Towns of character
Need not bow to anyone.
Hidden things are best.
Our host here in Thessaloniki informed us yesterday that his primary like of the city is that it's not so touristic as other cities. It has a life of its own, and people are encouraged to find it.
We woke up too early. What does that mean? Well, we fell asleep around 21h last night, and this morning we were out of bed by 9h. Sigh. We consumed what was left of the pepper stuffing from last night, grabbed our laptop and PIF bag, and set off to find some coffee to wake ourselves up. We stopped in a café called Dada that offered free Wifi.
We've gotten a few suggestions on things to see further along the way from various hosts we've had, so we checked up on the recommendations for Thessaloniki that we've received from our Greek friends. We were instructed to try toureki from Terkenlis, and since we love pastries this wasn't exactly a problem for us. We noted the directions to get there and set out!
It didn't take very long to get across the city, and along the way we spotted a bookshop that we'd like to poke through further later: we're still in need of a map of Turkey, and now that we're both done with "Gulliver's Travels" we need to find something else with which to entertain ourselves. We passed the really touristy stretch of shops and junk salesmen ("Want a watch, miss?", "Do you know the word of God?") and arrived at Terkenlis, which is, I suppose equally as touristy as everything else around it. For a famous bakery, it's pretty new... founded in 1948. But we got our toureki (around here, toureki is a common thing, but the one that comes from this bakery is special because it's the first place the baker decided to add interesting fillings and absurd amounts of chocolate coating to what is usually a simple bread) and ate it, too, in the park across the street, which boasted a giant flower clock that reminded me of Geneva's. It was delicious, if overly-sugared, and it certainly was enough to get us through breakfast.
We headed back to Stelios's place. He was going to be off to class soon (he's a chemistry student at the university), and we needed to know how to get to the food shop he recommended for lunch. He sketched us a map on his way out.
Next, we had a few errands to run. We rummaged through the bookstore we'd passed and also stopped by a few more, but we didn't find many English books in any of them. We did encounter a map of Turkey, though, which we're pretty excited about. :) It's to be the last map of our trip! We are CLOSE. We also found the municipal market and picked up squash, mushrooms, and wild rice to make some soup for dinner tonight.
After that, we hoofed it back to the train station. We'd heard that bikes are allowed on some trains, but not all, and we wanted to clear up what that meant. The woman at the desk made it clear as mud: bikes are allowed on normal trains. Um. Anyway, we'll just show up and try to put our bikes on the train. There's a non-InterCity train that leaves at 06:30, and we can only guess that that's a "normal" train. Guess we'll see.
Lunch was at a place run by "the Guy," as Stelios called him. We paid just 3€ each for heaping portions of "kitchen food," which is to say food that speaks for itself without being fancily dressed up on a tiny plate. We ate it in a nearby park with yogurt for dessert, then made our way back to our host's house to drop off the horrifically heavy squash mentioned earlier.
The rest of the day was spent lazily... we wrote some blogs, played some adventure games, took a nap... cooking dinner was nice, but it didn't occupy much of our time. Stew is magical in the way it just sits around and becomes delicious. We were happy enough just to relax.
We're turning in early again. The girls and dude who shared the room with us last night have headed out for a train to Athens, and we're contented to just fall asleep on this floor again. It's good to be warm. :)