Exploring Thessaloniki

So today we actually got to explore a bit of Thessaloniki, and more importantly we learned why it's called Solonika as well. If you drop the first part of Thessaloniki it becomes saloniki, which over time got boiled down to Solonika. Similar to how New York City becomes NYC.

So Adrienne already told you about our misadventures with timezones and alarm clocks...but once we got out and about our first stop was down on the waterfront. We walked to Alexander the Great's "grave" which is really more of a memorial as no one knows where he was really buried. Apparently the Thessaloniki area was his base of operations for his father's palace is about 2 hours outside the city, and the city is very proud to be associated with him.







From there we went onto the "white tower", which actually has had a number of names throughout history here. The most ominous being the "blood tower" because it used to be the place they executed all of the criminals and their blood literally stained the walls red. In 1890, one of the prisoners knowing how ugly it looked convinced the guards that he should be let go if he whitewashed the entire tower, hence the new name. They've now converted the tower into a mini-museum just about Thessaloniki. Unfortunately all of the exhibits are just in greek, apparently this is a trip that every school child in Thessaloniki makes to learn about the history of their city. However Elena translated what she could, and we were able to get the gist of many of the exhibits.





The real reason for visiting though is being able to be at the top of the tower. From the top of the tower you get a 360 degree view of the city and its gorgeous. I took pictures that I hope to be able to stitch together into a panoramic shot later, but here's one of us that Elena took.

After the white tower we walked down to the "world's fair tower" that the city had built in the 1970's to attract business and show that they were part of the modern economy. Now the tower hosts much of the communication equipment for cell phones, but it has a nice rotating cafe at the top where we got something quick to eat.



Then it was onto the Archeological Museum of Macedonia. They had some very interesting exhibits about Alexander the Great (or Alessandro Magnus as they call him), prehistoric Macedonian and one on the plants of Europe/Greece. By this time though we were starving for lunch and so we left with the goal to visit that and the Byzantine Museum next door today.

Unfortunately when we returned to the car, it turned out the police had taken Elena's plates and given her a ticket. Apparently we had parked illegally and that's what they do. Needless to say she was bummed and distracted as we drove to lunch....where she parked like this:



So I guess it's not that surprising that she got a ticket. We offered to pay but she wouldn't have any of it. The place she took us was the most brilliant idea ever for a restaurant....it was MEAT SUSHI! They give you a checklist of all the types of meat and you write down how much you want of each. We also got their version of "french fries" and you should see the size of these things:



Needless to say I was a happy man. I'm also loving the fact that everyone here eats on my schedule (versus Adrienne's). We've been having lunch at 2-3PM everyday and then dinner is at 8-9PM. Anyways, after lunch Elena dropped us back at the hotel so she could go to the police station to get her plates back and because Adrienne was tired anyways. We ended up napping again until Elena called us to see if we wanted to take a taxi to her house to meet up for dinner.

At dinner we met Elena's older sister Andromiki (probably slaughtered that) and her husband Yannis who will be taking us to dinner on Friday and dropping us off at the airport on Saturday (Elena and her family are leaving for vacation on Friday).

Once we came back neither of us were really all that tired, even though it was midnight, so we ended up watching Fever Pitch and not going to sleep until almost 3AM!

Anyways I've gotta run her cousin is taking us up to a castle today!