Hotel Amalia Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki was an interesting city… It was our first stop in Greece. Aside from the Greek language written everywhere and a few ancient ruins in random places in the city, I really wouldn't have known I was in Greece. Thessaloniki is a really big city, with tons and tons of clothing stores and cafes everywhere. There are also mass amounts of people everywhere. Many of the sidewalks were full of people trying not to bump into each ...

Hallo zusammen

und viele Gruesse aus Thessaloniki in Griechenland. Billigflieger fliegen selten in die ehemaligen Ostblockstaaten, daher sind meine zwei Fluege hier nach Thessaloniki in Griechenland und zurueck von Dubrovnik in Kroatien (an der Adriakueste, die sieht recht viele ...

We got back to Thessaloniki and we were going to have to spend the day there as the train out to Istanbul did not leave until the evening. Our expectations for the day were low based on our previous experience but we actually ended up having quite a good day!

We walked along the water front and saw a massive blue jelly fish which was quite exciting before heading to a pier that contained a few interesting museums and ...

We arrived in Thessaloniki from Macedonia late in the evening and as there were no trains continuing down to Athens that evening we were forced to spend the night.

We stayed in the cheapest place we could find which was probably a bit of a mistake as the bedroom floor was sticky (thankfully it smelt of beer) and vefore we checked in what can only of been a prostitute came and took the "concierge" away for 5 minutes to sort out some business :s

The most exciting ...

May 22nd .We awoke to see the caravan site in daylight covered in snow like fluff from the trees, everything including our van had fluff attatched to it. We had seen this before in Italy at the superbikes and around Milan but here it was thick and spectacular. I don't know the name of the of the trees shedding their seed pod fluff balls but it must be a pain to tidy up after every day. We packed up and left as this ing Friday there were few swimmers. site was resort style ...

... minutes to departure a bloke approached our seats and flashed a badge at the man next to me, who promptly produced a Turkish passport and some tedious looking paperwork. Greeks and Turks have been bitter enemies for centuries, the Greeks lost Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 and were under Ottoman Turk domination until 1830. I looked down the carriage and saw several other Turks being treated in a similar way by the Greek authorities. Exactly ...

... for a nice dinner and Curtis and I started talking about what we were going to order (the menu was at the front desk when we checked in with all of today's specials) we both agreed on the spaghetti as the remaining 15 items were rather weird. Just as we were talking about our upcoming meals, the waiter handed us some strange appetizer. We were both a little confused and just thought okay, maybe they give you a sampler? So we tasted the (what we later learnt) Spinach pie...not bad ...

... the overnight train to Thessaloniki. The train. Trains in Greece are pretty undesirable to say the least. I think they concentrate too much on ferries and neglect their trains. This being said, we opted out of "couchettes" (as we were under the impression that those were reclining seats and not beds), and just bought regular tickets. Big mistake! There were two trains leaving within an hour of each other, ours was the later train. The first train was the "couchette" train ...