Greece: Day 3

Bryan sitting at the Thessaloniki train station waiting for our train to Athens

Part of the waterfront of Thessaloniki

Rose garden at yet another church

Reading the guidebook, again

The White Tower of Thessaloniki - apparently the Turks did bad stuff here when they took over things so the Greeks whitewashed it to erase the memory of the atrocities... how friendly.

Inside the "Little Aya Sofya" which didn't look anything like the original. I know. I live by the original

Outside of the Little Aya Sofya with it's one remaining minaret

The oldest church in Greece

Very large candles for very big prayers

We arrived in Thessaloniki on the train at 5:30 in the morning. At this point, Bryan had closed his eyes for about 20 minutes in over 24 hours, and Hannah had slept about for about three hours. Needless to say, we were both pretty tired and as we walked out of the train station - we had no where to go and not much of a plan. We walked past a bakery open miraculously early at 6 am and Bryan was so delirious he thought he smelled maple bars (later it was confirmed they didn't exist).

We finally found the hotel we were looking for, but they only had one room until noon. We decided if we went to sleep now, which is all we wanted to do, we wouldn't be able to wake up by noon. So we wandered around badly signed Greek roads past Roman ruins and finally, after some delusional-translational confusion, we managed to find somewhere to sleep for the next few hours.

Refreshed around noon, we ran around Thessaloniki on LP's walking tour - mostly seeing some old churches, some older churches, and some ridiculously ancient churches. We spent some time looking for a ferry office to try to catch a ferry to the islands. We found out they all left that night, Friday night, and that was the only time that week.

Thwarted, tired, and starving we wandered our way into a street fish and chips shop. The waiter came out and started speaking so fast in Greek it was hilarious. He quickly figured out we were completely clueless, sat us down, and just said, "two pieces?" So he brought us out a newspaper sized piece of wax paper, LOADED with a mound of the greasiest french fries I have ever seen in my life (if you picked them up, the grease would run down in streams) and two huge pieces of fried fish. Now, Hannah doesn't eat fish, as a general rule, but she was so hungry she managed to eat most of half of one piece and she stopped eating not because she couldn't eat any more fish, but because there was so much oil and grease in it everything had clogged up. We had to walk a fair bit after that meal and it was the first time we couldnt' finish all the food we'd gotten.

The next morning, we woke up and walked to the train station, to find that trains to Athens were packed until late evening, so we bought some cheap tickets and wandered off to figure out what else there was to do in Thessaloniki (answer: not much). Every single museum in Thessaloniki was closed that day. We did meet up with the waiter of yesterday, and he offered us sodas, but otherwise we didn't do much. We had managed to make hostel reservations for Athens, the first prior planning we'd done all trip. (Big progress!)