In Athens it's All Greek to Me

As usual, I suggest scanning through to edit the following blog for young readers.  There are some minor references to drug use around day three/four, but other than that it’s pretty tame I think.

Greece was one of the first countries where I didn’t really know what to expect.  I had a vague idea of what to see, what it was famous for etc. but in terms of the feel of the place I was coming up blank.  Greece’s recent appearances in the news hadn’t been positive, so I was concerned I would find myself in a country slowly falling apart under the weight of its own financial woes, with public services difficult to impossible to manage.

I needn’t have worried.

DAY ONE

As usual we start where we left off, and this time we left off with me feeling mightily relieved to have managed to make it onto a boat heading for Patras, the Greek port that I needed to get to on my way to Athens.

As I mentioned before, it was a cargo ferry that happened to offer passage to tourists as well.  The majority of the passengers were grizzly Greek truck drivers, and they stayed up for a little while before heading to their company-bought cabin room.  Being the cheapskate that I am, I had just paid for deck passage, which was almost completely covered by my rail pass (I still had to pay port dues and a fuel surcharge).  Deck passage allowed me to sit on the deck for the entire overnight voyage.  Fortunately the deck was quite a pleasant area, with a bar, restaurant, lounge and baggage area.  There were also some airplane-style seats, though it was my impression that you had to book these in advance.

I spent the first few hours sitting in the corner worried that I would go into the wrong place or use something that my cheapskate deck passage ticket didn’t cover.  After a while it became pretty apparent that the staff didn’t give a toss what you did, so I dumped my bags and went to the restaurant.

An Australian girl and American guy who I had seen getting on the boat were already at the restaurant, so after collecting my food (oriental meatballs… though they weren’t ball-shaped) I went to join them.  Only they were already having a conversation, and as I approached and awkwardly stood behind the American guy, the Aussie girl glanced at me.  I got ready to make my introduction in the gap in conversation that was sure to follow, but she just continued.

I kind of stood there for a moment, knowing I had been pretty clear about my intentions to join them, but also recognizing that I had been snubbed.  Sensing that the opportunity was lost, I sat at the table beside theirs, back to them, and eavesdropped on their conversation.  I had assumed that they were a couple of some kind, and therefore wanted to be left alone, but a few minutes of listening in told me they had only recently met one another themselves.

As they began discussing their intentions to go and have a nap, I saw a final chance and got up, stood by their table and introduced myself.

The girl’s name was Athena, and the guy was Peter.  They were on their way to Athens as well – Athena had been planning to visit for a while, and Peter had met her at their previous hostel in Rome and been persuaded to join.

After only a short conversation the topic of how to reach Athens came up.  I told them that I was going to be taking the replacement bus service, since the train line from Patras was being repaired or renovated or something.  Then Athena dropped the bombshell.

She had heard on the grapevine that the Greek public transport union had organized a strike for the next five days.  I knew about the ferries, but ALL public transport?  This changed things.  I was a little dubious, as I didn’t think even the Greeks would initiate such a wide-spread and inconvenient strike without some kind of announcement, but I had to recognize the possibility that Athena was well-informed and that my journey in Greece would be even more stressful and challenging than the one in Italy.

I had some time to mull over this, though, since the ferry would not reach Patras until 1:30pm the next day.  We went and stole a few of the airline seats in order to sleep (no-one seemed to care, so I have to conclude that we weren’t breaking any rules by doing this).  I managed to catch some shut-eye serenaded by some Greek film that was playing on the room’s TV about an American kid who is kidnapped by some kind of Greek crime syndicate and has to overcome cultural boundaries to become some kind of leader for them.  Or something.  It was in Greek, so didn’t make a lot of sense, though I know it was called The Greek Godfather.

At around 6am we had a brief stopover at Igoumenitsa.  They made it very clear that we had arrived there, with numerous announcements over the PA system and ferry staff walking around ensuring that everyone who needed to get off did so.  This would have been very handy had I actually wanted to get off, but as it was I wanted to get some sleep.  For a good half hour period, though, sleep was basically an impossible prospect.

It wasn’t long before the sun was up after that, so I left the airplane seats, had a quick breakfast from the restaurant and went outside to watch the scenery.  The water was beautiful, and on either side of the boat great mountains rose up.  In order to reach Patras, the ferry had to travel along a stretch of sea that was bordered on the north and south by Greece, so it was a pretty good view.

I had taken advantage of the time on the ferry to have a bit of R&R and had been putting out of my mind the prospect of travel to Athens.  As the boat pulled into port, though, my lack of preparation hit me, particularly when I got off the boat and realized the port was, in fact, nowhere near the actual city of Patras.  Hell, I could barely work out how to get out of the port area (Athena and Peter went in one direction toward a car exit, but I noticed a building and went there instead).  In the end I saw a bus and walked to it, as did everyone else, assuming that it had to go into the city since… where else would it go?

Not only did it go to the city, it went to the main bus station.  Large signs proclaimed that buses to Athens would leave every fifteen minutes.  Perfect!  Only the bus I needed was the one organized by the train company, not the bus company.  And it was supposed to leave every two hours.  I couldn’t work out which buses fell under my pass, so approached the information booth to find out.

Upon seeing my pass, the lady at the info desk pointed at a blue bus and told me that it was the one I was after.  I thanked her and checked the bus.  It was the bus back to the port.  She had thought I wanted the bus for the ferry.  Bugger.

The bus station was a small, grubby building filled to the brim with people, particularly young soldiers for some reason.  A chaotic scrum led to the ticket desk.  The buses would pull up right beside the building, three at a time, so people kind of just spilled out all over the road with no clear indication of which bus was going where.

Also, everything was written in Greek.  Most languages you can get by.  Greek is not one of those.  Place names are vaguely recognizable if you’re lucky and you already know what it’s supposed to look like.  Good luck buying a ticket when you don’t even know how to pronounce the words displayed.

By this point we had kind of concluded that the bus on our pass probably left from the train station, seeing as it was a replacement service for the out-of-service train line.  Not really wanting to have to go through the hassle of finding the train station, we just bought the earliest ticket to Athens that we could find (fortunately all the ticket sellers spoke basic English, far superior to our Greek).

Other than the quite spectacular scenery, with mountains on one side and ocean on the other (unsurprisingly reminiscent of Greek mythology) the bus ride was fairly unexceptional.  I kept falling asleep and, since I had no idea how long the bus was supposed to take, I would wake up and think we weren’t even close.  Peering out the window at one point I assumed we must be in the Corinth area.  Then I saw a sign announcing our entry to Athens.

It wasn’t quite as I expected.  It was actually quite spacious – we were still driving along what appeared to be a motorway.  The street was lined mostly with industrial buildings, so it felt a bit like the outskirts of Brisbane or any Australian city for that matter.

It didn’t take long before it was revealed that we were, in fact, on the outskirts of the city.  Unfortunately this was revealed by the fact that we arrived at the bus station, which was basically a shed on the side of the road.

The hotel that Dad had booked for us (I did mention that Dad was visiting for the weekend, right?) was on Syntagma Square, which was in the same basic direction as Athena and Peter needed to go.  I wandered vaguely towards something that looked like an information desk, which unfortunately took me right up to the taxi rank.

“You need a taxi?”

“Oh… not really.  I’m just trying to work out where I am.”  Stupid thing to say.

“Where you trying to go?”

“Syntagma Square.”

“Oh, ok.  About seven kilometres away.” 

SEVEN KILOMETRES???

“You could catch bus, then other bus, maybe two euro, take about thirty, forty minutes.  Taxi, most it will cost is ten euro.”

I was very aware that it was starting to get dark at that point.  Catching buses at night is hard enough when you know where you’re going, but being in a new city, trying to figure out the correct stop when you can’t even sound out the letters on the signs – well, let’s just say that for the first time on this trip I was seriously considering just taking the taxi.

I went back to the others and filled them in.  They agreed that, between us, ten euro was not a bad price to ensure we made it safely before nightfall.

We headed back to the taxi driver, who waved us to the front of the queue.  At the front of the queue, the lead cabbie said, “Syntagma Square?  For three, twenty euro.”  We called bull, saying the other guy had said ten euro.

“For three?  Twenty.”

Seeing as a taxi service that increases in price as the number of passengers increases kind of defeats the purpose, we went over to the bus stop.  The list of stops for each bus was written in Greek, but luckily the guy at the counter could speak some English.  For 1,40 euro each he gave us a ticket for the bus and metro we would need to take.  He explained that the last stop of the bus would get us to a metro station, from which we could easily get to Syntagma Square.

On the bus, Athena was trying to figure something out.

“I was told it wasn’t safe to go on a particular square, especially at night.  I’m not sure, maybe it wasn’t Syntagma.  I think it started with ‘O’.”

The bus stopped on a narrow little street that looked pretty much the same as every other narrow little street.  Everyone got off.  The engines turned off.  Looked as though this was the end of the line.

We got out and had a look up the street.  Then a look down the street.  Then a look around the street.  No metro station.  Balls.

We approached the driver.  He couldn’t speak English, but I suspect ‘metro’ is universal, particularly when accompanied by a ‘vvvhwwwooooosh’ noise and a wriggling hand motion.  He directed us up the street and left, so we went that way.

The metro station appeared about two blocks down – Omonia Square.

“Oh, that’s the name of the square I was told to avoid,” Athena said.  It’s probably worth mentioning that it was most definitely night time by this point.

We made a quick dash to the metro station and I made sure not to look too much like a tourist by dawdling around the metro map, but then realized the backpack probably gave it away and ended up studying it carefully for a minute.  Syntagma Square was two stops away.

Athena and Peter parted ways with me at this point, as they were better served by reaching a different metro station.  I promised to join them later on and headed directly for the metro.

The Athens metro is actually very good.  Having said that, it’s small.  I’m pretty sure it was built specifically for the 2004 Olympics and is still slowly expanding.  Probably even slower now. 

I only went about two stops.  The metro works on a kind of honour system – unlike other metros where you have to insert a ticket to be allowed in, in Athens they trust you to validate a ticket at the entrance to the metro.  Not wanting to contribute further to Greece’s economic decline, I did the honourable thing (plus I’d already validated my ticket on the bus anyway).

Arriving at Syntagma Square (something like two stops – I later discovered it was about a five minute walk away) I went into seek-my-hotel mode.  I have become used to hostels being extremely difficult to find, often just a door in an alleyway with the only indication being a small business card on the doorbell.  Walking out of the metro I was greeted by a gigantic sign that took up half the skyscraper in front of me that stated, in big clear letters: HOTEL ARETHUSA.

Well, that was easy.

I was pretty tired by this point, so basically went straight to bed.  Oh, that’s a lie, I washed my underpants.  Soon the room was nicely decorated with my soggy undies.  THEN I went to sleep.

Wait, no, then I was hungry (hadn’t eaten all day), so decided to go out and find something Greek.  And by ‘something Greek’ I of course mean GYROS!  I kind of walked down a couple of streets, not wanting to go far, when I found a little place that had a lot of locals inside and advertised gyros.  So in I went.  Unfortunately I took one look at the menu and went… oh bugger.  All Greek.

But hell, that just means it’s authentic, right?  So I went up to the counter.  Or I would have done if there hadn’t been two counters, one in front of the spinning meaty chunks and one at the cash register.  Everyone seemed to be paying first, so I went to the register counter.

“Is this where you order?”

The guy said something, which may have been in English.  I asked him if he spoke English, and, in keeping with the trend, he indicated a basic knowledge of the language.

I wasn’t sure what they had, since the menu wasn’t particularly helpful on that account, but I was pretty sure they had gyros, since the Greek for gyros is gyros (rather helpful that – though note that I’m fairly certain the ‘g’ is pronounced like a ‘y’).

“Lamb gyros?”

He didn’t seem to understand my order, which was admittedly mumbled rather incoherently and phrased more as a question than an order.  He just started listing the menu.  Unfortunately, lamb wasn’t on it, but pork was, so I got a pork gyros.

“Two euro twenty.”

Awesome.  I paid and he told me to wait at the other counter for my order.  So I did.

One of the ladies behind the counter spoke to me in Greek.  I smiled and shook my head.  “Sorry!  English.”

“Bah!” she waved an arm and walked off.  There was one other guy behind this counter, and he now came up to me and spoke in Greek.  I kind of stood there, a little unsure how to approach this, when the customer beside me offered his assistance.  I took it gladly.  It turned out I was being asked to repeat my order (had I known the menu a bit better, I could probably have said I had ordered something more expensive, since there was clearly no communication between kitchen and register).

Long story short I ended up with a pork gyros with everything.  It was delicious.  THEN I went to bed.

At around 2am my phone started ringing.  I have it on good authority that before this, there was a great deal of knocking on the hotel door, but I was pretty deeply asleep.  Anyway, there was a brief period of me kind of lying there going, “I wish that arsehole would turn his alarm off – some of us are trying to sleep.”  Then I realized I was the only arsehole in the room.  Then I realized that Dad was still to arrive.  So I picked up my phone and let him into the room.

It wasn’t long before I was unconscious again.

DAY TWO

ARISE, screamed Helios, driving his chariot through the sky.  So I did.  Dad was already up.  After a quick Skype attempt to Australia that kind of failed partly due to poor internet in the hotel and partly due to the fact that Mum and Katrina weren’t actually home we went down to breakfast.  A hot breakfast.  After a month of stale cereal, jam and yoghurt (and a lot of coffee…) you wouldn’t believe how nice it was to have soggy bacon, greying eggs and unusually gritty chipolata things in a somewhat lukewarm state!

After eating probably way too much, but also much less than most of the Greek guests, we went out to find some ancient Greek ruins – specifically the Acropolis!

Dad had downloaded some walking directions, so we headed off down the street, aware that it could potentially be some distance from the hotel, and might not be that easy to- Oh wait, no, there it is, just around the corner.

Yes indeed, walking down the street we rounded a corner and were stunned to see a very dramatic Acropolis on top of a very dramatic hill rising very dramatically into a dramatic blue sky.  We took a few dramatic photos (the first of many) and dramatically continued on.  See, despite the fact that we could see the Acropolis just ahead of us, we couldn’t actually get there directly because there were buildings in the way.

On our way around the buildings we accidentally stumbled across some more ruins, this time Hadrian’s Library.  We weren’t quite jaded enough at this point to turn our noses up at something as recent as Roman ruins, and as the site sold a combined ticket that included the Acropolis we thought: “Eh, might as well.”  So we did.

An adult ticket to the Acropolis plus six other ancient sites around Athens (most worth seeing) is twelve euro, for international students the cost is six euro, and for EU students the cost is nothing.  That’s right, if you have a student card and an EU passport (or an identity card issued by an EU university… or you just lie to the ticket salesperson about where you attend university) you don’t pay anything to see any of Athens’ famous ruins.

I didn’t feel like taking advantage of a floundering economy, and Dad was paying anyway (hehehe…) so I let the salesperson know I was Australian.  We were given a sleeve of tearable tickets that could be used for any site, with the exception of one, which was specifically for the Acropolis.

I don’t know what to say about Hadrian’s Library.  Let’s be honest, if I detail every single ruin we saw we’ll be here all day.  It was a decent start to the weekend, but there was something better around each corner.

One thing we did notice was the presence of a very lazy and probably quite well-fed dog just hanging around on the ruins.  Actually, I’m pretty sure there were two dogs.  There were definitely two at the next site we visited, which happened to be just around the corner: the Roman Agora (thank goodness we got the Roman stuff out of the way early!)

Ok, they were nice, but the Acropolis was kind of just sitting up there on the hill, tantalizing us with its dramatic…ness.  We thought it was about time we stopped getting dramatic photos from below and started getting them up close.

After a couple more dramatic photos (they are not an easy thing to give up with any speed) we followed a sign that said ‘Acropolis’ and came to a dead end.  Backtracking, we discovered a staircase that kind of looked as though it was part of a café, filled with seats and tables, but actually also served as the main thoroughfare taking you up to the Acropolis.  Or, at least, taking you to the road that lead to the main thoroughfare taking you up to the Acropolis.

After sacrificing a few dramatic photos (there was a big rock that just screamed ‘climb me for a great view of the city’) we got to the Acropolis.  As we approached the entrance gate, a motorcade overtook us.  It kind of looked like something related to the Olympics – they had the rings on the side of the main car, anyway.  A bunch of important-looking people got out and kind of bummed about in the entrance.  Unfortunately, this is the kind of story strand that kind of goes nowhere, since we ended up having to go back down to the ticket office to get a fast entrance ticket since we had bought the ticket at another site, and by the time we got back up they were gone.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of getting the fast entry tickets was, as it would have been faster just to walk straight in.  Whatever.

The Acropolis is pretty cool, and is still dramatic up close.  Reading some of the informative signs, I was rather amused by the amount of restoration work going on that was made necessary by previous restoration work.  Unfortunately, a lot of the impact of seeing such an ancient site is lost when the ancient site is surrounded by scaffolding, though I’m sure what they are doing is very necessary.

The view was great, and it was a clear day so you could see Athens stretching out towards the sea, the mountains, and the horizon.  The whole city was white as far as the eye could see – actually, Athens is probably the brightest city I have been to so far.  It was also hot.

We kind of had a vague idea that we would head towards the Ancient Agora at this point, but we were sidetracked by the Theatre of Dionysus, which was just at the bottom of the Acropolis hill.  The ticket collector didn’t collect our ticket for the theatre for some reason, so we sneakily got in for free.

Unfortunately, our detour had taken us to the other side of the hill from the Ancient Agora.  On our way back around we thought it was high time we had some lunch, seeing as it was about 2pm.  Returning to the little staircase of cafes we had walked up previously (which turned out to be in a district called Plaka), we had the kind of lunch that I had been missing for nigh-on one month.  Dad had a look at the menu, decided he wanted a bit of everything (who was I to argue?) so we ended up with Greek Salad, fried cheese, meatballs, souvlaki, fried potatoes (for some reason this is what the Greeks call chips) and Mythos beer.  Oh yeah, and olives and bread.  It was a pretty comprehensive lunch, all things considered, and while Dad tended to think we could have done without the chips, and he was probably right, I left the table feeling very satisfied.

The restaurant seemed to have a cat that owned the place, going from lying in the sun to cooling off in the shade of the restaurant.  Every now and again a staff member would give it an affectionate kick, but that didn’t seem to discourage it.

We kind of took our time with lunch (well, we needed to) so it was close to 3:30pm by the time we stumbled out of our seats to go and find the Ancient Agora.  And find it we did!  But it had closed.  At 3pm.

This was my first experience of one of the most irritating aspects of Athens – ALL the attractions close at 3pm.  After that you’re basically left to just bum around or go eat or drink something (the restaurants don’t close, of course).  What with the enormous amount of food we had just guzzled down, neither of us was really up for more, so we opted for the bumming around.  From the Acropolis we had seen another hill (well, two actually, but we were closer to this one) with what appeared to be an impressive monument on the top.  So we went to have a look.

The walk was actually very nice – Athens has a great deal of green space, and this hill was kind of like a park or garden of some kind.  There were olive trees, too!  Unfortunately the monument itself, while certainly impressive, was a little more two-dimensional than it had appeared.  Somehow it had gone from looking like a building from a distance to looking like a big arch up close.  Well, at least it was close to 2000 years old.

The route back to the hotel took us along an enormous pedestrian (I say pedestrian, though you’d still see the occasional car) street lined with outdoor café spaces.  It was very busy, and for good reason – the view of the Acropolis was spectacular from that angle.

Well, we walked through a kind of market thing and eventually reached Monastiriki, where I noticed a sign advertising the famed Athens Flea Market!  Well… unfortunately a quick glance down the street revealed that the Athens Flea Market is just a bunch of chain stores selling shoes and jeans.  We could definitely give that a miss.

A bit of R&R at the hotel got us ready for going out once more.  Dad had decided that he wanted to return to Plaka that evening, as we had been promised by some of the street hecklers that there would be live music from 9pm.  Well, 9pm is a bit late (even after Spain I haven’t gotten used to that) so we definitely needed the brief rest in between.  9pm sharp, though, we headed out.

All along the way, waiters waited outside their restaurants, trying to entice us inside.  Dad had a rule – any place that spelled ‘taverna’ with a ‘v’ (the Greek uses a ‘b’ instead) would not receive our custom.  Dad made the mistake of telling one of the hecklers, “Maybe later,” which came back to haunt us briefly.

When we got to the staircase again, we started to consider the restaurants a little more seriously.  Well, the first one, at least, since the heckler for this one was really quite good.  In all fairness, he didn’t lie or cheat to get us into the place – he just saw we were looking, told us, “Very good food,” and half-dragged us in through the door.  Once you’re in, there’s no going back (unless you’re the group of American twenty-somethings who arrived a little after us, sat down for about a minute and suddenly marched out, much to the confusion of pretty much everyone).

Anyway, Dad wanted live music, and asked the door guy if there would be any.  He informed us that, yes, indeed, there would be.  At 10:30pm.  He saw we were a bit concerned by this (and also wary of being duped as tourists) so he basically just told us we should eat slowly and wait for all the locals who had reserved tables for that night to arrive.

He wasn’t lying about the reservations – the place slowly filled up while we were sitting there, sucking on our drinks.

Ah.  The drinks.  Dad was smart.  He got a beer.  I was dumb.  I went, “Hey, raki’s on the menu!  I’ve heard of that, it’s supposed to be a proper Greek spirit!”

Urgh.

UUUEEEEURUUUGUGUGGEHHRHEEHHHEUUEUHEUHEUEHG!

When I ordered it the guy was like, “Raki?  In a glass?”  Not taking the hint, I nodded.  He brought out a small, thin glass with about fifty milliliters of a clear liquid at the bottom.  He also brought a small metal bucket.

No, it’s not what you think.  The bucket was filled with ice and came with a set of ice tongs.  I dropped a couple of cubes in, wondering why they’d given me so much ice (the bucket was full).  One sip revealed the answer.  It tasted like I would imagine rubbing alcohol to taste.  Not quite as bad as tequila (what is?) but definitely in the vicinity of whiskey in the things-you-should-not-order-if-you-value-your-tastebuds hierarchy.

The next hour basically consisted of me constantly packing ice into the glass, waiting for it to melt, and then packing more in to try and get rid of the godawful taste of the drink I had ordered.  Once the mix was about 95% water, 5% raki, it started to taste a bit like liquid vegemite.

By the time I had finished my drink (I definitely took my time) the band was starting to set up.  We decided this was a good time to order mains (neither of us was prepared for a binge like the lunchtime one, so declined to have any starters, though some free nibbles including grilled octopus had been brought out with our drinks).

About thirty minutes after this, we managed to get the attention of the waiter.  The Greeks are very friendly, and the waiters are all eager to serve, but they certainly don’t push you.  It’s basically up to you to indicate when you are ready.  We made eye contact a few times, but this clearly wasn’t enough.  In a way, it’s nice not to be rushed into making a decision and getting out of the place to make way for more customers.  On the other hand… food.

It turned out that the thing I wanted (not sure what it was, but I bet it was meaty and delicious) was not actually available that day, as it was in the specials list.  Well, I could deal with that.  The waiter listed the specials for the day.  I understood, “Today we have…” but after that it kind of turned into a blur.  I just nodded and said, “Yeah, I’ll have that then.”

“Which one?”

“Which one?  Uh… the first one.”

The waiter nodded and left.

“What did you order?” Dad asked.  I shrugged.  First the raki, now some mystery dish – I was really playing Russian Roulette with the meal that night.

It turned out I had ordered some kind of chicken and cabbage and cheese (I think) stew thing.  It tasted pretty good, actually.

The music started a little before we got our food, and was, to our untrained ears, very Greek sounding.  I’d seen a walnut pie listed in the desserts menu, and, assuming they had just translated ‘baklava’ poorly, wanted to give it a shot.  They didn’t have any, so I had chocolate pie instead.  It was more of a chocolate fondue cake, actually, and was very tasty (but definitely did not beat the one in Lyon).

By this point it was pretty late – around 11:30pm.  Though the party’s just getting started at that time in Athens.  We left yawning, feeling quite satisfied, and foolishly headed back to the hotel the same way we had come.

Back past the restaurant hecklers.

Well, the guy that Dad had said, “Maybe later,” to was still there, even though it was two-and-a-half hours later.  And he eagerly approached us, saying, “Maybe now.”  I think I noted a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

“Oh, you’ve eaten already then?  Maybe tomorrow.”

Ha.

DAY THREE

As Dad was leaving the next day, we needed to basically do all those little things that we hadn’t been able to fit in the previous day.  We wanted to start with a small breakfast of a pastry and a frappe.  The pastry being baklava.  Unfortunately everywhere seemed to be closed.  We saw some people heading home after their night out.  It was 9am.

We ended up having breakfast at the hotel again.  After saying I only needed a small breakfast after all the food from yesterday, I made sure to cut myself down to only two courses.  Big courses, of course.

We made our way fairly lethargically to the Ancient Agora, which was the one site that we felt we really, really had to see of the ones left on our ticket.  The main reason we wanted to see it was for the temple that we had noticed from a distance, a temple that looked extremely well preserved.

For some reason entry was free that day, so once again we got into a site without using a ticket (we ended up with quite a few left over).  It was like the Greeks didn’t want to give us an opportunity to support their economy (though in all fairness we had already paid for entry).

The Agora was big, and we made sure to read every single placard in the place, though I can’t remember any of the information on any of the placards anymore.  The temple we had seen was actually one of the most complete ruins I saw in my whole time in Athens.  The reason for this?  It spent some time being used as a Christian place of worship.

I was pretty keen for a frappe, as this is a truly authentic part of Greek culture (no, really!)  The idea is to order one and just sit somewhere nice for a long time, sipping away and chatting with friends.  A Greek frappe is made with instant coffee, ice and water, with the option of including milk and sugar, which we went with.  They do something to froth it up so it has a nice thick foam on top.  It’s quite refreshing, and it was nice sitting in the big café space (the one we had passed by the previous day) and marveling at the Acropolis, watching the lady next to us continually lose control of her dog and perving on the young couple opposite me who were snuggling on one of the café lounges.

We spent about an hour there, just sipping away at our drinks, but still somehow managed to leave before any of the locals who had arrived before us (and ordered exactly what we had ordered).  The café culture seems to be good and strong in Athens.

We had some more ancient sites to see, though!  Up we got on our way to the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  Which was closed, because it was 3pm by the time we reached it.  There was a fairly nice garden next to the site, though, so we ended up wandering through there instead.

Dad planned to head back to the airport around 4pm, and so we just had enough time for a gyros at the place I had first visited (which turned out to have an English menu after all – thanks for letting me know, guys) before picking our bags back up from the hotel and saying our goodbyes.

In a move that has my budget (and stomach) singing praises to the highest heavens, Dad is planning to join me again in Budapest, which’ll be about a week away by the time I actually finish this blog entry.

But it was off to City Circus, the hostel that I had promised Athena and Peter I would meet them at, that I now headed.  It was much, much easier to find the hostel having been in Athens for some time already, though it was in a part of the city that was just outside the area I was most familiar with (that area being the area around the Acropolis).

Checked into the hostel, I met Alex, a Brit who was about eight and a half months into his round-the-world trip.  He had recently been in Egypt, which he said was fine apart from the violent insurrection going on outside his hotel room.  He got some good video of it, though, so at least he can keep the memories.

After a brief chat we got a new roommate.  The very, very first thing the large, middle-aged woman said to us upon entering the room was, “Either of you got any skunk?”

Both of us replied in the negative.

“What, do neither of you smoke then?”

Nope.

“Why not?”

Alex must have felt as though this question actually deserved an answer, because he gave one, explaining he had given it up some time ago when he gave up smoking.  I didn’t really feel the need to explain why I didn’t partake in the regular usage of illegal, addictive narcotics, though one of the reasons was so I didn’t end up becoming a grotty old person who went into hostels and introduced myself by looking to score.

Eventually I found out her name was Emily, that she was bipolar (I bet the marijuana did wonders for that) and lived off the disability benefits she received from the British government while squatting somewhere in Kent.  I mean, I’m not one to judge, but… No, actually, I think you can make up your own judgment from the provided information.

So Emily went off to score some skunk (feel for her – she hadn’t had any in almost a DAY!) and Alex and I quickly left the room, partly in order to avoid her when she got back, but also in order to hang out with two guys from Perth, Dave and Justin.  We all went out for a bite to eat.  The hostel was in a kind of youth/underground culture area, so there were some neat little places.  We found ourselves looking at one place before being dragged in by the owner.

It turned out that the place didn’t have an English menu, which made us fairly confident in our choice, so we had to go by what the waitress said was available.  I had a spinach pie and it was pretty good.

We were all kind of tired by this point (well, except for Dave, who ended up going out that night – not sure how he managed it) so off we went to bed.

Emily found her way back to the room once we were already in bed and kind of clambered around for a bit, then left again.  Huh.

DAY FOUR

Breakfast was actually really good at this hostel – they had a list of where all the different products came from (some guy’s mum made the yoghurt, the olives were from Crete, or was that the honey?) and I kind of just kept getting up for more.

If you remember, on the day Dad and I had scaled the Acropolis, we had spotted two hills, one in either direction.  We had scaled one to discover a Triumphant Arch from the Romans, and it was now time for me to scale the other, bigger one.  In the afternoon I planned to visit the National Archaeology Museum, which only opened from 1pm on Mondays for some reason.

Alex also planned to scale the hill, but he was going to go to the Museum of Cycladic Art first, so there wasn’t really an opportunity to go together.  Emily showed up and revealed that she had successfully found some skunk (“I asked the guy, and he said to head down the shady street behind the hostel where there were a bunch of Arab/Indian guys” – her words – “and he told me not to pay more than five euro for a matchbox, but I ended up paying ten because that’s a pretty damn good price” – she proceeded to show us the matchbox full of weed, which was hidden in her tobacco pouch.  I had to take her word on the price angle, since she was the expert having grown it for many years.  Did I mention that?)

Well, she seemed much more relaxed now, though was no less irritating, with a rather unusual habit of just butting into conversations with a completely irrelevant comment.  She also had a really weird laugh where she would throw her head back, make absolutely no noise, and her whole body would kind of shudder, mouth open to provide a stunning view of her rotting tonsils.  And she would just randomly do this whenever, even if nothing funny happened.  Probably because she was high.

Anyway, this is starting to turn into a blog about bashing on Emily, which could probably go on and on all day, but it’s starting to feel mean, and she is, to be honest, a very easy target.  So let’s move on!

I didn’t get lost trying to find the hill (it being the tallest thing in Athens helped on that account) so speedily found myself at the top, where I saw a bunch of cats.  And a café.  And a little church with an old woman wearing a headscarf sweeping, which is exactly the sort of thing I want to see around a tiny church on the top of a hill.  The view was unfortunately not great because for some reason I had decided to scale the hill on the one smoggy day I experienced my whole time in Athens.  I think the strong winds the day before had something to do with that.

At a distance I could make out the first modern Olympics stadium, and decided that it was high time I saw something that wasn’t two thousand years old, so I went and had a look.  On the way I (quite accidentally) passed parliament and the national palace, at which there were numerous military personnel and police, with a police van looking ready to start a raid.  Apparently there was no raid – there is always a police van there for some reason.

I also got to see the Greek National Guard, who guard the palace.  If you thought the British ones were silly looking… My God, these guys had pompoms on their shoes.  And the way they had to walk… it was like watching a crane.  They would raise one knee, then swing their lower leg out straight and bring it back so the foot was against the other knee, then swing forward and take a step.  It was the Ministry of Silly Walks before Monty Python ever existed.

I saw the Olympic stadium, nodded a bit with the appropriate amount of awe, and headed for the Archaeology Museum.

The National Archaeology Museum is interesting mainly for one key exhibit – the Mycenaean Treasure.  Basically, this is a treasure discovered inside a burial site in the Peloponnese within the ancient, mythical city of Mycenae.  Mycenae is where King Agamemnon supposedly ruled.  To give you an idea, this was ancient by the time Homer was writing about it; we’re talking 3000 years old.  The treasure basically consists of a lot of golden death masks (hence Homer’s description “Mycenae rich in gold”) and bracelets and things.

The museum also contains an impressive collection of Greek statues, which are displayed in such a way as to kind of reveal ancient Greek history, starting with Neolithic times and taking us through to the Roman conquest.  All the bits of ancient Greece started fitting together, and I realized that, actually, ancient Greek history was not quite as homogeneous as I had come to believe (when most of Greek mythology is based on civilisations that existed 1000 years before the ancient Greeks… well, that’s bloody old).

They also had a pretty good Egyptian section, though I only got a brief idea of how Egyptian history fit together (I had a similar impression of ancient Egypt as I had of ancient Greece in that it was one homogeneous period – wrong!)  Maybe a trip to Egypt is in order… though maybe I’ll wait a bit.

The museum was closing early for some kind of concert, so I left and returned to the hostel.  After a bit of time just kind of bumming around in my room, Alex arrived.

“Please don’t leave me with her again,” was the first thing he said.

Yes, he had spent the entire day dragging Emily around.  They had gone up the same hill I had, and Emily had apparently complained about how tough the hill was to climb the whole way (let’s put it this way – the climb up is an easy, paved slope).

We planned to head out with Dave and Justin again that night, so went up to meet them on the roof (oh yeah, the hostel had a rooftop with a view of the Acropolis) and also met some Taiwanese girls.  Dave had been conned that day, meeting a guy in the street who asked for the time, then invited him to his bar.  At the bar a hot Greek girl had joined him and ordered a drink.  Of course the girl was a plant from the bar who disappeared once the bill arrived, which turned out to be somewhere around 30 euro.  Dave refused to pay, tossed something like five euro at them and ran out.

Talking about scams, Alex had some of his own to contribute.  He’d known of one New Zealand girl in Thailand or Vietnam or similar who had been conned into somehow becoming involved in a card game and forcefully persuaded to go to an ATM to take as much money out as she could to continue playing.  She’d lost something like $13,000, which to give you an idea is considerably more than my budget for this entire trip, including airfares.

The saddest one, though, was in India.  It wasn’t nearly as much money, but it was a bit of an emotional con.  A friend of Alex’s had been in India and had been guided around by a local.  Over the course of the four days he was there, he got to know this guy, and very, very slowly a sad story about how the Indian man had used to be a shoe repairman, but his repair kit had been stolen and now he couldn’t support his family.  Well, the guy, before he was to head out of India, offered to buy the guy a new repair kit.

“I know just the place!” the man beamed.

By throwing numbers out and confusing the exchange rate, the guy ended up being duped for around $350.  The next day he saw the same man targeting a new tourist.

Emily joined us a little later and we all went out to the cool bar part of town for some food.

We had gyros.  What else were we going to have?

There was a short, embarrassing period during ordering where Emily struggled to say “souvlaki” and asked what it was, and asked one of the Taiwanese girls to order for her even though the waiter spoke perfect English, but we got the food eventually and it was delish.

The only thing of note that occurred during dinner was a lady came and tried to sell flowers to the girls.  She was fairly forceful, smilingly sticking the unwanted flowers into the collars of Emily and one of the Taiwanese girls.  Emily contemplated the flower for a while before, surprisingly tactfully I thought, handing it back and advising the woman to sell the flowers and make some money for herself.  Then she went and bought some tissues off the next little salesperson (a seven year old girl) that came up to us.  I got the feeling she had quite a bit of empathy for these supposed street urchins, but it’s difficult to feel sorry for them when they’re dressed better than you (this girl certainly didn’t have a massive tear in her jeans, I’ll tell you that).

Dave had an addiction for some kind of vanilla pastry coated in melted chocolate from a particular store, so we headed there next.  He promised we’d love it.  I got a nice big tray of it, and it was good.  Very, very filling though.

DAY FIVE

My final day in Athens got off to a fairly lethargic start.  I packed, had breakfast and checked out.  My train out of Athens to a city in the north called Thessaloniki was to leave at 23:55 that evening, so I left my bags in the hostel in order to avoid having to drag the around the entire day.  I have to admit to being a little nervous about this train trip – it was an overnighter, but not a sleeper (that is, it didn’t contain beds).  I had assumed it would be practically empty, but found a website that suggested that the train would be full of “vagrants, illegal immigrants, soldiers and other seedy characters.”  Not exactly comforting for a trip that would be taken from midnight until six in the morning.

Anyway, that was for later.  There were still two ancient sites I hadn’t seen yet, and I didn’t want to leave Athens having missed them.  The first was actually a great deal more interesting than it had any right to be – an ancient graveyard dating back to 3000BC or thereabouts that also happened to double as the ancient gate into Athens AND an old pottery site.  There were also a few tortoises, two large and one tiny.  Only one of the big ones left its shell to perform for me, and I got a good 15-20 minutes entertainment watching it slooooooowly plod from one end of a five metre strip of grass to the other.  I was a fan.

The other site that was a total necessity was the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which I had technically seen from the outside but wanted to get through the fence a bit.  It used to be an immense set of columns – a lot of columns – but only eight or so are still around.  One of them had collapsed a few decades ago in a massive storm.  Even the collapsed column was impressive, if decidedly… well… collapsed.

I went back to the park, saw a pile of turtles in a pond (they were all sitting on each others’ heads) and found the dirtiest toilet I had seen the whole time I had been in Greece.

I still had about ten hours to kill, so I went back to the hostel and tried to work on this blog entry.  Unfortunately it was not long before Emily returned from her day.  I was in a bit of a focused, selfish mood, so I responded to all her comments with rather terse, short statements.  She didn’t get the hint for around three hours, at which point I was too tired to keep writing.

I’d hoped to see Alex at the hostel again, but he didn’t show, having spent the day at the Archaeology Museum.  I left at about 9:30pm to head for the train station, planning to grab something to eat on the way.  I passed the pastry shop from the day before and bought some more of that pastry.  I mean, I hadn’t actually thought it was that good, but somehow I was craving it.  Being basically fat rolled up in dough and soaked in sugary fat, it was exceptionally rich and filling.

I still thought I ought to pick up something savoury, so went to grab a gyros from a place outside the Monastiriki metro station, from which I would catch the metro to Larissa train station.

I spotted a gyros place and headed for it, but was intercepted by a woman selling flowers.  Well… selling might not be the right word for it.  She kind of shoved a flower into my jacket and said, “Free for you, you are sexy young man.”  She was probably in her twenties, so I would have taken this as a compliment if it hadn’t immediately made me think that she was a prostitute (take note ladies, if you call me a sexy young man and give me a flower, I’m going to assume you want me to pay you for sex).  So I shoved past her, pushing the flower away, and headed into the metro station (“Free for you, free for you!” followed me the whole way).

As I was buying a ticket for the metro, a lady approached me nervously.  She was selling tissues for 0,50 euro, as well as a sob story about having lost her job.  When I declined, she looked extremely embarrassed, waving her hands and repeating, “Sorry, sorry!”  I kind of felt sorry for her – she was clearly new to the game and was probably in legitimate (recent) strife.  However, I am firm with regard to beggars, and my policy is that a) there are some who take advantage of the goodwill of others and fake it, and b) providing small amounts of money to individuals doesn’t solve the problem, and really just gives the local government an excuse not to enact some kind of decent social policy.  I did feel sorry for her though.

The metro was as simple as it had been on day one, and I soon found myself at Larissa station.  Which is basically just a small, dirty building with a few train tracks next to it.  The Greek train company is not doing so hot, as I think I mentioned previously, so a lot of services have been cut.

For the first time in my European train experience, other than on the fast train in Spain, tickets were checked BEFORE arriving on the platform.  This was kind of fortunate, as all the information I had seen previously had suggested I did not need a reservation for this train.  Turned out I did, which the (very friendly) ticket inspector indicated to me in the best English he could manage (I didn’t learn one word of Greek the whole time I was there).  The reservation was free anyway, so that hardly mattered.

The train journey was much nicer than I had expected.  Far from the train being filled with vagrants, I was accompanied in my cabin by three middle-aged, plump, wrinkly Greek men, all of whom sat in an amusing, serious row opposite me.  Unfortunately there is really no comfortable way of sitting in one of those tiny, cramped carriages for six and a half hours with four other people between midnight and six thirty (the train was late) while trying to sleep.  I was also feeling a bit weird – dehydrated and hungry, probably because I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough that day.

Some background information is required for the next part of the story.  See, I was trying to make my way to Bulgaria, the city of Plovdiv specifically.  Unfortunately, due to the Greek railway’s financial problems, all international trains had been canned.  This meant no train to get me to Bulgaria.  No worries, though!  There was a bus, and I was informed by the eurail website that the buses were organized by the railway company in tandem with a Bulgarian coach company, and that there was a ticket office somewhere in the Thessaloniki train station.  I had one-and-a-half hours to find it, buy a ticket and get on the bus.

Well.  If you’ve been following my journey from the beginning you’ll know that things have a habit of not going to plan on most of my train journeys (so far on two thirds of my transit periods something has gone wrong).  I searched all over the train station.  No ticket office for buses.  The information desk was closed, so I went and lined up at the train ticket desk and asked the guy there where the desk for international buses was.

“There are no international buses here.  Only the trains.”

Well, that didn’t help.  I walked outside the train station and saw a gigantic sign saying “International buses to Bulgaria!” on the other side of the road.

Oh, thank God, that must be it.

I got over and the office was closed.  Seeing as the one I was looking for was supposed to be open from 6am, and it was now 7am, it was clearly not the correct office.  I walked down the street, hoping for something else, but there was nothing else.

I went back across the street to a bus station directly beside the train station.  Maybe, I reasoned, the bus station will have the correct place, and it is considered part of the train station.

I went and asked the guy at the ticket desk.

“No buses here.  In the train station.”

“I asked in the train station, but they said it wasn’t in there.”

“I don’t know about tickets, I only know the buses, they come and they go.”
“Where do they go from?”

“Some go from the train station, some from the other side of the street.”

I thanked him and went for one last wander.  Worst came to worst, if I knew where the buses would be I could try and buy a ticket on the bus itself.  At this point, I happily noticed that the ticket office on the other side of the road had a light on now.  I went across and discovered that, while I had been wandering around, panicking, the office had opened.  I bought a ticket for the next bus (which ended up being cheaper and leaving at the same time anyway) and got on.  It wasn’t the one I had planned to catch, but it was good enough.

So off the bus headed towards Bulgaria, which is as good a time as any to state the fact that this story is

TO BE CONTINUED

A Test of Resolve in Naples

Naples was the biggest turnaround of my trip so far.  It gave me the worst first impression of any place I’ve been to so far, but managed to do a massive flip to become quite high in my estimations.  It’s really the first place that has shown me that, with a little time and effort it is possible to overcome initial prejudices and appreciate what a seeming hellhole has to offer.

DAY ONE

Well, the first impression was really bad.  The interior of the train station was actually quite pleasant, but it was not long before I was outside.  And oh my God.

OH MY GOD.

Outside was chaos.  A huge rectangle had been cut up in the centre of the plaza where they are building a metro station.  Around this cars just go.  There is no rhyme or reason to it – they just slot into any gaps they can see.  Pedestrian crossing?  Just dodge around them!  Red light?  Maybe slow down a little just in case.  Impossibly narrow yet somehow incredibly busy one-way street (that is also a pedestrian walkway)?  Why not reverse the wrong way down it at top speed in order to take a parking space that just popped up?

It was literal insanity.  Mopeds drove the wrong way up multi-lane carriageways, cars honked and hooted, and pedestrians just waltzed right into the middle of this, trusting in the probably clinically insane drivers to dodge around them.

(To be completely fair I only experienced one incident the entire time, though I’ll go into that a bit later).

The streets smelled like piss.  I don’t mean that figuratively.  I walked down the street and I got whiffs of actual urine.  The entire walkway was packed with dangerous-looking people, many of them selling sunglasses, beads and other useless s***.  I was heckled by three separate people on one single twenty metre stretch, all of them selling ‘iPads and iPhone 5s’.  I got the feeling that was a load of hooey.

I needed to find a road called ‘Corso Umberto’, which would lead me into the city centre and my hostel.  Once again, clear instructions but troublesome searching.  See, this plaza where the metro was being built was large.  Large in the sense that it appeared to actually be two separate plazas.  So I was searching the area closest to the train station for Corso Umberto, when in actual fact it was on the opposite side of the square, leading directly away.  I did find it eventually, though, hands wrapped firmly around my bag and burrowing through crowds of people.  It was around this point that I realized that in order to reach Corso Umberto I would have to cross the road.  Unfortunately all of the pedestrian crossings I had been using had lead to a bit of a dead end and there was nowhere to cross.  I was on a small island in the middle of a sea of roads.  It was the centre island of a roundabout, though on this roundabout cars tended to be able to go either direction in any lane (yes, the roundabout was designed for that purpose, and yes it works somehow).

Pedestrians were just stepping onto the road in front of cars, but it took me quite a number of to-and-fros before I built up the courage to just go for it.

I’ve only just left the emergency ward of the Central Hospital of Naples…

Kidding, I got across fine.

It was about a twenty minute walk to the hostel, and my impressions did not improve in that time.  Every set of traffic lights I had to cross was a potential deathtrap, the buildings surrounding the street were imposing and decayed.  The city just felt like a shambles.

I feel like this is an appropriate point to discuss something I think of as the Italian Contradiction (yes, I’m aware of the fact I’m naming everything the ‘ethnic group contradiction’, but this one is even more so).  See, Italians are incredibly concerned about their appearance – they are ALL decked out in fashionable sunnies, sleek, branded outfits and gelled hair.  I’m pretty sure the world’s acne cream industry could survive off the Italians alone.  Everyone is either really, really youthful (and hot) or a leather-skinned prune (that’s what all those chemicals and all that cigarette smoke does to their skin by the time they’re in their mid-thirties).

So, we’ve concluded that they are well-groomed and clean.  But this extends only to themselves.  They live in squalor (maybe not their houses, but their streets and cities certainly).  It’s as though no-one actually gives a toss about anything but their own individual appearance – they don’t feel any need to create some kind of communal impression like, for example, the Germans.  I suspect the governments may be so wrapped up in corruption and pettiness that they forget to take responsibility for the state of their services, and no-one seems to mind particularly.  It’s like the ultimate expression of capitalist egocentricity, no-one expects anyone to do anything for anyone except themselves.

I’m speaking in extreme generalities, of course, and only based on experiences in Rome and Naples, so make of that what you will.

I found the street of my hostel and was heading down it when I heard someone call out, “Hey, are you going to the hostel?”

“Yes,” I replied to the smiling young man.  He was carrying two large metal beams over his shoulder.

“I’m heading there too.  Come with me.”

So I followed him into a building and up to the seventh floor, where the hostel was.  On the way up I told him how confronting I had found the train station’s exterior, particularly having come from Switzerland.  He found that very amusing.

The hostel, called Hostel of the Sun, was a really friendly place (I particularly liked when the lady at the reception desk was telling me the price, and referred to the 1 euro tourist tax as the “bullshit tax” – so you know, all hotels and hostels in major Italian cities are forced to charge an extra amount of tax based on how expensive the place is.  In Rome the tax was 2 euro every night in a hostel, in Naples it was 1 euro for a hostel.  The accomodations are required by law to list the tax as a separate cost from the accommodation costs.  Which is weird.)

She then asked what I was planning to do in Naples.  I said Pompeii.  Then she gave me a map and proceeded to provide her suggestions of the best spots to visit, which places were free, where to get pizza, how to get to Pompeii, the works.  It was really very comprehensive.  As I often do after just arriving at a place, I decided to go to the Historical Centre (Old Town) to get a feel for it.

Well… it was a weird place.  As I have come to expect from Old Towns and Historical Centres it was filled with a winding network of narrow, cobbled roads, surrounded on all sides by towering blocks of apartments, shops and the like.  There were even the anticipated grand buildings – most of them churches or other religious buildings.

The main difference was this historic centre felt like the city’s slums.  The grand buildings were dirty and scuffed, generally with a single sign in front of them providing historical information (though good luck reading it under the stains, tears and graffiti).  They were just kind of slotted in with the rest of the street, unassuming and uninspiring.

That was a bit of a letdown, to be honest.  I like my history to be a little more… preserved.  Walking the streets, it soon became apparent that the old town’s roads worked a little like a scaled-down version of the plaza outside the train station.  That’s not to suggest it was safer – in fact, here the footpath and road were one and the same (they had little posts to mark out safe passage for pedestrians on the sides, but these ‘footpaths’ were generally blocked by parked mopeds or the sprawling shopfronts, making things no safer).

Nothing of particular note happened on my walk around the Historical Centre – an old woman started singing bad opera at me, I got a bit lost, got found again, considered buying some limoncello, decided to do it later and bought a hot chocolate.  There was a little chocolatier called Gay-Odin (yeah… not sure why) that I saw people leaving with little paper cups of the thick Italian hot chocolates.  Then I realized I was in Italy.  Exactly the kind of place you want to have an Italian hot chocolate.  Especially on a cold and rainy day (did I mention it was a cold and rainy day?  It was a cold and rainy day).  So you know, the hot chocolate was awesome.  And I ordered it in Italian.  To be fair, all I had to say was “cioccolata calda” and then “solo” when he asked if I wanted cream or not.  “Solo” means ‘by itself’ in case you didn’t know.  I worked that out ALL BY MYSELF.

I headed back to the hostel having quite enjoyed the hot chocolate but not much else.  The city didn’t speak to me.  In fact, at that point the words I was using to describe it were things like ‘hellhole’ and ‘very unpleasant’.  The hostel’s building had a lift that required 0,05 euro to work between certain times.  The hostel, recognizing this as a bit of a hassle, offered a pot of 0,05 euro pieces for people to take.  I hadn’t taken one, so walked up.  I earned that hot chocolate, damn it.

Inside the hostel they had a new sign: “DO NOT BUY IPADS OR IPHONES OFF THE PEOPLE IN THE STREET.”  I’m forced to conclude that some idiot had actually done so.

While attempting to finalise some of the bits and pieces online (I tend to need to do a bit of that upon reaching each hostel), a girl entered.  She was German and had been studying literature in Italy for six months or so, and had a bit of time before returning to Germany so was touring a bit.  She planned to go see Herculaneum the next day.  I had only a very limited amount of time for which I could stay in Naples, so had to give Herculaneum a miss.

Two American girls came in at that point.  They were also touring Italy, albeit for only a few weeks.  They’d just come from Rome, loved it, and were having similar issues with Naples as I was.

That’s about it for that first day.  At that point I was already kind of looking forward to leaving.

DAY TWO

I got up bright and early (8:30am is my new bright and early – don’t judge me) for breakfast and a shower, which I would tell you more about but it’s kind of really boring.  The American girls teamed up with an Australian girl that I only met that morning over breakfast with the plan to go to Pompeii.  I was meeting Li-Ting the following day for Pompeii, so declined to join them.  Instead, my plan was to have a castle-hopping day, since Naples seemed to have quite a few castles.  I frickin’ love castles.

I went off alone, which, in the past, has been a recipe for disaster (it tends to mean I avoid doing anything remotely interesting and just wander around, which doesn’t do wonders for my impression of the place I’m visiting).  Somehow, though, today would be different, and I would be given a chance to totally rethink my opinion of Naples.

Admittedly, it didn’t start off that way.  In fact, it started with me heading in the direction of Castel Nuovo, which was just down the road from the hostel, on the waterfront.  It was a very impressive castle from the outside, though I had heard the inside wasn’t nearly as worthwhile and required payment, so I didn’t bother entering.  The atmosphere was ruined a little by the fact that there was work being done on a new metro station here, too.

Walking towards my next castle, Castel dell’Ovo (literally “Castle of the Egg”) I came across something else that ruined the atmosphere a little.  Now, Naples is a pretty grotty city at the best of times, with rotting garbage piled on the sides of a lot of the streets without any sign that it will ever be cleaned up.  But it takes a special kind of city to have a street lined sporadically with human excrement.

From that low, though, things started to lift dramatically.  Castel dell’Ovo came into sight along the coast.  It was an imposing block of stone and brick, waves breaking dramatically at its base.  The structure was accessed via a single path across great chunks of stone spread out across the sea.  Castel dell’Ovo was originally built on an island, completely separate from (though very close to) the coast of Italy.  It’s accessible by foot now.  Across the bridge you go inside a large stone gate leading to a ramp that takes you up along the side of the structure.  Did I mention that it was free?  It was free.  For a moment I thought I might be kicked out as there were a bunch of official-looking fellows standing at the base of the ramp, but as was quite a common occurrence in Italy the officials didn’t seem to be serving any purpose other than to stand there wearing a uniform.

Going further up I was greeted by a number of placards detailing some of the history of the structure.  It had quite a lot of history, most of which I can’t remember, though I do remember where it got its name.  It was customary, at the time the castle was built, to put an ostrich egg inside a cage inside the building as a protector for the city.  At one stage the egg broke and there were ferocious storms until the king replaced the egg.

Naples also has links to Greek legend, and the island was supposedly where one of the sirens that Odysseus fooled ended up.  Or something.  It was related to the Odyssey, anyway.

All the way up the castle (it was basically a single path that took you higher and higher until you reached the top) I kept bumping into young Italian couples making out on the battlements.  It seems the castle was a popular spot for romance, something the Italians seem very adept at.  (As a brief aside, one thing I noticed was that all of the couples I saw making out in Italy were extremely attractive.  As in supermodel level.)  It’s extremely awkward when you’re trying to do the tourist thing with your camera out and there are these two bodies in the middle of your shot.

About halfway up there was a little room with more information.  I was reading it when some kind of custodian or something came up with a flyer for me.  I thought that was very sweet, though I suspect he was just excited that someone was actually taking an interest (it was practically empty other than the couples, who weren’t really there for the historical significance).

There was an art exhibition inside as well.  I made the appropriate nodding motions and so forth on walking through it.  A group of Japanese tourists were getting really excited about the art, taking their photos next to it and everything.  I thought that was a bit weird.

After Castel dell’Ovo I wanted to make my way up the hill to the Castel Sant Elmo.  The hostel receptionist had told me how to get up there via the funicular (cable car), but as it was still fairly early I decided to go for a bit of a walk up the hill, grab an ice-cream and then see the castle.

The route wasn’t exactly clear on the map (it was a map for the public transport system, so was very clear on how the funicular worked) but I surmised that as long as I kept going up I couldn’t go wrong.

To reach the hill, my route took me by the waterfront.  And it was stunning.  Somehow the water is totally crystal clear, there’s no garbage, and the (enormous) road is blocked off to traffic, meaning the whole area is solely for pedestrians.  I couldn’t believe I was in the same city.

Walking inland a little reminded me where I was, though even that didn’t last.  As I made my way uphill the streets became cleaner, the walkways wider, the roads less busy.  This was the wealthy part of the city, and it showed.

Up, up, up I went.  After some time, a bit of backtracking and some confused studying of the map I reached the main shopping street at the top of the hill.  I was looking for a specific gelateria that was supposed to be one of the best in the city, and this was the right street.  It didn’t take long for me to find it.  The gimmick, if you can call it that, of this place was that it made gelati flavours that reflected some of the famous Naples pastries.  I had the darkest chocolate flavor I could find (of course) and baba.  My understanding of the way gelato works in Italy is as follows: you do not pay for a particular number of scoops.  Instead, because gelato is a lot smoother and more malleable than regular ice-cream, they spread it into a cone.  You pay for a particular sized cone and are then able to make a selection of flavours.  I’m not sure how many you can have, but they adapt the amount of each to the size of the cone and total number of flavours.  I typically had the smallest size cone and two flavours.

The baba flavor was nice, and made me resolve to get an actual baba from one of the stands filling the streets of the historical centre.

It was now time for the Castel Sant Elmo.  I followed the signs around to an imposing entryway guarded by official looking people.  This seemed to be some kind of government facility or something, so I kept following the footpath around.  This took me to the building next door: Certosa di San Martino, and a fairly spectacular view.  Oh, and another kissing couple.  This time on a moped overlooking the view of Naples.

I had clearly missed the entrance to the castle, so I headed back to the official-looking spot and walked in.  The official-looking people didn’t blink.

I saw a sign saying ‘tickets’ and followed it.  Unfortunately the building it pointed to was shut up.  There was a man on the other side of the building, however, so I went over to him.

A very jovial man with an enormous grey mustache greeted me.  When he saw I was beginning to take money out of my wallet, though, he stopped me and spoke in Italian.  I shrugged.

“Ah,” he said.  He gestured towards some of the officials, then seemed to change his mind.  He pointed down toward San Martino.

“San Martino,” he said.

“San Martino?”

“San Martino.”

“Grazie.”

So I went back down to San Martino.  I walked into the entrance there, but there was no ticket office.  Then I realized that this was not, in fact, the entrance, but the exit.  The entrance was an unassuming little door a few metres back from the exit.  Inside I asked for a ticket for the castle.  She looked confused and gave me a ticket for San Martino.  So I went there instead.

It was actually more interesting than I was expecting, having a mix of history and art present.  History in that it was an actual palace with an actual story behind it and some nice rooms and frescoes, and art as in part of that story was that it had been designated as an art gallery in the 19^th century in order to promote the art and culture of Naples.  It was a nice palace, but it was certainly no castle.  Never mind, I managed to get over it.

I was about ready to head back to the hostel by this point, so walked past the mountains of smooching couples on the hilltop and made my way down the hill.  My path took me back past the historic centre, and I thought, why the hell not?  So I went looking for pizza.  Why pizza?  Because Naples is the birthplace (apparently) of the true pizza.  Their pizzas are world famous, and there is a special pizza organization that many of the restaurants belong to.  This organization has a standaradised measure for a true Napolitan pizza, related to the thickness of the base, the limited amount of topping, the fact that it must be woodfired and the bubbliness of the cheese.  Restaurants conforming to these standards proudly display a sign with an image of a man putting a pizza in the oven.

I went to the two places the hostel had recommended – Sorrelio Gino and Di Marello.  Fortunately they were on the same street, along with another pizzeria called ‘El Presidente’ or something, which Bill Clinton had once been a patron of (back when he was president – hence the name).  The other famous place is the one in the book Eat, Pray, Love.  I refused to go there, partly because it was in Eat, Pray, Love but also because they only served two types of pizza – Margherita and Napolitan.  I’m sure they’re delicious, but come on.

Well, Sorrelio Gino was closed (it opens at 7pm each night) and Di Marello looked a bit difficult to work out – it was kind of a takeaway desk, but no-one seemed to be serving there, and I didn’t really want to sit by myself, so I went and bought a baba instead, having tried the gelato flavor.

I got a baba with chocolate.  The guy put it in a plastic container and poured syrup over it.  I’m pretty sure the syrup was just really bad rum and water mixed together.  It tasted foul, like shooting bad rum only keeping the taste in your mouth for the amount of time it takes to eat a cake.  The chocolate on top was delicious though.

Back at the hostel I was greeted by the Australian girl who had gone with the Americans to Pompeii that day, and the British receptionist.  When I mentioned that I’d actually started to quite like Naples, the receptionist seemed very pleased.

I told the Aussie that I wanted pizza that night.  She had been to Di Morello before, so we decided to test Sorrelio Gino.  Then the American girls turned up – I hadn’t expected to see them again as they had checked out that day.  Apparently, in order to save some money, they had decided to couchsurf the next night somewhere in the vicinity of Naples, and they had to call the person who would be putting them up.  For those who don’t know, couchsurfing is an online community where people offer to allow travelers to sleep on their couch for a night or so, and the expectation is that if you take advantage of these offers you make the offer yourself when you are home.

The receptionist was a bit dubious about the whole arrangement.

“Be very careful staying with a guy, girls,” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” came the reply.  “It’s an older guy, so it should be alright.”

I’m afraid I don’t know whether they got out of the experience alive, as my path diverged from theirs at this point (though we all watched Hitch for just long enough for me to decide it was a load of garbage).

It being 7pm, the time Sorrelio Gino opened, I went with the Aussie to check it out.  The place was about half full when we arrived, so we got straight in.  The cheapest pizza was the Margherita.  It cost 3 euro.  I got one with ham and mushrooms for five euro because I felt like splurging.  The pizzas are maybe 35-40cm in diameter.  They come unsliced on a large plate, and the expectation is that you order one each.  We did, of course.

It was good, though I’m a bit of a fan of toppings and the rules of the game in Naples are that the topping must be scarce and mostly consist of cheese and tomato paste (albeit delicious homemade tomato paste that you can see the pieces of crushed tomato in).  It is too sloppy to be eaten by hand, though the idea is that you are supposed to cut slices with a knife and fork before eating it.  I tried that to begin with, but my attempt lasted all of two seconds.  In the end I was scooping up great stacks of dough, cheese and mushroom and shoving them unceremoniously into my mouth.

The base is worth talking about as well – it has a kind of stretchy quality, being a much softer and less crispy dough than many pizza bases I have come across.

That done we had some gelato.  Yes, it was my second one that day.  Shut up, I only had small ones.

Back at the hostel, two Australian guys were watching Kill Bill.  I sort of half-heartedly joined them.  When it finished everyone wanted something funny (the female members of our party had not particularly enjoyed Kill Bill) so I put on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I hadn’t seen before.  It was a bit of a trip, and I must give credit to everyone for actually sticking with it when they clearly had no idea what was going on.  I loved it.

There was to be no early night that night, which was not what I had planned at all seeing as I wanted to be up bright and early the next day in order to get as much time in Pompeii as possible.

DAY THREE

I probably ought to mention here that the reason I had come to Naples in the first place was really in order to visit Pompeii.  I had promised Li-Ying that we would go together, as she was coming down from Rome for the day.  No problem!

Just before leaving to meet her at the train station, I signed into facebook in order to check up on all the goss, as you do.  I got a panicked message from Li-Ying: “Andrew!  My train ticket was for a different train to the one I expected!  I won’t be at the train station.”

I asked what time she would be arriving.  1pm.  Well, I wasn’t about to wait around that long.  I organized to meet her at the entrance to the site around 2pm and went to catch the train.

The train to Mt Vesuvius and Pompeii is not run by Trenitalia, the public train service.  It is a privately run stretch of track managed by a company called Circumsivenia (that’s probably not the exact spelling but I can’t be bothered reaching over to my bag in order to check).  Thinking a private company would have to offer a better experience than the public one, I went to buy my ticket.  Service was the typical Italian disinterest.  The ticket machine didn’t work.  The seats were uncomfortable and plastic.  The train was crowded.  All in all, not really any different from the public trains.

At least it was very obvious which stop to get off at.  The Pompeii Scavi stop had a stall at the entrance advertising tickets and audioguides.  This confused me a little, since I was kind of expecting the tickets to be sold at, you know, the entrance.  The audioguides were advertised as being free to take home, so they were purchased rather than rented.

Noticing that everyone except American tourists was ignoring this little stall, I ignored it and followed the sign towards the site.  At the entrance was a much more official-looking structure offering tickets and audioguides.  Better.

I got a ticket and the audioguide.  The audioguide lady pulled out a map in order to show me how it all worked.  The map had numbers all over it, showing you where to key a particular number into your guide.  She offered a recommended path: “All the interesting stuff is in this area.”  She circled a great swathe of the map.  “If you have some time, you should move up to here.”  She circled another spot right up in the corner of the map.  “You must get the guide back by five PM at the latest, or else you won’t get your ID back,” (I had given her my driver’s license as collateral).

Of course I’ll have time, I thought.  I have like six whole hours!

Two hours later I was still on the first street, having spent most of the time walking around the structures within a single plaza.  Pompeii is huge – hey, it’s basically an entire city that has been turned into a historical tourist attraction.  You don’t just get one theatre, but two (and there may have been another on the other side of the city, but I didn’t make it that far).  Pompeii is one of the few places I have been where it is next to impossible to see everything there is to see in a day, so you have to prioritise.

The streets, walls and many artifacts are in an extraordinary state of preservation.  The site gives you an excellent idea of how a Roman city would have felt and been structured.  Slightly more harrowing are the plaster casts of victims of Vesuvius’ eruption, faces contorted in fear and pain, often with a complete skull visible beneath the cast.

The most interesting buildings that I saw were the theatres, the main square, the various temples, particularly that of Jupiter, the bathhouse, and the brothel.  The brothel in particular is in a remarkable state, with many of the frescoes (depicting lewd sexual acts in order to give patrons ideas of what to try on the prostitutes) perfectly intact.  I have my suspicions that the archaeologists were digging it up and, realizing they were uncovering 1^st century pornography, started to go really carefully so as to be able to get a good look at it.  One of the perks of being an archaeologist?

Li-Ying hadn’t turned up at the appointed time, so I went off without her and saw as much as I could – maybe half.  I was on my way to the point the audioguide lady had circled on the edge of the map – the Villa of Mysteries – which was actually a long way from everything else, when I happened to come across Li-Ying, who was now flanked by a young American boy named Shepherd who was travelling with his father and she had met at the entrance while hoping to find me.  I went off to the Villa of Mysteries and organized to meet them back at the entrance at 5pm, which was in about half an hour.

It took ten minutes to get to the Villa of Mysteries.  I was listening to the audioguide when I realized I had ten minutes in which to get back to the audioguide booth so that I could get my driver’s license back.  So I ran, still half-listening to the information from the guide, back to the entrance, arriving just in time.  Looking around I saw no Li-Ying.  I waited twenty minutes, joined by one of the many, many stray dogs that hang around inside Pompeii.  After twenty minutes I gave up and went to the train station.

While waiting for the train, I spotted her arriving at the other platform, so I went over to reveal myself, met Shepherd’s father, and we all caught the train back to Naples.  I had instructed Li-Ying that she was not allowed to leave without trying some Napolitan pizza, so we all went to Di Matteo in a taxi for dinner.  It was very similar to the previous night, so I won’t get too detailed about it.

I got Li-Ying back to the station in order for her to catch her train back to Rome in order to get the one to Verona she would be getting next.  Then back to the hostel I went, taking the same route I had done on my arrival, this time at night.  Somehow the city seemed much more comfortable this time around, even though it was dark.  Somehow the feeling had completely changed.

Back at the hostel there were some newcomers – two Canadians travelling Europe together, an American guy going through Italy and a guy from Amsterdam.  We had a few bottles of wine along with the German girl I had met on the first day before moving into the bar where the others wanted to try some shots.  Well, they didn’t end up doing shots, as they got distracted by a cocktail.  In the bar a Russian girl was enjoying her drink.  She owned a language school in China, or something along those lines, and had a lot of interesting things to say.

I needed to get to bed at a reasonable hour, though, as I would need to be up early to catch my train out of Naples.  As it turned out, Italy had one last adventure for me.

DAY FOUR

Technically this was not a day spent in Naples, but I will put it here anyway.  I had booked myself in on a ferry crossing the Adriatic Sea over to Greece.  It would leave from the Bari ferry port that evening at 8pm, and the instructions had ordered me to arrive at least two hours early in order to pick up my ticket and check in.

I planned to play it safe, so got a train at 9:04am to Caserta, which is famous for a palace that is supposed to be as luxurious as Versailles.  Well, I had no time to see this palace, unfortunately, since I needed to catch a train at 10:38am to get me to Bari at 14:30, giving me plenty of time to find the ferry port, get my ticket and get on board.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Please, this is Italy.  Of course it was never going to be that easy.

The problems began when I looked up at the board and noticed that the train I was to catch was listed as being 90 minutes late.

“That’s pretty late,” I thought to myself, but as I had given myself plenty of time I thought nothing of it.

Half an hour later, the train was listed as running 2 hours late.  In the meantime, a middle-aged man from Gambia came over to have a chat with me.  He was very friendly, and I felt a little guilty afterwards for being suspicious of him (the man on the train to Milan had put me on my guard), but we had a fairly lengthy conversation about interesting tidbits from around the world, and he told me I should visit Gambia, assuring me there were no political problems there.  I told him I planned to visit Africa some day, but it might be some time away.

When the train finally arrived at 12:40pm, I was starting to check my watch with a frown.

“Well,” I reasoned, “as long as it doesn’t get any later than this, the train will get me to Bari by about 16:30, which is still plenty of time to find the ferry terminal.”

Things began to look up when the conductor of the train handed me a bag containing a croissant, a bottle of water and an orange juice.

“For train being late,” he explained in broken English.  Naw, how sweet.

Well, Trenitalia (the train company running the public trains) wasted all the goodwill they earned with that gesture not a moment later.  An announcement came over the intercom in Italian.  I waited for the English version, which never came (it seems to me the only time they translate announcements into English is when they either provide self-explanatory information, advertise something or welcome you on board the train).  The fact that everyone started getting up to grab their bags raised some grave concerns, however.

I asked a man seated near me if he could translate what had been said.  He told me we would be stopping at a station called Foggio, where we would have to get off and find another train to our destination.  Well… ok.

Fortunately there was another train from Foggio to Bari.  Unfortunately it would arrive in Bari at 17:30, giving me half an hour to reach the port.

And it was ten minutes late.

I stared out the window intently, looking for some indication of which direction the sea was in so that I would be able to find it quickly.  Once I found the sea, I reasoned, the port would be easy to spot.  Luckily the sea was easily visible from the train, and I even thought I could see a ferry docked.

Once I got out of the train station, however, my confidence began to wane.  I had initially assumed that Bari would be one of those cities that is defined by the presence of its port.  Well… this is not the case.  It’s really a city that happens to have a port nearby.  There are no signs, the city is large and it has that irritating European building that basically funnels you down each street preventing you from looking around in order to get your bearings.

I ran down the street in the direction I thought the sea was.  I decided not to look at my watch as it would only serve to stress me out, and I didn’t need any more of that.  I was very aware that I was to meet Dad in Athens, making a late arrival not an option.  I didn’t know it at the time, but there was another potential problem: the Greek Seaman’s Union had organized a strike for that weekend, and my ferry would be the last ferry to cross for two full days.

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that.

The street I was following eventually seemed to end, which was a little concerning as there was still no sign of the sea.  I found a small pedestrian path that took me through the great block of apartments and out in front of a castle.  The castle looked a little as though it belonged on the ocean, so I kept going and, rounding a corner, saw the port.

YEEEEEAAAAAAHH!

Only it was fenced off.  To my right I could see the ferries, so I started towards them.  However, as I approached the fence, I noticed a sign pointing left, reading ‘Porto’ and with a picture of a boat on it.  So I followed it.

Ten minutes later I reached a car park.  This had to be some kind of entrance.  I walked around the car park, searching for the entrance.  There wasn’t one.  I asked the guy at the desk working at the carpark.  He pointed the way I had just come.

“One kilometer.”

F***.  My.  Life.

I raced that one kilometer, sweat dripping off me in the irritatingly warm Italian winter.  After an age I found the entrance to the ferry port, went in, followed a sign towards what seemed to be my ferry, got lost, asked one of the port officials, was sent in the same direction I had already been going, found the ticket office, got my ticket and headed for the boat.  The ferry was really designed for truck drivers, so the area was filled with trucks and there wasn’t really any pedestrian way to be seen.  I just blundered my way across the tarmac, got through security and got on the boat.

This was it.  I had made it.

All that was left was to navigate the mysterious Greek public transport system from Patras to Athens.  There was no way that could be as stressful as this leg of the journey had been.

Could it…?

TO BE CONTINUED