Fire in Greece

For someone who loves to read the news and watch CNN in the morning, one of the hardest things about being abroad is the inability to keep up with current events. And every time we hit an internet cafe, we spent all of our time keeping in touch with people at home. Newspapers are in different languages, as is the television, so we can cross that off the list of options too. It´s tough.

A couple hours before our train left from Athens to Patras, we´re using the internet in our hotel, and the news is on. We can´t understand anything, but we can decipher that there´s a big fire, and it´s a big deal.

Well, we walked across the street to the station, and we ate lunch outside at the station´s cafe. When we get up to leave, we look down at our bags and there are little white specks all over our backpacks. What is this, we ask each other, cigarette ash? Chipped paint? Weird...

But we board the train to the port at Patras, and as we´re sitting there, I look out the window and white specks are falling from the sky. What...and then I realize that the white specks on our bags were ashes from the fire. And I remember feeling so frustrated that I couldn´t understand what was happening. I mean, here we sit in Greece while something big is happening, and we have no idea what, where, when or why. And we could just see the importance on the faces of people, glued to the television, looking out at the ash.

I actually looked at the women sitting across from me and asked her if she spoke English. A little, she said, and I asked about the fire.
She said, with difficulty, that there was a big fire on a mountain very near Athens, but that was all she could manage to communicate.

The train bumps along the tracks to Patras, and we can see an enormous clould of smoke covering the sky. And then I look up and see that the sun is a burning red color from the screen of smoke sitting in the sky. Wow.

In Patras, we go to a Greek restaurant and the news is on, covering the fire. Our waitress speaks English very well, so I asked her what was going on. She explained that there were actually 4 separate fires, two near Athens, and one near Patras. She said that more than 50 people had been killed and explained that they were members of a village trapped by the fire. Apparently they could not escape, and the helicopters could not land there to rescue them because it was too windy. It was so sad.
She also told us that the restaurant´s internet was down because of damage caused by the fire, which is a hard thing to be sad about when Greece is mourning casualties. Putting things into perspective.

Leslie and I sat and ate and talked for a almost 3 hours with the news running in the background, and then it was time to continue on to Italy.