Europe Trip: Day 38, June 27th

In the morning the hostel owner was nice enough to let me leave my stuff at the hostel and keep the key to the place until I picked up my stuff -- but I only had to pay for the one night.

I took a regional train (Ferrovia Sud Est - FSE) to Alberobello, which had a unique type of house found nowhere else in the world. The story that Lubna and Francesca told me was that back when the King or Lord of the area was taxing them based on the house they had, they came up with a way to make a house of stone with no mortar. So when the tax collector came around, they were able to knock down the houses and say that it wasn't a real house. Now they even paint some of them and people still live in them. There are even some 'hotels' which let you stay inside one for the night. The houses are called Trulli.

After walking around the town for a while and seeing the church, the Trulli huts, and eating some food, I headed back to the train station. By some miracle I found it without having to ask for directions. Just as I was about to ask for directions, someone asked me where to find the Trulli huts and when I looked back to tell them the direction I saw the sign to the train station. Fate? Maybe.

I got back, picked up my stuff, and walked to the port. I bought my ticket about 2 hours early and went onto the ferry immediately. As I was walking towards the deck I saw this guy and suddenly I was like: Wait! I know him! And I could see in his eyes that he recognized me as well. It was the Mexican guy who stayed at the same hostel as me in Naples. So during the ferry ride I stuck around with him and a Dutch girl he had met at his crappy hostel in Bari.

The ferry didn't leave the port until around 8:45-9pm. And we talked for a while and hung out until around midnight when we decided to find somewhere to sleep. We ended up sleeping on the floor, which while uncomfortable was not as bad as it sounds. I got about 5 hours of sleep, the ferry arrived in Igoumenitsa at 6:30am (but with the time zone change it was 5:30am in Italian time). The other two stayed on the ferry, which continued to Patras arriving around noon.