Thessaloniki Again

Trip Start Jun 01, 2008
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Trip End Jun 30, 2008


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Friday, June 27, 2008

A slow morning in Thessaloniki.  As it turned out, too slow.  We slept in, did laundry, grabbed a late breakfast, walked slowly to the Archaeological Museum, sat in the cafe for a while and cooled off (which was complicated by the fact that the AC in the museum was off) and finally entered the first exhibit around 1:30 pm.  We were just leaving that one when we learned that the museum would be closing for the day at 3 pm!  We'd trusted the guidebook that the summer hours of the museum were from 8 am to 7 pm, but unlike elsewhere in Greece, these hours don't start until July 1.  So we rushed through the Alexander the Great exhibit (which was fortunately not all that large) and then zipped through the Macedonian Gold hall.  Time ran out and we still hadn't seen half the museum!

Sitting outside the museum afterwards, we decided that we'd half to re-arrange our schedule once again.  We'll get up early Saturday morning to see the rest of the Museum before we head back to Edessa.  But we'll have to get up early; it's only sleep after all.

So suddenly we had an entire afternoon ahead of us.  We enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch at a cooled restaurant on the waterfront and then decided to head back to the hotel to enjoy the coolness, to rest and to get caught up on blogging.  We've now mostly done that.

Again we went for a late dinner and again we went back to the Ouzou Melathron: it's just so entertaining and the food simultaneously Greek and new, in many cases a fusion with other cultures.  We'd just begun to eat our salad when a small thunderstorm hit, one which had threatened all afternoon.  We grabbed our food and darted into one of the inside spaces associated with the Ouzou Melathron.  We could have stayed outside, though: the thunderstorm yielded hardly any rain and, in any case, the awnings opened automatically all at the same time.  The musicians didn't even miss a beat.  But we stayed put, enjoy the somewhat quieter setting.

Soon we came back to the Amalia, remembering that we needed to get up early Saturday, um, today.  But I'm plagued by fly bites tonight and find it hard to sleep.  I never got a single bite last time I was in Greece and, in just the last day, I acquired over a dozen.  Hazards of hanging around fruit trees at harvest time.  It looks strange to Canadian eyes to see fruit being picked at the end of June; in Canada, fruit is ripe in October!  On the other hand, the fruit is currently abundant, sweet and juicy.  Oh my.. Bronze of Phillip II near the museum
Bronze of Phillip II near the museum
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