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My Time in Greece: A Tragicomedy

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There are three times in my life that I’ve found myself sleeping in the street—the first two were spent camping out for SNL tickets (Kanye and Mr. J. Timberlake, respectively). The third time was… different.

Picture it: Athens, March 2008. My friends and I had been studying abroad in different European cities, but our spring breaks lined up perfectly; we planned to spend the time touring the city and hopping around the Cyclades. Money was tight, but we had enough for semi-decent hostels, ferry tickets, museum entries, and beach days. We were excited, though perhaps a little naïve (despite living in countries with foreign languages, this would be the first time any of us encountered an entirely different alphabet). But when we landed in Athens our first night, our enthusiastic faces clearly didn’t make an impression on the hostel’s clerk—it was far too late, according to Greek time, for check-in. We were told to come back in the morning. Looking back, this should have been our first hint that the trip would be a near-disaster.

With no idea of where to go, or what to do, we started wandering around, eventually finding a touristy-looking café in the middle of a town square. We had to order something before the staff would let us sit, so we tried in vain to understand the menu. Honestly, I’m not even sure we did—I think that the staff just took pity on us after a really long time and brought us some coffee. By this point it was getting to be super late, maybe about 2 am, so we settled at tables outside and took turns sleeping. Some stray dogs wondered over (they’re all over Athens) and sniffed around us, but generally left us alone. One golden mutt curled up under a neighboring table.

Hours later, as the sun began to come up, the café staff kicked us out—it was understandable, but we still had nowhere to go. We started walking again and our new dog friend tagged along, clearly getting a kick out of showing us his (her?) favorite places (an empty fountain, a specific corner, and an alley). Finally, it was time to check in. This would be the last time I would ever sleep on the street, but it’s still not the rock bottom of the story.

The next few days were a blur—I remember seeing the Parthenon and touring the Acropolis, but soon enough we were on our way to our first island, Mykonos. We were all sleep-deprived at this point, but ready for some sun and blue water.

Instead, Mykonos was freezing. We had booked two rooms in the cutest hostel on the island—think those adorable white huts—but ended up huddled together in just one for warmth. Because going to the beach was out of the question, we spent our days touring the island, trying to find any place we could stay indoors without being bothered—more often than not, this meant the island’s sole Starbucks. A few days passed like this. Tempers were definitely running high, but we were all still trying to make the best of the situation, assuming that things would be better at our next destination, Santorini.

Except we never made it there.

When the day finally came to pick up our ferry tickets, we were in for a surprise: because this was Greece—the land of democracy, muses, outrageous leopard print clothing, and doing completely illogical things on total whims—our ferry was going to head to the neighboring island of Syros instead, and we’d have to switch ships once we got there. Okay, not a big deal, right?

Wrong. (Are you sensing the theme here?)

Let’s just skip over the part where the hostel owner’s son took a detour through a drug deal while driving us to the port (we didn’t want to be there, but whatever, we survived). Eventually, we made it to Syros just fine. But—wait for it—soon found out that we weren’t going to be leaving anytime soon. Apparently, during our 90 minutes trip, the winds had escalated and all ferries had been cancelled. Great.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere to sleep. Again. Except now we’re all about to kill each other.

Desperate, we hightailed it to the closest internet café (this was pre–international smartphone data plans, folks) and began searching for hostels. But Syros, as we soon learned, is basically the business center of the Greek Isles. It’s a place where people really only go for work, so our only options were Greek alternatives to the Holiday Inn—comparatively cheap, but still more expensive than we had hoped. Resigned, we pooled our money together and checked into the cheapest option.

With nowhere to go, nothing to see, and barely any money left to spend, we spent the next few days at the pier, hanging out with seagulls and checking with the ferry office nearly every hour. Finally, after three days, we became desperate: there was a single ferry leaving that evening to head back to Athens—the first to leave at all since we’d arrived—and we resignedly purchased tickets. From the ridiculously crowded boat, we called ahead to our next Athenian hostel (the plan had always been to stay in Athens the night before our return flights) and advanced our arrival by two days.

Impossibly, once back in Athens, our situation only grew worse—the next hostel was a new level of gross. I’m pretty sure we all cried ourselves to sleep the first night: I definitely refused to touch the blanket that had been provided, opting instead to wrap my legs inside of my sweatshirt. In the morning, after being frustrated with having to pay for shower water (cold water, mind you, not hot), we left to wander the city again.

Slowly, a new realization came upon us: if you’ve seen one Greek statue, you’ve seen them all. So instead of revisiting the tourist hotspots we had already seen, we hunted out English movie theatres, book stores, and small restaurants. We fell into a pattern of seeing double-features at an old, cheap theatre and reading silently while camped out in yet another Starbucks.

Looking back now, nearly six years later, I’m almost glad it happened the way it did. It’s quite possibly the last extreme experience I’ll ever have without a smartphone to save me. If the trip hadn’t turned out horribly, I wouldn’t have discovered my appreciation for Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities was one of the only English-language books we could find—Twilight was the other) or have pushed myself that far out of my comfort zone. Moreover, the experience of the trip definitely made our friendships stronger—without the typical creature comforts we were used to, each of us was forced to confront the best and worst of each other.

And, to be honest, I just really love telling this story and knowing that I was made stronger for the experience.

Photo by Gali Levi-McClure

Photo by Gali Levi-McClure

Travel

A Volcano Trapped Me in Rome

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“The word adventure has gotten over used. For me, when everything goes wrong—that’s when adventure starts” – Yvon Chouinard

A volcano trapped me in Europe, but strangely enough, that isn’t where the story starts. The story starts a few weeks earlier, during my year studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh, where “Spring Break” is three weeks long. Armed with a EuroRail pass, a carefully mapped trajectory, and a duffle bag I wore as a backpack, I was ready for my Grand Tour. Or, as close to a Grand Tour as I was probably going to get, given my gender, income status, and the century I live in.

My friend and I started the journey with five days in Paris. We’d eaten plenty of croissants, clomped all over famous French memorials, and kissed Oscar Wilde’s tomb stone (leaving bright pink lipstick smears mingling indistinguishable among their fellows). It was time for our night train to Venice.

Only someone was in our berth, and as a helpful, if stern, official pointed out, our tickets were for a month and some days later. Thank goodness for the young French woman behind the customer service counter, who took one look at our desperate American faces and then asked in English, “Alright, so where are you trying to go?”

She took our map, our EuroRail passes and our itinerary, and then presented us with some options that would get us out of Paris that evening. We picked a night train to Ventimiglia. We say it was because that route took us along the French Riviera through Monaco, along beautiful coasts we never would have seen otherwise. Really though, it was because we both loved Gilmore Girls.

nice, we had a one-night trip to Ventimiglia, another train to Milan, a hostel in Milan, and then another day of traveling. We ended up eating gelato in a tiny beach town on the edge of the Italian coast. We washed down delicious focaccia and prosciutto sandwiches with warm Pepsi on the sun-drenched train platform of a sleepy little town somewhere between Ventimiglia and Milan. We stayed in a strange, haphazard little hostel that might have actually been someone’s house, commandeered by the house sitter. Of course, we were panicked in Milan—unsure how the rest of the trip was going to go, unsure if we could even make it to our next stop. We were ready to scrap all of our plans completely because there were no train tickets to be had to our next destination. At least, no one who understood us well enough to sell them to us. We ate kind of mediocre pizza, and then I curled up in bed to read Percy Jackson, which just goes to show, you can’t have everything.

We did finally get a ticket to Belgrade, Serbia, the next stop on our journey. After three different train stations where they were not selling these tickets, we basically offered our first-born children to the travel agent who finally figured it out for us. The train itself was definitely older than we were and the air conditioning didn’t really work. The concierge spoke Serbian, German and Italian. We, suffice to say, did not. Mostly he talked to us in Italian and we tried to match it up with the French we knew, romance language to romance language. We did, as it turned out, finally make it to Eastern Europe, back on track to meeting up with another friend in Athens, our final destination.

Between getting lost in tangled webs of back streets, eating fried cheese in five or six European cities, taking seated showers in a bathtub, drying ourselves off with our t-shirts, and ripping our only pair of pants each, we finally made it to Athens. When I called my parents to let them know we’d arrived, they had some dire warnings about some volcano in Iceland, but I waved them off. It sounded as absurd to me then as it probably does to you now. A volcano? In Iceland? The Grecian sun was bright, the sky was blue, burning almost too brightly above the monuments. There was no ice to be seen!

“We’re going to be here for five days or so, it should have cleared up by then. We’ll be fine,” I said. My parents were skeptical but I ignored them and went back to hiking ruins, eating gyros, catching up on Bones, and drinking sweet, gritty coffee in the blinding Greek sunlight.

And yet, while we clomped all over Athens, the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, continued to blanket the European skies with thick, black clouds of ash and dust—grounding planes all over Europe, including the one that was supposed to take me and my friend back to Edinburgh.

We were stuck. The friend we were visiting was leaving on a trip of her own, and due to a booking mishap way back in January when we were planning this trip (yes, the adventure started early), we actually had tickets to Rome in our back pockets as well and so we figured that we might as well be stuck in a new city. We saw the Sistine Chapel, ate delicious gnocchi and pizza, stayed in another haphazard hostel run by a lewd, if ruggedly handsome, Italian and his more earnest, but no less lecherous Irish counterpart.

Later, people would hear this story and say sardonically, “Oh poor you, stuck in Rome! How awful!” And I will agree that there are much worse places to get stuck in the world. We had food, we had wine, we had ruins and warm brick and dappled sunlight. We had gelato.

We also had no money. While in Athens, a vicious ATM ate my friend’s debit card, so we were living on my bank account alone. We wouldn’t be able to get a train for weeks, and even if we could somehow find our way onto one, the tickets were about three hundred dollars. Our best plan was finding a train to France and then hoping against hope that someone would rent us (only recently 21) a car with an automatic transmission. Our second best plan was to try to stowaway in a DHL delivery truck. We sat in a café, alternating between giddy appreciation of the word “adventure,” and nervous eavesdropping on the conversations of the Brits sitting near us. We wondered if they would ever be able to get out of Italy, if they’d be willing to take us with them.

Finally, after three days, the smoke and ash cleared long enough for us to get a flight to Glasgow and a midnight bus to Edinburgh. When we got home, we slept for days.

It is, bar none, the best vacation I’ve ever taken. I think, in all likelihood, it will remain so for the rest of my life.

A million things went wrong, and we spent a few nights desperate and uncomfortable. We were nervous and scared a lot. Regardless of our fears, however, the sun rose the next day and we figured out what to see, where to go. We figured out how to circle Europe. It was a trip made up of old churches, art that stole our breath away, fried cheese, sunlight and rain, ripped jeans, endless train tracks, and uncountable, unbelievable stories. We were terrified and amazed. We were indomitable.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Photo by Sara Slattery

Travel

I Was a Eurail Stowaway

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During the winter of my senior year, I carefully scheduled my classes just so in order to have my college experience culminate in an awesome, once-in-a-lifetime, double summer study abroad program. It was going to be the best. I’d be doing a writing program in Florence, Italy, followed by a French-language intensive in Paris. Because I knew I’d want to do a lot of sightseeing on my days off, I purchased a Eurail pass in the States before I left. It wasn’t cheap, but I was told that it would save me a lot of money in the end instead of buying train tickets in Europe.

Cut to about six weeks later—I’m preparing to leave my program in Italy for Paris. I’d been using the Eurail pass around Italy over the past few weeks, taking day trips to cities like Venice and Siena. It seemed to be working just fine, so I figured I’d use it for my overnight train from Florence to Paris as well.

The day we were scheduled to leave, however, a friend of mine cautioned me that certain trains, specifically the overnight ones that went longer distances, wouldn’t accept the Eurail pass. I did a little research online and sure enough, he was right. This particular train wasn’t going to take my pass. I’d need to buy a ticket, and I’d need to do it quickly: every student in our program would be embarking on a mass exodus from the dorms at 5:00 that evening. We were being officially kicked out and would be unable to re-enter the Florence campus after 5:00, thanks to the way NYU had engineered everyone’s student visas and their wack-a-doo liability laws. It was a whole thing.

When I went online to buy my train ticket, it was unclear whether this train was being run by an Italian company or by a French company. The train I wanted to take showed up on both of the lines’ websites. I decided to roll the dice and purchased the ticket from the French website—I barely spoke any Italian, but I at least knew a little bit of French, so I figured I could (sort of) read the fine print. I bought the ticket, packed my bags, hugged all of my new friends goodbye, and hopped into a cab to the train station.

There had been a public transit strike in Italy while I was there (I later learned that there was a public transit strike in Italy at least once a month), so the train was delayed at least four hours. I waited. And waited. And waited. Stopped people watching when the people stopped doing anything worth watching and read my book. And waited some more. I couldn’t go back to the dorms, so I just had to sit there and hope that eventually I could get out of Florence

Finally, the train pulled up. I was exhausted and bored and starving for something resembling lunch… or dinner… or anything, honestly. I noticed that the passengers boarding in front of me were all holding tickets purchased from the Italian website. When I presented my French ticket, I was met by puzzled, mustachioed frowns and a lot of muttering in Italian.

The conductor, and some guy who I guess was his supervisor, examined my ticket. “We… do not know,” the conductor said in broken English and handed the ticket back to me. “No French ticket, we don’t speak it. I’m sorry.”

“Wait, so I can’t get on?” my jaw dropped. Where the hell was I supposed to go? “This is a ticket, for this train! I paid! See, here’s my receipt!”

I pointed furiously at the proof of purchase on the bottom of the ticket. More frowns. More Italian grumbles.

I stood there, weighing my options: I had to find a way onto this train. I was alone in a foreign country with nowhere to stay, and if I didn’t arrive in Paris the next morning, NYU would probably sound the alarm and call my parents in the States to tell them I’d disappeared into thin air. It’s worth mentioning here that I did not have a cell phone. My American phone didn’t work overseas, so I’d been relying on phone cards to call home in the dorms and I was out of minutes. It was after midnight, I had no idea where the nearest not-seedy hotel was, which meant wandering around the city alone in the middle of the night with my two enormous suitcases in tow. The only number I had for my destination was a New York phone number and it was a Sunday. I needed to get the hell on this train.

I heard people shouting something like “Andiamo!” from the back of the train, urging the conductor to get a move on. I was holding them up. The conductor’s supervisor (or whoever the heck he was) mumbled something in Italian that probably meant something like “I don’t have time for this, you deal with it.” Then, he walked away, leaving me alone with the conductor.

The conductor was this skinny guy with a bushy, unkempt mustache that looked like a caterpillar. I think his name was like… Giuseppe? Or Gironomo?

“We go on the train,” Gironoseppe finally said. “You stay with me here. We go to Paris. Yes?”

“Oh, thank you, thank you so much!” I practically threw my arms around Gironoseppe. Thank God.

He took me to his quarters, where he ordered me some food and some wine. I was like… okay. I’ll eat. But I needed to figure out where I was going to stay for the night. Like, I definitely wasn’t going to stay in the conductor’s sleeping chamber, right? Right. The guy was friendly enough, telling me about his wife and son who lived in Rome at his mama’s house, along with his two brothers and their wives and kids. He also kept telling me to drink more wine, which I politely refused. It had been a rough night, but not quite rough enough to get drunk in such close quarters with an utter stranger.

After we finished eating, Gironoseppe pulled an extra pillow and blanket from the closet and told me I should try to get some sleep. At that, I stood up, and concocted a story about a group from my NYU program who were also on the train and might have had an extra bunk in their sleeping compartment. This guy was probably well-intentioned and courteous and all of that but, like most girls, I’d been taught to trust my uh-oh feeling. So I picked up my two monstrous suitcases and peace’d. Sorry, Gironoseppe, I hope you understood. I mean, the Italians have to be at least vaguely familiar with the terms and conditions of Stranger Danger.

I made my way out into the hall, trying to find a spot where I could sleep/sit/while away the next eight hours ‘till we arrived in France. My ticket didn’t have a bunk assignment on it (which probably should have been an early warning sign that something was wrong with it. Oh well, too late now.) I wandered over to the dining car, and it was deserted. So I folded up my sweatshirt like a pillow and curled up on top of my suitcases. I’d just crash here. I’d make it work.

About an hour later, I was awoken by a kindly young British woman. I think I dreamed for half a second that Mary Poppins had come to rescue me (though maybe she just sounded Poppins-like and magical because I was so relieved to have an English-speaking female address me). She asked me why I was sleeping in the dark dining car all by myself. I explained the situation to her and she laughed, saying that there was plenty of space on the train. In fact, there was an empty bed in her compartment. I guess being a young female who spoke my native tongue was enough to win my trust. So, once again, I gathered my bags and I moved. This was becoming one of the longest nights of my life, and it was about to get longer.

I stayed in the bunk that Mary Poppins was sharing with her friend, and I managed to get a little bit of shut-eye. But just before dawn, our train lurched to a stop. And it stayed there, stopped where it was, somewhere on the border of France and Switzerland, for seven goddamn hours. I prayed that my French RAs weren’t the types to fly into a panic and tell my parents they ought to make plans to have my body shipped back to New York. I knew I had a lot of phone calls to make as soon as I got to Paris. Boy, oh boy.

Luckily, my NYU-in-Paris wardens weren’t the panicky types, and although I didn’t end up checking into my room until 9:00 that night and had to bathe in the dorm’s tiny, communal closet with an overhead faucet that passed for a shower, I’d never been more relieved. While everybody else was checking out the bar scene in the Latin Quarter and making new friends, I was upstairs, sleeping like a baby, resting on my stowaway laurels. I might have gotten a lively little anecdote out of the whole ordeal that I can kill with at social gatherings whenever studying abroad comes up. But, next time… I’m definitely taking a plane.

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Travel

Let’s Ask: Yeah, I Lived in a Castle

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Once upon a time, wicked far away, I totally lived in a castle. (Yep, sure did). It was part of a semester abroad that took place in the Netherlands, most of the time, and included a once weekly romp out into the EU, except for that jaunt we took to Croatia. It’s one of those things I’ve done in my life that, when mentioned in casual conversation, usually garners a “wait what!” followed by a slew of questions. So, to set the record straight and to shed some light on the topic of studying abroad and living in castles, I’ve compiled a number of questions that have come up over the years (and a few that have not—but seemed really basic) and I give to you my most honest answers:

“Oh, you studied a broad? What was her name?”

Very funny. This is a serious article, thank you very much.

“Did birds in tiny bonnets and mice with teenie jackets help you clean the place and get dressed in the morning?”

Only on Tuesdays…

“How? Why in the world did you end up in a castle?”

I attended a private college in the Boston area that had, many years before my attendance, acquired the property. Moat included. The inside had been remodeled to accommodate dorms and classrooms. Over the years (I’m fuzzy on the facts here), the school started relying on the support of the town’s two local dining establishments to feed the 80-some students.  The facility was so limited, and the burden on the restaurants to great, the school started including a Eurail pass in tuition so that the students could leave the country in order to get a well-rounded meal on the weekends. Expensive. Awesome. Tomato. Toh-mah-toh.

But, wait, that’s not what you asked. I ended up there after weighing my study-abroad options. It was basically a no-brainer. I could go to Los Angeles, where I currently reside, and live in a luxury apartment or I could go to the Netherlends and live in a castle. It wasn’t a tough decision. It was also not a tough application process…

“What is it like to live in a castle?”

Well living in a castle is kind of a lot like living in any other old stone building. Come to think of it, it’s a lot like living in a concrete or wood building. Sorry to disappoint with this one, but it was basically a really adorable quaint old building. It creaked a lot and the bathrooms were strangely designed. The electrical circuiting was sensitive, the kitchen was reminiscent of a stone hobbit home, and aside from the ghosts, it was a lot like most apartments in Boston.

I’m only kidding. Boston has ghosts, too.

“Wait, there were ghosts?!”

Yes, of course. Her name was Sophie and she had a whole room in the castle named after her. Sophie’s Lounge. I did not ever meet Sophie, probably because I’m a nonbeliever and I wouldn’t waste my time with someone like that if I were a ghost. My roommate, Jess, still maintains that Sophie used to open our door in the middle of the night. Where some see a building settling, others see the handiwork of the dead. We may never know the truth.

The closest any of us ever got to Sophie was our friend Rachel. Rachel was Skyping in Sophie’s Lounge one night when her Skype buddy stopped speaking for a moment to let Rachel answer her friend—a girl who was standing behind her. Funny thing is, Rachel was completely alone in the room and not seen or heard another person the whole time she was Skyping. The friend absolutely insisted that there was a girl standing over Rachel’s shoulder.

Very. Creepy.

“Was there a tower room? Is it drafty?”

Yes, there was a tower room and, no, it wasn’t mine, but I did sometimes sleep in the extra bed in the tower room because I had friends in there. Also, a word about tower rooms: romantic on the pages (of epic novels), impractical in real life. Where’s a princess to keep her rectangular desk? In the center of her round room?

“Was it dangerous? What’s the worst thing that happened to you while you were there?”

The worst thing that happened to me was a far cry from the awful things that happened to other people. I got my camera stolen and that sucked a lot. Pickpockets are amazingly slick. Point for you Venlo, Netherlands. But the worst thing happened to almost everybody except me and my roommate, in a little town called Dubrovnik. Now, don’t mistake my story here. Dubrovnik is a lovely place full of smooth pebbly beaches, as much gelato as you can stand, Game of Thrones sets, and some really, really old walls. I would go back in a heartbeat. That being said, our trip out to Croatia was a field trip involving all 80 students together and we spent a week being thrown a number of the curviest curve balls.

The start of our journey left many among us blessed with either a terrible flu bug, or food poisoning, or a plain old case of the travel voms. So, on our way from the airport, we stopped many a time on that bumpy dirt road so that one of several students could well… you get the picture.

A couple nights in, we’re in downtown Dubrovnik at a small pub, I think all 80 of us are there, and my roommate, a Gatsbian partier, had overdone it. She required an escort home at the tender hour of 8 pm and so up the hill we went. We made an early night of it, but in the morning at breakfast all of our friends who had stayed at the bar were black-eyed and split-lipped. Apparently, as small groups left the bar and slowly made their way back to the hotel, a gang of Croatian teenagers attacked each one. Roundhouse kicks to the face and all. I still to this day thank Jess for being a drunken space-case that night.

Lots of other terrible things that did not happen to me happened to the people I was with. I did not pass out from dehydration and hit my head on the night table, I did not get stung by sea urchins while swimming in the Adriatic Sea, I did not get electrocuted by a ladder in a water garden, I had no moped accidents, and I spent zero hours acquainting myself with the Croatian healthcare services. I did, however, wake up during the earthquake.

“Would you recommend studying abroad?”

Yes times a million. But with a caveat: from my own humble experience, and from what I have gathered from those that have been shared with me, if you are looking for a rigorous course load, choose a more intensive program or one that offers classes from the native universities. Or maybe don’t study abroad.

The highlight of my program was the opportunity to travel every weekend to a completely different country. I took a travel writing course, a literature class, and an ethics and philosophy class, allegedly (I showed up for class, the professor did not). So yeah, I’d advise you go immerse yourself in other cultures and build out your chotchky collection. Don’t over think it.

Photo by Michelle White

Photo by Michelle White