Podgorica, Skopje, Greece
Skopje
Morning bus to Podgorica, which is dull, so spend much of the day reading. Night bus to Skopje. Mother Teresa statues, nice Turkish bazaar, buy a hat, fortress, Dutch people, talk about Amsterdam, Greek girls beat me and a French teacher in Bratislava at pool, take a morning train with an unsurprising two-and-a-half hour delay down to Thessaloniki.
Greece
Thessaloniki bores, Kavala is nice, but after the boring experience of Thessaloniki I left my camera in our hotel, damn. There are no connections to Istanbul from Kavala, so in the morning (my friend’s “Fancy another hour in bed?” response to the alarm clock is met with an unconvinced but determined “No” on my part) to grab as early a bus to Xanthi as possible. Xanthi has connections to Istanbul, we’re told. We get to Xanthi around noon…and it ain’t much. The place is absolutely dead, hot, and dull. When we realize that the single shabby building by the railroad tracks is the main train station, we’re not hopeful. Fortunately, there’s a train to Istanbul going at midnight, so we don’t have to stay the night. We spend the day mostly reading in a park, having decided against investing four Euro into a size 3 football (a decision we would regret many times during the rest of the journey). At midnight we hop on the train, into a rather slick compartment with two beds, and after staring out the window for half an hour, we go to sleep.
