Greece, Part Three (Santorini)

This is a continuation of my previous post here.

Despite the late night, we were able to wake up successfully and head out for the bus on time. Unfortunately, the bus driver was less than helpful in notifying us of our stop and it was never obvious that we had passed the place we were looking for. So we wasted a good forty minutes riding the bus and then backtracking on foot. Somehow, we still made it to the metro and got to the port on time. When I say on time, I mean we got there according to the time we thought the boat was leaving. In fact, it had already left an hour before.

Needless to say, we were a bit upset. Susan may or may not have cracked for a minute. I tried to talk to the only employee in the entirety of the port of Piraeus that represented Sea Jet, the company that we were traveling with. She was on the phone for a while, so I just waited patiently at the window. At some point in her obnoxiously long phone call, she stopped and asked what I was waiting for, at which point I briefly described our mistake. She told me to wait one moment and then resumed her conversation. After a while, she hung up the phone and then very briefly told me that we had missed the boat. That was that. I asked if there was a way to get a partial refund or to change our tickets, even at a fee. Her reply was to smile and say, in the most arrogant manner, "No, of course not!" It took every bit of my being not to jump through the window and dismember her where she stood.

Apparently Sea Jet has a "no tolerance" policy and just hires vile-mannered representatives to work in their customer service locations. So I demanded our pre-purchased return tickets and then we went elsewhere to purchase tickets to Santorini. We had already invested so much in the tickets and hostel reservations that it would have been too much of a loss not to follow through with it. The new tickets were about half the price of Sea Jet's tickets too. The only problem was that the boat left at 6 in the evening and it was 8:30 or so in the morning.

We found a nice little coffee shop with Wi-Fi and emailed the hostel so that they would know we weren't going to be arriving that afternoon and would instead arrive at 1 a.m. We were hoping they'd still come pick us up at the port, as transportation to our part of the island at that hour would have been nonexistent or extremely expensive. They never emailed us back. We passed the day in various coffee shops, buying freddo cappuccinos to try and maintain some kind of consciousness.