As you know i was on a holiday in Greece, in it’s eastern part to be more precise between 11 and 22 july.

The price for the holiday cost 215Euro(338$) and it included transportation and the hotel room(2 star hotel). It’s a pretty reasonable price, and its a lot cheaper than going to the sea here in Romania, and a lot more beautiful and cleaner(the beaches here are filled with lots of mess).

The transportation was by bus, 22 hours there and 20,5 hours back. This made me hate riding the bus, and i sweared that if i’ll ever go on a trip outside Romania(except Hungary) i’ll take the plane or go with car(depends on distance).

At the borders the guys from customs came up the bus checked the ID’s and let us through. We had 3 bus drivers and a guide, each of the drivers drove 6 hours staright with about 120-140km/h. The bus stopped every 3 hours so people can go to use the toilet, and o buy water/food. We mostly stopped at gas stations and restaurants.

You have no idea how our morale jumped up when we first spotted the sea in Greece, we were like “we’re finally here!” .

The place we went to is called Nei Pori, and its a town built specially for tourists which was built about 15 years ago, so all youl’ll find there is restaurants/souvenir shops/hotels/stores. The town lies at 45 minutes distance from Thessaloniki and at the poles of Olympus mountain.

Here are some pics of Nei Pori:

The holday was great, especially thanks to the guys and girls we met on the trip, it turned out that we knew some of them, every night we made home cooked food and drank vine/beer.

Me and my girlfriend bought a subscription to a restaurant near our hotel. The breakfast + dinner for a day cost 10euro(about 15$) for a person, and it was well worth it, because the food was great.

I noticed that almost all stores/restaurants are owned and operated by families, starting with granddaughter to grandparents everyone works there and manages something.

We were on 2 trips, one to Olympus mountain and one to Athens:

Olympus Mountain

We went on the trip because it was pretty cheap, 10euro(15$). We got on the bus at 9AM and got back to the hotel at 3PM. They took us up to 900meters height where they gave us 30 minutes to take pictures and look around.

From where we went to visit Zeus’s bathtub where a spring well filled up the depressions between the 2 mountains and legend says that Zeus went there to take baths with the nimfas. As you will see the water is crystal clear and it’s channeled down to the nearby town’s drinking water. We stopped at a well and drank some water also, and it tasted great.

From there we descended to a Greek-Catholic monastery(or temple) where to enter the temple both men and woman had to have clothes which covered their shoulders and knees, if you had short clothes you could use a long dress/pants from the entrance. Taking pictures inside the temple was forbidden(nobody was watching over you, but you don’t want to mess with God do you?).

Athens

“You can’t go to Greece and not visit Athens” this was the slogan of the tourism office which organized the trip to Athens. The price was 30Euro(about 50$) and it included transport and a guide who spoke in hungarian.

Athens Harbor

Lots and lots of huge passenger ships were docked there, we saw 5 Vodafone yachts passing through…a yacht like that costs “just a bit” more than a car,lol.

Acropolis

BLAH! The Acropolis(that big mountain which has all those fancy old buildings blows! All the buildings are being restaurated since 1983 and as you’ll notice on the pics almost every building is filled with iron ladders. I paid 12Euro(~20$) to go up that mountain…i don’t regret it because now people can’t pick on me saying that i was in Greece and i didn’t visit the almighty Pharteon(biggest building). The guide said that if we steal a rock from up there and we are caught we will get a 1000$ fine and 7 days in prison. LOL, for a damn rock.

Parliament of Greece

I talked to the supervising soldier(the one with the green beret in the pictures) and he said that the soldiers guarding the parliament have to stay there 1 hour without moving(similar to the guys at Scotland yard in UK) and they are wearing a design of clothes which was worn in the revolution by the freedom fighters. Every hour the soldiers are changed in a very cool dance type mode. I couldn’t resist not taking a pic with one of them.

The Battle at Thermopylae

If you saw the Movie 300 than you know what i’m talking about. The only difference is that in the real story 300 spartans and 700 soldiers from Thessaloniki fought against 1,7million soldiers in the Persian army.

Bulgaria

On our way to greece we slept while we passed through Bulgaria. On our way back it was daylight so we had the chance to check it out. I know that there are rough conditions in Romania, but compared to Bulgaria it’s like heaven. Bulgaria has some very cool bridges(mostly the only thing i liked from there). All pictures were taken from the bus.

Phew, after 2 hours of writing, image selecting, resizing, and cropping i finally got to the end of this post. This post xontains the most important places which i visited, and maybe they will serve as a motivation for you to visit Greece