Hey everyone...we made it. After a long trip of around 23 hours of travel we made it to Thessaloniki, Greece. We had one layover in Chicago and another in Dusseldorf, Germany. I guess I don't know my German geography but I didn't even know dusseldorf existed. I was thinking the first step...get some Gyros...I mean Euros. We hit the hot tarmac at around 4:30 greco/roman time and talked to the info desk and found that there was a camping place near the beach, we took a bus to the nearest town and were supposed to take a taxi the rest of the way.
We have had a little trouble reading the signs as they are almost all in Greek (mostly symbols and nothing similar to the english equivalent) it is a fun game- saying I wonder what all of these signs say. In retrospect I should have brought my decoder ring. The point is that we got off at some wrong bus stops and were finally heading in the right direction with the help of an old man that did not speak any english. We have noticed that most of the older people don't speak much English. We decided to start walking towards the beach since we found no taxis. It ended up being a narrow road and greek drivers are a little scary after about an hour of walking a pickup pulled over and offered us a ride in the back. Great sucess! He drove us about 10 minutes further and Melica commented that "I hope our health insurance covers dangerous sports". He stopped at his fruit and vegetable stand and started up a broken conversation. His english wasn't great but the first thing he asked was "where are you from? Germany?" We told him America, and he told us he does not like America or Britain only Swedish...I didn't know exactly where this conversation was going but he must have seen that we were hot and tired and he told us to sit down on his couch. He offered us some fresh Honeydew melon and cold water. We chatted with him and his two buddies for almost an hour. Only one other person stopped and they were heading the opposite direction. We thanked him for his help and headed on our way to the beach. We got to the camp site about a half an hour later. It was pretty nice, close to the ocean and some good shade. We set up our tent and headed for the water. Hopefully, the salt water washed away a bit of the jet lag.We then had dinner. I had the "special meat" which was a fetta stuffed burger and melica had a mixed salad lots of olives, tomatoes, cucumbers and feta. Today we woke up pretty early and started back on the road towards the bus station. We hadn't gone very far at all and we were offered a ride by a nice british guy and his greek wife. Good luck again. We then took the bus into the heart of Thessaloniki and walked around, checking out the old churches and ruins. We are now sitting at an internet/gaming cafe with a bunch of greek geeks playing World of Warcraft in a small villiage of Litithoro, at the base of Mt. Olympus. We plan on starting out early tomorrow, hiking to a mountain "refuge" and spend Friday night there. All is good.
We're not speaking the same Language
