Airmail letters from the mainland take three to seven days to reach the rest of Europe, five to twelve days to get to North America, and a bit longer for Australia and New Zealand. Generally, the larger the island (and the planes serving its airport), the quicker the service. Postal rates for up to 20g fall within the normal EU range: ¬0.60 for postcards or letters to Europe, ¬0.80 to North America or Australasia. For a modest fee (about ¬3) you can shave a day or two off delivery time to any destination by using the express service ( katepígonda ). Registered ( systiméno ) delivery is also available for a similar amount, but proves quite slow unless coupled with express service. If you are sending large purchases or excess baggage home, note that parcels should and often can only be handled in the main provincial or county capitals. This way, your bundle will be in Athens, and on an international flight, within a day. Always present your box open for inspection, and come prepared with tape, twine and scissors - most post offices will sell cardboard boxes, but nothing to actually close the package.

For a simple letter or card, a stamp ( grammatósimo ) can also be purchased at a períptero (kiosk). However, the proprietors charge ten percent commission on the cost of the stamp, and never seem to know the current international rates.

Ordinary post boxes are bright yellow, express boxes dark red, but it's best to use only those by the door of an actual post office, since days may pass between collections at other street-corner or wall-mounted boxes. If you are confronted by two slots, "ESOTERIKÓ" is for domestic mail, "EXOTERIKÓ" for overseas. Often there are more: one box or slot for mail into Athens and suburbs, one for your local province, one for "other" parts of Greece, and one for overseas; if in doubt, ask someone.

The poste-restante system is reasonably efficient, especially at the post offices of larger towns. Mail should be clearly addressed and marked "poste restante", with your surname underlined, to the main post office of whichever town you choose. It will be held for a month and you'll need your passport to collect it.

Phones
Making telephone calls is relatively straightforward, though the OTE (Organismós Tiliepikinoníon tís Elládhos, the state-run telecom) has historically provided some of the worst service in the EU. However, since the mid-1990s this has improved drastically, and rates have dropped dramatically, under the twin threats of privatization and competition from thriving local mobile networks.

All land-line exchanges were supposed to become digital ( psifiakó ) by 2002, but you may still encounter a few pulse-analogue ( palmikó ) exchanges. When ringing long-distance on such circuits, you must wait for a critical series of six electrical crunches on the line after dialling the country or Greek area code, before proceeding.

Call boxes , poorly maintained and invariably sited at the noisiest street corners, work only with phonecards; these come in four sizes - 100 units, 200 units, 500 units and 1000 units - and are available from kiosks and newsagents. Not surprisingly, the more expensive cards are the best value in terms of euros per unit. Despite numbers hopefully scribbled on the appropriate tabs, call boxes cannot be rung back; however, green, countertop cardphones kept by many hotels can be rung.

If you won't be around long enough to use up a phonecard (the cheapest is about ¬3), it's probably easier to make local calls from a períptero or street kiosk . Here the phone may be connected to a meter (if not, there'll be a sign saying móno topikó , "local only"), and you pay after you have made the call. Local, one-unit calls are reasonable enough (about ¬0.15 for the first three minutes), but long-distance ones add up quickly.

Other options for calling include a bare handful of counter coin-op phones in bars, kafenía and hotel lobbies; these should take small euro coins - probably five-cent, ten-cent, twenty-cent and fifty-cent denominations - and, unlike kerbside phone boxes, can be rung back. Most of them are made in northern Europe and bear instructions in English. You'll probably want to avoid making long-distance calls from hotel rooms , as a minimum one-hundred-percent surcharge will be slapped on.

For international ( exoterikó ) calls , it's again best to use kerbside cardphones. You can no longer make metered calls from Greek telecoms offices (the OTE) themselves - most keep daytime hours only and offer at most a quieter cardphone or two. Like BT Phoneshops in the UK, they are mainly places to get Greece-based service (including OTE's own mobile network Cosmote), pay your bills, and buy one of an array of phones and fax machines for sale. Faxes are best sent from post offices and some travel agencies - at a price; receiving a fax may also incur a small charge.

Overseas phone calls with a 100-unit card will cost , approximately, ¬0.40 per minute to all EU countries and much of the rest of central Europe, North America and Australia - versus ¬0.28 per minute on a private subscriber line. There is no particular cheap rate for overseas calls to these destinations, and dialling countries with problematic phone systems like Russia, Israel or Egypt is obviously rather more. Within Greece , undiscounted rates are ¬0.16 per minute on a subscriber line, rather more from a cardphone; a twenty-percent discounted rate applies daily from 10pm to 8am, and from 10pm Saturday until 8am Monday.

Charge-card call services from Greece back to the home country are provided in the UK by British Telecom (tel 0800/345144, www.chargecard.bt.com ) and NTL (ex-Cable & Wireless, tel 0500/100505); in North America, Canada Direct, AT&T (tel 0800/890 011, then 888/641 6123 when you hear the AT&T prompt to be transferred to the 24-hr Florida Call Centre), MCI and Sprint; in Australia, Optus (tel 1300/300 937) or Telstra (tel 1800/038 000), and in New Zealand Telecom NZ (tel 04/801 9000). There are now a few local-dial numbers with some providers which enable you to connect to the international network for the price of a one-unit call, and then charge the call to your home number - usually cheaper than the alternatives.

Mobile phones
Mobile phones are an essential fashion accessory in Greece, which has the highest per-capita usage in Europe outside of Italy - in a population of roughly 11 million, there are claimed to be 6.5 million mobile handsets in use. There are three networks at present: Panafon-Vodafon, Telestet and Cosmote. Calling any of them from Britain, you will find that costs are exactly the same as calling a fixed phone - so you won't need to worry about ringing them when given as alternative numbers for accommodation - though of course such numbers are pricey when rung locally. Coverage countrywide is fairly good, though there is a number of "dead" zones in the shadows of mountains, or on really remote islets. Pay-as-you-go , contract-free plans are heavily promoted in Greece (such as Telestet B-Free and Panafon-Vodafon À La Carte), and if you're going to be around for a while - for example, studying, or working for a season in the tourist industry - an outlay of ¬90 or less will see you to a decent apparatus and your first calling card. This lasts up to a year - even if you use up your talk time you'll still have an incoming number, along with a voice-mail service. Top-up calling cards - predicted to be in denominations of ¬6, ¬15 and ¬18 depending on the network - are available at all períptera .

If you want to use your home-based mobile abroad , you'll need to check with your phone provider whether it will work. North American users will only be able to use tri-band rigs in Greece. Any GSM mobile from the UK, Australia or New Zealand should work fine in Greece.

In the UK, for all but the very top-of-the-range packages, you'll have to inform your service network before going abroad to get international access (" roaming ") switched on. You may get charged extra for this depending on the terms of your package and where you are travelling to. You are also likely to be charged extra for incoming calls when abroad, as the people calling you will be paying the usual rate; discount plans are available to reduce the cost of forwarding the call to you overseas by as much as seventy percent. If you want to retrieve messages while you're away, you'll have to ask your provider for a new access number, as your home one (or one-stroke "mail" key) is unlikely to work abroad.

In terms of call charges , experience (and examining UK-based bills) has shown that the local network that you select out of the three local networks makes little difference: depending on the length of the call, chat back to the UK (including voice-mail retrieval) works out at £0.49-55 per minute; ringing land-lines within Greece is £0.23-0.26 per minute; and calling Greek mobiles ranges from £0.30 to 0.43 per minute - all significantly more than using a cardphone, but worth it to most for the convenience and privacy.

Email and internet
Email and internet use has caught on in a big way in Greece; electronic addresses or websites are given in this guide for the growing number of travel companies and hotels that have them. For your own email needs, you're best off using the various internet cafés which have sprung up in the larger towns - street addresses are given where appropriate. Rates tend to be about ¬4.50 per hour maximum, often less.

Ideally you should sign up in advance for a free internet email address that can be accessed from anywhere, for example YahooMail or Hotmail - accessible through www.yahoo.com and www.hotmail.com . Once you've set up an account, you can use these sites to pick up and send mail from any internet café, or hotel with internet access.

Alternatively, you can lug your own laptop around, not such a burden as they get progressively lighter. You will need about 2m of North American-standard cable (UK ones will not work), lightweight and easily purchasable in Greece, with RJ-11 male terminals at each end. The Greek dial tone is discontinuous and thus not recognized by most modems - instruct it to "ignore dial tone". Many newer hotel rooms have RJ-11 sockets , but some older ones still have their phones hard-wired into the wall. You can get around this problem with a female-female adaptor , either RJ-11- or 6P6C-configured, available at better electrical retailers. They weigh and cost next to nothing, so carry both (one is sure to work) for making a splice between your cable and the RJ-11 end of the cable between the wall and phone (which you simply unplug). You will usually have to dial an initial "9" or "0" to get around the hotel's central switchboard for a proper external dial tone.

Compuserve and AOL definitely have points of presence in Greece, but more obscure ISPs may also have a reciprocal agreement with Greek-based ISPs like forthnet.gr and otenet.gr , so ask your provider for a list of any available dial-up numbers. Piggybacking charges tend to be fairly high, but for a modest number of minutes per day, still work out rather less than patronizing an internet café.