America 1 + America 2 take a trip: DAY 18: All €24 worth, and then some

After the last week or so worth of cloud cover and occasional showers (plus a downpour here and there), you can imagine my surprise at opening the balcony doors to a (nearly) clear sky and blinding sunlight in the morning! Great timing, considering that we planned to spend the entire day driving back to Athens (and by entire day, I mean a few hours). Baby Splash had to be returned to the airport by two that afternoon and we were in no mood to pay extra, so off we went to the glorious metropolis of Athens.

As we discovered a week before, the drive between the Peloponnese and Athens is a bit costly via the 'National Road', so our main goal for the drive was to avoid tolls at all costs—mission accomplished! We managed to find a road that paralleled the national road, but with better views of the coastline and no tolls! Even better, we ended up taking a detour to picnic on the beach, as our overzealous planning had resulted in an extra hour and a half to kill! Our views of the coast included the Salamini Islands (Salami Islands, as I preferred to call them), which made JJ super-duper excited about something to do with Persian wars in that part of the bay.

Also, I would like to take a moment to vindicate myself from the anti-classical connotations that have been bestowed upon me through the graces of JJ's blogging—I really do think that most historical sites and ruins are cool (or at least educational...slightly), but Mycenae literally looks like a pile of rocks...more so than any other ruins I've been to. I just find it difficult to be very interested in rock piles (or other historical sites, for that matter) that I am utterly unfamiliar with. And I've been to more than my fair share of historical sites (here's looking at you, Dad).

Anyways, a bit further down the road, we made our way towards Marco Polo (ok, it's really Markopoulo, but my names for Greek towns are more amusing. So far we've been through Purgatory, seen the Salami and Diaper Islands, and nearly been to Marco Polo). Making our way through the eternal spiral of the airport parking lots, we eventually checked the car back in (covered in dirt) and hopped on the metro to get to the Athens Hotel/Hostel. We got off the metro at Omonoia Square and walked up the stairs in to the glorious sunlight of the heart of Athens—which just so happens to be a not so friendly place.

As we did our best to follow the poorly labelled streets towards the Athens Hotel, the streets didn't seem terribly different to those surrounding our Athens hotel the week before (which weren't too bad, but weren't the best...people wise, that is.). The last few blocks of the walk, however, shed light on a new situation. Not only had we taken a scenic route on our way to the heart of the Athens ghetto, but our hostel apparently came flanked by prostitutes and druggies. Schweet. Good neighborhood. (for obvious reasons, I don't have pictures). I was a bit unnerved by the general environment, and after being buzzed into the building, we still had five floors worth of poorly lit marble stairs to ascend before reaching the hostel.

Quick clarification: there were no prostitutes or druggies IN the hostel, simply AROUND the hostel.

Check in was an adventure in itself. After JJ somehow communicated to the man at the desk that yes, we had reserved online, and no, we weren't expecting to pay in cash, and yes, we had reserved a private room, he led us down the hallway to our quarters for the night 'to clean it' and let us set our stuff down. Thinking he meant we needed to make the bed (typical of many hostels), this was normal. Except that when he opened the door, the linens hadn't been taken off the bed from the previous occupants...who so kindly left the room smelling of stale body odor. JJ and I awkwardly watched as the man took off the linens, conducted a unique 'cleaning' method to ensure the bed was 'clean' (does beating the mattress with dirty linens count as cleaning?), and put new sheets on the bed. I thought, alright, this is a bit weird that it was dirty, but it's cleaner now, we'll deal with it.

That thought lasted until he opened the closet to put the comforter on the bed. No, strange dead creatures didn't fall out of the closet. But he did do a smell test to see which of the two comforters was cleanest. Which means neither was clean... I should have known something strange was going on when he tried to convince me that the United States had 53 states, now that they had bought Guam...

After he put the finishing touches on the room (that is, tripping and knocking over the lamp and closing the sheer drapes to our fantastic window view), he left us to settle in, the first step of which was taking off the stained comforter (key detail for later that evening). We were still both a little shell shocked at what we had gotten ourselves into, but it was only for one night. JJ started to wash her face, only to find out that we had no hot water (no big deal, just unexpected).

Moving on, we set out a game plan to find a cash point (to pay for our five star accommodation) and a restaurant with authentic gyros for dinner. We had long before planned on eating out that night, but thought it best to be back in our room before dark given the surroundings. Being a Sunday in Greece, all of the grocery stores were closed by the time we made it out the doors (past the new man at the front desk, our personal Greek Elvis impersonator—I kid you not), which meant eating take out in our room. After stumbling upon a cash point, we beelined towards a restaurant we had passed along the way and picked up two delicious bundles of greasy, authentically Athenian gyros before heading back to our room.

An astute observation on JJ's behalf, the street crowd around our hostel could have been worse—at least they didn't approach us. I love friendly hookers, don't you? We shut ourselves up in the room for the night and the gravity of our situation turned into amusement, as we read online reviews of the Athens House Hostel, which clearly hadn't been done prior to booking (do it, it's a good laugh). The evening turned into a movie night, as we had little else to do and had both forgotten how cheesy 'When in Rome' truly was. The film almost masked the sounds of the back alley outside our window, and to quote JJ at the end of the film, 'I almost forgot where we were.' With only a sheet for warmth and quite a racket in the common room, our last night in Athens was most certainly the longest of our trip, but we survived. JJ is asleep right now (trying to make up for it, presumably), but her comments and editing will be added in the morning (if we aren't too busy frolicking around Rome!).