We're Going Home

Yes, Olympic has come through with tickets for our return. It will not be an easy trip for me but at least it will happen without any additional cost to us. We will have to fly the new Olympic Air to Paris, wait for a few hours for a connecting Air France flight to Toronto via Montreal. Total time is roughly 20 hours start to finish if there are no unexpected delays along the way. Air France would not have been my first choice since they’ve had a couple of crashes recently but we had no real option.

Life here in Athens/Glyfada has been quiet this time around with not a lot of traveling. We may go to Pylos this weekend but that’s dependent on whether legal stuff gets sorted out in time. The weather hasn’t been as good as in the past and there have been fewer beach days. Steve has also been super busy clearing out his mom’s apartment and the bureaucracy of settling an estate and buying property is unbelievable by North American standard.

The apartment has a little furniture most of it from my MIL’s house. It’s not my choice or style but I have very little input here. I think Steve keeps most of it for sentimental reasons and I get that, so I have a dining room suite that doesn’t really suit me but it works and various mismatched dishes. I did draw the line at the sofa and bedroom furniture. I won that battle but as a result we still don’t have a sofa or a bed. At this stage I think it will wait until next year. The airbed is still hanging in despite a slight mishap that found us flat on the floor at 5:30 one morning. It wasn’t funny at the time but now we joke about it.

I haven’t gone far from home on my own because truthfully, my foot is not working very well. I brought four pairs of reasonably comfortable shoes yet all of them hurt after a short while. It’s been almost four months since the operation and even though I was told full recovery would take 6 months I had hoped to be further ahead than I am. Maybe I’m just too impatient. I have wanted to make a trip into the centre of Athens to do some shopping but either I’m having a bad foot day or the shops are closed. Oh yes, the store hours! Shops close at 2:30 pm every afternoon and reopen at 5:30 pm for a few more hours, except Mondays and Wednesdays of course, and then they stay closed after 2:30. I guess coming from a country of 24/7 shopping I am spoiled if you call finding an open pharmacy after 2:30pm spoiled?

There are a couple of things that really grate and unnerve me here. The first is the noise, the truly unrelenting noise. It’s either motorcycles that roar with machismo down the street at all hours of the day and night, jackhammers with all the building going on around here the junk man/men who drive their trucks through neighbourhoods every hour or so with a big bullhorn, the dogs barking and what I call the “banshees” running around the streets after school every day screeching at the top of their lungs. I don’t think kids have homework here! I miss the peace and quiet of home and miss waking up to birds singing instead of jackhammers. I told Steve that if I thought I had to live her the rest of my life I would go to the roof and hurl myself over the balcony. He thought I was joking.

To say that I counting the days before we leave would be an understatement. A little more than two weeks and I’ll be home again. I may do a Pope John Paul and kiss the ground when I get there.

I miss having an internet connection without having to go out to a café, I miss reading my favourite blogs, I’m totally out of the loop with news of the world, darn it all, I even miss CNN. I guess I’m not ever going to be a good transnational. I have heard some expats say that Greece speaks to their soul. Greece doesn’t speak to me, it yells out loud and I don’t like being yelled at.

Most of all I miss craft shops and wool shops. I have yet to find even one…

Just for a little fun, meet a Greek weather girl...