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02-08-2011
A grueling 14hr flight from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi. Poor ross struggled with food poisoning for most of the flight. He skipped dinner and breakfast on the plane and was looking pretty pale. I felt soo sorry for him. It was good to see him a bit more up and about after eating 'lunch' at 6:30am in Abu Dhabi.
I was a bit worried about getting to navigating and communicating at foreign airports but pretty much everywhere we have been so far accomodates from the english language.
Excitement started building as we started our decent into Athens airport. Nerves started kicking in at the realization of having to navigate our way around athens to find out accomodation. The information desk at the airport was very helpful and before we knew it we were buying a bus ticket and heading into the center of athens. Luckily where we needed to go was the last stop on the line which made it a lot easier.
With a map in hand and our backpacks strapped on, looking like the newbies of traveling, we navigated our way through the streets towards our accomodation. We were very unsure of how causious to be, I treated everyone as suspicious haha, I have heard many a story of pick pocketers and the like so proceeded with a lot of causion :p
Finally arriving at our accomodation, we met with our room mates, pretty much aussies all round. I swear we are taking over this place haha. Once settling in went for a stroll, we were pretty hesitant to venture too far in case we got lost. Taking in the unfamiliar surrounds, there are many stray dogs and cats which seem to inhabit the main streets of athens. Walking past restaurants is like walking down lygon street back home looking for a restaurant, you get hounded from 20m away :p Scanning around you see that buildings dont seem to be very well maintained. Its interesting the apartments / units crammed into narrow streets, you can have beautiful buildings right next to some really run down places. Some buildings have been abandoned at the construction stage. Cars seem to just park anywhere and everywhere around the place, they are jam packed into narrow streets, traffic is hectic, people just pull out of nowhere. I observed a few people just shooting across 2 lanes to make a turn at the lights, it just seems like you pretty much do what you want not taking in much consideration for other road users. Its pretty funny how your traffic sense is built it, its taking a bit of getting used to crossing the streets, i keep looking in the wrong direction and stepping into the line of on coming traffic, something i will have to address sooner rather than later.
-Ryan
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