Prague

After our brief unplanned stint in Vienna, we continued on with our roughly laid out list of destinations, and arrived in Prague, Czech Republic, two days ago. So far, it's been great!

Our first day was spent wandering around all the famous touristy sites, like the Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, and the Astronomical Clock at the Old Town Square. We also threw in a few geeky engineering/architectural landmarks like Prague's famous Frank Gehry building (the "dancing house", a.k.a. "Fred and Ginger") by the river. It's no Guggenheim Bilbao, but it's a pretty cool looking building nonetheless.

Today, we went to the Communist Museum (very intense), and explored the old town a bit more. I thought Vienna and Budapest were remarkable for their wall-to-wall gorgeous buildings, but I think Prague takes the cake. We also caught a World Cup match (Germany v. Argentina) in the middle of Wenceslas Square with a few hundred other people. Germany won, and about half the crowd went nuts. My favourite celebration came courtesy of a German guy singing "We Are The Champions" by Queen. The thing was, the only actual words he knew were "we are the champions", so he faked the rest. "No time for losers" became "no eye illusions", etc. Hilarious.

Now we're off to watch some more World Cup!

P.S. If anyone knows of any good Canadian bars in Prague, let me know! We're trying to line up our own little Canada Day party here in central Europe.

Oud Traveller

We have safely arrived in Vienna, and luckily enough, pretty much the only available room in town tonight happens to be a very reasonably priced hotel room roughly the size of a football field. I am only partially kidding. James and I each get two comfy single beds to ourselves (as opposed to one single bed with springs poking out and a sack of cotton balls for a pillow, to which we have been growing accustomed), with enough room left for two desks, a giant closet at least twice the size of the one in my room back home, and a HUGE open floor area big enough to fit at least 4 more beds. It's a little ridiculous, actually. I'm thinking about running laps there tomorrow. I'm quite happy to have the extra space right now, however, since I've been travelling with a new companion for the last week or so.

I bought an Oud.

I've got a bit of a musical instrument collection started in my room (which is not news to my housemates, or anyone who has ever had to put up with my attempts at banjo playing), and I really dig middle eastern string instruments, so there was no way I could leave Turkey without some crazy instrument. The Oud (pronounced Oood) fits the bill pretty nicely. It's got a huge egg-shaped body, a short neck, and a headstock that's bent almost 90 degrees away from the neck, which makes it really cool looking, and a huge pain to carry around. It's got 11 strings (one bass string and 5 sets of doubled up metal/nylon strings) and no frets. Fretless string instruments are pretty challenging, and it's really easy to produce the sounds of a dying cat as opposed to, say, music. Right now I'd estimate my level of Oud mastery at somewhere in the neighborhood of "novice" and "absolutely terrible", but we've still got a few long train rides ahead of us. Hopefully I'll have it somewhat figured out by the time I get home, for the sake of my housemates.

Change of Plans, Part 2!

We've decided to axe our plan to head out to Tokaj for two reasons:

#1) Getting there and back is difficult, and my extremely limited* Hungarian skills probably wouldn't make things any easier in a small, relatively untouristy town.
#2) It turns out you can get Tokaji wine in Budapest.

"What ever will you do with those 2 extra days?", I can hear you asking right now. Well, why not hop on a train to Austria? Very few times in my life will I have the opportunity to answer yes to the question "Hey, wanna go to Vienna tomorrow?", so I'm jumping on this one. We'll be there for 2 nights, then it's off to Prague!

*Extremely limited means I can manage a passable "thank you", and I know the Hungarian word for "new". It is "uz". I figured that one out from a concert poster.

Budapest Rock

Budapest has been a really interesting city to check out over the past 2 days. There are reminders everywhere of the fact that this city has been host to not one, but two dicatorial regimes (the Nazis during WW2 and the Soviets from 1946 onward to the breakup of the Eastern Bloc). Some buildings still have metal slugs studding their walls, patching up bullet holes. It's a wonder the city managed to retain as much of its amazing architecture as it did.

Aside from grizzly political history, one other thing Budapest seems to have in abundance is concerts. There seems to be an unwritten rule, though. You can only play in Budapest if you had a huge musical career in the 80's. Here, as proof, I give you a list of the acts playing Budapest in the next month:

-Eric Clapton
-Sting
-Pet Shop Boys
-Billy Idol
-Joe Satriani
-Dweezil Zappa (ok, so Frank was famous during the 80's... close enough)
-Whitesnake

In addition, Budapest is also host to this year's worldwide Klezmer music festival, which promises to offer all the best in Klezmer and post-Klezmer music. Unfortunately, it starts on Wednesday, and we'll be gone by then. We're gonna miss Whitesnake too...

Alas...

Budapest, finally...

Well, James and I finally made it to Budapest, Hungary from Istanbul, Turkey, despite the best efforts of the Turkish train authority to prevent us from getting here.

The journey started on Tuesday, when we bought tickets for a direct train from Istanbul to Budapest on Wednesday. It turns out that "direct" is Turkish Rail Authority for "this ticket I am selling you is for a train that does not exist". There is no such thing as a direct Istanbul-Budapest train on Wednesdays, so we'd be forced to transfer in Bucharest, Romania. They gave us a modest discount when we figured that out, so hey, no big deal.

The first snag that indicated this might indeed be a "big deal" was when we hit the Turkish border. This border is on a busy rail line that links Europe to Asia (as made famous by the Orient Express), so you'd think they would have their business in order as far as clearing people across the border goes. Nope.

We arrived at the border at 3AM, only to be met by NO police officers. It took them about half an hour to arrive on the scene. That was followed by about a half an hour of standing around, smoking cigarettes, chatting with other police officers, polishing the mice on their computers, etc. Eventually, they made it known that they couldn't actually clear us through the border AT the border, but for some reason had to take all our passports with them back to the police station to get them stamped/cleared. So off went about 200 passports, to return about an hour later, followed by a semi-chaotic mob of people all eager to make sure their passports hadn't fallen in the gutter somewhere along the way.

Eventually, it was 5AM and we were back on our way, free to get some sleep on our couchette "pillows" which were about as comfortable as a grocery bag full of soup cans. However, due to this 2 hour delay, along with another (more minor) delay at the Bulgarian/Romanian border, we arrived in Bucharest at 10PM having missed our transfer by exactly 2 hours. The next train to Budapest: 6AM. We grabbed a bench and dug in for a long night of coffee drinking and suspicious glances at everyone in a 30 metre radius. Fortunately, it didn't wind up being nearly as shady as our suspicious traveler minds assumed it would be.

Our train showed up at 6AM, and from then on in we made it to Budapest without incident, 46 hours after leaving Istanbul.

Today we're striking out to see some of the sights in Budapest, which is to say, just about everything. There's hardly a single building in this city that isn't gorgeous and ornamented to the hilt. It all feels very grand.

Cappy

Well, today's our last day in Turkey. We're catching a train at 10PM tonight en route to Budapest, Hungary. It's a bit of a hike, however, and we should be arriving in Hungary sometime early Friday morning.

Turkey was a pretty interesting place all around, and one of the things I will miss the most is Cappy. Cappy is a canned fruit drink (owned by the Turkish division of Coca Cola) that's sold at pretty much every street vendor/cafe in the country, and it is the most delicious fruit drink I have ever tasted. The peach version in particular tastes like they took a bunch of peaches, ran them through a blender, and poured them in a can. None of this artificial flavouring stuff. I'll be grabbing a few for the road before we hop on the train, but it will be a sad day indeed when those run out.

Cappadocia Caves and Moped Madness

James and I are just now wrapping up our time in Goreme, Turkey, which turned out to be a ton of fun. The first day we wandered around and checked out the landscape, which I can best describe as looking like the surface of some crazy alien moon. We also checked out the Open Air Museum, which is a series of dwellings and churches carved into huge rock spires by early Christians about 1,900 years ago. Speaking of caves, we spent both our nights here in a cave! Several hostels around here have converted some of the ancient caves to be a bit more comfortable by modern standards, and it was actually a pretty comfortable room. As for our second day...we got scooters! We were intending to take a guided tour, but we slept in and missed the bus. Alas... If I may paraphrase a man wiser than I, "When fate makes you rent a motorcycle, you rent a motorcycle". Our mission: We found out on Thursday that we're only about 100km from where they shot all the Tattooine cave house scenes from Star Wars, A New Hope. We needed some sort of destination to justify the riding of scooters, so we figured what better place than the home planet of Luke Skywalker? Destination: Ihlara Valley. We had 8 hours of scooter time,so we picked the farthest point on our map that we could make it to in 4 hours, and drove in a giant loop. It was an incredible experience. There were times when we would drive from huge, rolling hills to massive, flat fields of wheat, to winding mountain passes to super-steep valleys all within the space of an hour or two. As a bonus, we hardly saw another soul the entire time. It was like we had the Turkish countryside to ourselves... well, ourselves and several goats. Also, one really angry dog. He chased us for a good half kilometer at 50km/h looking quite angry/starving. It was at that point I became extremely grateful we opted for the "Sport" scooter models, which eventually outlasted the dog. The few Turkish children we did see all seemed to get a kick out of a couple of OBVIOUSLY foreign guys driving around a hundred kilometres from the nearest tourist outpost. Most of the waved and honked their bike horns, and one kid tried to race me down the street on his bike! He was pretty fast for an 8 year old, but I totally kicked his ass. Time to go inquire about getting some transportation to Istanbul tonight. I can't say I'm particularly excited about another 10+ hour overnight bus ride, but at least the Turkish bus lines know how to treat their clients. What would be a $200 ticket in Canada is closer to $20 here, and they have cabin attendants who provide complimentary coffee, tea, water and snack cakes for the duration of the trip! Of course, this means there are also frequent bathroom breaks, but it's a nice touch nonetheless.

Modern Ruins

The sailing trip turned out to be a great time, though technically we were only under sail for about 10 minutes. Damn combustion engines.

The boat was filled with James and I, an American couple, an ex-Bosnian girl who now lives in San Francisco, and six Australian guys, all around our age (plus or minus a few years).

Some of the trip highlights included snorkelling in incredibly clear Aegean (or possibly Mediterranean) waters, watching the Australia-Japan World Cup match in the living room of a small house in the village of Simena (the Aussies insisted, and our crew found a small TV with cable for us to watch) and playing texas hold 'em with pebbles (the boat had no chips on board so we swam ashore and each filled our pockets with flat, roundish stones and used them as chips).

One snag in the itinerary came when we were supposed to go to "Pirate's Cove", a bar in a small, remote bay. The hitch was that the bar no longer exists. Apparently it got shut down a while ago, but for some reason they took us there anyways! It was essentially a junkyard. The building was completely dismantled and piled in heaps on the ground. There were goats and chickens wandering around the wreckage, and there was an old goat skull sitting on a rusty beer fridge. It was weeeeeird. We figured this must have been part of the archaeological tour material... if you think about it, we were touring ancient ruins hundreds of years before they became ancient! Yeah, we're trendsetters.

We managed to make the best of it though, by building our own makeshift bar out of scrap wood and some old chairs. For some reason though, this greatly upset the captain of our boat (who spoke no English), and he tried to take off and leave us there! Fortunately, cooler heads eventually prevailed, and we abandoned our makeshift bar and returned to the boat.

We depart for Cappadocia in about an hour, and from there it's on to Istanbul and beyond!

Spontaneous Sailing!

Change of plans! James and I have postponed our trek into central Turkey in favour of a 4 day sailing adventure along the Turkish coast! Such are the perks of travelling wıthout an itinerary. We'll be embarkıng tomorrow morning at 10AM (Turkey time) and arriving in Olympos on Tuesday morning. I'm going to go out on a limb though, and assume that this boat won't have satellite internet. As a result, it'll probably be a few days before I get the chance to communicate again. Thıs heads-up is mostly for the benefit of my parents, who might otherwise assume I've run into trouble, and who have made their position on bailing their son out of a Turkısh prison quite clear.

Lucky's Souvlaki

I forgot to mention the single greatest part about Santorini while we were there: Lucky's Souvlaki.

It's a little pita shop just north of the bus station in Fira, the main town on the island. For a little under 2 euros, they'll serve you a gyro pita loaded with delicious, juicy gyro meat, big chunks of fresh tomato, lettuce, tzatziki, red onions, and french fries. Yep, french fries, right on the pita. One of them was a meal in itself, and they were the bulk of our sustenance in Santorini. I miss them already.

Rhodes

We've arrived in Rhodes for a short one-night rest before continuing our multi-day migration from Greece to Turkey. Tomorrow we're headed for Olympos with the goal of staying at a hostel IN A TREE! That's right, we're staying in Turkish Treehouses.

Rhodes is super cool looking so far. The "old town" is the center of activity, and it's entirely surrounded by a medieval stone wall and a ton of fortifications. I'm not sure the exact history of the place, but I think it was some sort of outpost during the Crusades. In any case, the entire city is extremely well preserved, and there are stone arches and crenellated roofs everywhere you look.

We're about to strike out to explore some of the more interesting looking alleys and passageways, before buying our ferry tickets over to Turkey later on this afternoon.

Another Athens Note

I forgot to mention this... When I was in Athens, I heard a cover of Volare played only on the accordion and clarinet, complete with occasional shouts of "Opa!"

Amazing!

Athens/Santorini

It's amazing how much a little cheap and delicious food can change your perception of a city. I enjoyed my first day in Athens, and the Parthenon/Agora/Dionysus Theater were all cool, but I wasn't really digging the city until we (myself, James, and a Californian sociology student named Emily we met on a bus) went out and found some incredibly cheap, very tasty kebabs. It was like an instantaneous 10% increase in coolness.

The next morning, James and I hopped aboard our 7 hour ferry to Santorini, and met up with Emily yet again at our hostel. We've been wandering around the island for the last 2 days, lounging on black volcanic sand beaches and eating more deliciously cheap pitas. I was already impressed with the island before tonight's sunset off the coast of the village of Ia. Most Greek guide books call it the greatest sunset in the world, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing with them. All told, I've taken 200 pictures in the past 2 days.

Our next task is to see the sunrise over the caldera, which is basically the big inlet at the centre of the island. It's an active volcano, and last erupted 50 years ago. It makes for some pretty spectacular scenery, and some slightly unsettling thoughts about seismic activity. For now, however, I've got to finish my Greek coffee and hop a bus back to the town of Messaria, where we're staying. It's not quite as flashy as the main town of Fira, but it feels a lot less touristy. We've already acquainted ourselves with one of the local restauranteurs (George), and one particularly friendly dog who follows us everywhere and marks his territory as we walk, just so we're clear about whose turf we're on. We have named him Parker.

Athena!

I made it safe and sound from Kingston to Toronto to London to Athens, with a grand total of 23 hours of travel time, none of which were spent sleeping.

Athens looks really interesting so far, but I've only really seen it at night. The acropolis is lit up with big flood lights, and towers over the "downtown"-ish area of town. Very scenic.

The biggest challenge thus far has been navigation. The problem with Greek is that *most* of the letters resemble English characters, but are usually pronounced quite differently. For example, P's are pronounced like R's. The net result of this is that I sound like a total goof when I try to ask people for directions or read any sign. It also doesn't help that, thanks to four years of engineering education, my brain interprets Greek words as really complicated math equations. Enough with the variables, already! (I promise, that will be my one and only math-based Greek character comment).

Tomorrow's agenda: Ascend to the Athenian Acropolis! Also, there's a museum of traditional Greek musical instruments downtown that is calling my name. If they have a gift shop, I could be in serious financial peril.