Camilla Ransom
Today was to be our last day in Greece so we had to go through all the formalities to officially check out of the EU. Facebook, despite it’ shortcomings is an invaluable tool when it comes to finding out how to do these things, and a quick search in the Med Sailing group revealed the steps we needed to follow.
First, we go to the Port Police. When we first rocked up we weren’t sure whether we’d inadvertently walked into the local creche as there were children running around everywhere! Nope, we were in the right place. The policewoman behind the counter took all our paperwork and gave us back two copies of the crew list with copious amounts of stamps and signatures on it. Not a single computer in sight I might add, good to know our checkout is all in “The System” then 🙂
Next up was customs and immigration who were based inside the local ferry terminal. The customs man had no clue at first why we were standing at his desk but eventually he filled in a slip of paper, stamped it and gave us a copy. Immigration was manned by some very stern and not-to-be-messed-with officials wearing shorts and t-shirts, who duly checked our passports, added a few more stamps for good measure and sent us on our way.
Finally back to the Port Police with our inked paperwork where we handed over 5 EUR, and that was it, checkout complete!
We rewarded ourselves with lunch at the Ronda beach club, where we anxiously waited on news from our job interviews. It’s amazing how many times you can check your email in a few hours! As the sunset we walked back to the boat, had a little celebratory nightcap in the bar and headed to bed where on one last check of the email we found out we were both going to be made job offers, yay!
