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7-30 Wed. I got up early and began my journey to Thessalonica, and my hitch to Brindisi, Italy, where I would get a ferry to Corfu Island.  The Swiss are evil when it comes to hitching, and the going was very slow until I could get out of Switzerland.  After I got out of Switzerland, I had a pretty easy time, but I was still quite a bit behind schedule to make my ferry un Brindisi.  Along the way, I met lots of interesting people including a couple who invited me to come hiking with them. I didn’t make my ferry as planned, but I caught another ferry in the morning after taking the train for a short section. On the ferry I met Shawn Prentice and Kristin. In Corfu we began searching for my friend Marcel Vrachliotis, but had nothing but problems. We needed to call, but first we needed cash and then we needed a calling card. Hours later, we called, and the number didn’t work. We walked to his address, but he didn’t live there. In addition, the doors were only labeled by names using the Greek alphabet, and I wasn’t yet accustomed to that. We walked back to town, and my friends lost faith, gave up and found themselves a place to stay. I talked with some natives and they used the phonebook to look up his name and found the same number as I had. I walked the few kilometers back to his place and asked some other people. One person mentioned that there was another building with the same address (Only in Greece!) so I went there and knocked on the door.

The person who answered was not Marcel, but could direct me to the right apartment. At the proper apartment, I knocked again and an old man, whom I later found out was Marcel’s father, answered the door. We spoke together in French, and he told me Marcel was down the street at a restaurant. It was a big surprise for Marcel to see me, because his phone had been disconnected several days earlier and his wife had been unable to inform him that I was coming, or even that I was in Europe. In addition, the group couldn’t believe that Marcel’s father had given me coherent directions or even spoken with me, due to his senility. We had a great meal and conversation and I met lots of other people.

Marcel is an amateur photographer, and took some very nice pictures for me.  He's also a very interesting person, who is constantly thinking up seemingly random, but somehow distantly related thoughts about each thing that he sees or hears.  He's the sort of person that narrowly escapes a major automobile collision, and at the moment of near impact calmly says says "boom" out his window at the panicking driver with whom he almost collides...

I stayed and toured the city together for a few days, and I met up again with my other friends again as well. I got a great haircut that Marcel’s friend fiercely negotiated down to $8.00, and shopped endlessly for neat trinkets. Corfu was great, and I would have loved to have stayed longer, but I needed to get to Thessalonica before the Kirijas family would be leaving for Halkidiki, Greece, and that left me only one day to cross Greece.

8-3 Sun. I took the early morning ferry to Igoumenitsa and then hitched to Thessalonica. The hitch was difficult since the Greek are not always trusting people. The first leg of my journey was on the back of a motorcycle driven by a likely gay teenager. He took me several miles out of his way, and dropped me off. Next I hitched with a Bulgarian truck driver from Sofia, Bulgaria, named Gregoir.  He was hauling slate and could only go about 10 Kilometers per hour on some of the passes, but I was extremely grateful that he picked me up since I had been waiting for hours and walked several kilometers.

The drive took forever, but we had a great view form his Mercedes truck, and we somehow managed great conversations in Italian and Bulgarian as well. We stopped at a restaurant and had dinner with several of his other trucking friends.  During the dinner, Gregoir and one of the others got in a brawl, and we were all asked to leave the restaurant.  Unfortunately, due to language barriers, I never figured out what the argument was about, except that they began as friends and parted as friends.  Gregoir slept for an hour or two after the meal, and then continued driving, almost completely asleep, but still able to somehow keep the truck on the road.  Near Thessalonica, before I had a chance to get his contact information, Gregoir found a trucker who was going directly into the city and could take me to a bus stop, so I quickly transferred into the other truck. I feel bad that since I didn't have his address, I wasn't able to send him a “thank you” postcard.

8-4 Mon. After walking a bit to the nearest bus stop and taking a bus into town, I figured out how the Thessalonica bus routes work, and also figured out how to take the bus directly to Dzordzi and Make’s apartment, which amazed them. Dzordzi is also a skilled amateur photographer, and took numerous photos of everything we would do for the next several weeks.

We toured around and I met their relatives. I also learned that in Macedonia, at least in the Kirijas family, floors and dirt are considered contaminated, and are never to be touched by any part of the body. Therefore, going barefoot was out of the question with the exception of on the beach where the sun sterilizes the germs. Despite this, food doesn’t always need refrigeration… Later that day we loaded up the car and drove south to Halkidiki to stay in a small beach apartment just above a cool beach.  The apartment was located smack-dab between Kriopigi and Kallithea Kassandra on the first Greek finger.  I would become a true beach-bum for the next few weeks!

8-5 Tues. The apartment, located just above the beach, is simple but great. It uses solar heating to heat the water. Next to our beach house complex there’s another complex being built by several hard-working and friendly Albanians. I would find out later that many Albanians work illegally in Greece for lower salaries than the Greek’s demand. Several Greeks also explained to me that whenever something needed to be done right, it was best to hire an Albanian because they are honest and very hard workers.

Later in the day I constructed a sand sculpture of a woman. It wasn’t my best work, but none-the-less Dzordzi loved it, encouraged me to be a sculptor, and took lots of pictures. he made me feel pretty good about my otherwise average sand sculpture.

About two weeks later I would create my masterpiece sculpture of a girl partially sitting up with one leg bent and slightly folded above the sand.  The sand was highly cohesive that day, and allowed me to sculpt overhanging areas around her side, and the part of her knee that was lifted above the ground. It was by far my most ambitious effort ever, and attracted an entire group of people standing around watching as I worked.  Unfortunately, it was too ambitious, and developed a crack down her midsection which grew until the entire sculpture broke in two and crumbled.  Even more unfortunate was that I didn't have a chance to get any pictures of this masterpiece, even in its unfinished state.

8-6 Wed. Mostly just hung out on the wonderful Beach.  Succumbing to peer pressure and cultural norms, I replaced my normal swimsuit with a skimpy Speedo version.  I felt a bit naked at first, but got used to it in time, since this is what everyone else was wearing in Greece.  I Met a young French girl named Ekaterina and showed her my camping pictures during the twilight hour.

The weather was extremely hot for me, even during the night, so I spent a lot of time on the porch without wearing my shirt in attempts to stay cool. The Kirijas family thought this was very bad after the sun went down, because I was overly stressing my system by exposing it to “the cold”. I tried to convince them, that if anything I would succumb to the heat, not the cold!

The other interesting and somewhat related thing is use of pesticides. It was considered critical that there be ample amounts of pesticide in the air if one was to be outside or sleeping. According to Dzordzi, “Bugs are not going to ask your permission to bite you.” They used a burning chemical thing to drive bugs away while outside, a plug-in pesticide dispenser during the night, and spray on demand both for individual bugs and the air in general. Interestingly enough, there were almost no bugs there, and when I brought this up, it was used as confirmation that their techniques were working…

8-7 Thurs. Beached with Ekaterina and met her family. Later, I walked with Tiberia down the beach to Palini’s beach. There was a concert going on, and I quickly met up with a German tourist named Kasandria. We later danced at the hotel disco, and she wandered off never to be seen again… Oh well...

8-8 Fri. Dzordzi drove me to Spitaki, where I met two Austrian girls who were planning to rent a moped and tour the Greek fingers. After chatting for a while, I was hoping they'd take me back to their hotel, but no such luck.  For the rest of the night, I hung out at Bubbles, a local night place in Kallithea and rode a driving simulator for the first time. It was really cool!

8-9 Sat. I hung out at Bubbles again, and met up with the French family. They were really wild, and didn’t mind their young daughter being with them in that pretty wild place while drinking and the like.  In the US the police would descend and arrest for underage drinking...  Probably arrest the parents too...  Later we had dinner in Kriopigi, and later I met Marina on the beach and was attacked by her dog. Marina was a Greek girl with the most evil terrorist dog imaginable. She was pretty, but what I liked most of all about her was that she had an interesting look that is very uncommon.  I had a few conversations with her, and she agreed to go on a walk with me later, but never showed. I ended up giving up on her, and also learned that Greeks are often quite nationalistic when it comes to dating, so I probably never had a chance.  I wish I had gotten a picture of her, but instead I only got a picture of her evil dog.

8-12 Tues. Met several German girls on our beach: Tanya, Micheala, Yavonne, and Dianne. We all went together to Bubbles and some place near Ahoy. The conversation was great, and the girls looked really nice. The beer was extremely expensive though, but at least the women could drink for either half price or free…  The next day Michaela would come to our beach say she had a great time the night before. We talked for quite a while after that.

By the way, in reading what I just wrote, the reader might assume that I spent 24 hours a day hitting on every beach woman that walked by.  While this isn't completely false, I mostly spent my time just laying on the beach or snorkeling in the shallow and warm sea, but there isn't much to write about that.

I found out later that while I had been conversing with the Greek girl, a very beautiful girl whom I had noticed a few times playing in the surf, but whom I had never approached, had been watching me from a distance.  I would later find out her name was Anela, and that leads us to the next page.

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