Greece

At 30,000-something feet on my way to Athens and a series of mishaps have occurred such that I am superstitiously hoping that the nonsense is behind me. A late night in the office trying to tie things up before escaping for 16 days to the Cyclades and as luck would have it, when I descended the elevator to the sub-basement #2 level where my parking space is allocated, I was the last car on that level and surely the other two levels. Once I ascended to sub-basement #1, I saw the security door down and got out of my Jeep with the a/c still running to re-enter the building and take the elevator up one flight to alert Security that the security door needed to be opened to let me out. Except for the fact that the cleaning crew had taken all three elevators out of service, my plan was fine. So I climbed back into the Jeep and started laying on the horn. Which no one heard and/or acknowledged much less bothered to check the security cameras to notice my predicament. I thought about the colleagues that lived nearby and who might not mind getting in their car to drive to the office to tell the Security team on duty that I was trapped in the basement. I called my direct-report assuming she wouldn’t be too inconvenienced seeing as how I asked her to go to the South of France on my behalf for a business trip that would have wrecked the front end of my long-anticipated trip to Greece. She was on the other side of town having her nails done and couldn’t get there for at least an hour. So I called someone else, who didn’t mind and drove over. After 20+ minutes stuck in the basement and dumbfounded with the certainty of death in the likelihood of a fire, I emerged and wondered if I could send the vacationing CEO an email about my plight while imagining what the lawyers might do in the US if this idiocy had taken place there.

So, typical of a 4:45am wake-up for the airport, I couldn’t sleep after finally getting packed and leaving my orchids with the neighbors for them to tend in my absence. In typical 5am zombie-form at the airport, I checked into my flight and as I thought about charging my iPhone on my laptop, I realized that I left the charger to the laptop plugged into its socket in my bedroom. So I did the only thing available at the hour….I called my driver who had just dropped me and asked him to come back to the airport. Clinging to a double macchiatto with one bag checked onto Athens, I met him at the same curb and gave him my house key and told him to enter my apt, go to my bedroom and take the cord out of the wall and bring it to me. If he got caught in traffic and the flight was called, at least I could board the plane and buy another cord in Athens but it would be less expensive to pay him for a 2nd trip to the airport than to find an Apple store on arrival 8 hours later. So, in usual reliable form, he turned up 25 minutes later with the cord.

This is also the man to whom I entrusted my Jeep a few months ago to have it inspected. I couldn’t face the lines, the bureaucracy and the tedium of having my Jeep inspected so I gave him the keys and asked him to do it. The Jeep failed b/c of an expired bulb in one of the taillights I had not noticed so he went to the Jeep dealership and faithfully bought the factory-specific bulb and then took it back for inspection the next day, when it passed. I am finally learning that in this part of the world, there is a man you can pay to get just about anything done.

The heavy narrative and dearth of visuals is over. The Lumix point-and-shoot camera I bought in Cairo last June to replace my original Lumix after it was stolen (with photos still on the card of dawn at the pyramids of Giza) at a conference, died on one of the winter desert excursions. It must have been a dud and sold into the black market. Note to self- do not buy electronic equipment in countries with anemic GDP and crumbling authoritarian governance. So I am armed with a 3rd Lumix (16 mega-pixels).

I picked up the 3rd Lumix in Dubai Duty-Free on my way back to the home sandbox, minutes before picking up a few cold Perrier bottles in the lounge to drop into my work bag to keep 2 kilos of prosciutto, pancetta and Serrano ham cold for the next few hours of transit; it’s not haram in some of the Arab Gulf countries. Ironically, once though Immigration and going through the arrival x-rays at the home airport, the local attendant had me pull out the Perrier bottles from my bag. He could not read the labels and asked his colleague at the next machine if the Perrier was alcohol. She assured her colleague that they weren’t and waved me and the illicit meat through to the arrival luggage belts.

P.S. Arrived to Athens a few hours after tapping the above to a taxi strike. I emerged from the subway at a central Athens stop and met these Roman market ruins as I was told to board the back of a motorbike and shoved my bags onto it to zip through narrow streets and corners to my host's home, at the foot of the Acropolis.





After eating a divine Greek meal at a taverna 10m from her front door, we strolled around Athens as the sun set before leaving for the Pireas Port for the 4-hour ferry ride to the Cyclades. Enjoy.