Around The World – Kavala, Greece
My goal on this leg of the trip is to stop for one night in Kavala, Greece which is on the highway from Thessaloniki to Istanbul. I have sufficient days in hand before I get my flight home.
Waking up in Thessaloniki, I packed up and Nikos gave me a lift to bus stop. Thanks again to Nikos and Silvia for a great visit and all of the above-and-beyond assistance. I don’t know if I will come back to this part of Greece again but if I do I will definitely stay with them, one of my best hosts.
At the bus station we discovered that the 1 PM express-2-hour bus is cancelled due to a farmer blockade of the road. Oh those pesky farmers! I got a ticket for the 2 PM local-3-hour bus. They must have decided to step on it and we arrived in just 2 hours at 4pm, we didn’t encounter any problems with the farmers along the way.
Previously I had quite a bit of back and forth messaging with my host, he offered to pick me up but he was busy with something when the bus was scheduled to arrive. I rolled from the bus stop, across the waterfront and up to his address but I can’t find his “house”. I asked in a shop, they pointed further up the street. I asked a girl on the street and she pointed to a big apartment building, not a house. I walked up the steps to the apartment to discover 2 entrances, one had no markings and one was marked “22” – that’s me. I message my host – what floor do I go to, what apartment number do I knock on and got no reply. Well shit.
After a while a lady from the aforementioned shop walked up and she recognized the host from his Airbnb profile on my phone, he’s a local policeman. She says he lives in the other entrance, the one with no markings. Another man walks up, says he lives on the same floor as the policeman, and he will take me up. We go up and I knock on the door and the host’s mother lets me in. I’m home at last! Airbnb Host Pro tip, which I may have mentioned before… Give complete and accurate directions on how to get to the front door of your place when I make my booking. It makes for a bad first impression if I’m standing on the street a quarter of a mile away, you don’t respond to my messages and I’m asking little girls for directions.
The mum serves me her homemade plum liqueur and chocolate which were delicious. The host arrives, he was taking a logistics class at the local university. He says he used to be in the riot / special forces police in Athens but gave it up to move back here to his hometown and be a regular traffic cop. From what I’ve seen of the riots in Athens, I don’t blame him.
I rest a bit then walk into town for dinner. With the sun down, it’s brutally cold, with the wind off the sea driving below freezing wind chill. I find a restaurant and have roasted feta with tomatoes and pepperoncinis, fried zucchini slices and tzatziki and a local beer called Fix. A lady with Down’s Syndrome sat down across from me, apparently this is her regular table. The staff tried to wave her away but of course I said it was OK and she stayed in her seat for a while.
My host messaged me to come to a bar with his friends. He gave me the name of the bar but no directions. See a pattern here? I found the address online and walked in the cold into town, under the magnificent Roman aqueduct and to a square where the bar definitely was not located. I asked a nearby policeman and he pointed me back exactly where I’d been. I found it eventually and my host showed up. We had a beer there then we went to another very crowded bar where his friends were. Thankfully it was non-smoking inside and a live band was playing – sax, keyboard and a singer doing Greek oldies. At midnight on the dot literally everyone started smoking inside, which is either OK by the law or just nobody cares.
Now imagine this scenario: incredibly crowded and noisy bar, 5 people standing around a small table, speaking to me in English with heavy Greek accents. One of the women looks at me and says “Are you gay?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but trying to be ultra-cool I say “No, I’m not gay.” Her mouth drops open and she says “I asked ‘Are you OK’? I’m so embarrassed!” I said “Ha, it’s OK, don’t be embarrassed. Gay – no. OK – yes.” So that made for a good laugh all around. Not sure what kind of vibe I was giving off. Maybe she was confused by my self-diagnosed Resting Bitchy Face. At closing time we took my host’s car the whole half mile back home but it helped to keep us out of the freezing wind. I prepped for the bus ride to Istanbul in the morning, and fell asleep.
Surprisingly, Kavala is a really cute little town built in a natural amphitheatre shape on a hillside down to the sea and in hindsight I should have stayed another night to explore the huge-walled old city.
