From Ohrid to Athens

In general borders are very good spots for hitchhiking because all cars have to stop and the drivers can see you easily and often you can even ask them, if they have the window down. We tried it once, we tried it twice, we tried it maybe 100 times and what happened at the Greek border was just spectaculary shitty. All the drivers reacted like stupid assholes. Most of them didn´t react at all when we asked them, others just looked at us like we were ghosts. It was really strange because so far we only met very friendly and helpful people and the Greeks at that border did not even said „no“ or something else to us. They acted like they could´t understand what we wanted from them or completely ignored us. So the first impression of Greece was really bad. The concept of hitchhiking is not very well known in Greece but when I heard that it´s hard to hitchhike there, I just said „Ah, come on! There are friendly people everywhere!“ Then we figured out that a possible reason could be that the Greeks thought we are from Macedonia. The two countries don´t like each other because of that -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

The only nice guy over there was this beautiful peacock, which was at the border.

After two hours we gave up and decided to hitchhike back to Bitola to catch a bus from there to Greece. By the way: the first car stopped and gave us a ride 🙂 In Bitola we figured out that there are no buses to Greece and we have to go over the Greek border to catch a bus from Florentina, a city in the north of Greece. It started to rain, again nobody picked us up and we started to become pissed off. After an hour we took a dubious private taxi to Florentina. After all we were very happy to catch a bus to Athens, even though it hurt our hitchhiking-honour doing so.