Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 04:01:37 -1000 (HST)
From: Lee Lady
To: Friends
Subject: Re: Athens
Oh, yeah, and about islands, and Thessalonika and all that.
Well, including people in Honolulu, I know that there are at least four or five people who explained to me in detail why I absolutely must go visit some islands. But somehow I just can't seem to remember what all the reasons were. I seem to remember people saying something about beaches. But I didn't come half way around the world from Hawaii in order to go to the beach.
Anyway, I have indeed tried. I decided that I should visit at least one island, just to give the whole island concept a chance. An hour on the hydrofoil, just go for a day and come back in the evening. Poros sounded like a good choice for that.
But these people don't make it easy. The Lonely Planet says, ``Hydrofoils leave from Piraeus almost hourly,'' but it's not quite like that. I went to a travel agency and asked, ``Are there any schedules for hydrofoils?'' and was told, ``I know it seems crazy, but there aren't any.'' I went down to Piraeus, and there are half dozen companies, and I couldn't tell which ones went where I needed. At one company, I asked the guy, ``Do you have schedules?'' He spoke English fairly well, but ``schedule'' was one of those words that wasn't in his vocabulary. (Maybe I should of thought of trying ``time table.'') I did find one company, which I think was the one I want, that had a brochure which actually gave a schedule. And I found a trip that looked right for me, but this particular boat operated every day except Wednesday, and the day I went down to Piraeus just happened to be .... Wednesday!
Anyway, one can get down to Piraeus on the metro, but this is line number 1, the oldest line (very old, in fact), and it takes quite a while and is not a pleasant ride. And the trip ion the hydrofoil is cheap, but still, $40 round trip is not really all that cheap for something I really don't have much interest in doing.
So I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint all you guys when I get back to Honolulu by not being able to tell you about any islands.