20050722
Was woken up this morning by a greek female member of the ferry staff saying “Stand up, stand up bys, stand up”. Not a great morning call and it took me a while to figure out what was going on! I think she wanted to clear the corridoor but the next stop wasn’t for a long time! She smiled afterwards.
Spent most of the day planning our journey (on the ferry). It’s going to be very tight but we think we can fit everything in. Wez asked at reception if he could see the bridge of the ship. “That’s not possible” was the answer. The ferry was quite late, lasted almost 30 hours in total!!!
Watched the sunset over the sea in Patras and went off to find the train station and a hostel for the night. We found a hostel but it wasn’t the one we were looking for but was E10 cheaper so we thought yeah! There was a man sat outside on the porch with a slight Scottish accent. I asked him and he said that he lived in Scotland a long time ago, he has lived in Greece for 7 or 8 years. His opinion of Athens wasn’t great, but then locals are sometimes like that.
So we signed in and were shown to a room. The is what you would call extremely basic… I’ll leave it at that.
Walking through the corridoor I noticed a man preparing raw meat on the table. So what did we do? a) thought eww! and left the hostel right away b) shut our door or c) went in to say hello. answer: c
Two guys of unknown origin were sat around cooking meat over a camping stove (in their hostel room) and welcomed us in. They spoke a little English and I asked them if either of them played the accordian I noticed on the top bunk. One of them said yes, in fact he played us a tune and I asked him if I could take photos. He then proceeded to ask money for the photos. I have him about 27p!
They then offered to share their meal with us. “Oh, sorry, we have an early train to catch, we’ve got to sleep”. We managed to escape.
Providing I live through the night (there are blood stains on the pillow in our room) we’ll be catching the 6:02 train to Athens in the morning. What an experience!