Patras, Piraeus, and Our Very First Greek Dog.

We climbed on the ferry in the port of Bari, Italy, at 18:00, on the evening of the 6th. The ferry, which was scheduled to depart at 20:00, wisely decided to depart a full hour and a half later, close to 21:45.

Thus we experienced our first real taste of the Italian concept of time. By which I mean the lack of any word for "late" anywhere in their language.

(No, really, they don't have one; their word is rooted in a Latin word for 'slow' or 'held back').

We paid for meals on the ferry, because my throat was killing me, which were very good, for transportation food. I had some sort of Greek meatball with French fries, and 80 had some sort of pork thing, I think. In any case, it was tasty.

Via the convenient bending of space-time, we arrived at 12:30, a mere 30 minutes behind 'schedule' (such as it is--they don't have a word for that either, the one they use correlates to our word for program, which is to say the order in which things occur, not the times at which they should occur) in Patras, Greece.

I should point out three things at this point.

1) Neither of us speak Greek.
2) Both of us have just spent the last 18 hours on a Ferry, cat napping whenever possible.
3) Neither of us has had breakfast.

We were not exactly the most brilliant and intrepid explorers at this point, or even the most conscious.

Therefore when we declined a taxi to Athens and instead asked the location of the train station, we were pointed in the complete wrong direction by a taxi driver (I will never trust a Greek taxi driver again) and wandered almost a mile in the wrong direction in our search for a train station.

During this time two important things happened: we met a couple of fellow backpackers, also on vacation from study-abroad programs (one in London and one in Edinburgh) and we acquired a dog.

The fellow backpackers were named Zuzannah and Alanna which I will look up later, because I forgot my notebook (it is in my other backpack). The dog, we nicknamed Lassie.

For those of you unfamiliar with Greek dogs: here is an overview. Some Greeks own dogs as pets, however, much like in the states we have public parks which welcome visitors, stray Greek dogs adopt people for absolutely no reason. You'll be walking along and find a dog walking with you, and this dog will follow you (pausing perhaps to smell something or being distracted by food, but mostly just at your side) sometimes for miles.

The strays are friendly, almost never bark at anything (in fact, I can't remember any stray Greek dog barking during our entire trip) and apparently have nothing better to do than keep pathetic looking tourists company. If only they knew how to direct us to the train station, all would be well with the world.

In any case, after we received fresh directions, we walked back to where the five of us had started, then just around the corner of the terminal, and tada! Less than 100 meters from the ferry terminal was our train station.

Lassie left us before we arrived at the train station, which is probably just as well, since we had decided we were adopting her if she was quick-witted enough to sneak herself onto the train without getting caught.

It was at this time that we discovered that the Greek train system draws it's inspiration from the Italian concept of schedule, and wound up boarding the next train for Athens which arrived at a truly random time and took over 6 HOURS to get us to the port town of Piraeus just south of Athens (bearing in mind that Athens is a 2.5 hour drive from Patras, and the Metro ride from downtown Athens to Piraeus is another 25 minutes).

So it was that we stumbled out of the train in Piraeus at 19:01 and made our way to the nearest Ferry ticket counter (there are dozens of these all along the waterfront). Unfortunately this counter, and every other one in Piraeus, told us the same thing -- the very last ferry to Aegina, our destination, leaves at 19:00, and there is no other way to reach the island that night.

After an hour of searching, we finally gave up and acquired a hotel room for ourselves, planning to leave for Aegina as early as possible the following morning. Our hotel room was nice (though tiny) and we went to sleep early so that we would be up early enough to reach Aegina before 8AM the next day).