by Christina Brzustoski

Created on: April 19, 2008

After three lovely days in Greece experiencing the Parthenon and sampling delicious moussaka, I was ready to return to my current home in the equally fascinating city of Istanbul. There is a long history of animosity between the two cultures, from who invented baklava to the mandatory resettlement of Greek Muslims in Turkey and Christian Turks in Greece.

Our flight back to Turkey was to board at 18:30, which came and went without any Olympic Airlines announcements about delays or anything else. 19:00 rolled around and there was still nothing. No sign of an airline representative, except at the other counter where another flight had been delayed. One of my travel companions went to question her and she assured him there would be an announcement in the next few minutes. But that announcement never came. Finally at 19:45, the board read "Late" for our flight, as if we couldn't have figured it out at that point. The ominous part was that there was no estimated time for our delay. So again we waited, with no announcements, no representatives and no boarding for our flight.

There was a group of Canadian guys near us who were also trying to get updates. After checking the flight board for the fifth time, we noticed that our flight was no longer listed. Five minutes later, one of the Canadians came back from upstairs to tell us the flight had been cancelled. Again, no representatives, no announcements and now no flight! Everything we found out was from the other passengers. We now had to make our way backwards through passport control and collect our baggage. We finally heard an announcement about 15 minutes after we had learned it was cancelled from our fellow passengers. But of course there must have been an Olympic representative at this point to guide us through. Because how often is it that a person has to go backwards through passport control? As it turns out there was still no representative, and even the Greek passport agents weren't really sure what to do. They simply scribbled over our stamps in blue ink to "cancel" them.

So we and our fellow disgruntled passengers - not mad at the cancelled flight so much as the complete lack of information about it and what to do next. We waited on line at customer service for an hour, only to find out we should have been in another line, which we found out from another passenger who started screaming at the representative that he was going to kill someone. Apparently he and his family had been trying to fly back to Dubai

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