Athenian Adventure

We just got back from a little side trip to Athens to collect our things from our friends who has been amazing enough to keep them for so long. We had initially only planned to leave them for seven weeks back last November, but when Pete then suffered a lot of ill health and it went on and on for seemingly ages, I ended up having to go back to Canada and well, the rest of the story is pretty boring. So seven weeks turned into more like 10 months and we finally got back to Athens.

The bus takes around 10 hours from Saranda, which isn't too bad considering the distance. What I wasn't expecting was the border to be so close to Saranda. I know we live very close to the south, south border, but I didn't expect we lived so close to the next border along which is known as Kakavia. Saranda and Kakavia are both circled below.

Map of where Kakavia is

It wasn't my first border by foot/car. I'd done this only once before in Laos into Thailand and that was a colossal pain in the ass mainly because it was like a 2 hour ordeal in +35C including a 2 kilometre walk with our enormous bags. 

This border was less of a pain in the neck. Firstly you arrive at the Albanian side of the border. A guy gets on the bus and calls out for passports. He comes around and collects your passports and then disappears with them. He returned about fifteen minutes later - maybe less with the passports. Albania doesn't stamp your passport (boourns, I love collecting the stamps), and instead they just record your entry and exits on a computer system. Okay fine. It was weird they didn't want to physically see anyone in person though. I had expected this - when I entered the UK by the Channel Tunnel train, they hauled everyone off the bus in Calais to go through British immigration because of 4 foreigners on board - one being me. We got several rude remarks by the Brits as to the great inconvenience two Japanese, an American and a Canadian had caused by making everyone get off and go through immigration. Oh well. This was not like that at all. We drove through the border then and the bus stopped again and the guy yelled at everyone to get off the bus. Oh great. Here we go. 

So then the underside of the bus opens and everyone hauls their bags out. Remember, Pete and I speak barely any Greek and next to zero Albanian aside from being able to tell everyone to "f*ck everyone in their family" which definitely wouldn't help here. An Albanian border guard rambled something to us in Albanian and we just replied with "Anglisht?" to ask if he spoke English. He kind of chuckled and walked away. Oh, okay. 

This younger girl then who spoke fluent English then told us that if we had any bags to put them on the tables. Okay, we did this. Once everyone's bags had been put on the tables the bus turns and leaves us all standing on the side of the road between Albania and Greece. A border guard came along then and everyone opened their bags, so I followed suit and opened our small backpack. I don't know what he was looking for suffice it to say he wasn't looking very hard. He basically just flipped open our backpack and was like yeah fine. Okay... great. Thanks I guess. 

We asked the girl what they were looking for and where the bus went. It went to a scanner apparently to scan it for things. What things I don't know but we assumed it was both drugs and people. Yes, people. Albania has a serious issue for two things: people trafficking of non-Albanians and Albanians trying to sneak into the EU. Usually from what I have been told by a well-travelled Italian the Albanians go to Italy and purchase Italian identification papers from Italians. Their identification papers apparently leave much to be desired in the sense of security and they can easily mess with it to their own ends to create a forged document. With that, then the Albanian person appears to be Italian and since Italian is the second language here thanks to Italy's occupation/control of Albania during World War 2, Albanians can then pass as Italians. 

So the bus returned and we got back on and were sent to the Greek border. That was simple. I have been through Greece three times now and all I get is either a surly or very jolly Greek border guard looking at my passport and stamp stamp goodbye Canadian have a nice trip. They have never even ask as much as how long I plan to stay or where I plan to go. Now watch - next time I'll probably get grilled! :P

The trip through Greece is stunning. It's a huge mix of mountain scenery, coastline and forests with tiny towns on hills all dotted with Cypress trees. The land has a very ancient energy about it and it felt rather surreal. Even Pete commented on the countryside about the strange energy it possesses. I found it peaceful and he found it unnerving. No idea why. 

We stopped at a small Taverna in the countryside between Ioannina and Patras for lunch. I'm not sure why but I wasn't hungry at all on the trip and managed somehow to live on a couple of weird Albanian biscuits and water. It was here that I got the opportunity to approach something I'd noticed along the way on roadsides - tiny little churches with offerings inside them. 

I was curious as in South East Asia you see these frequently along roads and on properties as an appeasement for the land spirits who had resided on the property prior to humans. It acted as a place the spirits could reside and receive gifts from the people who took over the land. These shrines on the other hand are like small churches with candles and whatnot inside and are actually used to honour the deceased person or people who died in car crashes along the road. A bit unnerving, since there were so many of them, but a nice gesture nonetheless.

Athens is a huge city, completely chaotic and manic. The streets are rammed with traffic and drivers are about as insane as they are in the countryside, prompting so many road shrines. There's a sanitation problem in the less touristy areas, like where we were staying, an area known as Vironas. Garbage piled up in street bins seemingly overnight to the point of overflow, much like in Saranda. This is a huge problem in Saranda. 

Anyway, we decided instead of splurging for a taxi which should have been only 10 euros, we decided to take the metro. Luckily the Athens metro is much the same as London's with signs denoting which stations this platform's train will take you to. We found our way easily from the bus station to Syntagma Square, the main centre of the city, or so it seemed. From here we had to find the bus stop to take the number 11 trolley bus to a stop called Gefyra. When the bus finally came, we realised that the bus, metro and tram system in Athens is similar to that of Prague with one ticket for your whole journey that you can validate in little machines on buses, trolleys, trams and at metro stations. This is one of the best systems I've ever experienced and you can get tickets in advance to validate from kiosks and metro stations. 

Let's talk about kiosks for a second here. These things are off the hook in terms of convenience. I guess you could compare them to convenience stores back in North America, except without the usually attached gas station. You can get anything at these bad boys, including beer, wine and cigarettes. Snacks, chocolate, chips, grab and go breakfasts, sometimes even more heftier foodstuffs like sandwiches, desserts and more. It's honestly insane how great these things are. 

You can even get toys. The great thing about kiosks though is that they don't jack the price up like a convenience store would. Back home if you want to get a coke or something you're going to pay some bastardised upped price at a Shell or something than you would here. Kiosks tend to be the same price as supermarkets and sometimes even lower. You can also usually find brands in the kiosks you can't get in the supermarkets probably because the kiosks stock themselves and don't rely on larger companies to come and deliver, so they get just whatever they want for the most part and aren't beholden to large corporate contracts. 

We have seen these beauties in Kyiv, Tbilisi and now Athens. There's something a bit awesome about picking out your snacks and having to go to the tiny window in which a person is taking the money. I do mean tiny. A McDonald's drive through window is bigger than this thing. You can just about make out the person's whole face. Whether it's for security or not though, I have no idea. 

Athens' kiosks seemed more... trusting in terms of you having free access to your goods, as you can see. In Kyiv and Tbilisi all the things were INSIDE the kiosk so you had to ask in your broken Ukrainian/Russian/Georgian mix for whatever you wanted. "Piva? Voda? Cigaretti?" Sometimes you had to mime what you wanted. Charades overseas is always fun... kind of. Until it's your last resort and you still don't have what you need. Although they all seemed to understand cigarette, go figure. I failed to mention that in all three of these countries with kiosks smoking is still allowed inside so basically everyone does it. You're more the black sheep if you DON'T smoke. Let me tell you, when you're in a packed bar or restaurant and there's 30 people smoking you don't have to smoke your own because you pretty much already are. 

Back to Athens. We had been desperate for something aside from pizza, pasta, pita or souvlaki. It's essentially what we have been living on in Saranda. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but by week three of the same kinds of food you'd probably commit a crime for a burger. Luckily though we have found a handful of places that actually do burgers in Saranda, but I'm hesitant ever since I had a "burger" in Morocco and it was more like a crime against nature, but that's another story.

Luckily in Vironas there was a handful of cute cafes and restaurants and one of them did burgers. Beef burgers. Doubles. With everything. Oh my god, we hit the jackpot. Fries! Oh man, it was the best meal we have had in awhile and so cheap at only 4 euros for a burger. Pizzas in Saranda are more expensive than that, not by much, but still. 

We didn't do much that first night aside from scope out the area by dark and eat a burger. We made a friend of a white street cat that we gave cuddles to. They were actually friendly in Athens which greatly thrilled me. As you can hardly look at them in Saranda without them running off into the bushes so I always have to admire them from afar. 

The next afternoon we headed over to Plaka, a neighbourhood near the Acropolis that was filled with tiny backstreets filled with shops and cafes. These are usually my favourite places to explore in a new city because you find all manner of surprises back there. We happened upon the old Roman Agora for example, which was teeming with extremely friendly street cats who are fed by a woman who owns the adjacent shop. Another cat lover stopped, a guy I think is Canadian and he cuddled the cat that was paying me close attention before going back to his friends. I overhead him saying "Okay I got my fix, we can go." Too true, fellow cat lover, too true.

We ended up in an interesting restaurant that was seemingly nestled between the neighbourhoods of Plaka and Monastiraki, a balcony overlooking the Parthenon as well as another overlooking Plaka. It was chilly and windy but not horribly so. The food was fantastic and pretty well priced. We ended up just having a few beers at this place, dinner and generally just hanging out in Plaka for the evening. We got free bar snacks. It was a good time. Fun side story - the women's toilet had basically an immense view of the Parthenon lit up. That was one of my life's more enjoyable pees thanks to the view. 

Plaka restaurant view

Roman Agora

The next day we slept in. We had a late one and didn't get back to our Air Bnb until late in the evening. We hit up the kiosk for snacks and had a lazy one. We were meeting our friends Eirini and Yiannis later that evening to collect our backpacks from them. They'd been kind enough to keep them for us for so long. We all went to this crazy restaurant bar called the Silly Wizard. It was a British styled pub and it was absolutely hopping despite it being Sunday night. We ended up closing the place. Pete and Yiannis were drinking some kind of wheat beer from Germany but Eirini and I were having a Greek beer from Santorini called Volkan. She had the black and I had the blonde one. Turns out it's filtered through lava rock too which is pretty cool and made with a type of plant that Alexander the Great brought back to Greece from Persia with is doubly cool. It was pretty delicious stuff. 

We left early Tuesday morning. The bus to Saranda was at 8am, which was more preferable than Saranda's Athens bus at 630. I think I figured out why there's the time difference. The Albania into Greek border took an hour and a half thanks to being hauled off and our bags checked etc etc. The Greek into Albania way though took thirty minutes. That's all. They just wanted to have a quick peek in the hold, didn't want to see anyone and we were through. We took the same route back, stopped at the same Taverna along the way and had to go through Greek immigration first to "leave". The border guards in Greece are always like "whatever" to me it seems. This guy was the same. Stamp, stamps, see you later, Canadian, despite the fact I have enough Greek entry and exit stamps in my passport to make it look like I'm up to some shifty business. One day here, two days there, four days. No hassle so far though, so fingers crossed next time it's the same. They barely looked at Pete's passport, but being British in the EU (for now, pending Brexit in 2019, hahahahaa!) they don't really care. They didn't even scan the British passports in Corfu. The guy just made sure everyone looked vaguely like their photos and was so relaxed about it that it seemed to be like "hurry up tourist, I want to get back to my game of Backgammon." (which is incredibly popular in the Balkans it seems).

Again the Albanian border, they just turned up, took our passports and disappeared with them, returning about 10 minutes later and handing everything back. There were literally only like 10 people on the bus so it was super fast. 

The drive through the countryside of Albania this time was magical. It had been too early and misty to see it on our way to Athens, but this time it was sunny, bright and a lovely day. We didn't expect it to be so mountainous as it was. The roads twist and turn and at some points there are sheer cliff drops into the valley below on these tiny roads in the mountains. It was harrowing at times for sure. 

In short, damn Albania. You beautiful. 

Erin