spipes

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

We are in an Albanian internet cafe right now, hoping to catch a bus or furgon (minibus that follows a mysterious route around the country and leaves when full) back to Gjirokastra to our Peace Corps host. Peace Corps does all the couchsurfing in Albania! We've been lucky to enter their network; there is at least one in every city and if they like you they will send you to their friend in the next city. We spent the day in Butrint, an ancient settlement. There are mosaics and fountains from 800 and 400 BC, and early Christian ruins on top of that. I had no idea we would see so many Roman ruins! We have spent the past 2 nights in Gjirokastra, birthplace of Enver Hoxha, Communist ruler of Albania who shut it from the ... 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

Sorry not to have written in forever. The internet is extremely expensive around here. We are staying in the motorhome of a German traveler on the outskirts of Dubrovnik, a beatiful city. We have many many stories to tell and have met some great people.Thanks for your interest, and if we get to a place with cheaper internet we will update more. Tonight we go to Montenegro and then soon after we finally get to Bosnia. I can't wait! ... 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 are now in Zagreb, Croatia, so I am a country and a half behind in this blog. I'll try to give some highlights... We had a wonderful time exploring Budapest which is a striking and intense city, and full of surprises. The first was the price of Coke. We saw a sign for coke taped on the window of a window in a wall on the sidewalk, which served as a store front. It was 50 forints (160 fts to the dollar) for some amount of soda listed in "dl"s. Jan bought it and recieved a little white cup, like you get to rinse at the dentist, full of flat Coke. We began to pay more attention to translating sizes and weights after that. We saw tons of shops, most of them called "outlets," but ... 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 took the S-bahn back to Offenbach and sat across from a kid wearing a Utah t-shirt listing the places to go hiking. We spoke to him and his father for a little while and they made sure we got off at the right stop. People here are really friendly, from our experience, though maybe it helps that we look so clueless. We went to Stephen and Oliver's apartment on the "penthouse" of Offenbach's "skyscraper" (the 14th floor). It was beautiful, with a long terrace full of plants, and a modern white decor. The dinner table was nicely decorated with a big pumpkin in the middle, which turned out to contain homemade pumpkin ginger soup (apparently pumpkin is the new food trend in Germany, they've recently discovered it). This was followed by sticky potato balls with ... 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

We landed yesterday in Frankfurt at 5:45 (earlier than it was supposed to come - a good omen). We made our way to the central train station with very little trouble and found an internet cafe open in the station (a very good omen - we found an email from our couchsurfing host telling us how to get to his place). As we left the station, though, we realized that Jan had forgotten the nice new black jacket his mother had gotten him, essential to staying warm on this trip, and we had to go back to the airport and wait around for an hour to get it back. We decided this was a pretty bad omen. Having no idea what to expect or what the future holds, we are giving undue importance to everyday mishaps. ... read more