Living in Greece

A practical guide to moving, living, working & traveling in Greece, plus musing and misadventures from an American in Athens

Commuters in Greece still sweating it out

April 13, 2007 at 13:16 ·

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A lot of buses are air conditioned. They even have signs on the windows saying “PLEASE DO NOT OPEN – THIS BUS IS AIR CONDITIONED” but of course you always get some tourist who cos they are boiling hot from standing outside and don’t feel immediate relief… open them!

I remember back in the ‘bad old days’ when I used to have to take the bus everywhere… I would often tell people off for opening the window and letting in 45 degree heat from outside!!!

As for the Kifissia – Piraeus train, the news you report is a joke. As you state, it’s an overland train (it’s only in central Athens that the stations are undeground) so people are in for another fun fun summer!

As I say in my article, I know the buses and some trolleys have AC, but I was led to believe that they didn’t because the driver never turned them on…not on the major lines I rode for several years, anyway. Maybe I was unlucky. On the buses that did have them turned on, the driver turned it off despite our protests, saying he was too cold and therefore didn’t care if we suffered.

Also, sometimes people (those sick, elderly or sensitive) open windows while the AC on because they WANT warm air to come inside as they’re cold. People also don’t read signs.

The concept of AC is that it’s freezing cold inside a space, especially one of a bus that is small and thereby easily cooled. I find that tourists open windows because they are under the impression the AC can’t possibly be on because it’s still warm inside despite the fact it is (aka, the AC is turned too low, broken or otherwise weak). If you’re ever in Manhattan, huge stores have efficient AC that passerbys in 45C heat and 100% humidity can feel cool just walking by an open door.

Kat –
I am a Brit living in the USA and contemplating moving to Greece (I work for a Greek company in their NY office). I have thoroughly enjoyed your site for the past 8 hours!!! – haha Started at midnight and just about to have breakfast!

Anyway just wanted to thank you for both the education and the entertainment and thought I would offer, for what it’s worth, a piece I wrote on Greek Taxis a few years ago . . .

A little known fact of Greek life is the perception of everyday conversations by non Greek speaking people. To the untrained ear, most social discourse sounds at best like an exchange of orders and at worst like a blazing row. For example, when sending an email, it is virtually impossible to use lower case characters since the default is automatically to upper case, SO YOU CAN SHOUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR F’KIN VOICE!. This said, however, once one finds the more dulcet, “little” letters it is as a lull in the storm . . .

Most are aware that Greece is the cradle of civilization, many of the world’s great thinkers solved the mysteries of mankind here whilst the rest of us were living in caves and there are many areas that have been developed here for thousands of years, greatly surpassing the efforts of” newer” nations who have far to go in their evolution of certain concepts.

One such area is Traffic Jams. There are very few places on the face of the globe that can offer more frustrating vehicular transport then the roads between Athens and Pireaus which are a virtual melange of pot holes, construction sites, heat, dust, opportunistic drivers and road rage. Somebody untrained in the navigation of this road would be more than foolhardy to attempt to actually drive it themselves as it is certain that the end result would be to be splattered against the rear of a truck or at the very least to have three scooter riders embedded in the passenger door.

To compensate for this, Greek Taxis are numerous, reasonably priced and a source of some of the best entertainment one can wish for. My travels today took me to the little know town of Kastri, from the time it takes to get there one would assume that it is situated somewhere in Bulgaria wheras in fact it is a northern suburb of Athens.

The adventure of returning from this place to the bosom of Pireaus is one of the most entertaining couple of hours I have spent in a long time. My business completed, my host informed me that it was very easy to hail a taxi outside his office.

Clearly, this is not an activity he undertakes regularly since after some forty minutes beside an extremely busy highway, the only things i had “hailed” was about half a kilo of dust to stick to the pint and three quarters of sweat that had run out of me on to the pavement. Then, lady luck smiled upon me with the entrance over the horizon of Nikos and his much loved (and certainly much used) Seat taxi.

Nikos appeared to offer an unusual variant on the taxi theme, the “local” service. When he stopped next to the grease puddle that i was transforming rapidly into, there were already two elderly ladies in the back seat of the car. Having determined my eventual destination I got into the front seat. It was at this point that I realized that Nikos considered one leg to be a sufficient proportion of a passenger to be actually in the vehicle and that it was time to move away at as high a velocity as could be achieved.

Fortunately, I was swift in my reactions and managed to get my bum through the door several milliseconds before we passed the first parked car. Nikos is a cheery man, he spoke little English but this was far greater than my Greek which is limited to phrases like “malaka” and “yasu nafti”.

He explained that the ladies were going to points on our route which was fine with me since being close to fainting (both from the heat and the dramatic embarkation) I was prepared to be agreeable to pretty much anything. One of the ladies left us fairly early, to be replaced by a mother and child en route to Athens to go shopping. Nikos is not a person you would readily give a TV remote to, he kept one finger on the radio tuning button at all times flipping between stations every few seconds. A large wear mark on the dial stood in evidence of many years of this practice.

We happened upon a news station; during a twenty or thirty second report I recognized one word. “Australis” which I presumed to be Australia. I regretted my lack of linguistic ability since Nikos roared with laughter at the end of the piece and endeavoured to explain the joke.

Apparently, a man in Australia (I was right!) had been driving his wife and mother in law somewhere when he had run out of petrol. He went to a station to get a can but found that he had no money on him. The owner was reticent to give him any gas without security so it was agreed that the wife and the mother in law would remain whilst the man refilled his car, went to the bank and returned with payment.

Apparently the man seized his opportunity and never returned!! Nikos opined that he may well try that himself and whilst he did not know the word “harridan” he made it abundantly clear that his life contained at least two! The lady with the child left us and shortly afterwards the other lady and we replaced them with a very attractive young woman and a man who,from his odour, probably worked in the goat industry.

We were now a little over an hour into our journey and the discussion had turned to my background in the maritime industry. Nikos was not a fan of shipowners, his opinion was that they make vast fortunes and then spend them in foreign lands, I wondered where he got that impression . . . The goatherd was the next to leave us and we found another gentleman to fill the vacant seat. I am not certain he really wanted to go anywhere but was clearly keen to sit next to the young lady in the back seat who he engaged in flirtatious conversation (flirting sounds the same in any language) She was not receptive and left us shortly afterwards.

When she was gone, the man and Nikos exchanged a few words which I took to mean either “She must be a lesbian”, “She had big ears anyway” or “Nice tits”. All too soon, the voyage was completed and I was back in the more familiar streets of Piraeus. I bade Nikos farewell as he set off to find more lost souls to fill his taxi.

Hi Mike! Thanks for stopping in for an extended visit. I take it as a great compliment that I held your interest overnight, but I hope you caught up on your sleep.

I liked your story and thanks for sharing it. If you have it published somewhere else on the Internet, it’s very possible I’ve read it before because it sounded familiar. Or maybe all taxi stories are the same, it’s hard to know the difference 😉

The way it ended reminded me of a post I wrote called “Conversations from a day in my life as a non-blonde lesbian…”

I appreciate you making a comment — so many people don’t and I never have a chance to “meet” them.

Well spotted Kat! It was first published on a site I used to write for (sadly now defunct though still there) called maritimewired.com

regards

M – That’s always been a quality my boyfriends hate — remembering everything in detail. 😉

I also wanted to add that if you decide to move here, it will likely be easier for you since you are an EU citizen and have an existing connection to a Greek company.