Purgatory- A Timeline of Events

Most of the following times are completely made up but this format will help me keep track of my thoughts.

January 24th, 3 PM, Budapest: My friends and I went to Budapest for the weekend and it was a lot of fun. We were checking out of our Air BnB when my roommate back in Athens sent me a video of snow coming down. He told us our plane definitely will not take off so we should find somewhere to stay for an extra night. We laughed it off because it did not look like a lot of snow. 

January 24th, 6:09 PM, Budapest Airport: This time is actually exactly right because my Snapchat memory saved the time. We got to the airport and while we were waiting for our flight we got Hungarian airport KFC and a bottle of wine. I got a burrito-type thing. It was really average. Here is a photo

KFC Burrito and red wine yum

January 24th, 8:12 PM, Athens Airport Runway: The plane ride was horrendous. It was so rocky and the landing was absolutely terrible. I have no right to make these claims but I will make them anyway. People clapped when the plane landed. Normally I think that is literally the dumbest thing in the world as the planes essentially fly themselves, but I liked it here. The pilot really needed something for his confidence. Pity claps are claps nonetheless. After we landed we sat there on the runway, for so long. We sat there for the same reason the flight was rough and the same reason my roommate told us to stay in Budapest. It was snowing. When we landed we quickly saw there was a lot more snow than we had originally seen from my roommate's video. Plows ran nonstop to keep the runway clear and it took a while for a shuttle bus to pick us up and bring us to the airport.

January 24th, 9:21 PM, Athens airport: Within seconds of stepping into the airport one thing was made clear, we were not going to leave the airport for quite some time. Walking around we ran into other students from our Greek school who were traveling, many of them had been there for hours with no idea when they'd be back. Roads were closed so taxis were not an option. There were power outages all over the city stopping the metro from running. If you tried to make the 3-mile walk back to the dorms police would tell you to turn back to the airport. We were stuck. Every outlet was taken by someone charging their phone. The hallways were dressed with sleeping bodies covered in blankets made of jackets and sweatshirts. Smoking rooms were filled. Every table or chair was taken by someone checking their phone every 30 minutes for an update on the power and road situations. The updates were far and few in between as the prime minister and minister of transportation were essentially silent throughout the entire ordeal. After looking for a while my friends and I found a spot on a hallway floor with an outlet to use.

January 24th, 9:50 PM, Hallway outside of Burger King in the Athens airport: A couple of my friends at this point were already fed up with the situation and began trying to sleep. At the time, I thought the whole thing was just a minor inconvenience and kind of funny. A couple of us decided to pass the time in a variety of ways. First, we ran through random hypothetical situations, like anything that could possibly come to mind. We spent most of our time discussing one in particular. 

I'm yet to witness a short discussion when I bring out this photo, making it the perfect thing to discuss while we were chilling in purgatory. I've almost lost friends over this because there are definitely wrong answers. Anyone who picks ten gators or crocodiles is an idiot. To me, there are two clear answers. The 50 hawks, and the 10k rats. Hawks are an obvious choice, as the only flying animal they are least likely to get hit. Say a bear or gorilla eventually catches one, so what, there are 50 of them. 50 hawks could easily take out the hunter before he kills more than two. And for the rats, ten thousand is just so much. That is simply too many rats. Gorillas, grizzly bears, or wolves are also decent picks. The rest are just wrong. Lions are very overrated don't let the whole "king of the jungle" tagline fool you. 

After discussing that for about an hour we shifted toward 20 questions. Everything was going well. We were doing fairly basic things like George Washington, the moon, the back left tire on my 2014 Toyota RAV4, and LeBron James. There were no problems or arguments until it was my one friend's turn. We asked him "Is it tangible?" Pretty basic question. Seems like a straightforward yes or no question. Things are either tangible or they are not. There is no in-between. Somehow, he responds with "Yes, but that's misleading." We proceeded to argue over the definition of "tangible" for the next 10 minutes until he told us that he was thinking of Seinfeld, the show, not the person. Television shows are not tangible, they are concepts and nothing more. My friend argued that it technically is tangible because you could have a Seinfeld CD, which is a garbage argument. Seinfeld isn't tangible, the CD is. We tried to explain this to him and even had a nearby French woman support our argument but he wouldn't budge. Eventually, we got tired and decided to try and sleep. 

January 25th, 3:30 AM, Athens Airport: Our hypothetical situations and 20 questions really did occupy our minds for 5-6 hours before trying to sleep. Looking around the airport at the thousands of people collectively losing their minds made me imagine the world was ending. That's what it felt like. It's like we were all stuck inside, seeking shelter from whatever will ultimately destroy the world, as we sit on our phones and eat airport food. But really we were stuck in purgatory. We had all died and didn't even know. Like in Lost. Dogs started using the bathroom inside, children continued to cry, and Greek men yelled into their phones as I tried to catch some sleep. 

January 25th, 7:06 AM, Athens Airport: Laying down on my bed made of shirts and a sweatshirt, it was difficult to get sleep. Despite being overtired and running on very few hours of sleep I couldn't seem to pass out. I'd doze in and out of sleep every 15 minutes or so, putting me in a state of delirium. I was starting to forget what was going on and lost hope of leaving. I think I saw the Hatman. At some point, the intercom turned on and someone began speaking. The crackling sound of the speakers woke everyone. First, the voice spoke in Greek, and then English. The voice explained one of the metro lines was up and running and the first train would arrive at the airport spot at 8 AM. We were finally able to leave.

January 25th, 7:45 AM, Metro Stop: We quickly gathered our things and followed the mass of people migrating from the airport to the metro stop. The crowd was huge, Greek police officers tried to limit the people getting in but that didn't work at all. The metro platform was covered. Every inch was taken up by someone trying to get on a train. Greek voices chanted something, I don't know what, but they were chanting with some of them holding middle fingers in the air. I didn't like how many people there were. My biggest irrational fear is dying in a human stampede. So when I got to a place like this I immediately imagined the worst. Like Jon Snow almost dying in the Battle of the Basterds. Or the 2005 Baghdad human stampede that killed close to 1,000 people on a narrow bridge. Or the recent Astro World incident. Those last two are actually real so that's definitely worse than Jon almost dying. Anyway, with those delightful images running through my mind I ended up returning to the airport to wait for the next metro.

January 25th, 8:04 AM, Athens Airport, Again: When I stepped foot back into the airport I had possibly the most fascinating human interaction of my entire life. A fellow American College of Greece student who had also been stuck overnight approached me and asked "If I thought about trying to get a taxi yet." What an incredible question. At first, I thought it was a joke but he looked completely serious. Did he have any idea what was going on? If he thought taxis were running what had he been doing the last several hours? Was he sitting here for fun? How was I gonna break the news to him? I wonder if he knew it was even snowing. I had so many questions but equally little brainpower to try and understand him. I explained to him the taxis weren't running and his girlfriend responded with "I'll check Uber." What was happening? I thought I was losing my mind. My brain was going to fry itself if I entertained their questions any longer so I walked away and lay back down on the floor. I lay there trying to sleep as I thought about my day. I went from eating a KFC burrito and drinking red wine out of a paper cup to sleeping on an airport floor. A true fall from grace. 

The rest: I realized this blog was getting way too long so I'll briefly summarize the rest of the experience. The metro stopped running again, so I was stuck in the airport even longer with a couple other ACG kids I found. Around noon the taxis started running again but they could only get within a mile from our dorms so we got dropped off and had to walk through the snow-covered suburbs. People were outside, fascinated by the amount of snow. They clearly had no idea what to do. They didn't have shovels or plows, the trees all fell down on power lines, and almost every car was stuck in the snow. One person was shoveling their car out with the back end of a broomstick while others used pots and pans. Children zipped up and down the sidewalk on makeshift sleds. We walked through the middle of the road and eventually reached our dorms after crawling under trees that had fallen on the main road. The city was shut down and we had no classes for the next 4 days. Part of me is hesitant to believe I really left the airport after a long 15 or so hours. I wouldn't be surprised if one day I woke up on the floor of the airport, listening to my friend trying to explain how Seinfeld is indeed tangible.