Thessaloniki

The Kavala crew left us on the side of the highway at midday on the 6^th of February. We walked up a roundabout and found a place as good as any for hitching to Thessaloniki. There was a small shoulder and about one in ten cars was merging in and going slow enough to be able to stop safely. The weather was far from terrific, and we weren’t sure whether or not we would get a ride, but we figured that if everything went wrong we could easily walk back into Kavala and spend another night (I think we secretly wanted to do this anyways).

We were picked up after not so long by a woman who was kind enough to drive us only 10 km (just far enough to eliminate the option of giving up and heading back Kavala). She left the main road, and us along with it, in the middle of a very cold nowhere. We waited a long time for our next ride. The Mediterranean Sea was beating violently against the cliffs and shores of Greece. Dark cyclonic activity was brewing in the distance and appeared to be headed our way. We were lucky with what turned out to be our second but last ride of the day. Two sisters picked up us brothers and carried us all the way to Thessaloniki. They were slightly older than Ben and I, good English speakers, and not incredibly interesting. We were so happy to finally be warm again. Ben fell asleep in the back seat with the guitar wedged between his legs. I managed to stay awake and listen to the younger of the sisters (who was wearing what might just have been the most vibrant red lipstick in the universe) as she postulated rhetorically about how we might be serial killers or rapists and how she probably shouldn’t have stopped to pick us up.

Pretending to be pensive in a Thessaloniki café.

Thessaloniki is a huge city, and we were relieved to have been left by the sisters in front of the main port downtown. If you’ve ever been to Europe, traveling from place to place and trying to reorient yourself in a new environment on a daily basis, you’ll quickly learn that everything revolves around a city square or, in the case of coastal cities, the harbor. Ben and I Skyped with Danielle and had a hot chocolate while waiting for Steve, our Canadian Couchsurfing host, who showed up and paid our entire bill at right around the same time that he introduced himself.

We drove back to his place in his new car, which was driven by his fiancé Mahi. We rolled in and wasted no time in having a delicious meal of Pastichio (which was in fact so good that I proceeded to write an improvised song about it on the guitar). Steve is a great guy. He was born into a Greek family in Montreal, though moved to Greece when he was still quite young. He has a ponytail, his English is near perfect (maybe better than mine), he works for some kind of agricultural pesticide company, and he’s the reason I started this blog. Steve was so good to us that I don’t think we paid for a single thing (despite trying) throughout the duration of our stay. According to him, we were only staying with him because he wanted to prove to Mahi that Couchsurfers are good people so that he could invite hot Russian girls the next time (apparently he gets a disproportional number of couch requests from this demographic).

"Just wait, I have to look cool
for this photo"

We spent two days in Thessaloniki. Steve took a couple of days off work to hang out with us and show us around. There isn’t all that much to see, but it is nevertheless a fantastically Greek place. We spent time eating Mahi’s great cooking (best pizza I’ve ever had - even better than in Italy… props!), smoking a massive cigar, visiting various pubs, drinking one and a half litre plastic bottles of wine (only 3 euros a pop!), shopping for warm clothing in the cheapest parts of town, complaining about the unprecedented cold weather, and trying to convince Steve to quit his job and go traveling. One of the highlights of the stay was buying a new razor and having the most incredible shave. It was then that I learned that Indian razors are more like chainsaws than devices used for shaving.

We wrapped up our visit to Thessaloniki in a downtown bar. Steve bought us beers and shots of tequila. We were served free nuts, pizza, and so on, which is a business tactic that seems to be prevalent in Greece and which I very strongly condone. We sat around having our last chat as Steve explained to us that Greek people don’t dance (the subject had inevitably come up when a great live DJ was playing dance music and nobody was moving a muscle). According to Steve, dancing is an “unnecessary step” (the pun was almost surely intended). I am still unable to decide whether the free pizza is worth the lack of dancing.

The next morning we decided to skip Skopje because of the weather (it was almost to the point where we weren’t able to leave Thessaloniki at all). Our plan was to hitchhike to Macedonia. Steve was so kind that he drove us 25 km out of town to a poll station that would make hitchhiking easiest. He also gave us a pack of cigarettes, which once again foiled our plans to quit by having a “no buying of tobacco” policy. It was cold, windy, snowy, and miserable. Steve took a Hanuman sticker and the weird unidentifiable guru dude who was probably responsible for making the stickers (and decided to make one of himself while he was at it). He said they reminded him of us. I’m guessing that Ben was Hanuman.

Steve and Ben in the same café (I seem to have not taken all that many pictures in Thessaloniki).