first of all if you have heard, athens and thessolaniki are blowing up. we are not there right now and may only go into athens to catch our flights out on the 16th and nothing more. we will be watching the news.
on the night of the 4th we headed out of istanbul on an overnight train to thessolaniki. we reached the turkish border at about 1:30am and were greeted by our rather chubby conductor barrelling down the very narrow aisle of the train blasting open cabin doors and yelling in turkish. our passports were rounded up in an ordinary fashion and we waited. about an hour later, customs came through the train checking luggage. he took one look at our tightly packed backpacks and frowned and made frustrated noises and several loud sighs. he was pissed. he had me heave my bag up onto my bunk and preceeded to unpack the meticulously packed thing after he discovered he couldnt just cram his hand in there and feel around. my tampons got some serious investigation to the point that i thought i might be required to demonstrate what they were used for. i could tell when he realized what they were because he turned red as a tomato and dropped them. about an hour later we continued. about 30 mins later we were awakened by the same door-blasting ritual for EU customs, but our bags werent checked fortunately. we made it to thessolaniki without much problem and got to kalambaka via train a few hours later. on the way we think we saw mt olympus, the top of which had a fair amount of snow. kalambaka is situated right under the cliffs of meteora and is a decent sized town with several fountained squares and pretty white buildings with red tile roofs. and there are christmas decorations! the call to prayer has been replaced with church bells. on the 6th we headed out for a day in the monastic complex of meteora. the four monasteries (grand meteoron, varlaam, agia triada, and agios nikolas) and two nunneries (agios stephanos and roussanou) were originally built to harbor greek orthodox monks on top of rock towers from the persecutions of roman and turkish invaders. the original complex was 24 monasteries, but just the six remain active now and these were fully built in the 13th and 14th centuries. we hiked out of kalambaka up through oak and sycamore forest to the nearest monastery, agia triada (were part of the james bond movie for your eyes only was filmed). as we were walking up the stairs below it, a monk came across the ravine in a box-sized gondola thing on a rather frayed and rusted cable. funny sight. we were the only visitors in the monastery and the doorman gave us cookies and turkish delight. the church inside was really pretty. a rather shy monk explained a few of the frescoes to us until he got tongue-tied and ran off. the church was covered floor to ceiling with frescoes. red and blue and green and lots and lots of gold with many biblical scenes of the saints and martyrs. gold candelabra and lanterns hung from the ceiling, there were little wooden chairs for the monks and the altar was covered with a red velvet curtain and gold lattice work doors. the outside of the monastery was just as impressive. sweeping views of the valley and kalambaka down below as well as some of the other monasteries and lots of mountains and forests. they also had a little bell rack with three different sized bells that i would have loved to hear. after agia triada, we walked past the nunnery agios stephanos and then along the road to varlaam and grand meteoron passing lots of goats and more spectacular views of the surrounding rock towers. we found a great little viewpoint looking the down valley between the cliffs to roussanou and nikolas and fall colors and sat down and could hear hundreds and hundreds of goat bells everywhere echoing off the cliffs! the sun even came out to light some of the forest and cliffs. we were kind of overwhelmed by grand meteoron as we were surrounded by fancy pants anorexic greek women smoking frantically and clicking around in their heels from the several tour buses parked nearby. we just walked up the stairs to the front door and then turned around and fled to varlaam nearby. we went inside varlaam, but couldnt access much, although the church was again very impressive. from there we walked down to roussanou. but it had already closed so we just walked up to the front door for the views. we also walked past nikolas and then through the village of kastraki on our way back to kalambaka. it was a great day! we hiked about 15km or so which we were excited about.
this morning we woke up to snow on the mountains across the valley from town! oh is was so pretty and there wasnt a cloud in the sky. we walked back up the road to roussanou to go inside since we missed it yesterday. the nuns were very grumpy but it was definately worth it. the church frescoes were highly graphic with saints and martrys being cooked, grilled, scalped by saws, chopped, de-limbed, decapitated, eaten by lions, eaten by dragons, eaten by two-headed fish, stretched on wheels, stabbed with no less than six spears, and hung upside with heads being stabbed with swords. of course all wounds were squirting masses of blood. i can imagine it was not funny when it happened and it was not painted with the intention of being funny, but it was so graphic it ended up being rather comical. after roussanou we returned to kalambaka for an afternoon of research (there is a lack of information about all things we are trying to do here). tomorrow we head to ioannina and then hopefully into the zagoria region in monodendri at the foot of the pindos mountains a few miles from the albanian border. there is some confusion as to when and if the buses run from ioannina to monodendri so we will see what happens. love you all and i will keep you updated as often as i can about any changes in plans and what not due to the riots.
