KLM helps me to "travel light."

After a somewhat arduous journey to Athens (Note: If you ever fly via Continental’s hub at Newark, you will encounter delays. Thanks to one inexplicably cancelled flight, two delayed flights, and a broken jetway, we were forced to take a rather circuitous route to Athens, complete with an unplanned stop in Amsterdam. Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, by the way, was a monument to efficiency and modernity. So, kudos to the Dutch for their airport.), we immediately set to getting ripped off by the local taxi drivers (Well, this was after we spent an hour submitting claims for our lost luggage to the airline, but that’s another matter).

After a long and expensive taxi ride into the city center, we dropped off our hand luggage at the hotel (You’ll recall that our actual luggage had not yet arrived. This confused the taxi driver to no end; since we didn’t resemble the typical American tourist with loads of luggage, he couldn’t decide to which degree we should be ripped off.) and headed out for a meal. After getting lost repeatedly (My keen sense of direction is no match for the mess of streets known as Athens.), we finally found a suitably overpriced restaurant in an area filled with other tourists, and settled down for a much-deserved meal. I ordered moussaka, a traditional Greek casserole consisting primarily of ground/minced beef and eggplant, and Drea enjoyed a bit of spanakopita, which is little more than a puff pastry filled with spinach and cheese, though it is, admittedly, delicious. After a rather long dinner (Invariably, I found table service in Greece to be slow to a truly shocking degree; I once waited 90 minutes for a lunch that consisted of nothing more than a Greek salad.), we trudged back to the hotel for some well-earned rest.