Θεσσαλονίκη - Χανιά

Hello! It's been a while since I've written anything as I was trying to save up all my Greece stories and photos for when we finished travelling around Greece. As it turns out that's actually a lot to cover! But here are the places in Greece I've been to and what I thought of them:

THESSALONIKI
Thessaloniki I didn't get much time to see as I was just there for a night in between Sofia and Athens. As a result, the guy at the desk of my hotel suggested that the best way for me to see the city in my few afternoon hours would be to take the city's tour bus. I waited for the bus for an hour, learnt about "Greek time", enjoyed some Mediterranean Herb flavoured chips and realised that you feel pretty old seeing a city through the window of the bus (at least when that thought crosses your mind of, "hey, I'm kind-of seeing the city but I don't have to walk around!"). All up, I enjoyed walking along the waterfront to get to the bus the best!



ATHENS
Athens took a long time to get to due to trains running on "Greek time" and when I got there it wasn't what I expected. I'd heard a lot of stories from fellow travellers about how Athens was dodgy and dirty: but what I saw was clean, white, sunny (til Jenny got there!) and awesome. I ended up really loving Athens, tying with Heraklion as my favourite place in Greece I visited! On the day before Jenny got in I climbed Lycabettus Hill, the tallest hill in Athens, where I could see for miles and miles, and then walked around the National Gardens which were also really cool. As mentioned, Jenny and I then did a lot of sightseeing in the rain which dampened our clothes but not our spirits! We didn't end up making it to the National Museum that day due to unexpected metro delays (ie. an entire section of the track being missing), but we did have some brilliant kebabs, possibly the best kebab I've ever had! According to the bag they came in, the place we chose had been around since the 20s, which was a fortuitous "next kebab place we see we're getting one". A good choice!

In Athens I also took the opportunity to do ridiculous things like this:


(reference point)

MYKONOS
Mykonos was also not what I was expecting! I hear that Mykonos is some kind of "party island", but when we were there we didn't see any of this famous "party". Instead our pension was in a quiet, beachy area and when we headed to the main town it was also not too crowded. This was a good thing! It meant my first impression of the Greek islands was a pretty chilled out and peaceful one. We'd mainly headed to Mykonos as a means of getting to Delos, which we did indeed get too and this was very, very cool. I couldn't get over the fact that a) they've preserved the ruins of almost an entire town and b) that they've managed to keep the island free for the archaeologists to work on it. I was expecting a small site by the port, not realising that an entire town really means a lot of ruins! We rambled around it for a good couple of hours and it was good fun.



SANTORINI
After two nights in Mykonos we had two nights in Santorini. Santorini I will remember for what seemed like a particularly crazy day! We'd planned on: heading to Fira, the main town, which was close to our pension and then heading to Oia to see the sunset, something which is apparently good to do. After wandering around Fira for a bit I had a great idea - to walk to Oia! Looking at the map, I enthusiastically suggested to Jenny this would be "at the most" a 40 minute walk and would save us a bus fare. Woops! Turns out it takes 2 hours. On the walk there we picked up a mysterious dog companion which walked with us for probably over an hour and practically led us to Oia. It was walking ahead of us most of the time and kept looking back to make sure we were still following. Thanks, Dog! We made it to Oia, checked out the nice houses, and then found our "good spot" for watching the sunset. Luckily we headed there early as it turned out this was a lot of people's "good spot" for watching the sunset!

So on one side you've got this peaceful view:


And on the other side this:


After watching the sunset we had a great plan to catch the bus back to Fira, go for dinner and head back home. Surprise! Even though this was peak tourist time because everyone had gone to watch the sunset, there wasn't a bus for an hour. We sat in a cafe near the bus station with not enough jackets, tried to nurse espressos for as long as possible to fight off the cold and then realised that the TV was wackily showing a countdown of "Top 5 breast grabs". Some were from movies, some were from real life. They should expand that and make it a 20 to 1!
By the time the bus finally came a good number of tourists had accumulated who wanted to catch it. At first I was concerned that we wouldn't all fit on the bus. No worries! After they'd filled up all the seats they stuffed us into the aisles, until the bus was completely packed with squashed in tourists. The bus then proceeded to make its speedy way back to Fira around precarious Greek road bends. It was genuinely a very crazy, and very scary experience. Legs felt a little bit wobbly when I stepped off that bus and felt thankful that I'd survived. The wine was extra good when we finally made it to a taverna for dinner.
My evening then concluded its craziness by being invited up to the bedroom of our pension owners - they had concluded I was a technical person and wanted me to fix something on the internet for them. I ended up composing an e-mail to hostelworld, being patted on the back lots by George whilst the wife was hanging around in the bed nearby. All up, a strange day.

HERAKLION
After Santorini we headed to Crete with no idea of where to stay in Heraklion - a surprisingly big town that has surprisingly no internet presence. We were very relieved to find out a place we'd read about in Lonely Planet had cheap rooms and turned out to be pretty good! It had a very jungly rooftop bar. Heraklion was kind-of like a mini-Athens and turned out to be one of my favourite places we went to in Greece for that reason. Whilst there we headed to Knossos, where I didn't see any minotaurs but did enjoy making fun of Arthur Evans and seeing the ruins. After Delos I was expecting a bigger site, forgetting that a 'palace' (loose term) compared to a town would be much smaller. Still great, anyway!

CHANIA
Chania was our second stop on Crete and was also good. We took our time wandering around here as we'd planned to head to the Samaria Gorge but it was already closed for the winter, so we had heaps of time to see the town.
Here is a sad story from Chania! We found a t-shirt shop which sold a lot of cool internet-style shirts, where I found a shirt that said DOS and had a picture of a record on it. Oh man, best fake Exit to DOS shirt ever! But they only had it in XL! Ahh, sad times!

I ate lots of tasty Greek food and downed Mythos beer, retsina and ouzo, though I've got to say that the moussaka and pastitsio I had were not as good as Mum's, and the Greek beans I had were not as good as Dad's. Tasty food but after a few tavernas I do miss home cooking! Also, there was a fly in my pastitsio. I picked it out and tried to pretend I didn't see it because that was one of the better taverna meals I'd had to that date! Jenny and I frequently chose places based on Greek Salad Index, ie. the price of their Greek Salad on the 'extortionate to surprisingly reasonable' scale. The best things I had were veal giouvetsi, and another awesome veal dish from a slightly Turkish-influenced place that was a tomato, raisin and pine nut stew with tons of Greek yoghurt on the side. Tasty stuff! We also had a surprisingly good run of getting free shots of spirits and desserts from our last few tavernas. Hooray!

I've been working on uploading my Greek photos - I've got a lot so there's still a few to come! But for now you can see them here (and I'll add more to the same album hopefully soon)
For anyone who's looking at Jenny's photos as well as mine - surprise! We have heaps of similar photos. You have been warned!

Travelling with Jenny has been going good so far, although she did ask me:
"Can you play any musical instruments?"
A friend indeed!

We've now succesfully made it to Rome where it turns out our arrival has coincided with the Rome International Film Festival! So here are some famous people who will also be in town whilst we're here: Martin Scorsese, Shah Rukh Khan. I should invite him to Venice so we can celebrate our birthdays together!
We're definitely hoping to make it to at least one film in the film festival, ideally the Burke and Hare screening with introduction by John Landis, though it's quite possible tickets have already sold out. Hopefully we can get into something! I will break out my fancy "jumper" again.

You know what's crazy? All of a sudden it's less than a week til my birthday. How did that happen? But in awesome news, Ben and Alicia from Vodkatrain are going to be in Venice at the same time and me and Jenny, so all of a sudden my birthday's going off! I hope there are one or more of the following in Venice for the big day: catacombs, vampires, speedboats.

We have 5 nights in Rome before then, which is the longest I've spent in one place for a long time, possibly since Munich. Lots of time to try and learn to, as they say, be Italian!