Travel Weekly contributing editor Felicity Long arrived in Athens on July 9 with her daughter for a weeklong Celestyal cruise of the Greek islands and Turkey. What follows are her first impressions of how the financial crisis in Greece looks on the ground to visitors.
Given the scenes of chaos in the streets of Athens I'd seen in the U.S. media leading up to our departure, our arrival at Athens airport was notable for its lack of drama.
Sure, we saw a few arriving visitors talking earnestly at the currency exchange bureaus about their best strategy for obtaining money, and on our taxi ride into the city we saw orderly lines of about a half dozen people at each ATM we passed.
"You would see longer lines in the city center," our taxi driver told us. He also acknowledged that the preponderance of graffiti we saw on city walls was politically inspired.
Although he was intent on giving us an oral history of ancient Greece, he let me hijack the conversation to the current crisis. A staunch no-voter on the referendum to accept European Union austerity measures, he seemed remarkably free of any anxiety about what the repercussions of that vote will be.
On arrival at the Athenaeum InterContinental, again it was business as usual. At the check-in desk, the clerk seemed startled when I asked whether I could use my credit card for incidentals rather than cash.
"Of course, madam," he said, and later I did just that when I bought drinks at the hotel's rooftop terrace for a local friend and her American niece who stopped by to greet us before dinner.
This friend, an outspoken yes-voter on the referendum, said that there had been a huge but peaceful demonstration in Syntagma Square that day, representing clashing opinions on how to manage the crisis. The demonstration snarled up traffic in the city center.
She said that the lines at the ATMs are long in that part of the city and that some of the banks were running out of 20 euro bills, in which case locals might receive only 50 euros for the day instead of the allotted 60. Also, she said the ATMs are timed to dispense the daily cash 24 hours from the last withdrawal, rather than any time on the subsequent day, so there's no arriving an hour early for your daily cash. Locals are permitted to buy groceries with their credit cards but only up to $150 a day. She also said she can't use Paypal, iTunes or perform software updates on her smartphone.
She impressed on us, however, that the ATM rules don't apply to visitors using their U.S. bank cards. The American niece said that she regularly uses her ATM card to withdraw higher amounts of cash but that she is discreet about it so as not to antagonize locals waiting in line behind her.
Although the country is and will be on tenterhooks in the coming days as the Greek government and the EU attempt to reach some sort of workable compromise, so far our visitor experience has been completely unruffled. It will be interesting to see what the scene is like on the islands as the week wears on.