You had one job

Another weekend aviation experience. The economy FlyDubai was just fine and relatively inexpensive. I booked another flight for Thanksgiving weekend at an astonishing QAR382 return including 20kg checked baggage allowance.

But that’s in a fortnight’s time. Here is what happened when I attempted to board last Saturday’s flight.

We all piled on to the airport bus and were driven lumberingly out towards the row of parked FlyDubai aircraft. The bus driver swung to the left and stopped at the steps, and the self-loading cargo waited for the door to open. The bus went forwards, and backwards, and forwards again. It would appear that the bus driver had taken a wrong turn and arrived at the wrong aircraft. That is in itself a big bag of oops. Then the driver tried to drive his ponderous bus around the front of this aircraft.

Here was the problem. There was a sign pole and a safety fence in the way to the left, and a pushback to the right, attached to the nosewheel of the aforementioned aircraft. Instead of realizing that an airport bus wouldn’t fit through this tiny gap, the driver jammed the bus between these two obstacles and stopped. He may have realised his error, but didn’t immediately reverse. Meanwhile, other ground crew rolled the boarding ladder away from the aircraft and blocked the bus from reversing.

Was this a prank being played on Nobby Newbloke?

We waited. Time passed. Thorin sat down and started singing about gold. At last somebody noticed the problem and moved the steps. The bus reversed, unblocked the road, and ten minutes’ worth of airport vehicles were released like Formula 1 cars when the safety car returns to the pits.

And once this queue had dispersed, the bus driver had another run up. This time the pushback actually moved out of the way, pushing the aircraft. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes!

But it still wasn’t over. The bus eventually pulled up alongside the correct aircraft. Were we allowed out? Oh no! The bus had to reverse so that the passengers could be directed to either the front or the back of the aircraft. This is all fine and sensible, and yet apparently not in “Airport Bus Driver: Rules. For the Reading and Understanding and Compliance Of.”

It gets better: there was a second bus following this one’s every move.
]}:-{>

Magnificent men

Just for a change, I find I have to make one choice from a collection of relevant popular culture. There’s Captain Blackadder’s comment concerning aviators: “I don’t care how many times they go up diddly-up up; they’re still gits.” There’s Fascinating Aida’s now infamous Cheap Flights song, and there’s also Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines.

I got the email from Air Arabia: “Lock in your seat at lower fares: return from AED399 all inclusive!” As I’d booked the Eid leave but not the flights, it was obviously time to secure a cheap flight to Dubai before the world and his wife, children, and animals all decided that Doha was not the place to be. Not being daft, I checked other airlines too.

Hmmm… Qatar Airways bargain basement AED850.

How about Fly Dubai? Not the usual sub-600 cheapness, but AED800.

Obviously AED399 wins.

The Air Arabia website decided to be a recalcitrant beast, failing entirely to do anything on the desktop machine. It would talk to my tablet, though. So through the booking process I went, carefully skirting around and deselecting special meals, special seats, and massive quantities of luggage. Great. Card details…Click…Ping…Job done!

Oh, but in my fervour I’d forgotten to select which flight I wanted. There’s a choice of four, and the booking system had allocated a 9am flight and I wanted the 7pm. To be unfair, I think the website didn’t prompt me to select which flight; what is more likely is that the pop-up keyboard obscured that option. So I had to call Air Arabia to get the flight changed rather than take Thursday off and incur Thursday, Friday, Saturday as additional annual leave.

I don’t know what happened to the putative AED399. I was charged AED577. This included a charge for using Visa (which was drastic, ‘cos how the feck you s’posed to pay if not with fecking plastic?) Still a lot less than the other airlines, until I tried to change the flight. They wanted nearly AED500 to change both directions, so I dealt only with the outbound, at a mere AED369 including yet another charge for using Visa.

So that’s now AED946 of the alleged AED399 for Billy-basic cheapskate-no-frills, and around AED100 more than Qatar Airways. Had I gone expensive early, I’d have saved a bit of cash, got into the Business Lounge and priority access through Immigration, and even collected some air miles.

Edited 8th September to note that within 24 hours of booking and paying for these expensive tickets, Fly Dubai emailed me with a "Book today for 30% discount."

As Muttley so eloquently puts it: “Sassa frassa rassum dassum…”

]}:-{>

Happy Hallmark Holiday

That was a busy weekend. First, I had to explain to my employers that I had a certain need to be visiting Beloved Wife in Dubai for Valentine's Day. Then I had to persuade the same employer of the need for me to have my passport in hand prior to my booking air tickets.

So it was on Wednesday that I finally received my passport complete with Iqama, or "Residence Permit", and my ID card. Despite having had to be fingerprinted - twice so far - the authorities have given me the same ID number as last time and the time before that. I don't suppose either my fingerprints or blood group have changed much since 1996. Doesn't hurt to check, I suppose.

Buying an air ticket was another simple task fraught with unnecessary difficulties. Fly Dubai had sent me emails advertising special offers, but their website fell over every time I tried to book. Qatar Airways had nothing for the return flight except at obscene expense. I'm not paying QAR 1200 one way for a 45 minute flight in cattle class. Eventually I ended up with cheapskate Air Arabia via Sharjah instead of Dubai. Fine. The only problem was the screaming brat at check-in who ended up being King of the Seat-Kickers right behind me. I gritted my teeth, put in my earbuds, and shutted the fcek up.

I spent Friday morning in the dust of a desert rally. About 90  knobbly-tyred motorbikes went past at speed over two hours, and my job as one of the many marshals was to keep track of when each and every bike went through my control, and to call into Base any who missed the gate. This was Round 5 of 6, but I can't be at the final round of the Emirates Desert Championship because of the Scottish Play.

I took Beloved Wife to the pictures that afternoon, and we were surprisingly entertained by "Kingsman." Knowing nothing about the film, we didn't know what to expect, but were treated to two hours of fun being poked at James Bond and Jason Bourne, with a hint of The Avengers (Steed, Purdey, Kinky Boots, etc., and not Marvel). See "Kingsman" if you enjoyed "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", and be prepared for violence, gore, and copious use of Adult Language. Samuel L. Jackson does not disappoint in this area.

Following a further Valentine treat over at TFI Friday's, Beloved Wife and I returned home in good time for wine o'clock.

I'd promised myself a motorbike ride on Saturday, and to this end, on Friday afternoon I'd reinstalled the battery and fired up the Black Beast. First stab of the starter. Although I had set an early alarm for Saturday morning, when it rang I merely found the excuse of a nearly-flat phone battery to give myself an extra hour in bed.

My leathers not only still fit, but are in fact now comfortably loose around my midriff as well as baggy in the arse. The latter is a design feature to make sitting on a motorbike actually comfortable. My reprofiled seat is still a success. I covered some 400km on Saturday morning, seeking out known bendy roads over towards the eastern UAE and I only actually stopped and put a hoof down when refuelling. If you saw a streak of black lightning whizz past you at near-relativistic speed, it might have been me. If you clocked the registration plate, it certainly was someone else.

The therapeutic benefits of going for a good thrash cannot be underestimated, except by non-motorcyclists, who don't understand.

Beloved Wife wished me a Happy Hallmark with a full English, and I went out afterwards, removed the battery and mothballed the bike again. I suspect that it needs new brake pads, for which I've been quotes a rather alarming QAR778, but it's due a service soon. That will have to wait until I'm not whizzing in from Doha about one weekend in eight.

To finish the weekend, we ran an errand up to Barracuda and I got out of the car at Sharjah airport for my 1830 flight.

I'm now back to bikeless, wifeless, catless Doha. My life is shortly to be taken over by the Bard of Avon; I'll not be able to get away any weekends until the end of March. Beloved Wife says she'll come to see the play, so there is some variety on the horizon to break up the soul-destroying cycle of work/rehearse/eat/sleep that epitomises my life.

]}:-{>

Use it or lose it

“You have worked since September, so you’ve accrued nine days of annual leave to year end. Use it or lose it.”

I noted that Qatar National Day would produce a public holiday on Thursday 18^th December, so exploited the long weekend to get myself a Christmas break. They’re calendar days, which is a bit of a swizz, and I work on Saturdays, but I would be able to get away until after Christmas. Not enough leave to extend the break to include the New Year, so apologies and thanks for the invitation, but I’m unable to attend the Bring-Your-Speciality-Dish party in Dubai on 31^st December.



Beloved Wife and I decided to go to Spain. We’ve not been since 2011, and I’ve not been to Andalusia since 1987. Having arranged accommodation in both Granada and Madrid, I set off from Doha and arrived in Madrid, picking up the rental car from the airport. It was no small irritation to learn that I had to pay €150 deposit even though I’d already paid everything including insurance and CDW up front. “It hweel be refhunded, Señor Macho Cabrío, once you hrethurn the car undented ahnd with a full tahnk.”

I headed off to Keef and Noelle’s for, in no particular order of preference, bed and board, beer, and immense frustration with parking.

Madrid Municipalidad, in a fit of Mad, has installed paid parking all around the residential area. The machines take cash or credit cards, but don’t take paper money (and I had no change and the few corner shops were shut), and didn’t wish to talk to any of my several plastic cards. Having eventually dragged Keef from his flat with a pocketful of change, I got him to feed the meter for the maximum permitted two hours, and we went to the pub. Two hours later, none of the machines wanted my money. It would appear that the car had become Auta Non Grata. At this point I totally lost it. I was forced to drive around Madrid – after several beers; something I was loath to do – looking for somewhere to park the bloody car. Having given up and returned, the machines had apparently seen fit to allow me to park again, and I paid for a further two hours that took me to past 9pm when parking became free overnight. Pub. Chillax. Recover temper.

If they don’t want cars to hang about or return, why do they provide annual permits? You can park for a maximum of two hours, or up to one year. Nonsense.

The following day, Keef and I went into town and found an underground car park with minuscule spaces just big enough for my rented Citroën C1, aka Toyota Aygo, aka Peugeot 107. We did some shopping and sightseeing, I took photos, and then I dropped Keef at home while I retrieved Beloved Wife from the airport. She’d taken the same flight as I, but because the UAE didn’t have a holiday on Thursday she was 24 hours later.

A brief stop chez Keef later for tea, chat, and dropping off Christmas presents, and then Beloved Wife and I were off into Madrid’s Mad evening rush hour, heading generally south to Granada.

Clarissa had been briefed with 2010 mapping and the hotel’s location, I had checked out what the place looked like using Google Street View, and we rolled into the hotel’s free parking in time to wander into town in search of food.

TripAdvisor suggested that there might be vast queues at the entrance to La Alhambra (Spanish translation of Arabic, which ultimately comes back to English as “the the red [one]”) merely to buy tickets, followed by a further queue in order to gain admittance. So we bought our tickets in advance at the hotel. Admittance to the Nasrid Palaces is at a specific time stated on the ticket, but you can wander around the rest of the complex at your leisure. I took many, many pictures. There’s a small selection here, but more Alhambra pics in this Picasa album.

Snow in the Sierra Nevada.

Lion Courtyard.



Alhambra from Generalife.

Islamic influence all over.

As the running gag with this blog post is parking, I’ll mention that it cost about €10 to park the car for a six-hour visit, but the Pay-As-You-Leave machine was happy taking paper money and dispensing change. As the car parks were virtually empty and the queues weren’t too awful, I’m offering this piece of advice: Don’t Visit in August!

The following day we explored Granada’s old town. Beloved Wife wished to avail herself of an alleged “Christmas Market”. However, we’ve been to München and Nürnburg, so these had already set the bar extremely high, and the market stalls were underwhelming. We did pick up some food and sweeties, and settled down to Chocolate con Churros, something that was to become a pleasant, albeit colossally unhealthy, habit.



Extruding a churro.

Happy now?

Churros are similar to doughnuts, but extruded through a nozzle into a vat of hot lard and deep-fried, then served hot for dunking in drinking chocolate. What’s not to like? I’ll tell you: frauds who pull their rubbery churros from the freezer and microwave them. Fresh ones are much better.

We discovered the latter on a day-trip to Ronda, the traditional home of bullfighting and famous for its New Bridge (1751-1793) which, in turn, is infamous for having Nationalist sympathisers tipped over its parapet during the Spanish Civil War, or so said Ernest Hemingway.

New Bridge.

Precarious cantilevered viewpoint.

View from the bridge.

I decided not to mess about, and pointed the car at the first public car park I could find. As usual, expensive Pay-As-You-Leave and underground. But everything to see was within easy walking distance.

As I’ve not been to the Costa del Sol since 1987, I suggested the coast road back to Granada. We got stuck behind a tiny car whose driver wanted to do the entire 30km mountain road from Ronda to the coast at 10km/h slower than I wanted to drive. At the only overtake, she steadfastly sat in the overtaking lane. I’m going to invoke Hanlon’s Razor here and conclude, because her door mirrors were folded in, that she was simply oblivious to anything behind her. And I thought that was the First Rule of Italian Driving.



There’s a new motorway along the coast, largely behind the development and stuck to the foot of the mountains. As it was a peaje, I decided to take the old N340 to Fuengirola and Los Boliches before heading northwards back to Granada. The whole coast area appears to be colossally overdeveloped. I thought it was a bit full back in the 1980s, but I was wrong. Fuengirola, holiday destination of choice for many, was shut.

We tried to extend our hotel stay in Granada by one day, but as Christmas was coming the hotel would be shut. So Beloved Wife got on to Booking.com and found a cheapish business hotel in Seville, a city where we’d both never been.

Seville is very congested in parts.

We arrived in good time to drive into the old town and get horribly lost in the medieval alleys. Once more I gave thanks for having the wisdom to pick a tiny car and not some Hummeresque battleship. Beloved Wife eventually found one of those underground car parks, and we walked to the Cathedral, checked out Christopher Columbus’ tomb therein, climbed the 34 ramps and 15 steps up the bell tower to enjoy the view, avoided a ride in a horse-drawn carriage, and grabbed something to eat and drink.

 

Cathedral exterior.

Cathedral minaret, er, bell tower.

Cathedral nave.

Christopher Columbus.

Gargoyle.

Another gargoyle.

It was nearly chucking-out time at Real Alcazar, the Royal Palace and Gardens, by the time we found it, so we decided to visit the following morning before heading back to Madrid. As we emerged from the subterranean parking, I got Clarissa to remember the location.

And then at the hotel I shut down and slept 14 hours straight.

Refuelling the following morning at a comprehensive continental breakfast buffet, I commented that one should “starve a fever and feed a cold.” I’d not knowingly been in the company of any snot monsters, but had managed to pick up rhinopharyngitis anyway.

Beloved Wife and I were glad not to have attempted Real Alcazar in 30 minutes. It took hours and hours, even though the hedge maze was barred and not available for use. We wandered around the gardens and enjoyed the various grottoes, walls, and gateways before disappearing inside to look at the tapestries, tiles, and courtyards. As at the Alhambra and the nearby Cathedral, there’s a lot of Islamic influence in the architecture and decoration. Indeed, the cathedral used to be a mosque, and its bell tower a minaret.

Formal courtyard garden.

Less formal orange and Swiss cheese plants.

Back on the subject of tiles, I took pictures of the tiles cladding the Pavilion of Carlos V (1360) in the gardens that depicted, among other things, a Goat, a weird two-legged Centaur archer, a Unicorn, and a Faun smoking a pipe, which Beloved Wife said reminded her of someone… All these tiles were reproduced in the gift shop, except one. Guess which one. I had to satisfy myself with a goat-tile fridge magnet.



Pavilion of Carlos V

These are not fridge magnets.

Not coming in Sevilla, Señor Macho Cabrío

Initial estimates of rolling into Madrid mid-afternoon were trashed. Clarissa decided that the best way would be to follow the Portuguese border up to Badajoz and then to turn right and head directly for Madrid. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect €200. Even sipping fuel at 50mpg the rental C1 needed to be gassed up, I needed espresso, and both Beloved Wife and I needed to use Los Facilidad. It’s long way; Spain’s a big country. We passed numerous medieval castles. Perhaps a future visit might involve a castle tour.

There was, of course, nowhere to park in Madrid on Christmas Eve. Not even a stable. So, assisted by Noelle, I drove to the airport and dumped the car keys in the deserted car rental area. Hmmm, Marie Celeste Car Rental Central. Then back into town by Metro, and food and drink. Yay! Christmas!

Christmas itself was only excellent. It included the usual plethora of junk food, booze, and pressies. Then a nice walk in the sun. I should mention that the weather throughout had been sunny and only cold and frosty at night. Should’ve brought sandals. Keef cooked an amazing turkey dinner in a minuscule kitchen that must be bigger on the inside, which is a sneaky segue into noting that we watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special; the one in which the Aliens encountered on LV-426 meet Inception.

Keef doesn’t only do excellent turkey. He also makes pies that are on sale at selected pubs and bars in Madrid. And here is the gratuitous hyperlink to Keef’s stuff:-

Keef Cooks

We went touristing in Madrid on Boxing Day. As this isn’t a holiday in Spain, where the Big Event is on Twelfth Night, everything was open except the Irish bar where we were due to have lunch. So we went to the James Joyce instead. I did my usual thing and took photos, we failed to get in to see the Nativity display, and then we all headed back to the flat, for many people were coming over for mulled wine and Christmas carols.

The Goat's shoes disguise his hooves.

No comment!

Old and new.

Decoration dated 1919.

The main Post Office.

A further splendid evening later, and it was time to pack and go. Without a car this time, Muggins wheeled Beloved Wife’s overstuffed orange suitcase through the streets to the Metro. Thank you again and again to the genius who first though of sticking little wheels on to suitcases.

At the airport I checked with the car rental people, and was advised that €60 of my deposit had been withheld because I’d hnot hreturned the car hrental paperhwork. That’s right; I’d not handed it in to their non-existent staff on Christmas Eve, nor had I put it into the slot labelled “Car Keys Only.” My bad.

“You shhould have left hit in the cahr,” I was advised, in accordance with what is an obvious known fact and not written. Also not written was this punitive €60 fine. They said they’d refund it, they phoned to say that they had, but the money has yet to appear. It finally showed up after 42 days and my very public complaints on social media. I'm curious as to why the need to lie repeatedly to a customer that the payment had been made when, in fact , the problem was that Atesa had lost the paperwork.

Of course, this left me fuming. But I put a lid on it and smiled sweetly at the Qatar Airways ticketing counter. Sweetly enough, in fact, that I was able to get the last two seats in Business Class for frequent-flyer miles rather than cash, despite having received an email a few days before stating that my request had been refused. But I wasn’t going to tell them that at the ticket desk, was I?

For once, I ended a holiday on a high: Comfy travel, Business priority lane at immigration so no queue, and as I only had hand luggage I was in my bed less than an hour after landing. And up again five hours later for work. It’s only a four-day week, though. The memo came round confirming 1^st January as a holiday.

Pity Beloved Wife. She had a further hour to wait for her flight to Dubai. This was apparently full of drunken Spanish yoofs flying over to see some foopball. And it took a further hour for her orange suitcase to appear on the carousel in Dubai.

]}:-{>

Unpleasant surprice

Holiday season will soon be upon us, and Beloved Wife spent some time on line, researching options for air travel to Foreign Parts. The favourite plan appeared to be to visit her parents over Christmas, and one of the most cost-effective ways to do so was to fly via Munich.

I'll let that sink in for a moment. Separate flights: from Dubai to Munich, Munich to Washington, then home again home again joggity-jog. Cost of all four flights: around AED4200 per person.

These flights are scheduled for every day of the week, and it stands to reason that it costs the airline exactly the same in landing fees, passenger handling, luggage handling, extra take-off fuel, etc., whether our stopover in Munich be four hours or four days. The only additional costs that I can identify are use of the baggage carousel, and having someone inspect our passports. And these costs are borne by the airport, not the airline. They're presumably funded from landing fees and therefore paid for anyway.

I tried many variations to get a stopover in Munich, but every one of them totalled up at the same cost, to within AED100 or so.

Why, then, does stopping in Munich on the way west cost AED8250 per person? That's almost twice as much money for exactly the same effort. Anyone would think that Lufthansa didn't want people to visit Germany, to stay in German hotels, ride on the German rail network, drink German beer and Glühwein, eat German Wurst, or buy German Christmas ornaments; in short, spend money in Germany.

So we won't be stopping over in Munich after all.

]}:-{>

Greece is the word

Ruined Erechtheion temple, Acropolis.

 It might have been nice to leave on Thursday night, but we couldn’t leave any earlier than Monday because of the way Eid Al Adha was declared this year. Late. With less than a week to go, we learned from rumours published in the official national newspapers that the Public Sector would get a full nine days off. The government decreed that the Private Sector could come in to work on both Sunday 14^th and Thursday 17^th October and like it.

Beloved Wife had booked Monday to Saturday, anticipating that these days at least would not be work days for her, and we set off for Athens at 10am on Monday morning. I’ve never been to Greece.

In keeping with tradition, custom, and practice, the flight was 20 minutes late out of Dubai. Oh, and left from Terminal 1. It’s a long walk from the T3 taxi dropoff to the aircraft.

Breakfast in McGettigan’s (the airport Irish pub formerly known as the Irish Village) consisted of an ‘Irish Breakfast’ plus a pint of Guinness for me, and Eggs Benedict and cider for Beloved Wife. An Irish friend of mine assures me that it’s soda bread that turns a Full English into a Full Irish. Breakfast was yummy, albeit not even slightly Irish. Apart from the Guinness, obviously. And with the sun barely over the yard-arm. I’m shocked at myself.

I think I’ve found a way to get peace aboard aircraft: wear earplugs under the headphones. The plugs cut out virtually all of the jet roar and infants’ screams, but it’s still possible to hear the movie soundtrack. One disadvantage is the way that earplugs tend to allow internal sounds to seem exaggerated. Eating cream crackers makes one helluva din.

There were about three of us in the EU Citizens queue at Athens airport, so poor, foreign Beloved Wife had to weave back and forth while her Goat wandered around and picked up some discount cards that apparently work at museums, restaurants, shops, and spas. They don't. "Athens Spotlighted' cards were absolutely useless wherever we presented them.

The metro took us straight into central Athens at a cost of €14 for two (travelling together (compare with €8 each for singles)), and it took around 45 minutes to get to our hotel. We decided not to rush and immediately buy week-long transport passes at €20 a pop, airport trips excluded (when single journeys were €1.20), partly because the map in our Lonely Planet guidebook seemed rather to suggest that all the stuff we were likely to want to see was within walking distance of our hotel.

The Hotel Fresh was excellent. It's Four-Star and therefore a bit pricy, and is in a grotty area of town. However, it's clean, the rooftop bar and restaurant are very good, breakfast is marvellous and extremely comprehensive, and there's free wireless internet all over the building. It's also a short walk to the tourist area and ancient sites, and to the Metro.

Having checked in, chilled out, and fought with my computer, we retired to the rooftop bar for beer o’clock and a sunset look over the Athenian rooftops to the mountains beyond and the Acropolis, which is surprisingly close.

Part of the view from the hotel's rooftop bar.

The evening walk from the hotel down to the tourist area took us through a seedy-looking neighbourhood. It looked like the hardware souq. Most of the tourist shops were selling the same selection of alabaster gods and heroes. One shopkeeper did agree with me that it was a bit odd selling images of ancient Sparta in Athens: the Spartans and the Athenians basically hated each other’s guts. Oh, and of the fauns and satyrs for sale, most were – to say the least - anatomically ambitious, which is more than you can say about Greek gods and heroes.

This Is Athens. Not Sparta.

The only thing, aside from food, that we bought this evening was a hat. Muggins forgot his Very Pterry Hat, and on Tuesday would be appearing in public on the Acropolis as a bekilted Goat From Del Monte.

Tuesday: "Acropolis" is more-or-less Greek for "Uptown."

Nobody knows if Athens is named after Athena, or the goddess Athena is named after Athens. But what is certain is that the ancient Greeks adopted Athena as their own goddess of wisdom, chastity and moderation and built a huge temple on top of a hill in the middle of the city.

And to this temple we slogged. It’s uphill all the way. The basic fee to see the Parthenon on the Acropolis is €12, and this includes various other sights and sites such as the Theatre of Dionysos, and Agora. If you buy individual admissions to the smaller sites, you’ll still get hit up for €12 for the Parthenon, so pay for the lot up front. Thank you Lonely Planet.

Erectheion by night.

Front row of caryatids at the Erectheion. These are copies.
Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens;
the sixth is in the British Museum in London.

The Parthenon. Nearest to the camera is the southeast corner.

I confess to a little gentle Photoshoppery. I’ve trued up the verticals and removed the cranes that make the Acropolis look like a building site.

Several people ‘liked’ my kilt, in a Facebook sort of way. Mostly Aussies and Canucks, plus a couple of Greeks. One mature American lady confessed to “Really liking MIKs.” As a Utiliclan member, I’m an unpaid ambassador for Utilikilts, so I dished out business cards. Brace yourselves, Utilikilts Seattle!

Kilted photographer at the Theatre of Dionysos.

Kilted photographer was allowed to take pictures without flash,
except in the Acropolis Museum where all photography was forbidden.

It was a minor disappointment not to be able to walk around inside the ruined temples, but they were building sites, so I basically understand. What was less understandable was the outright ban on photography in the Acropolis Museum (unless, apparently, it was undertaken surreptitiously with a telephone.) Muggins with his DSLR stood no chance.

Acropolis Museum main entrance.
Below is part of ancient Athens.

The museum is very interesting. The top floor is an exact layout of the top of the Parthenon, and the friezes and marbles, or copies, are displayed exactly as they would have appeared on the monument if it hadn’t been vandalised by arsonists in the fourth century AD, the early Christian church, the Turks who turned it into a mosque, the genius who stored gunpowder inside and had an explosion, more Turks who tore bits down to make a signal tower, and Lord Elgin.

The museum very much takes the attitude that the twirly-moustachioed villain Lord Elgin took advantage, and stole the Marbles for his own purposes. They’re in the British Museum, along with one of the columns and a caryatid from the Erechtheion, an adjacent temple. In one version of the story promulgated by the museum, the Turks were using marble from the Parthenon to build their own new tower and Elgin realised that he could obtain permission to take the Marbles before they became part of a new structure. In another version, Elgin’s cronies hacked the Marbles off and stole them away without Greek consent.

But I feel that, as most of the site was being pillaged by all and sundry in 1801, it’s far better that the Marbles ended up in a foreign museum than as a Turkish tower or hardcore beneath a new road. How many different bas-reliefs of Centaurs fighting Lapiths does one museum need? Should the British Museum give the reliefs back to Greece? I really don’t know.

The friezes are on display on the top floor.

Back to the museum. The lower floors are orientated to fit the adjacent streets, so the top floor is at a peculiar angle. Parts of the ground floor are glass, and it’s possible to look beneath the museum at the walls and wells of ancient Athens, plus archaeologists working on them under glass but in air-conditioned comfort. The columns holding up this magnificent new building carefully avoid the archaeology, you will be relieved to learn.

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus used to have a roof.

Presently, Beloved Wife declared Cake O’Clock, which was followed by more walking, this time around the southern side of the Acropolis. Agora (Roman; temple; ruins) closed at 3pm, so we’d have to visit that tomorrow. I attempted to order my coffee and salad by reading the Greek and mispronouncing it at the waiter. Success at my third attempt: I must have the world’s worst Greek accent.

I gave to a busker who was standing in front of Roman Agora and playing a tenor recorder. One of my musical instruments of choice, he was clearly a better player than I, but he was helped by a microphone, amplifier, and a backing track.

A busker, recordering in front of Roman Agora.

We discovered the flea market. Definitely the place to go for crappy, broken furniture, dodgy fake Reeboks, and military apparel. The place was overrun by army surplus stores. Having bought precisely nothing, we headed back to the hotel for a short siesta prior to heading out for food.

Wednesday: Oh noes! Rain.

We very quickly had our dilemma – south to Agora or north to the National Archaeological Museum – solved. The museum represented a day of indoor culture.

The octopus motif appeared again and again.

Mosaic Medusa.

Some mythological deal being made over at Pan's house.

First century BC bronze racehorse.

Here we have Aphrodite, accompanied by Eros, beating off Pan.
You can see she's having at the satyr with her shoe.

Why, what did you think I meant?

And what culture! From the gold, bronze, and pottery of ancient Mycenae, through sculptures dating from around 800BC to 100AD; glass from the Archaic period up to the 1300AD; terracotta; and bronze. It’s all somewhat overwhelming to think how incredibly old some of this stuff is. I found a 5000 year old piggy bank. The plaque said it was a vase, but it looked exactly like a piggy bank and not much like an actual pig.

“Zoomorphic vase” or “piggy bank”?

Beloved Wife declared Cake O’Clock, and we retired to the basement level for cake and coffee. The rain was still hurling down in the middle of the quadrangle, and we had the choice of either fresh air and tobacco, or stale indoor air and coffee. We chose the latter, mostly because all the tables in the covered arcade were occupied.

Zeus, King of the Gods.
It looks like the thunderbolt he's throwing has been lost in the mists of time.

Funerary monument to a fallen Greek warrior.

The museum shop missed a trick, though. There are a lot of examples of Mycenaean jewellery on display and, according to Beloved Wife, reproductions of these should have been available for sale.

There was a special exhibition of the Antikythera Shipwreck. The vessel sank in the first century BC and took a wealth of bronze, glass, marble, and The Antikythera Mechanism to the sea bed off the west end of Crete. Sponge divers discovered it in 1900, and Jacques Cousteau had another go in 1976. The museum made a big thing of The Mechanism, with a 3D film and displays showing how, over 2000 years ago, a mechanical device existed that could do celestial calculations. As I understand it (from the Greek soundtrack), you wound the handle to set the date and time, and pointers showed sunrise, sunset, moon phase, that sort of stuff. It’s the earliest example so far found of a portable astronomical calendar calculator, and predates similar machinery by an incredible millennium and a half.

The museum staff threw everyone out at about 1530, but by then the rain had at last stopped. We wove our way back to the hotel pausing to obtain beer, Coke, and crisps in a mini-mart. The plan was to take a break, and then to go out again for a late afternoon to evening session of sightseeing and restaurant.

We ended up at a streetside restaurant in the Plaka area, right on the northern slope of the Acropolis. There has been a town here for nearly 3000 years. The restaurant was very traditional, right down to the live bouzouki players and ritual breaking of crockery on the flagstones. I had lamb kleftiko for the first time since a few years ago in Cyprus: lamb, cooked slowly in a clay pot for several hours until it’s melt-in-the-mouth tender.

Also much in evidence were souvenir statuettes of gods and heroes. Beloved Wife has instructed that no such tchotchkes shall adorn the Crumbling Villa.

Thursday: Markets and Old Town

“Partly cloudy. 20°C” said the weather website. With blue skies overhead, we set out without an umbrella.

Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus were on the menu, along with the local food market. On our way around the market, some random Greek dude insisted that he have his picture taken with the bekilted Muggins. Shortly thereafter, he chased us down with a note containing (presumably) his name and address. He’d managed to work out that without this information, there would be no way we could let him have the picture. He even attempted to pay us for it. Unfortunately I managed to lose the scrap of paper, so if you know this guy, please get him to contact me.

Do you know this man?

The meat market. There's absolutely no doubt what this guy is selling.

Spices for sale. Beloved Wife bought some "Award-winning" olive oil,
but we have no idea what it's like.

Presently, we entered Ancient Agora using part of our ‘Acropolis and Everything’ tickets and, in accordance with the guide book, headed for a reconstructed arcade to get orientation about the site. The Stoa of Attalos has a museum on the ground floor and lots of statues and models on the upper floor that overlooks the site of ancient Athens.

Waiting for the rain to stop.

The big selling point is the Temple of Hephaestus, the best-preserved ancient temple in the world. It protrudes from multiple shades of greenery and really sells the place as Classical. At this point the heavens opened so, like everyone else, we hung around the ground-floor museum and then sat and waited for the rain to stop. By the time we got to the Temple of Hephaestus, the sky was blue and the damp ground was starting to steam in the sunlight.

The Temple of Hephaestus is surrounded by greenery.

South west corner of the Temple.

Many photographs later, at 1430 we were abruptly thrown out. The staff clearly want to go home spot on 1500.

Ancient Agora and the Acropolis, as seen from the Temple of Hephaestus.

Beloved Wife advised that the Museum of Cycladic Art was recommended by both the guide book and her friends. It was a tidy step away – at least a mile – but by curious happenstance was advertised as open until 2000 on Thursdays. So off we ambled, through the tourist shops and then the National Gardens (a park), pausing only once for coffee and cake.

It’s a small museum, but there are four floors of it. Paying our admission, we were advised to go to the top floor and work our way down. At the top were exhibits about Life in Ancient Greece, with artifacts, illustrations, and even a video of Scenes From Everyday Life. (Birth, betrothal, marriage, going off to war, funeral rites).

The Cup Bearer. Carved from marble about 5000 years ago.

The third floor contains a display of ancient art and culture from Cyprus, with items dating from 4000BC to 1800AD; mostly the very old stuff, and a lot of it in amazingly good condition. On the second floor are displays of ancient Greek art, with a lot of pottery and bronze, plus some glass and a number of interactive displays.

The first floor houses Cycladic art. Dating from 3000BC or thereabouts, this is the stuff that developed in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in the Greek islands. There are many marble figurines in a distinctive style that could have been 20^th century modern art. Picasso is one of the artists who nicked the style. The Cycladic people had little in the way of arable land, and scratched a living with a little agriculture and animal husbandry. But they had the sea, and became big-time maritime explorers and traders, and they also had masses of marble.   

This museum had not missed the same trick as the Archaeology Museum, offering for sale reproductions of the bling in the glass cases and reproductions of the marble figurines.

It became sunset and time to find food, so we staggered back through the shopping centre until we located a quiet restaurant in Plaka. I am pleased to note that I have failed to notice any McDonald’s outlets. In fact, the only big-name restaurant I’ve spotted so far is a TGI Friday’s, and that’s out among the foreign embassies and not in the middle of town.

Friday: Funicular fun

Today we went up the funicular railway to the Chapel of Agios Georgios. This chapel and attendant café and bar is right at the top of a hill a mile or so north west of the Acropolis. Owing to yesterday’s rain, the atmosphere was pretty clear, and I hoped to get some reasonable views and photos looking down on to ancient Agora. I wasn’t disappointed.

The green patch represents most of Ancient Athens.

Beloved Wife decreed that we’d take the metro two stops to the foot of the hill. We alighted at Evangelismos and headed up a seemingly never-ending flight of steps. I’m really glad I don’t have a job delivering grand pianos to the apartments served by these steps. Just as well we’d not walked from the hotel too. More than halfway up is the lower station for the funicular. It cost €7 return each. We were planning to get the train up and then walk down, but single tickets were not available. They are from the ticket machine at the top, which is a bit weird.

St George’s is a tiny traditional Byzantine chapel. The whitewashed exterior is inevitably covered with spray-painted graffiti, as is every other vertical surface in Athens. The hilltop is also covered with masts and antennae, so it’s quite a fiddle to get photos whilst avoiding these and their guy wires.

Coke and cake followed, as did beer. It was, perhaps surprisingly, not ludicrously priced bearing in mind the location. We speculated as to the lack of rooftop swimming pools and shortage of solar panels on the apartments stretching off to the edge of the Attic Basin.

It seemed a very long walk down from the funicular to the main street. Beloved Wife wished to visit the Byzantine and Christian Museum. This is magnificently laid out, and takes the visitor from the fourth century AD up to the nineteenth. Frescoes rescued from old churches that were flooded by reservoir schemes, stone bas-reliefs, icons. That sort of thing. It did occur to me that a huge Last Judgment could have been used by the artist to take all sorts of cheap shots at unpopular public figures by portraying their likenesses burning in the fiery pits of hell.

Elijah ascends to Heaven aboard a fiery chariot.

Fourteenth-century centaur, from an equally old church.

I was pretty iconed out by the time beer o’clock occurred, and then Beloved Wife mentioned that the Changing of the Guard was due to happen on the hour just down the road. We made it in good time to see the actually rather difficult high-stepping drill by the Greek soldiers in their ceremonial tunics, hose, and hobnailed shoes with pompoms. The two guys who started their one-hour stint at 1700 stand to attention for half an hour, then do ten minutes of pacing up and down, then stand for a further twenty minutes before being relieved. They’re back on duty at 2300. There’s a third Superintendent, whose job appears to be to talk to onlookers, prevent them from molesting the guards or taking the piss, and to ensure that the guards’ uniforms are exactly right.

Changing of the Guard. They do this on the hour, every hour.

The new guard makes the most of his time in the shade.

The first train to the airport on Saturday leaves at an unholy 0536. The hotel has, at least, offered a packed breakfast because we’re leaving before the breakfast we’ve paid for starts being served. And we’re doing our packing this evening, prior to our Riotous Night Out with one of Beloved Wife’s old friends and former colleagues from Dubai, now living in Athens.

Saturday: Back to reality

I do not function well on three hours’ sleep a night, and it was pretty much Dawn of the Living Dead by the time we rolled into Athens airport. I do not know how Emirates gets their aircraft back to Dubai from Athens, but we were obliged to fly Aegean to Milan in order to catch an Emirates flight. The self-check-in was a recalcitrant machine that showed us our flight details and then refused to issue boarding passes for the Emirates flight. And as we were carrying liquids, we had to check a bag, so we needed to deal with a person anyway.

I think we encountered the only Lawful Neutral person in Greece. It turns out that, in order to prevent leaking liquid food from ruining everyone’s luggage, Aegean has an inane rule that requires liquids to be packed in a wooden box. That a tin of olive oil – not a fragile glass bottle – was wrapped in plastic, then padded with underwear, then inside a suitcase was not good enough. No wooden box: no olive oil, and Beloved Wife found a Greek couple to give it away to.

Had we been desperate for some Greek olive oil, it would have been possible to buy it in the airport shop and transport it as carry-on. I hate the capricious ill-logic of airline security rules.

Aegean left late, so much so that someone met us at Milan and led us very swiftly across the entire, huge airport to where our Emirates flight was waiting. I asked, and was assured that our checked bag was on board, which it wasn’t, as we learned in Dubai six hours later. One of our aisle seats was also as far from an aisle as it’s possible to get on an Airbus A340; a lie that we discovered about five minutes after being spun this whopper.

When the bag was finally delivered some 24 hours later, it had been ripped open by persons unknown. Presumably by either cack-handed baggage handlers or airport security. Nothing was missing, and I went to Emirates the following day bag in hand, and eventually received financial compensation.

All in all, then, a fun break in Athens that was ruined at the end by airline security and mishandled luggage.

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