Day 81 - Home

The subject line says it all. (But it wouldn't be a propper blog entry if I didn't take at least a thousand words to say it. :)

I didn't really sleep much the night before the trip. I stayed up watching Men Of Honor on TV, well aware of the contrast between the title and my encounter that day. I was anxious to get home and anxious about running into the thieves again, so there was little point in trying to get to sleep early. It's unfortunate, in a way, that I was staying in a hotel. Any hostel I spent a week in, I generally made a few friendly aquaintances. The only people I know in Athens are criminals.

I woke up at seven thirty and gave up on trying to get back to sleep about eight. I ate some more fruit from the fruit store, some cheese from the mini-market, and some pound cake from the bakery. One thing I'll say for Athens, it's not hard to find good food. It's annoying to be a vegetarian in a restaurant, yes, but there are markets with good food all over the place. I was particularly impressed with the fruit. The cherries were some of the best I've ever had, and the kiwis, although not as conistent as the cherrys, were quite good too.

After stuffing myself in anticipation of 24 hours of airline food, I headed to the one supermarket I'd seen nearby. It didn't take too long to find chocolate covered raisins. I should have taken heed of the dust on top of the boxes and three price reductions, though. They weren't very good. Still, I was happy to have some comfort food for the trip. I even have an extra box, if anyone wants to try some. The raisins are so small, and the chocolate so sweet, that all I can think to do with them is pour milk on them and pretend they are Calvin's favorite cereal.

As you might be able to deduce from my rambling about raisins, the trip itself was fairly uneventful. I worked out my database schema while sitting in the Athens airport. I am downloading MySQL and Python even as I type this, so photo catagorizing should be underway by the end of the day. I can work on a proper place to sleep tomorrow. :)

Changing planes in Munich was a bit of a hassle. We had no time, but they felt a need to submit us to bonus security checks. Admittedly, the checks in Athens weren't as thorough, so I could see some small benefit. I found it funny when they announced that we had to change course coming into Munich. I knew why before they even told us. There had been thudershowers frequently when I was there, and sure enough, when the captain came on he explained that a thunder storm had rerouted us. Still, we were on time.

The United flight to Chicago was well crewed. There were plenty of movies running every two hours. I watched Coach Carter, Robots, and even the latest Bridget Jones, which had a few funny scenes, but could have been half as long or even less if you just put the funny bits together. "But Blain", you say. "Why weren't you sleeping?" For one thing, the flight went from 4PM to 2AM, Athens time, so I wasn't sleepy for most of it. For another thing, there were multiple screaming children aboard. I hope people don't think I'm a sadist, but I actually enjoy screaming children. They're too young to know better, and watching all the people get annoyed (while not offering any assistance) amuses me. Silly people.

There were a few cool things in the Chicago airport. They had a cast of a brachiosaurus skeleton and a huge moving sidewalk with neon lights over head and giant multicolored squares along the wavy walls. It looked like a painters color chart writ large. I'm sorry if I'm a tease for talking about them. I didn't take any pictures yesterday. I didn't want to mess with taking my camera out of my bag. I just wanted to be done.

So naturally the plane out of Chicago was delayed. I bought a phone card and let mom know what was up. Then it was just sitting. Of course I'd already sat two hours before the announcement, so it was pretty dull. The young ladies (junior high school?) from the Sacramento Synchronized Swimming Team were coming home on the same plane as well. One of them had a temporary tatoo of a cobra on her forehead. Apparently she'd forgotten about it though, and thought I was staring at her. I find it amusing that I creeped out a woman with a snake... tatooed... on her forehead! Heheh. I later learned she had done it on a dare. Good dare.

When we finally did get on the plane, they were blowing cold air like no tomorrow. While they had been working on the mechanical problem that had delayed us (a faulty battery recharger), apparently it had gotten quite hot. But now it was freezing, and they had closed the cabin, which meant that they couldn't turn the AC off until ten minutes after take-off. I figured I'd tough it out in my shorts and t-shirt and ask for a blanket when we were underway.

It was taking a long time to get underway. But I overheard the attendant saying there were no blankets. Great. There's a flight from 11PM to 2AM Chicago time, and they have no blankets. Well. That's not true. They had blankets for all the first class passengers. So by the time we take off and it's okay to get up and get my jacket from the upper compartment my knees are already ice cubes. I get my pant sleeves as well and return my pants to full length. Still, I'm freezing, and all they've got on the flight are cold drinks. This was not my happy place. There was one more touch, for that extra special flight memory. Because of thunder storms in the US, we had to fly a good deal south before heading west, extending the flight another half an hour. Specifically, we had to fly over Kansas. Heheh. That was too perfect.

Now that I think of it, there was also a bonus snub. The one movie in the whole airline movie listing I actually wanted to see (Million Dollar Baby), would play on this flight, but I was way too exhausted to watch, much less enjoy. Eventually I got to sleep.

When we eventually touched down in Sacramento, I was very happy to have a seat near the exit. Three rows got out in front of me. But people are slow. I passed two rows walking towards the main lobby and the last row on the escalator. Even with my pack, I take stairs two at a time and very consistently fly by morons on escalators. It is not a ride!

My parents were waiting. Apparently others of you would have been, but I didn't find an internet terminal to check my mail all day. Sorry about that. I would have loved to have seen you there. My dad said he didn't think it could have been me already. The plane had only landed twenty four seconds ago. I was in a hurry.

We went home. I had some salsa (which I had been sorely missing since Prague, at least) and some ice cream and turned in. The great thing about screaming kids on the plane is that no matter when you get home, you can sleep. Yeah, I woke up at eight in the morning, but I'm sure I'll adjust to my old slacker schedule shortly. :)

In closing, thank all of you for following along, helping me with information, advice, and good wishes. They made me feel befriended even in places where I had none, and that means a lot.

My downloads have finished, so now it's time learn about MySQL and start sorting. Let's kick some S! ... QL. And feel free to drop me a line at brn@calweb.com if you want to get together, see a slide show, etc. I'll probably post at least one more post here as the sorting winds down. Ah, alive again with geekish joy. I still don't have a bed, but my own computer and DSL connection is more than enough right now. Life is good.

Day 79 - The Ten Euro Beer

Well, my tourist experience is now complete. I have been robbed.

They didn't get much, and I am none the worse for wear. In a way, I'm happier to have the story and feel justified about being as cautious as I am than I am sad to lose a little money. That said, I was a total moron to get snared like I did. So I'm leaving the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It would be the biggest ancient temple of all time, but there's just a few columns left now. Even still, it's impressive. It's funny because so many people talk about the immensity of the Parthenon. Sure. It's big, but I'm standing at the edge thinking, "Get over it people! There's a bigger temple right over there!"

Anyway, back to the robbery. It was a social engineering robbery. Nothing fancy. Just the type I'm most likely to fall for, as well. A man on a bench said hello, introducing himself as a chemical engineer back in the states, but originally from Thessaloniki. He invited me to lunch, but as I don't eat meat, he invited me to a drink. I don't really drink, but this was the first person I'd met in Greece, so I figured it was worth the time and trouble of a beer. The girls were the first tip that something wasn't right. There were a couple women in the place, so immediately I figured he had taken me to prostitutes. When we went to the furthest back bench in the place and they immediately joined us, I knew he had taken me to prostitutes. He had just been talking about how much he hated working in Saudi Arabia with no alcohol and women around, so I figured he was just a lusty greek. They are known to exist. I made it clear I was not interested, but I didn't mind having a beer. I should have asked how much it would cost.

We chatted. They asked lots of questions. Too many, now that I know better. Then the bill came. Ten for my beer and one hundred and sixty for the champaign the "lady" was drinking. I said she could drink with me, not on me. (By that I mean on my tab. I suppose I should phrase my sentences more carefully when prostitutes are involved.) I looked at my new companions. Two fairly young women, the lusty greek, and the big greasy bartender who had handed me this bill. This was not a good scene. I don't even remember what happened next. I just remember putting one foot on the seat of the booth. Then I was out the door and running. I made it to a corner and looked back to see the bartender hoofing it after me. I took a corner, then another. I was sure he couldn't be positive of where I had gone. But then neither was I. I had a general idea of the direction I was headed in, but I also knew they knew enough about where I was staying and when I was leaving to stake me out. I stopped running. There was no safe way out.

I checked my map. I figured I could take a slightly further metro station. I might be able to avoid him that way. When I looked up from my map, he was coming around a corner. In a way, I was relieved. We were now in a public place, one on one. Greasy was breathing pretty hard. I was actually pretty impressed at the time he'd made. He seemed to know no english outside of "call police" and "pay your bill". He got his cell phone out. I challenged him to call the police, and he went back to "pay your bill." He touched me a couple times, but if he was trying to intimidate, he wasn't succeeding because I was still working by the american rule that touching a person against their will is assault, so him holding my wrist for a second just pissed me off. I'm proud to say I was not backing down. I'm also proud to say that when he said "pay your bill, ten euro" I was smart enough to realize I was getting out cheap and paid him off.

I talked to the police. They confirmed that I got off cheap. I realized later that it wasn't quite that cheap as I left my Rough Guide language book and umbrella that Mike gave me. Doh.

For other travelers, the place was called "New York Bar". But I wouldn't be surprised if they change the name frequently to keep ahead of the law and vengeful tourists. There's still a small possibility that they'll stake out the airport and try and get the 160 out of me. I'll try to be an extra hour early just to have police explaining time. I doubt they'll bother, though. In a way, I wish they would. I'd love to get a chance to beat them definitively, maybe even let them do the jail time they deserve. Who knows what would have happened if I'd been the kind of guy who actually did go out for hookers? Yay celibacy. :)

Other than that, the day was pretty uneventful. I went to the agora and keramicos, basically lots of ruins. Yawnsville compared to Rome. I snacked. I drank. I'm more glad than ever to be leaving.

Day 78 - Acropolis: Round One

Yep. Today I went to the athens acropolis. Every city around here had an acropolis at one time. It was simply a raised area with fortifications and a water supply, according to my city guide. As with many of the great monuments I've seen on my travels, much of the acropolis was entwined with scaffolding (as opposed to the Eiffel Tower, which is scaffolding, and very impressive scaffolding, at that). Regardless, it was still impressive to see the parthenon and some of the adjacent buildings. Really there were only three adjacent buildings: The gate (propylaea), the temple to Athena and Posiedon, and museum. The temple to Athena Nike just seems like part of the gate to me. I'm not even sure I took a picture of it. There was so much construction going on, and so many pieces of the ancient buildings around, I wondered if they weren't planning to rebuild some of the other buildings. My map even names some of the piles of rubble as thought there were buildings there.

As you may have heard, the view from the acropolis is stunning. Athens may be unkempt at street level, but it's still beautiful from above. The city just sprawls in every direction. It's burly. I tried to take lots of pictures and a 360 degree movie. I've still got most of two memory cards left and only two days, so I can afford the space. I'm not bothering to delete bad pictures anymore, either. Take 'em all and let mom sort 'em out. :)

Seriously, though, there will be sorting. I will have an entity relationship diagram for my simple database, along with a tentative list of picture catagories before I touch down in Sacramento. Once I have a computer, chair, and bed, and maybe a little food, it's straight to work. I will post the list of topics, and anyone who wants to see a slide show can just tell me what topics they're interested in. I can tell them how many hundreds of slides that entails, and they can tell me to never mind. :)

I did some provisioning this morning. I think my lunches and breakfasts are taken care of until departure. Outside of one other food necessity, that only leaves dinners. Last night I went to Eden, the one vegetarian restaurant in Athens, according to one web site. I went and found myself having tofu kabobs. They were well seasoned, if a little dry. Overall, I'd say not worth the price. That said, I'll probably still go there for my last night. There were a couple more dishes on the menu I wanted to try. Tonight, however, I think I'll go to a more traditional greek restaurant and try my luck. As for that other food necessity, the chocolate covered raisins are still at large.

It remains to be seen who is holding them. It could be the nun cops. But it could be someone else. There was a detail I neglected to mention in my story of my travels from Budapest to Belgrade. You may remember how I just barely had enough hungarian money (4750 forints) to buy the ticket (4743 forints). And that was only thanks to the lucky find of a fifty cent piece on the floor. Well, what I couldn't reveal until now is that it probably wasn't luck at all. After I bought my ticket, I took a close look at my remaining forints. Three ones, forming the all seeing pyramid. Two twos, forming the foci of the copernian elipse. Five coins in all. Yes, my friends, I can now say with some certainty that I was safely ferried across eastern europe under the watchful eye of the Illuminati. Perhaps simply because I took the time to visit Zurich, or perhaps for some darker purpose. I may turn out to be a pawn (or even patsy) in some international conspiracy. I think the raisins are the key somehow. Raisin... Reason... If only I could figure it out.

Time will tell.

Day 77 - My Second Favorite MC

My favorite MC, as most of you know, is MC Frontalot. My second favorite is playing here in Athens, so I went to see him today. I'm referring to MC Escher. No, not the musical MC that stole his name, the travelling Escher art show that's now in Athens. It was thoroughly mind bending, and very fun. I got to learn a little bit about the different processes he used to make his artwork. Wood carving, lithography, and another one involving rough metal that I don't remember the name of. As usual, picture are not allowed, but there's so much Escher online and in popular culture, it probably isn't necessary. The most interesting thing to me was how Escher learned about symmetry and patterns by reading books on rock crystal formation that his geologist brother turned him onto. It'd be bizarre if I could learn something about designing tile art for games through the same means.

I also took my airport excursion today. I know how long it takes to get there, where to go, and how early to be. I also confirmed all my flights. "Measure twice. Cut once." Heh. I should have plenty of time to roll out of bed, eat, and get underway. My only question remaining is where to find the chocolate covered raisins. I took a bunch left over from our last movie day when I went to South America. I bought a bag for the flight over (which I finished on the way to Paris, as I recall). I should definitely have some for the flight back.

But I still have two days and change to spend here in Athens. I'm finally ready to tackle the acropolis tomorrow. I've kind of been putting it off as I expect it will be one of the highlights of the trip. I've gotten some glimpses as I've been seeing other things, whetting my appetite. I'm ready.

Day 76 - A Little Wander

It's been a pretty lazy day today. I went to the Museum of Cycladic Art. Basically it's really early art from the islands off the coast of Greece. Those totally nondescript figurines with the big heads. No, not Easter Island. Wrong ocean. The big flat heads. Oh, nevermind. They'll be in the slide show. There was also some early greek clay art that lends credence to my hypothesis that all really ancient art is a hoax and is actually just clay sculptures made by third graders in Kansas who have a lot of extra time on their hands because they don't have to learn about evolution. :)

About the slide show, my current plan is to get all the photos unique ID numbers and put together a little MySQL database to store data on them: timestamp, country, description, categories. That way, if someone wants to see only the funny slides. (There's one of a pigeon in Prague that makes me smile every time I think about it.) We can do that slide show. If someone just wants to see slides from certain countries (or cities), that should be doable too. I'll probably have a very short slide show entitled "Actually Good Photos" as well. :) Most of my photos are meant as memories, not gallery pieces, although I have gotten a bit more artistic with framing as time has worn on.

Anyway, back to Athens. Siesta is just about over. I'll probably hit the supermarket for some food. I had a wonderful (and expensive) risotto for lunch, so I'll probably eat in tonight. Then again, maybe not. Sometimes it's hard to know which will make me feel better, economizing or splurging. But lunch was really expensive (like $30), so I'm going with economizing. There's a great deal of honking going on outside. I wonder if it's a Turkish wedding or traffic as usual in Athens.

The city planners here should have been shot. The back streets are full of parked cars. You often can't cross at the corner because there's a car parked on the sidewalk there. Heck, there are cars parked on the sidewalk everywhere. It's not like these are cobblestone streets from ancient times, designed for the width of a horse's ass. They're modern asphalt. What were they thinking? Munich is looking like the best city ever designed, right now. Bikes, people, and cars seemed to coexist really well there. Pedestrian underpasses really helped. But maybe there's too much history here for that. I heard they had to delay construction when they were expanding the metro for the Olympics because they kept hitting archaeological finds. "Held prisoner by the glories of the past." It sounds like something right out of the brochure. :
[record scratching sound] Dinner last night was good (if also too expensive). That's what I get for trying a place from the brochure. There look like lots of cheap places around, but I'm really and truly sick of trying to explain being a vegetarian in countries where I don't speak the language and vegetarians are considered only slightly less weird than extra terrestrials.

The walk to dinner confirmed what I'd read about greek sleeping habits. It was nine PM as I walked to the restaurant. The streets were just as full as they were at noon. Victoria Square had children playing. Nobody was at the restaurant when I showed up. Well, there were three other people, I think. The place was almost full when I left at ten. The park wasn't quite so full. I guess the children clear out about ten (although there was a family with two kids still at the restaurant when I left). Part of that is because we're another hour ahead here, so it's not completely dark by nine. Heh. If I could just get two more timezones I'd officially be half a world away. But I just want to get closer to home now, not further.

To that end, I'm planning a test trip to the airport tomorrow. I don't know how the ticket system or transit system work, so I'm hoping to get my ticket and the train schedule all sorted beforehand. The paperwork I got from the travel agent said to reconfirm 72 hours before the flight. Can you tell I'm looking forward to getting home?

Anyway, I should get to the store. I'd like some more paper to do game design on. The little graph paper notebook I bought in Versailles is almost full of game design and travel notes.

Day 75 - Decompression

Warning: This post is excessively random.

Having arrived in Athens after over 24 hours of train travel, I decided to take it easy today. I walked around a little bit, mostly just to forage. When they say Athens is dirty, they ain't lyin'. There are broken mopeds and mattresses just lying about. Stray animals are common. So are walls with huge chunks of plaster missing. This is not Kansas. But then, neither is Kansas, I expect.

The stray chunks of missing wall remind me of war damaged Berlin, and I think, "Maybe calling it a war on poverty makes a certain sense." Of course, the US only loses figurative wars. I think about all the drug money that goes to foriegn criminals and can't help but wonder if we're making the wrong call. I mean, the US could be the biggest drug producing country in the world if companies like Phillip Morris were only allowed to assign high tech research labs to woefully backwards fields like meth lab construction. Heh.

Anyway, back to Athens. I've been very much enjoying the lazy hotel life, showering at my leisure, watching TV, and washing a few delicates in the sink. I'm afraid I may just have to burn my socks, as yesterdays washing provided only negligible improvement in their olfactory qualities. It must be International Big Word Day. Of course, calling it Big Word Day really isn't in the spirit, is it?

Anyway, back to Athens. TV is actually pretty watchable here. A couple channels show movies in english with greek subtitles. I watched Finding Nemo and The Wedding Singer, classics both.

Anyway, back to food. It's nice having a fridge. It's funny at the same time, because many hostels have kitchens with no fridge, and now I have the reverse. It's mostly full of hotel crap, but there's enough room for yogurt, juice, and maybe some ice cream for later. Breakfast is free here. I didn't get up early enough to enjoy it this morning, but I should make it tomorrow.

I only say should because Athens keeps hours like Buenos Aires. There's a siesta from two to five, and most restaurants are open to midnight or later. Tonight I'm planning an excursion to a nice Italian place. There's a nice Greek one further on, but I don't think I'm feeling it tonight. Today is all about ease. Of course, that's a relative term in Athens.

Athens has to be the least pedestrian friendly city I've ever seen. Rome was crazy, but pedestrians with their wits about them could get around. In Greece, the crosswalk signal may be green, but the people turning won't yield. If I end up jumping on the hood of a car turning right to get across a street before I leave, I won't be the least bit surprised. And if that wasn't bad enough, the scooters here are worse than Rome's as well, cutting in and out of traffic without giving pedestrians a second thought. It'd almost be worth it to buy a scooter just so I don't spend two hours a day waiting to cross streets.

Hmmm. Bringing up Rome reminds me of something I read in the "Athens Guide" available at the hotel. They talked about some of the ruins in Greece as being "from the Roman occupation." I guess Greece is still near enough to the Balkans that people here know how to hold a grudge. There were some other strangely prideful statements in the guide. The orthodox church is very big here, and the guide made sure to mention that greeks were the first christians. I suppose that's true, considering the first apostles after Christ probably did their converting here, but it seems an odd thing to boast about. Were the apostles greek?

Because, ironically, randomness is the unifying theme of this entry, I should take a moment to mention a brass band was playing in a building across the street as I was writing this. I think I recognized the english nathional anthem and 1812 overture. Bizarre.

Day 74 - Greece Is The Word

I got into Skopje (pronounced scope-ya) at midnight, a full hour and a half after I was supposed to. Since the first train to Greece was at 3:20, and I'd napped on the train, and I'd only found two expensive hotels scouring four or five different online booking sites, I elected to push forward. So now I'm in Thessoloniki, northeastern port city, with about three hours to kill before my train for Athens leaves. Let's review the recent happenings of the last day (and night and day). You'll excuse a bit of punchiness.

• Belgrade. I got up around ten and, knowing my train didn't leave until two, headed for the market. After provisioning with lots of cookies, water, and a bit of yogurt for breakfast, it was off to the train station. Getting back to the train station by day was much easier than getting to the hostel by night using a 1999 map I found online. For some reason Mapquest has no data on eastern european cities despite the fact that maps are available at any airport or train station (during the day, that is).
• Train Station, Part 1. I found a bench and ate my yogurt. It was probably my favorite yogurt I've ever had in my life. It wasn't really flavored, just sweetened enough to keep it mellow, but not at all cloying. Perfect. Too bad I'll never find it again. :P Then I ate some chocolate covered wafer cookies. The box I bought was way too big and they were way too melty. Then I wrote in my game journal for a while. Finally I realized that with two hours left before the train came, I should probably do at least a little sight seeing. My 1999 map showed a giant castle. Stuff like that doesn't tend to move around much.
• Belgrade Castle. I made my way through some convoluted streets to the river and, eventually, the castle. Belgrade is really run down. Even Berlin's sixty year old war damaged sections seemed nicer. The castle itself was largely a ruin, as well. I got a few pictures and climbed around a bit in an area I'm not sure I was supposed to climb around in, but there weren't any signs. I was beginning to cut into my safety buffer, so I high tailed it back to the station. On the way back, I made one of the classic rookie explorer mistakes and took a different route back than the route I'd gone out on. I still made it, but there's that sinking feeling you get when you're losing faith that the way back you're taking will actually work. That's a bad feeling.
• Train To Skopje. As late as it was, the train ride to Skopje can only be described as magical. It started by sparking a lot of nostalgia. Southern Serbia reminded me a lot of the central valley. Some granite deposites, hills, and changing flora suggested the Sierra foothills. Something about the farm equipment was similar to home. I think it's that the south of Serbia just has better equipment than the north. Also the smell of animal farms after dark brought back memories of family trips on I-5. When you're getting nostalgic over manure, you're definitely homesick. :) Then the ride took a sharp left turn into the magical. It had gotten dark, and we were moving through the hills. I turned out the light, trying to get some shuteye, when I saw that there were dozens of fireflies outside. The train's flourescent lights were also casting a pale bluish green glow on the plant life outside. It made the plants appear to be an unnatural shade of gray, and as the train moved against the swaying fern-like trees, often at a snail's pace, it often felt as though we were travelling underwater. The fireflies became little flourescent fishes at the bottom of the sea. And when the moon came up, it was as full and orange as I've ever seen it. Last, but certainly not least, when we finally did catch sight of Skopje, I swear it looked just like Tulare. How the heck I know what Tulare looks like, I don't really know. I vaguely remember visiting my uncle there once, but even that seems more like a dream than a memory. All in all, it was a bizarre and wonderful ride.
• Skopje Station. I knew I'd be able to pass the time in the station when I walked down the stairs and was immediately face to face with the Pepsi Insomniac Pro Gaming Center. Thirty or so Macedonian youth were playing Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and Warcraft 3, among other things. Unfortunately, they were also smoking up a storm, so an hour of that was about enough for me. I took a few pictures, foolishly tried to change my Serbian money, and waited for the train. I'm probably lucky. Changing Serbian money in Macedonia is probably only a stones throw from trying to cash an Israeli money order in Syria. Stupid tourist.
• Train To Thessoloniki. Between lapses into unconciousness, I saw some beautiful mountains and lots more familiar agricultural terrain heading into Greece. It occurred to me that I've seen an awful lot of corn. Then I realized that corn syrup is the cheapest sweetener known to man. Between the rapeseed and the corn, it's no surprise the world is getting fatter.
• Thessoloniki. Since my train for Athens doesn't leave until two, and I got in at eight, I decided to wander a bit. I could smell the ocean, and that's always a big draw. Athens isn't costal, so this would be my only chance the entire trip to see the sea. It gave me a worthwhile surprise, too, as it was full of jellyfish. I hope my photos turned out. It's not always easy to get a camera to focus on translucent shapes under a reflective surface. :P I wandered a bit more, seeing very little of interest, and headed back to the station, finding this internet cafe along the way. I knew the parental units would be concerned, so I was very glad to find it. It's almost noon now. I want to double check that the train station I'm leaving from is the same one I came in from. I'm done with rude surprises like that. Once that's sorted, I think I'll grab some lunch. I've still got a box of cookies for the train, but I need something healthy. Just grabbing an apple from a produce vendor on my walk today felt like a major victory after the number of chocolate covered wafer cookiers I'd eaten. As much as I often disregard my body, I do value it. It conveys my head to interesting places.

All right. I'll take a quick peek at where I want to stay tonight in Athens. I'm thinking I'll splurge on a decent hotel for the last few days. Air conditioning in Athens is more than just a luxury.

Day 72 - Hit The Bricks

Yay burned CD. The gal behind the counter was pretty clueless about how to burn two memory cards to a CD. With her broken english, it would have been twice as fast for me to do it myself. It's not only hostels that require patience. Also, the word for two in hungarian must be one. I say I want one hour. She says two hundred forints. That's bull. The sign at the street says 100 an hour. I tell her so, but pay anyway because it's still cheaper than the other places around. Then I log on and find out I have two hours of time. I'd love to chalk this up to kindness on her part, but this is not the way it worked previously, so the process of elimination yeilds incompetence as the most likely cause. Oh well.

While I was waiting, I got to find out how hungarian childern get their sex education as twelve year olds were watching a threesome on the computer. But mores are a lot different here. Anybody who can stay up until eleven can see porn here. People talk about how sex is considered more acceptable and natural here. I'm not sure there's any real connection between the words porn and natural, myself. Oh well.

I've got about two hours before the train leaves. Time to catch the bus back to the hostel, have some lunch, and head out for the station. I still need to shave. One shower for a dozen people is not optimal. At least the toilets are in other rooms. The hostel in Belgrade is supposed to have free internet, so hopefully I'll be adding an epilogue to today's update from the hospital.

Later!

[later]

I'm boiling a second batch of pasta. A black cat sat in my first bowl. :P It's twenty two twenty. I am glad to have a place to boil pasta. The street signs here are in cyrillic text, so letters aren't what they used to be. I saw one word with a six and a four in it. I kid you not. I'm certain that at least one of the rows of aliens in Space Invaders is a letter here, maybe three or four. Regardless, I eventually found my way. I also made sure to get some serbian currency. Hopefully tomorrow's travel will be less harrowing than todays. But, barring a true catastrophe, it would have to be.

It started early. I had given myself a comfortable margin with which to make the train. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until I set foot in the station that I had missed an important detail. The gal at the info office had said I don't need a reservation, not that I don't need a ticket. My eurail pass was good for the Hungary leg, but not for the Serbia leg. I needed a ticket. I stood in line. My train would leave in twenty minutes. The young man at the front of the line was trying to explain string theory to the clerk. Once he was satisfied with the clerk's understanding he left. My train would leave in fifteen minutes. Three more ticket buyers moved through. My train would leave in ten minutes, and there was only a woman and a couple in front of us. Unfortunately, the woman was trying to get across why Deep Blue has consistently failed to best Casparov. Once she had accomplished this noble goal, she got her ticket. My train would leave in five minutes, and I had no idea where the platform (lucky 13) was located. The couple behind the woman spoke no language the clerk understood so the woman acted as intermediary. The clerk, obviously taking pride in her efficiency, went on break. I took off for track thirteen.

I got on the train with a minute or two to spare with no ticket. I knew the name of the border station on my eurail map. I figured I'd try to jump out there, buy a ticket and get back on. There was no telling if there would be another train to Belgrade today. Every stop was a new conundrum. Where's the sign? Is this the border? Am I going to get arrested if I don't have my ticket yet? For some reason, the train always seemed to stop well short of the station signs, even when I moved to the furthest forward car.

At one stop, the train really stopped. All was silence. I decided it was now or never and grabbed my pack. That was Kelebia. I headed for the nearest building. The first room was the office. I got pointed around the side to the ticket window. All I said was "Beograd". The lady behind the counter said a lot of stuff and wrote down a number. 4743. Wow. I hadn't picked up any extra cash since my first day in Hungary. I pulled a wad of small bills and coins out of my pocket. I had 4700. Crap. Then I noticed the fifty forint coin on the ground. Oh yeah, baby. The train was changing engines, so I had plenty of time to get back on. I at least had the foresight to check the schedule and find out that the train to Skopje leaves at 2PM. That'll be cool because it will give me a morning to take a few pictures in Serbia.

I didn't take a single picture on the train, at first because I wanted to stay focused on making sure I steered clear of any "imperial entanglements". After I got the ticket, I got thrown back to second class and the aquarium window. There were four inches of water between the panes and lots of moss. It was cool to watch it slosh when the train slowed down and sped up, but no pictures would have turned out.

There also wasn't too much to take pictures of. Wheat and corn predominated. There were also incredibly ugly brick homes. There are a lot of darker skinned people (turks?) living in them, from what I could see. Some were so terrible they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of the favelas in Rio. I'll take some pictures of them tomorrow probably. Part of me is also a little worried about being pegged as an American in this part of the world. I don't really know what anger is harbored here towards the UN intervention of the mid nineties. There aren't any active warnings on the US travel page, but I'd rather not push it.

Okay. It's almost midnight. I better drink some water and get some sleep. I want to have a big fat time buffer tomorrow. Oops, after I book my Skopje hostel, that is.

Day 71 - I Got A Bad Feeling About This

Today was the last day to decide how I'm getting to Athens. I could have tried flying, but between the reservation web sites that seemed to be broken and prices that seemed completely illogical (over five hundred dollars from the "budget" airlines), I decided against it. I could have tried Eurail, but I know how that would go, and three solid days of train and ferry travel is out! So what did I decide? I'm forging across the great unknown, in other words Serbia and Macedonia. I arrive tomorrow in Belgrade. I'll spend the night at Three Black Catz hostel and probably head out for Skopje the next day. I'd like to make the whole crossing in three nights. Belgrade, Skopje, Thessaloniki. That'll give me almost a week in or near Athens. Bye bye free trains, hello places I never heard of. Every trip should feature at least one place you've never heard of, right?

Bang! Bang! Bang!

• Decisions. Other than make my train reservations, I didn't really have an agenda today. Since I do believe the Palace of Miracles is just a myth spread by the tourist board, I decided to head to the
• Zoo. Part of me hates zoos because the animals are so restricted. The giant parks where they have room are okay, but some of the animals in any zoo are so restricted it's just criminal. The cow was tied up in a way that just made me sick. It couldn't do anything but stand there. Admittedly, cows don't usually do anything but stand there, but the fact that it was on a three foot leash tied around its horns was just wrong. The bald eagle in the enclosure that gave it no room to fly was another notable crime against nature. Reservations aside, I love seeing these animals. They're amazing. Just the size is impossible in some cases. The silverback was incredible. The grizzly bears were intimidating even with a huge moat hemming them in. I took a movie of them that will hopefully convey their size better than the pictures.
• Veggie Restaurant. Having spent the better part of the day walking to and photographing the zoo, I headed to a vegetarian restaurant. It was more costly than the other vegetarian restaurant, but they had more variety, as well. I tried the chef's special and got breaded tofu with sour cream. It was pretty good. Lunch was actually a better value. I had hungarian macaroni, by which I mean the macaroni noodles were six inches long. At first I thought they were just really fat spaghetti until I tried to slurp one up and found myself sucking air through the noodle.

That's pretty much it for today. The train to Belgrade doesn't leave until 13:35 tomorrow, so I'll take a leisurely shower and shave in the morning, burn a CD, and make sure I'm properly provisioned for the train.

Day 70 - The True Underground

When we last left our hero, ignorant tourist office people were running him all over Budapest and not helping him find anything. Well, I did what any vigilante would do. I took matters into my own hands, finding the addresses of the attractions online and using the interactive map to look them up.

• To The Caves! The caves you get access to with the Budapest card were a little tricky to find. One was unmarked on my map, and the other was well off the edge. [Blain the Hero music kicks up.] It took quite a while to get to the first cave. It involved a bus, metro, tram, and a lot of walking. The walking wasn't really essential, but I prefer to walk in areas I haven't been in yet. You never know what you'll run across. I ran across a traffic jam. I actually had theme music for ten minutes or so as my walking was just as fast as a car in traffic blaring hip hop. I didn't bust a move, though. I always regret it when I leave a move unbusted. [music dies] Still, I had places to be, obscure places. Much like Venice, there are almost no street signs here. You have to look on the sides of buildings, and it is not uncommon for only one of the four appropriate buildings to actually have a sign on it. I don't know how the drivers around her cope. I was relying on intuition as it was, finding a street with a name only similar to one on my map and finding my way regardless. I had five whole minutes to spare, even.
• Wussy Cave. The first cave had no warning about being difficult for the faint of heart to traverse, so I call it the wussy cave. It was still pretty, with cauliflower shaped formations. It was cool, as well, a welcome respite from the hot days we've had here. It doesn't seem that hot on the weather.com web site, but when the sun shines down between the buildings, it gets very warm. Those thirty mile an hour winds they write up on the web site are often only encountered when you get out on the bridge over the river.
• Nav Bomb. After the wussy cave, I had twenty minutes to make it to the other cave. Because it was off the edge of my map, I had no idea whether it was even close enough to make it there in twenty minutes. Meh. Let's jog. So I jogged it on over. Despite the fact that none of the streets seemed to be going in the right directions or connected in the way I thought, I made it with two minutes to spare. Then they told me the tour was starting fifteen minutes later. Wah. I still rock!
• Big Cave. Big cave was pretty cool. It's got some formations with fun mythology. There's a rock haning out of the ceiling, looking like it's ready to fall. The rumor is it will only fall on someone if they've been unfaithful. All the couples giggle, some more nervously than others. There's also the witches kitchen (with "pots" on the walls made by carbon dioxide bubbles). Supposedly you can call out the name of your favorite food and it will be waiting for you when you get home. We'll see. ;)
• Vasarely. Hungary's father of something called Op-Art has a museum here. As far as I can tell, Op-Art is drawing lots of geometric shapes with lots of gradients and mathematical transforms. It's a lot like Escher only less obviously mind bending. If you actually try to analyze a picture and pick out patterns, you could probably spend a goodly amount of time on them. In fact, the feeling that I got was that these might be paintings for geniuses. If you had a two hundred IQ, you'd probably just look at them and see the six or seven patterns that contributed to a particular piece. I, on the other hand, just enjoyed staring at them, following a pattern or two at a time. The green X-shaped "Ferde" is the ultimate X-box logo. Bill Gates! Buy it! Market with it! Be cool like me!!!11!1 (You can see lots of what I saw at Vasarely's web site. It's Macromedia Flash, just so ya know.)
• Palace of Miracles. The miracle being its disappearance. I still can't find the damn thing, even knowing it's address. I'm thinking it's hidden in the mall somewhere. It can't possibly be as cool as it would have to be to justify the time I've spent, so I may just do a day trip somewhere else tomorrow. Then it's back to Prague.

Okay. It's time to turn in. Party on! (Did I mention they play dance music in this internet cafe?) [/me busts a move]

Day 69b - The Pest

I had a really good day today, despite some really bad information. I picked up the Budapest card today. Free public transit and admission to a lot of attractions. Unfortunately, I picked up a lot of bad info along with it. I got the wrong location to the kid science place. There was a nice park there, but nothing like what I was looking for. Some security guards gave me directions to where I was supposed to go, but it was too little too late by that point. I didn't care too much because I was still seeing new sights, photographing, and enjoying. I had half a pound of potato salad, a candybar, and some juice... [strongbad] some pumpkin apricot juice! [/strongbad] I always enjoy trying funky juices. Pumpkin apricot doesn't stack up to carrot orange, but it's drinkable, and probably pretty healthy, eh?

I also found a couple mega malls. Mega malls rule for one simple reason. They don't close on Sunday, like every other store in Europe. I will have cheap food on Sunday. Internet, I'm not so sure about, but we'll see. The cafe I'm typing from now is only fifty cents an hour. It rules. I'd like to take this opportunity to appologize in advance for the abrupt subject change.

[record skipping noise/] I looked up some more airline sites. It seems my best bet is to go back to Prague and take a flight from Czech Air. Yay eight hour train trip. Heh. I guess I'll have to take a book from the hostel in exchange for Angels and Demons and make a day of it. w00t.

Day 69 - The Buda

It was a very mellow day today. I got up around ten, watched everyone else getting ready. The guys from Krakow who said they'd be up around six, and the gals from Ireland who said they were sleeping in until noon. I got to wait a half hour for the gal from Mexico to take her shower. I didn't really care. It was a nice morning. I had breakfast, some cereal I'd bought at the store the night before. That reminds me, dinner last night was frozen vegetables and the closest thing I could find to tater tots. Long live Ashland. :)

After all that, it was finally time to head out. I walked to the train station to pick up a map. While I was there, I was engaged in conversation by a man who rents rooms in his house here. He wanted help getting young tourists to stay with him. He was a big guy, so I could understand how people might be a little afraid if he tried the hard sell. He talked about how hard it's become because a lot of foriegn interests (arabs as he put it) have taken over the hotel industry here and how the textile and some other industries have been taken over by the chinese. With as much programming as the US is shipping off to South America and India, it's hard to imagine how people in the US are going to make money, especially after we've covered every square meter of the country with housing no one can afford, which at the current rate will be in about two months. :P I guess that's why the government is backing the entertainment industry so hard. It's one of the few things we still export effectively.

After our discussion of geopolitics, I wished him the best and headed for Buda. The rail station is well on the east side of town, and Buda is on the west. In fact, you can imagine the division of the two cities like the division of the word. Buda on the west side, Pest on the east. I saw lots of lovely architecture. When I got to the river, I realized that the most beautiful stuff is on the far side, though. There's a huge rocky green hill just on the other side of the river that I climbed to get some great views. There's a church in a cave there, too, but I was wearing shorts, so I decided to leave it alone. A lot of churches don't want anything above the knee, and I didn't want to see the inside that badly. The park on that hill was great. You could go to the fort at the top where they had some statues, which I took pictures of, and some old artillery pieces and ambulances they had up there from when there was a working fort, which I didn't take pictures of. The light was bad. Then I walked down, taking more pictures of the lovely greenery. Then it happened, something I knew was coming from the second I started growing my hair out. Someone mistook me for Jesus. Luckily it was just a local body builder. I'm waiting for a crazy person to really think I am Jesus.

The universe having the sense of humor that it does, I then walked around a three card monte game being conducted in the park. Even walking around it, one of the guys running the game called out to me like I was rude for just walking by. Part of me wanted to warn the people he was most likely stealing from, but I left them, without a word, to their own devices.

I tracked along the river, heading north. I had intended to explore the island park in the middle of the river, but I then realized it was four and I hadn't eaten anything. There was a vegetarian restaurant listed on my map. So instead of hitting the island, I just took some pictures of it (and of the incredibly ornate parliament building beside it) and went to an early dinner. Apparently hungarians eat late, or never eat at "Vegetarium", because I was the only one there. I tried the big sampler plate and ended up polishing off seasoned potatoes, herb rice, soaked cabbage, mushroom dumplings, tofu with tomato and peppers, and a mushroom rice patty somewhat reminiscent of a garden burger. This and a raspberry yogurt shake all for eleven bucks (and that's including an overly generous tip). I was very full.

I wandered back towards the hostel, taking a few pictures along the way. I took a detour to head past a small park. It was full of dogs. No one breed seems to predominate in Budapest. Black collies, terriers, dobermans; poodles, they're all here. There was something that looked like a saint bernard mix I rather wish I'd taken a movie of. It's size was unreal. Whenever it moved, it took it's coat a second to catch up. If it had been in a movie, I would have thought it was bad computer animation.

After that I headed back to the hostel, started this update, watched the computer crash, and then decided to follow its example. All that food needed digesting, after all. I took a nice three hour nap, which was probably good as my roommates were up chatting unti two. It was standard raunchy hostel faire, mostly. I thought with women in the room, it might tone down a bit. You would need a delicate, well calibrated instrument to detect the difference.

So here I am the next morning, more than a little glad that only one of my roommates will still be there tonight. But with the vagaries of hostel life, who knows who'll be next. It's time to do a bit more research and continue my exploration.

• Flights to Athens
• Map locations of attractions I want to visit

I'm seriously considering finding accomodation outside of Athens. For having hosted the olympics only five years ago, people say it's truly disgusting now. We shall see.

Day 67 - B To The P, Booooooy!

There's not too much of interest to report today. I got my things in order (including burning another CD) in Prague yesterday and hit the train station early this morning. I couldn't get to sleep. I blame Dan Brown. A guy from my dorm (a super cool guy, by the way) gave me Angels and Demons to read. I haven't read The Da Vinci Code, but I can't guess they're much different. Countless conspiracies, brutal killings and lots of basically accurate info about religion and science. It's a good read and helped the eight hour train ride go faster. I'm almost done with it, actually, and considering I'm feeling that familiar tickle in my throat, it may be a good time to grub, read, and sleep. I don't know if I'll be able to find goulash like mom used to make here, though. ;)

Speaking of here, (marvel at the glorious seguay). It's warm here. I have converted my convertible pants into shorts. Many will go blind, but I won't stink so bad. This is a major consideration as before I got that shoe powder, my socks were so stinky, I didn't have to register them as lethal weapons. No government on earth would dare stand against them. Still, I had finally gotten comfortable going without sunscreen. I shall miss that. And there are more than a few walking sights here in Budapest. Luckily some of them are caves. :)

Also speaking of caves, I'm not so sure about this hostel "rated in the top ten by hostelworld users". The guy working there barely speaks, the free internet computer is hopelessly hosed, and he tried to charge me over twice what my bed is supposed to cost. We shall see.

Day 66 - All Set

This is my last day in Prague. The first train to Budapest leaves at seven thirty and I plan to be on it. So today is mostly packing, looking up stuff about Budapest on the internet, maybe shooting some more nazis, maybe not. I can't believe I'm paying for it. Gaming, I mean. It's so degrading. I pay at home, but that's for a relationship, not a fling. So wrong. Still, Brothers in Arms is teaching me covering and flanking tactics, so its worthwhile. It's almost more of a puzzle game than an action game, and I expect it will only become more so as it progresses. We shall see.

As for yesterday, it was mostly an evening wasted out with guys from the hostel. It was fun, and I picked up some interesting trivia on Budapest. Now I'll go see if it's true. :)

Day 65 - Richness

What the heck did I do yesterday? I shot a few nazis. I celebrated listening to all the answering machine messages on homestarrunner.com by eating an entire 400 gram marzipan. It was pretty good. Um, what else... bang!

• Nap. You shouldn't eat a big marzipan without a bed handy.
• Eat More. I went to the store and got some veggies to have with my remaining pasta. They didn't really have what I wanted so I ended up having pasta with a red pepper, carrot, and onion. It was surprisingly good, especially with a little salt and hot sauce on top. Hot sauce?
• Denim Crew. A bunch of guys and gals from the bay area had bought some cheap denim jackets and were cutting them up. Jackets became vests. Cuffs became wristbands. Sleeves became big wristbands, headbands, and leg warmers. It was fun to watch.
• Hostel Bar. After cleaning up after dinner, I decided to join the denim crew downstairs. I had an absinthe and a Budwar Budweiser, which is supposedly the beer Budweiser stole its name from. I thought it was good as the three kinds of beer I've ever had went. The absinthe, however, was nasty, no matter how much sugar you put in it. :P
• Nap. I went to bed about one in the morning, but since the hostel bar closes at three thirty, I was awoken by the sounds of random yelling in the hallway a little before four. And to make matters worse, we are so far east in the "Paris" timezone, it's actually getting light at four in the morning. It took an hour or so to get back to sleep.
• Check out. I had to change rooms since I was extending my stay at the hostel. That meant I dumped my pack in a pack room and headed out.
• Tesco. I grabbed some powder for my stinky shoes and a breakfast candy bar. I forgot I still need a few ziplock bags. Minutiae.
• Giger. It took a while to get there, being a click away from any metro stop, but I finally made it to the Giger exhibit. The museum it's in is a technology museum. They've got scads of old cameras (still and moving), vehicles (air and ground), astrological equipment, clocks, audio gear, etc. As such, they have scads of school children being led around. They don't get to go into the Giger exhibit, but just the fact that the Alien is clearly visible from the hall made for some interesting traffic jams as eight through ten year olds tried to process what they were looking at. I think I can sum up Giger for me pretty simply. If it looks like a penis, it's in there somewhere. If the texture is rotted, translucent, or pitted, it's in there somewhere. The way he plays with perspective and interconnection between elements keeps me working to figure out exactly what I'm looking at. The level of detail also keeps me looking for, and finding, new elements at every turn. DooM 3 seems so impoverished compared to Giger's work. Giger's work is so mind bending. In fact, I find it silly when he includes classic christian references like satan and the number six six six. His work is so much more compelling than any christian conception of evil and hell that I've seen.

Day 64 - The Toreador Song

Bang! Bang! Bang! Here come the bullets!

• Gaming. I did play some more Brothers in Arms, but the PC I had yesterday was taken, so I had to start over. I think I can now pick up where I left off on PC 24. It's good to remember. It's a fun game, but one that requires some discipline as you have to use supressing fire and flanking effectively. Also it's not as easy to survey the battlefield in zoomed out mode as I'd like. Ah well.
• Eating. Dinner last night was mostly almonds and cookies, the vegetarian's version of the high calorie diet. Heh.
• Carmen. So I watched a french opera about spanish gypsies performed by the state opera of Prague. Some people in the audience said the french was pretty terrible, and the subtitles in czech weren't useful for me. Czech is one of the wierdest languages I've encountered. It sometimes seems like they have an irrational fear of vowels. You know the letter z? It's a word in czech. You know when Homer jumps around saying, "I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A-R-T!" Smrt is a word in czech. It means death. My head spins. But I digress. I had the foresight to look up the synopsis of the play on the Metropolitan Opera's web site. It's basically the story of a woman who wants freedom. She supports the freedom fighters. She loves who she wants. Unfortunately for her, she seduces the wrong man to stay out of jail, Don Jose. Don Jose forsakes a woman he's supposed to marry and his career in the military for Carmen and the life of a resistance fighter. When his morther takes ill, he goes to see her, promising to return to Carmen. Carmen takes up with a bullfighter, and when Don Jose returns, she tells him to get lost. Don Jose, forsaken and jealous, kills her. The end. It's about what I'd expect from an opera. There weren't really any fat ladies, though. At least none with a major role.
• Giger. I only mentioned going to see the Giger stuff in Switzerland because I thought it might be a silly thing to do if it was convenient. It didn't seem that convenient, so I gave it a miss. Now the guy is freaking following me around. A travelling exhibit was in Berlin while I was there. It arrives tomorrow in Prague. Just to keep him off my back, I'm probably going to go. Are you happy now, HR? Hehe. Also, I saw a museum for a czech artist who does lovely art deco glass painting. I think they're art deco, anyway. I'll probably stop by today.
• Travel plans. It's time to book a room in and train for Budapest. One of the malaysian gals from Florence sent an email saying what activities they enjoyed there.

Truth be told, I'm ready to come home. Matthew's giving lectures on the history of console games. I've been writing notes about the eight bit style game I want to write in my little notebook. All this touristy stuff feels like a big waste of time. I have work to do.

Day 63 - Closed

Lots of Prague is closed today, but luckily the mini-mall where I use the internet is unaffected. It's a fair distance away from the hostel, but I don't seem to mind. I return to my favorite mood, unshakably mellow. There are several good reasons for that.

• Brothers In Arms. They have it here at the internet cafe, so I got to spend an hour blowing stuff up. The acting in the game is really good. The opening is a grabber too. I think I'll play another hour today and see if I can keep my backup from getting killed.
• Carrefour. Carrefour is like Target and Albertsons put together. They seem to still be working the kinks out though, as sometimes items don't ring up correctly. Today I'm going to take pictures of the items I buy to avoid any more delays at the register. There's a bar of white chocolate with straberry bits with my name on it. I'm actually trying to eat a little poorly at this point as it has recently come to my attention that I've lost some weight. Well, I've lost some width anyway, as I can now comfortably use the last notch in the belt I brought. Doh.
• Park. The park itself is nice. The most fun I had in the park came from trying to photograph bees. I just wanted one picture of each kind of bee. I think I eventually succeeded, but sometimes it's hard to tell on my little preview pane. I can only zoom in so far. After a leisurely stroll through the park, I headed back for the hostel and the remaining food I had left over for dinner. I made pasta again, and while the addition of sauteed mushrooms was definitely a cool addition, I couldn't find decent tomatoes to put in it. The czechs make spaghetti sauce with ketchup. That just ain't right. I used some tomato puree. Meh. I ended up picking out all the pieces of mushroom and garlic. Yummm.
• Sweet Rest. Amazingly enough for a Saturday night, the hostel hadn't managed to fill any of the other beds in my room. I locked the door and slept a wonderous sleep.
• Morning Walk. I decided to walk to the mall in the morning. Prague never fails to please. Even though I wasn't in the old town, there were still plenty of things to photograph. I also wandered by the state opera house and picked up a ticket for Georges Bizet's Carmen tonight. I think this will be my first opera... ever. It oughta be a good one. And it was less expensive than Duran Duran. :P I need to get more cash from the machine though. Plays in London and concerts in Prague. The National Museum was next door, but I thought the mall might close early on Sunday, so I headed here instead.
• Funny Pictures. There have been a few funny threads of posters here in Prague that I've wanted to take pictures of. I ran across well placed ones to phograph this morning. The main one is the official czech beer, Pilsner Urquell. I think if Glenn's Isetta comment every time I see it. It's made in a place called Plzen or something, so I think it might be the place where pilsner was invented. [homer]That crazy Urkel! What will he think of next!?[/homer]

Now I think it's time to check out the lebanese place in the food court. Mmm. Food court.

Day 62 - The Morning After

Duran Duran was cool. The Prague crowd was a little sedate, but they seemed to enjoy themselves. It made me wonder about the associations we have with music. For a lot of people in the states, Duran Duran means guess jeans, big hair, and beaucoup makeup. For a lot of people here Duran Duran had a lot of their hits during communist rule. How does that color their view of the music?

Duran Duran does bring back the memories, too, as they played every song of theirs I've ever heard. Well, they didn't play the theme to the last Roger Moore James Bond film, but I didn't really expect them to. I didn't realize I knew so many of their songs, actually. Here are the ones I recognized from the set.

• (Reach Up For The) Sunrise
• Hungry Like The Wolf
• Notorious
• The Wild Boys
• The Reflex
• Save A Prayer (for the morning after)
• Girls on Film
• Rio

They also played a nice instrumental number to give Simon a break and a song called "What Happens Tomorrow" about the war in Iraq. I thought it was really nice.

After the concert I headed back to the metro. Public transit in the US will probably never be as good as it is in Europe, but I'm getting ahead of myself. On the way there, I almost tripped on something on the ground. I turned around and looked at it. "What is that? A koosh ball? It's pretty large for... Woah! It's a hedgehog!" I'd never seen a hedgehog just wandering the streets before. It was a cute little bugger. It started moving and I kind of herded it back towards a grassy area. That was cool.

What was less cool was the drunkard who tried to take a bed in our room at three AM. Oh well. Hostel life. I'll be better about locking up in the future. Today it's time to get my walk on again. There's a huge park, and if I don't see anything else today but its insides, I'll be happy.

Day 61 - It's Full Of Decorations

Despite the twin snorers in my room, I had a very restful night's sleep. They were very amusing, actually. One has a raspy snore that pitch bends up every breath. The other has a low rumble that changes pitch rather like a fog horn. Listening to them go in and out of sync was strangely relaxing. I've spent most of the day today in a relaxed state of wandering. You can't go wrong in Prague. Old school architecture is everywhere. At first it's overwhelming. Then it's kind of dull as the variations in it seem to be relatively minor. Why spend all this time on ornamentation just to make every building vaguely resemble every other building? There are still a lot of unique buildings though, and I've got plenty of pictures to prove it.

I let the interesting buildings guide me for most of the morning. Eventually I came across the Charles Bridge, an old bridge with a bunch of old statues on it. It's sort of like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, except it has no shops. I waited for the sun to show up again so I could take a picture. It's been pretty cloudy, which makes for nice backdrops but lousy lighting. So I waited, knoshing on some pastry I bought at the market the night before. Mmmm. Hazelnut pastry. While I was waiting, a group was trying to get someone to take their picture. I obliged and after an awkward exchange of camera and pastry I took a picture and was thanked. "Spaceba." I guess the cold war is long over, but I still thought that was a cool experience.

After the light finally showed up, I took a picture of the bridge and a cool building next to it and some cool buildings across the river. They have a lot of cool buildings here, in case that isn't becoming clear yet. I wandered down the river. There's a huge green hill with an Eiffel Tower type structure across the river. I wandered across the river. I kept getting distracted by cool buildings and staying near to the river. At one point I just wandered into a park and started napping on the bench. The weather here is fantastic. The sun will come out and get you toasty, then a little wind and cloud will come along to cool you down. Marvelous. I eventually found a hill, but not the one I had been looking for. I had nothing to do but climb it, so I did. The view wasn't that great, but the trees and weather left me well past caring.

It was about this time that the hazelnut pastry started to wear off, so I decided to head to the little shopping cart icon on my map. Oh my god. It's full of stores. I wandered into a three level mall, where I am now typing this on a much nicer computer than the hostel's for a lot less money. Everyone else is playing Counterstrike. :P

I also took this internet opportunity to check out the Duran Duran situation. It looks like there are still seats available, so I've taken down the ticket center location on my map. Time to rock out, 80s style! :D

Day 60 - Prague

I couldn't get to sleep last night until about one. I was a little disgruntled because I knew I had to catch a seven o'clock train the next day. Imagine my joy when all my roommates came home at four. Doh! It's hostel life. They finally turned in around six. Totally unable to sleep, I sat in the lobby and ate cookies. Even at six in the morning, the computer was in constant use. :O Speaking of computers in constant use, this hostel has only one, and it's not even free. Three bucks an hour. Nothing in Prague is really cheap. Let's hit the highlights of the last day in Polska.

• My Baby Takes The Morning Train. Heh. I sing that all the time with all the trains I take, but this was the most appropriate one. I slightly underestimated the time it would take to walk to the train station, so it was a little bit of a rush at the end, but I made it. The transfer was a rush too. Five minutes to change trains may work in countries where everything is clearly labeled and easy to find, but in the train station we were in, we basically had to run from one end of the station to the other. I travelled with a couple guys from the hostel who were also going to Prague. We had assigned seating on the subsequent trains, so I don't know where they ended up.
• Czech Businessman. There was a nice czech businessman in my compartment (on the second out of three trains). He was very quiet at first, but once we started chatting, he was very friendly. He talked about working across eastern europe. He knows russian, polish, czech, english, and german. He gets a little confused sometimes, as I suppose many people would. Regardless, he was kind enough to help me make my next connection (which was also supposed to be a close shave).
• Last Train. The scenery in the Czech Republic is beautiful. Grass and tree covered hills abound. I was going to call them forrest covered hills, but I think many of them were tree farms. There are these fir trees which have almost no branches except at the very top. I think they may grow closer together, which would make them ideal for harvesting. Regardless, I snapped many pictures from the train window. I'm really looking forward to burning another CD. I recently realized that my picture taking has slowed down a lot. I have some Berlin, Krakow, and Prague all on the same 256MB memory card. That's just wrong. How am I supposed to wallpaper my room in Wayne's house properly if I don't have at least two thousand pictures?
• Prague. The train doesn't really show you that much of Prague coming in. Still, you know it's going to be beautiful. I don't think cities should ever be built on flat ground. Hillsides are what make every beautiful city I've seen beautiful. I was already somewhat late for my hostel so I converted my polish money. When one polish dollar buys you over seven czech dollars, you know you're dealing with a depressed economy. It's about twenty of theirs to one of ours. Still, everything is just twenty times more expensive here. Ingredients for dinner were two hundred dollars. The hostel payment was 1,850. Still, it's fun to throw twenty dollar coins around and carry around a thousand dollar bill. :)
• Wandering. I wandered north toward some markets on the twenty dollar map I bought. It's a pretty nice map. But no map could prepare me for the shock of discovering that Prague markets close at seven. I'll bet if I can hit them when they're open, the prices will be much better than stuff here in town. I'll probably want to do that too, as I've already extended my stay here to a full week. Prague is really beautiful and has a huge youth culture and nightlife, so there's plenty to do. Duran Duran is playing tomorrow, but I doubt I can get tickets. I'll check anyway.

Well, I ought to make some attempt at appearing polite and let the nice gal from Florida check her email. Chat atcha later! :)

Day 59 - Yay! Walkabout!

It's weird because I spent all day walking around Auschwitz, but for some reason it felt really good to walk around Krakow. Maybe it's because I felt like a rebel for not going to the salt mines. Maybe it's because I left the tourists behind. Maybe it's because I saw a hill over four clicks away and got to it with no map. Regardless, it was a nice day.

• Train Reservations. Let's just say Italian service doesn't seem so bad anymore. The lady at the information desk speaks no english. Not "little bit" like almost every train person in every other station I've been in. Just none. When presented with my phrase book, one of the clerks claimed to know none of the languages listed. And they say Americans are provincial. Still, everything eventually got settled, and I'll be taking day trains to Prague. With all the night train horror stories, I'm glad to be going during the day (not that I'll let my guard down).
• The Park. I left the train station happy to be walking around with nowhere to go. I took some shots of the park and the local architecture. Krakow's quite pretty in the old town. As I worked my way around, I found myself gaining some altitude and realized I was heading up the path to...
• The Castle. The word Wawel is used a lot, but I'm not sure if that's the name of the castle or the polish word for castle. Regardless, it is really pretty. I think someone from the hostel said the interior tours are kind of lame, so I didn't bother. I got some nice pictures of the castles and some closeups of some interesting flowers (a.k.a. more wallpapers for mom). Also, I saw some signs for a dragon, so I paid a buck to go through a cave that leads to it. Seeing the dragon itself is free, and lots of school children were doing just that. What an odd field trip. Anyway, as I was walking along the river next to the castle, I saw a mound sticking up from a faraway hill. Ten minutes later, when I saw a sign pointing in that direction that said "WKYZWKYZKWYZKYWKZY - 4km" (or something like that), I knew where I was going that day.
• Real Krakow. The first thing that I liked was that I was seeing regular storefronts, cars, etc. I stopped into a bakery and bought a big chocolate covered croisant for forty cents US. The currency here is called the szloty and is roughly the same as Brazillian and Argentinian currency. In other words, once you're out of the tourist traps, things are really cheap.
• Little Help. After going a significant distance, I came to a sort of one leaf cloverleaf. I was getting close to the mound, I knew that much. But I wasn't sure if I should head up the hill on a small road nearby, or stick to the main drag. A gal on rollerblades, coming the opposite direction seemed to be my best bet. Amazingly, she spoke fine english. I've since learned it wasn't that amazing as much of the younger generation does. I didn't know how to pronounce the name of where I was going, but happily I had taken a picture of the sign pointing to it and showed it to her on my camera. She said go up the hill, and I was on my way.
• The Mound. That's what the signs call it. Some people from the hostel said it was the grave of some ruler so well loved that when he died, everyone brought a handful of dirt for the grave, and it became a hill fifty meters tall. Regardless, it gave a pretty great view. I took lots of snaps. I still don't know if I can trust the viewpiece on the camera with skies. Sometimes the sky seems washed out, so I take another shot in which the ground seems almost black and indistinguishable. We'll see when I get home if I really need to take two of every picture, or if one of the two settings is almost always best.
• Walking Back. The walk back was fairly uneventful. I had half a liter of yogurt drink to keep me going until dinner and took a few snaps of the cute little polish fiats you see frequently in Krakow. I also finally bothered to take some picture of the main town square. It's funny how I can immediately talk a beautiful landmark like that for granted just because my hostel is nearby.
• Dinner. I got recommendations from the man at reception and headed out. Actually, I was going to take a silly scotsman from the hostel with me, but he disappeared for a while. The restaurant had an english menu, so I didn't have to guess. The staff spoke english. I ate with a british couple. It was almost too english to be the experience I was looking for. But the food made it all right. I had two plates of pirogi. (They had two vegetarian kinds. I had to.) A gal that works there game out to our table at one point to warn us about a guy who had sat behind me. He always comes in, sits next to tourists, orders nothing but tea, and leaves very quietly. Then people tend to notice their cell phones are missing. He had probably had enough opportunity to make off with my camera, if he'd been sneaky enough about it. Luckily he wasn't. Anyway, I had a great time relating some of my favorite experiences with the british couple. They warned me not to take the boat to the castle outside of Prague, as it takes ninety minutes versus the twenty it takes if you take the metro and bus. It's only five miles out of town. I might walk. I think I'll be doing a lot of walking in Prague.

That's it for the night. I'm back on the clock now, as I've pretty much given up using the free internet in Mama's Hostel. It's a great hostel, but they really need to institue a thirty minute time limit per person or something. Regardless, I installed my favorite Nintendo music plugin and got a lot of positive comments about the music. :) All right. Off to bed, then off to Prague!

Day 58 - Auschwitz

"Free Internet" as offered by the hostel is one computer for fifty people, so I will be brief. Auschwitz was not what I expected. It is so different than it once was that it's hard to imagine the horrors of what occurred here. Grass and wildflowers grow over the majority of the death camp area. Trees frame the edges. It's lovely. I took the tour, but it wasn't really helpful. I know maybe three more things than someone who just read all the placards, and I probably know many things less because we didn't have time to read the placards as we moved through. Plus, hearing someone who sounds bored describe what happened is not nearly as dramatic as having to read it and imagine it for yourself. All that said, some of the things the nazis did to trick people into the gas chambers were truly chilling. They told peole they were being relocated, even giving them tickets that said Krakow. They built a fake villiage nearby that they would see from the train, populated with jewish people. When they were going to lose the camp, they went into the elementary school, gave the children toys taken from children murdered at Birkenkau , and marched the happy kids to the gas chambers. Yeah. I think I took two pictures the whole day. It just felt wrong to be a tourist in the presence of such suffering. I was more of a pilgrim.

We hit a mexican restaurant tonight. The cottage cheese enchiladas were actually pretty decent. Okay. I should be polite (unlike everyone else in the hostel), and I can't seem to shake this tired feeling. I've gotten tired way too early for three nights now. :P

Day 57 - Train To Cracow

It's not really late, but with the all day train trip, I don't think I'll be clubbin'. There are a lot of cool people at this hostel who are going out. I think the rumors of Krakow being only for old people are greatly exaggerated. Of course it's getting into heavy tourist season and Krakow feels a lot like Florence. Nothing I can't handle! :) (I'm a little random an punchy, if you haven't noticed.) Let's catch up.

• Laundry. I had a little fun at the laundrymat. It was just me and a young couple. I took my laundry out of a bag and threw it in. I took off my jacket and threw it in. Then I took off my shoes. I made a signal at the guy (The gal was reading.) to turn around. I took off my belt. Then I took off my pants. I was wearing my long underwear which hadn't seen use since Paris. They found this highly amusing, which was what I was going for. :)
• Train Ride. By popular demand, here's what you see when going from Berlin to Krakow.
  • Run Down Buildings. This is standard fare for train rides, since the worst real estate is next to the tracks. Still, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of rundown buildings in Poland. I'm assuming the Department of Glorious Communist Neglect had a hand in that.
  • Farms. Tree farming seems to be big in Poland. I'm guessing they produce a lot of paper or wood.
  • Coal. I saw a number of coal refineries and train cars full of coal. But I'm not sure how much they actually use it in light of the next bullet item.
  • Active Cooling Towers. Maybe they weren't what they looked like, but it there appeared to be at least two operating nuclear power plants along the train route. Unfortunately, trees and other obstacles prevented me from getting any good pictures.
  • Funny Letters. I am very glad the hostel has an american keyboard. (UK ones are slightly different.) I suspect polish keyboards have only C, Z, Y, and W keys as most words here seem primarily composed of those letters. Words like "wypozyczalnia" are not uncommon. Marjan, are slavic languages related as closely as "romance" languages? Can you get by in most of the countries here just knowing Slovenian? I have only czech in my language book, so polish and hungarian are pretty mysterious.
• Mama's Hostel. This place is really nice. They have free lockers, free internet, and free toast for breakfast. And you can even install stuff on the computer so I downloaded the NES music player for WinAmp and am currently listening to the Strider soundtrack.
• Dinner. I got some instant soup from the store. I figured a nice polish beet noodle soup would be good as I hadn't eaten anything but dried fruit and peanuts on the train. Good for the colon, but low on calories. I also have some cookies which are calling to me even as I type this. Yeah. It's time to hit the sack. I want to go to Auschwitz tomorrow. The also have a salt mine tour here. It doesn't say anything about slides, but underground chapels carved in "living salt rock" might make up for it. Regardless, the old town here is really cool looking. I'll probably have fun just walking around taking pictures, sort of a prelude to Prague.

Day 56 - Laundry

Hehe. It's been a bit long since I've done proper laundry, so I'm trying to sneak that into a final lazy day in Berlin. I'm also planning to catch a movie called Yasmin about a palestinian family in Scotland and how people react to them after 9/11. But that's the future. Let's catch up with the past.

• Back To The Front. I headed back to the Ethnology Museum. The horror. The horror. The African exhibit, which according to one source was going to dispel any notions of African art as primitive, is closed until August. "I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows." I wandered through the rest of the south seas, indian, and oriental sections. I didn't find myself taking nearly as many pictures as in the south american section. Older oriental art seems so formal and lifeless, and I saw much cooler indian art at the British Museum. Heh. One gal was ending her tour in London and someone said the British Museum is a good review for all the art she'd seen thus far.
• Morphine Mood. My drugs and society teacher described being given morphine as sleeping in on a Sunday morning, somewhere between dreaming and waking. I took a nap in anticipation of heading out to the club, but was disturbed partway through (by the oriental screen that gives John's Cozy Little Oriental Hostel its name being knocked over on top of me). The result was that I was in a sort of hippy dippy trippy mood the rest of the evening, and instead of heading out to the club, I wandered the streets in search of falafel, tofu, or whatever for a couple hours. I finally found some falafel, took it back to the hostel, and listened to one of the guys who works there complain about the politics of their tiny hostel worker's community before sacking out again. I'm tempted to diagram the relationships, but you probably aren't interested, and I might get someone in trouble.

And now, back to the future. I've burned my last CD here, so my memory cards are ready to rock. I'm assuming the post office is closed, so I'll probably just hold onto the rest of my CDs until I head home. I have a nice box for them that the memory card reader came in. Isn't that conveeenient? In the meantime, it's showering, laundering, eating, movie watching and relaxing. Tomorrow morning it's provisioning. I'm not planning on spending a ten hour day eating train food. :P

Day 55 - Multicultural

Yesterday day was the Ethnology Museum. All I can say is Freaking w00t!!! Getting away from European art is definitely refreshing. I did see one painting of Christ and St. John the Baptist, but it was in the northwest native american modern art section and thouroughly unrecognizeable. Mostly it's different interpretations of human and animal shapes, with some unfamiliar mythology thrown in. I have scads of pictures and plan to return today to take more. Unfortunately, the one place I can burn CDs doesn't seem to be open today, and the memory card hasn't come in the mail yet. The story of german efficiency has become tiresome. The states, England, France, and even Italy (probably where the word italics comes from, as the Venetians invented it) deliver mail more reliably than Germany. How's that for a slap in the face? I'm trying to figure out if I need to swing back this way before going to Greece just to pick up my memory card. That's entertainment.

Yesterday night was the night life tour. Whoops. It was all of five clubs, all of which were mentioned in the free guide I picked up, and there was no techno on the tour. It was cool to get a little more history on the places, but it was only a little more than what the free guide said. The King Kong Klub (Yes, it spells KKK.) was cool. It's an expiremental venue. There was a guy singing and playing guitar, backing himself up with an iPod mini. There wasn't enough variety in his set, but for his apparent age and experience he did well. That was the place I got to do the most dancing, too. I would have gone techno clubbing afterwards, but it would have been costly and I would have been too tired to enjoy it. Well, that last part's probably a lie. Techno is energizing. I may have to trek out there tonight.

I got my train ticket for Krakow. Ten hours, and that's the direct train, and that's assuming no delays. Marjan, you were definitely right about eastern european rail. Ah well. It'll work out.

In the meantime, it's back to the museum! I've only been through the americas and half of the pacific islands. I still have the other half of the islands, africa, and india to go! I don't know how I'm ever going to make use of all this stuff, but it's too cool and too late to stop now!

Day 54 - Richard Wagner Platz

I'm having a little difficulty remembering what I did yesterday, so I named the entry after the street where I had a noontime snack. Heh. I think I remember my food from the day better than the day itself. For breakfast, still sick of müsli, I headed out and got some eggs. I scrambled them well and had them with grapefruit juice. I got burned out on grapefruit juice a while back, but if I have a glass of water before and after the juice, it's nice. Still on a bit of a protein kick, lunch was bread and an apple with a big bag of peanuts eaten a block east of Richard Wagner Platz because I wanted to find a bench in front of the church I wanted to stare at. Peanuts are hard to find here sometimes, which feels odd because they're hard to avoid in the states. For dinner I had two falafels and baklava. Quite possibly the greatest desert I ever had was baklava eaten in Rio. This was not nearly as good, but I should have enough time in Hungary and Greece to find its equal. So much for the food update. Let's catch up with the activities.

• Nightlife Tour. The time on the web site is wrong, so I missed the tour by a half hour. It was the perfect end to a cranky day. I was already feeling better at that point, so I didn't really mind.
• Busy Work. I booked reservations for Mama's Hostel in Krakow and A Plus Hostel in Prague. I still need to book the trains.
• Bröhan. The Bröhan was supposed to have art deco and art nouveau. It did, but you can't take any pictures because they want to sell you forty euro books. I liked the stuff, but not that much. I should mention that out of all the porcelain sculpture I've seen, I think the Bröhan had my favorite stuff. It had character, and personality, and used the characteristics of the medium to its advantage. So much porcelain statuary seems like it's trying to be marble, plastic, or something other than what it is.
• Old Museum. I took the metro across town and wandered my way to the antiquities museum. As an aside, the metro here is fabulous. It runs ever five minutes and it moves. The antiquities museum had some cool jewelry from a nomadic culture that was contemporary with the greeks. They were nomads and some of their artifacts were found as far north as Brandenberg. Then someone chased them off and they were never heard from again.
• Wondering. I'm still wondering what my interest is in these objects. The art deco glass looks fabulous, but even if it wouldn't poison you, would you dare drink from it? The same can easily be said of jewelry. I'm impressed by how detailed some of it is. I find the interplay of colors and shapes interesting. But I have no use for it in real life, do I? If nothing else, it enriches the textures I dream in, hardly justification, but an interesting side effect, nonetheless.
• Scrabble. A couple of hosteler's were playing scrabble. It was very fun to watch and be silly with them. They are both physics students (going for a masters and a PhD), so it was good nerdy fun. Geeking out is definitely one of my favorite activities. The highest scoring word of the evening was quark, at fifty six points.

That pretty much catches you up with the highlights. Today the plan is to visit some museums out near the botanical gardens. Lots of ancient art that is not Greek awaits. :O

Germans are so efficient. They can make that open mouth symbol with one letter. Ö They can do a smiley in one letter, too. Ü Now that's a big smile.

Day 52 - Ready For Some Nightlife

It was a cranky day today. I'm really sick of being cranky. It's a useless feedback loop. But it is fun to watch people get out of my way in museums when I'm in a bad mood. :P

Today was the Pergamon. The Pergamon does big better than anyone. They've basically rebuilt sections of temples and fortresses inside the museum. The roof is about twenty meters high so that you can check out all their majesty. It's nuts. I made myself cranky by forgetting to recharge my batteries. Luckily my iPod batteries had enough juice to get me through the day. In my continuing study of what makes some art interesting and some art not, I found it really interesting that a lot of the objects in the islaamic section of the Pergamon were lit from below, the same technique used by Wes Craven (or his lighting tech) to make the dream world of Nightmare on Elm Street seem unnatural. Given what I've been reading about German prejudice lately, I'm not sure I approve of the choice, although I thought the artifacts looked cool. Then again, I always keep an eye out for something that might inspire a DOOM wall texture or architectural motif, so maybe they really are trying to make the islaamic stuff look evil.

After that, I took off for the Old National Gallery. That was pretty cool. It's organized fairly similarly to the gallery I liked so much in Munich (the Alte Pinakotek). I largely whipped through it though. I was crochety over my batteries and other things. Also, german museums employ people to watch you at all times. I was told not to get too close to the paintings with my camera. It's not very conducive to the art appreciation experience to feel like you're being there is nothing but a potential problem. Heck, in the nigh deserted Kunstgewerber museum, the guards actually followed me around. Also, they don't want me to put my camera against glass cases to get good pictures of the items within. They don't light it brightly enough that you can take the picture by hand, you can't use the glass to steady your picture, and they don't have pictures of most of the smaller items in any books or card you can buy. What the %$}*. Fire that useless guard and shell out for new glass once a year. The museum will save thousands. And one last complaint regarding the Old National Gallery, the audio guide sucked. Too few works have description numbers. Half of the numbers are wrong. (At least they're written in a different way so you learn not to waste your time.) And your characterization of The Thinker doesn't match up with the description from the Rodin museum. Get it together.

Afterwards, I went over to the culinary school to grab dinner. No dice. They seem to have one menu a day and it doesn't cater to vegetarians. I could have had soup and some veggies in cheese sauce, not a dinner for someone covering as much ground as I do. I had another plate at my favorite turkish place, instead. I really dig that restaurant. The pasta I had today wasn't a culinary delight, but it was good, filling, and cheap. Additionally, the people who work there are always very nice and seem to really care if I'm enjoying my meal. I'll probably eat there more than a few more times before I leave.

Speaking of leaving, it's time to book accomodation in Krakow. Heck, I'd like to get my hostel arrangements out of the way for the month. We are in the last month now, and even as crochety as I've been, I'm going to miss this place and all the others. By the same token, I'm looking forward to not having to constantly relearn how to get basic necessities (food, transportaion, ATMs, laundry, etc.) handled. All right. Tonight is the nightclub tour, so I better get my butt in gear. Berlin is famous for its nightlife, and I'm looking forward to getting a broader feel for it.