I skipped breakfast and left the bad hotel early after a night of no sleep. The situation at the train station was not good--all trains were booked all day long which meant standing room only to Thessalonica. The ticket agent was demoralized, and I took it as a sign that the train was a sucker move, so I got a cab to the bus station and took first bus to Thessalonica.
We stopped for a gyro about noon. I appeared to be the only non-Greek on the bus, but the man sitting next to me spoke English. He said he knew the Seattle Supersonics and used to watch Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton when he was a kid. Also, he told me about a twice daily train from Thessalonica to Istanbul, and this is the way I decided to go.
In the train station, I met a young man from Greece who was a newspaper writer. He was going on a visit to Thessalonica's sister city in Southern Turkey near Syria--Sanliurfa. He had a reproduction of a piece of ancient art and some official looking paperwork for his visit. That reminded me of what I'd heard from the Greek cab driver in Athens. He had said students were going from Greece to Istanbul for an exchange type program. Maybe it's part of the same thing. I don't know, but the exchange is promising. Maybe EU isn't far away for Turkey.
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Was the gyro good, like those at Med. Plus in Pensacola? Isn't it great to run into an English-speaking person who can help out? Most of the folks we met in Florence and Paris spoke it better than we did. We loved the way one artist outside the Ufitzi spoke. When he said the word "Paris," he said it with great enthusiasm, "Pa-re-ge." Was Ataturk like our FDR?
Yes, I enjoyed the gyro, and the young man on the bus was helpful. I was able to catch the train I needed thanks to him. I don't know much about FDR, so I'm not sure how he compares to Ataturk.
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