To start things off, I don’t know how it is possible, but somehow, Jason managed to drag about a half liter of human or dog poop into the train car. The dozen people that followed behind him helped him to smear it everywhere and we are now witnessing an exodus off the entire train car. Anyways, we are on the train to Innsbruck after a few hectic days in Vienna and Salzburg. Vienna was another large European city with the usual big cathedral in the center of old town. Vienna also has lots of rich Europeans that drive elite cars. Brand new Bentleys and Ferraris were not out of place.

We spent some time wandering a bar scene called the “Bermuda Triangle” where we enjoyed the “best falafel in town.” We also had a great time at an enormous hostel called Wombats. Jason has gotten better at navigating, though he had a few close ones in the underground subway. That night, we popped in the large cathedral and witnessed a little bit of evening mass. The incense and organs were a sight to behold.

The next day, we checked out more of the cathedral. As you can see in the picture, people still manage to pray even when the cathedral is under siege from tourists. It is called Saint Stephan’s cathedral if anyone is curious. Jason really wanted to see the cathedral, but the non-stop school tours prevented us from getting down there. The musty smell of stone and marble, along with the faint hint of incense was a reminder that something special takes place in Saint Stephan’s every day.

After the cathedral, we found our way to the aboveground tram system and headed to an old cemetery where Mozart is buried. His burial site is shown here. Oh, an update on the fecal matter on Jason: we just discovered a good size smear on his pants which makes me wonder what he did with himself while I was in the WC at the train station. The cemetery is called Saint Marx and it was immensely peaceful and tranquil. It mostly has people from the late 18^th century with elaborate tombs and large trees that are allowed to grow virtually unchecked. Following our visit to Saint Marx, we collected our bags from the hostel and hopped on a train to Salzburg.

We’ll be in Austria tomorrow. Will update then.

Pics are appearing funky. I’ll try to fix the problem for future posts.

When I was in Europe last summer, I never took an all-night train. We were in a three-person cabin and life was grand until about midnight when an old German guy got on board and joined out room. Let me just say, sticking two people and a stranger in a phone booth is awkward and this was no different. I barely slept because I’m sick and Jason slept even less because he was too hot in the small room. When the train arrived this morning, we were already kind of tired. We landed in a nice hostel called the Dizzy Daisy, or the reversal of that, and headed out to the main square. The main square reminds me of the square in Siena, Italy. It is the main hub of the city and attracts hoards of crowds. Oh! I forgot to mention the Ethiopian protestors outside of the German EU building. Well, in Krakow, we witnessed a march against gay rights, and saw another with equal numbers that seemed to be for gay rights. They were well organized and made quite a scene.

Jason and I also climbed the old city tower which seemed ready to collapse as we walked up it. The view at the top was like Krakow’s Eiffel Tower. There are three things we want to do here, deliver a book to a friend of a girlfriend of a friend, see the famous UNESCO salt mines, and visit Auschwitz. Salt mines were today, with the other two tomorrow. We’ll leave Krakow during our third day here. As of right now, I will not really miss it. I’ve never received so many stares from people and it is honestly making me uncomfortable. The vodka’s great, the food is good, and the salt mines were sheer wonder. It was like seeing another world, hundreds of meters underground. I’ll blog more when I am feeling better. Below is a picture of Jason being super happy to be in Poland. Jon is looking forward to places where people enjoy their hair rather than shave all of it off…

Oh, and Jason ordered dumplings and a cherry-flavored beer for dinner tonight. I’m still amazed people are staring at me and not him. He is passed out now. I have to remember, he needs 8-9 hours of sleep in order to function the next day and we have not even broken the 4 hour mark. Luckily, I am recovering quickly and by the time we get out of Poland, I’ll be 100%.

[Sorry it took so long to get an update posted. I have been sick and blogging is not at the top of my list]

If you have found this blog, you probably received one of the dozens of emails Jason has sent out to the world with the blog address. We are traveling through central Europe with a few stops in Eastern countries, including Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. An itinerary/route map is displayed below. The numbered boxes are locations we are going to (try) to stop at. I’ll tell you about Berlin and then move on to Poland, where we currently are. Note, on the day before we flew out, I was getting “that feeling.” You know the one where you just know you are going to be with a cold or the flu the next day? Sure enough, that plane ride was absolute hell and the following day even worse.

Berlin was very much like a capital city: dirty, large, and interesting. On the day we arrived, we spent time finding a place to stay, eating sausages, planning our exit, and getting solicited by prostitutes; a typical day in a big city. After allowing Jason to navigate a few times, he was promptly fired and has not recovered the position since. We’ve moved into a testing phase where we “pretend” he is navigating but do not follow his directions. It is working fabulously. After several trial runs, it is apparent Jason will not be navigating for the duration of this trip.

On Day Two, we awoke in Berlin to Jon hacking like crazy with a stuffy nose, completely clogged sinuses, sensitive muscles, a mild fever, and fatigue. Jason has also discovered what it is like to sleep near someone who snores and that is compounded by Jon having a plugged up nose. For the day, we ate more sausage, found the parliament building, East Berlin, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and a bunch of other commie crap. Those Soviets really knew how to build large, imposing, pointless things. It was really special to see the wall and all the history clearly displayed on it. We also found the U.S. embassy and were told we were not allowed in there, even after we showed the guy our passports. Good thing we have no problems. One of the most interesting places was the Holocaust memorial. It is pictured below but is essentially a city block with perfect rectangles that line with each other. We are not sure if there is pattern significance, but it is a sight to see and the little kids playing in between the large square columns did not seem disrespectful in the least bit.

Day Two marked the end of our time in Berlin as we decided we wanted to move on to the more quaint and interesting areas of Europe. We had previously scheduled a sleeper train with no connections direct to Krakow, Poland and we left Berlin at 8 PM. See the next post for our arrival and first day in Poland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I promise I am not moving there. It is just DIRT CHEAP to travel anywhere now. My plane ticket last year was about $1,400 with ample lead time on the purchase. This year… $500 after taxes to fly open-jaw into Berlin and out of Paris. Ridiculous. You should grab a flight and come hang out with us in Krakow for the weekend.

 

I’m traveling with a fellow MBA grad who recently emerged from a bomb shelter he lived in until 2 years ago when he joined our MBA program. He’s pictured here. Ok, the bomb shelter is fiction, but Jason regretted not bringing a camera to Bellevue Square Mall because of a fountain we walked by in Lincoln Square. True Story. Am I worried? Yes. Should I be worried? Absolutely. I have promised to bring him back in one piece and I’m really gonna do my best. Anywho, I’ll be back on doing the blogging thing again as much as I can.

The trip will be fairly plain with us mostly staying in the central Euro areas. We will be spending some time in post-communist Europe, so that will provide some good cheap fun. I’ll try to find a nifty mapping image to show you where we are headed. We’re traveling in the shoulder-season, which will be a different experience to my high-season fun last summer. So stay tuned for Jason and Jon’s European Adventure.

The final destination of my trip was a one day buffer in Athens, the city I was scheduled to fly out of. The boat arrived very early in the morning around 5 AM and I was checked in by 7:30, which meant I had a lot of time in the city. With the entire next day dedicated to traveling home, I had to get as much out of Athens as I could with the one day. My hope was to spend time at the Acropolis and its neighboring attractions, as well as walk through the market and bazaar. Knowing the Acropolis gets packed around 9 AM from the bazillions of people offloaded from cruise ships and bus tours, I immediately showered and headed there via the Metro. I got my ticket at the south entrance and headed up to the Theater of Dionysos. It was remarkably preserved and you could see remnants of the old stage made of multi colored marble. A few hundred feet later, I ran into the fully restored Herodes Attricus Theater, which is used for summer performances of the classics on the weekends. The top of the Acropolis is not actually that big column structure you see in all the famous photographs. The acropolis is the rock that all of the summit structures sit on. The entrance to the acropolis is Propylaia, a large stone structure built to compliment the large Parthenon. On my way down, I ran into about a thousand people in tour bus groups I ended up wondering: how are those people having any fun at all? You just know everywhere they go they are arriving at the same time as similar tour bus groups and they are always standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their little headphones that receive the transmission from the tour guide and constantly maneuvering to take the same pictures of each other standing in front of the same rocks. Anyways, after fighting my way downstream, I headed over to the Ancient Angora, which was the old market for Athens during 3000 BC. Overlooking the Angora is the Temple of Hephaisteion, pictured here.

 

Athens’ Famous Markets

I exited the north entrance near Ancient Angora and promptly found the modern market of Athens. It is actually several markets lightly connected by convenience stands and lots of people. I was most interested in seeing the flea market and the meat market and neither disappointed. The flea market was essentially a ton of bums sitting on table cloths or blankets on the ground selling the most useless crap you could imagine. I am 100% certain virtually all of the items for sale were pulled out of a dumpster or found on the ground. And the tourists were eating it up like they were making the greatest finds ever! “Look Honey, I got this authentic old solid rubber wheel the size of a coffee mug for only 11 euro from that old woman over there! It’s so amazing that we came to Greece and I got a real Greek treasure that I bargained for at the town market! Doesn’t it look like a wheel from a shopping cart?!” And if she looked closer, she would see the merchant’s inventory management device mysteriously missing a wheel. Anyway, that was happening all over the place for 2 blocks. Broken clocks, unwashed t-shirts, rubber balls that were no longer balls, old store signs, scratched CDs (no covers or boxes), old tapes (some home recorded with no labels), rocks that were claimed to come from “a Greek Island”, bags with holes in them, etc.

The meat market was interesting because it was not like talking to the butcher behind the Safeway counter. Heads, livers, lips, tongues, ears, feet, stomachs, testicles, kidneys, steaks, roasts, legs, noses, and every other part of animals. And there were piles of the stuff. I saw lots of chicken, cow, rabbit, lamb, goat, and some more exotic meats that I couldn’t make the translation. I was going to head to the fish part, but strangely, I never ran into it. I also never found the veggie, fruit, or flower market, but I know they exist. After walking 9 miles around Athens, I decided it was time to grab some food. And maybe take a nap.

Given the size of Athens, I expected to find food everywhere, but I didn’t want the tourist junk they sell near the Plaka and Acropolis, so I headed farther from the sights and closer to my hotel near Omonia, what many consider to be the heart of the city. I ended up walking an additional 2 miles just to find a souvlaki stand and realized that almost everything was closed. And this was on a Wednesday, but the city felt like a ghost town. After getting a 2 Euro chicken souvlaki pita, I asked the proprietor why everything was closed. “Holiday!” he replied, “They go to the islands in August.” Hmmm, given the nightmare that hotel hunting was, I think I saw the holiday people he was referring to. By the time I got back to the hotel at 4, I had walked 11.5 miles and had had enough of Athens. I headed back to the hotel for a quick nap and to get out of my walking shoes.

 

Final European Dinner

Around 6, I got up and headed back out into the heat. My destination was the Archeological Museum of Athens, as it is supposed to be among the best in the world for quality of artifacts and given that I had not even been to a real museum in Europe, I felt obligated to visit at least one. I never made it though, due to some late afternoon yacking with some locals at a café. But hey, the café was near the museum, so we’ll just consider it a cultural mussio visit. When Europeans sit down at a bar/café on a sidewalk, they don’t move for hours. This is not just a Greek phenomena, I observed this in Italy too. France and Switzerland also have skills at the café-camping, but the Italians and Greeks have perfected the art. In fact, I don’t think any men in Greece work at all and I am convinced they don’t have homes either. They just squat at a café where they have likely made prior arrangements with the owner. At 6 PM, I sat in an uncomfortable chair talking about nothing and everything with these 3 guys all the way until 10 PM. That’s 4 hours in a chair, 2 frappes, 1 greek coffee, and 2 beers. In that same time, they had 1, maybe 2 drinks to my 5 and believe me, I was holding back. They just camp in those seats and hassle every woman that walks by, whether she’s Eva Longoria or Rosanne Barr. Around 9, I was thinking about the 2 hours I would never get back in my life and looking for polite exit. By 9:30, I realized the point was not to waste time, but to just exist with your friends. So I just relaxed and stopped worrying about what other things I should be doing. Hunger finally motivated me and I headed off to look for some lamb stew.

 

Heading Home

This morning I got up at 6 to give myself plenty of time to find my way to the airport and get checked-in. Conveniently, the metro runs directly to the airport, so I never had to leave the tub to get there. The metro is nice and modern and was essentially created for the 2004 Olympic Games. In fact, much of the city’s modern aspects are largely due to a hasty facelift for the Olympics. I say hasty because most of the metro lines have the cars getting knocked all over the place because the tracks are not straight from them installing them as quickly as possible. Oh, did I ever mention you don’t flush the toilet paper in Greece? Yeah, remember my little issue with trying to accept and properly use the bidet in Italy? I’m not going into details, but I ended up turning the shower into a bidet everywhere in Greece because I refused to put the paper in the little waste bin next to the toilet. I ended up planning food types in Greece to avoid unexpected big flushes. Oh, a big flush is a Jon-Phrase. In Switzerland, and many other places of the countries I traveled to, there are 2 different flushes for the toilet, a big button and a smaller one. They use different amounts of water and you can guess what they are intended for. Enough on that though.

I’m on the Athens to Philly flight at the moment and it is less than exciting. Firstly, the flight back is the addition of time, so I am gaining extra time in life. Yay! Now I don’t feel bad about the café-camping from yesterday. But in gaining that time, I am already all messed up mentally. For one thing, it is 21:00 in my mind and that means it’s time to get a pre dinner ouzo and start browsing menus on display on the restaurant walks, yet, it’s 2 PM where I’m heading. The other thing is, it took 6.5 hours to fly to Paris from Philly, during which time it was in the middle of the night and the entire plane was passed out, including myself. But this is an 11 hour flighttime due to flying against the wind and with the time zone adding time to my day, I’m feeling like I am in the twilight zone. Essentially, I am landing at the same time I took off, but will have spent 11 hours on the plane and have been up for 18 hours. And I refuse to sleep so that I can adjust to Pacific Standard Time in one day to not fall asleep at the wheel on the way to Pullman on Saturday. So that means, I need to go to bed with the rest of the Seattle people tonight, and not in 2 hours like I want to. I’m complaining and will stop. Ok, one more, the girl next to me has bronchitis and I think she might die. Well, she’ll live, but lots of coughing coming from this poor girl. I’ve been holding my breath for 8 hours. We’ll see if I get sick in a few days. I will probably eat a whole tube of Airborne the moment I can find some. [Added the next day from Seattle] The Philly to Seattle leg was even more interesting. Because my International flight was delayed, I sprinted through the airport to get to the gate on time. We boarded and everything was going fine, until the captain told us the airport was shutting down one of its routes because of an incoming storm. After an hour on the runway, some lady decided she was going to have a panic attack and we had to return to the gate to off-load her. They refueled us, and we headed back out to the runway to queue up for what turned into a three hour wait. I arrived in Seattle at 12:30 AM local time, and had been awake for almost 30 hours, sitting on planes.

Oh and one final funny thing about Greece. Man, that place loves their buses and it was all I could do but laugh at the situation when we boarded the plane. As a testament to their love for their buses, they designed their airport around using buses to get people to the planes. That’s right, no terminals with walkways. Just staging areas where they guide you to each area where you wait to get to the next area, and the prize at the last area is a bus that takes you out to the runway at the other side of the airport where, no matter how big the plane is, you board it from the ground. I’ve been on puddle-hoppers where you walk partially outside the terminal to board from the ground, but never ferried via large coach out to the actual runway. I seriously chuckled when we got on that bus. The entire global bus manufacturing industry has the Greek Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation to thank for keeping their industry alive. I’m surprised Greek locals don’t own buses instead of small cars. I bet the rich and elite of Greece all have garages full of blinged-out coaches.

I plan to write a final wrap-up post with some thoughts on my experiences exploring Europe for the first time and will be uploading it soon. Check back in a few days. Until then thanks for reading the blog!

After getting myself organized for the flight home, I realize I’m too tired to write about my time in Athens tonight.  I will do it on the plane(s) tomorrow and post it when I get home.  And thank you all for reading the blog and for your comments and emails.  I has been an experience to remember.  Once I get some USA-sleep, I’ll be looking towards planning my next adventure.  The next few days will be heavy travel: flying back to the states, and then driving back to Pullman to get ready for my last 9 months in grad school.  Check back Friday for the Athens post.

 

Last Boat Ride

Somehow, I ended up with a ticket that had a reserved seat. They must have just booked it that way when I bought it, which was fine with me. After two other boats where I spent most of the night wandering, a reserved seat on my final boat was a welcome change. What I didn’t realize was sleeping on the hard floor is actually easier for me than sleeping in a reclined chair and I was therefore awake for most of the night on the way back from Crete to Piraeus. Different boat because I was leaving from the Souda Port of Chania instead of Iraklion and the difference in the quality of ship was like night and day. The Chania boat was probably very new, as it was very nice inside, full of pullman style seats, and very clean. The other two boats in contrast, relied on massive open deck space to cram people in with very few reserved seats. We arrived in Athens at 5:30 AM and got off the boat around 6. A 30 min metro ride and several blocks of walking and by 7, I was standing in front of my hotel and was lucky enough to have a room that had not been occupied the previous night and therefore, ready to for me to check in. Some other early arrivers were not as lucky and they were still waiting in the lobby (passed out) when I got back from the Acropolis at 1 PM. My usual post-check-in shower (humidity + pollution + 84 degrees at 7AM + big backpack = sweaty jon) and a cup of coffee had me ready to go explore. Actually, I really just wanted to sleep but I only have one day here and need to make the most of it. So I figured one last push on my last day in Europe. But before I get to that…

 

Last Night in Chania

The day of my ferry trip, I had a lot of time to kill, so I started off on a bench that overlooked the sea and relaxed. [That picture to the left is from my last night in Crete]. Oh, but first, the hotel proprietor, who is arguably the nicest one I met my entire trip, insisted I leave my bags in the hotel backroom and come and go as I please throughout the day. It’s status quo for hotels to allow you to leave your bags on day-of-arrival and day-of-departure, but he was so nice about it that it stuck out in my mind. Around lunch, I figured I should eat something Cretan, since I was leaving soon, so I found a restaurant in a back alley away from where the tourists are directed and full of locals that mostly kept to themselves. I ordered rifi, which is young goat, cooked in herb infused olive oil produced by the family that owned the taverna. They are very proud of their olive oil in Crete, as it is a unique micro-climate for olive trees and tons of families produce some of the best olive oil in the world. They also gave me some guacamole that had garlic and olive oil in it, giving it a tangy kick. I plan to try to replicate it when I get home, as I ended up eating it with a spoon because it was so tasty. And the goat: oh man, it was good! You can add that to the horse steak, sea urchin salad, grilled octopus, stewed octopus, fresh anchovies, fresh sardines, and other non-US goodies I’ve sampled in Europe. It was like venison, but not gamy at all. Kind of like a mild lamb. Anyways, after lunch I made my way to the port (in no hurry) and ended up hanging out with a woman who had gotten separated from one of those European tour groups for a few hours at a coffee shop. It was interesting hearing a perspective on the EU from someone other than the non-EU-Swiss perspective. I’m gonna go grab some food and then come back and write a quick Athens post, which will sadly, likely be my last as I head back to the States tomorrow morning. Check back later in the afternoon. The Acropolis was awesome and insane.

Today was simple: I woke up, notified the room owner about the broken AC, and headed to the bus station. Once there, I got a 1.90 EU ticket to a remote town in the Akrotiri Peninsula, slightly northeast of Chania called Stavros. The town is mostly a beach and a few tavernas. I had heard it is less known (meaning fewer crowds) and is based on a nice lagoon where the beach is located. It did not disappoint, and I found myself being the most relaxed I have been since I can remember. It was the perfect end to my trip to the Greek Islands and the only time I can recall where I was actually watching the clock because I didn’t want the day to end, rather than watching it to make sure I didn’t miss a connection. Swimming in the warm Aegen sea certainly helped that relaxation, as well as finding tiny perfect sea shells right next to the place I had sat all day. I got on the last bus back to Chania at 9:10 PM and returned to the massive crowds mobbing old town.

There were people everywhere, of course, and I ended up at the little taverna I have looked down at from my balcony for the past few days. I avoided lunch at Stavros because I knew I was going to drop 10 or 12 Euro on food later that night. Speaking of dinner, Greeks don’t eat it until 9 or 10 PM, and it is always the heaviest meal of the day for them. My body is not used to eating a ton of food at midnight, but it’s their culture and I’ve gotten used to it. Dinner was bowtie pasta with what seemed like three chicken breasts with pine nuts in a spicy cream sauce. The usual Crete tradition of watermelon and more raki followed the meal. That watermelon is a great idea because I think I am eating at sit down dinners here (as opposed to take-away kebabs) solely because of that watermelon. I finally paid my check at 12:30 and walked upstairs to blog the day. Well I’m tired and gonna head to the internet café to post this and then pack up for my final two days in Europe. Tomorrow is another overnight boat and I’m gonna try and get all the bed-based sleep I can tonight before more boat floor sleep tomorrow. Have a great day all! Look for an update Wednesday, as my hotel in Athens supposedly has WiFi.