Πέλλα και Έδεσσα

(Pella and Edessa)

We decided to go for a little day trip this weekend. First stop on the list: Pella, then continue on to Edessa. Both of these cities are north west of Thessaloniki. I had heard about Edessa from other American students here that went and it sounded awesome so I really wanted to go. I didn't know anything about Pella, but the girls I was going with really wanted to go so we did. What an adventure we had....

So we take a bus (like a greyhound) at 10:30 a.m. out to Pella. The bus driver pulls up to this sad looking bus stop bench in the middle of no-where and yells out "Pella!" So, we get off the bus. We're looking around like, "Oh my god, where are we?" (The first photo is where we got dropped off.) But there is a sign for the museum we came to see pointing down a long road. We start walking. 15 minutes later, we've arrived at the museum! It's tiny, and we go in. The museum has 3 rooms, and most of the display cases were empty with signs in Greek that we couldn't read.



The cool part about it though, in my opinion, are the ruins outside. This is part of the museum and we do this after the inside. It was GORGEOUS outside! Sunny and 70 with light to no breeze. We walked around the ruins. It was an ancient town, the cultural hotspot and capital of ancient Macedonia. There were old, crumbling columns still standing. Some steps that they had partially re-built for the sake of the viewers. There were also the mosiacs on the floor inside the rooms-and in the museum they had the decorated part of the mosiacs hanging up.

A mosiac is a floor with pictures, made out of different colored stones. The famous one that my friend wanted to see is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pella_Lion_Hunt_Mosaic.jpg








It was quite stunning to see in person! It was perserved extremely well! The colors were very vibrant and the outlines of the hunters and the lion were very distinct. Probably the nicest one I've seen so far (I saw multiple mosiacs in different museums so far).

So, after the 2 hours we spent wandering around the ancient sites, we decided it was time to hop a bus and go out to Edessa, the town I really wanted to see. When we left Thessaloniki, the guy at the bus station told us that a bus goes out to Edessa every hour, 10:30, 11:30, etc.... So we ASSUMED that if we were dropped off around 11:15, a bus would come every hour around then.

I'm pretty sure most of you can tell where this story is headed by now.

We started walking down the road around 1 p.m. and we saw a bus drive up and leave while we were still a few meters back. Oh well, we'll just sit at the bus stop and eat our snacks for a bit until the next bus! None of us had really eaten at this point, and we were excited to get to Edessa and grab some lunch.

So we sat at the bus stop. I should mention at this point that where we were sitting was basically a hotbox. There was a bench inside a plastic box with a door-hole at the end. I already mentioned it was gorgeous outside... OUTSIDE. Not in the hotbox. Bad idea. There was another bench to the left of the hotbox, but there were two Chinese tourists sitting on it already, there was no more room.

After about 45 minutes, a bus going the opposite direction of what we wanted came by. The 2 Chinese guys got on and the bus driver came out looking at us saying "Thessaloniki?" "No! No Thessaloniki, thank you."

"Thessaloniki?"

"Oxi!! (no)"

"Thessasloniki!"

"OXI"

He was rather upset that we weren't going to Thessaloniki apparently. They eventually drove away and we sat on the other bench, thinking that OUR bus MUST be coming soon. We did see a bus going the direction we wanted, and it kept on driving. He didn't pull up to the Pella stop at all. So what could we do? We kept sitting there.

2 and a half hours later...

A bus finally pulls up to our stop that is going to Edessa. We get on and take a nap for the rest of the ride. Sitting in the sun that long makes me sleepy. So we eventually got to Edessa. At nearly 5 p.m. and we only have 3 hours until the last bus leaves for Thessaloniki. We get some snacks and walk to our destination: The Waterfalls. They were amazing! It was so nice outside at that point, nice and cool but with the sun low in the sky.

There are 3 waterfalls, the "twin waterfalls" and the "Great waterfall". We also got to go inside a little cave behind the waterfall, which was cool. We also ran into some other Americans there, from Chicago. It was a nice couple and the woman was doing some teaching in Thessaloniki. Small world.



(Side story: I've been telling people here that I'm from Chicago because it is the ONLY other city besides New York and L.A. that any Greek people know. Although, it's pretty bad when you tell an American you're from Wisconsin and they say, "Where in Canada is that?")

Well it was absolutely beautiful. It was a nice change from the city living. Pella was silent! And Edessa was a cute little town, and by the waterfalls it smelled soooooo good and the sounds of the water were very pretty. I really needed that after living in Salonica for so long. I kinda forgot that I really like that about home-trees and water... Good smells and quiet sounds! Yes, we have the sea here which is where I like to go and walk by myself and have some deep thoughts, but it's not the same when the city is all around you.

We walked around for a while and ended up taking the 7 o'clock bus back home. It was only about an hour and a half drive back to the city. The bus driver also played very good music all the way home! Cities 97 kind of music that I like. Once back in Thessaloniki, we went straight to our favorite taverna for some good food and free wine. We were rather exhausted at this point and asked for our check at about 11 p.m. and our server, Christos just looked at us and smiled. He sent more wine over instead of a bill. We love those people... they know us pretty well by now. And leaving at 11 is UNHEARD of. I am telling you, these people like to be out LATE. We left at midnight which was a tad bit more acceptable to Christos.

I LOVE this city, it is so much fun! I try to be like a Greek and stay out all night, but I'm just not used to it. I have yet to go out clubbing all night, that's not really my thing but I guess I have to give it a try here at some point.

It was nice to get away for a little bit to a nice quiet place. It really did remind me of home! Especially the middle-of-no-where, that definitely reminded Megan of home (who grew up in middle-of-no-where Wisconsin).

My roommate and I have been looking at our remaining weekends here and I am really going to be busy until June... we are trying to get in all our traveling since our time here is already half over :( Athens next weekend, then spring break, and then Istanbul, then hopefully Delphi (and other places in the Peloponnese), then maybe Santorini (which my sweetheart is trying to get out here for)... too much to do and not enough time to do it!! But if you're reading this Marc, Ali really wants to go to Santorini as well so if you don't come then we're going to have a romantic weekend there!! lol

Thanks for reading my long blog. If anyone wants to hear the funniest part of the middle-of-no-where Pella story, hit me up on FACEBOOK :)

Here's a video of the waterfalls:

Movie Madness

This week there has been a film festival right here in good ol' Thessaloniki. I got a free pass to all the screenings thanks to my school! The film festival people give a certain number of free passes to students and I signed up for one. Normally they cost 60 Euro! (Like $75 US) I've been taking advantage of this pass as much as possible. I'm going straight downtown after class today for another film!

I've seen some good ones and some bad ones. My favorite so far has been, "Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai" which was about the movement in Kenya that brought down a dictatorship. It was a really interesting story that I never knew, and the film was shot beautifully! I guess there was something about their style of filmmaking that I really enjoyed. I can't quite explain it unless you've seen the film.

I've seen some disturbing films. Why else would you go to a documentary film festival, if not to be disturbed by human nature? One such of these was called, "Zeru Zeru, the Ghosts." This film is about people in Tanzania that cut off the limbs of Albinos for good luck and fortune. Sometimes they don't even kill the person, they just run into their house with machetes and start hacking off arms and legs. To CHILDREN no less. Pretty disgusting. The film wasn't that great; they just didn't do enough with the subject to make a good film. I do not recommend it.

Another film that was slightly disturbing (not as much as the albino one, in my opinion) was called, "The Children of the Pyre" about kids in India that live and work at a ceremonial cremation site. They burn corpses all day and night and steal shrouds to make a living. It was a little sad to think about what these kids do just to make some money. They all talked about how scary it was at first, but that after a while, you get used to seeing all the corpses. I actually liked this film a lot; I really liked the shots the directors were doing in it. Nobody else liked it except me though so what do I know.

I've also seen a film about Chinese parents that are pusing their children into being Olympic gold medalists in gymnastics, one about the monarchy and it's fall in Iran, an Israeli's film about Anti-Semitism across the world, and maybe a few more that I can't remember. I have 2 I want to see tonight and a few more this weekend! I really want to use my free pass until I'm sick of films! I'm a documentary junkie, so this is like crack to me.

Aside from the films, I haven't been doing much else. I'm slowing down on the travel for now since spring break is coming up as is my trip to Athens. The study abroad students all have a trip to Athens the first weekend in April. I'm excited for that! I'm also going to be officially buying my plane tickets for spring break today. I'm starting in Amsterdam which I didn't think I was going to get to but I'm going with 2 other people for the first weekend. Then I'm going to fly into London and meet the girl I'm traveling with the rest of the time.

My life here is more or less the same as back home. Meaning that I do a lot of sitting around waiting for something exciting. The only difference here is that I get to travel a lot and I actually get to have a night life, something I've never had before! And man, do the Greeks love their night life. I can't do it how they do it-usually out til at least 3 a.m. if not later. But, they don't start til midnight usually. The city here is really energenic at night as well. Always people doing something and there mysteriously always seems to be traffic. The only time it stops is from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. when everyone is sleeping!

I love this place.

Berlin!

So here I am a week later and I can finally blog about my adventures in Germany :) ACT may not give a lot of homework, but for some reason all of my professors decided to hand it to me all at once! (Exam, position paper, quiz, project... etc) Of course it had to be the one time I actually went somewhere but anyways....

I flew directly from Thessaloniki to Berlin so that was pretty nice. We used EasyJet which has pretty cheap flights, roundtrip I spent about 250 US Dollars- which is less than trips I've taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco! We left Saturday morning at about 11 a.m. and we arrived in Berlin around 1 p.m. (Germany is one hour behind Greece) We bought the "Berlin Welcome Card" which was the smartest decision I made all weekend! With this card, we got to ride ALL public transportation unlimited for 72 hours. We also got into museums with a discount, all for only 25 Euro which I thought was a very reasonable price. We did use the S Bahn (train above ground) at every chance we got. We used the U Bahn as well, which is an underground train like a subway.

I went with 3 other people, Dewey and Megan who are both UWEC students that I knew before coming here, and Caitlin, a studet from Florida (University of South Florida-Tampa). Megan had some friends there she wanted to see and Caitlin speaks some German so they were good travel companions to Germany!

As soon as we left the airport, we took the S Bahn to our hostel, which we had booked in advance online. It was 15 minutes from the airport - THE OTHER AIRPORT... not the one we flew into! It was actually 55 minutes away from the one we went to. Ooops... It wasn't a big deal it was just kind of funny when we realized we had directions from the other airport. But we got there. The hostel was really nice! For only 11 Euro a night, you can't really complain. Plus, we had a 4-bedroom private which meant that it was only the 4 of us in the room. Plus the hostel wasn't super crowded or anything so the bathroom situation wasn't bad. After we put all our stuff down, we went walking. The hostel was across from the train stop and there was a long street full of shops and stuff to do. We got some curryworst at a nice little shop with a really nice German woman running the shop! She was laughing at us a little bit because we were taking pictures of our food... I would have laughed at us too. Curryworst is pretty much just sausage with fries, I'm not really sure what it was but it was good!

We shopped a little bit down the busy street until about 9 p.m. when we were picked up by Megan's friend "Biggie". He was an exchange student at her high school a few years ago and apparently nobody can pronounce his real name so he just goes by Biggie. (He's Turkish) It was his girlfriend's birthday so we were going to tag along at the bday party which was at a karoke bar. When we got there the waitress told us that happy hour was just ending, but she would let us get the happy hour prices on our first order. So what do we do? Order 2 drinks apiece, of course. This was BEFORE I learned that B52's have rum in them... but that was very apparent later (rum and I do NOT get along). I also had German beer that was mixed with Orange Fanta soda which sounds disgusting, but it's not beer like you are thinking. It is a creamy smooth light beer meant for mixing with other drinks. It was basically a beer creamsicle, as my roommate pointed out later. It was amazing!

So after much German beer, Dewey and I sang a duet "Summer Nights" from the Grease soundtrack. I kept saying that we had to sing something from "GREASE" (hahahaha, get it guys?? Cuz we came from GREECE??!!!) Yes, I am a dork.

That was my first experience with karoke. It was lots of fun though, especially to hear the German people all singing American songs. There was definitely some Britney Spears and Backstreet boys! We were all laughing and singing along. Biggie was very impressed by my rapping skills and made me sing a rap song... I picked Ms Jackson by Outkast because that was one of the only rap songs on the list that I kind of knew. Well you can imagine how THAT went... I know Megan recorded it but I haven't seen it yet...

The next day we decided to take the free walking tour of East Berlin. Which lasted 3.5 hours and it just so happened to RAIN the whole time. That was fun. It was really cold and I forgot my umbrella at the hostel, but hey, at least I had my Columbia jacket with the hood. It was a really interesting tour. I never knew much about Germany, but Berlin was pretty sweet. I saw the Berlin wall, walked over Hitler's bunker (where he committed suicide), saw one of the only remaining Nazi buildings, and some other crazy stuff. It was all pretty heavy stuff. There is also buildings around from the 18th/19th centuries and the time of Fredrick the Great (but there was so many Fredricks I forget which ones were which) who apparently attempted to create religious freedom for all and built multiple churchs around one spot to open up Berlin to immigrants. It was a little sad to think about what happened later in the same spot that had been declared for freedom of all-there was a huge Nazi Book Buring in the square later in history. It is next to the University where Albert Eistein, Karl Marx, and others attended.

That night we went out with Megan's other German friend from high school, Svetlana and her boyfriend Peter. We went out to dinner and a hookah bar. It was fun to hang out with them because they didn't take us to loud or touristy areas, just cool little places that were fun to just chill out at. Lots more German beer was consumed! Not by me, by Dewey. We're determined to find some of this back home. I told him that if we can find it anywhere in the States, Wisconsin would be the right place to be!

The last day, we went to Museum island. First we went to the German Historical Museum then after that to the Pergammon. The Pergamon is AWESOME. I saw the Ishtar Gate, which was part of the Walls of Babylon-built in 500ish BC. Crazy. I can't even explain how it feels to see this stuff-inside a museum no less. It is just HUGE. The Pergamon Altar was pretty amazing. That is the first thing you see once you walk in. Built by the Greeks as a temple to Zeus. I really can't wait to go to Athens, to see the things in their original places. For the curious ---> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Museum)

After that, we went to the top of the TV tower which was built before the fall of the wall, by the East Germans. It kind of reminds me of the Space Needle for those of you that do not know what it is (I had never heard of it until I was there). We saw the whole city from the top at night which was beautiful all lit up! Then we had dinner at the revolving restaraunt at the top which was pretty sweet. We stayed up there for 3 hours. Then we left and walked around town to take some night pictures.

Then we took the train to the airport at about 1 a.m. We got there around 2 and tried to sleep on some couches. Our check in started at 5:30 a.m. I of course could not sleep for some crazy reason. I've been having trouble sleeping on trains, buses, planes, pretty much everywhere. We got back to Thessaloniki around 11:30 a.m. and I didn't have class til 2 p.m. but I was so exhausted from not sleeping for over 24 hours I just crashed on my bed for the rest of the day!

So that was my Berlin adventure. It was really fun! I would recommend the city to any one that wants to travel. It was definitely up there for me as one of my favorite places I've seen so far. SO FAR is the key sentence here... I still have a lot more to see!

Thanks to everyone that made it to the end of this post, I had a lot to say.

Parade Silliness

Hello to all my faithful readers! How's it going? All is well on my end of things. I'm going to Berlin on Saturday so I'm rather psyched about that.... I also got to go to Xanthi for a parade in celebration of Clean Monday (start of Lent in the Greek Orthodox church). Xanthi is a town northeast of Thessaloniki (for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthi).

We took a 5 hour train ride north east from Thessaloniki on Sunday morning at 7 a.m. which wasn't too bad. It was only 7 Euro (approximately $8.75) for the trip there. We had "standing room" only seats though, which basically meant that we could sit down until someone came along with the actual seat numbers we had taken and kicked us out. That didn't happen until about 3.5 hours in to the ride so I only had to stand for 1.5 hours!

The parade was crazy! Energetic and silly are the best words to describe it. Confetti is thrown from all people all the time at everything and everyone! Other people were spraying silly string and something that looked like foam (I'm still not really sure what it was). The people in the parade come at your face if your standing near the barrier and put streaks of paint on you. The whole parade was basically a bunch of people dressed up in silly costumes dancing down the street. There were "sections" and they each had a particular costume set. I think these sections may have been community clubs and organizations, but I couldn't read any of the signs (they were all in Greek).

There was a group of the squirrels from Ice Age, a group of beer, a group of pirates, princesses, Indians, smurfs, raggedy Annes & Andys, something that I think was supposed to be Mary Poppins and the Chimney Sweep guy, hippies, and many other random things that I can't even remember any more. Each section had what appeared to be the designated "male" and "female" counterparts per each costume. For example, the princesses were with princes. The fun part of it was that not all males wore the male costumes nor did all females wear the female costumes. It was totally random. Also, most of the people in the parade were drinking and smoking. Many just had a bottle of wine in their hands. So I thought that was rather interesting... It is definitely a family event! I love the Greeks...

It was hard to get any good pictures at this parade because there were just too many people and it was random craziness the whole time. But I got a few.

The only other excitement at the moment is that I am starting to plan my spring break! Another girl and I are going to travel together, mostly taking the train through much of the European countryside. We're going to fly to London, then Dublin, then from there go to Barcelona, Paris, Geneva, and lastly Venice. The problem with Greece is that it is expensive to travel outside of Greece but once we're out in Western Europe, travel becomes cheaper. I'm taking a flight from London to Dublin on Ryan Air for $5. Seriously, 5 US Dollars TOTAL taxes and all. I'm pretty psyched about that! I've heard so much about Ryan Air and I really wanted to give it a try but they don't fly any where near Greece!! For those who do not know, Ryan Air is known for SUPER CHEAP flights around Europe and is a popular choice for many college students.

That's the news from this end of the world. It's starting to warm up a bit here, so that's nice. Hope all is well back home.