June 15, 2010
Day 2 Athens-Thessaloniki-Turkey
We woke up pretty early, around 08:00 to get some free breakfast. Waking up was hard after coming into the hotel around 03:00 the night before. After grabbing a simple, but good breakfast in the completely empty breakfast room, we headed to the train station to find out if we could get to Istanbul, Turkey. After a tricky conversation and being sent back and forth between windows, we ended up buying tickets to Thessaloniki. Trevor ran to get some food while I read, waiting for our train. It was super hot, so it was nice not moving around. The train arrived and we left at 10:50. The ride was uneventful. At first there was a guy sitting across from me, but he moved to another seat and Trevor and I ended up with four seats between the two of us. We got in to Thessaloniki around 16:00 and went straight to the line to try and get tickets to Istanbul. First we found out there was a problem with the train so there was no train to Istanbul, but there was hope. There was a bus. We headed to the next window that we had been directed to, this time found out the train was destroyed and we were given info to take the metro to a square to buy bus tickets to get to Istanbul and the lady wrote it down (using the Latin alphabet). When we went to buy metro tickets, I asked the guy where the metro was. He laughed and finally explained that this (the bus depot) was the "metro" and that they would have a real metro in 10 years. He told us which bus to take to get to where we wanted and we headed over. Being silly, I didn't bother to ask the driver to tell us when to get off and we ended up missing our stop and walking over a kilometer back. At least the walk was along the water. The view was nice, but the walk was HOT HOT HOT! We finally made it to the place (with Trevor's excellent sense of direction), and after much discussion, bought the tickets to Istanbul. We had a bit of time so we wandered a little (not too much, because we were cooking) and ended up in Goody's, a fast food joint, where we grabbed dinner and hung out. They offered beer with their meals, so of course we ordered a beer. We sat and chatted for a couple of hours until it was time to head over to catch our train. We had to be at the bus at 21:30. We got there early and hung around and finally bordered the double decker bus (so cool!) that would be taking us to Turkey. We changed our seats at the start so that we could sit at the front of the top level (to watch out the front window), but headed back to our seats soon after because we knew they would be taken at the next stop but didn't know when that would be and I was too anxious to stay. We were served tea on board, an unexpected pleasure. All the seats had their own screen/TV, also nice, unfortunately ours didn't work. No worries, I ended up finishing one of the books I brought along. After finishing, I tried to fall asleep, but very soon we were at the border. We were told to unload. We got our exit stamps from the EU and headed back onto the bus. I started to settle in when we stopped and were told to unload again. This time, the Americans and Canadians were sent to a different area and we had to purchase a visa. Apparently a Canadian has to pay 3 times as much for the visa! We bought the visas and then back to line up so that we could get an entry stamp into Turkey. Finally we got back into the bus (it was close to 02:00 at this point) and we got to fall back asleep. It was quite warm on the bus, so the sleep was not as pleasant as it could have been.
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