Our epic night the other night definitely meant that I slept well last night, though not for long enough. I had to repack and such, so I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight, and I had to be up to catch the train at five. Gross, but I think I’m on track with this whole time zone thing now. I’ll be totally flattened when I get back though! So my adventures yesterday. Let’s see. We went and bought our train tickets so that we didn’t have to do that super early in the morning. It was a very good idea, as I was barely functioning when I woke up today. Then we went for a little walk to Ste. Elizabeth’s Cathedral. Those buildings are so beautiful. This one was a fairly small cathedral, for a ... read more

I am pretty excited about the next couple of weeks. I had an awesome day today. We got up early-ish (7:30, but after a long day, that’s early), had breakfast at the hotel, and then headed out exploring. We first checked out the train station directly across from us, as that is where we will be catching our early morning train to Cluj, and we wanted to scope it out. There are only two platforms. We’ll be golden. Then we struck out for the Danube, only a glance at our very touristy map after a half hour revealed our direction to be exactly opposite to the one we should have been heading, so we ditched the river idea for the moment and continued on to see where our little utca, or street, would take us. It ... read more

Thursday, October 28 It rained all of last night, with some serious lightning and thunder happening, so this morning when we went out to explore Chania we lit a candle for the guys, for luck. Chania, when you aren’t driving, is really very beautiful. We explored all sorts of tiny alleys full of shops and little restaurants. I splurged and bought myself a foursome of BEAUTIFUL mugs for my apartment next semester. Really big ones I can hold with both hands and brightly coloured. There was some sort of military thing in the square this morning and we watched them getting all lined up. My FAVORITE part was the clarinet in the band who was warming up by playing the Star Wars theme! I wish Logan could have heard that. We decided to leave the big ... read more

Tuesday, October 26 Karleen got up this morning, at eight with the rest of us (Chris had the mechanic come at eight to check out the motor) and announced that she was done with the boat, that the guys could take it down the coast, but we were driving. Ok. Actually, by the time I got up at eight, she had been up for a hour and was fully packed. So as to avoid a hasty decision, we put it off, went window shopping, got breakfast, toured the town a little bit. There is a gorgeous lake right in the middle of Old Town where the four of us had brunch. All of one side is overgrown cliffs and olive trees, with a tiny white chapel in the middle of the trees. Colourful boats are tied ... read more

Sunday, October 24 We’ve left! I really can’t explain why I wanted out so badly, except perhaps by saying that everyone we talked to there was either just visiting or only staying because of some unavoidable reason. No one seemed to really want to be there, there was always a mother or daughter or fish or some reason. The trip to Crete, however, was absolutely brutal! The winds were still pretty nasty, but we raised the mainsail to about half just to help with the bouncing around on the massive swells. On top of all of that, the motor started inexplicably revving down occasionally. The by word of the trip so far seems to be “catastrophe,” pronounced without the “-e”. It’s very Greek. The nice thing about all of that is that everyone on the boat ... read more