Day 1: The Journey begins
Trip Start
May 18, 2007
1
12
Trip End
May 31, 2007
Delhi - Santorini,
Greece
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Work is manic - when is it not? - and my last week is spent rushing around from place to place, batting out emails at a tremendous pace. We're not finished packing, thanks to hubby dear getting out the suitcases only on Sunday evening and having to work the entire weekend while our kids' help took Sunday off.( a mother with 2 young kids, husband working at weekend and packing to do needs about 3 pairs of eyes - ideally out on stalks; 6 arms and eight legs to be able to cope! I know - I need to become an octopus!) I try to squeeze in half hourly packing slots thru the week which is made more difficult by having to work late to complete stuff before we leave.
Packing is disrupted by the inlaws' visiting in the middle of the week. Get away from work thursday night at 7:30 pm - our flight leaves at 2:30 am so I suppose I have the rest of the night/ morning to pack...Packing creates its usual stress between husband and me - him helpfully shoving things in higgledy-piggledy and dumping heavy shoes on top of newly ironed clothes while I run around tearing my hair out. Eventually, though, we do finish and even have time for a last shower at home and a two hour nap.
Our daughter sleeps thru the airport like a champ while our son is overexcited and stays up till the flight takes off. This is when we realise that he has developed travel sickness and struggle to cope with his nausea with no change of clothes handy. Tip to parents - always, always pack a change of clothes for the kids and a Tshirt at least for yourself, unless you don't mind arriving with chocolate/ juice/ milk stains all over you!
Arrive at Istanbul with five hours to spare before our next flight. Husband and I argue about whether we should check into the airport hotel ( at a bloody 200 euros!) for a few hours or head for the city. I win - we're downtown and in a kids' mall in 20 minutes - not exactly sight seeing, but better than the airport. We like the look of the city with its red-tiled roofs and the low skyline and the fantastically shaped mosques which look like they could be out of the Arabian nights. We're also amazed by the 'young turks' we see at the mall - the women are incredible - most of them are very good looking and they are really well put together in an elegant yet casual way which seems to indicate that they haven't tried too hard, that it's part of their DNA. We hang out till about 2 pm and then it's back to the airport, which we reach way too early. We're incredibly sleepy too from being up most of the night and try to curl up on the decorative but unkind to the spine wooden benches dotting Ataturk Havalimani.
We begin to discover some things about our 11 month old daughter that we'd possibly not had the time to discover so far - she's a flirt! Her favourite pastime is making goo-goo eyes at passers by and if they aren't paying attention, she makes sure she stops traffic with a loud gurgle or a shrill scream and then onto the goo-goo eyes thing. And it works a treat - hardly anyone passes by her pram without a smile or a kiss for her. In the process I become friendly with some over-55 (at least)-ish Indian ladies who seem to be traveling in a group. They wonder at how brave (or foolhardy) we are to travel with such young kids. I tell them there's too many places in the world and we can't wait for the kids to grow up before setting off or we'd never finish. They reveal that they're a senior citizen's group from India - over 80 of them - who've just spent 10 days in Turkey, between Izmir and some other locations and are off to Athens for another five days. Wow!
We land after a short flight at Athens and meet up with my sister and her family. They've had an eventful 2 day journey to reach here, with 4 hops and plagued by delayed flights all through. We check in for the flight to Santorini to be brought up short by EU baggage regulations - we had bought a bottle of turkish Raki as a gift from istanbul duty free for my brother-in-law, whose birthday it is in 2 days, and it turns out that the quantity of liquid is over that allowed in the EU (but we bought it in duty free, isn't that allowed, doesn;t that count? no it doesn't.), and our toothpaste tube is 175 grams, not 100, so we have to check in one of our carry on bags. We then get fleeced by Aegean Air who then decide to count our daughter's pram as part of check-in baggage and claim we're over the allowed weight! Shouldn't there be some sort of tourist baggage allowance for international travelers who then do domestic travel within the country? Given that their excess baggage usually means they've been spending their shopping dollars in the country?
Anyhow, the tiny little aircraft lands at Sunny Santorini - at last - and we step out to an icy shower of rain and ferocious gusts of wind. We get two taxis (lots of luggage) and head through the pitch black night through winding roads into the back of beyond - our getaway near Perissa beach. The roads are slick and the countryside roars past invisibly. The landlord of our getaway has mistakenly given us a maisonette with a steep and unrailed flight of stairs instead of the apartment we had asked for - not a good move with 3 kids in various stages of crawl (my daughter), lurch (my nephew) and belief that he's superman (my son).We sort this out with the landlord and he's nice enough to admit his mistake and give us two studio apartments for the same price. They're basic but clean and there's a lovely pool at the complex, if we can ever use it given the weather. Too tired to even think about dinner, too hungry despite the (horrible) airplane food, we munch on some biscuits and namkeens we carried with us and quiz Nikitas about the weather.
It's been pouring like this for two days, apparently and no one knows when it will end! (Well, we do now, but that's another story!). Off to bed now. To sleep, perchance to snore...
