The world is charted. There are no white spots in Africa, the Iron fence to eastern europe has fallen. No beasts left to tame, no adventures to brave.
No! Rejoice, for there in southeastern Europe lies the Balcan states, and still you never know what the next hour will bring there ^.^
Since my holiday to greece this year was rather spontaneous and impromptu and I have my masters thesis to FINALLY FINISH!! ( please send me buttkicking to my mailing address) I did not make fixed plans for when to return, instead deciding to simply go back by train or bus when i deem the time right since as opposed to ferryboat or flight you don't need to book those ahead of time and they are cheaper too. The war in Youguslavia has been over for 10 years now, so the journey should again be safe enough, trains go regularly and so on.
Well, that is what it says on the paper at least.

Setting out from Volos to thessaloniki where the trainstation lies, the first leg of my journey was at least a road well travelled by me and my mom before. I left in the evening because the train would go at 8 in the morning, so had a very nice and speedy trip through dusky, then night time northern greece, perfect athmosphere to mull the holiday over in my mind, think ahead and reflect... and after a mere three hours i was in thessaloniki. Up untill 2 years ago thessaloniki, although being a major overland route point with busses going to every major city in greece had no central bus station but you had to find the busses to volos at one obscure corner, those to Athens at a totally different part of town and so on. If you were lucky tho someone at the trainstation was able to tell you where. Now though they have a new, shiny and architecturally reknown central buss station for the overland routes. Or rather a.. decentral one.. lying some 5 miles out of the city centra and train station. No matter, there are busses going from one to the other with the slight drawback that the last bus to the city center leaves at 10:30 pm and my bus arrived there at 11:15 pm. Oh well.. i had over 8 hours to kill till the train leaves so I just walked. very hot and humid and icky :P At the trainstation I found that international tickets are not sold before the morning so I had to wait around the night, getting eaten by mosquitoes :p
As a cute sidenote, if i had bought a trainticket from thessaloniki to vienna already IN vienna it would have been 124 Euro. Bought in thessaloniki it only was 80. go fig :D

Then i boarded the train. It consisted of only the engine and two wagons, must have been built somewhere around 1940 or such, and proceeded to race through greece at a pace straight from hell, making me spend the first ten minutes in expecting that it would break apart every moment. Somehow it held though and at the makedonian Borden at Gevgelia a friendly, very smartly dressed young gentleman join my cabin. Speaking a few ( as in 5 or 6) words german he proceeded to start a conversation, turning out to be a Makedonian Jehovas Witness, on his way to a Paneuropean Jehovan wittness congress in Budapest. As any good witness should do he spotted a book in my hand and popped the first trap question, namely whether i was reading the Bible here. Well, duh, he saw that whatever i was reading there was not in Chapters and Verses so it obviously was no bible but that simply *is one of their first snare question. Um.. soo... how do you explain to a jehovan witness that you are reading an Anne Rice book and what that entails? c.c; It did have the advantage that he realized that i must be the antichrist and thus beyond salvation and eased up trying to save my soul :D ( by the way i was reading "The Witching Hour" which i honestly cannot reconmend. It starts very nice and Anne Ricy with smooth southern decay and genteel crptosexuality, but later on simply drags out way way too much and gets rather trivial and Stephen Kingish as well. Definitely not on par with the Vampire Chronicles)

On went the train through fair Makedonia, my Witness left at Skopje, and shortly before the Serbian border the train stopped and they made.. some.. announcement. which was in makedonian so i did not understand a word they said.. (it is very rare to find *anyone speaking even a little english or german in that region, even among train personell) A conductor came in then though and made it clear that there was a problem with the tracks and so we had to leave the train and go on by bus. Okay, can happen, why not. Out we went, and sat around at the train station. An hour later one of the train personell started to wonder why all those people were sitting around there and came to enquire. Finding that we were waiting for the trainreplacing bus he decided it might be a nice guesture of them to organize that a bus would actually *come too! >.< which took another hour, already making me bury my hopes of changing trains on time in Belgrade. The bus arrived, we were crammed in and the bus took off. Now if i was worried about our high speed before i got reassured because the bus did a lively 30 mph, provided that the road went downhill. even despite the careful pace we suddenly heard a crash and found that one of the windowpanes had fallen off, which did not seem to perturb our driver very much though. perhaps he appreciated the fresh air c.c;

The next problem arose when we actually made it to the serbian border. Despite being 300 meters away from the makedonian border post the officer controlling our passports found that i had no stamp in the passport that shows that i had left makedonia. I showed him that i had not gotten a stamp on *entering makedonia either, but was obviously here now, wanted inside and had a valid passport. he disappeard with said passport and i started to give up hope on ever seeing it again when he showed up again not half an hour later, indicating that *legally he should shoot me on the spot but that as a special grace i was allowed to enter, so on we drove to the closest trainstation.
Now as I indicated, the Civil war there is over 10 years now, but still the serbs seem rather.. protective about their train stations, collection heaps of police and military around them, this fair little province one having in it's parking lot 6 troop transport trucks, 2 APCs and 2 Light Battle Tanks o.O; the heavier weapons were covered up, but nonetheless it did not very much inspire confidence in me. After we boarded the train waiting there we were chased out again by a conductor who made it clear that we cannot use this train because it has to remain here in case another train is missing. Well.. our train *was missing, but nonetheless he'd rather have it stay here. ours would come in two hours. :P
After a mere two and a half hours the train actually *did come too, so I was back on track,and despite the fact that we took the following 300 miles at an average 25 mph again it was pretty fun, because one station later i was joined by 4 jolly men of about 50-60, carrying lots of paintbrushes and ladders and such. I did not find out whether they actually *were painters or just had painted their weekend houses, but that didn't matter because despite the face that I did not understand a word they said and the other way round we had a terriffic time conversing with gestures and noises, obliging me to join in their dinner of homesmoked bacon, selfbaked bread and dreadfull pearschnapps destilled straight in hell ^.^
Sadly I fell asleep after a few hours of that, and awoke to find that the passengers had changed again, and now my cabin was besieged by 2 couples. The men were taken from some sort of cabaret, one a HUGE giant of a man, the other a tiny little midget and they proceeded to talk to each other with huge loud voices, suitable for grand opera baritones, while their wifes peered covetously at the free seet opposite of mine ( i.e. the other window seat) I understood their stares when i briefly got up to go to the toilet, because on returning i found that they had taken my seat already and fallen asleep, also blocking access to my backpack and book and food :/ I spent most of the rest of the night in the corridor of the wagon, and instead of 8 pm we arrived in belgrade at 6 am the following morning.

That though did turn out to be not *that bad after all, since the next train to vienna would leave at 8:20 am so not too bad a wait. Even so 2 and a half hour were a bit of time so i decided to go have a look at the city itself. Sadly this plan did not last long either since apart from all the policemen, military personell and conductors milling around the train station they had stationed a troop of myrmidons stationed at the exit/entrance. they were 4 men of about 40, wearing civillian clothing ( purely civilian, not even private security uniforms, or secret agent suits, just tshirts with holes and greasy pants) with.. paper slips pinned to their shirt chests, which accosted everyone entering, who then either explained that they worked here or produced some sort of .. documents. Seeing as how i had no way to find out what kind of documents i'd need to get back into the train station I decided not to risk leaving in the first place and explored the station instead.
Which was.. odd. They have 8 departure platforms, but only benches on one of them, a waiting room that instead of the familiar rows of plastic seats has 4 or 5 very luxurious office arm chairs, next to it a "ticket reservation room" and *there were the normal waiting room chairs, a "childcare room" which was an empty corridor, 6 feet wide, 10 feet high and about 30 long, the bare walls painted with actually nice but faded disney pictures and a few children sitting in it looking understandably lost. The whole scenario was accompanied by subtle music played through the Public Access system ( very unusual for european train stations) . Actually nice music, surprisingly 70s and 80s pop, but in *every song either a child's or young woman#s voice crooned one or two words interspered 4 times or so throughout the song, obviously some sort of brainwashing which i escaped by not understanding the language again c.c;;;
Also the plan of drawing some in my sketchbook got abandoned for fear of getting arrested on espionage and the realisation that showing to the police that i actually simply draw naked cat/human women in there would not exactly help ally suspicions..

So i think it is understandable that I was glad when i boarded the train and left this hospitable place. The rest of the journey was rather uneventful in comparison. I merely had to bribe the first conductor with 3 euro so he#d allow me a place to sit ( in an almost empty car), missed another chance to break into disorganized crime by declining to partake in cigarette smuggling at the hungarian border when invited to, and having to explain to the hungarian conductor that when my ticket states the entry and exit border towns that *implies i move thorugh the space between, which he did not exactly believe, but once again let his good graces get the better of him, so after 48 hours and 1000 travelled miles I once again was at home. ^.^