Day 8 – Thessaloniki

Today I left the Holy Rock at 8 to take the train from Kalambaka further north to Thessaloniki in Makedonian Greece. To show my appreciation for this amazing hostal I left something for Kostas, the owner of the place:

The train left extremely punctual and also arrived punctual although it went in the wrong direction for about half an hour. It was the only direct train there is – and included one change… It didn’t matter, it’s just difficult to understand. I did the journey with a Korean girl from my hostel who had the same itinerary and we passed through green landscape with snowy mountains to one side and sea or olive tree fields on the other.

I arrived in Thessaloniki at noon and went to a hostel in the old town on the top of a steep hill and went back down after a while to explore the city.

Maybe it was because of my general mood today but I really didn’t like Thessaloniki. I found it to be a very ugly city. There is an incredible amount of very nice Byzantine churches everywhere (I counted like 25 of them and the city is not very big…) and they are immediately surrounded by shabby 50s and 60s architecture:At some point I felt like I just wanted to go to the shore and see the sea but that wasn’t a very fulfilling experience either. The more interior parts of the city seem extremely poor and not very beautiful, the shore on the other hand is pretty touristic (with 90% of the tourists I saw being Germans) but still not beautiful. Immigration is extremely present but I cannot distinguish between nationalities or languages yet (I guess many Syrians).All in all, this city seemed to be a little preview of what is expecting me in the Balkans. It felt like being in a different country, even a little bit like the middle East.

The hostel I am staying in is not as comfortable as the previous ones but I spent a nice evening with the other guests and the volunteers working here. It actually turned out that one of the girls who are volunteering with Workaway is from Saarbrücken and has been living in San Sebastián for one month (what are the odds?!).

I think I am not giving Thessaloniki a real chance and I feel sorry about it but I really feel like I don’t want to be here and have decided to move on tomorrow morning. I think my impression could change if I stayed a little longer and explored the old town and did a guided tour to understand the history of all this a little better but I’m following my instincts and crossing the border to Macedonia (FYROM) tomorrow.

From now on, everything is going to be a little more complicated. I don’t know if the life-saving internet on my phone will work and I won’t have the commodity of a common currency anymore. Already here in Thessaloniki I noticed how people generally didn’t speak English anymore, how I felt a little less safe and that I didn’t find anything to eat. Apart from that, I have missed out on learning any Cyrillic and feel like that will make my life a lot harder.

The only means of public transportation that crosses the border to Macedonia, which still has a complicated relationship with Greece because of the continuing fight over the name Macedonia, is a bus which will take me directly to the capital Skopje.