T is for Train

 

Pericles

The best thing about my train journey from Athens to Thessaloniki, the big city in the north of the country,  was the view of Mount Olympus. That’s the wonder of Greece: I just keep tripping across the stuff of the myths. For instance, I alight at the wrong metro station in Athens and wander up a hill only to find myself in the Pnyx, the very place where Pericles used to address the Athenians twenty-five hundred years ago. Should I be surprised? Probably not.

 

 





Mount Olympus

Olympus itself hove into view about four and a half hours into the six-hour train ride. Snow-clad, dominating the horizon, it was a fitting place for the gods to live.

 

Back on Earth, the train was comfortable, clean and had a restaurant car. My ticket cost 34 Euros, that’s because I’m an elder – under 65 it’s 45 Euros and at night it’s only 25 Euros for people of any age – but I was traveling by train specifically to see a bit more of Greece, so the night train was a non-starter for me.

And see Greece I did: the mountains north of Athens were riddled with tunnels; the great plain of Thessaly spread its winter colors of brown and pale green on either side; towns and villages were scattered across the plain.
 

I saw little stations like Sfendali and Inoi where we didn’t stop; small farms, white houses with red tiled roofs; mixed herds of sheep and goats; olive groves and snow-covered peaks - not just Olympus but Parnassus too!

Mount Parnassus

 

Announcements were in Greek and at the larger stations where we did stop, signage was rare so I had to guess where we were and how much further we had to go. Thessaloniki was the terminus so I had no fear of missing my stop.

 

Tunnel after tunnel through the mountains.

First class passengers get separate compartments.

Walking along the train I encountered doors
 between the carriages. The junctions were a
bit scary! But see how tourist-friendly
Greece is! The instructions are written
in English as well as Greek.




A very comfortable train

 

Arriving in Thessaloniki, events take a downward turn: the person who’s supposed to meet me isn’t there and after a three-hour comedy of missed communications and wrong station entrances I finally take a taxi to the volunteer apartment where I’ll be staying, in Diavata, a small nondescript town 10 kilometers outside the city.

 

It’s dark by now: the light in the apartment stairwell doesn’t work. Two kind young volunteers carry my luggage up two flights of stairs – there’s no elevator – and introduce me to the apartment.  

The room in the volunteer apartment  was carpeted with shag.

It’s dank and dismal and mold adorns the bedrooms walls. The heating doesn’t work. There’s no Wi-Fi; I’m sharing a room with the two kind volunteers, Ken from New Zealand and Bro from Germany. Kind they are, but also male, and no-one asked if this was OK with me. The volunteer coordinator is not happy with me because of the station snafu. I’ve had a bad cough for some time and suddenly feel a whole lot worse. This thing is migrating toward my lungs.

 



Sunset behind the warehouse.

I work all the next day in the warehouse, sorting clothes. This is the HelpRefugees warehouse in Thessaloniki and in a way, it’s the reason I came to Greece. When I volunteered at the HelpRefugees warehouse in Calais in the summer of 2016 (see blog post #1) I spent four days packing up children’s clothes not needed in the mainly adult Jungle camp to be sent to this very warehouse in Greece. In 2017 I planned to follow the clothes but ended up in Athens. This year, I’ve managed to see the warehouse, the clothes long gone, I hope!

 



After a day’s work, an unexpected evening meeting and narrowly avoiding getting sucked into a prolonged and noisy birthday party, my lungs were screaming, so next morning I spent two hours wandering round in the rain trying to find a doctor’s office. I eventually found a walk-in clinic just two minutes away from the apartment – why had no-one told me when I asked?

 Armed with a bronchial inhaler and orders to rest for four days I took my leave of the squalid volunteer apartment and rented an Airbnb room from a very nice Palestinian man called Mohammed and his dog Lukas.

Four days of luxury ensued: the heating worked, the bed was comfortable and I had little need to stir outside. I binge-watched “Outlander” on Netflix, even though I cringed and fast-forwarded every time they launched into their grammatically strangulated travesty of the Skye Boat Song.



Street market seen from DocMobile apartment.

Following my break, I contrived to move out of the moldy volunteer apartment into one across the landing which was rented by a different NGO, DocMobile. This one offered heat, a female roomie and the companionship I found largely lacking among the youngsters in the other apartment. Decent accommodation put my Thessalonian adventure onto a more stable footing, while the challenges endured reminded me of how fortunate I am to be able to change my plans if something becomes too difficult – an option not usually available to the refugees I work with.

 Part two of my Thessalonian adventures follows soon.