Slow Connection

No, not my internet - my brain. It is amazing and disturbing to me sometimes the speed (or lack thereof actually) at which my brain processes information sometimes.

This morning shortly after I woke up, my cell phone rang. The display read "Dimi", and my thus far caffeine deprived brain began rifling clumsily through it's database. "Dimi? I don't know anyone named Dimi. Why is this name showing up on my display?". I answered it, and it was a woman speaking greek who switched to halting english once she realized I was a foreigner. She was calling about the plane ticket.

Plane ticket? What plane ticket? Wait...synapses trying to fire...Lisa contacted me yesterday to tell me that her original flight had been canceled and that she had to come in a day earlier, and I was supposed to go to the travel agency in Kastelli to see about getting her domestic portion changed. Is Olympic Airways THAT on the ball that they somehow knew this, even though the two flights were not booked in conjunction with each other? Has the airline industry somehow pulled its sh*t together and managed to start communicating across carriers to anticipate stuff like this? Really, that's what was going through my mind at the time. So I asked, "Are you calling from Olympic Air?" and she said yes. She then explained that the flight time had been changed and was leaving several hours later than the originally scheduled time. Oh, now I got it. They were calling about a schedule change completely unrelated to Lisa's other, international issue. So she and I spoke for a few more minutes, me trying to explain that I was going to have to change her ticket to the previous day anyway because of the change in her international flight, and that I was going to visit the travel agency from which I had purchased it later that day to get it exchanged. And as she was saying OK, it hit me...Dimi is the name I had entered a long time ago, when I first bought the tickets, for the travel agency (the name on one of the business cards I took was Dimitrios - this was before I knew Mike's name, and I had taken the company's card which has his cousin's name on it). So this was in fact the travel agency calling me, not Olympic Air, and while it may have been a simple issue of faulty communication on both of our parts, that I didn't remember entering "Dimi" was bothersome.

It was all very confusing, but maybe I can chalk it up to pre-caffeine stupor.

Not so my realization today that the "Agora" that I see on the sign for many little markets around here is derived from the word "agorazo", which means to buy. Agorazo was one of the first greek words I learned, and that it has taken me this long to take note of this pisses me off.

Really wishing I hadn't smoked so much pot in highschool...