Latest news with #Sisyphean
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Goose droppings plague Finland's short and precious summers
Now, after Sisyphean summers facing down the fowl's feces, he thinks that he just may have found a solution: a wheeled cage with a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned hand lawn mower that is meant to sift the dirtied sand and whisk up only the offending feces. The contraption may be Helsinki's most innovative poop-fighting effort yet. It is being tested this summer on about half the city's 25 public beaches. It was designed in-house by beach staff members, who drew inspiration from a public competition last year meant to crowdsource poop-scooping ideas. Advertisement Finns are hardly alone in their fight against goose droppings, which can carry dangerous germs like E. coli and Salmonella. In other places, officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves. In recent years, Canadians have tried to relocate the geese, New Yorkers hired a patrol dog, and Californians moved to cull them. Advertisement But Finland does not allow culling, and hunting geese in urban Helsinki would not be a feasible option anyway. The Finns are desperate for solutions because their summers are precious. They live so far north, two months are about all they get. However brief, the summers they do get can sometimes be unpredictably hot, with this past Sunday marking the 16th consecutive day that temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhere in Finland — a record. So on a recent afternoon — a warm day in a city where anything over 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 Celsius) is considered hot — Pauli Puirava biked with his wife and two children to Hietsu Beach, whose formal name is Hietaranta. They brought some nuts and a few juice boxes for their children, five and eight. 'The summer is so short,' said Puirava, an entrepreneur, pharmacist, and restaurateur. 'We really have to make the most out of it.' Helsinki's humans are not the only ones who gravitate to the beach in summer. Last July, according to the Finnish Environment Institute, researchers counted about 5,300 geese in the Helsinki area. The plump birds are everywhere. They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks, and sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes. At the beach, sunbathers must check the sand before they lay down their blankets. Beach volleyball players hope that a dive does not bring them face-to-face with the feces. And parents, like Puirava, keep a watchful eye out so their young children do not end up putting the droppings in their mouths. Advertisement 'You have to watch your every step,' he said. 'Wherever you go outdoors in Helsinki, there is nowhere without goose poop.' To keep up with the cleaning demands, the ranks of summer maintenance workers have grown in the past decade, Lundgren said. Some beaches can see well over 40 pounds of excrement a day, he said. His team keeps looking for new solutions. They once tried to mix the poop into the sand, which just dirtied the water, he said. They tried to scare the geese by broadcasting the sounds of sea eagles, but the geese quickly got wise to it. He even considered hiring gig workers, in this case, skilled patrol dogs, as have other Finnish cities. But, he said, the few eligible dogs would have been too expensive. 'And,' he lamented, 'they would have been able to get there only a couple of times per week.' The latest hope was the new wheeled contraption that the summer maintenance crew at Hietsu Beach rolled out to use, said crew leader Minni Aakko. But they soon found it was heavy, she said, dragging on wet sand. Now, the machine that was supposed to be the solution mostly sits in the storage room. So Aakko has returned to the old-fashioned method: scooping up goose poop with a spade and rubbery gloves. She finds the work almost meditative, she said. But the smell — grassy, a little mildewy, and undeniably fecal — can linger. 'It's not bad work,' she said. 'But it's not my favorite job here.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Los Angeles Times
09-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. vowed to remove 9,800 encampments. But are homeless people getting housed?
Musician Dennis Henriquez woke up in a doorway in East Hollywood last month, hidden behind cardboard and sheltered by a tarp. When he peered outside, half a dozen sanitation workers were standing nearby, waiting to carry out one of the more than 30 homeless encampment cleanups planned that day by the city of Los Angeles. Henriquez eventually emerged, carried out a bicycle and deposited it on a grassy area 20 feet away. He also dragged over a backpack, a scooter, two guitars, a piece of luggage and a beach chair. The city sanitation crew grabbed the tarp and the cardboard, tossing them into a trash truck. Then, the contingent of city workers, including two police officers, climbed into their vehicles and drove away, leaving behind Henriquez and his pile of belongings. This type of operation, known as a CARE-plus cleanup, plays out hundreds of times each week in the city, with sanitation crews seizing and destroying tents, tarps, pallets, shopping carts and many other objects. The cleanups have emerged as a huge source of conflict in a five-year-old legal dispute over the city's handling of the homelessness crisis. Depending on how the cleanup issue is resolved, the city could face legal sanctions, millions of dollars in penalties or increased outside oversight of its homeless programs. In 2022, city leaders reached a legal settlement with the nonprofit L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, promising to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027. Eventually, they also agreed to remove 9,800 homeless encampments by June 2026 — with an encampment defined as an individual tent, makeshift structure, car or recreational vehicle. To reach the latter goal, city leaders have been counting each encampment removed from streets, sidewalks and alleys during the Bureau of Sanitation's CARE-plus cleanups — even in cases where the resident did not obtain housing or a shelter bed. The alliance has strongly objected to the city's methodology, arguing that destroying a tent, without housing its occupants, runs afoul of the 2022 settlement agreement. Any 'encampment resolution' tallied by the city must be more permanent — and address the larger goal of reducing homelessness, said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the alliance. 'If the person insists on staying where they are and nothing else has happened, that's not a resolution,' she said. 'They can't count that.' City leaders have carried out CARE-plus cleanups for years, saying they are needed to protect public safety and restore sidewalk access for wheelchair users, the elderly and others. Some encampments are strewn with debris that spills across an entire walkway or out into the street, while others carry the smell of urine, fecal matter or decaying food waste. The cleanups have a Sisyphean quality. Many seasoned residents drag their tents across the street, wait out the cleanup, then return to their original spots in the afternoon. The process frequently restarts a week or two later. The alliance's legal team, alarmed by the inclusion of CARE-plus cleanups in the encampment reduction count, recently spent several days trying to persuade a federal judge to seize control of the city's homelessness initiatives from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turn them over to a third-party receiver. U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter, who presides over the case, declined to take that step, saying it went too far. But he has made clear that he, too, objects to the city's approach to eliminating the 9,800 encampments. In March, Carter issued a court order saying the city may not count CARE-plus cleanups toward its goal because, as the alliance had argued, they are 'not permanent in nature.' Last month, in a 62-page ruling, he found the city had 'willfully disobeyed' that order — and had improperly reported its encampment reductions. Clarifying his position somewhat, the judge also said that the city cannot count an encampment reduction unless it is 'accompanied by an offer of shelter or housing.' 'Individuals need not accept the offer, but an offer of available shelter or housing must be made,' he wrote. Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case, has opposed the 9,800 goal from the beginning, saying it creates a quota system that increases the likelihood that city workers will violate the property rights of unhoused residents. 'Throwing away tents doesn't help the homelessness crisis,' she said. 'Building housing does.' City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helped negotiate the settlement, told the court last month that his office does not count the tents that homeless people move temporarily — around the corner or across the street — during city cleanups. However, the city does include those that are permanently removed because they block the sidewalk or pose a public health or safety threat, he said. Szabo, during his testimony, said that when he negotiated the promise to remove 9,800 encampments, he did not expect that every tent removal would lead to someone moving inside. The city is already working to fulfill the alliance agreement's requirement of creating 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities. On top of that, Szabo said, encampment residents have 'free will' to refuse an offer of housing. 'I wouldn't ever agree that the city would be obligated to somehow force people to accept [housing] if they did not want to accept it,' he said. 'We never would have agreed to that. We didn't agree to that.' For an outside observer, it might be difficult to discern what the different types of city encampment operations are designed to accomplish. Bass' Inside Safe initiative moves homeless people into hotel and motel rooms, and at least in some cases, permanent housing. By contrast, CARE cleanups — shorthand for Cleanup and Rapid Engagement — are largely focused on trash removal, with crews hauling away debris from curbs and surrounding areas. CARE-plus cleanups are more comprehensive. Every tent must be moved so workers can haul away debris and, in some instances, powerwash sidewalks. Sanitation crews are supposed to give residents advance warning of a scheduled CARE-plus cleanup, posting notices on utility poles. If residents don't relocate their tents and other belongings, they run the risk of having them taken away. In some cases, cleanup crews take the possessions to a downtown storage facility. In many others, they are tossed. One of the largest CARE-plus cleanups in recent weeks took place in the Westlake district, where nearly three dozen tents and structures lined a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. A construction loader drove back and forth on the sidewalk, scooping up tents and depositing them in a trash truck. Ryan Cranford, 42, said he didn't know the cleanup was scheduled until minutes beforehand. He wound up losing his tent, a bed and a canopy, but managed to keep his backpack, saying it contained 'all that matters.' Sitting on a nearby retaining wall, Cranford said he would have accepted a motel room had someone offered one. 'Hell, I'd even take a bus to get all the way back to Oklahoma if I could,' he said. On the opposite side of the street, Tyson Lewis Angeles wheeled his belongings down the street in a shopping cart before sanitation workers descended on his spot. He said an outreach worker had given him a referral for a shelter bed the day before. Angeles, 30, said he was not interested, in part because he deals with panic attacks, PTSD and other mental health issues. He also does not want a roommate, or the rules imposed by homeless shelters. 'Basically, it's like volunteer jail,' he said. While Angeles managed to safeguard his possessions, others are frequently less successful. Nicholas Johnson, who is living in a box truck in Silver Lake, said city crews took the vast majority of his belongings during a CARE-plus cleanup in mid-June. Some were destroyed, while others were transported by sanitation workers to a downtown storage facility, he said. Johnson, 56, said he does not know whether some of his most prized possessions, including letters written by his grandmother, went into that facility or were tossed. City crews also took books, tools, his Buddhist prayer bowls and a huge amount of clothes. 'All of my clothing — all of my clothing — the wearables and the sellables, all mixed in. Hats, scarves, socks, ties, a lot of accessories that I wear — you know, double breasted suits from the '30s, the suit pants,' he said. Johnson said the city's cleanup process is a 'harassment ceremony' that only makes life more stressful for people on the street. 'They hit you in the kneecaps when they know you're already down,' he said. Earlier this year, city officials informed the court that they had removed about 6,100 tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles — nearly two-thirds of what the agreement with the alliance requires. Whether the city will challenge any portion of the judge's ruling is still unclear. In a statement, a lawyer for the city contends that the ruling 'misconstrues the city's obligations.' 'We are keeping open our options for next steps,' said the lawyer, Theane Evangelis.
CairoScene
27-06-2025
- General
- CairoScene
The Other Albert: Egypt's Nihilist Who Gave Camus a Run for His Money
Somewhere in Cairo in the early 1940s, an idle figure reclines on a wicker chair, not reading, not writing, simply breathing. "Doing nothing," Albert Cossery would later quip, "is an act of revolt." Albert Cossery stands as one of the few Arab writers to embody what might be called passive nihilism, a philosophy that mocks power, revolution, and ambition - not with rage, but with a disarming, almost elegant indifference. Born in Cairo and shaped by its languid rhythms, he would eventually make his way to Paris, where his name secured a quiet permanence in French literary circles. And yet, for all his sharp prose and radical detachment, Cossery remains a faint presence in Egyptian cultural memory, a local son more revered abroad than at home. In 1945, Paris was piecing itself back together from the ruins of war. By then, Cossery had already settled into a rhythm of deliberate indifference. He lived in a small, unassuming room at Hotel La Louisiane on Rue de Seine. The space was tiny, but perfectly sufficient: a bed, a desk he rarely used, and a window overlooking the boulevard where life hustled below. Cossery lived a life measured not by accomplishment, but by the perfection of repeat ad infinitum. In the shrine of literary Alberts, however, one name has long overshadowed the other. Albert Camus: philosopher of the absurd, moral voice of occupied France, reluctant existentialist, and grudging Nobel laureate. His name brings back visions of plague-stricken Oran and mythic Sisyphean struggles. But Albert Cossery? Even in Cairo, his birthplace, he remains, at best, a vague idea. And yet, the two Alberts, Camus and Cossery, offer us a strange, inverted mirror of the 20th century. One laboured under the weight of moral responsibility in a world devoid of real, inherent meaning; the other shrugged, lit a cigarette, and asked why everyone was making such a fuss. In Paris, it was not unusual to see the two Alberts strolling side by side through the Latin Quarter, pausing at bookstalls and exchanging barbed observations over coffee. One carried the burden of the world's absurdity; the other, its futility. "Cossery is, in a way, the most extreme passive nihilist of all," says Léa Polverini, whose thesis at Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès charted the Egyptian writer's long, improbable career. When we spoke, Polverini painted a picture of a man at once radically disengaged and deeply embedded. "His early works still held some hope: In 'La Maison de la Morte Certaine' (House of the Dead, 1944) a revolutionary character of communist influence fighting greedy landlords, poor men scheming to overturn oppression. But with time, even that dissipates." Indeed, by the time of 'The Lazy Ones' (Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile, 1948), Cossery had perfected his paradox: a fiction in which no plot moves forward, because to act is to be complicit. "The more you struggle and push back through enticing an act, the more you submit to the farce of social order," as his characters imply. "Better to sit back and enjoy the sunshine." Born in 1913 to a wealthy Syro-Lebanese family in Cairo, Cossery emigrated to Paris at 17, where he remained for the rest of his life, living most of it in the same small room at the Hotel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He published seven novels and one collection of short stories (Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu), and one collection of poetry (Les Morsures, no longer edited) over six decades - always in French, but with a vocabulary so infused with Egyptian vernacular that scholars like Frédéric Lagrange have debated whether Cossery was writing in "Arabic disguised as French." "His language," Lagrange observes in his seminal essay 'Albert Cossery écrit-il arabe?', "has an imaginative syntax that feels Egyptian, even though the words are French." His characters speak in certain metaphors, their insults drenched in the improvisational sharpness of Cairo's tongue. Yet the literary establishment placed him squarely within the French canon, if only on its margins. "He erases almost any historical reference point to his novels," Polverini adds, "and this refusal is telling. His work is not Egyptian in the historical sense, nor French in the cultural one. His settings are not necessarily depictions of a certain place but stylized archetypes of power, sloth, and futility." If Camus's Algeria was a tortured pentimento of colonial guilt, Cossery's Semi-Mythical Cairo is timeless in its corruption. In Cossery's 'The Lazy Ones', a family of aristocrats idle away their days in a decaying villa, each finding new ways to avoid work, responsibility, or even thought. The characters of 'The Lazy Ones' live this credo to the letter. They have no ambitions, no goals, not even real desires. And yet they are not entirely unhappy. Their inertia is almost erotic, their indolence bordering on a mystical state of grace. The conflict, such as it is, revolves around a character named Serag's half-hearted attempts to break out of this life of idleness. He briefly thinks about joining a political movement, tries to seduce a woman, considers starting a business, but every time, his own cynicism defeats him. The family's shared philosophy always pulls him back into inaction. In the end, nothing changes. The family remains in its comfortable bubble of laziness, detached from the city's wider poverty, oppression, and political turmoil. The villa, like their existence, quietly rots in the sun. "At first glance, it seems like political satire," Polverini says. "But in truth, Cossery believed that nothing mattered enough to deserve struggle. His passivity was devoid of any care for ethics, because for him, even witnessing atrocities was not sufficient cause for moral indignation - he fosters a radical indifference that 'resolves' everything with unconcerned laughter.' Here lies the essential divergence from Camus. Both recognised the absurdity of existence: life's refusal to yield meaning, the universe's indifference to human suffering. But while Camus made this his moral starting point, proclaiming that rebellion is the only dignified response while Cossery took it as permission to withdraw entirely. "For Cossery, you exhaust yourself if you try to change anything," Léa remarked. "If nothing can be changed, one might as well enjoy the futile pleasures of life." And yet, Cossery's characters are not simple hedonists. They are ambiguous figures, convinced that their very refusal elevates them above the mediocrity they despise and mock. "They think by rejecting work and ambition they have transcended society," Polverini explains, "but in truth, they become trapped within their own inertia. They they simply play a different score of this very mediocrity they claim to escape." This ambiguity gives Cossery's work a strange resonance today, as younger generations confront their own version of paralyzed rebellion: the climate crisis too vast to reverse, late capitalism too entrenched to dismantle, political regimes too demonic to confront directly. The temptation of Cossery's passive nihilism, its chic disavowal, its knowing smirk, feels dangerously seductive. When Andrew Gallix profiled Cossery for The Guardian in 2008, shortly after his death, he called him a man whose lifestyle amounts to a "mummified existence", a self-styled voluptuous idler. In an era that fetishises hustle culture and productivity metrics, Cossery's contempt for work reads almost radical. But his idleness was not resistance in the sense that Camus understood revolt. For Camus, to revolt was to say yes to life despite its absurdity. For Cossery, revolt was pointless theatre. He shares with Camus the diagnosis, but not the prescription. There is also, unavoidably, the matter of colonial position. Camus, the French-Algerian, was forever implicated in the uneasy ambiguity of the pied-noir identity. His call for moral responsibility was deeply shaped by his own proximity to, and distance from, colonial violence. Cossery, by contrast, floated above these entanglements, neither fully Egyptian nor French, his novels intentionally dehistoricised, his characters too aloof to even notice the empire that encircled them. "In a way," Polverini suggests, "Cossery's refusal to name regimes or dates makes his work simultaneously timeless and irresponsible. Just the spectacle of human folly endlessly replayed. Over and over and over.' One might argue, of course, that Cossery's work offers its own kind of critique; a satire so brutal it refuses even the solace of moral engagement. His landlords are cartoonishly greedy; his revolutionaries, bumbling opportunists; his policemen, absurd caricatures of authoritarian stupidity. In 'Proud Beggars' (Mendiants et orgueilleux, 1955), the police inspector begs a suspect to confess, not to punish him but to "give meaning" to an otherwise pointless investigation. There is a certain grim comedy in this: the bureaucracy is so obsessed with its own rituals that it fabricates guilt simply to preserve its own sense of purpose. It is bureaucracy as metaphysical farce, a darker Kafkaesque echo filtered through the Cairo sun. Yet to linger only on Cossery's pessimism would overlook the strangely buoyant texture of his prose. His characters drift through corruption with a lightness that seems, at times, enviable. Life is so short. Why make it heavier with illusions of progress? Camus offers the ethics of resistance; Cossery offers the pleasures of defeat. Camus made this his moral starting point, rebellion as a dignified response. For Camus, the absurd doesn't mean despair or absolute nihilism. His famous formula (in 'The Myth of Sisyphus', 'The Rebel', etc.) is: once you recognise the absurd, you must live in defiant awareness of it, through rebellion, creativity, engagement. It becomes an ethical imperative to live fully despite the absurd. Cossery took it as permission to withdraw entirely but with nuance, not despair. Rather, they mock it, refuse to take part in its seriousness, and live lives of deliberate laziness, detachment, and ironic distance. Their withdrawal is both a personal liberation and a kind of passive rebellion, but not in the heroic or existentialist sense Camus proposes. In fact, Cossery saw inaction, indolence, and idleness as a superior response to the absurdity of oppressive power structures. One insists that meaning must be constructed, even if the universe is deaf; the other simply leans back and watches the spectacle collapse under its own weight. There is, of course, an unsettling edge to Cossery's serenity. "At some point," Polverini reflects, "his indifference risks becoming complicity. If nothing matters, if no atrocity deserves indignation, then at what point does passivity enable unmorality?" In 2008, Cossery died in Paris at the age of 94, still living in his tiny hotel room. And yet, as his novels quietly endure on the fringes of literary conversation, one suspects he maybe knew better.
Chicago Tribune
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘An Iliad' is back at Court Theatre, reminding us war never goes away
My personal history reviewing 'An Iliad,' the contemporary vernacular take on the Homeric epic penned by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare, has become my reminder of the ubiquitousness of war and human suffering. If you know the 90-minute piece, as extraordinarily performed at Chicago's Court Theatre by Timothy Edward Kane under the direction of Charles Newell, you'll know that its signature moment comes when The Poet, the one and only character, recounts at breathtaking speed a greatest-hits list of all the human conflicts since antiquity, the writers having left instruction in their script that this section should be kept up to date. The conceit here is that although The Poet is telling Homer's story of the final weeks of the brutal 10-year siege of Troy at the hands of a coalition of Greek city-states, and himself comes from that era, he also knows modern life. More simply put, he's like the Ghost of Wars Past, coming to warn those who fail to learn from prior human experience. You will not be surprised to know it remains a Sisyphean task. When I first reviewed this show, with this same actor, in 2011, the final word out of The Poet's lips was 'Afghanistan.' Court staged 'An Iliad' again in 2013. That time, it was 'Libya.' Wednesday night on the campus of the University of Chicago, it was 'Gaza.' I picked up my pen to note that maybe The Poet was falling fast behind. Especially by the time you read this, the final word probably should be 'Iran.' Maybe they will make that change. The other difference, of course, is the age of the actor playing The Poet; it has, after all, been 12 years. I haven't asked, but I'd imagine that Kane thought twice before he came back to this character; the actor is deeper into parenting now, and it seemed to me that the recounting of the human price of war was born this time more intensely of personal experience. But that might be in my head; it has been 12 years for me, too. And it could well be that Kane has come to terms with this being a career-defining role (he was widely acclaimed the first two times and the third time around is even better) and one that can be accessed at various points in his life. There was a discernible gulp from the actor as The Poet came up from wherever he lives between shows, but then Kane roared his way through the entire show. This time, I was struck by how well he caught the gestalt of the aging warrior back from an agonizing war, finding the clarity of thought that comes only with age and experience while still embodying the grunting, macho ethos that caused all of this chaos in the first place. Newell's staging, of course, has always had much to do with Kane's success, as has Todd Rosenthal's timeless scenic design. I'd probably say this was the career-defining piece for Newell, Court Theatre's former artistic director, too, although it has formidable competition within that particular career in artistic Chicago. What matters most here, and what makes this show a candidate for the best solo show in Chicago theater history, is that the telling comes at great cost to the teller. In most single-character monologues, the actor merely tells the story. But the point of this inspired take on Homer's 'The Iliad' (the Robert Fagles translation was the basis) is that the very act of recounting the story is so fraught, it competes with the drama of the war narrative itself. And the further point is that every telling gets harder, because it is a reminder of how humans refuse to learn. But The Poet sees it as a moral imperative. And a curse. I've no idea if The Poet will be coming back in future years to lament the latest wars and count once again the cost of armed conflict, be it ancient or modern, in sons, daughters, fathers, mothers. So I'd catch him now, just in case. But if he does, I don't doubt for a second there will be a fresh end to that inglorious list of glories. Review: 'An Iliad' (4 stars) When: Through June 29 Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Tickets: $100-$125 at 773-753-4472 and
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Yahoo
Horrid flight as passengers stuck on 32-hour trip to nowhere — and wind up right back where they started
It was quite the odyssey. Passengers endured a mind-numbing, 32-hour flight to nowhere after a Condor flight to Greece was forced to turn around and return home following multiple failed trips. The Sisyphean journey occurred on May 24 when Condor flight DE1234 was embarking on what was supposed to be a routine 1,198-mile flight from Zurich to Heraklion in Crete, Greece, One Mile At A Time reported. Despite departing around 30 minutes late, the flight appeared to be going swimmingly. After a short two hours, the plane began its initial descent to the idyllic Greek isle. Unfortunately, the aircraft's landing was hampered by powerful winds, which forced it to circle around for a prolonged period before the pilot decided to divert to Athens and refuel. They touched down at the Greek capital at 11:24 a.m. local time — three hours after they'd originally departed Zurich. Around two and a half hours later, the crew made a second attempt to ferry the 137 passengers to Heraklion, only to be boomeranged yet again. The weather conditions were still quite severe. After circling around again, they decided to divert to Kos, a nearby Greek island, to refuel, landing at 3:28 p.m. after a 1.5-hour flight. As the aircraft was once again running dangerously low on fuel, the decision was made to divert to Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, which the crew felt was a good place for the passengers and flight attendants to spend the night. They reportedly touched down at 6:04 after an approximately one-hour flight — a whopping 11 hours after they'd initially left Zurich. The following day at 9 a.m., the crew decided to make one last attempt to get to Crete, but found themselves in a holding pattern yet again due to the wind — like de ja flew. Again, they were forced to divert to Athens, whereupon the crew decided to call it quits and fly back to Zurich, arriving a full 32 hours after their initial departure. Condor reps said that 'due to extreme weather conditions and strong winds, takeoffs and landings at Heraklion Airport were only possible to a limited extent.' During the fruitless journey, they had reportedly landed a total of five different times. To make matters worse, flyers were only given a glass of water and nothing else during the whole flight while many passengers vomited during the approaches to Heraklion because of the powerful winds. Upon arriving at Thessaloniki, meanwhile, flyers were forced to float their own hotel rooms, although they are entitled to reimbursement under European aviation guidelines. This isn't the first time passengers have experienced an inadvertent round trip. Last June, British Airways passengers flew for hours across the Atlantic Ocean — only for the plane to turn around and return halfway through their trip due to a technical issue.
