Saturday morning was the end of the conference, marked as always by everyone carrying their luggage around with them at the session. (Side note to whoever stole my poster tube: Really? It was a cardboard tube. It wasn’t even a fancy hardshell poster tube. But anyway, I hope you’re enjoying my cardboard poster tube.)
The new new new new plan for the day was that I would take a bus down to Kalampaka and meet Dan there. This was a great plan, except that it involved me taking a bus to Kalampaka and meeting Dan there. (I’m kidding. Mostly the whole thing went pretty smoothly, with only one major hitch.)
After the conference-provided lunch (which of course involved feta cheese), I jumped on a local bus headed to the regional bus terminal. I had been warned about how the bus terminal worked, so I was mostly prepared for the madness, but not entirely. There were labyrinths of windows at which you could purchase a ticket, and each window had a sign above it listing the places that that particular window sold tickets to. I wasn’t sure if I needed to find the window for Kalampaka or for Trikala, as I knew I was going to have to change buses in Trikala. I wandered around until I found the correct sign — luckily, for both towns. I bought my ticket and settled into a seat to wait for the bus. As I waited, I inhaled at least two packs worth of cigarette smoke; it seemed like everyone around me was chain smoking in anticipation of (I hoped) not being able to smoke on the bus.
The bus was a modern coach bus, like the kind you would charter for a trip, complete with air conditioning and Greek pop music being blasted through the overhead speakers. The trip to Trikala was pretty, as we went through hills near the coast for part of the way. It was also mostly uneventful, except for the half an hour we sat on the highway because there was a car on fire in front of us. The only other odd thing was that while the bus driver had checked our tickets when we boarded, at one point he pulled over on the highway to pick up a woman standing by the side of the highway wearing an official-looking uniform. The woman got on the bus, the driver pulled back onto the highway, and the woman proceeded to check everyone’s ticket on the bus. When she finished, the driver pulled back off to the side of the highway, where she got off and stood there as the bus pulled away. Random ticket inspection? Normal? No idea.
We arrived at Trikala, a lovely modern facility in the middle of nowhere, about a half hour late. I was worried that I’d missed the bus to Kalampaka, and it turned out I had … but there was another one in 40 minutes. So 40 minutes later, I’m off on another coach bus. This one was a little different: unlike the first bus, which left point A and didn’t stop until we got to point B, this bus actually went through small towns and stopped at bus stops along the way, picking up people and dropping them off, so even though it was the same kind of coach/tour bus as the last, it was a lot more like a city bus. At one point we drove past a small park and there were two horses wandering around in the park. This did not appear to be an unusual thing.
It was at this point that I realized that I had NO idea where our hotel was in Kalampaka. The directions I had only indicated that it was on the street to the old Byzantine church. This, however, was not enough information. I ended up getting off the bus FAR too early, and walked across the entire town asking anyone and everyone on the way where I was going. I had the street name, but it was transliterated into English, so when I showed it to people they didn’t recognize what street I was looking for. I finally came across a very nice pharmacist who, through a mix of English and (his excellent, my horrifically substandard) French, understood what I was looking for and then walked me through a neighborhood until we came to a major street that intersected the street I needed. It turned out, of course, that the bus I had been on actually terminated about 150 meters away from where the hotel was, and if I’d just stayed on the bus longer (or, you know, looked at Google Maps for where the hotel was) I would have been fine.
Dan had already checked in and was waiting for me at the bus terminus, where I was supposed to have been arriving. Through the magic of public wi-fi, we found each other. Our plan was, in total, “Dan drives and Leigh takes a bus to Kalampaka, and we meet up somehow.” We’re still kind of amazed that worked.
Statistics:
- Modes of transportation: coach bus
- Cumulative total: 10
- Creepy staring guy on bus: 1
- Meals involving cheese: 3