Don’t trust Athenian cab drivers

We had a smooth flight from Dubrovnik to Athens, which didn’t prepare us for the travel confusion that was about to hit us. We flew to Athens due to the lack of any reasonable overland route from Croatia to Greece. Our plan was to immediately ferry out to Santorini (the farthest island we are visiting) before island-hopping our way back to Athens. The ferry to Santorini left Athens’ port, Piraeus, at 7:30am, so we planned to stay in Piraeus after landing.

Shit.

We expected an easy trip to Piraeus because the Athenian metro goes to both the airport and Piraeus. But the airport metro station was hit by a strike. So were the airport buses. But we were told that not *all* of the metro was on strike and so we could cab to the nearest station for not much money. After joining the hundreds of other travelers in the cab line, we got into a cab and pointed on the metro map to the station we wanted to go to. He seemed to understand. Many minutes later, as the meter rose higher and higher, we finally told him to pull over and asked where we were going. He pledged ignorance, and claimed that he thought he were going to the Metro hotel, despite us pointing to a station on the metro map. He also claimed that the entire metro was shut down, so we had no choice but to go with him the rest of the way. A quick check at a metro station showed him to be completely wrong (or lying), and after some argument he let us go with a reduced fare. We probably weren’t the first tourists he pulled that trick on.

After that it was relatively easy to find our place – a metro ride to Piraeus, with some slightly sketchy characters that Jami and I argued about whether they were better or worse than the NYC subway’s denizens; and a sketchy walk through a port town to our seedy hotel. The website did a good job of hiding its sketchiness, somehow failing to mention that it didn’t seem far removed from its past life as a by-the-hour hotel (or so we assumed…)

This picture doesn’t show the creepiness.

Nor this.

Piraeus seemed like a typical port town – industrial, plenty of quick food, but not a lot to see or much going on. But none of that mattered – in the morning we found our ferry and were off to Santorini!