Thessaloniki

We woke up at 5am on Tuesday morning after a late night of packing up and telling each other about our day (because only two of us stayed in Greece and toured around, while the rest of the team went on a mini boat cruise of the Greek Islands).
We got on the train just before 8am and rode it all the way to Thessaloniki. I met an old Albanian man on the train who was travelling with his parents to visit his relatives throughout Greece. He only spoke Greek and it was hard to understand his accent, but his name was Ramos and he was a refugee from World War Two and it was cool to hear his story even though I only understood half of it. He gave me some Greek coffee and it was possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted, but it was still cool, because it was something that locals would drink.
Then we took cabs from the train station to our new hotel: Hotel Metropolitan and our cab driver charged us 10 euros when everyone else's cab only cost 7.5 euros....what a rip off!
Then we wandered around by our hotel and got some spanikopita for lunch and then went to the new pool for a training session.
The pool would be nice but it has been run down quite a bit since the economy went down. There is an outdoor 50m pool and an indoor 50m pool. We swam outside and there were no backstroke flags, so we kind of counted our strokes and kind of just didn't do backstroke.
Then after training we had a quick abs session and dropped our stuff off at the hotel and went downtown to find a place for dinner.
The walk to downtown took over an hour and no one realized that it was almost 9pm by the time we got there. The local football team is down a place in the play offs, so there was a big pep rally kind of thing to get everyone's spirits up and that was taking over this square on the sea, and we were hard pressed to find a place to serve dinner. I ended up just coming back and grabbing some more spanikopita on the way home.

This morning we went to the pool and trained a 7km workout and then quickly visited the European Speedo store, which was pretty awesome and then rushed back for the hotel breakfast. Now time for a quick nap before heading back to afternoon training...hopefully in the outdoor pool...