Reading Alex's "Table for One" blog (the part in Greece) - her story about the bus driver who stopped the bus to talk to his colleague - reminds me of the train driver who stopped the train from Athens to Thessaloniki in the middle of nowhere. He got out of the locomotive, waited for his mother to come hobbling across the fields with his lunch. He took the lunch, all neatly put into a steel container, gave his mother a quick kiss and then hopped back onto the train, clutching the meal, to continue the journey, while his mother hobbled back across the fields. All the passengers, including me, who had been watching this through the compartment window, took this as perfectly normal. Gives a new meaning to delivery. Anyway, back to the mad teacher.

The doorbell had rung, and I answered it. Standing there was the Bug-eyed Beast of Badlands, the German teacher, Hans (I've changed his name to protect his insanity). He spoke English like you might speak a language through a comb and paper, mashing phonemes, vowel-sounds, etc. Though this won him full marks for trying, it won him no marks for comprehensibility. He was the kind of person who would tell you a long and elaborate joke that you didn't understand a word of, and because you didn't understand it, you would laugh in the wrong places.
I had met him in my second year of teaching in Thess., in the Lotos, an unpretentious bar full of foreigners and backpackers, near one of the large cinemas. I was with Despina, and we had found somewhere to sit - quite difficult in the Lotos, being a very popular bar. The stranger immediately asked us if ve vood mind (that much we were able to understand) and we said, no, please do join us. This chap joined us, and immediately began to regale us with stories of near-incomprehensibility, but we were able to salvage something from the wrecked English.
Perhaps sensing that we found him difficult to understand, one of his favoured forms of communication was by writing messages. He would scribble down a message, you would write a reply to it, and the 'conversation' would get weirder and weirder.
According to one of his students that I met, he also spoke German with an incomprehensible accent.
He was genuinely interested in hiring a car, loading it to the top with weapons, driving to Russia or Belarus, and attempting to assassinate whoever was in charge at the time. He had planned it down the minutest detail, we found out. He occasionally went back to Germany for an injection - what kind of injection, and for what affliction, was never specified. He had been arrested in Germany for vagrancy and for graffiti, for fighting with a policeman during a demonstration, but he had only ever spent a night in a police cell, never in the nick.
Hans played the bass guitar in a band, had been struck by lightning (spont a foo days in hispitalszh winderong abit the munning of looof - spent a few days in hospital wondering about the meaning of life). He was also a voracious traveller, a voracious whoremonger, had whooped it up in Siberia in a bar with the rising boys in black suits and submachine guns.
How much of this was true, we never found out, but we could believe him. There was something profoundly unbalanced about the wild-eyed stare, the bug-eyed brag, the manic murmur that dominated his pesonality.
He also claimed to have seen an angel, and even heaven, outside his squalid flat in Thessaloniki.
'U knoooi, oon day it wis just oonudder diiiirte stroot, u knoooi, Diiiiispena" (You know, one day it was just another dirty street, you know, Despina)"
Despina agreed. Being Greek, she was an expert on the merits and demerits of the streets of Thess.
"And thiiiiin, I sew the stroot wis fool of aanjellz, fool of loot, it vooz cloon, and, paredooz had arrrrivd."
(And then, I saw the street was full of angels, full of light, it was clean, and paradise had arrived.")
Now this was the person standing outside my door.