Meteora, (or Our New Zombie Refuge)

We celebrated our mountain back in Thessaloniki. We drank Champagne in a water themed bar on the beach with Nizar while Ginette flashed flirty looks at all the attractive men. After that we spent several days recuperating by lying on the beach. Ginette said we both needed to work on our tans but I don't understand how anyone can just lie there while there is so much interesting sea life to examine.
The storm had washed up sponges on the beach and I needed to examine them.
Also there was lots of little black pods that I thought might be seaweed. In the name of science I cut one open with my knife and to my shock a fully formed baby cuttlefish fell out onto my hand. I was horrified, because I didn't know if it had been ready to come out of its egg case and the idea that I had been responsible for the death of a cuttlefish is awful. I took it back to the sea but I don't know if it made it and I spent the rest of the afternoon picking up cuttlefish egg cases from the waves and swimming them far out to sea to try to make up for what I had done.

We had planned to head for Meteora, a town with huge cliffs where there are monasteries built on the tops of the cliffs.
It took us three days to get there because to catch the train we had to get up at 6 am and we couldn't do that because we were exhausted from staying up all night battling with mosquitoes. It's apparently a bad year for them, Nizar has a couple of bites but Ginette and I have hundreds. There are little blood smears all over the walls of Nizar's apartment from killing the little bastards. It's pretty gross.

After a couple of days practice we managed to get up and catch the three hour train to Meteora.

An odd thing happened to us at the train station. We were sitting waiting for the train. The waiting room was filled with people and there were three African guys sitting across from us. Suddenly for no apparent reason two Greek men showed up (no uniforms) and asked the African guys for their passports. The guys showed their documents, then the Greek men turned to us. The asked Nizar for his passport and he showed it  to them and then they walked out. The asked NONE of the white people in the station, including me and Ginette who were sitting next to Nizar. He says this happens all the time here even on the street. Ginette and I were shocked that these guys had just picked out the dark skinned people in the room. We didn't even know who they were, they didn't have badges of anything. Apparently if you have dark skin in this country you have to keep your passport on you at all times, and when Nizar forgot his last year they took him to the police department. It's insane. I know their economy is terrible right now but that was unbelievable. Anyway. It really annoyed me.

So we arrived in Meteora around 3 pm. It was easily 40 degrees there and we thought we were going to die. (40 is 105 F). We had planned to walk up to the top of the cliff to go to one of the monasteries but we only made it about 30 meters before we collapsed in a fountain instead and looked up defeated at the cliffs.
In the intense heat we couldn't even think so we lay around asking each other what we should do now and if we should try to get up the train in the blazing sun. After that we went to get ice cream and lay around some more. By the time someone suggested we take a taxi up there (duuuh), the monasteries had closed and we had wasted an entire day and 50 euros on train tickets. However a cab driver told us there was one monastery open, (the one for lazy tourists) so we drove up there and climbed the steps to the top.

These places are really amazing. They're built (somehow) on the tops of these precipices that come out of nowhere. The scale is hard to describe because these rocks are just so HUGE. The monasteries at the top are probably the best places in the world to be when the zombie Apocalypse happens. They have their own gardens and beehives and are pretty self sufficient. As well as being totally unassailable at the top of thousands of feet of sheer rock face.
The view from the top is epic, you can see across the whole valley (and see the zombies coming).

I loved the monastery, it's so peaceful and quiet. This must be why they put it up there in the first place. I have come to value peace and quiet a lot more while traveling, I didn't realize it until recently but I like best the places where I can sit and think without the chaos of the world bashing me over the head. The nuns here have beautiful little gardens built into the rocks and all they seem to do is walk around the gardens and pray and look out at the nice scenery. It's a pretty chill life.

Oddly enough the church in the monastery isn't chill at all. It has really old religious art on the walls, (I don't know how old but it looks to be centuries) and it's unlike any church I have ever been in. Every painting shows a different saint dying and they're incredibly violent. There are people getting beheaded, limbs chopped off, torn apart by horses, squished in giant presses, burned alive, bleed to death hanging upside down. Each one has bright red blood coming from all their wounds. It's incredibly violent.

Tomorrow I leave Thessaloniki for Corfu, an island on the west coast of Greece. I'm splurging on a hostel there even tough my money is low. I spent me last day here snorkeling around a reef off the coast and swimming with a million different kinds of fish. My friends stayed on the beach. People have no appreciation for fish these days. Nizar hung out for a little while but when I started telling him about the evisceration habits of sea slugs he left to work on his tan. Lame.