Around The World – Thessaloniki, Greece
My goal on this leg of the trip is to cross the Adriatic Sea to Greece and then go overland to the northern city of Thessaloniki.
In the morning in Bari, I packed up and put my bags in the hallway. My host isn’t home so I left a note explaining the situation that I’m going for a walk around the city and will come back and get my stuff in the afternoon then go to the ferry.
I walked in a new direction today, east to a boundary with an industrial area of the city. I had some hot chocolate and spotted a “Penny Market” where I picked up some snacks for the ferry. I also saw a solar array on some building roofs just to the south so I walked down to check it out. There are a series of military warehouses, all covered in solar, way to go guys!
I bought a takeaway pizza lunch called the “Disco lunch”, not sure why. It was a good size margarita pizza, fries and a Coke Zero for E5.50, pretty good price. I brought it back to the Airbnb and my host was home and we discussed my final travel plans. When it was time, he called for a taxi for me, picked me up in 3 minutes and, for what I discovered when i was dropped off, a “fixed price from old town to ferry” of E12 I arrived at the ticket office. Screw it, with the wind and cold and the wheels ready to fall off my suitcase it was worth it.
I went inside to the SuperFast ticket desk and was helped by a wonderful lady who spoke English quite well, despite her protests. My free ticket price was E12, all in taxes, and it got me an “aircraft seat”. With my first class Eurail pass I could have had that or a “dormitory bed”, but of course this ship doesn’t have any dormitory beds. I spotted a sign that explained a two day strike has been called but it will starting be a day after my trip so two thumbs up for lucky timing on my part.
I rolled outside and went up to the building marked “Passport Control.” There were two guys inside but the automated doors wouldn’t open. I knocked on the door and pointed to the door like “How do I get inside?” They waved in a “go around the building” motion so I did. I walked towards the ferry and into a small security building where my passport and ticket were visually checked but in no way was this a formal border crossing with a computer check and passport stamps. It’s not required as I’m going from Italy to Greece within the EU but it still feels weird to me. My bags and I went through a scan and I rolled onto the ship. This is where things started to go downhill.
At the reception desk they pointed me to the seating area. I walked in to find about 200 large and padded seats and settled on one along the wall in the back row with a power plug. I noticed it was colder in here than in the rest of the ship but paid no attention. I set up my cabling and bought a whole-trip Wifi pass for E5. My laptop connected with no problems but the cell phone kept getting an error with the authorization process. Not a big deal I was still close enough to shore to get a cellular signal and with the laptop connected it wasn’t really necessary.
I watched some videos and we pulled away right on time. Within an hour or so it became uncomfortably cold and I went to the reception desk to ask them to turn on some heat. Two people behind the desk – one said right away “Cannot fix” while the other said “I will check with engine room.” Hmmm. I walked back inside and could feel a significant temperature drop. There were two truckers sitting near me, with a grand total of about 10 people in the whole room. I made a shivering-mime kind of motion, they both pointed to their double-blanket beds on the floor, this is clearly not their first trip through. I had on a shirt, a hoodie sweatshirt and windbreaker, pants, two pairs of socks and shoes on and I was still cold. I tried to lie down across a row of 5 seats but the cold was seeping into my bones. I think I slept for about an hour but woke up shivering. I walked out to the restaurant area and some warmth and had a bad sleep on a padded seat until the docking announcements came on at 5:30 AM. That really sucked, free or not.
Slightly warmer but brain and ears buzzing from lack of sleep I packed up when the first announcement about approaching the harbour came through. I then heard an annoucement for drivers to go to their vehicles. Then no more than 5 minutes later I heard an announcement saying ferry leaving in 5 minutes. Yikes, I sprinted down the hallways, down two sets of stairs and off the back of the ship into the dark. I was OK in the end, 20 or so trucks rolled off after I was on land and then the ship raised the deck and left. It must have been stationary for no more than 15 minutes.
So, this is my welcome to Greece and the mainland city of Igoumenitsa! Luckily there is a modern terminal building right there so I walked inside and found a cafe that was open at 6 AM. I got a hot chocolate and with 3 hours to burn until my bus ride to Thessaloniki, I found power and Wifi and watched videos. I also spotted a massage chair and after the night I just had, it was the best Euro I ever spent.
Surprisingly my SIM card was working here in Greece, the International plan must have kicked in. I rolled about half a mile across the waterfront to the bus station. I bought a ticket for E37, a bit steep for a 4 hour ride I thought. 5 minutes before departure we loaded in our bags and hopped aboard. The bus was only about 25% full so I had a 2-seat to myself. I reclined my seat and immediately fell asleep. I woke later to find ourselves in some seriously high, craggy and beautiful snowy mountains, not what I was expecting at all. The highway seemed new with dozens of tunnels cut through to make a more or less straight shot from the coast towards Thessaloniki. The road goes across the top of the Greek mainland, less than 50 miles from the Albania and Macedonia borders. I noticed a lot of farming tractors parked along the side of the road in several places and later I saw on the news that this was the pre-staging of a highway-blocking protest about tax hikes and pension reform. Glad I got through the day before!
Along the way I spotted multiple solar arrays and even a “Go Solar” message painted on the cooling tower of a power plant. I don’t know if it was a protest message or the power company trying to buy some sympathy.
We rolled into the bus station at the western edge of Thessaloniki. As I disembarked I saw a young man holding a piece of paper with my name on it. This was my host Nikos who did me a huge favour of a pickup rather than another expensive taxi ride into town. Nikos took me on a bit of a tour through the city, past the waterfront and showing me Roman ruins everywhere. We got to his place and triple parked of course. Here parking is a nightmare and everyone puts their phone number on a piece of paper under the windshield. If you come out and someone is blocking you, you call them and in 5 minutes you’re on your way. Since everyone at some time will be a blocker or blockee, the system works.
Nikos and Siliva are great hosts and we had a talk about the city sights and pointed them out on a map. We discussed Greek and Euro politics. Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, behind Athens. Due to wars over the millennia, land has changed hands many times leading to the united Greece we have today, although there is still a lot of north vs. south animosity. Politicians went as far as to name Thessaloniki the “co-capital” of Greece just to placate the folks up here a bit.
We also discussed the safety situation in Istanbul. They have friends who live there and will contact them to ask about safety of being in the city after the recent bombing. The European attack pattern seems to be attack one place then go somewhere else so I hope Istanbul is finished for now and my last few days before the end of the trip will continue to be safe. Nikos came up with a list of possible places for me to visit, including a 5 hour bus ride up to Sofia, Bulgaria, which is actually closer than Athens.
Still feeling the effects of the ferry and bus, I went to sleep for 4 hours in the afternoon with 2 blankets and full heat from the radiator. Oh, just what I needed.
Around 6:30 PM I went for a walk down to the waterfront, across to the west and back up. I was looking for a sit-down Greek food restaurant to start my stay in Greece on the right foot. As with the rest of the world, everything is a bloody coffee shop or a no-sit-down fast food joint of some kind. Please, if you have an idea for a food or drink place, don’t open a coffee shop. Seven of them in a row is quite enough. Offer something that nobody else has. Maybe a good-quality local food specialty place, the kind of place tourists are looking for to get the local food experience. Happily I did find a place and the owner had an English menu and everything. Greek is about as readable to me as Thai so it was definitely appreciated. It all looks like complicated mathematical formulas. I had tzatziki, bread, a slab of feta cheese with olive oil and a roasted eggplant with tomato chunks and even more feta cheese. These are all appetizers because all of the main meals had some kind of meat. I ate all I could and brought about half of the tzatziki and half of the feta home with me for breakfast. I stopped at a local shop and got a liter of pineapple juice.
I watched videos until I felt it was time to go to sleep, but due to my huge nap, I didn’t fall asleep until about 4 AM. It’s OK though, nothing to do but walk and eat tomorrow.
I woke up at about 11 AM after the late night. I wrote up journal entries for the trip since Palermo and posted on Facebook.
Tomorrow my 2 month Eurail pass expires and I’m not travelling on it today, so it’s time to retire it. I took close-up pictures of each page and brought it with me on my walk. The Eurail people have an offer if you mail it back, they send you a “gift.” I’m not sure what the gift is, but it must be some kind of commemoration of your journeys.
At about 3 PM I walked over to the ruins of the ancient Roman Forum, then straight down to the waterfront through the parks and pedestrian path. The clouds are low and grey, cold at 3C, feels like a dull Canadian winter day with snow on the way.
I found a post office and went inside. The back side of the Eurail pass has a self-addressed and no-stamp-required face, so I showed it to the clerk to confirm I didn’t need a stamp. Yes, she said, it’s fine. I then pantomimed the need for a bit of tape to seal the folded pages up but they don’t have any there. I went next door to a bookshop and found a small roll of scotch tape for E1, taped it up and dropped it off back at the post office.
I stopped in for a hot chocolate along the waterfront which turned out to be E4, wow won’t go there again! I followed the waterfront to the right and walked a few miles down to the small yacht club. A dozen or so fishermen were trying their luck. I saw one man pull in a fish that he had accidentally hooked in the tail and everyone laughed but he certainly kept it. I cut two blocks inland and then walked back into the city center.
It was 6 PM and I was getting hungry but I also had the idea of finding a showing of Star Wars, so I used Google Maps to find all of the cinemas downtown. The first three were small and showed only Greek films but the Odeon had Star Wars, in English, in 3D, in 45 minutes! Woo hoo! I bought my ticket, then found a small shop where I had a pita bread stuffed with tzatziki, tomatoes and thick round french-fried potato coin-shaped things. Back to the theater and watched the film. It was well done, but it was hard to live up to all the hype.
In the morning, I realized tomorrow is my last day here so I need to figure out which path I’ll take to get to Istanbul. There are a few possibilities. First, I can take a 10 hour bus ride directly east through Greece, across the Turkish border and into Istanbul. I can supplement this with a stopover in a town called Kavala. I can take ferry from Kavala to Lesbos and then across to the Turkish mainland, or a bus or ferry down to Athens and then a ferry across to the west coast of Turkey at Izmir, then by bus up to Istanbul. I’ve only got 9 days left and I don’t want to spend them travelling long, out of the way paths. I’d rather get to Istanbul, book into my last place and use it as a base to explore the city and the surrounding area.
I walked outside to find a bright and sunny day, but still damn chilly. I went just over to the Roman Forum to where my hosts were selling the family olives out of the back of their pickup truck. I was happy to see they got quite a bit of foot traffic. Looking across to the Forum archeological dig, they said this used to be a big concrete area and bus stop. In the 1960s the city decided to build a new city building there and when excavation began, they found the ruins. The building project was abandoned and the site was excavated. This is actually an issue in this part of the world, you start to dig and find something ancient. Do you abandon the project and lose the property or do you quietly cover it up and continue?
In my discussions with my host Silvia, she told me she has a PhD in Computer Engineering from Milano. Her fields are high performance computing and embedded systems. She worked in Washington State in America at a US government research site. She was writing plugins for gcc to produce firmware for supercomputer clusters – my geek friends will understand. The pay was good but she didn’t like the environment – everyone was forced to publish papers, either of their own work or that of others in some cases, stretching out a small advance in the state of the art into a series of papers just to increase numbers. The battle for funding was never ending. In the end she quit and moved here to be with her boyfriend. Unemployment is rampant in Greece and they make a living by doing Airbnb, selling olives and doing the books for a friend’s restaurant. Not much call for PhD supercomputing experts in the country…
The friend I just mentioned walked past and we talked about the situation in Istanbul. I was hesitant to spend much time there due to the recent attacks but this man goes there regularly and said that security is normally quite high with metal detectors at tourist sites and police and army patrolling the streets. He’s going again next week without hesitation. This makes me feel better.
I walked west through the city towards the train station. As I got near, I spotted a shop called Crazy Holiday and believe it or not they sell tickets for one of the largest bus companies in Greece. I went inside and spoke with the two staff members and after going through all of my options, I decided to take the bus two hours to Kavala, stay overnight, then take the bus 8 hours to Istanbul. This gets me where I need to be, by the most direct route, and where I can relax and enjoy the area rather than racking up more hours and miles. I booked the Kavala to Istanbul bus ticket with them, I’ll buy my Thessaloniki to Kavala ticket right at the bus station tomorrow when I’m leaving.
With my travel plan locked in, I walked south to the waterfront and into an area dense with restaurants. I spotted a shop with pita sandwiches so I went in and found the waitress spoke excellent English so I got one with tzatziki, tomatoes, cucumber and french fries. Again, the fries came wrapped up in the pita which makes it awkward to eat, so I shook them out onto my plate and ate them separately.
As I walked along I came across a series of power tool stores so I had to go in and check them out. One place had a line of Chinese tools that had the exact same shape and color scheme as DeWalt. I bet they even came out of the same factory.
I walked across the waterfront to the pedestrian walkway leading back north to the Roman Forum so I went home to rest for a while. I discussed my travel plans with Nikos and Silvia and asked if they had a way to print out my needed Turkey tourist visa. Yes they could, so I went online and filled in the form and E20 later I had the PDF. I emailed it and they came back later with the printout. Funny, on my whole trip the only two places I needed to apply for a visa before arrival were Australia and Turkey. I also went onto Airbnb and booked one night in Kavala and 8 nights in the Sultanahmet neighbourhood in Istanbul, the old city on the European side of the Bosphorus where the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar and the Hagia Sophia are located. These are the tourist hotspots and with the extensive public transport system I’ll easily be able to go anywhere.
At 8 PM I walked out and tried to retrace my steps to the traditional Greek restaurant I found the first night and I found it! I had the same tzatziki and slab of feta cheese but got a roasted half eggplant with sundried tomatoes, red peppers, feta and balsamic vinegar. Yummy.
Tomorrow, a short bus ride to Kavala.
