A Few More Hotel Reviews

Okay, I’ve been in four additional hotels since my last ranting spell, so I guess I’ll do a brief overview of those.

In Rome, I stayed in the Hotel Saturnia, which is about a ten-minute walk south of Roma Termini, Rome’s main train station. I had read that it was in a dangerous neighborhood, but in my eight-night stay, it seemed alright to me. When I got to the hotel, they told me that there was a problem with my room. They could put me in a room without a bathroom and give me a parial refund or call around and find me another hotel. I went with the refund and the room was fine. The hotel’s breakfast was pretty good, with some very nice cappuccino. The location was perfect as it was a short walking-distance to everything I wanted to see except Vatican City. Also, the staff was extremely nice. They also had a room free when I hit my snafu on the way to Bari and had to stay in Rome for an unexpected extra day. The price was right, around $60/night, which is awesome in Rome. There was no internet, but wifi was easily pirated, so I had access the entire time. Overall, I have to say that it was a pretty good stay.

In Athens, I went all out. I stayed at the Best Western Pythagorion. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly all out, but it was a step up. The area around this hotel really was sketchy, as I was almost always hit up by a prostitute/pimp when I ventured out after dark. Other than that, though the area was good because, like in Rome, the hotel was centrally located and I could walk everywhere. As far as the hotel itself, the rooms were large and clean and the staff was incredibly helpful. If they could just take the hotel and move it a few blocks west, it would be perfect.

From Best Western, I stayed in a Holiday Inn in Thessaloniki. (Note: I’ve stayed in hundreds of hotels in my lifetime, but to the best of my recollection, this is the first Holiday Inn I’ve ever stayed in. Go figure.) This hotel was very conveniently located, as Holiday Inns typically are, I suppose. There were problems, though. The breakfast and internet were both outrageously expensive. Since I found a café nearby at the train station that provided food for cheap and wifi for free, I just opted to frequent that place when the need arose. Also, the staff was rather unfriendly, which was a little surprising considering the great hotel staffs that I had encountered all over Europe, even in the cheapest of hotels. Given a chance, I’d probably stay somewhere else next time.

Finally, in Sofia, I stayed at the Maxim Hotel. No, it had nothing to do with the magazine. It is a reasonably priced hotel that is located about a ten-minute walk from the train station. Here, the staff was very, very friendly and helpful. The breakfast was free and, umm, interesting. Every morning, I had some slice of a pork-based breakfast meat and an ice cold fried egg, which wasn’t all that bad, all things considered. As I mentioned in a prior post, there was a Dunkin Donuts across the street, which I LOVED. Everything that I was aware of in Sofia was close enough that I could walk to it within thirty minutes. There was no internet, but I knew that going in and Sofia turned out to be a pretty good city for free public wifi anyway, so it wasn’t a huge deal. At checkout, I had to pay in cash because the hotel’s card reader wasn’t working, so I had to go out to an ATM and get as exact change as I could, because I didn’t want to be left with any Bulgarian Lev, and paid the bill. It was about $60/night, which was satisfactory. I left feeling pretty happy about the Maxim Hotel.

Okay, that’s it or this hotel post. My next hotel, in Belgrade, is rather expensive (for me), but is across the street from the train station and offers free long distance calls to anywhere in the world, so some of you may hear (or have heard by the time this gets posted) from me while I’m there.

Toodles . . .

Thessaloniki in the Sunshine

My last full day in Thessaloniki was also Greek Independence Day. On top of that, it was one of the most beautiful days imaginable. My favorite thing about being me, at least currently, is that when days come around like that, I can go out and enjoy them. And enjoy it I did.

I went back out to the waterfront and walked along the shore. A kilometer or so down from the square that I had found the previous day, I found another square. This one was even more lively than the first. Also, it was very odd because intermingled among the cafes and storefronts were ruins of an ancient town (I assume because it looked ancient) here and there throughout the square. Right next to the roped-off sections of ruins were people drinking coffee or beer in the square.

A little further down the shore was what I believe is the biggest icon of Thessaloniki. It’s called the White Tower and I honestly don’t know anything about it except it isn’t really all that white and it looks like it belongs on a chessboard. I noticed the first day that I saw it that there were people up top, walking around. Having not suffered from acrophobia for almost two weeks now, I resolved that the next day, I would go to the top of the White Tower as well as visit a few of the many museums that were in the neighborhood. I made this resolution, however, not realizing that the next day was a holiday and all of these places would be closed.

Still, I walked around for a long time, looking at the crowds and soaking up the atmosphere. Just like Independence Day in the United States, there were lots of people walking around with their children and vendors were selling hot dogs and popcorn. Some were also selling souvlaki, which I guess is a little different, but much of what I saw didn’t look too different than what you would expect to see back home.

I took pictures of any of the old buildings and statues that I thought looked interesting. I would be lying if I were to say that I knew what many of them were, but I just snapped away. Clearly, there were some ancient ruins, as well as some churches that appeared to be several centuries old. Intermingled amongst these were modern buildings, like the Thessaloniki Civic Center, and modern sculptures. I can’t say that Thessaloniki is a very picturesque city, but it does have enough personality to at least make it interesting.

For food in Thessaloniki, I basically alternated between gyros and Greek salads, making up for the lack of those items when I was in Athens. There was also a ham and cheese pie mixed in there, but just the one. Also, there was some junk food that I tried and liked. They were little puffs of flavored corn meal. They were almost exactly like cheetos, but instead of being flavored with cheese, they were flavored with peanuts. It was sort of a corn-meal-peanut-butter-puff that was actually really good.

One last observation about Thessaloniki is that I’m not sure if it’s spring break in Greece, which is possible considering the holiday, but I saw kids and teenagers out all day the entire time I was there. Even if school was out, however, I can’t explain why the coffee bars and cafes were packed every day I was in Thessaloniki starting at around 3:00 in the afternoon. People must have been working somewhere, besides the cafes, but it looked like an early-Saturday evening instead of a mid-Wednesday afternoon. All-in-all, though, I have to say that Thessaloniki seemed to have a much better going-out-youth-oriented culture than Athens, at least from what I saw.

Okay, that’s probably enough about Thessaloniki. I’m on a train from Greece to Bulgaria (did you know that they stamp you passport in Bulgaria?) and I’m sure I’ll have stuff to say about Sofia coming up.

Thessaloniki - Seriously, Thessaloniki

Who knows? Maybe, we’ll get two entries out of Thessaloniki, though it seems like much more of a one-entry town. We’ll see.

I came to Thessaloniki not knowing anything about the town except that it is the home of PAOK (a football club), it is the second-largest city in Greece, and you pretty much have to go there if you want to train out of Greece because, from this direction, it is the gateway into eastern Europe. I decided that since I had to go there anyway, I’d spend a few days and see what it had to offer.

Arriving at the train station, I knew I was staying at a Holiday Inn that was supposed to be very close. The directions were simple – exit the station, turn right and walk about five minutes. Fair enough. That’s what I did and lo and behold, I was at the hotel. As in Athens, the neighborhood in which my hotel was located did not appear to be too promising. There were sex shops, strip clubs, and x-rated movie houses all up-and-down the street. It appeared that I had found myself in Thessaloniki’s red-light district and it didn’t have anything near the charm of, say, Amsterdam’s.

Because of train strikes in Greece, the only train I could get out of Athens left at 6:50 in the morning, so I was pretty tired when I got to Thessaloniki. I had noticed that I was getting wifi at the train station from somewhere, though I couldn’t get it at the hotel without paying through the nose, so I decided to walk along and see where else I could get it. I turned and walked in the opposite direction from the railway station.

There were little, grungy cafes and army surplus stores, but I only had to walk about three blocks before I found a Starbucks. Excellent. I hate Greek coffee. I sat down and had some coffee and went back to the train station to check my e-mail and maybe get a ticket for Sofia. When I got back to the station and looked around, I noticed that getting out might be a little difficult. There were eight ticket stations, but only three of them were open and they all had lines about 40-50 people deep. There was one lane for international tickets and that was closed. I decided that it should be a job for the morning, so I checked my e-mail (there were two cafes in the train station that had free wifi), grabbed a ham-and-cheese pie and went to the grocery store, where I bought my new favorite five-euro-red-wine. It was a Macedonian wine and I could read very little on the label, but it was sweet and not too strong and went down well.

The next day, I returned to the station and discovered that morning was the best time to get a ticket out of Thessaloniki. The lines were short, and the international booth was open and only one person was in the line. Because the ticket to Sofia, with reservation, was only 18 euros, I decided to buy a ticket rather than using up my Eurrail pass.

I still hadn’t found anything even close to scenic in Thessaloniki. As far as I could tell, it was all porn shops and Starbucks, but I ventured a little further this first full day. Three or four blocks up from the Starbucks was a little square and a pedestrian (other than motor scooters) way. There were dozens of little stores and cafes and, to the right, it went on for five or six blocks all the way to the Mediterranean. I walked down to the sea and had a look. It was beautiful, but the weather was sort of dismal, which took away from the overall experience. I knew I would be in Thessaloniki for a few more days, though, so I had high hopes for a better day.

Coming back from the sea, I stopped by a gyro shop and ordered a sandwich “with everything.” Now, this gyro “with everything” was a new one on me. It had pork, tomato, onions, french fries, ketchup and mustard. What, realy? French fries, ketchup and mustard? Where’s the tsatsiki. Well, tsatsiki might be fine for you fancy folks in Athens, but in Thessaloniki, they were using french fries, mustard and ketchup. Is Primanti a northern Greek name? I don’t know. Still, it was mighty good.

It looks like I’m getting two posts out of Thessaloniki after all because I haven’t even mentioned walking along the shore or Greek Independence Day. I will, though.