Greek hospitality and weirdness with trains

[matgb]

Well, I've been having a blast do far. This may be partially due to a struggle paying for *anything* whatsoever, at one point Arne (my German friend/roommate) and I tried to pay for a meal as a thank you; Manolis told the waitress something in Greek, she refused our money and took his credit card.

8 nights here, I've paid for the hotel for only 3 of them; "we insist!" Incredibly friendly people, and I've made some more good friends, as well as meet a few people I've only ever been in contact with via e-mail before. Yesterday in Thessaloniki, we met up for coffee and a snak, then Angelo and Vasilis insisted on cooking me a real Greek meal (without the meat, which they still don't understand) for 'lunch' (Greek time, we ate lunch at about 4pm). Very (very) nice, then we went to a cafe where they have a selection of games (Very cool, even a greek translation of Carcassone), the rest of the group slowly arrived, we went on to a restaurant and had another meal (they're all really skinny, but boy do they eat, no idea where they put it all).

Then I went to catch the overnight train. Except I couldn't; it was full. I'm assured this is unusual in Greece, but both it and the next train were full with Turks travelling to Athens for some event, so Konstantinos insisted on paying for another night in the hotel, and buying the first available ticket to Athens the next morning.

I took out 200 euro at the airport when I arrived, I still have 50 of it left. So, off to find something to spend it on in my last night in Athens.

I am so glad I came; didn’t see any of the sites of Thesaloniki, but saw a lot of the bars.

Hope everyone out there in Cyberspace is OK; I arrive back into Luton airport tomorrow night, then it’s the long coach journey home...

[edit: put the font back into western encoding, don't know what happened at the net cafe...]

Comments

[sinju.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun!