ATHENS - The years-long mad dash to get Athens ready for the Olympics obviously was a success.
There is a modernized airport, a subway system with shiny new cars and marble-walled stations, freshly paved highways, dozens of new sports venues and buildings, an ongoing spruce-up and a citywide commitment to help even the most befuddled tourists - including Florida-based sports writers.
But as the Games opened, the Greeks seemed to be returning to their normal pace.
Here, patience isn't a virtue.
It's a necessity.
Consider the adventures of Danielle Reed and Chiara Benitez, two Florida Tech graduates a third of the way through a three-week Greek vacation.
Benitez really wanted a leopard skin-trimmed hat from the new Athens Hard Rock Cafe. The restaurant seemed ready to open when Reed and Benitez checked midweek, but they were told they would have to wait for Friday's official opening. They went back, only to be told it wouldn't open for another day, or maybe a few.
Later they saw a separate Hard Rock retail outlet opening in a different area, but sales couldn't be processed due to computer problems. Determined, Reed and Benitez convinced the manager to make the sale then and ring it up later.
Just like that, the two engineers made their own little history. "The first official customers," Reed said.
And just like that, they got a sample of Greek life during the Olympics.
Having spent Friday walking and wandering through some of the more popular parts of the city with Times columnist John Romano, we can report that Athens seems to be operating on a special schedule.
We're just trying to figure out what it is.
Stores closed for a few hours in midday, restaurants were crowded at midnight, traffic backed up at 3 a.m.
We had our maps, our credentials, our Euros, our Greek phrase books and our geek(y) tourist guides. We even had a plan - to go to the Parliament building to see the hourly changing of the guards wearing the traditional evzone uniform (white skirts and pompommed red shoes), to some of the shops and restaurants around Syntagma Square and Plaka, to a restaurant with real Greek food and, of course, to the Acropolis.
We rode a public bus from our dorm, took a couple of quick rides on the shiny and clean new subway system, walked through the narrow streets lined with shops and stands, and found ourselves at the foot of history.
After about a half-hour hike - without having to stop for oxygen - we had climbed the Acropolis, passed through the Propylaia (sort of the entranceway to the entranceway), looked at the Theatre of Dionysos (wondering how Springsteen would sound there), checked out the Temple of Athena Nike (we had to Just Do It) and strolled around the under-restoration Parthenon (and just what kind of cranes did they drive up the hill 2,500 years ago to erect those enormous marble columns?).
One of the things that makes Athens special is the mix of ancient and modern.
Similarly, one of the things that made the afternoon special, after days of drinking liquid mud, was to stumble on a Starbucks.
There we found drinkable coffee and Noemi Guevara, a manager of a Houston-area Starbucks who was chosen, with 44 others from around the world, to spend 10 days working one of the Athens stores.
As thrilled as Guevara was to be here, she was even more amazed at the reaction of some customers who would walk in and act like the coffee shop was their own personal Parthenon.
"It's something in the states that people are so passionate about," she said, "but to see it so many miles away is something. It's great."
Most everywhere we went, prices seemed reasonable (except for the cab with the mysterious meter that didn't show any numbers until the end), people seemed friendly, crowds seemed manageable.
With information booths dotting the tourist area - City of Athens/May I Help You? - and multilingual street and subway maps, it really isn't that hard to get around.
For most people.
After eating an assortment of grilled meats (at least we hope they were meats!) for dinner, we watched the opening ceremonies on a big-screen TV in an Athens bar (and just how does that Greek alphabet work?) and drank Greek beer. We had directions to move on to a bar in another part of town but encountered a slight hitch - we couldn't read the Greek street signs.
By the end of the night we had a bigger problem.
When we left the dorm we didn't think about getting back. We had no address. No phone number. No street name. We didn't even have a landmark, not unless you counted Munchies, the all-night cafe a couple of blocks away that we had quickly made the Times' clubhouse, but that wasn't much help to anyone else.
We backtracked, but with bus service done for the night we were going to need a ride. Finding a taxi wasn't hard; the problem was not knowing what to tell the driver.
Only thanks to Zoe, a resourceful volunteer at the Evangelismos Metro station, did we make it back. She looked up the address and wrote it down in Greek so we could hand it to a taxi driver.
When we got to the dorm we stopped at the reception desk to see if there was anything printed with the address so we could avoid future problems. Actually, the clerk said, they had slips of paper for just that purpose.
It would have been better, of course, if they had given those out sooner.
