Round the World 2002/3
June 22nd 2002 -» May 20th 2003
Life in Europe
June 30th 2003 -» August 6th 2005
First Time to Asia
August 10th 2005 -» July 30th 2006
Ecuador
October 16th 2006 -» December 22nd 2006
Asia Revisited
March 14th 2007 -» October 15th 2007
South-America
October 16th 2007 -» July 15th 2008
Zochs
non-member comment
to be honest
Most people raving about how lovely Thessaloniki is fall into two broad categories... Thessaloniki regionalists, ie locals who have been born and raised here, and have a very stong sense of connection with their particular part of the world. It's their home, it's the best in the world, it "rulezzzz", and anyone who says bad things about it must be ill intentioned, malicious, or Athenean (they got some kind of perpetual enmity between them, though Atheneans themselves play a large part in, too). The other category that has nice things to say about Thessaloniki are non Thessalonikan students, from all over Greece, who have associated the fun and excitement of early adulthood and college life with this city, housing, as it does, the second biggest student population in Greece. Rarely if EVER have I met a Greek who was neither a college student in Thessaloniki, nor FROM Thessaloniki, who lived and worked in this city and had much good to say about it. Every person, from every other part of Greece that came to work here despises it. It's filthy (literally! the trash are picked on an... indeterminist, to put mildly, schedule and regularly overflow the trashcans into nice little impromptu mini-landfills by the sides of the pavement), it has non existent public transportations, it has execrable, third world level housing (hope you enjoy hearing the neighbours blasting music at eleven, at any and all hours, cause there sure is a lot of that going on in here - and with most appartments dating back into the 60s and 70s, you'll get to hear it well better than anywhere else in the country)... Not to put too fine a point on it, life in Salonica generally resembles life in a huge, overblown, overpopulated ghetto. It's a dump.