Thankfully, I managed to sleep a good bit on the flight, and was reasonably alive when we landed in Athens. It was the first time I\u2019ve ever been out of the U.S., so I was pretty excited. Another difference (and a very nice one) from normal travel presented itself. We had no idea where we were going, and didn\u2019t care. All we had to do was find the guy from the promotion company (Jim Morris says it\u2019s always the \u201csame\u201d guy, no matter what country he\u2019s in), and everything would be taken care of. He found us, and got us in cabs and on our way. We made it to our hotel eventually. On the way, I got my first taste of Athens traffic. I\u2019m from Chicago, where plenty of people drive like maniacs, but it\u2019s nothing compared to Athens. Just before the hotel, four guys got out of a truck in front of us trying to make it up the street, picked up a car, and moved it out of the way so they could get by. And the cabbie said we hadn\u2019t seen anything yet.<\/p>\n
Our hotel was in a great spot, basically right under the Acropolis. We had a nice dinner right next to the hotel. Earlier, Jon\u2019s dad (who is a pharmacist) went into a pharmacy across the street to talk shop, and find out what kind of differences there were between the U.S. and Greece. Within five minutes, he\u2019d gotten into a big argument. It quickly became obvious where Jon gets some of his fire from. That night, we all walked around the Plaka (the old town area with lots of shops and restaurants) and scoped out some bootleg Iced Earth merchandise among other stuff. I walked into a record shop, and for the first time, realized that I was in Europe, where there would be all sorts of CDs I normally wouldn\u2019t see in the U.S. I got Misanthrope\u2019s Libertine Humiliations (a very fine CD!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thankfully, I managed to sleep a good bit on the flight, and was reasonably alive when we landed in Athens. It was the first time I\u2019ve ever been out of the U.S., so I was pretty excited. Another difference (and a very nice one) from normal travel presented itself. We had no idea where we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1491,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/1491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregie.com\/neil\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}