Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday to some old fuddy duddy.

Day 11 - The return to Istanbul

Who the fark wakes up at 4:30 in the morning? UGH My phone being extremely low on battery and the power point was too far up a wall for me to charge my phone, we relied on SOME ELSE's phone to be the alarm. You would expect that when your alarm is loud is enough to wake up the building goes off, that person would get up and turn the alarm off. Especially since no one else knows where the phone is in the dark. But some people were able to sleep through the alarm whilst waking up the entire building. Freezing at 4:30 in the morning, we drag ourselves out of bed and grab our suitcases to check out. Guess what? The elevator is broken. So ontop of waking everyone up with an alarm that went on ringing for about 5 mins, we dragged our suitcases down the stairs whilst making a huge racket.

We go around the corner to look for a taxi to Syntagma square which is like the Martin Place of Sydney so we can catch the airport shuttle bus from there. Ok, I know I don't speak perfect Greek, but I can't have been that hard to understand!? After the 3rd Taxi refusing to drive us, we finally found a guy who understood what the hell we were talking about. We make it to the bus stop just in time to hop onto the bus and on our way to the airport.

Checking our luggage in, we decided that it was time for some coffee and food. We go to the Maccas at the airport and tried to order a Ham, Cheese and Tomato Crossiant without the ham. We asked the bitch at the counter whether she can just take the ham out she gives us a dirty look like we just asked her to flash us her tits. THAT BITCH! I hope you slip on a piece of ham on the floor and crack your head on a block of lard. But I guess it was a good thing since the bloody crossiant, which was about the size of a crumpet would've cost us $7.

Getting onto our flight, we pass out and fall asleep. Note to self: Never fall asleep during a plane landing. I swear I lost 3 years off my life when we bumped onto the runway. It felt like I was sleeping on a bunk bed and someone threw me off the bed onto the floor in the matter of 2 seconds. FFS don't you people know how to land a fuckin plane!? Then they make an announcement over the PA and said something something blah blah "after dessert". ?? WTF?

We flagged down a taxi to the hotel. After leaving the airport, we noticed that most of the roads have been barracaded by comps and all the traffic was getting diverted to a different area. We keep driving and we notice that the route we were going was also getting blocked off. I turned around and mouthed "OMG Its a bomb!" thinking that it was a joke. Now I actually kept a journal for the whole trip making notes of incidents that happen during the day. In the taxi, after circling the city and making verious detours for about 20mins I wrote in my journal:

"Police barracades EVERYWHER! Bomb?"

Someone turns and looks at what I was writing, nods and then laughs. THERE WAS A FREAKIN BOMB SCARE!? I quickly wrote the following note:




What type of sick person doesn't tell me that there is a bomb scare and leaves me practically peeing my pants worrying about my life? I show the note to the asshole who turns and laughs in my face. !?!?!?! Well after about another 5mins, we realise that it was actually a bloody marathon that caused all the road closures and not a bomb. Yet someone didn't even bother clarifying that with me even though I was shitting my pants and writing out my will in my head. Oh btw, we got trapped in the taxi for 1.5hrs whilst circling the city trying to find a way to the hotel.

We get to the hotel and check into our room. Not before this woman in the reception PULLED DOWN HER TOP AND FLASHED US HER BOOBS! UGh! I need a shower, for my eyes as well thank you very much. I hop into the shower and half way through the shower, theres a blackout. FFS! CAN'T YOU BLOODY PEOPLE LET ME SHOWER IN PEACE!? I managed to finish showering and get dressed in complete darkness without slipping and cracking my head open. I walk into the room only to almost fall through a hole in the floor! There was this massive indent in the middle of the room covered by carpet. If you stepped in that stop, the whole floor sags in! The whole place was falling down around us! None of the power points work so I couldn't charge my phone again.

After our "budget" holiday in Greece, we head to the nearest turkish restaurant and ordered two main meals per person. Yes we were being greedy but the whole meal cost about 50% of what we normally paid in Greece only we were getting twice the amount of food. Now this is the place where we met this freak of a waiter who would walk up to our table and move our plates around. Not that there was more food coming. He just wanted to move our plates for the sake of moving it. If he saw me not eating a particular dish at the very moment he looked over, he would come and move that dish closer to me and move everything else around on the table. Sometimes he'll just come and nudge my plate over by 2-3cms. !?!?!?! The restuarant we were at was right outside a train station. All of a sudden there was a really loud announcement over the PA. Since it was in Turkish, I asked my friend what they were saying. Without missing a beat, he turns to me and says:

"The train's coming. We have to move the restaurant"

And hence the famous quote was born. After scoffing the food and laughing at the same time, we ask for our bill and paid the waiter. He walks back to us with the change and puts it down on our table. My friend turns around and says "Thank you". The waiter picked up the change and walked off. What the!?

I give up. You people are nuts. I'm heading to the asia side of Turkey for a bit of normality. We jump onto the ferry, and I mean JUMP because there is no ramp from the shore to the ferry, we head towards the asia side. The minute we get off the ferry, this guy walked up to us and dragged us up 3 flights of stairs in this cheesey looking building. Of course I don't get an explaination as to what is happening from some people and just assumed I was walking into a brothel. We get up to level 3 and it's a bloody VCD/DVD/CD galore! *cough* I browse whilst my friend gets dragged into a back room where I thought the prostitutes were. When he gets out, we quickly run from the building which was when he revealed to me that he scored some free porno DVD. I'm disgusted that he didn't get any for me. After exploring the asian side, we head to the hotel and dump all our things to go to Profilo.

We satisfy our stomaches with mass amounts of Kofte and do some CD shopping before I head to the Internet Cafe whilst someone goes and gets a haircut. I sit in the net cafe for over an hour inhaling second hand smoke and almost die before my friend rocked up to go back to the hotel. We decide to have a nap before heading out clubbing. The only problem was we were so buggered from our early morning start that when I managed to wake up later that night and get changed, my friend opens a lazy eye and says "I'm too tired" and then goes back to sleep. WTF? You ass! You owe me a clubbing session!! The least you could've done was told me before I got up and got ready to go out! I even had my shoes on!

Day 10 - Delphi

Who the hell wakes up at 6am when they slept at 2 am with a hangover!? What the hell were we thinking? Ugh......with our mouths tasting like an ashtray, we drag our corpses out of bed and down to the breakfast room. We managed to scoff down breakfast whilst avoiding the mouldy bread in about 15mins. My friend also managed to shove about 15 sausages into his mouth in one go. Lets just say I don't want any sausages for awhile......Again, we managed to swipe a number of sandwiches and cakes which we hid in a few vomit bags we swiped from the plane to snack on during the day.

We grab all our luggage and get our arses down to reception to checkout at 7am so we can catch the 7:30am bus to Delphi. We asked the reception woman (The blind bitch who insisted that she doesn't have anything for us from the tour company) if she can keep our luggage for us until about 8pm. She told me to just leave it in the lobby. WTF? I chucked a tantrum saying that we needed it locked up and secured and not lying in a lobby. She went and charged us like $5 to have our luggage "locked up". Which turns out to be her calling the concierge to drag the suitcase and dump it in the staircase. @!?#$@#?$ And the damn staircase was out of sight from the reception as well! It would've been more secure to sit in the lobby! GRRRRRR Not wanting to waste time, we run out to try and catch a cab to Terminal B which is where the bus to Delphi leaves at. I asked the reception guy the night before how to get to Terminal B and he told me it's a 10min cab ride to Terminal B..........thats what he thinks........

We found a taxi stand and got into the first cab where the guy said he didn't speak english, so we got off and ran to the next taxi only for the guy to say he didn't know where Terminal B was. This was when my friend ran to the cab behind us and yanked the door open only to find a chick sitting in the back seat. I think she thought we were going to rob her or something. We then ran to cab #4 where the guy spoke english. We get into the cab and told him to go to Terminal B. It seemed like the understood what we were saying. He starts driving only to call a guy and ask him where Terminal B was. This was when he told us that its atleast a 1/2hr ride to Terminal B and that we won't make the bus. We paid our $8 and got out of the cab. WE MISSED OUR BUS TO DELPHI!!! ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

We sat down at the nearest cafe to get some caffiene into us whilst we decide what to do. We pull out a book and made a group decision to go to Sounion. The history of the place is that the son goes off to fight a monster and he told his dad that if he wins, he will sail back to the island with white sails. Only the stupid moron forgot he told his dad, the king, and sailed back with black sails. Thinking his son died in battle, the guy throws himself off the cliff and kills himself. Talk about getting screwed. I bet the son did it on purpose just so he can get the throne! The scheming bastard! Yep.....definetly a place we want to go to! It sounds like a H.I storyline!! aheaheAE We catch a train to the bus station (And no its not Terminal B) only to realise that everyone really needed to pee. BAD. So we snuck into a musuem by avoiding the security for our peeing session before we all jumped onto the bus. We popped a few motion sickness tablets and passed out for the whole trip. By the the we woke up, we were at Sounion. The view there was awesome! I think I even managed to get tan! We did some filming, lots of photos and numerous suicide and homicide attempts by trying to shove someone off the cliff. Too bad I failed. :T Next time maybe.

We catch the bus back to Athens for a bit of shopping where we spent more money on Oil Paintings! How many of these things can you buy FFS!? *SigH* that another $30 down the drain.....

After last night's "Pita" incident, we felt safer going to a little corner store and getting a proper pita from there. It was good pita! So good that we decided to call Cherry and get our friend to be "Pierre" and tell her that she has a good "behind". I think she was flattered? Who the hell gets flattered by a complete stranger calling their mobile talking about their ass!? What type of sick person doesn't hang up and has a conversation with a freak!? FFS!

After a long day, we drag our asses back to the hotel only to grab all our bags and move it to the backpackers hostel. You see.....we've been staying at hotels for the entire trips. Fresh linen and towels everyday, our beds are remade, breakfast is served and we get new soap everyday. Well they don't have any of that in the hostel! And we didn't have towels! Or soap! >_< We ended up wiping ourselves dry with old dirty clothes which kinda defeated the whole purpose of the shower in the first place.....

Since our flight to Istanbul tomorrow is at 8am......that means we had to get up at 4:30am the next day.....we decided to screw the big night out and have a quiet one. Luckily it was quite an incident free day. Except us missing the bus to Delphi. Oh and us eating more Pitas for dinner....UGH. NO MORE PITA!

Day 9 - Revisiting Athens

After an exhausting night, we managed to drag our lazy asses out of bed. Well most of us did anyway. For those who were still fast asleep and severely allergic to the sun before 11am, we managed to go to the buffet breakfast and steal a nice big breakfast which features bacon and eggs, sandwiches, fruit, cake and mouldy bread. Yes. Mouldy bread. As I was trying to wrap the food up in napkins, I noticed the bread had a strange green tinge to it. Ahhhhhh the joys of staying at a top of the range hotel and eating food that people wipe their arse with. Although I must admit their cake was awesome. After wrapping all the food, egg and all, in my jacket, we managed to sneak back into the room before the oil from the bacon soaked into my jacket. ]

First stop for the day was the Australian Embassey. I needed to make sure I find the place before I get arrested for smashing someones face into a pita roll. I mean......IF I smash their face into a pita roll.......anyyyyyyyway......despite getting lost, we finally found the damn place so some people can vote. I should've voted a second time. Not like they check my damn ID anyway. I should've voted as Cherry and get her arrested. Making out of there without setting off the alarm, we made our way to our friend's backpacker place so he can pick up a few items from the bag they were supposed to deliver there. When we arrived, the woman said that they did infact deliver a bag, but because my friend didn't stay there last night, and he didn't call, they sent the bag back to the airport. Oh FFS. We quickly call the airlines and after much arse sucking, they agreed to deliver it again. This time we made sure the woman knows to keep the bag. You know.....if we didn't get our friend to stay with us.....he wouldn't have lost his bag a second time! God we try to be nice and we screw people over anyway!

Sorting that mess out, we head to the Olympic Stadium. Yes! Its been four year!! Catching a train there, we noticed that the place was a tad quiet. The reason? We were there after the Olympics and they had closed the entire stadium and barracaded the place to do renovations! I mean for crying out loud! Who the hell goes to the Olympic Stadium AFTER the olympics besides us? We stood outside the damn place, got a few photos and left.

Despite the LUSCIOUS breakfast of mouldy bread, we were starving. We went to the next train station and found ourselves a restaurant and managed to scoff down the food before the local dogs attacked us for it. After spending most of the day out, we realised that it would be a good idea to go to the tour company that screwed us over and chuck a fit. We ran back to the hotel only for my friend to "lose" his camera. We start having a panic attack as to where the camera can be, when did we last see it, whether it was stolen and who the hell dares mess with us. This was when I asked the question of "Was the camera on the front of your belt or the back of your belt?". "belt...?" Yes.....the camera was securely attached to my friends belt. We all had a heart attack for nothing! After a group hug, we ran back to our room, grabbed the tour company's address and stormed off seeking bloody revenge.

Storming into the office, we're faced by a couple of chicks. The rage and fury within my friend quickly fizzled to a warm pile of fresh shiet. So much for our tantrum. We got a letter off them and then THANKED them before walking out. I'm disgusted with myself! FFS!! WHERE IS MY RAGE!? Mykono screwed me over.......I've been too relaxed for too long. We decide to go back to the hotel right after my friend managed to finger the elevator, spend $80 on CDs and sculled a hot coffee all at the same time.

Needing a bit of excitement after the tantrum that didn't happen, we got our friend to call Cherry and heap on a bit of abuse before we headed out for some exploring and dinner. We managed to get targeted by a bunch of crazy guys with backpacks forcing us to buy CDs off them. And you know what type of CDs I'm talking about. The obvious person will ignore them and walk away, yet some lunatic within our group decided to entertain the guy and started flipping through the CDs. The guy wouldn't stop shoving CDs into my friend's hands! He ended up holding like 20CDs and the guy kept shoving it in his face! In the end, after much negotiation and yelling and screaming, we threw $70 in his face and bolted.

After that ordeal, it was dinner time. There wasn't much else besides having pita rolls. We ordered a pita each and sat down. After about 30mins, we each got a plate where the pita was rolled out flat on it. Being as hungry as we were, we scoffed the food down and asked for the bill. Here is the fun bit. The pitas are $1.90 each. We estimated that it will cost us less then $10. The bill comes and it was under $10. We stupidly thought that we would wait around for the change. The waiter comes to take the money, has a look at what we had and said the bill was wrong, walked back inside and came out with a bill for $25. Like WTF? He said we didn't order a pita when we ordered a pita. We argued for awhile and in the end we just paid the $25 and decided to hit the bottle instead.

Following some directions, we found the Lavabore night club which was supposedly the most happening night club in Athens. The place where all tourist goes. I think those were the same words they used when we first heard of the Skandinavian bar. We walk in and there was a total of 10 people. Including us. FARKKKKKKKKKKK @#%$#&^$@&$* *SigH* we decided to have 1 drink since it was happy hour between 10pm-11:30pm and we'll go buy our own alcohol and drink in the hotel later. After we got our drinks, we sat down waiting for 5mins to pass so we can leave the damn place. The next thing you know, it was a damn sausage parade! About 50 guys walked into the club within the space of 5 minutes. Like WTF? After my whole experience on Mykonos, this was not a good thing. Luckily after about 10mins and 100 people later, we started to see chicks filter in. This was absolutely insane! It was like the entire Athens young population decided to walk in at the same time.

Being Happy Hour with lots of guys and girls to perve on, we hit the bar again. It was 10:45pm. The bartender told us happy hour was over. We argue and he finally gives the drinks to us at happy hour prices. We decided to play drinking games which meant that the drinks were going down fast. After visit to the bar at 11pm ended up with an argument with the bartender who insisted happy hour is over despite the fact that his watch and our watch says 11pm! We even shoved their brochure that advertises the happy hour in their face! FFS! We got our drinks for cheap again since I think he was outnumbered and we had a murderous look in our eyes. As we got closer to 11:15, we thought we better get more drinks incase we argue with the bartender again. We were going to double up on each drink. But guess what? He claims its 11:30 already! This time, we had a pretty full on argument which ended up with him talking to the manager who was fed up with us and told us that this was the last round of happy hour drinks we were getting! For fucks sake! We can't even go out to drink without getting into a fight with some moron who can't tell the time or who can tell the time but were trying to rip us off!

After about 5 Gin and tonics that was double the size of what they serve in Sydney, I had more than my fair share of alcohol, we all headed back to the hotel dancing and screaming. This time we were all too drunk to sneak anyone into the hotel and wayyy too gone to try and create a distraction. We just paraded right into the lobby, past the old guy and into the lift. This is when I drop to the floor so I could squat like the asian that I am. We get to our floor and SOME ASSHOLE runs out of the elevator and tries to slam the door in my face! This elevator didn't have the sliding doors. They had the old style swinging doors which you have to manually open to get into the lift. So here I was, on my knees trying to keep the door open so I can get off with a moron standing on the other side of the door pushing with all his strength to close the door so I get sent back down to the lobby. After much screaming and laughing and death threats, I managed to CRAWL out of the elevator on my hands and knees and crawl my way into the hotel room.

I think we all passed out within 5 minutes.