Dear Athens, learn to drive.

Recently, we went to Athens for a few days, and chose to, for something different, do one of those 24hour hop-on/off tours. Not the red bus, our choice was about €3 each cheaper. High stakes !


It's a locally-run company, instead of the global conglomeration that runs the franchises for the Big Red Bus companies. So we thought this would be a good idea. Maybe, maybe not.

On the first afternoon, due to an unannounced protest out the front of Syntagma, we had to walk away from the signposted stop, because the roads were closed off. Once we were able to get on our bus, he had to turn around, which was great, until a random woman decided to try and cut through the inside of the bus to also turn around, then started havin a big bitchfight at the driver, accusing him of hitting her car and stuff. He didn't. We observed it all from the upper deck. Including the hilarity that followed.

As the queues formed up behind us, the other driver refused to let the bus move on. Eventually, he was able to. Only to have her hound the bus for several blocks, eventually getting in front of him in the far left lane, and stopping, thus causing the bus to also stop. So now, we have traffic banked all the way back on the other side of the road, and now banking up on this side too. All because of perceived yellow mark on the front right fender that wasn't there.

Eventually, police showed up, and another yellow bus showed up to offload us all.

It was a highly entertaining way to spend an hour of the afternoon. I'll talk about the next day, in another post.