Europe Trip 2011: Day 0 – Getting yelled at by a local restaurant waitress, confused on bus rides, getting f-ing lost, and eating at TGIF = EPIC FAIL

So we started our trip well until we got to Philadelphia…that’s when the failure started. Anna had to sit next to a woman who she thinks needed some Geodon or Abilify or even Librium “Yeah yeah yeah” (according to Lindsey’s friend, “is it like Usher’s??”). Anna was really afraid that she would get slapped or hit because of her great anxiety of not leaving Philly in time and had started punching herself for it…Ah!! Lindsey had her own despair with the woman too – she continuously got hit by the woman’s “humongous butt” and “hairy back” because she sat next to the bathroom which anxious woman kept going to after every hour.

After 2 long, grueling hours sitting on the tarmac (because they decided to fix something on the plane while we all sat in it, causing us also to get stuck in huge Tstorms that were rolling along the East Coast), we finally flew off in the ghetto, old US Airway plane. Lindsey slept the whole way through, while Anna was up making sure the woman was okay…=)

When we finally arrived in Athens, we took a cab to the hotel. This is unfortunate, however we didn’t tip the taxi driver because he failed to turn on the a/c. However, we tipped the porter although we didn’t need to because it was included in our tour package and Anna was taking too long in the bathroom (she didn’t know how to flush the damn toilet and stood in front of it for minutes before figuring out it was the huge button on top – in Anna’s defense though, Lindsey had did the same thing when it was her turn) – major fail on us…boo =(

We decided to be adventurous and we were super hungry, so we walked outside the perimeter of the hotel looking for food. We found a sign leading us to this gyro restaurant and proceeded to ask 2 young ladies chatting it up outside to seat us. But no, she spitted multiple Greek phrases at us with an very angry expression on her face, continuously said “NO NO NO,” bickered at her friend about us, and went inside the restaurant. ~sigh~ no food there…dampened our moods.

Next, we decided to forget the whole thing and go to the exciting Syntagma square via bus (because we’re cheap and exciting like that). So all the bus stops were really Greek to us (no pun intended). Anna spent the entire time waiting for the bus looking for something that resembled Syntagma…but became really annoyed that she couldn’t find a combination of “sigma” “gamma” “alpha” and “ma” ending the word. So, we decided to hop on one of the buses that were recommended to us. We had no idea where we were and asked two Asian looking ladies in front of us, who told us we had passed the square. So, we jumped out the bus and took the bus going in the opposite direction. We tried asking the bus driver to drop us at Syntagma, but got no response until he kicked us out at the last stop. We ended up at some marina, where we were so happy to find TGIF -- Yes, our first meal in Greece was at an American chain. Go figure.