Annabel wanted to ride the bus out to the airport with Galen when he headed off on Sunday after spending a week with us in Athens. It's about an hour's bus ride out there, and we'd just heard about a new zoo out near the airport, which I'd researched online, and which sounded definitely worth seeing, so we decided to combine the trips. After Annabel and I said a sad goodbye to Galen in the airport (as he began what would turn out to be a delayed/missed connections/arrive a day late return trip, just like his trip to Athens had been), we found an airport information booth and asked about getting to the Attica Zoological Park.
The booth worker said it was very difficult, no buses went there (despite what I'd read online), we'd have to take a taxi, it would cost a lot, and besides it wasn't a real zoo anyway. We were a little discouraged, but I had a couple more errands to accomplish in the airport, and after talking to two car rental agents (planning for Julie's upcoming visit) and trying but failing to get cash at the ATM (running up against the 24-hour-limit), we decided to ask another airport information person. I think I learned this lesson from Alex, but I don't trust everything I'm told when asking for information, and in fact generally trust it in inverse proportion to the certainty with which it's imparted. The second person said that she didn't know where the zoo was or how to get there, that the town I mentioned was in fact the whole area in the vicinity of the airport, and I should really ask the Greek Tourism Office--she (and her counterpart upstairs) only had information about the airport itself.
Duh. So we walked down to the tourism booth, but it was dark. We asked the nice people in the travel agency booth next door, and they said it would open at 10:00. They asked what we needed, and I said information about the zoo, and they said that it was worth seeing but we'd have to get information about getting there from the tourism office. It was 9:50, so we got something to munch and waited. After a while I asked a few more questions of those nice people, and Annabel and I decided to set a limit of 10:30. It was Greek election day, but we were told that wouldn't prevent the office from opening. When 10:30 came around, the nice travel agency lady gave us a zoo brochure that was a little out of date, and armed with that we headed out to find a cab.
I waved the brochure at the cab driver at the head of the long line, and he nodded and opened the door for Annabel. I handed him the brochure and said "Spata," the town where the zoo was, the freeway exit to which we'd seen on the way in, the last one before the airport, the same freeway exit where we were hoping to catch a return bus to central Athens. He eased out of the front of the taxi line, kind of sidling alongside the terminal, while looking at the brochure, trying, it turned out, to find an address that he could put into his GPS. The directions on the brochure, the same as those on the website, were terrible, it turned out. I have to give him that. He called in to his dispatcher or someone for help, with no luck, and then swung out into traffic to attempt to follow the map on the brochure. He didn't speak English, so we were already struggling, but I heard "30-35 euros," as did Annabel, and we both said "NO, wait, stop!" Our cab driver earlier that morning, taking us from our house down to the airport bus stop, had made a half-hearted attempt to persuade us to take his cab all the way to the airport, and offered to do it for 30 euros, which was a decent price.
Now, I have to take a minute to explain cabs in Athens, which are actually reasonably priced and generally easy to use. They always use the meter, so you know what you owe, but there's extra for big bags, and an additional fee for going to the port or the airport, and another fee if you phone for the "radio taxi" rather than just catching one on the street, and sometimes cabbies will stop to pick up additional fares to ride with you but that doesn't mean you get a break on your fare. Okay, but like I said, it's still a pretty good system, generally quite clear. Unlike in Turkey, where we'd just been taken for a literal and metaphoric ride, and where I learned just a little too late that you always have to negotiate the price BEFORE you get in. I was still smarting from that one a week earlier.
Anyway, back to this driver, who wanted 30 euros or more for what I thought should have been a 12 or 15 euro trip, at most. He pulled over to the curb, but we had already left the terminal behind, and there was of course no sidewalk and little shoulder, and I didn't fancy making our way back to the terminal and then having the same situation to deal with, and the driver was explaining that he didn't want to get back in that long line and wait again after having just worked his way to the front of it, and trying to justify the cost of the trip, and talking about the cost of going to Athens (which I didn't consider relevant), and meanwhile easing back into traffic, and, in the end, I just shut up and sat back and decided to lump it. I hoped that he simply didn't know how far it would be, and that he was overestimating the cost to be on the safe side, and that we'd only have to pay the meter amount after all, and that I'd be right about what it would be and the story would have a happy ending.
He took the first exit, after paying one toll (and of course I factored that toll into the cost), headed towards Spata, then stopped to ask directions of a motorcyclist along the road. The motorcyclist gave what seemed like very complicated directions, and after we started off again the cab driver gave me a significant look in the rear view mirror and said, "Spata?!? Hmphh." This asking-for-directions and muttering "Spata--hmphh" occurred twice more en route. Meanwhile we were kind of far out in the boonies, easily too far from the freeway exit for us to walk back there. The good news was that as we pulled into the huge zoo parking lot, the meter only read 12 euros. At the start of the lot he slowed down and started asking me about how I was getting back, and what time I'd be done, and saying that he'd be happy to come back and pick me up and take me back to the airport. I told him we wanted to get back to Athens, and he said fine, and mentioned "45 euros." I was thinking about the challenges of Annabel and I returning, and thinking that the extra 15 euros wasn't an exorbitant amount to pay for getting to the zoo and back from the freeway, on top of the normal 30 euros to go from the airport to Athens. Remember, he doesn't speak English and my Greek is pre-remedial. I'm making this all sound a lot clearer and simpler than it was at the time.
But after he copied out my cell phone number and we set a time to meet, and I said, "How much do I pay now, how much for this part, just in case?" it suddenly became clear that he wanted me to pay 35 euros for this trip and ANOTHER 45 for the trip from here to Athens. As I realized this I said "80 EUROS?!?" and Annabel immediately said, "OXI, OXI, OXI!" I was very proud of both her Greek accent and her Greek attitude. "NO, NO NO!" The cab driver gave her a tight smile and a pat on the head, and began trying to convince me.
Now here's the part of the story I'm not proud of. I gave him the 35 euros. I should have given him 20 at most, for which he'd have been happy. But instead I paid what he asked and we walked off. I certainly made my statement, which was something like: I may be a sucker, but I'm only so much of a sucker, not quite as big a sucker as you think I am. The few people I've told this story to already here in Athens were disappointed in me. Just wait till next time, that's all I say.
So now here we are in line at the zoo, mightily offended but determined to enjoy our beautiful day, low on money, starting to get a little hungry, and kind of nervous about how we're going to get home. At least our straightened finances made it easy to say no to the dolphin show, although we admitted to each other later that we were both a little sad about missing it. The zoo's prices had gone up too, but their exhibits had expanded a lot also, so we didn't mind. This is a private zoo--Greece doesn't have a real public zoo-and I was happy to support what turned out to be a first-class, high-standards, plenty-of-room-but-also-good-animal-viewing zoo. I won't go into detail--you've all been to the zoo, and this isn't that story anyway. It's the story of how we got to the zoo, and eventually got home.
One of the notions in the back of my mind was that we'd strike up a conversation with a nice Greek family with room in their car, and they'd insist on giving us a ride back to Athens, but we'd say, no, no, it's too crowded for your beautiful children, just a ride up to the freeway will be fine, we already have our tickets, thank you so much anyway. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. The zoo was packed with people, and almost all of them appeared to be middle-class Greeks. Many of them exhibited the worst kinds of irresponsible zoo behavior: throwing things into the enclosures despite all the signs everywhere saying not to (including pictures of the poor monkey who died from eating something someone threw in her enclosure), tapping on the glass despite all the signs saying not to, and shoving up in front of us at exhibits, actually pushing Annabel out of the way in one case. With both hands. And that was an adult pushing my 10-year-old, in the reptile house, just to look at a lousy boa constrictor. I think I could sum up our zoo experience by saying that the animals were wonderful but the people were awful. I wanted to put a few of those folks behind bars.
And, like I said, no one offered us a ride. I heard an American voice shortly before we were going to leave, and thought about striking up a conversation with an ulterior motive, but didn't. When we'd seen just about every exhibit, we walked out the front door (after the obligatory stop in the gift shop) and headed through the big parking lot and down the long driveway. Two gypsy boys about Annabel's age shot at us with a plastic pellet gun as we walked by, reminding me of the time the gypsy girl threw rocks at us on a walk in Spain. The boys followed us for a bit, continuing to shoot, until a parking attendant stopped them. This part of the trip--the long, hot, dry walk from the zoo along a narrow-shouldered road full of speeding cars, back toward what looked like the more urban part of Spata--was the low point for both Annabel and me. We'd had ice cream bars at the zoo, but decided not to eat lunch there. I wanted to find a taverna in town where we could eat and I could ask about how to get back out to the highway. When we finally got to the larger crossroad, I couldn't see anything in any direction that looked like a place to eat. So we turned right and headed in the general direction of the highway and Athens herself, not entirely sure of the what we were in for.
Through this entire experience, from the airport onward, Annabel had been a trooper. She expressed no doubts in her father, not a speck of disloyalty, apologized even for getting us into this by wanting to go to the zoo in the first place, and I did my best to disabuse her of the notion that she had any responsibility for our situation. I was very happy to have her there with me, and felt like we'd been a great team at the zoo and would be a great team getting home.
At that point we came up to a bus stop with one person waiting, who turned our to be very friendly and helpful. Again with no English on one side and no Greek on the other, but this time the key term--"metro"--needed no translation. A bus came in just a few minutes and our new friend indicated that we should get on with him, which we did, just barely, because the bus was PACKED. For the next ten or fifteen minutes Annabel held onto me and I held onto the bar of the bus door, as we made a few stops, and somehow a few people managed to get off and on (mostly on). Our friend had found another friend who spoke some English, and said he was going to get off at the metro station, and we should ride along until he got off. I saw out the window with a sinking heart the point at which our bus turned away from the freeway, which I was hoping we would intersect so that we could still use our airport bus tickets, but at that point I decided to relax and put our fate in the hands of our new friends, who by the way appeared to be south Asian, as did many of the people on the bus. Gradually the crowd thinned out, and Annabel and I could move away from the door, and even for a few stops into seats. The end of that bus line was indeed the metro station, just eight stops from our neighborhood, and we bought our metro tickets (we hadn't been able to buy bus tickets even if we'd wanted to, but it's all on a semi-honor system anyway, and by buying the metro tickets we were fulfilling our one-ticket-per-trip legal and moral obligation) and boarded the train, safe at last.
That's almost the end of the story. We met an Alaskan on the train, on his first day (of a two-month vacation) in Greece, and I hope were able to give him a bit of welcome and reassurance. When we got off the metro we called Alex, who'd been wondering about us but whom I hadn't wanted to call until I wouldn't have to worry her, and she met us at an Italian restaurant near our house, where I had a calzone and a much-needed glass of wine, and Annabel had ice cream for the second time that day, and we told her the story of our harrowing adventure even as she enjoyed with us the happy ending.
Did I mention how fabulous Annabel was? Well, she was.
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