[PICTURED: The view of the Acropolis from our hotel]

Malpensa

The following morning Chiara and I groggily made our way to Malpensa Airport.

Malpensa means “Bad-Think,” and it certainly is aptly named.  It must be the worst airport in Italy.

It didn’t help that we woke up to a thunderstorm and had to make our way to the subway station six blocks in the rain.  The Malpensa express train to the airport only leaves from Platforms 1-3, not 4-16, but they still couldn’t put that on the board until the last minute.

Italian trains charge virtually the same price for first- and second-class service, because the two service levels are virtually indistinguishable.  On the Malpensa Express all pretense is dropped and both classes cost the same.  First class buys you three extra inches of legroom separating the people you are staring at when two pairs of seats are facing each other, nothing more.

The train was mostly empty because most people were not going to the airport because the airport is not a nice place.

Milan’s Airport

Aegean Airlines front counter clerks don’t start checking bags for the next flight until 8:30am. If you get there before 8:30am, they just fiddle with their computers and do not make eye contact with the guests, nor do they answer questions.  There are no signs that even say Aegean Airlines, no indication that you might be in the right place, no hint that the attendants might at some future time become attentive.  I know this for a fact.

Once you get through security and customs, they dump you in a duty-free store so large that you forget where you are or why you are there.  Chiara and I found a wall covered with every kind of Perugina Baci, including a type that we did not previously know existed.  They were selling Bacis for the outrageous sum of more than a dollar a piece, and the duty-free good news was that none of that outrageous price went to taxes, just private wealth.

Next came a luxury mall, with clothes stores, and then the main attraction:

At Bad-Thought Airport they don’t assign gates to flights until the inbound plane is actually at the gate. They should name it Heisenberg Airport, or Shroedinger’s Airport. The Italians are totally into inderminacy: The quantum state of the flight is its gate, and the probability-wave function of the flight’s potential gate doesn’t collapse into an actual gate until the plane is observed at the gate.

So even though Bad-Thought Airport is a vast sprawling megalopolis of an air traffic city, most of its citizens are consigned to a single room, where they crowd and push ueasily around a single display that announces how many minutes until a gate assignment will be made.

Once the designated number of minutes have passed, and a gate assignment is due, the status changes to “Waiting for a Gate.”  The wait could be indefinite. 

There is Wifi so you could pass the time or check FlightAware to find out where the plane actually is, but the Wifi does not work.  The registration page accepts all of your personal information, then generates an error message.  It does this no matter what device or browser you use. I know this for a fact, also.

Our flight was on time, or at least Aegian Airline never said otherwise, but the gate was not assigned until 35 minutes after the gate was allegedly due, and just a few minutes before proposed boarding.  Once the gate was finally posted, 180 refugees in the Gate Assignment Room suddenly rose and raced to Gate A8.

Gate A8 had been empty for the past hour, when all of a sudden 180 panicked passengers arrived at once.

There were no gate attendants.

There were 40 chairs for the 180 passengers, but 15 of the chairs were in a forbidden area accessible only by people who had already had their tickets taken by the non-existent gate attendants, but inexplicably chose to sit down rather than board the plane.

A long line formed on the “Economy Class” side of the desk. No line formed on the “Business Class” side of the desk.

When the gate attendant arrived – looking suspiciously similar to the front desk attendants to whom I had taken a dislike, they first shoo’d away the trespassers from the forbidden chairs, and then they switched the sign in front of the desk, swapping sides for “Business Class” and “Economy Class,” so the entire line was now in Business Class instead of Economy Class.

No passengers moved.

Next the Gate Attendants told everyone that Business Class would be boarding first, and everyone else should just sit down, in the non-existent chairs.  Nobody moved.

I won’t bore you with the details of how the ensuing chaos unfolded.  It is enough to say that directing passengers to the gate and then boarding them on the plane is a routine, non-complicated problem that has been solved at most other airports and by most other airlines, but not by Aegian and MalPensa.  I am tempted to say, “THIS is Italy.”  But it might be more accurate to say, “THIS is Greece.”  Perhaps THIS is ITALY AND GREECE at their combined best.”  Whatever it was, it seemed like a bad omen for Athens.

Athens

There had been no customs for us when we arrived in Switzerland – just a perfunctory passport stamp.  They didn’t EVEN check our passport when we left Switzerland and entered Italy and the EU on the Bernina Express.  Upon arriving at Athens, we chose the line for people entering from another EU country, which we were, since we had somehow snuck into Italy, and there was no customs or passport check at all in Athens.  It seems like the pretense of caring about borders is falling away in the rest of the world, even as the US intensifies its obsession with borders.

Our flight arrived at 4:20pm, and Toni’s and Aaron’s flight arrived at 4:30pm, which is why we arranged to meet in the Athens Airport and take the Metro-3 together, non-stop to Monistiraki, where our hotel (“360 Degrees Hotel”) was allegedly located.

Actually, our flight arrived at 14:20pm, not 4:20pm – I’m just not that good with 24-hour time.  So instead of waiting for Toni and Aaron, Chiara and I sent them a text message – a kind of message-in-a-bottle dropped into the timelessness of cyberspace – and hoped that when they got to Athens they would find the WiFi and get the message.

Just in case, we turned on International Data.

Meanwhile, Chiara and I blazed a trail to the Athens Metro, which was a somewhat circuitous walk, but easy in all other respects, and we waited in the heat for the next departure, which departures were scheduled on the hour and on the half-hour.

When the subway arrived we experienced favorable thoughts about Athens.  The station list inside the train was clear. There were only three subway lines. And all of the station names were in both Greek and English on the signs. A dystopian female voice of unnatural calmness called out the stations in both Greek and English.  PLUS the station signs in each subway station, which you could see through the glass, were big and beautiful and easy to read.  That’s all the help we needed.

We exited at the 16th station, Monistiraki, at just about the time Toni and Aaron arrived at the Athens Airport and texted us, “Where are you?”

That got sorted out.

When we emerged from the subway, we were just a few feet from the hotel – we were almost standing beneath the “360 Degree Hotel” sign.  Sometimes my travel plans DO work out right!

But not this time.

Being next to the biggest subway station in Athens in the center of the most touristy part of town, literally in the shadow of the Acropolis (Parthenon) and across the street from the ruins of Hadrian’s Library, means a lot of Plaza noise late into the night.  But more about that later.

Athens 360 Degrees Hotel

The Athens 360 Degree Hotel is locally famous for its rooftop garden bar, which indeed has something like 360 degree views, and a simply stunning view across to the Acropolis.

Its other primary feature is what it refers to as “Pop Art,” by which they mean that the guest rooms and hallways are littered with phonographs, typewriters, juke boxes, and ancient gasoline station pumps.

It’s not so much pop art, as the ruins of American culture, or the last bit of American culture than anyone cares to remember.

So while modern Americans come to modern Athens to view the ruins of ancient Athens, the 360 Degree Hotel confrontationally surrounds those same Americans with the ruins of their own past. The 360 Degrees Hotel is thus an act of cultural rebellion that is no doubt lost on nearly all of the hotel’s guests, who are entirely used to and comfortable with a dreamy false nostalgic self-image.  Were I not traveling with a few PhDs, I might not have noticed it myself.

For some reason at the 360 Degree Hotel, in order to eat you have to go up to the rooftop bar, walk across it in the sweltering heat, then descend two flights of stairs.  We did that to meet Gianna and Sam, and then when Toni and Aaron arrived we were shoo’d back up to the rooftop bar. The only reason given was because it was the rooftop bar, which is no reason at all, and when we got there it was full, but somehow we ended up with a meal and a sunburn and sweat-stains, and everything was fine.

After dinner we exhausted ourselves winding through the surrounding streets, which style themselves a bazaar. It was our first trip backwards in time, but not to the time of Plato and Aristotle, but just a few decades, to the time before amazon.com, when retail was still alive. Endless stores on every street offered endless varieties of touristy things – art, jewelry, clothing, trinkets, produce, meals, drinks, soaps, leather goods, plants, whatever you could imagine.  In America, this would be a dead mall, crushed by the uncompromising rents extracted by mega-mall-managers like Simon.  But here in Athens everybody seemed to be doing okay, and there were lots of customers.

We did not do our share to help the retail economy by buying something, though, and we eventually made our way back to the piazza in front of 360 Hotel, which had in the night transformed itself into a carnival-like atmosphere, with glow-in-the-dark goods tossed high in the air by hawkers confident that they could make the catch even in a crowd. The temperature was still over 80 degrees in the dark.

We sank into beds so soft and comfortable that we might never have woken up, but for the drummers outside the windows who worked the drunk crowd until 2:30am.  I did not hear any drummers, but everyone else in the traveling party assured me that there were drummers.