After our plane landed in Athens, we boarded another airplane. A much smaller, older model plane. The carpet was dingy. The upholstery had long ago gone to be with Jesus.

Our fellow passengers were almost entirely Greek. I know this because the passengers were louder than an average SEC Championship. Almost all passengers were talking and laughing, at times leaning over neighboring passengers to shout with glee toward the back of the plane.

Greeks are not at all like Americans, I discovered. You know how when Americans fly, we sit in polite silence? Americans don’t speak to fellow passengers except in dire emergencies. (“Excuse me, I don’t mean to disturb you, but my husband is having a heart attack.”) And if, by chance, there are Canadians on such flights, all you hear is the sound of people randomly whispering apologies.

Greeks are not like this.

At least not when using public transit. They talk to each other. They laugh. They are not at all self-conscious about conducting animated conversations with a person who might be sitting, for example, in the cockpit.

I was seated between two older, strong-voiced women, deep in the throes of loud, social discourse. They seemed not to notice me at all. It was not unlike riding in the backseat of the First Baptist youth-group bus when Allen Weatherby ate Mentos and guzzled Coca-Cola on a dare only to discover this doesn’t make your stomach explode. But worse. Everyone was forced to clean up the remains of Allen’s semi-digested lunch while Pastor Phil’s wife watched over the felons, expressing her deep disappointment between uncontrollable fits of gagging.

When that plane landed, passengers were then vomited into a much tinier airport where pretty much all the signage looked like this:

Δεν έχω ιδέα τι λέει στην πραγματικότητα τίποτα από όλα αυτά.

“Excuse me,” I asked random people who looked vaguely official. “Where is the bus stop?”

“Τι είπατε;” they replied.

Greeks are not known for effusive customer service. Don’t misunderstand me, Greeks are very kind, and extremely helpful, but they do a lot of sighing and head shaking during the process.

My friend Nick comes from a large Greek family. He once explained Greek customer service like this: “It is an ancient Greek custom to be very hospitable and pissed off at the same time.”

We finally found the bus stop with the help of a kindly pissed-off older woman. I had the feeling that if I didn’t do as she instructed, she was going to drag me through the depot by my earlobe.

We boarded a bus and were taken to another, much more rural bus stop. There we waited for a few hours. While we waited, I visited a local bookseller nearby.

There are tons of bookstores in Greece, selling magazines, paperbacks, and newspapers. Almost everywhere you go, you see people reading printed material made of actual paper products. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be in a book-intensive country.

I browsed the bookstore shelves to pass the time. There were several teenagers doing the same. Teenagers reading paper books. Astonishing.

All the books looked like normal American trade paperbacks, but the text was in Greek.

Our bus finally arrived. By now the sun was lowering. The Grecian sky was pink, with zigzagging clouds across the sunset. We had been in transit for twenty-six hours. But I didn’t care. Greece was quickly becoming more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen.

The bus led us through an arresting countryside, sun-drenched and dry. We passed swelling hillsides of terraced vineyards, winding olive groves, and whitewashed stone chapels with painted murals of golden saints. The smell of wild thyme filled the evening air.

We arrived by the seaside village of Nafplio after dark.

The cobbled streets, uneven. A church bell, tolling. The dark water, reflecting a thousand yellow lights like a Van Gogh painting. Ancient stone buildings, crumbling beneath centuries, like weary old soldiers. A castle on the hilltop, overlooking the sleeping city.

My wife and I were the last passengers left on the bus by the time we reached the town. The driver, an elderly man with thick features, wooly eyebrows, and hands like Virginia hams, removed my lap harp and fiddle case from the baggage compartment below the bus.

The old man had never seen a harp before. He seemed genuinely amused.

“Árpa?” he kept saying, while making the universal gesture for playing the harp.

“Naí,” I replied, which means “yes.”

So, I unzipped the harp case and let him run his weathered hands across the nylon strings.

The old man’s face lit up.

In severely broken English, he said, “Árpa is what we all play in heaven, no?”

“Then we’d better start playing,” I said. “Because it appears that we’re already here.”