{"id":201,"date":"2002-05-06T04:45:00","date_gmt":"2002-05-06T08:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/?p=201"},"modified":"2010-06-13T14:08:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-13T18:08:09","slug":"201","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/?p=201","title":{"rendered":"An exchange of intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Monday, May 6, 2002  10:30<\/p>\n<p>Weather:  Hot &amp; sunny.  I&#8217;m going to have to leave this section out, in future:  no news to report.<\/p>\n<p>Location:  Aolis hotel cafe, Vathi, Samos.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I&#8217;ve pretty much had enough time in Greece.  I&#8217;m ready to move on.  I&#8217;ve check out of the hostel, dumped my pack at the local travel office (free storage) and I&#8217;m enjoying a cappucino with a couple of chocolate-covered coffee beans and a miniature cookie in one of the harbourfront cafes.  I don&#8217;t recognize the music playing, but it&#8217;s good:  sounds like it could be early Leonard Cohen.  I have about 5 hours to kill before the travel office closes, by when I have to be back, and my ferry leaves about an hour after that.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday afternoon was a writeoff.  I read my book, watched some Greek TV, and went for a brief swim in the rather disappointing Gregou beach, north-west of the town.  After a shower, I met Sahn and Kerry and we found a good bar for a couple of drinks before dinner.  They&#8217;re yet more of the seemingly endless numbers of Australians working in London.  As they&#8217;d just come from Turkey, I got some useful information on how the buses work (very well), the markets (chaotic), and the hammams (good, but best to stick to the tourist-oriented ones).  In exchange I told them about my Greek islands experience, and suggested they skip Athens and see some of the mainland instead.<\/p>\n<p>It turned out that they were staying at the same hostel as me, the Pension &#8220;Dreams&#8221;, so after an excellent dinner at Taverna Gregoris in town we walked back, and I hauled out my Lonely Planet and gave them the Greek section, which I won&#8217;t need any more.  Kerry noticed that someone had abandoned sections photocopied from a Turkey guidebook on the table in the hall, so I picked them up and we&#8217;re all happy.<\/p>\n<p>Most important lesson of the whole trip:  talk to strangers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monday, May 6, 2002 10:30 Weather: Hot &amp; sunny. I&#8217;m going to have to leave this section out, in future: no news to report. Location: Aolis hotel cafe, Vathi, Samos. Well, I&#8217;ve pretty much had enough time in Greece. I&#8217;m ready to move on. I&#8217;ve check out of the hostel, dumped my pack at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2002-mediterranean-tour","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":534,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}