JOURNEY TO THE WEST
next stop Thessaloniki, the second biggest city in greece. This should also be one of the highlights of the trip because our good friend "Yanni, the greek" moved there after he left shanghai and
we where really looking forward to hang out with him. Unfourtunately he was needed back in mao tse dong country for some "important" issues. Bad timing.
So after we arrived we met up with his girlfriend Aleksandra instead. She was a great host and dragged us to a very good restaurant just around the waterfront.
Here we had Meze which is maybe the equvalent of a spanish tappas or a german "Brotzeit". Depending on your appetite you get huge amounts of small dishes which are all supertasty. Grilled wild
mushrooms, eggplant, greek sausages, meatballs and a lot of other stuff that I cant remember now.
After that Alex tried to motivate us to enjoy Thessalonikis nightlive but we where so tired that all her efforts where useless - that moment we where quite relieved that Yanni was not here -
because everybody who knows the lovely Greek - he is a partymachine and would never take no for an answer...
Initially we planned to just stay a day in the city but next morning we where still really tired and decided to stay for one more night.
Its something with being on the road for so long. Your body doesnt really recover as much as before and you just need to take more restdays than in the beginning.
When we left from China we where super motivated and saw the whole thing more like a project with a rough schedule. We got up early and drove four days before we took one day off. That worked
perfectly but after a while the pace changes and you feel more and more exhausted - so we arrived where we are right now, not deciding by the schedule but by feeling if we take a rest or
not.
I guess thats also the main reason why lots of travellers end up needing much more time than they initially planned for such a trip. As we skipped some parts of Turkey and the Pamirs we where
still more or less on schedule - but a restday in Thessaloniki was very welcome.
Alex invited us for breakfast to her and Yannis appartment where we spent almost the whole afternoon before we strolled along the beautiful waterfront with a huge statue of Alexander the great
and Thessalonikis most famous Monument - the white tower. We had a beer and watched the sundown and then had a few more beers in the hostel with the other inmates. Here we met Kyrsty from England
who travelled around Greece quite a bit and had some great tips for stopovers on our way to Athens. Meteora and the Thermopylles will be our next destination - then to the capital of the
greeks-Athens!
