It's All Greek to Me

I attempted to rouse myself at 3am in London to get ready and checked in for my 7am flight to Thessaloniki, Greece. Talk about an early morning. Or was it a late night? I'm not sure which timezone I'm in right now. I made it to the departures counter on time to get my boarding pass, traverse through security and then wait for 1.5 hours until the gate number was listed on the monitors. At the London Gatwick Airport, gate numbers aren't assigned until 1/2 hour before the flight leaves. This only served to make me nervous that I might not be able to get to the gate in time if say it happened to be 95 and at the far end of the terminal. Easyjet doesn't wait for you to show up if you are late. All part of the no frills, inexpensive policy. Lest the suspense stress you out, I did make it to the gate on time though only half awake.

I slept most of the way through the flight though some guy a row back talked non-stop all the way there. Customs went well and I managed to find the bus ticket booth. The one slip in the plan was I took the wrong bus into town. On the bright side, I discovered there is an IKEA in Thessaloniki. Yea for international symbols! Didn't think I'd see one of those here. Once the bus circled back to the airport, I got on the right bus and headed toward town. The only trouble was that the stops called out on the bus didn't match anything in the map in my book. I kept looking for landmarks, but nothing looked familiar. Eventually I got off and wandered into a motorbike shop. One of the guys spoke enough english to help me figure out that I was about 10 minutes from where I wanted to be. All in all, not too bad for not being able to read what the signs said fast enough. One moment in life when I can say "Thankgoodness for Greek class." I can't speak much, but at least I can read it. I wandered around the area where the hostel was supposed to be, but no luck in finding it. There were about 10-12 other hotels along the street, just not the one I wanted. I did manage to find one that was close to my price range. The lady who checked me in was very helpful. She gave me a more detailed local map and told me about a nearby internet spot.

Since breakfast at 3am, I hadn't eaten and was a bit low on blood sugar and water. Once I got up to my room (no elevator and two flights of about 10 stairs each) I downed some water from the sink and remembered I had some chocolate covered cookies in my bag. Now that my brain had some energy to work off of, I decided to walk to the train station to find out which train would be my ticket out of town. I ate some mousaka, beans in a red sauce and salad at Sofi's House restaurant. I'm not sure exactly where the internet place was the hotel lady was trying to direct me to, but there's a Starbucks across the street with 2 hours of internet with a purchase.

And so the adventure goes on to explore the other sights of Thessaloniki and beyond.