Ferry to Greece & Athens

Setting off from Venice was beautiful. When we got on the boat, we were shown into a huge room full of people in sleeping bags and little tents. We dumped our stuff, layed out our sleeping bags and then I realised that we weren't in a room at all. We were on the deck. The roof just covered about half of the deck with no wall separating us from the outside. I passed one of the side decks and saw some dudes hanging up hammocks. What a genius idea.
We arrived in Patras at 5am, our earliest start so far! we then waited 2 hours with three Americans for our train to take us away to Athens. I was expecting a nice long nap on the train, but we had to swap from train to bus and back again. So by the time we got to the hostel I completely passed out on the bed!
We went back to the train station to sort out some tickets to Istanbul and had to hang around before a very big jolly man came to help. We gave him dates for the trains and threw his arms in the air and said 'no trains, no trains' with an awfully big grin on his face. I'm preeetty sure he was drunk. We checked out the city and went back to the hostel bar for our free shots of ouzo and more drinks where we met Alessia from Switzerland.
Filled up with pancake and coffee, we spent the next day exploring the old Athens in the sun. We saw all the greek remains and went for a wander round the museum. We found a nice little cafe down a side street, and got a free dough-nut each. They were so good!!
We caught a train to Thessaloniki the next day to get a bus to Istanbul, but after spending all day looking for the tourist information, which was closed, we decided to unfortunately miss out Turkey and continue north. We walked back to the station along the sea front and caught our second night train to Bucharest.