departing Athens

(continued from 6/9/08) The joke in Athens, as in so many place that secretly want to claim this distinction, is that everything comes in months behind schedule. But at 6 AM that day as I pulled up to Eleftherios Venizelos in my very expensive Athens taxi, there seemed to be activity all about. Maybe my flight actually would take off from the new airport.

The first thing I noticed inside were signs announcing the airport was a no smoking space. Athenians are famous for smoking anywhere and everywhere. I heard stories about people smoking in hospitals. An orderly, told that he shouldn’t be smoking inside the building replied with “Oh, I work here,” as if that was all it took to explain his lit cigarette. Athenians cannot not smoke and they were entirely flummoxed by the new no-smoking rule. Anticipating the flummoxedness, airport authorities had indicated smoking areas where it was legal to smoke. Where could you smoke? In restaurants. Yes, the first places to be made non-smoking in America were the last places you could smoke in Greece. So as I was buying and trying to eat a pastry that morning I was surrounded by puffing airport mechanics, flight attendants, airport cleaning staff, counter attendants, police, even people who worked in other airport stores, all standing just inside the white line on the tiled floor that indicated, like Les Nessman’s office on WKRP in Cincinnati, the imaginary boundaries of the restaurant. It was crowded

I lost count of the number of moving sidewalks I rode on the journey from the check-in line to my gate, but I seemed to be going directly to my stopover point in Munich. The airport was the psychic and physical opposite of the quaint old airport nestled at the bottom of Athens’ reach. I collapsed at my gate, raw with morning exhaustion, having arrived before sunrise, nibbling my pastry in an actual non-smoking area.


Athens International Airport, in Spata, was now large enough to accommodate the millions of visitors Greece was anticipating at the Olympic games. The airport’s website announces that they welcomed their 100 millionth passenger on June 4. It says she is Greek, that she arrived on an Air France flight, that she was welcomed by the marketing director for AIA and the manager of the airline in Athens, there are even three photos. But her name is mentioned nowhere. She is, apparently, every-passenger.