I know, I know, it has been awhile. That is because nothing particularly blog-worthy has happened since I last wrote. No incarcerations. No robberies. No jumping off cliffs. No begging for money from random tourists. We have been eating well, drinking lots of red wine, and wandering around nice cities. Some people might call this a trip-gone-smoothly. I call it poor blog material. And anything that is blog-worthy is not blog-friendly, you know? Life is hard.
So last time I wrote, I was in Bosnia. I don't believe I talked about our last night in Sarajevo, when this Aussie guy called Greg invited us to this wine party. At the mention of wine, Kaje and I were, of course, keen, so we were all over it. Turned out to be one of the best deals of the trip. We paid the equivalent of 10 euros and got a free wine glass and got unlimited wine from a bunch of wineries all over Croatia, Bosnia, and Hercegovina (sp?). AND there were tons of canapes, all made with truffles...You know, those fancy things worth thousands of dollars because only hogs can dig them up from under the ground? (I think that's the story). So we ate lots and drank lots and hung out with the sophisticated artsy crowd of Sarajevo. Yes, we were the least sophisticated people there, by a considerable and very visible margin. I was wearing jeans and Uggs and a yoga zip-up...I was way underdressed and I was a bit too excited about the bottomless wine glass. There were pretty cigarette rep girls wandering around in red cocktail dresses giving free cigarettes and lighting them for you. Greg was all over that. I smoked a couple, due to massive peer pressure from Greg and the fag rep girls. And Sadam Hussein was there. There is a picture on Shutterfly with him in it. Kaje is in the foreground, laughing, and he is in the background. That was the day he got sentenced to death, so I can understand why he needed to go out drinking. After we closed down the party, we went to the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, sparking the beginning of WWI, and re-enacted the assassination. Is that rude?
Next day, we headed to Mostar, where I wrote the last blog. It is a town on a river with a famous bridge. During the Bosnian War, the Muslims and the Croats (Christians) banded together to oust the Serbs, then turned on each other and bombed and shelled each other, including the bridge. It's been rebuilt now, but the Muslims and Christians still live on opposite sides of the river and hate each other. The city, like Sarajevo, is full of bombed-out buildings and there are bullet holes everywhere.
We finally made it to Dubrovnik, Croatia, after days and days of trying to get there. It was really pretty, but really dead. There's really not that much to say about Croatia, to be honest. We ate four Italian meals, drank a lot of red wine, saw a beautiful sunset, hung out beside some very turquoise water. Could have been very romantic...but, alas, there were no guys around. We headed up to Split and took a ferry back to Italy, where we went straight to Florence for some more fabulous meals, some more wine, loads of shopping, and a couple CRAZY nights playing asshole with a motley crew of maniacs. I'm not kidding about it being crazy. I would say it was about as crazy as a night playing cards in a hostel can get. Crazy.
Next was Vienna, which was beautiful. We wandered around, saw the Sigmund Freud Museum (which bored the bejesus out of me...the coach isn't there...it's just a bunch of photos and report cards and books in display cases...I thought there would at least be some Phallic ink blots or something, but nothing), the Belvedere (where the famous Klimt painting "The Kiss" is...very, very cool to see in person). We drank coffee in Cafe Central, where Freud, Lenin, and Trotsky used to play chess, and went to the opera "La Boheme" (the opera on which Rent is based). We got standing spots though, and we were exhausted (hungover) and way underdressed (again) so we only stayed for the first act. Plus we couldn't see much, because all the action was on the 1/3 of the stage that we couldn't see. Which is probably why our entry was only 2 euros. It was pretty cool just to see the inside of the opera house, though. And to see a sequence from Rent, only without the heroin and HIV and homosexuality.
We had one crazy night in Vienna, thanks to Red Bull. Red Bull comes from Austria, so it is really cheap there, and Kaje and I were a little low-energy, so RB&V was the drink of the night...I ended up (accidentally) having seven Red Bull, which beats my record from last summer, and had some strange physiological and psychological effects. (Calm down, Mom, I'm fine. My heart has resumed its normal beating pattern and the shakes have subsided). Anyway, we had a good time and stayed up very, very late. So when we finally started to fade and went back to the room, four of us in our dorm were having a little chat and trying to find my camera, which was lost temporarily. Unfortunately, I'm realizing that I can't tell this story without being able to affect an angry Finnish accent and posting a picture of our long-haired Albino Finnish roommate, who we called Adolf. We were buds with Adolf earlier in the night, but he had gone to bed early as he had to work the next morning. See, Adolf actually lives in Vienna, but stays in a hostel. So we don't really have that much sympathy for him. He is staying in a dorm. In a youth hostel. Noise happens. So anyway, we're all making our way to bed and looking for my camera (overhead lights were off) and Adolph, who wears a black satin sleep mask over his eyes, sits upright in bed and yells (imagine the white-blonde ponytail, the sleep mask, and the Finnish accent now) "F*** you, asshole!" Initially, we froze in confusion. He said asshole, singular. Who was he addressing? Then he followed up with, "Take your town meeting somewhere else!" Tom (T-Dot), our Kiwi roommate, said, "What's a town meeting?" And Adolph said, "It's where people go to talk a lot." We thought this was pretty hysterically funny, so Adolph didn't get the response (silence) that he was hoping for. He moved out of our room the next day.
We are in Prague now, and it is beautiful. It is my favourite city yet in Europe...Paris has been bumped. We haven't had loads of fun yet, but I am making a valiant effort to like beer. I figure that if I am going to become a beer-drinker, the Czech Republic is the place to do it...But I don't think it's in the cards for me. I'll probably keep faking it as long as I'm here, though. It's cheaper than water...
The end of this trip is coming way, way too quickly.
I miss you all!
Love,
Chels
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Without further adieu...
OK, OK, I get it. You want pictures. I dont know if this is because of the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" deal or if you would just rather see some pictures than read my looooong verbose blog posts, but here is a start. If this works. We all know how much I suck at computers.
This is a very random assortment and I know there are some duplicates. I will add more and put some captions on them when I have time/figure out how. The older people in the photos, to answer many many questions, are not fellow inmates but two homeless people who lived in our hotel in Thessaloniki (possibly not so much a hotel as a homeless shelter). They were hilarious. The video we have of them is priceless. The first are from London TWO months ago, the beach ones are from Sardinia, then most are recent...prison, etc. They will all be explained in due time. This is just a taster...
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AYt2jZs5Zs2Llw
Hope this works. Otherwise you will have to wait some more.
This is a very random assortment and I know there are some duplicates. I will add more and put some captions on them when I have time/figure out how. The older people in the photos, to answer many many questions, are not fellow inmates but two homeless people who lived in our hotel in Thessaloniki (possibly not so much a hotel as a homeless shelter). They were hilarious. The video we have of them is priceless. The first are from London TWO months ago, the beach ones are from Sardinia, then most are recent...prison, etc. They will all be explained in due time. This is just a taster...
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AYt2jZs5Zs2Llw
Hope this works. Otherwise you will have to wait some more.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Does This Mean I Have a Criminal Record?
Never in my life have I been so at risk for a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). For those of you readers who are doctors, MOAs or die-hard fans of Greys Anatomy, a DVT is a blood clot that forms in your leg--often after long periods of inactivity--that can travel to your lungs and kill you. I have spent the last three days sitting down. Literally I am pretty sure that I could count the number of steps I have taken in the last three days.
So last you heard from me, Kaje and I were preparing to take a 20-hour train to Zagreb, Croatia. Well, Eastern Europe threw us quite the little curveball in the form of a stern customs official 1.5 hours in to our journey. We were asleep when he came to ask for our passports, then took a look and said, "We have problem." We didnt even know what country we were leaving or entering, but as it turns out, it was the Former Yugloslav Republic of Macedonia (I wrote this out instead of "Macedonia" because it sounds a lot more sinister, no? And sinister is what it was...) and Canadians are not so well beloved by Macedonia. We apparently did not have the requisite paperwork, which needs to be applied for 48 hours in advance at a consulate. So the police officer ordered Kaje and I to get our luggage and deboard the train. I am thinking that we can just give him some money, but instead he put us in jail. OK, not jail jail, but a holding cell in the police station--an 8 by 10 room that was regularly monitored by angry Macedonians. We were left in there for 13 hours without food or water (although we did get a heater, which was nice because it was FREEZING) and were only allowed to leave to use the washroom. It was insane. At first, Kaje and I did all we could do--laughed a lot at the weirdness of being in JAIL, said "dont drop the soap" when she went to the bathroom, did Sudoku puzzles, and ate bananas and Nutella. That worked for about six hours. Then the angry Macedonian said that we would be extradited back to Thessaloniki at 5pm (OK, extradited wasnt the word she used but it seems appropriate). 5pm came and went...6...7...then we were told that the train that was supposed to come was a few hours late as it was encountering troubles at the Yugoslavian border and would not be there until 9 or 9:30. This is where I started getting angry and yelling. Kaje kept saying that she really wished we had a pack of cigarettes because it would just be really appropriate to chain smoke in jail...especially when I was having one of my little rants.) The time kept slipping by, no one was telling us anything, the staff changed over, they had our passports, and...the train that was supposed to be coming for us (the only train) was stuck at the border of a country that DOES NOT EXIST. This concerned me a good deal. Tod, our new American friend who reads Platoan philosophy on train rides, put it best: If a train is stuck in a country that isn`t, is the train? Hmmmm...So I started ranting and getting really paranoid. And then, suddenly, it was over. A disappointingly friendly police officer (because really, it makes for a much better story if we get treated badly the whole way) escorted us onto a train, gave us our passports, and said good night. In our passports, we now have a Macedonian entry stamp with another big "REJECTED" (or whatever) stamped over top.
We had to spend the night in the train station that night, which wasnt cool, especially if you remember my last post about lack of sleep and showers...So after arriving back at Square One in Thessaloniki at 1am (17 hours after leaving) we slept in the very dodgy, very cold train station and got on a train to Sofiya, Bulgaria early the next morning. This train was supposed to arrive at about noon, in time for us to transfer to Belgrade and on to Zagreb, but again things did not go according to plan. Our train broke, had to have its engine replaced (this is only beginning of Eastern European dodginess, seriously), then sat at EU customs and Bulgarian customs for well over an hour each. So we arrived four hours late, missing our connection. We had met some new friends on the train--a Kiwi Maori girl named Pita and an American dude (the eleventh child in his family!) named Tod. They were a lot of fun, and honestly were a godsend for this situation. It was -10 in Sofiya and could not have been much warmer inside the station, where we had to wait for five hours. So we picked up a Slovakian dude named Lubor and a British chap named Oliver and drank liters and liters of cheap Bulgarian red wine from plastic 2L jugs. It was actuallz really decent wine and we had a good laugh, waiting there and spending the equivalent of 10€ (which is about 19 of their currency...which we called the Bulgo) on more food than the two of us could have hoped to eat and six hot chocolates from McDicks (a McDonalds, by the way, that did not have fries or burgers...crazy). It was actually a pretty fun time, considering the fact that we were freezing in the train station (despite wearing about fourteen layers each) of a country that we never planned or wanted to visit. We all got on an overnight train to Belgrade that night, where Kaje passed out in her bunk to the degree that every time one of the millions of customs officials came to our cabin, she didnt wake up, despite yelling and poking. The Serbian customs man was all concerned and asked me, "What is wrong? She is ill?"
We all had to part ways this morning in Belgrade, which was quite sad. Going through an experience like Eastern Europe with people reallz brings you together...like war, you know? So Kaje and I jumped on a bus to Sarajevo, which is where we are now...
(That last part was all written two nights ago and saved because I was too exhausted to type anymore. It is now November 5 and I will continue where I left off...)
Sarajevo was amazing. It was incredible to see a place that so recently was at war, and that has evidence of this fact all over the city. We took a tour and visited to tunnel where Sarajevoans passed through to Bosnian Free Territory during the siege, for food and water. It was FREEZING and during the four years that Sarajevo was surrounded by Serbs, they had no water and no electricity, and there were daily shellings and bombings. There are bullet holes in buildings all over the city, marks in the sidewalks where bombs exploded (many of which are filled with red paint and called "Sarajevo Roses") and buildings completely gutted by bombs. On our way into the city, the guy from our hostel who picked us up at the station did not speak any English but every time we passed a building that had been bombed, he would point, make a bomb sound effect, and say matter-of-factly, "No money. No resolution." We thought this was pretty funny but then when you spend some time in the city, it isnt funny at all. The city is beautiful and the people are obviously pretty amazing. The guy at our hostel said that it was the best and worst time of his life, because the people of the city--who could have fled if they wanted to--stuck together in a way he has never seen before. Sarajevo is the coolest mix of religions--it is known for its religious tolerance. There are mosques, Jewish synagogues, and Christian churches within a square mile of each other, and our tour guide said that the most relevant question you can ask and the best way you can judge whether you like them is not by asking which religion or ethnic group they belong to, but by asking which football team they cheer for. I could rave about the city lots more, but I wont...I will just say that it is difficult to describe what is so special about Sarajevo, but it is really, really special.
OK, there is much more to say, but no time or energy to say it. More later!
Love you all!
Chels
So last you heard from me, Kaje and I were preparing to take a 20-hour train to Zagreb, Croatia. Well, Eastern Europe threw us quite the little curveball in the form of a stern customs official 1.5 hours in to our journey. We were asleep when he came to ask for our passports, then took a look and said, "We have problem." We didnt even know what country we were leaving or entering, but as it turns out, it was the Former Yugloslav Republic of Macedonia (I wrote this out instead of "Macedonia" because it sounds a lot more sinister, no? And sinister is what it was...) and Canadians are not so well beloved by Macedonia. We apparently did not have the requisite paperwork, which needs to be applied for 48 hours in advance at a consulate. So the police officer ordered Kaje and I to get our luggage and deboard the train. I am thinking that we can just give him some money, but instead he put us in jail. OK, not jail jail, but a holding cell in the police station--an 8 by 10 room that was regularly monitored by angry Macedonians. We were left in there for 13 hours without food or water (although we did get a heater, which was nice because it was FREEZING) and were only allowed to leave to use the washroom. It was insane. At first, Kaje and I did all we could do--laughed a lot at the weirdness of being in JAIL, said "dont drop the soap" when she went to the bathroom, did Sudoku puzzles, and ate bananas and Nutella. That worked for about six hours. Then the angry Macedonian said that we would be extradited back to Thessaloniki at 5pm (OK, extradited wasnt the word she used but it seems appropriate). 5pm came and went...6...7...then we were told that the train that was supposed to come was a few hours late as it was encountering troubles at the Yugoslavian border and would not be there until 9 or 9:30. This is where I started getting angry and yelling. Kaje kept saying that she really wished we had a pack of cigarettes because it would just be really appropriate to chain smoke in jail...especially when I was having one of my little rants.) The time kept slipping by, no one was telling us anything, the staff changed over, they had our passports, and...the train that was supposed to be coming for us (the only train) was stuck at the border of a country that DOES NOT EXIST. This concerned me a good deal. Tod, our new American friend who reads Platoan philosophy on train rides, put it best: If a train is stuck in a country that isn`t, is the train? Hmmmm...So I started ranting and getting really paranoid. And then, suddenly, it was over. A disappointingly friendly police officer (because really, it makes for a much better story if we get treated badly the whole way) escorted us onto a train, gave us our passports, and said good night. In our passports, we now have a Macedonian entry stamp with another big "REJECTED" (or whatever) stamped over top.
We had to spend the night in the train station that night, which wasnt cool, especially if you remember my last post about lack of sleep and showers...So after arriving back at Square One in Thessaloniki at 1am (17 hours after leaving) we slept in the very dodgy, very cold train station and got on a train to Sofiya, Bulgaria early the next morning. This train was supposed to arrive at about noon, in time for us to transfer to Belgrade and on to Zagreb, but again things did not go according to plan. Our train broke, had to have its engine replaced (this is only beginning of Eastern European dodginess, seriously), then sat at EU customs and Bulgarian customs for well over an hour each. So we arrived four hours late, missing our connection. We had met some new friends on the train--a Kiwi Maori girl named Pita and an American dude (the eleventh child in his family!) named Tod. They were a lot of fun, and honestly were a godsend for this situation. It was -10 in Sofiya and could not have been much warmer inside the station, where we had to wait for five hours. So we picked up a Slovakian dude named Lubor and a British chap named Oliver and drank liters and liters of cheap Bulgarian red wine from plastic 2L jugs. It was actuallz really decent wine and we had a good laugh, waiting there and spending the equivalent of 10€ (which is about 19 of their currency...which we called the Bulgo) on more food than the two of us could have hoped to eat and six hot chocolates from McDicks (a McDonalds, by the way, that did not have fries or burgers...crazy). It was actually a pretty fun time, considering the fact that we were freezing in the train station (despite wearing about fourteen layers each) of a country that we never planned or wanted to visit. We all got on an overnight train to Belgrade that night, where Kaje passed out in her bunk to the degree that every time one of the millions of customs officials came to our cabin, she didnt wake up, despite yelling and poking. The Serbian customs man was all concerned and asked me, "What is wrong? She is ill?"
We all had to part ways this morning in Belgrade, which was quite sad. Going through an experience like Eastern Europe with people reallz brings you together...like war, you know? So Kaje and I jumped on a bus to Sarajevo, which is where we are now...
(That last part was all written two nights ago and saved because I was too exhausted to type anymore. It is now November 5 and I will continue where I left off...)
Sarajevo was amazing. It was incredible to see a place that so recently was at war, and that has evidence of this fact all over the city. We took a tour and visited to tunnel where Sarajevoans passed through to Bosnian Free Territory during the siege, for food and water. It was FREEZING and during the four years that Sarajevo was surrounded by Serbs, they had no water and no electricity, and there were daily shellings and bombings. There are bullet holes in buildings all over the city, marks in the sidewalks where bombs exploded (many of which are filled with red paint and called "Sarajevo Roses") and buildings completely gutted by bombs. On our way into the city, the guy from our hostel who picked us up at the station did not speak any English but every time we passed a building that had been bombed, he would point, make a bomb sound effect, and say matter-of-factly, "No money. No resolution." We thought this was pretty funny but then when you spend some time in the city, it isnt funny at all. The city is beautiful and the people are obviously pretty amazing. The guy at our hostel said that it was the best and worst time of his life, because the people of the city--who could have fled if they wanted to--stuck together in a way he has never seen before. Sarajevo is the coolest mix of religions--it is known for its religious tolerance. There are mosques, Jewish synagogues, and Christian churches within a square mile of each other, and our tour guide said that the most relevant question you can ask and the best way you can judge whether you like them is not by asking which religion or ethnic group they belong to, but by asking which football team they cheer for. I could rave about the city lots more, but I wont...I will just say that it is difficult to describe what is so special about Sarajevo, but it is really, really special.
OK, there is much more to say, but no time or energy to say it. More later!
Love you all!
Chels
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