Taxi, Boat, Train, Bus, and 3 Airplanes

Wow... that was a crazy 5 hours. I called north west airlines at 1:30 pm. By 2 pm they told me that basically I had to leave the next day out of Athens or have to wait till at least Tuesday to come home which just wouldn’t really cut it. So, I said lets do it. I said yes to the flight without even knowing for sure I could find a way to get to Athens by 10 in the morning to make my flight… in hind sight that probably wasn’t a great decision but it worked out. I went directly from the restaurant I was using the internet at, to the ferry ticket office with every possible finger, toe, eye, piece of skin I could cross crossed praying that there was a ferry tonight I could get on so I could make it to Athens in the morning. Sure enough, there was a ferry leaving Kos at 8 pm that would arrive in Athens at around 6 AM which would give me plenty of time to make it to the airport from the port in time to catch my flight. Every thing has just kept falling in to place thus far. So by this time it was 2:30 and I needed to be at the port at 7:30 to catch my ferry. I had 5 hours to pack; inform work, my roommate, and all of the other great friends I’ve made since I’ve been here in Greece that I was leaving; I needed to work something out for my roommate so she didn’t get hung out to dry by my very money hungry Greek landlords which didn’t really work too well, I felt really bad they said since I was leaving and the agreements were all made through me that she had a week to find a new place to live, which didn’t make any sense to me since they were getting the same amount of money from her as they would me, but I think they were just looking for a way to get the room back so they could make more money off of tourists rather than rent it to us. Oh well… I tried my best but it was just another situation where for Greeks making money takes all precedence over actually caring about a person.  My parting with work wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be they were very understanding but I still felt like a real jerk for not being able to give them any notice about it. But they still were like come back next year! I told them I’d definitely keep it as an option but I didn’t want to do it unless I had a friend come with me, so, applications are still open for next summer and will be evaluated at a later date haha. Saying goodbye was hard and it was sad because I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to half of my good friends, I didn’t get to have a “last night out” or anything like that it was just like hey… I’m leaving in an hour and have to go home, take a shower, and finish packing. So… good luck and have fun and you should come visit me!  And now I’m here in the middle of the Agean Sea again on my ferry to Athens writing this blog. I’m not going to make this a final thought blog or anything of the sorts because, especially now, I’m in such a daze pretty much by what has all happened in the 5 hours that I can’t really be asked to sit and reflect. All I know right now is I am on my way home to go see my nephew and its totally worth doing at this point. We better have some fun together me and Samuel seeing how just in order to see him I am giving up half my trip to Greece, by the end of this trip home will have taken a taxi, a ferry, a bus, a train, another bus, and 3 airplanes totaling over 30 hours of travel.  But the funny thing is I haven’t doubted it for a second. I know I’ve made the right decision to come home. So to all of my friends everywhere I’ll be home Thursday night, I have a week with my nephew then he leaves for Alaska, after that its time for me to catch up with the ones I care so dearly about. Which means I’m gonna need some cell phone numbers and a replacement phone pronto!

 

Much love guys, This is going to be my last post while actually in Greece. I’m sure there will be a couple reflection posts afterwards

 

Stayin classy on my 30 hour trip home,

 

Evan 

Nephew

WOW… do I have a lot to talk about.

 

First things first, I am now a very proud Uncle of by far the coolest nephew ever.

 

My Sister (Christa) and her Husband (Gastin) have adopted a little boy from Liberia. They got him from a family that had originally adopted him from there, but he just wasn’t fitting in with the family that had originally taken him in. So, my sister and her husband who had known they wanted to adopt since before they were married went and met him and fell in love with the little guy. His name is Samuel and he turns 6 in September. They officially got to take him home on the 21^st of July, which also happened to be their 2 year anniversary. It’s a pretty sweet story.

 

But now here comes the tricky part. They are moving to Alaska on July 30^th with Samuel and have no plans of coming home for Christmas or anything as of yet. So I’m in a pickle, if I don’t change my flight and come home in like a few days so I can spend a few days being the coolest uncle in the world so its not a whole year until I meet him. I’m writing this blog while I sit and wait for the customer service for northwest airlines to open up in 2 hours, so I’m not sure what is going to happen as of yet.

 

I know this for sure though, if I can come home I will. And its not at all because I don’t like it here or that I want to leave this place. But if being here this past month has taught me anything its that even if you can make friends quickly like I can it’s a totally different ball game to have people that you really are close to and would do anything for. Obviously my family and new nephew fit into that category as well as many of my friends back home in Ohio, Florida, and around the world from CAJ.  I have made great friends here but none that I share a bond with like I do people like Yosh Morita, Drew Lord or Stephanie Devine to just name a few from different areas. I came into this trip knowing that I wanted to get an experience of a life time, and I can say that even now with my trip only half way over that I truly have gotten that experience, but what I didn’t expect was to learn how important it is to be able to share those life changing experiences with people that you truly love. I have gotten plenty of awesome experiences up till now, but now that I’m getting more settled in to life here its beginning to be just more of the same experiences rather than new ones. 

 

I think the hardest thing about leaving early is going to be explaining to the Captain and crew my situation and why I need to leave in their broken English. I’m really worried they won’t understand and will think I’ve basically played them by telling them I was going to be here till the end of August since I got here now all of the sudden I’m up and leaving. I really need to find a way to get it through to them that this wasn’t in mine or anyone’s plans its just kind of happened, I’m thrilled it has, but it wasn’t what I had planned on. Also, I’m going to leaving my roommate hanging, with no roommate and rent due in like 3 days. I’ve saved up enough to give her a little bit of my extra money to help buy her time, but its not gonna help much.

 

If I do come home early its not going to be easy, I’m going to have to find a new job quickly, and its going to be even more difficult because I really want to find a job where I can gain some office experience rather than just a laborer job. And with this economy, that’s not going to be easy. But I feel like at this point if my flight change goes smoothly I’m making the right decision, so in the end it’ll work out I’m sure of it. 

My least favorite part about Greek Culture

So the worst part of my job is not getting told things ever until the last minute, like today for instance, I came to work in the morning having booked 15 people for the trip knowing that we usually have a tour group of about 50 people on Fridays so that meant there was plenty of space on a boat that holds around 100. Once I got to work, I was told oh yeah, you need to take all the people you booked for today for the boat to a different smaller inferior boat cause we got another tour group and we have 105 people on the boat for the tour groups. So I get to be the bearer of bad news to these people, who are all on vacation and have their days all pretty much planned out, and tell them basically that even though yesterday or the day before, I talked to them and told them we never have more than about 70 people on the boat and not to expect much more than even 60 people on the boat for their trip. That not only would the boat now have more than 100 people on the boat, but the reservation that they made, didn’t even really matter because my bosses booked the boat like they didn’t even exist.  So I have to try to deal with them calling me a liar and yelling at me for ruining their day while still trying to convince them to take this different crappier boat. It makes for a wonderful morning.

 

This is just one example of this, stuff like this happens at least once a week here. I mean as much as I like the guys that I work with, the Greeks in general way of doing business is absolutely ruthless they could care less about pleasing people or customer service if there is a bit of money to be made. They don’t care that they are ruining these peoples days, its all about their money. I mean I understand its business, but it’s the tourist industry as well which is all service, you would think that they would at least have some heart or compassion for the people who they are inconveniencing. But then again they don’t really care because they have their friendly American boy to smooth things over with the people. ARGH. Today I had a lady who was furious with me be like “You know, you’ve been here too long. We knew that Greeks and Turks are all liars and will say what ever you want to hear to make a dollar but we didn’t expect to get it from you, an American.” All I can say is the truth that I never get told anything and that if I had know that I would have been honest with them and told them that the boat was full. But it doesn’t usually help.

 

Oh well, I can just add it to my experiences here. I’m sure its helping me to build skills in customer service and dealing with upset people from all around the world. So I guess some good might come from this experience even though it sucks real bad when it happens. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it here, I like the guys I work for, I just hate the way that business is so heartless here. There is just no sense of integrity with anyone here in business.

 

I’ll keep stayin classy and putting on the charm for the angry tourists if you do!

 

Evan

 

4th and beyond update.

Wow…. Where do I start. I feel like I’ve posted consistently, but I havn’t been able to actually tell you all what I’ve been up to since like before the 4^th of July. So lets start there,

 

The 4^th for me was initially a very big disappointment. I had my whole day planned out, I was gonna go on the boat and grill steaks, have a good time. But I got to work in the morning, and was informed the boat wasn’t going out so not only would there be no grilling, but I would need to work from 9-2 then from 5:30-Midnight. Needless to say I was thrilled… but I didn’t have much choice, put off the steaks for another day and went on with the day. Worked the afternoon went home, slept a bit, then went back to work at 5:30 and worked… but around like 8:00 I started having people coming up to me and being like hey… we are here for the party cruise tonight. I turned people away saying I knew nothing of any party cruise on the boat tonight since no one had told me about it. More and more people started showing up saying that they were there for the cruise, none of my bosses were there either, so I figured people must have been told the wrong place. Finally at 9 2 girls from the GOGO travel agency came with a large group of people and were like why were you turning people away from your party cruise? My boss who had just arrived comes running off the boat and was like oh hey guys! I forgot about the cruise, come on aboard! He forgot about scheduling this cruise with the travel agency which meant he forgot to tell me about it as well. Within 15 min we had the boat full of gorgeous Dutch girls with a few guys mixed in. I came with the boat, my boss let me just act like one of the tourists and have a good time. So it ended up being a fairly good end to the 4^th just getting to have some fun instead of work all night. Then randomly the next night there were fireworks for no in particular reason but I was happy to see them!

 

Alright… what has happened since then… um, I met 2 Finnish girls here who were on vacation, hung out with them the past week they were pretty cool. I think they are the only two girls from Finland who aren’t blond haha.  They got me an awesome spiderman watch as a parting gift because I always keep my alarm clock with me for my way to tell time because since my blackberry got stolen and I forgot my watch in the states its all I’ve got and I’m too cheap to buy a real watch. Its pretty sweet… even though the watch doesn’t fit around my wrist… haha.

 

Oh! I have a roommate now! Lauren from England. (to all of you interested, she is not a love interest in any sense of the word. Just a good friend I’ve made here that needed a place to stay, and I needed a roommate so its just kinda worked out that she should move in with me) She is pretty cool though, really laid back but still girly haha. So needless to say the one closet in the apartment has been taken over by her, oh well. I’m enjoying it though its nice to have someone to talk to and not be alone all the time. As you all know I’m not the type of person that is really like oh I need my alone time, I’m definitely an extrovert.

 

The pictures above are of Lauren and I and some from the Boat trip that I sell.

 

That’s about all I’ve got for now, I pay my rent in 8 days and I’ve already got enough money saved up for it, so I think I might start trying to save so I can travel a bit the last couple weeks of my stay here in Europe.

 

Stay Classy as always!

 

Evan 

quickly a small world moment.

How about this for international/small world experience. I just met a Brazilian guy who lived most of his life in England, who works for Jonathan Cook?  And has been to Japan, not only has he been to Japan but he went to visit his buddy in Utsunomia which is 2 hours north of Tokyo and also happens to be where my parents live?! We talked for a bit and he talked about like these specific restaurants that I knew of in the city my parents live and talked about how good they were and everything! How incredibly small is this world!? He went to a city that really isn’t on the tourist map in Japan and we talked about specifics of a city that I am very familiar with. This all with a Brazilian guy who mostly grew up in England, and oh… don’t forget that this conversation took place in Kos, Greece!? Whaaaaaat?! I love small world findings! 

Questions from Mom

I recieved an email from my mom asking... mom questions... but i figured the answers of her questions might be of interest to the rest of you so I'm answering her email via blog for you all to read as well! 

 

I have some questions that I thought of that may be interesting to touch on while you are in Greece...

 

What is the perception of Americans, vs, Austrailian, English, etc.? Most everyone I talk to that isn't from an english speaking country thinks I'm English so one of my favorite past times is having people guess where I'm from. But there is no beef or anything between the 3 english speaking countries, every one is really cool with each other especially since we all share a language. 

 

What kinds of food do folks usually eat...I know that the roast and "peanuts" really sounded good! What kinds of food do YOU eat on a normal day--got any recipes you'll be "bringing back"?

Just because I have 2 pots and 1 burner I'm kind of limited on what I can cook at home. I make a lot of pasta with canned sauce just because its really cheap and easy. I also make like potato's ext. nothing extravagant here just because I don't want to buy all of the ingredients and more importantly spices. But I'm surviving here just fine! If I ever want like a snack they have gyros which can be used for a meal for only like 2 bucks so those are my fail safe option for food. 

Is the weather ALWAYS sunny?  That seems to be all I see--brilliant blue skies...do you get storms?

I haven't seen a cloud in 4 days and that is no joke. I think of the almost 3 weeks I've been on this island now I've seen maybe 6 days with clouds and never had a drop of rain. Its consistently about 90 with a slight brees coming off of the water. 

Do you have bothersome mosquitoes or bugs like cockroaches or hoppers? 

Mosquitoes are bad here but they have these things you plug into your outlets and put this little pad thing inside of it and no mosquito comes near it. It's pretty awesome! No other bugs or anything though. Some roaches on the boat every once in a while, but I mean... its a boat... 

 

Has the economy "taken a hit" there too?

The Economy here has taken a big hit here! Its pretty bad actually, everyone has been telling me stories of the amounts of people here like 3 years ago and how this seems like a ghost town comparably, I personally feel like there are LOTS of tourists here but evidently in comparison to before its not much at all. I guess its since there are so many British tourists that used to come and since their economy has been hit almost as bad as Americas its kept lots of people home this summer. 

 

Do you have a good place to "wash your clothes"  Ok that's a "mom's question"  just wondering if they hang stuff like here to dry or use dryers?  Do they have large washing machines or small ones like here, 

Its pretty sweet actually... I pay like 6 bucks and take all of my laundry to this place in a bag, then come back the next day its all clean and folded and ready to roll. :) 

and Oh...do Greek women shave? :-) Someone here asked me that and I didn't know the answer...I'm guessing you do!

I think that the whole rest of the world has finally gotten on the band wagon with shaving to be honest, I haven't seen one single lady with hairy pits same goes for the legs. 

 

Now that you've lived for a bit on 30 euros a day...will you be able to save enough to pay for your next months rent?

Yep! and I won't be paying 300 next month I'm either making my land lord let me get a roommate for 300 total or moving to a place where its 250 a month for 2 people and that includes AC. So I shouldn't be paying more than 150 for an apartment next month.

 

Do you think you will have enough money to stay until Sept....how long is the tourist season?

Absolutely, I haven't touched my ATM cards since I've started my job, and don't intend to until I fly home on September 9th. Unless I decide to travel a little bit at the end of my trip, which is a possibility, but you better believe I'm going to be saving up to do that so no worries. 

 

Is there anything from here (Japan) that you think would make for a nice "thank you" gift that we could send in appreciation for your boss and "crew"? (not real expensive!)

I think the crew is alright, its still a job with people telling you what to do and having to be on time ext. I've never given a boss a gift before for letting me work for him... And greeks aren't really sentimental... at all actually. 

 

Ok that's all for now...wouldn't mind another skpe session...

 

Oh, and too bad the Americans couldn't pull off the win in the Ferderation Cup but it was still a good ride!

There ya go guys, I'll write another blog hopefully today or tomorrow bout the fourth and what I've been doing since, I just needed to get this out before my Mother shoots me! 

Stay classy! 

Evan

Job offer for next year.

Alrighty, Things are getting better daily here not that it was bad before, but its just getting easier daily. The people I’ve met are turning into true friendships, both with the Greek crew I work with and the other foreign workers I have met out and about. I can’t wait to see how good of friends I’ll have by the end of the summer here and how hooked up I’ll be for a Europe trip in the future! Haha.

 

So yesterday I found out some interesting information, the guy who I thought was the first mate Manoly who is also my favorite member of the crew… is actually the owner of the boat as well as the owner of the boat that we partner with. He really has taken a liking to me as well which is quite nice for job security here haha. Yesterday he told me he thought of all of the people selling tickets on the port he thought I was doing the best job, and Greeks aren’t really the type of people to just throw out compliments so I knew he meant it which was really cool. Then he asked me how long I’d be here on the island for and when I told him through the end of August he got excited then said he wanted me to come back and work next year! AND OFFERED TO PAY FOR MY TRIP HERE NEXT SUMMER IF I COME BACK TO WORK AND PAY ME MORE!  Needless to say that has sparked my interest greatly in returning for next summer!

 

But here is some stuff I need to figure out before I commit to anything, I know I need to get an internship eventually if I want to really land a decent job after college, but I could perhaps do that in Columbus while I go to school, or really since I’m not in any huge rush to finish school, I could take a quarter off to go for an internship else where during the school year then work back here next summer. My other dillema is that there is so much of the world I want to see and there are so many summer jobs available that I could go to a different country and work there and experience a new culture different from this one. I guess it would all kind of depend on money, like if I could come here and actually make money that I could save for later instead of just enough to survive, especially getting paid in Euros (I know that next summer is a long way away and the currencies could be completely different, but I’ll cross that bridge when it comes.) I mean I get paid 30 euros a day now and that’s not commissioned or anything, what I’d probably work on doing is switching to a commission based salary where I get a base pay of like 20 euros a day then 2 euros per person I book for the trips. Then say I can book an average of like 12 people a day that would be 44 euros a day I’d be able to get a cheaper apartment than the one I’m living in now hopefully a roommate as well so it would be less than 200 euros a month for an apartment then being quite generous say I spend an average of 20 euros a day on food and drink. I’ve still got almost 20 Euros a day to save. So if I could save 20 euros a day for lets say 70 days of work for the summer I’d save 1400 euros which would be right around 2000 US dollars if the exchange rate is around the same as it is now.

 

But even so, if I decide to do this again, I don’t think I’d do it alone again, as easy as it is to make friends and meet people and everything here, it would just be better to have like a solid buddy with me for this trip. So I guess that means I’m taking applications for next summer! Haha!