I met Lindsey in the morning and we explored the city for the whole day. In some ways, Thessaloniki is more like what I'd expected Rome to be. There are ancient ruins absolutely everywhere, and sometimes they aren't ruins - we poked into many churches that were built on Roman/Byzantine construction from 300 or earlier. I think it's clearly the result of Thessaloniki remaining Roman up until the 1400s, unlike Rome itself, which fell to invaders 1000 years prior. The city is built into hills along the coast and as you go higher up, the vibe gets more residential and grungy. The coast is all very polished and classy, reminiscent of Kotor or Split, but the upper city is more familiar to the majority of the ex-Yugoslav states I just left behind. It's still much nicer than those, though, and I'm really appreciating being in the EU once again. Prices are higher, of course, but it's still not too bad - my hostel is $22 a night as opposed to the 10-15 range that I was typically paying in the West Balkans, but it's extremely nice and still much lower than some of the prices I found earlier on in the trip. It's got a fair amount of stuff that a tourist would be interested in, but it seems to me that Athens and the islands siphon off a lot of those visitors - not many tourists here at all. I guess it is the off season, but the weather isn't too cold and I thought northern Europeans might flee here in the winter. While we didn't stop by any museums today (I'm saving them for the next few days), they were only a few euro each and are vastly less expensive than the wealthier parts of Europe. It's funny that Greece has such a reputation for corruption and economic failure, since those comparisons are all to the likes of France and Italy and Germany. Sure, it's definitely worse in that regard than those countries, but after the dysfunctional governments I've been putting up with for the last few weeks they seem to be running a pretty tight ship over here.

There's a lot to see in this city, and we really only explored the basics today. We walked around so many churches and monasteries, all of which are free, and Lindsey kept asking me about the geotechnical construction practices that went into the ancient construction. It was fun to think about how I'd have done some of this different, but also gave me an immense appreciation for how well they did in building this stuff without any of the modern tools or resources that I've had at my disposal. No way any of the buildings I've worked on will still be standing in any form 1700 years from now. The Roman forum is still there and it was fun to look around around and speculate what each part of it might have been for. Later in the day, we hiked up through the forested park at the top of the hilly outskirts of the city to watch the sun set across the bay. It was clear, and from above the whole city you can see Mt Olympus dominating the horizon as the sun sets to its right. One of the better sunsets I've seen in a while. We went our separate ways and I headed back to the hostel to make dinner, where I met a cool German guy I ended up going out to a few bars and played pool with. The city has a lot more going on at night than any that I've been in probably since Budapest which is a very welcome change of pace.

I've decided to stay until Thursday, partly because Lindsey and Oscar are here (he got in late tonight), but mostly because the bus that leaves for Sofia on Wednesday is $70 and the bus on Thursday is only $9. Bulgaria looks fairly depressing and I'm not especially looking forward to it, but I'm also really curious and there's a certain reward to seeing a new country that I find myself continuing to crave. More or less the same thing can be said about Romania, and then onto Istanbul.