Saturday July 25th, down to 3 of us and the day we will always affectionately remember as the day of “sweat and cankles”.
-train was supposed to leave at 7 a.m., but arrived at 9:20 or so
-during the 2 hour wait, Steph and Chels decide that they would try to find a public bathroom in the train station only to come back with horrid expressions on their face and utter disgust. There was a good chance to see the 20 denar espresso we bought from a machine laid out on the platform somewhere. The place was apparently no more than a hole in the ground with filth on every wall, leaving a desire to Purell from head to toe
-ok, the ladies are going to hold it
it is around 30 degrees already…small little detail but will help describe the rest of this day of “crankiness”
-train is 2 hours late, but we are excited to enter the train only to discover that instead of sitting in a covered area on the platform, we have to sit in the non-air-conditioned, metal, hot, smelly, old train because of what the Macedonian women in our little hot cabin describe as “machine defekto”. Ok, got that one figured out, we are sweating for longer than we thought….one more hour sitting without moving in this sauna. We get going around 10:30 or so, before even having moved a meter (metric system, folks).
-we sweat just sitting there. And we are talking SWEAT! The kind that collects and runs down the back of your knees, your chest and that sits on your forehead. There is no shame now and we are past glistening, it is a downpour kind of experience. No one worries about being sticky, as long as there is no B.O. involved; we are all good to suffer together.
-the train starts and Susanne realizes that she has to bite the bullet and use the bathroom. May she have courage and the ability to hold her breath for more than a minute. Yes, the breath holding and trying to not take much detail in, as well as having the ability to squat comes in handy….after the detailed description, Steph and Chels again decide to hold it….
-more sweat. We are now using towels and figure out after a couple of hours on the train that the window in our little cabin DOES open. Hmmm, does not help when the temperatures outside feel like an oven. Now we seem to collect dead bugs which somehow fly through the window to land on Chelsea’s chest once in a while. She LOVED that experience for sure! ;-)
-“Cankles”. We start talking about them. Those lovely combinations of ankles and calves which we have heard and read about. Well, looking at our feet, we realize they look ‘ginormous’ and are missing any kind of definition, any veins that were ever visible or any bones. Just a mass of hot foot. We are feeling very sexy with our massive appendages sitting and sweating. Cankles it is…hopefully they will “decline” in size and our ankles will appear at some point.
-we travel through Macedonia along the various stops including one where people reviewed our passports on the Macedonian side of the border (not too bad) as well as the Greek side (why are the train employees wearing masks?). We give up our passport and are told to leave our train, and that they are given out in 10 minutes by the officials.
-ok, how are the bathrooms here, we wonder? Not too bad, we have a hole in the ground but an acceptable one. We are pros now and carry our toilet paper and Purell with us.
-Passports are placed in a pile and Susanne grabs 3 that looked like our Canadian ones. Hmmm, how easy it would be to take a few extra ones. Do people ever do that? I’m glad ours were still there. Not the safest way to keep important documents. We are now in the land of Euros, Chelsea grabs an ice cream and we are on our way again to Thessaloniki.
-After getting into the train station, we sweat more lugging our bags a few blocks up to our Hotel Atlantis and up three flights of steps.
-now we are onto the more pleasant part of the day: a walk alongside the waterfront, a $4 Euro Frappucino from Second Cup, as well as a nice meal including octopus, beer and other yummy items on a boardwalk.
-Rough, hot, sweaty, cankle day!!!
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