Today we left our olive farm in Proastio, a small village near Kardamili, which is a town in Mani, the southern part of the Peloponnese (that big island on the SW of Greece). It's been a beautiful past 2 weeks. We lived in the bottom part of a house surrounded by old yellow stone houses and olive tree terraces until the Ionian on one side and the Taygetos mtns on the other. As you approach Kardamili from Kalamata (a city an hour away where we spend a few nights), you see the mountains descend into a plateau that stays flat for quite some time, with its own villages, and then another steep descent into the sea, with just room for Kardamili between the cliffs and the water. It is a beautiful, rocky, austere view, as though ... read more

After much encouragement from readers (I'm so flattered people are checking for updates!) and the discovery of a cheap internet place in Sarajevo, I'm going to try to write a longer entry. Bosnia is fantastic, and the people here are incredibly nice. Every day we experience extreme highs and lows, staying in a Soviet apartment block surrounded by bullet-riddled buildings, then stumbling across impromptu parties, wandering through beautiful old labryntine streets and talking and talking to people. We are staying in Sarajevo with a Turkish guy who works for the EU police, and he gives us rides in an EU car. There is another couchsurfer too, Tanya from Germany who biked for 3 years through South, Central and North America and is now taking a roundabout way of biking home for Christmas. Yesterday we woke up, ... read more

We spent a few days in Pecs and on a farm outside of Pecs in a town of 280 called Kiskassa. Pecs was far more relaxed than Budapest and when we first got there we sat on some benches outside a church near some fountains and snacked on salami and bread, checking out the scene. It is like a very touristy version of Cambridge to Budapest's Boston. In Budapest we went to the baths to relax (an amazing experience); here we could just look around. Pecs is more tourist friendly - more people speak English, it is compact and fairly cheap (gyros are half the price of those in Budapest). We met a backpacker from Missouri named Scott who gave us a map and pointed us in the direction of the bus station after telling us ... read more

We woke up at 4:45 am for coffee and "proper goodbye," then caught a bus at 6:20 to Frankfurt Hahn Airport - Ryanair is very sneaky and uses this airport, which is one and a half hours from Frankfurt. Then, when we got there, Jan had to pay 20 euros to check his bag. We were relieved to get through with no further trouble. We had a huge cheese-pretzel, about 1 foot wide and a half-foot tall, for breakfast, and got on our flight. It was our first time on Ryanair, and I was struck by how much it felt like a chinatown bus. We both slept. At the Budapest airport we went to an internet cafe and found out where our hostel was. I also saw a sign for coke and cappucino (mixed, that is), ... read more

We only left the apartment around 4 yesterday after catching up on the computer. We hopped on the S-bahn after buying our day pass (Markus had already left for Wall-E and Nurlan had work). Jan wasn't sure that we were waiting on the right side of the station, so I said I was sure but that it didn't matter if we went the wrong way! This reminded us that we're free to explore whereever we want, so we got off at the stop labeled "Ledermuseum," which had caught our attention. It was a small residential town, but we found our way to the Ledemuseum and the more commercial area. All hotels and shops near a tourist destination are named after the destination, so there was a lederhotel, a lederkiosk, etc. Jan figured out that leder means ... read more