Nearly half of Athens’s population has run for cover and fled the city, and those who’ve stayed have little choice but to embrace the Olympic madness. It’s mostly the 30-and-younger crowd that’s still here, and in a display of altruism that even the mayor said was completely out of step with national stereotype, 160,000 of them have signed on to work as unpaid volunteers – in addition to holding down their regular jobs in many cases.

Sonya, a new friend of mine, leaves home every day at 3:30 a.m. to go to the television station where she’s a health correspondent for a morning news program.When her program wraps up at 10 a.m., she comes to the Olympic press office, where she fields questions from abusive English journalists. Sonya’s colleague Stella has also packed in two jobs this summer – she’s an attorney who’s also working pro bono in the Olympics press office.

They both stay at the Olympics office until 9 or so at night, at which point they take off to get ready for parties that often don’t get started until midnight. This leaves me to draw the conclusion that young Athenians are past the point of not getting enough shuteye. They must not get any at all.

Good thing I’m still stuck in the New York time zone, rising at lunchtime and staying on my toes until 4 a.m. At 9 the other night, Stella the lawyer found me hunched over my computer, and told me it was her friend Nikolas’s birthday, and his girlfriend Evelyn was throwing a surprise party for the occasion. Stella had to race to the bakery and pick up cakes, but I was welcome to meet her outside the Ethniki Amyna metro station at 10 o’clock.

As promised, Stella and her cakes were waiting for me in her little silver Volkswagon. She drove hastily, saying she was worried we’d get there too late for the surprise part.

The party was at Evelyn’s parents’ house, which is also Evelyn’s house. It’s customary for unmarrieds to live at home here, and Evelyn, a doctor in her late 20s, is no exception. Her family lives in a large house in the posh, olive tree-lined suburb of Kifisia. We arrived there to find a very agitated Evelyn and 20 of Nikolas’s friends milling about the pool and munching on pistachio nuts. Inoffensive techno music was playing on a portable stereo and somebody had propped an 8-foot-tall teddy bear on the outdoor table. The civilized atmosphere was occasionally interrupted when Evelyn would order us to crawl into bushes and practice jumping out at Nikolas.

We were expecting him at 10:30, but it wasn’t until a quarter past 11 that the birthday boy called to say he was still 15 minutes away.

Given that he had been told he was going out to a dinner a deux with Evelyn, I wondered if the late start time might give him cause to suspect there was something fishy in the air. “Dinner at midnight?” I said to a newfound friend, George. “He must know there’s a surprise party.”

“No,” George, a dentist, replied with a slightly patronizing chuckle. “In Greece, it’s whatever you want, whenever you want. Dinner at 6 o’clock? Okay! Midnight? Okay! Three in the morning?” he tilted his head at me expectantly.

“OK too?” I ventured shakily, unfamiliar with the Socratic method.

He looked happy to see I was such a fast learner.

The birthday boy was in fact very surprised when all his friends burst from the bushes. He laughed and laughed, all the while greeting the guests with kisses – men and women alike. Evelyn and her mother lugged the bear away and set the table with mounds and mounds of food – cheese souffles, sausage-filled puff pastries, potato salad, and meatballs. Stella’s sister, Myriam, grabbed at my elbow as I was loading up on seconds and told me that it was time we hit the road. “I’m bringing you to a beautiful nightclub on the sea.”

Most of the fashionable nightclubs in Athens are in the Kolonaki district downtown, but due to the acute summer heat, a handful of open-air “summer clubs” on the south side of the city have filled their shoes for the summer.

On the way south, Myriam zoomed into the lane that’s reserved for Olympic traffic (it’s a free-for-all from midnight to 6 a.m.) and made a pit stop to pick up two of her friends, Nikola and Evie, both Olympics volunteers. Nikola is posted in the main Olympic hub, where she’s on hand to help people with their cell phones. Evie works in the Faliro Coastal Zone Olympic Complex, where she has the excellently titled job of “ambush marketer.” She’s responsible for making sure that all the logos on the venue’s walls and the athletes’ clothing are those of sponsoring companies, like Coke or Adidas. “It’s gotten much easier,” she said. “At first we had to remove everything.” She sounded exhausted from the memory of it.

The club was a perfect mix of lily-white lounge chairs, slender twentysomethings, and obsequious waiters mincing about, balancing silver trays over their heads. Evidently it was the brainchild of some anal-retentive night-club developer who believes the words “lifestyle” and “chill” actually reflect life’s higher meaning.

Some clubgoers were reclining in the main, wall-less building, but most people had chosen the outdoor pool area. Myriam explained the pool is put to use on Sundays, when people come to sunbathe and listen to the afternoon DJ.

Myriam’s male friends had already arrived, and were seated at a reserved table. Arranging ourselves in sex-segregated colonies around the table, we ordered mixers and a bottle of vodka that had enough for one drink each. Slowly draining our rations, we remained in our spot for hours, occasionally standing up to dance ever so slightly. There was almost a professional sense about the atmosphere, as if we were on an early morning film shoot for a scene that’s supposed to take place at a glamorous nightclub at 4 a.m.

The club was not without its weird touches. A stroll to the other side of the patio revealed a strip of sand where clubgoers could dip their toes in the Aegean Sea. A trip to the bathroom turned up a toilet seat fashioned out of full pink roses trapped in transparent red plastic. On my way back from the bathroom, I stumbled into an all-white room with tiny sculptures of sea creatures in sealed-off glass cases.

When I returned to our table, Stella, her boyfriend Niko, and George had shown up.The girls and boys were still in separate clusters, and, like the rest of the clubgoers, refraining from drinking too much or chatting up strangers.

Come 3:30, the local rap hit, Nikos Vourliotis’s “You are such a jerk” came on the loudspeakers, and Myriam declared it was time to move on to the next venue. I was ready to call it a night, and said I’d get a taxi.

“No, you can’t do that!” exclaimed Myriam. “You’re with me and I’m going to take care of you. In Greece it’s not nice for a girl to take a taxi home by herself.”

“Why? Isn’t it safe?” I questioned.

“Of course it’s safe. That’s not the point,” she said, proceeding to arrange for a ride home with Stella, Niko, and George.

Pulling up outside my building, they waited until my door snapped shut before motoring off to wherever it is one goes at nearly 5 in the morning.

I didn’t get a chance to speak to Stella the following day, but I witnessed her racing about the press center, looking far fresher than the pink roses in the toilet seat.