Greece: arrival

So this is Greece, specifically Athens, specifically a suburb called Glyfada. I can't say much about it since my flight landed in the evening and I haven't really seen anything except for where we ate dinner. I was a little taken aback by customs which looked briefly at me, scanned and then stamped my passport, and then let me through. No questions at all. No request for information on where I would be staying or what I was doing or how long I would be there. Welcome to Greece.

Since I have nothing on Greece yet, I'll enlighten you all with my sharp insights into travel. When people board airplanes, they behave very similarly to the way they do in self-serve food lines. They're impatient to reach their seat area or get near the food, but once they get there they start to take all the time in the world. In food lines, people have this odd habit of leaving their plate on their tray and trying to scoop food all the way over to it. It is much faster to simply hold your plate right above the serving container and just shovel the food on. (I think I've mentioned the food thing before but it can never be said too many times.) In the same vein, once people get to their seat, they decide to fuss with everything and try and get their bag just right either in the overhead bin or under the sat or both. Meanwhile, they're holding up all the people who need to get to seats that are further back. Is it so hard to just shove your bag into the overhead bin and then flop onto your seat, thereby getting out of the aisle so other people can get by. Once in your seat, you can at least half-stand and do all the fidgeting you need.

O'Hare decided to provide me with a little entertainment. While I waited in the gate area, I watched the ground crew load the plane. It's an interesting ballet of sorts to see the different trucks that need to pull up to the plane and all the non-descript boxes that they load. The best part was watching someone re-park some conveyer trucks right near the window. I think these trucks are primarily used to load and unload luggage from the plane. All they have is a conveyer belt that can be tipped up that runs the length of the truck. Anyway, this guy was trying to re-park some to make room for another one on the line where they are left. There was no need to have them more than a couple feet apart, but this guy apparently decided that if he didn't scrape them together while parking then they weren't close enough. And in the process of doing all the scraping he also managed to back up into another vehicle twice. O'Hare also provided me with this photo. Really now, who carries $4 in quarters? Besides me of course. Not that I bought a copy of Barron's or anything like that.

The flight from O'Hare to Heathrow was pretty good. British Airways travels in style and offered wine with dinner. I declined since I don't like wine, but the gesture seemed nice. I watched the movie Crash on the plane. While it may not be the best title for a plane movie, it has nothing to do with airplanes. At least it wasn't Alive.

The Heathrow airport is a very odd place. My plane landed in Terminal 4, which apparently suffers from a gate shortage. We got off the plane in the middle of the tarmac onto a bus that whisked us away to some nondescript entrance to the airport building structure where I followed signs for Terminal 1 until I came to another nondescript entrance where another bus was waiting that whisked me off to my terminal. At least the signage is good.

At no point did I leave the secure area (I think) but I still went through two more checkpoints. This probably has something to do with all the international flights that come through there and a certain lack of faith in the rigorousness of the airport security in some parts of the world. And I'll concede that the first checkpoint I went through may have been necessary because I can't say for sure where that bus dropped me off relative to other checkpoints. When it comes to going though those checkpoints, I've become fairly good at packing and unpacking my laptop and pockets and never getting dinged by anything like a belt or coins. I'm starting to get bothered by people who can't seem to figure it out and I try to pick the line with the fewest looking amateurs, but it's always a crapshoot in the end.

One last curio was that the Heathrow to Athens flight was not boarded in any order. I was waiting for them to announce their boarding instructions when people just started lining up and getting on the plane. Very odd, but more effective than I thought it would be.