Airport, Athens and airplanes

We spent the rest of the day waiting around the hotel—in the lobby, in the room. D napped with Baba. Waiting. We finally left the hotel at about 8 p.m., anxious to return to Athens, and ready to kill an hour or two at the Lemnos Airport before our 10:40 p.m. flight. The airport—relatively clean but stuttered with persistent flies—was a long rectangle with duty-free catalogs glossy under the fluorescent light. We ate pistachios—the kids working faster to consume than I could shell, and D took Eena and Baba for a stroll outside under the now slowly cooling sunset. And so we prepared to depart.

The first sign that something was amiss came from a Greek pharmaceutical salesman, on a business trip to Lemnos, who told D in broken English about Olympic Airways’ recent problems. He also tried to repeatedly hug the children—which seemed to terrify them (and me). Before long, the boarding time came and went, and we spent the night at the Lemnos Airport. We finally left for Athens at 5 a.m. Luckily, at about 2 a.m., the kids fell asleep in their strollers—which D retrieved with some hassle from the Olympic Airways backroom.

My dad, D and I passed the waiting time by talking with a Canadian woman Jenny who also had Lemnian roots. Jenny recently quit her public relations job to pursue an acting career (she did some voice-over work in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”). Fluent in Greek and English, she was also extremely helpful in calling our Athens cab company several times to explain that we’d be late. They had simply hung up on D the two times he called and asked with his best effort, “Milas Anglika?” (do you speak English?).

When we finally arrived at our Athens hotel around 6:30 a.m., the five of us crashed like flaming stockcars. My dad, D and I had visited Athens before, so we didn’t feel the urge to spend our single layover day carrying Eena and Baba up Acropolis in the unseemly heat. Instead, we spent the morning at the rooftop pool.

That evening, we met Marina Harami, the author of a 3-volume genealogical book (in Greek) on Haramis families all over the world. Marina e-mailed me several years ago, and I provided her information for her book. She was extremely helpful in arranging for us to meet our Lemnos relatives, and for our face-to-face meeting. She brought us a selection of delicious Greek chocolate, which Eena and Baba devoured with furious abandon. Within 10 minutes, they were flailing wildly on the hotel carpet while D went “fishing” for them with a gold ribbon. Eena was not pleased to hear that real fishing used hooks to strike the mouth of the fish, as she had previously thought the fish just sort of rolled into a line and without harm were lifted to land before their glorious splashback to the sea. D took the opportunity to make a point of vegetarianism to the now heavily wired children. Baba chanted, repeatedly, “I get crazy crazy.”

With the kids thus distracted by D, I was able to listen to Marina’s vast knowledge of all things Haramis. First, I discovered that she goes by Harami because that’s the female version of Haramis. We also learned about the family’s storied roots. It seems the family can be traced to Peloponnesia (Mani) around the year 1500, when they lost a sort of tribal war with the other prominent family—and so dispersed throughout Greece. The family also were pirates (arrgh) and brigands at some point—“Haramis” may mean “one who steals”—but we also had members decorated as war heroes in the early 1700s. Marina indicated that the family, most likely under a different surname, is believed to have existed even earlier—perhaps as early as 1200—under the Byzantine Empire.

Marina kindly drove us to the suburb of Athens called Paraskevi, and in a near-exhausted state, we ate at our first U.S. restaurant, Pizza Hut. It was good to eat some non-Greek food for one day, and this Pizza Hut was considerably more upscale than its U.S. cousin. Marina brought us to Paraskevi Square and a playground (which was crowded at 10 p.m.), and the girls gleefully frolicked in the dark among other children.

The next morning we woke up early (3:30 am), flew to Paris and then back home. En route to Chicago, we sat next to a father and his 11-month-old son. The boy’s mother had left them in France to fly to a conference in New England, leaving the father, a professor, to watch his son alone for what seemed like the first time. D (world’s greatest dad) was horrified when the other dad told him he really only needs to spend limited amounts of time with his kid because anyone—and primarily his mother-in-law—can entertain his child at this early age. His work, he told D, held a place of great importance and so necessitated that he take a more removed view of parenting. The job, you wonder: a research professor in rehabilitative studies at a local university. D did his best, for the sake of airplane calm, to not completely pick apart this logic.

The girls did pretty well on the flight (sleeping for at least two hours)—but Eena and Baba were thrilled to get back home, ride their bikes, and play with their toys. Although we had a great time in Europe—with adventures to last us until our next trip across the pond—we were glad to return to the comforts of readily available soy milk, soft beds and the warm welcome of our Greek-named cat, Cassiopeia.