Well, after the howling dogs and mad bouzouki musicians, it was time to settle into Thessaloniki properly. To start, I will discuss a lively and interesting book written about the city, and my own impressions of it.

If you're going to choose a city to live in in Greece, this is the one. Unlike Athens, air circulates and blows much of the pollution away. It's cooler in the summer and apart from Egnatia and other main roads it is not so noisy, though traffic is as much of a problem here as in the capital. As Matt Barrett says on his website (recommended earlier) Thessaloniki is hip. The capital of Greek cuisine and much more of a Byzantine city than Athens, it is also one of the main centres of Rembetika, and has the best jazz venue in Greece, Milos. Under its flow of concrete, it has an amazing history that the Greeks themselves are only just beginning to come to terms with. For the most interesting look at the history of this place, there is a book published and written in English called
Salonica, City of Ghosts, by the talented historian Mark Mazower, published in Britain by Harper Collins and worth every moment of its 500 pages or so. In fact, this outweighs any number of guides to Thessaloniki, many of which, of course, fail to capture the spirit of the place.
In fact, as we are talking about the capital of Northern Greece, I think it is also worth mentioning the great travel book Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of the finest travel writers ever, which recounts his adventures among the now assimilated tribes of Northern Greece (most remarkably, the Sarakatsans). I remember I was reading the book at the school in Thessaloniki while waiting for a class, and a gentleman who was sitting opposite me started talking to me. He was a parent of one of the students there, and was connected through marriage to a Sarakatsan, and he told me that they were now so assimilated into Modern Greek life that there was no one left who followed the old liftestyle. Who can blame them, life had been hard for them. However, some clever documentary film makers managed to capture for posterity, like Leigh Fermor, the dying moments of these tribes.
In a sense, Thessaloniki itself was a city of tribes, or maybe a more accurate term for it would be ethnic groups. This was the true melting-pot of Greece, but because of the trauma of Ottomanisation, few Greeks have started to examine their own past here until recently. Under Ottoman rule, it was home to Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians, Jews, Turks, etc. etc., with sometimes fluctuating populations due to the vagaries of war and displacement. A description in Mazower's book of what the famous central marketplace must have been like, when most of the people selling things at the stalls could speak at least five languages, stretches the imagination.
The reason why Mazower calls it a city of ghosts is that you have to look quite hard to find much of the history. Though its archaeological museum is very impressive, Thessaloniki is a modern city in appearance, and most of its past lies buried underneath its concrete.
So, I recommend the best way to see the city is to walk up to the Upper Town, maybe take a sip of wine at one of the tavernas there, and look out over the gulf, and this way you can glimpse the Byzantine churches, the old houses in the Upper Town, and that tremendous view over the gulf that brings home the point of Thessaloniki. Another possibility is to go up into the hills that are now covered by the suburb of Sikies, and once again, find a gap in the buildings or go into a churchyard and look out over the city, the traffic snailing past the blocks, the cranes of the dockyards looming like spindly colossi, the water yawning blue to the horizon. If you're very very lucky, on a very clear day in the Spring or winter, you will see right across the sea to Mount Olympus, its shaggy peaks like a white-haired, gnarled old giant, fast asleep, as the Ancient Greek gods are, while a ship slips across the water, hoping not to wake up the home of the gods.