The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost.

Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, is on the Mediterranean waterfront. There may or may not be a seafaring route to get here, but my requests in Athens and the island of Aegina for "a boat to Thessaloniki" were met with charmed, friendly laughter. This is how Circus Ninja ended up at the Larissa train station in Athens at midnight on a Thursday.

I was there on Wednesday as well, hoping to buy an advance ticket at a window clearly labeled "same day departures."

"Come back tomorrow," the beefy Greek encouraged me, cigarette pressed between his fingers.

"Will there be a train at the same time tomorrow?"

More charmed, friendly laughter, clearly a trademark of the seen-it-all-and-still-kicking Greeks. It occurs to me that the Russians could learn a lot from these people.

"Tomorrow, you come, and we talk about trains tomorrow."

The Athens train station is a veritable nightclub at 9pm on a Thursday. The beefy Greek and I, we talk about the trains, and I even get to ride one after handing over my purchased-as-far-in-advance-as-i-possibly-could ticket. Smugly, I note the international band of hippies clogging the ticket line just before departure.

Less smugly, I settle in to seat 83 and notice it faces the wrong way. People who clearly bought tickets even later than I did - I am judging this by their dreadlocks, which to me indicate a clinical inability to plan ahead in life - are assigned forward-facing seats on the train. This will be the least of my worries as soon as I meet my seatmates, a flock of nineteen-year-old Greek women on school holiday or perhaps heading to Thessaloniki to set up a commune where they will teach the youth of tomorrow how to wear dreadlocks and pierce their cartilage.

When I say, "Athenian woman," what comes to mind?

You're wrong. You're so wrong it's not even funny. Admit it, your mental image involved an aquiline nose and alabaster skin and some form of toga. Let it go. You're totally wrong.

Perching my backpack on my lap, I press my face into it and attempt to get some sort of sleep. The train arrives at at 6:30am Friday morning; I bought this ticket instead of spending money on a night's lodging, and fully intend to sleep here, spend the day sightseeing in Thessaloniki, and prepare for Shabbat in my northern Greek youth hostel.

There's just one wrinkle in my grand plan: I can hear the Athenian Women chattering away, clearly the type of people who would start their evening at midnight and remain awake until 6am even if they weren't on a transnational railroad. In my youth I was one of these people, and G-d clearly has no intention of letting me forget it.

Clucking and chirping and chatting in Greek, they sound for all the world like a henhouse. "Go with it," I purr to myself. "Just pretend you're in a henhouse." There is a precedent, is there not, for farm-animal-based self-soothing techniques? Something along the lines of counting sheep? I try to pretend that my Henhouse of Disappointingly un-statue-like Athenians is actually row upon row of sleepy-eyed rams, lining up to be counted as they leap fences in the idyllic pastureland of my fathomlessly creative mind.

1...2...

Nope, they still sound like chickens.