Adventure Time Round 3

My week in thessaloniki was amazing, ορεο, or I guess I should say, incroyable! Catching up with Katie, eating amazing food, meeting an assortment of backpackers at the hostel I stayed in on nights 1 and 6, and exploring the city, were all better than I could have imagined them being. On the last night I was in Saloniki, I went on a very informative waking tour of the city with my hostel mates, watched the latter half of a bootlegged, and dually subtitled, version of the sequel to Thor, and played drinking games in the street until it was time to catch my train to Athens. I fell asleep as soon as my very exhausted, fairly drunk, body hit my seat.

When I awoke on the train some hours later, I took in some of the sights and was once more in awe of how beautiful Greece is. Exhaustion aside, I was elated to have been able to spend 9 beautiful weeks in such a wonderful country.

I held onto that moment when things got dicey….

Literally 10 minutes before we were set to arrive at Larissa station (the train depot at Athens), the train came to a complete stop. After some confused translating between the Greeks on the train, I gathered that someone had been hit by a train (whether or not it was OUR train was never clear to me), and the rail crew was cleaning the mess up. So we had to wait.

And wait we did. For over an hour.

By the time we got to Larissa station, it was 1130am. My flight to Brussels was scheduled to leave at 215pm. I was not allowing myself to stress out at this point. The situation was so out of my control that I simply had to roll with the tide. Certainly I would be able to get to my flight on time!

Then I did my research: The next train to the airport was leaving in one hour and if I were to use the metro, I could plan on a minimum of a 45 minute to an hour long trip. Public transportation was not an option.

So I hit an ATM and I hailed a cab. A €40 cab to the airport. Great.

But! I made it to my flight on time, managed to convince one flight attendant that at least one of my fluent languages was French, and confused the hell out of another one when I answered all of his questions in the Greek/English hybrid language I’ve been speaking since the middle of May.

My goal for Brussels?

Aside from having an amazing time catching up with Keller and Lucile, I’m going to make a point to switch out of Greek brain and be a proper tourist because, really, no one other than Greeks speak Greek, and although I may be as brown as the Skyrians I was living with, this blonde hair of mine is really going to throw people for a loop if Greek starts tumbling out of my mouth when I go to order μ καφέ. I mean, un café… At least the pronunciation on that one is close…