Europe Trip: Day 41, June 30th

When the wake up call came, I was in my silk sleeping bag liner and had to struggle out of that. Then I realized I had been laying on my arms for a while, and so they had fallen asleep. So it was comically hard to answer the phone. I felt bad since the guy who had checked in the previous day got woken up -- I hadn't heard him come back in the night before.

I got ready, packed up my stuff, and went to check out. Then after doing some computer stuff like replying to emails I headed down to eat breakfast.

My plan for the day was to go into Corfu Town and see the Venetian fortress and the Byzantine churches, plus anything else I stumbled upon. When I went to check the times for the bus I found out I had just missed the 10am bus and the next one wasn't until 1:45pm. So I went down to the beach with Hector, which was his plan for the day.

At 12:30pm I went and ate a plate of souvlaki (pita bread, chicken on a stick/kebab thing, a few fries, and a small salad. It was very good for only 4 euros. Then I headed back up, did a couple small things, and headed down to the bus stop. On the walk down I met a guy named Alec who was from California. We talked and ended up sticking together in Corfu Town, having some similar interests and wanting to return at the same time. He had been there a little bit before and I had a map, so it worked out quite well.

We first tried to find a couple of the museums, but we never could figure out where the Archeaological or Byzantine museums were, and a couple people told us it was closed. So we just got a drink and then headed to the Venetian fortress. By the time we had walked all around in there and I had taken some pictures it was almost 5pm and we had to be back at the bus station by 5:30pm! We hurried down, and Alec ended up paying for a taxi to get us there in time (5 euros). Since I had bought him a drink earlier we called it even.

Back at the Pink Palace I went through and looked up a bunch of information on Athens. I had a small map that showed most of downtown Athens (not all the side streets, but quite a few of the streets) and I marked it a bit with the places I wanted to see. I wrote everything else in my little notebook, which also had the information on where to meet my host in Athens the next morning.

Then I went and ate, adding Alec to our little group. Hector, Alec, and I sat with three Portuguese people, a guy and two girls. I was surprised at how good their English was since I had heard somewhere that Portugal didn't have as many English speakers. It turns out that their university had been turned into an English university, where all the classes were taught in English. So they spoke almost flawlessly and with very little accent.

After we finished eating, I headed up to the luggage area, where I grabbed my backpack and sat down to wait. The bus was supposed to leave at 10pm, but didn't leave until at least half an hour later.

I slept a couple hours on the ferry, since there were couches we could lay down on. But the bus was extremely hard to get any sleep. I dozed a bit on and off, but only got some decent sleep when I experimented with sleeping positions that were more or less sleeping flat. We arrived in Athens by 6:30-7am, and the driver dropped us off at about 7:30am.