The Midnight Train (from Hell) to Meteora

I went on Wednesday to go buy our (Maria, Emily, Suzy and my) tickets to Meteora. We had anticipated on catching the earliest train on Friday morning, but when I arrived to the ticket booth, it was sold out. The only tickets left were for the Midnight train on Thurday. So we took it, not thinking about what it might be like and who might be on it...

We arrive at the station at 11:30ish, and immediately notice that nearly everyone else at the platform is creepy, sketchy and male. This should have been an indictator... but I at least did not connect anything.

We got on a train, found our seat and sat down completely hyped for our trip. About halfway through, Maria get up to go to the bathroom... she comes back less than 5 minutes later and looks at Suzy and I and says "do not go to the bathroom." We asked why... and she said "beacuse there are poeple snorting and shooting up in the hallways, not to mentions having sex everywhere and some guy asked me for sex for money." We were like oh... But Suzy had to go to the bathroom really bad so she tried the other half of the train, hoping it would be better. NOPE, she ran into the same thing. She came back, but still had to go really badly so I went with her to find a toilet that was unoccupied and at least a little santiary (as in the toilet bowl was over flowing with an unknown liquid and cigerette butts). I could not believe my eyes, what Maria had said was true... I just walked really fast and found one.

Finally we arrived at our connecting station. We got off and followed the crowd to the sitting area in the station. We were sitting near a wall in a circle just talking, trying to keep calm. I decided that I needed to go to the bathroom since our train was later that we had originally thought. I walked in to the womens bath room and saw mens boots sticing out of one of the stalls, it looked like the guy was lying face down in the stall (YUCK!). I went into the other stall but noticed that there was no toilet paper, so I went back to the others and grabed my bag of kleenx. When I got back to the bathroom he looks like he was sitting on the stall, I went to the bathroom and booked out! Then about 10 or 15 minutes later the same guy approaches us from behind me. He asks us in Greek where we are from, but I didnt know that he was behind me so I jumped about a foot in the air, they said that I was completely airborn and exclaimed "Oh Jesus!". Well that cause a scene, but thankfully the Greeks told him to stop bugging us. We went and bugged some Greek guys.

Finally, out train arrives. While we were sitting in the station we didnt really think about the fact that everyone we were waiting with would be on the same train with us... but got on and went and sat in a corned booth together and avoided all eye contact. But this man sat across from us and he had a bloody nose (we can only guess that he snorted too much), and he kept dabbing his nose with a wash cloth... OH IT WAS SO GROSS!

So FINALLY, we arrive to the station, we call a cab and arrive at the hotel about 6:30am on Friday morning. The hotel was seriously a beacon of light after our night! It was a really nice hotel.

More about the trip later... I thought I would blog the part that I didnt have pictures from.