Pulling your hair out

I've been trying unsuccessfully for the last half hour to find a street in Thessaloniki. I'm due to start a new lesson today and it's in an area I'm not familiar with. After failing to find it in the city map in the front of the telephone directory I decided that I'd go on the internet. First, I tried Google Earth, and whilst the city is shown in pretty high resolution there are few place names - forget roads, you'd be hard pressed to find entire neighbourhoods.

Afterwards, I tried to Google "Thessaloniki street map", in both Greek and English with only limited success. The best on offer are scans of map of the centre. Not much use to me as the area I'm looking for is nowhere near there ( the city has over a million inhabitants).

Finally, I came across the University Of Macedonia and Thrace website (it's 1999 all over again) which purportedly gives information about the whole of the city. There I found this;

"Οδικοί χάρτες της Θεσσαλονίκης με εξελιγμένες δυνατότητες αναζήτησης για διευκόλυνση των μετακινήσεών σας:"

- http://www.saloniki.org/
- http://www.driveme.gr/
- http://www.231.gr/ - Χάρτες
- http://www.it.uom.gr/dromoi/

Translation

"Thessaloniki street maps with advanced search capabilities in order to make moving around the city easier."

Of the five links, four are either broken or irrelevant and the one that does take you anywhere vaguely useful shows the scanned map of the centre I mentioned earlier. Annoyed, I decided to send them an email asking the designers to update the information, only to find out that you can't do this without a password!!! Meaning they've sealed themselves off from any outside contact! Welcome to the new "high-tech" primitives. This may explain their total non - appearance on the top 500 universities list.

In the end it took four phone calls and a lot of needless explanation to find out something that you should be able to do in less than 60 seconds.

PS

There is a happy end to this sad tale. Thanks to Kassandra I found a site that has all the information I was looking for. Check out www.navigation.gr.