Dear Lord.

What a traumatic experience. At time of writing, I am in the cabin of a rocky boat sailing the...Adriatic Sea? To Italy anyway. This ride in itself is disconcerting enough, but our last night in Athens is another story.

So we had to stay in Omonia. I'm not sure what you'd get if you googled that, but it would probably be something like crime rates because the place was definitely the downtown eastside equivalent. Drug dealers everywhere, prostitutes... It seemed like complete sacrilege that the street we were staying on was named after Aristotle.

Hoping that our hostel would at least be a friendly youth hostel, we got into the creepy elevator which could only fit two people at a time and had no door so you just saw all the floors going by and could touch the wall as it zipped by you. We get to the top and see the single most creepy looking guy on the planet. I think he had a scary black wig but it could have just been bizarre hair. He kept making us follow him and every time we were sure we were going to be murdered. And the lobby. Oh my god. There was like... A creepy red chandelier... I really don't know if I can convey how disturbing it all was. The room keys were skeleton keys too. We get shown to our room which had a LOVELY view of the disgusting area below. And the toilets. Gah. Enough said.

The only other residents of this hostel seemed to be these two girls who could have been on drugs or prostitutes or both, and an entire family of polish immigrants with babies, which was pretty depressing. In the terrifying lobby, mega-creep watched some kind of horror movie which we could hear while we went to the bathroom.

Follow up this hostel with a full 2 days of travel including metros in 2 different cities, 3 trains, a bus and a 17 hour boat ride and this equals 1 discombobulated Caitlin.

I'm sure my first blog from Rome will be a happier one :)
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