DraculaLand

- Taken at a cemetary in Romania; isn't it just awesome?























- View of Brashov from the top of the cablecar





- B for Brad? or B for Brashov?

- Bee-you-ti-ful Romanian castle

- Shots of the crazy game of soccer we saw in Sofia

Hello again dear friends,

I am happy in the knowledge that this post ought to make you all pretty damn jealous, as this post is being written in Sighishoara...Now, why, you may ask would a post written in Sighishoara make me jealous? Is TK on crack?

Nope; no crack.

Sighishoara is in Transylvania, Romania and is, in actual fact, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the nasty little man who was the inspiration for Count Dracula, Prince of Darkness. So there!

The downside to my gloating is that Sighishoara is actually a pretty dull place. We planned a day trip here enroute between Brashov and Budapest, but it only took 2 hours to see literally all the sights. The sights were predominantly plaques on walls stating that 'Vlad was born here' or 'Vlad ate a meal here once' or that 'Vlad bought a stamp here' or 'Vlad sucked someone's blood here' and things like that. But our train does not leave for another 6 hours....and that's after having already (a) seen all the sights (b) had 3 cups of coffee (c) gotten lost (d) had lunch (e) sent a bunch of long winded emails to just about everyone I know. Oh well, we had an 11 hour gap between trains, so 4 hours down and 7 to go! No excuses for typos in this post; I should have all kinds of time for spell-checking!

Overall Romania has been very cool and I would recommend it as a good place to visit. To get here, we took an overnight train from Sofia to Bucharest, on which we slept not a wink due to the 4 hour border stop between 1am and 5am. I swear 7 different men dressed in uniforms of varying severity insisted on looking at our spiffy Canadski passports, and they all strategically timed thier knock on the train compartment door for the moment we were finally drifting off to sleep...Nevertheless, our train arrived promptly on time at 6:02am. I would like to note that this is the ONLY train thus far in our travels that has arrived on time, and it is also the only train that we were hoping would be late...anyone else sense a new Murphy's Law coming out of this one?

Anyway, not a thing is open in Bucharest at 6:02 am. Except MacDonalds. The coffee was surpisingly good, but trying to get a non-meat food stuff out of a Romanian MacDonalds is akin to doing advanced linear algebra with a hangover! Neither easy nor fun, and very much headache inducing! Our guidebook did not have very many positive things to say about Bucharest, so we decided to just spend the day there and take a late afternoon train to a popular city in Transylvania called Brashov. So, after our sleepless night on the train we drank about 6 cups of the aforementioned MacDonalds coffee (have I mentioned lately how much I miss my Tim's? Has anyone out there gone to a Tim's and had a cup on my behalf - email me; let me know!!) and then went for a 7 hour walk around Bucharest. We saw pretty much all of it. We saw the Parliamentary Palace, which has the honour of being the second biggest building in the world (after the Pentagon). It's big. Photo forthcoming. We saw the musuem of Romanian State History, which had some pretty gold necklaces and not much else. We drank more coffee. We went to the Village Musuem, which is an outdoor musuem of buildings and exhibtits designed to look like a traditional Romanian Village. Probably the most interesting thing we saw was a mini L'Arc de Triumph randomly planted in the middle of an intersection....Decidedly odd.

Our afternoon train ride to Brashov was very, very nice and Brashov itself has been a highlight of the trip so far. We found a fantastic hostel called KismetDao (link on main page); it was so nice that we ended up spending 4 nights there which is the longest we've stayed in one place in over a month I think! As I say, the hostel was great; nice common room with a TV and a bunch of good DVDs (except Highlander, which is a truly awful movie), great clean rooms and a free laundry service, which came in very, very handy. Of course the thing that makes or breaks any hostel is the other people there, and KismetDao was full of very cool, very fun fellow travellers, which was great. Over the past few days we have toured Romanian castles, gone hiking, drank much tasty Romanian beer, and rescued the cutest kitten ever from under a car... We have met cool peeps from California, Toronto and Jordan. The wife of the California couple was from Moscow, so we got to speak Russian with her for a while; the Toronto couple had been teaching in Japan for 8 months and then travelling for 4 months on the way back home and were supercool, and the couple from Jordan were actually American Peace Corps Volunteers who had been living and working in Jordan for two years! All in all, a very eclectic and interesting bunch of people were hanging out in Brashov last week.

So that's what we've been up to. Transylvania is a beatiful area and you all should come visit! No sign of Vlad yet though.... and only 5 1/2 hours to go before we hop on the train to Budapest, Hungary.

Bye for now,
TK

Made it to Europe...Kinda...

Hello Everyone,
How are you?

Well, after three enjoyable but long weeks we have left Turkey and have entered Europe. However, it's not really Europe. It's Bulgaria. We are in Sofia, the capital city.

Sofia is nice but odd.

very
very
odd

Let me explain.

Biggest odd thing: they shake thier heads to mean 'yes' and nodd their heads to mean 'no'. It is seriously the weirdest thing! We asked for the bill at our restaurant yesterday, and the waitress shook her head at us - we were, like, 'what do you mean we can't have our bill!?!?' Then we realized, she was acutally saying 'yes'. We have been trying to just keep our heads still when agreeing or disagreeing with things, but it is virtually impossible to to stop - try it; try to nod your head, or even just keep it still, when you are disagreeing with something....betcha can't!

Next odd thing: sometimes the street signs are parallel to the street you are on, but sometimes the signs are perpendicular, so it's pretty much impossible to figure out where you are. Seriously, is there anywhere else in the whole entire would that puts street signs perpendicular to the street!?!?!

Next odd thing: Bugarian is similar to Russian, but not quite identical. They use the same alphabet and some words are the same, but some words are just similar without being the same so it's just similar enough to make me and B think that we understand what someone is saying, but acutally we don't....


Suffice it to say that we have spent the majority of our time here totally and completely lost!


Other observations about Bulgaria:

- They make very good ice cream. Really, really good!
- Food and alcohol are DIRT cheap. We've been eating really good, really large meals with lots 'o beer, and paying about $3 or $4 per meal! Love that!!!
- They really love football (soccer). We actually went to a football match last night. A guy from our hostel recommended going, and tickets were super, super cheap. We paid the equivalent of about $2CAD for our tickets! But, little did we know that the match was the biggest, most important match of the year for Bulgarians!

IT WAS INSANE

The match was between two Bulgarian teams, so there was huge, and I mean HUGE, rivalry between the fans. We ended up in the 'Blue Section' with fans cheering for "Team Levski". There were 11,000 people at the match and all of them, except us and the 3 other nice Americans we met on the train from Istanbul and who came with us to the match, spent the whole time incessantly screaming nasty things (at least they sounded nasty) regarding the 'other' team. The craziest thing was the level of security. As I say, there were about 11,000 fans at the game and I swear there were 1,000 police. Most of the police were in full-on riot gear and several dozen were on horseback. Despite this massive police presence, the fans still set fire to the 'other' teams flags, set off flares, shot firecrackers towards the football field and towards the police officers, and pushed poor little me over running towards the field when a penalty was called. We left shortly after the pushing over/falling over incident, but it was fun while it lastest!

So that's Bulgaria! Photos coming soon.

T

Photos from Turkey

- Making friends with sweet, tiny kitty cat in Cappadocia - SOOOO wanted to take him with me...


















- Hanging out with the Turkish flag at a look out point in Cappadocia


















- Sunset at Nemrut Dagi. This is where a megalomaniac king (Anticos) built a monument to himself, which included huge stone figures of himself, Zeus (who he believed was his father) and gods from other regligions.

- Me and Zeus' head...(fyi, the head fell off the bodies due to an earthquake about 50 odd years ago)...I've now tried to have a chat with him about 'what I should do with my life' in both Greece and Turkey, and I still haven't had an answer...getting cranky, I must admit...

- Super cool pic that Brad took of Turkey's largest Ghost Town, Kaya Koy near Fethitye.


















- Hundreds of years of Calcium deposits in Pammaluke have created beautiful travertines.

















- It looks like snow, but trust me, it ain't soft! It's rock solid calcium deposits. Quite neat.

















- Amazingly well preserved relief of Nike (goddess of victory) on a marble block at Ephesus, which is probably Turkey's biggest tourist draw, as the site is about 3000 years old and is incredible. The city was first founded by the Amazon women (the ones that cut of their left breast so they could shoot arrows better...) During pagen times, it was the site of the Temple of Artemis, which was one of the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World. Alexander the Great conquered the city in 334BC and it passed to Rome in 133 BC. It was the second most important Roman city for a couple of hundred years. The Romans that lived here were amazingly advanced. They had hot and cold running water in thier houses (at least the rich ones did), they knew the world was round, and they had a beautiful, well maintained and well protected library (see below) that was the social and cultural hub of the city. Furthermore, in order to make the extreme climate of the Mediterranean more ammeanable, they carved shallow channels on either side of the major road ways; in winter they would run hot water through the channel to warm the air and in summer they would run cold water through it to cool the air. The same idea applied to the public toilets - a huge bath of cold or hot water would ensure a comfortable temperature, and constantly running water through the room would ensure that it never smelled. In winter, a slave would be expected to sit on the concrete toilet for a few minutes to warm up the seat for his master! Wonder what that would look like on a current resume....


















- The library at Ephesus. I want one...


















- This is not just a picuture of a foot. This is (according to our guide) the world's oldest advertisement. It was the marker for the brothel in Epheseus! The sign has the foot carving, also a carving of a woman's face, a currency symbol and a love symbol! So it meant that love could be found with woman inside, but only if you had the money. The reason that the foot was there, is because they would not allow young boys inside, so your foot had to be bigger than the one carved in order to be allowed to enter! Funny, eh?




















- An honest (and funny) merchant at one of the many rip-off-tourist-gouging-shops at the exit point at Ephesus.

Adventures in Turkey

Hello all,

It's been a long couple of weeks here in Turkey, but all in all it's been a whole heck of a lot of fun.
We've done too much and covered too much ground - literally 3900 kilometres - to go over all the details, but here are my general impressions of the country and some of the highlights of our time here. We started in Istanbul, then went to Ankara, Goreme (in the region of Cappadocia) Malatya, Nemrut Dagi, Selifke, Antalya Kas, Fethiye, Selchuck, and now we are in Cannakale, which is right next door to Gallipoli. Tommorrow (at 5am - blah!!) we head back to Istanbul to complete our circle around Turkey. Whew!

Impressions:
Turkey is a very odd mix of the Middle East and Europe. The infrastructure is definitely European. The trains are nicer than ones I've been on in Italy and Spain. The busses are definitely some of the nicest I've ever been on, which is a damn good thing because this trip has entailed at least 4 hours on a bus every second day (need I re-mention the 3900 kilometres). One of our bus trips was 9 hours and one was a whopping 11 hours. And, as some of you
may know, I can't read on busses because I get motion sickness, so I needless to say, I was popping a whole bunch of gravel. (Thanks Lindz - that was a great Trip Gift!).

Anyway, the busses have been air conditioned, relatively comfy and some have even had TVs, just like on planes! Too bad the only channels they get are ones with weird and incredibly melodramatic Turkish soap operas on them... There is always a 'conductor' on the bus who periodically serves water, soft drinks and snacks and also splashes this neat collogne type stuff on your hands...it cleans them and makes them smell nice:) It's amazing how entertaining hand collogne can be after 7 hours on a bus...

Speaking of cleaning, one of my general impressions of Turkey is that the people are very, very hygenic. (That comes from being 95% Muslim I think, because Muslims must be clean before they can pray.) Every single washroom I've been in, whether it be in a hotel in a major city, or a dive road stop in the middle of nowhere, has had soap! A very nice touch I think.

So, the infrastructure of Turkey is very modern and western; good train, good buses, good roads, clean toilets...all great. But the vibe in Turkey is decidedly not Western. It's hard to describe; it's not distinctly arabic, like Egypt was; for example they use western script not arabic, so all the signs are legible. But it doesn't feel western either. I guess I just have to go with the traditional cliche of Turkey being a mix or a bridge between east and west.

One thing that has been a problem here is being vegetarian; B & I have eaten so many freaken' tomatoes, I'm practically turning red...

Trip Highlights:
Kayaking in Kas (pronouced 'Cash')
B and I went sea kayaking on the Mediteranian for a full day, which was just lovely!



















Another highlight was DEFINITELY paragliding in Fethiye. Don't worry Mom; I'm fine!!!
From the coastal town of Fethiye we drove about 45 strait up along very dusty and windy roads until we arrived at a big hill 2100 metres above sea level. Then the paragliding-expert-dude clipped me onto his parachute and said 'run'..... I ran for about 2 steps and then was floating thousands of feet above the Mediteranean. The paragliding ride down took about 15 minutes and it was fun as well as beautiful. HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommended!















- Me: About to jump off a mountain! YIPEE:)

















- Me in the process of jumping off a mountain!





















- SuperBrad!

















- View from the parachute...

Trip Lowlight:
Getting violently sick at the very picturesque harbour front in Antalya...Wasn't feeling well, but decided to go for a walk around the old town of Antalya to get some fresh air. But the Evil Green Monster that had taken up (thankfully temporary) residence in my tummy decided that my walk was not to be a success...so I ended up throwing up dockside...probably not so picturesque for all the poor people on their boats nearby....It was horribly embarrassing... and 'no' there are no photos! I spent the rest of our time in Antalya wearing in a path between my bed and the toilet in our hotel room. sigh. But no worries, I'm all better now!

More photos coming...
TK