A Trip to Kastoria

---

We have asked around and it seems that there is a bus to Kastoria each day at 9 am so we got an early start to the day. It was quite cold and we could see our breath as we waited at the bus stop after our short walk down the road to Koromilia. The sight of the snow capped mountains in the distance where a reminder of just how far North we are in Greece. Little English is spoken in this part of Greece, so it was a bit tricky trying to figure out how much the bus cost. In the end I held out a handful of coins and just let the conductor pick up the fare.

The trip to Kastoria takes about 20 minutes and we seem to be the only non-local people on the bus. This 9:00 bus seems to be mostly older people. Evy and I both notice that several of them crossed themselves quickly when the bus passed the graveyard.

The bus follows the towns at the edge of the hillside, rising up as it moves from town to town. The view as it descends into Kastoria is quite fetching with the town of tightly packed tile roof houses set between the mountain and Lake Kastoria. Kastoria is actually quite a large place, with tons of hotels and restaurants and looks quite upscale and cosmopolitan.

After an unsuccessful attempt to go to the tourist office (it seems to be perpetually closed with no hours posted) we use a pay phone and gave my Aunt Helen in Lefkada a call. She told us that she had some leads on accommodations near her town, which is good news as we plan to go there in about a week.

After asking around, we found an INTERNET place (a modern but smoky and dark den that seemed mostly set up for online gamers) and were able to follow up on our flood of booking inquiries regarding places in Sorrento, Rome, and Florence. Out of these replies, we picked a few top ones to respond to.

With Benjamin's most recent package of school work now ready for mailing (questions from the math book sent to the Koromilia neighbour were the final piece) we mailed off his school work before doing some food shopping and grabbing souvlaki pitas for lunch.

There are only a few buses a day from Koromilia to Kastoria and back, so we took the 2:00 bus back to our rural flat and spent the rest of the afternoon getting school work done. About 4:30, Alex from up stairs came down and took Joshua off to play “football”. Just before dinner, we called my Aunt Helen and found out she was following up on a lead of a friends apartment that might be available. This would be excellent, but we will have to see if it works out.

---