no vehicles allowed on Hydra (although I did see one garbage truck at one point – I guess some exceptions are worth it!) and the locals get around on foot or by horse or donkey. I spent the afternoon walking around the island and getting lost in the maze of pretty little Greek stucco houses stacked upon one another and climbing up the sides of the island. Given my history with getting lost, particularly the extent (and sheer distance!) to which I’d been lost before, I was completely comfortable wandering around without a clue. I figured that I could get lost in the tiny, winding stone streets for a couple hours and then eventually pop back out somewhere in Hydra which, for once (thankfully!), is exactly how it worked out.
One thing that struck me as I walked along the water was that nearly every boat in Hydra was flying the Norwegian flag…what were all these Norwegians doing so far from home? I’ve learned that if you even mention the word “Norwegian” to any non-Norwegian European, you will usually hear “all that oil money” before you can even finish your sentence. So, it follows that all the fancy yachts and October tourists in Hydra come all the way from Norway in search of some autumn sunshine by which to sail their oil-funded yachts, while their home country is getting colder and darker by the day.
I woke up to another fantastic day on Saturday and grabbed a “cheese pie” (soft Greek cheese wrapped in triangle-shaped phyllo dough) and a diet Coke – breakfast of champions! – on my way out of town for a hike to the beautiful Agios Konstantinos (Church of St. Constanatine) perched atop the highest mountain on the island. The hike up was absolutely gorgeous at about 80°F of perfect sunshine and clear skies. I climbed up the remnants of old stone steps which had been used by the monks hundreds of years ago and had a spectacular view of the water and neighboring islands. (The steps were originally laid down by a monk who took on the project as a sort of penance – yikes!) The view alone motivated me to commit more strongly to my future month in Greece trip! I had a great time hiking around the island for a few hours and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the sun on the porch of my guest house doing a little bit of work and just enjoying the lazy ambiance of the little town.
Sadly, Sunday came all too fast and I had to be on an 11am ferry in order to make my 4pm-ish flight (the reason why everyone thought I was crazy to make the trip in the first place!) so it was goodbye to the Norwegian yachts, donkeys, and spinach pies and back on the little catamaran to get back to Piraeus. Again, and not unexpectedly, we left rather late but I still made it back to port in time to hike back to the train station, catch two trains to the airport, and then my two flights home to Helsinki…arriving at around 11pm. Twelve hours of return travel including a catamaran, two trains, and two flights for only two and a half days of fun seemed like a pretty high price to pay but, given that this was to be my last “fun” trip of the year (although I didn’t know it at the time), I was happy I did it!
The reason this was to be my last fun trip is because the very next day after returning from Athens I got staffed on my current project which completely changed my last six weeks in Europe. This project not only required that I cancel my vacation plans and delay my move back to the US by a week (so now I will arrive just before Christmas with no apartment and no time to find one before the holidays!) but only after getting sent to London did someone figure out I wasn’t even legal to work in the UK as a US citizen. Subsequently, I had to make a last minute trip to New York to get an expedited work permit which required copies of my college transcripts, copies of my last year’s worth of pay stubs, proof that I had a “special skill” that couldn’t be found in the UK (quite a stretch!), more passport pictures, a “biometrics” session (even more pictures and fingerprinting)…I swear I started having flashbacks to the Russia visa process! Four days and who knows how many thousands of travel dollars and immigration lawyer fees later I flew back across the pond, no longer an illegal. What did this earn me? Nothing but more scrutiny and fingerprinting every time I go through UK immigration. Turns out the more legitimate paperwork you have the more scrutiny you get. Go figure.
I’m now in the homestretch of the case but, much crazier and exciting yet disturbing, am in the homestretch of the year. Speaking of “home,” I’m not even sure I know what that means anymore and the moving, the goodbyes, and the starting over (again) is overwhelming…just as it was a year ago. But, regardless of my being overwhelmed, time just keeps ticking away and in one week I will be back at the beginning at the end. I just haven’t figured out yet if this is a good thing, or maybe more telling, if I’m ready for it even if it is.
I am beginning to think I might need to stand still for a while.
(Standing still, of course, being relative!)
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