Catman

You meet the most interesting people when you travel. I know I've said it a thousand times, but you do. You really and truly do. I can find no better example of "interesting" than the man I met while waiting for the night train to Thessoloniki.

He talked with a slowly, with a slight wobble in his voice. Very tall and inordinately thin, he seemed to be traveling with only a guitar and a duffle bag. That is, until I met his cats. Three of them. Stacked in carriers. Sitting on a dolly. Yowling. To me, three cats equals a lot of cats--especially for one person. Then he told me he owned another three cats at home that a neighbor was taking care of. He couldn't travel with all of them (too impractical).

He told me he was a music teacher, specifically the guitar, piano, and accordian. I said I wasn't very good at music. I told him when I came down with mono before my 5th grade recorder concert and couldn't perform, I considered it an early Christmas gift. He sighed, a wistful look in his eyes and said "there is nothing more lovely than sitting in a tree, playing the recorder." Anyway, somehow in the course of that conversation I ended up swearing to him that I would take up the recorder again. (Obviously I was pulled in by his trippy way of talking and had become a bit delusional to make such ridiculous promises.)

A girl from Hungary joined us, and we sat there waiting for our delayed train until we realized that it was boarding. We ran through the airport and down the stairs, up to the wrong platform, back down the stairs, and finally back up the stairs to the right platform. The cats, sitting in their carriers on the dolly, had banged banged banged their way up and down four flights of stairs. Needless to say, they were pretty angry at this point. Glad he and his cats were in a sleeper car and not in my compartment.

The girl from Hungry and I shared a compartment. We had plenty of room to stretch out and I was asleep within thirty minutes of leaving the station. As my dad sometimes says, "I slept like a dead dog on the highway." I was woken up four times for the passport check/return, and as soon as my passport transferred hands, I was back asleep.

We arrived in Thessoloniki about two hours late, which meant I had about two extra hours of sleep. Unfortunately, all the early trains to Athens were full, so I ended up getting stuck at the train station for five hours. It wasn't too bad though, I did have a book to read. (A rather predictible boy-meets-girl kind of novel that I usually dislike. It was by a British author though, so I was amused by the vocabulary and slang.)

Anyway, I am running out of internet time, so I will write about Athens later. Peace.