22nd day

Another strike day in Athens! Couldn't even visit some places because the "personnel were in strike".

In our opinion...strikes in Athens are getting more like a touristic attraction! Half the parade in front of the parliament was tourists and there where people selling hot dogs and drinks in the middle of the parade xD funny ah? But we think that people are still traumatized about this strikes...hotels were with windows covered, metro stations near the strike were closed and all population saying to be careful with this demonstration.

 

We manage to visit all we wanted during the morning. Hugo, as a true Portuguese loved Athens because everything was freeeeeeee!!!!! =D Entrance to museums and famous places are free to students (and we both still had our student cards with us eheh).  Hugo went to the Acropolis museum alone because Liis had already visited it before but the best part was: while she was waiting for Hugo and drinking a coffee she met her Estonian History teacher from high school! Cool coincidence that made her smile a lot =D 

We were kind of tired of Athens =x after some stressful moments...we decided to hitchhike today to Volos (the place where we have our plane to Frankfurt on 18th). We took 4 cars to reach the city. One of the cars were an awesome couple that told us about a cool old tabaco factory that was occupied by a bunch of local radical people called anarchist squad! We went there and guess what? We met amazing people, went to drink some beers with them and they gave us a place to sleep (really cool and original place as you can see in the pictures).

The city looks nice and we feel good here! Tomorrow we'll try to enjoy some time in the beach and relax once more =D

 

21st day

Athens finally! After more then 4000 km and hitchhiking with 50 cars...WE ARRIVED =D We only took 2 cars and the trip lasted 6h.

The city is as beautiful as everybody says but also really chaotic. There was a strike happening that would last 2 days! Even the police was striking!

 We saw almost all the beautiful places in the city. And Hugo accomplished his promise of "fazer o pino" (don't know how to say this in English xD) in Athens.

We met a really cool Brazilian girl (Manuela) that walked with us for a while; we had time to see the funny guard changing in the parliament and still hiked the highest hill in Athens to see the amazing night view of the city.

We had some problems! Athens wasn't that nice with us. We almost had a hearth attack when they started closing some metro stations because of the strike - our backpacks were in the locker of one metro station =O we were running like crazy to reach the metro station with the fear of loosing our stuff for the next days. But thankfully it was still open when we arrived there and we got our things back. After that we had a host from couchsurfing...and one thing happened for the first time in both of our life! When we arrived to the meeting point already at almost 11pm...the guy looked at us and went away without saying anything =O we don't know if we are to ugly or if he was just expecting 2 girls to have fun with...but it was really sad that we where waiting and then he just text saying "I can't host you. Bye". We were shocked and that put our mood really down. So...at that late time we had to find a hostel to sleep in - the cheapest we found was 12€ for that night.

Tks to Liis good friend Mari-Liis for all the help during this day that we didn't had internet - she helped us by phone from Estonia =p*

20th day

Greece

We spend the entire day visiting Ioannina with our host Eva. She showed us everything and we walked a lot! From the city center, to the castle, lake and forest =)

We were impressed with the beauty of the city and the hospitality of Greek people. We met Eva's friends & entire family and we manage to try 10 different Greek foods: sweets that Hugo loved, strong drinks similar to "agua ardente" in Portugal, feta cheese, souvlaki (we eat 2 because they were just to good to be true =p) and many other things.

Of course, all of this with our good humor, laughs and crazy photos everywhere.

We end up the day (after some drinks) with the final preparations to reach to our most wanted destination: ATHENS!

19th day

Time in Albania was definitely interesting! First country where people were actually staring us...maybe because of our backbacks and different appearence. We decided to listen people who told us before that hitchhiking can be difficult there and also wanted a day to relax, so we took bus. But this was a priceless experience! First we had to go from Shkoder to the capital Tirane. They don't really have normal bus stations in the cities, they just stop almost random vans in the streets and apparantly most of them work as a taxi. Nice ride.. our van had 9 places and 11 travellers xD, the driver drove like crazy and used the horn 5 times in every second.

The capital was a complete caos...old buildings next to 5 star hotels, people driving like there where no traffic rules and lots of motorcycles and 0 helmets - quite "safe" to drive there =p.

Finally we got to Tirane and real adventure started - to get to Greece we had to find travel agencies (there is no bus station or central place for buses...you pick the buses along the streets in front of the travel agencies). They have A LOT of them just next to each other, most of them sending at least one bus a day to Greece... I guess Albania will be empty in few years. After asking from 20-30 places, we finall decided to take a bus for 4400 Lek - 15€ for each.

Bus took us through all Albania (seriously, they stopped even in middle of nowhere - in corn fields next to many cows - to take more people). And roads were just amazing...as it can be seen in the pictures.

This trip to Ioannina took us 11h... =l with some relaxing moments to play around and look at the beautiful mountains. Best thing: in middle of the trip we found out that they will drop us next to airport -.-" 5km away from the city. "Nice & refreshing" walk for 1h with our bags. Finally we arrived at 2a.m. and met our amazing host Eva!

HELLO GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECE =D

18th day

We had like 4 or 5 different roads to reach Albania...all of them "amazing". We tried to go trough one but suddenly when we noticed we where already in other =P

We did it anyway. From 3 amazing women that where all the time smilling to us and telling how crazy they were when they were young and that they also hitchhiked a lot...to a taxi driver that took us only 3€ to go 15km. In some point...we where hitchhiking in the middle of the montains in the "main road" in the middle of cows and tractors.

After some while we still managed to get a ride straight to Shkodër! No more struggling under the sun!

Shkodër is one of the biggest cities in Albania and also considered as cultural center. Honestly, comparing with Central-Europe the difference of life quality is huge. City center is nice, but lots of buildings are old and need restoring. But there was a beautiful castle and gorgeous lake to walk around and just enjoy nature and some music in the bars.

Prices are low but it was sad to see so many children begging on the street. We manage to eat a Byrek (typical food with meat or cheese) for 0,50€; 5L of beer (called Giraffe) for 4€ & a big breakfast for 1,40€.

We can say that if we liked this city it was all because of our host (tks for all Arbri)! He was amazing!! And Hugo was really happy to talk with Jose (the other Portuguese that was being hosted in the same house) and to meet other Portuguese crazy as him. Jose was traveling for 7 weeks by bike in all Balcan countries - you can see his blog in here: http://andararoda.blogspot.gr. Ou host had amazing appartment with graffitis from everybody he hosted already! We also contributed with our typical smily sun =D *