Arms spread wide on the starboard bow

I left Rome pretty early for Bali, Italy to catch a boat to Greece. In Bali, I met a guy who bought me 5 (yeah, five) beers and a pizza before I got on the boat. He was probably disappointed by how well I held my liquor but I was completely sober by the time I got onto the ferry, despite his continuous attempts at distraction. Towards the end of the evening I could tell he was purposely trying to get me to miss the passenger loading, probably so that I'd have to stay the night at his place. Hah. The beer was pretty good though. And the pizza was AMAZING. Best pizza I've ever had and totally worth the increasingly awkward advances of the young dock worker.

The beers:

My boat:

On board:

So yeah, I paid for a couple hours of internet on board and then ate some cranberries and watched The Benchwarmers with Greek subtitles. It was fun. I think I was just so happy to hear American voices again that I laughed far louder than was necessary at the jokes, but the other Greeks around me were laughing pretty hard too so I didn't feel bad.

After the movie, I fell asleep on a couch in the bar area because I didn't have a cabin ticket (a lot of the other deck-only passengers did the same). Someone woke me up when we landed in Igoumenitsa at 6am but I was mostly just annoyed by that since my stop was the next one at around noon. I went into the "airplane seating" area, which is just a dark room full of airplane style, slighty reclining seats, and slept a few more hours in there since most people had gotten off. Then at around 10 I woke up and just wandered the boat until we landed. It was pretty cool when we got in close to all the Greek islands.

When we landed I was quite well rested and ready to get to Athens. Unfortunately, the guy on dock who was in charge of directing people where to go, told me and two others to wait for a bus to the bus station where we could catch a bus to Athens. I hate buses btw, but that's a different story (mostly because they aren't free like trains are for me). So, we all waited for about 40 minutes, and then one of the guys waiting with me went inside and came back out and said that the buses don't run on Sunday. Thanks dock worker guy. Jerk face.

So we three walked to the bus station. They barely spoke English but helped me figure out where to go and helped me buy my ticket to Athens as well. Very nice of them.

So I got on the bus at 3pm, fell asleep a few times, and arrived in Athens around 6pm.

There's some kind of Mardi Gras-esque holiday going on all month leading up to Lent and the riot police are keeping a close eye on it all apparently.

I wandered the allyways for a few hours looking for a hostel, and I think I'm lucky it was a holiday because there were happy, drunk people everywhere dressed up and on their way out or home. That probably kept the muggers away from me and targeting them. So I finally got to a hostel, called AthensStyle (a very nice Greek couple in their late 30's helped me find one) and crashed.