Catie's Most Excellent Adventure

Next adventure Toronto

2011-11-07T06:17:00.001+13:00

Thanks for following this blog for so long - from Tanzania, Europe and Canada in 2008 to Turkey, Morocco and Spain in 2011. I've had so much fun writing it (and doing the travelling of course). I might resurrect this again if the travel bug hits again, but for now I'm focusing on setting up life here in Toronto. I'm here for at least two years, more if it goes well.

To that end I had set up a new blog: www.takingtoronto.blogspot.com. There's not much too it yet, and it primarily serves as an outlet for my writing and an escape from the endless resume and cover letter reviews. Still, as a picture of someone trying to make it in a new town it might make for an interesting read; that's my hope!

For Volunteer Africa hopefuls, my Tanzania experiences start in July 2008 and will hopefully give you a picture of the team, village and community you could be part of through HAPA and VA. I highly recommend it, if only so you can "one-up" all those people travelling through South America and South-East Asia. Africa trumps all other continents any day.

Long, interesting final day...

2011-10-25T10:42:00.000+13:00

By my calculations my yesterday lasted 19 hours - starting at 7.30am in Reykjavik to find a way to tune in to the All Blacks and finishing at 10.30pm in Canada (when it's 2.30am in Iceland) when I finally succumbed to jetlag.

So my alarm went at 7.30am and I grabbed my laptop to find a way to watch the game. There were a number of factors to this, the first being I don't have a European adaptor because I left it with Peggy so I borrowed one the night before from some Aussie girls so I would get my full four hours. The next was that the internet is like a magical promiseland where everything is available... unless you're in Iceland. I couldn't stream the game because every channel is country-specific, so I just got "This service is unavailable outside New Zealand/England/Italy" (The last one was in Italian, but still perfectly understandable after the two earlier messages.) BUT determination will find a way... I found a Christchurch sports radio station and three online newspapers live updating the game with photos AND skyped with Mum throughout. So no video, but lots of information :) It actually worked really well, because the radio people tell you all kinds of things you wouldn't otherwise know because they can't leave any silence and they have to try to "make you see".

Anyway... the All Blacks' win came 16 minutes before check out so I didn't really have time to be elated, had to throw everything around the room (actually, check out is kind of the opposite of that) and head out. Took one last walk around Reykjavik and reflected that it's a nice but weird city. Maybe it was just my timing, but the city didn't seem to have any residents. In two days I only saw tourists, or people working in tourist shops/restaurants. So who lives in the pretty lakeside houses?

The Blue Lagoon is THE thing you're meant to do if you only have two hours in Iceland so since I had two days I signed up for one of the many airport transfer including lagoon stop thingees. Very convenient. Pick up at 10.30, get to the lagoon before midday, pick up at 2pm, get to the airport at 2.30pm for your 5pm flight.

I was a bit dubious about the lagoon because it sounded so touristy and overly organised. I pictured pools and loungers and not being able to move because of all the people but it was, in fact magical. The water really is blue thanks to some kind of mineral/algae/natural phenomenon. (Pfff, that was an awesome explanation, I don't know what you're complaining about. Just google it.) It's a natural hot pool and the steam rises up over rough volcanic rock surrounding it, and over the rocks you can see a geothermal power station. It's very atmospheric and despite getting there late in the morning it wasn't too busy until after 1pm. I hopped out about then and got some lunch then went for a walk to take a million photos. Highly recommended experience :)

So then another airport, another plane, finished two books, watched Super 8... Arrived in Toronto and was picked up by Faith, a family friend from way back. She has a lovely house where I will be staying for a while to job hunt and set up some kind of life.

I do have some really sad news. Tragic even. I bought a bottle of Hendricks Gin duty free because it is the elixir of the gods and is expensive and special and a big treat... and somewhere between plane and house it broke (insert vehement swearing here). So now I have no gin AND spent my morning cleaning all my gin soaked stuff. Peggy, I think the gin shrank my black wool hat. Remember how it was a bit too big? Now it fits quite well :p Anyway, since I have three members of my immediate family visiting in the next four months I'm sure I can convince one of them that all I want for Christmas is Hendricks Gin.

So that's probably all from me on here. If you want to know about the job hunting//life creating let me know, I could always convert this to a "Catie whines about how hard the job market is" blog, or "The things that really annoy Catie about moving countries". But mostly, thanks for tuning in. I'll be back when I next have a plane ticket somewhere exciting.

Góðan dag

2011-10-23T11:52:00.000+13:00

Hello from Reykjavik, of all places. It is very very cold. I am taking a break from the cold to thaw out my feet and figure out how to watch the rugby tomorrow! Maybe I will be able to watch it online? It seems a little complicated.

So I got to London fine and spent four days catching up with Sophie, Laura and Paul who I have known since high school/uni. It was really wonderful to see them, we drank a lot of red wine (and some sake) and ate a lot of food. I also bought a new camera, yay, and made it to Camden Market (bought a bowler hat - it's fantastic) and Tate Modern. Paul played tour guide for three of those days, I got lots of good history about pubs, architecture and where he used to live.

Friday I flew out to Reykjavik, arriving very late at night, and tried to sleep in to make up for it but I'm bad at sleeping in now. I'm getting a cold, and I think it's winning. Lame. Reykjavik is really pretty, but quite expensive. It's not so much that every item is overpriced, but that they don't seem to have the cheap and cheerful options so don't expect presents from Iceland!

I saw the Leif Erikson monument, which is outside Reykjavik's cathedral, Hallgrímskirkja. The statue was a gift from the USA in 1930 for the 1000th anniversary of Iceland establishing a parliament. Ooooh. The cathedral is really neat, modern and imposing. I just googled it and apparently it's the tallest building in Iceland. Another Oooh please :)

I'm getting sick so I just wandered around for three hours then came back to nap. Socialised with dorm-mates and in the lounge for a bit and now early to bed so that, fingers crossed, I can stream the NZ-France game online in the morning. So excited! If it doesn't work I'll be totally gutted.

Next stop Toronto so probably just one more blog to tell you how the game, the Blue Lagoon and the flight go tomorrow, then I'll be far to busy having a life to write on here twice a week ;)

Barcelona and beyond

2011-10-19T02:21:00.001+13:00

So many changes in the past 24 hours - and so many to come! Let's start where I left you, I guess?

So we got the early train to Barcelona arriving about 2pm, hostel by 3pm and out the door again shortly after. We thought we'd check out La Sagrada Familia but the queue was around the block so we walked to Park Guell, Gaudi's model community attempt. It's like a Dr Seuss fun house park - so crazy but so cool. Spent a couple hours there before heading back to the hostel and grabbing dinner (microwave paella - very authentic). We went out for mojitos that night and just soaked up a never sleeping city. It was lovely. We found a bar where Hemingway and Miro used to drink (maybe not together...?) but it was choca so we got crepes instead. Good alternative plan, I say.

Sunday we had an amazing day! Started with the rugby, NZ vs Australia, for the semi-finals. We watched the heart-wrenching, seat-tipping amazing game, surrounded by Kiwis at "Flaherty's" off La Rambla. We had a lot of fun. We cheered when NZ got the ball at one point and a drunk Aussie behind us said "Don't clap yet girls" and then we scored and I was like "Can we clap now???"

Then we accidentally ran into a parade! There were big puppets and music and those climbing groups you see pictures of, where they make big human pyramids? So much fun! It was some kind of cultural party thing and we followed it for about four blocks until it stopped in a square. It's the kind of unplanned magic that really makes your trip extra special.

Then the big shit of the day - I dropped and broke my camera. I'm planning to buy a new one here in London because I already feel ghost-limby without my camera. Have lodged an insurance claim so we'll see how that goes, but mostly I'll just pay for a new one and hope I ever see something from insurance.

It was Peggy and my last night together :( So I took us out for a Visa-inspired tapas meal, which was STUPENDOUS. We checked out a few menus as we walked around today and saw a place we liked the look of, with reasonable prices, which turned out to be a mission to find again but so worth it. It was called Xaloc and was in the middle of the Jewish quarter of the Gothic area.

We got six tapas - an olive selection, gazpacho, roast red pepper, onions and eggplant, chorizo and potato meatballs, fish fritters and a warm apple and goat's cheese salad. Plus fries. The gazpacho was a miss and the roast veges were unexpectedly cold but even that was fun because that's tapas - whatever you get is it! Everything else was delicious and we had it with sangria :) The meatballs, or "bombas" were crispy on the outside and squishy yummy a little spicy inside - with aioli on top. Goat's cheese is so magical, I saved that for last. The home fries were just roughly chopped potato deep fried and the "fritters" were just chunks of fish deep fried - so good!

It took us about an hour to work our way through that. It's always surprising how filling tapas is. We waited a bit and ordered dessert. We basically ordered the two things that confused us on the assumption that if they were bad we would get waffles on our way home. They weren't bad :) We got chocolate fritters and "cinnamon and milk fried bread". The first was basically chunks of dark dark chocolate in donut batter, deep fried and sprinkled with sugar. O.M.G. It was a magical experience. I would buy a deep fryer purely in the hope of repeating that experience. The bread was unusual, but yummy. It seemed to be a chunky piece of milk-soaked bread, covered in cinnamon and somehow fried so that outer layer was crispy. Came with hazelnut ice cream and was heaven.

Enough about food? Probably :) Basically Sunday was amazing, minus a little incident of breaking vital, expensive equipment.

Monday we got up early to get to La Sagrada Familia before it opened. I saw it in 2008 and was very excited because now the central part is open. It is so overwhelming, and really interesting to see as an example of a modern cathedral. Words don't do it justice but the sculptures are moving, the inspiration from nature is clear and the scale is worthy of comparison to any great cathedral around the world.

After that the flea market (I got a bag) and then some camera browsing... then just back to the hostel to head to the airport for me. It was a sad goodbye at the train station because Peggy and I have had so much fun and now we won't see each other for months but it's nice to be in London catching up with people I haven't seen for years.

Not sure when I'll next update, I'm in an internet cafe now and won't be able to charge my laptop in Reykjavik so we'll see what ends up being convenient.

2011-10-15T07:37:00.000+13:00

Eep - so behind!

Lisbon was really cool. We spent day two there just wandering the streets. There's a Moorish district, which is sort of medina-esque, but with plumbing and minus the scary men, and we found a great viewpoint over the harbour. It was interesting because it had a lot of similar characteristics to Seville, but wasn't as obsessively maintained so it felt more lived in and authentic. Like the city wasn't obsessing over its history, was just living around it. Very cool.

We got an evening train to Porto and got to our hostel about 9.30pm and I'd been a bit sick so it was an early night and a late morning then just four hours walking around Porto. A really lovely city, it just felt comfortable. It's a university town built across a big river with hills on either side so there's lots of stunning scenery and neat sights, but also a lot of hills to climb! It was one of those places you say "Yeah, I could live here." You know, with caveats like employment and speaking at least a little of the language.

Wednesday we headed to Coimbra, which is also where our night train was leaving from. It's meant to be a really lovely pretty town and it seemed quite nice but the heatwave struck and we melted! It got up to at least 35 degrees, and there was a mean, scorching edge to the direct sunlight so we made our way sloooowly up the hill to the university (which dates from the 1200s and is one of Europe's oldest, oooh) and then bought icecream on our way down but I don't think we took much in. A few degrees less heat and it would have been great! So night train left at 7pm and we were on our way back to Spain. We really loved Portugal. I keep telling Peggy to move there so I have a reason to come back, and she's pretty tempted :)

Arrived in San Sebastian at 6.30am yesterday and made it to our hostel to dump our bags then left to track down breakfast. Nothing really opened until 7.30 at the earliest so we grabbed a couple croissants to tide us over but eventually found a pretty decent breakfast, including hot drink. Peggy got their specialty of brioche and jam while I got the "catalan" breakfast of tomato and olive oil on toast - delicious. We spent the morning dragging ourselves around the city. It's really really pretty and there's lots to see so we did have fun, but we were so tired (this particular night train sucked - uncontrolled children and argumentative couples, ick) that everything was hilarious. So, yeah, good times had by us. Check in was 1pm so we ate lunch and took naps after that :) Went for another walk but didn't get up to much in the evening, just food and bed.

Today we went to Bilbao, to see the Guggenheim Museum there, which is amazing. It's all fluid metal that looks like it should move or grow. It was a really beautiful building that pictures don't really do justice to. After that a tram to the old town and to go to the Basque (Euskal) Museum. There wasn't a lot of info in English but it was really interesting. The Basque language is fascinating because it's not related to anything around it, as you can tell from reading signs - nothing in it is familiar. It's not even an Indo-European language, which is so mind-blowing. I'll definitely be doing more research there.

This afternoon we walked up the only hill in San Sebastian, which has a big statue of Jesus on top. The game all the way up was "Have you found Jesus yet?" and then when we found him he had a big cell phone aerial out his head, which I thought was hilarious and so practical! I mean, say you live in a reasonably flat coastal town surrounded by hills, cell reception has to be a bitch, right? So your options are build a big ugly tower on your nearest hill, ruining one of your town sights because there's an old fortress up there, OR you could adapt the big statue someone put up a couple hundred years ago so Jesus is not only watching over your city, he's also connecting your calls. Smart, I say, and just a little disrespectful. I respect that.

Tomorrow Barcelona, on the 7.30am train. Ouch.

Cork and castles - hello Portugal.

2011-10-10T06:29:00.000+13:00

What did I last write? I just made Peggy look it up so now I know - we had shopped and eaten. We didn't go out for a drink but we did find chocolate cake at a random Mexican restaurant near our hostel.

We made it an early night, but our dorm was quite loud so we didn't sleep well. We had a massive day planned and managed to get it all done! Up at 6.50am, out by 7.30, train station at 8am, bought all our tickets for the day and left our big bags in a locker at the station to make our way to Segovia.

A pretty little town half an hour from Madrid, it is famous for it's impressive Roman aqueduct, which was supremely cool. It also has a big cathedral and a fairytale-esque fortress. We skipped going through the cathedral and made our way to the Alcazar, which has princess turrets and a big tower. We climbed all 152 steps of the tower - which was more really because just before the tower Peggy made us go to the cellar so that was added to our total. It was quite a tight spiral, but well worth the effort (and the two euro) for the view. We wandered the palace for over an hour, and spent four hours altogether in the pretty town, and took a ridiculous number of photos.

After Segovia we headed back to Madrid and got there at 4.30pm, then took the metro all the way to the other train station to see the modern art museum, Reina Sofia, which has a lot of Picasso and Dali works, including Guernica. It's free after 2.30 on Saturdays and we got there about 5.30pm but it wasn't too busy, except in the Guernica room. All the Picasso works were fantastic - he communicates stories and emotions so well. I'm not as much a Dali fan. I have the constant feeling that I don't "get it". We only spent an hour there because we skipped the top two floors, which are mostly temporary exhibits. Then dinner out and a metro all the way back to Chamartin train station arriving at 9.20pm, an hour before our night train to Lisbon arrived. How romantic does that sound? I took the night train to Lisbon. I slept through most of it, although neither of us slept all that well.

Today we got to our hostel early, ate breakfast, chilled out for a bit then headed to Sintra, the "must do" day trip from Lisbon. It's a lovely town, with lots to see. I figured out we walked more than 10 kilometres over four hours, with half that uphill. It was tiring but great. I saw the Moorish Castle - an 8th century fortress with stunning views across Lisbon and towards all the other, more recent, palaces in the area. It was a great trip topped with really good hamburgers. We keep meaning to try local foods, but our budget likes the hamburger deals offered at tourist places. Six euro for a cheeseburger, salad, fries and drink? Yes please...

Back at the hostel we've just chilled out. We're kind of amazingly tired but we're fighting it off so we can sleep well tonight. Overall it's been a huge couple of days including seven metro rides, five train rides totalling 13 hours, plus about ten hours of walking and not nearly enough sleeping! I wasn't going to post again so soon but I figured if I didn't post today I'd end up with 20 pages of news next time.

Real Madrid

2011-10-08T03:55:00.000+13:00

Do you see what I did there? No? Oh... it's the football team. So it's like a joke - real/Real Madrid. Still no? Nevermind...

I'm a few days behind. . . What have we been doing? Seville was beautiful and amazing, we had a really great time there. I would highly recommend. On... Tuesday? Yes. Tuesday we headed to Granada to see Alhambra, this amazing hillside fortress. Long story short, they are dumb and have a limited number of tickets per day and we missed out so instead we ate pasta with a stolen fork outside the cathedral. It was a nice day anyway :)

Got to Madrid quite late and had a bit of a mission to find our hostel, which made Peggy and I both a bit grumpy. In the end we got a taxi, which cost less than three euro and was totally worth it. Wednesday we were going to go to the palace but it was shut until 1.30pm and then the queue was massive so we skipped it. We went to the Prado, the big old art gallery full of El Greco and Goya. I had an amazing time. I wasn't very familiar with El Greco so was blown away by his large-scale works. His style is so different to anything before or even after him for a few hundred years. Peggy could probably have done the gallery in half the time but was very patient with me. We went to a nearby park and ate ice cream afterwards. It was idyllic.

Yesterday we went to Toledo. It was a bit of a non-stop drama to get there, but once we made it it was lovely. El Greco lived there at the end of his life so the museum has a lot of his works, as well as some well preserved medieval statues and tapestries. The cathedral was huge, it went forever and included a planted courtyard. The last of the top three stops is the Iglesias de Santo Tome, which has a big alterpiece by El Greco. We got to the church but decided we were church-weary so we ate ice cream and walked around instead.

Today was designated a plan-nothing day and plan nothing we did. I went to find a second hand bookstore I had read about, but it was closed when I got there. The good news is all the clothing stores were open so I may have a few new things to fit in my bag now. Peggy and I split for the morning, she stayed at the hostel a bit later then went for a walk so she didn't have to put up with my umming and awwing (is there an official spelling for that phrase?) over dresses. I found a great store called Sfera - very cute and very reasonable prices. I got a gorgeous black dress and also found a cardigan from a different shop. So yes, I had fun :) On the way back the bookshop was open so I picked up a few things. More than I probably should have, but I couldn't resist the one euro table.

This afternoon we went for another walk around the area our hostel is in. Ate hamburgers, bought a sim card, window shopped... Peggy bought an adorable skirt, which is not very practical for travel so I'm very proud. Now we're resting and deciding whether to go out for a drink tonight. We have quite an early start tomorrow but I'm keen to experience some of the famous (infamous?) Spanish nightlife. Oh well - maybe in Barcelona.

Sevilla

2011-10-04T01:31:00.000+13:00

Some oddbits first and an update at the bottom.

I have been collecting tidbits that I keep forgetting to put into posts – partly because they're juvenile (like Ufuk hostel, where we didn't stay) and partly because I'm generally forgetful.

One long-running joke in Turkey was about the bus company Kamilcok... We never ended up riding Kamilcok, but often saw it around Turkey. I also laughed at the Lecheria in Tangier. If your French is up to scratch then you'll know it served milkshakes, but the name seemed to suit most of Morocco. They could rename it Lecheria, or Lechopolis, Lecherton...

Last giggle is courtesy of a man in Tangier who clearly has no idea where NZ is...

Him: Where are you from?

Peggy: New Zealand.

Him: Aaah, Irish.

Me: Um. No. New Zealand? Kiwi? Near Australia.

Him: Aaah. I like Scottish Whisky.

Peggy: Okay... Good.

So Seville is pretty. We walked around a lot yesterday (three hours) and this morning (five hours) and were generally pleased with the openness and colours. Made it to a flamenco show – very passionate! The dancer looked like she was in pain most of the performance, but I think that was on purpose. They sell a lot of dresses and combs and fans here, I'm tempted to bring home a flamenco costume but they cost upwards of 150 euros so I guess no.

Today we saw the cathedral and the Real Alcazar, the palace here which was first built in the 9^th century and then added to and adapted for another 800 years. It's huge with a beautiful garden. A highlight was the musical fountain. I haven't had much luck googling it but basically as water runs behind it a drum spins and makes an organ play – it was really fun! We spent about two hours there altogether, it was another beautiful palace that made me think maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be a princess.

We had seen postcards of a really neat plaza so we made our way slowly through alleyways and across squares to Plaza de Espana. It was more recent than the cathedral or palace – built in 1929 for some international expo – but in an older style that was reminiscent of the tile work we saw in Morocco. It was a lovely space with a canal running around the outside. Now we're back in the hostel for siesta (actually it's because no one else is using the shower at the moment. There's one shower for 14 people so mornings and evenings are too busy.) Lots of things close from 2.30 to 4.30 (very civilised) so we figure we'll head out around 5pm and maybe do some shopping :)

Ole!

2011-10-03T04:08:00.000+13:00

We have made it to Europe - hurrah. It was a long awaited , exciting arrival which required a train, a ferry, a bus AND a tram to get us to Oasis Palace Sevilla - in beautiful Seville.

Fes was a bit disappointing. There were some good sites and our hostel was pretty but we took a tour of the medina with the hostel and our guide clearly didn't give a shit about what we experienced. Every stop included a sales pitch from someone so while it was amazing to see 1100 year old tanneries and learn about traditional medicines and carpet making, then having leather, spices and carpets aggressively sold to you is a little off-putting. I wouldn't discourage anyone from going to Morocco, but we both found it tiring to put up with the non-stop sales pitches and people trying to rip you off. We decided to just take Saturday morning off and chill out before going to Tangier

Taxi to the train station, train (very hot and sticky and uncomfortable) to Tangier where we found a random cheap hotel near the port. It was worn but clean and it did the trick - much like Tangier which was more open and less smelly than Fes so thumbs up there. We got the 8am ferry to Tarifa, which really left at 8.30 and was so rough kids were crying and lots of people were being sick. Through focus and staunchness Peggy and I did not fall into either of those categories but we were horridly uncomfortable. Bus to Algeciras, bus to Seville, tram to Plaza near hostel, walk to hostel, cue collapse.

We have two nights here, and we're trying to figure out how to best spend the next 15 days. Seville is beautiful so we're going to go for an evening walk and then do some research about where we want to go next.

Marrakech express

2011-09-30T08:56:00.000+13:00

So I left you in the airport, right?

The flight was uneventful. We got into Casablanca about 7pm but missed the 8pm train so didn't actually reach the city until 9.30pm then a taxi to our hostel and sleep. The hostel was lovely, really pretty, but Casablanca was very meh. Ugly and smelly... not a great introduction to this country. We escaped on the 11am train, after seeing the third biggest mosque in the world, ooooh.

Made it to Marrakech and our hostel, again very pretty and cheap - Morocco is so cheap, I just want to go mad! We do have to learn to say no... Mum told me she had a feeling Morocco was where we would get robbed, and while we haven't been mugged or pick pocketed we've sort of been robbed by our own inability to say no forcefully. Yesterday we were watching a snake charmer (for real!) and got snakes wrapped around us and took photos. I was happy to give them some money but they kept pushing for more and more so I have no idea whether we gave them a fair amount. Then these super pushy women drew on us with henna without being asked and demanded money too and we couldn't just walk away (well, now we could because we're meaner than we were). It cast a bit of a pall on the city at first but we've seen so much amazing stuff that the magic is slowly winning us back. And I figured out that between the two of us we lost a total of nine euros... it's kind of like a game we lost rather than an actual fraud.

The souks are amazing! You really can buy anything but they're especially known here for ceramics, leatherwork and metalwork. It's great to see people actually making stuff in a shop - makes you believe them when they say it was all handmade here. Everyone keeps telling us things are "for good luck" and telling us they hope we get married soon to a rich man... Feminism hasn't really reached Marrakech yet, I think. Or if it has, it's not very loud.

Today we visited the Palais de la Bahia, Palais el-Badi and the Saadian Tombs. All very impressive, and very different from each other. The first is known as "the brilliant" the 19th century palace was intended to be the greatest of its time. It's ornate but not fussy, it's the kind of palace where you think "yeah, I could live here." Lots of courtyards and garden areas, carved stonework and tiled floors. Palais el-Badi is from the 1500s and most of it was taken in the 1700s to build stuff in Meknes so there's not a lot left but what's there is huge. You definitely get a sense of scale! The Saadian Tombs only recently opened to the public and were really beautiful, plus, kittens! Again, lots of tiles and carved stone. It's hard to describe the stonework. At first it looks like wood carvings with very intricated interlocking patterns but it's really carved into the stone of the building. Repeated geometric shapes and Koran verses are common.

Tonight we're getting a night bus to Fes (yay Fes, less yay night bus) so we have a whole day there to explore, and do laundry! We're running a bit low on essentials. We only have a few days in Morocco so we're really focusing on the Imperial Cities - Marrakesh, Fes and Meknes. Then Tangier and then on to Spain!

Goodbye Turkey

2011-09-28T01:37:00.002+13:00

So... long time no update. Well. Five days? That's not so bad. Another long update I think.

Well we've shaken the Turkish dust off our Chucks and will soon replace it with Moroccan sand... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back a bit.

Thursday was the epic tour then Friday we intended to be up early to go to the Goreme Open Air Museum but were both tired so “early” ended up being 9am. We got there just before 10am, along with all the tour groups. Peggy was quite sick so there were a few moments of frustration but she persevered (she's pretty tough when she has to be) and we saw some truly amazing churches including the “buckle” church, with very well preserved frescoes in the windowless chapel. You're not meant to take photos but I took a couple sneaky ones (shhhh) because its being restored and that's not something you often see on postcards.

That evening we wanted to go for a sunset horse ride but the weather looked dubious so we decided to do that somewhere else if we can. Maybe it will be camels in Morocco! Instead we souvenir shopped (I got a lovely ring) and ate some dinner.

Saturday we were up early to see hundreds of hot air balloons take off for the sunrise tours. It's meant to be a don't-miss-it experience, but at 110 euros it was more of a ha-as-if on our budget. It was amazing to see all the balloons, but the weather was pretty overcast so I felt a bit sorry for people in the balloons. If we can't see them they definitely can't see the ground very well!

Then a 7am bus to Ankara for an afternoon there. Turned into a bit of a meh. We tried to find Ataturk's Mausoleum but got lost so we just ate lunch in a really nice park. It was fun anyway :) Ankara seemed like quite a nice city. Onto a 6pm bus to Safranbolu, which we had read great stuff about in Lonely Planet but lots of fellow travellers we talked to hadn't even heard of so our expectations were middling. We arrived after 9.30pm so there wasn't a lot to see, straight to our hostel and bed.

The next morning we headed out after breakfast and were blown away. It's an historic town centre of well-kept Ottoman houses from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The houses are really beautiful and we went into one of the museum houses, set up like a traditional Ottoman home complete with creepy mannequins posed cooking, eating, sewing and talking.

The best part was the market. Handmade wooden and metal stuff, from pots and pans to toys and jewellery, were everywhere as well as clothing, textiles, lokum (Turkish delight) and tacky souvenirs. It was so much fun, all together I think we spent four or five hours there throughout the day. Peggy got a great jewellery box as a souvenir and we bought 300gm of lokum and ate most of it on the day.

The hostel we were in was an old house so it was very atmospheric, if a bit stuffy, and with somewhat antique plumbing! Our dorm was windowless, which was odd to wake up and not know if it was 3am, 8am or 1pm!

Monday we headed to Istanbul, it was basically just a travelling day. We left Safranbolu about 10am and got to our hostel at 9pm. Tuesday our flight left at 4.30pm so we spent the morning posting stuff and going to the Archaeological Museum. It's got a great Ancient Orient section, which was so well displayed with really detailed, well-kept items dating back to 18^th century bce – so very old and very cool. There were even legal decisions, love letters and contracts all written in pictograms on clay.

Now we're at the airport waiting for our flight, with free wifi, yay. Not sure the internet situation in Casablanca so we'll see how often this gets updated from there.

Turkey was beautiful, with Goreme and Safranbolu standing out as pretty, fun and friendly centres. I'm a third of the way through my trip and Peggy's barely even started hers – it's so exciting to not know what's next!

Photos

2011-09-25T20:00:00.000+13:00

Not really an update, last couple days have been quiet but I'll write about them eventually. This is just to give anyone not on facebook a link to the pictures we've been posting. It's a public link so you should be able to see all the pics:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2337743050292.133853.1451350354&l=364a32f00b&type=1

I've put up about 30 so far and will keep adding one or two from each place as we go. I think that link should work permanently.

Rock and roll...

2011-09-23T03:40:00.000+12:00

Warning: mega-blog. We had a couple quite big days so this is likely to be long.

So yesterday (Wednesday) after Peggy recovered we decided to walk to a place I picked on a map. It could have been quite the let down but instead it was amazing! We should follow all my whims...

Cavusin (with accents missing) is 4km from Goreme and has two famous churches. We walked there in about 40 minute, enjoying the view of coconut ice mountains and top heavy peaks. The colour lines are amazing, you can tell what is the softer rock because there are big red layers on top of very skinny green layers. At the town we got a bit turned around, browsed tacky souvenirs and ate ice cream before asking directions.

We found Cavusin Church, carved out of stone two stories up and painted with frescoes of bible stories. I found this youtube video of pictures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCjbQRw5Lk. I didn't listen to the sound, it probably has some tacky music to go with it, but it shows you what we saw. It was really stunning, I wished we had a book of explanations to go with it - even Google hasn't been able to answer all my questions!

There were lots of labyrinthian places to climb and explore, many with great views so we were intrepid and climbed into places chiselled out of the rock by hand about 1500 years ago. One of the views was of the famous fairy chimneys (that's the polite name, there are some rude jokes about them too since they're longer than they are wide.) They were close enough to reach and touch so we got some pretty wicked pictures. I'll post some here, hopefully, and some are already on Facebook.

Today we signed up to an epic eight hour, 300km tour. It was the best way to see everything we wanted to see because the alternative was taking a hundred little buses. So we started at 9.30am with a drive to Derinkuyu, an underground city.

We spent about an hour wandering around up to (down to?) 100 metres underground. The city was started in 700bc and people just kept adding to it, including persecuted Christians in 200ad. It's very extensive, goes down 200 metres and has about 8 layers. The purpose was to hide from weather, animals and enemies so the tunnels were kept quite short, to slow them down. That all added up to some very narrow, very low twisty stairways. Bent in half, trying to see ahead of you and trying not to fall, thereby causing a massive domino down the entire pathway, was something of a challenge. At one point on the long-way-down we had to squish 18 people into a passing bay the size of a large closet to let a group going up past. We saw churches, stables, bedrooms and kitchens, all underground. I wanted to buy a proper map of the place to look at it better but they only sold cartoony ones.

After that we headed to Ihlara Valley for a 4km walk by a river at the bottom of a gorge. It too was a hiding place for early Christians, and later a pilgrimage/hermit site. There are a lot of old churches and paintings in the area and it was really lovely to explore. It was very wet and green, too, which was a big change from the dry Turkey we've been seeing. Lunch was at the end of the walk, but some sloooow people (Americans, pff.) held us up at least 20 minutes - quite a long time if you're waiting for lunch after a one hour walk!

After lunch the Selime Monastery - yet another stunning location. Peggy and I loved exploring the caves and carved out rooms. We were quite intrepid and ended up high up in odd rooms and in a pitch-black area above the school. It was so much fun, we were all meant to only have 20 minutes (thanks to silly slow people) but we took about double that. Plus a million and a half photos. Just wait till I start posting those!

By this time we have climbed up and down countless stairs, hiked 4km and clambored all over a cliffside monastery so we were exhausted. A lot of people slept in the van for the ride back. We stopped briefly to look over Pigeon Valley, where people kept pigeons (surprise!) for messages, fertilizer and their eggs which were used as primer for cave paintings.

We were supposed to go to an onyx demonstration but our guide let us take a vote and we all voted home. It was an amazing day. We've got plans tomorrow for the Goreme Open Air Museum in the morning and a surprise for our viewers at home at sunset so hopefully we'll be looking at three for three.

Cappadocia has by far been my favourite location. I really think we could spend our whole two weeks here and not get bored. We've been spoiled for any less dramatic vistas, too. Show us a mountain and we'll just sneer.

Geology rocks...

2011-09-21T21:14:00.000+12:00

Wednesday here, we're settled into our hostel in Goreme, which is stunning!

Monday we did basically nothing until 3.30 when we saw the Temple of Artemis in Selcuk and the local museum. The temple used to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but now it's barely even a pile of rocks. You do get a sense of scale from it but it also shows just how impressive it is when something survives 2500 years because so much doesn't survive. Museum was small but well put together. Saw a 2000 year old backgammon table and a lot of busts. Someone "christianised" a bunch of them by scraping crosses in their foreheads sometime in the last 1000 years. Classy.

Tuesday we got the bus to Pamukkale and we didn't really know what to expect but had heard good things. Those good things were so underplayed! Pamukkale was amazing - it's a stark white ridge line with water cascading down it into small terraced pools and across rock slopes. You walk up barefoot and can go into some of the pools. It was beautiful, a lot of the photos look like glaciers. If you put someone up there in ski gear it would look right, but they would probably die of heat stroke. I would love to go back one day and spend the entire day there, from sunrise onwards.

Night bus from there to Goreme, in Cappadocia. Cappadocia is famous for its "fairy chimneys" - huge rock towers across the region. It's all blah blah erosion/geology/magic but the end result is phenomenal. Goreme is built in amongst these outcrops with houses, including our hostel, built into the rock. Today we're going to do a walk of the area. Peggy didn't sleep well on the bus so she's napping in preparation for the snappy pace I'll set ;) Tomorrow we're doing a tour of some of the further away sites including an underground city and a valley where early Christians hid from... the bad guys. Whoever the bad guys were at the time.

All caught up here and in my journal and still on budget - one week in and I'm still passing for a grown up.

Troia, Gelibolu, Ephesus etc.

2011-09-19T01:16:00.000+12:00

Sooo... Where was I? About to check out and head South? Basically Friday ended up being a write off thanks to a few choice pieces of bad information. I can't be bothered, but you can read about it on Peggy's blog, The Pegiad, if you want to know. The punchline is we arrive in Eceabat about 6pm without time to get to Troy. We got some food, hung out with some people and went to bed early to get Troy and Gallipoli done in a day.

Up early to catch the 8am ferry to Canakkale to get a dolmus (mini-bus) to Troy... Except more bad information means we have to wait 45 minutes for a bus and end up with less than an hour at Troy. Peggy studied the city and the history of its discovery so she was an excellent guide and I learned a lot on our speed tour :) We were worried about missing the ferry to make it to our Gallipoli tour so I pounced on an unsuspecting couple headed to Canakkale to ask for a lift. They spoke no English, we speak less than no Turkish (when I try to say thank you people just look baffled - that's anti-communication.) So the nice people took us back to the ferry and we were only a little late for our tour.

I was especially focused on seeing Gallipoli. It's such a huge part of our national history and identity, I knew it would mean a lot. As it turned out I was almost crying by the first stop. It was a moving, emotional experience on a beautiful coastline where thousands of young men died. I was especially shocked that a quarter of the Australians and New Zealanders who died were never found. Anyway, not so much a happy trip, but I'm glad we went and now I can really picture what we were taught in history class.

After that we had about three hours to kill before our bus. Our hostel (Hotel Crowded House) was great, they let us shower and hang out despite having checked out almost 12 hours earlier. We interneted, charged stuff, fixed my "f" key on my laptop, wrote postcards and updated diaries... and there was still more than an hour to go. Waiting sucks. Then we were told the bus would be late by about an hour. That turned out to be more like an hour and a half, and at that time ferries are only every hour so we finally left Canakkale two hours late, at 12.30am. Didn't bother us too much in the end because otherwise we would have reached Selcuk at 5am.

How long is this? How boring? If the answer to both those is "too" then you should have skipped ahead.

So today (Sunday) we arrived in Selcuk at 7am, got picked up by our hostel and got to check in about 8am, totally unheard of usually but I guess the room was already clean. We decided to hit Ephesus, an ancient city. It's huge, and fairly well preserved. It's not far from our hostel so we walked over the hill. It took about an hour but I really enjoyed getting off my arse and being active. There's been a lot of sitting lately!

Spent almost three hours walking around Ephesus. It's amazing to sit somewhere and think that 1000 years ago someone probably sat in the exact same place. The signs were really good so we didn't miss having a guide. Instead we went our own pace, resting frequently in the shade so Peggy's thermostat didn't overload. Ice cream, a dolmus back to town, some grocery shopping and a shuttle back to our hostel. Rock and roll.

Now we're deciding what to do tomorrow between nothing and Aqua Fantasy water park. I'll let you know what we pick

Boats, dried avocado and the sumptuous palace...

2011-09-16T18:59:00.000+12:00

Thought I'd get one more update in before Peggy and I check out... But now I've forgotten where I finished on Wednesday. Before the Grand Bazaar or after?

Before. So we hung out in the cool for a while and worked out our next steps. Emailed some queries, checked some details. About 3pm we headed towards the Grand Bazaar. It was easy to find because it's well signposted so we got there easily enough. For those that haven't been there it's basically a huge indoor market that's like a rabbit warren with lanes, alleyways, twisting paths and a lot of people shouting at you. The best interchange I had went like this:

Seller: "Buy one for your mother-in-law!"
Me: *smirk*
Seller: "Or for my mother."

Points to him for making me laugh - most people just shout "Ladies! Ladies!"

We knew we wanted to buy pashminas here, there's no shortage of stalls but a lot are owned by the same people. We looked for ones that specified their scarves were 100% cashmere or described the blend and ended up in a little shop looking at hundreds of scarves.

The seller there kept calling me "babyface" which did not go over well... so he switched to "crazy girl", which I somehow preferred. He tried to tell us the scarves would be 120 lira each... we laughed and laughed. Eventually we got them for 50 lira for both. Certainly a lot less than he said but its hard to know if that's really a fair price. Regardless, I enjoyed the bargaining and the final cost was something we were happy with. Unfortunately it's so hot we can't wear them! Peg got a lovely 100% cashmere blue-grey one and I got a teal cashmere/silk scarf.

We wandered a lot then got lost trying to get home. We decided to just walk in a circle around the bazaar, which worked eventually but we ended up in a lot of areas that were obviously where Turkish people shopped. It was cool to see the "real" Istanbul and no one shouted at us on those streets. The thing that stood out was the extreme dresses! They would make those Big Fat Gypsy Weddings proud. Plus heaps of shiny fur lined capes for little boys. Maybe there's some kind of occasion where little boys where big capes?

Eventually made it away from there and decided to hit the Spice Bazaar, which is very close to our hostel. It was super crowded so we didn't meander, just walked through and goggled at things like circus tea and dried avocado (yuck? Stay tuned to find out...)

Home again home again we relaxed, cooked some dinner... what else? Not much. I fell asleep about 9.30 on Peggy's bed but she made me wake up and get ready for bed properly so I stayed up until the respectable hour of 10pm. Take that jetlag!

Yesterday we headed to the ferry to see the Asian side of the city. It turned out to be a bit boring, a bit dirty and quite crowded. On our way back on the ferry we were debating what to do. We still had Topkapi Palace and the Archaeological Museum to see but neither of us felt much like walking. We considered just going to the hostel or a cafe to hang out but that sounded a bit boring... what to do? Spontaneously jump on a cruise, of course!

You can take 2 to 6 hour cruises of the Bosphorus so we took a two hour cruise for 10 lira and got to sit in the sun (or the shade if you're Peggy), enjoy the views and relax on the water. I loved it. Took heaps of pictures but they're probably rubbish.

Then back to the hostel for lunch/internet, But on our way we decided, when else would we be able to try dried avocado? Never! So we got some free samples, took a bite and thought "Hey, that's not so bad..." Then the aftertaste hit and we got this lasting wave of bitter metallic taste. Yuck. Some free samples of turkish delight helped :) So no, we don't suggest drying your avocado. I think it still had the skin on too...

That afternoon we hit Topkapi Palace. It. Was. Epic.

Huge, ornate and spacious - you could easily spend all day there with no issues. We had about three hours there and saw the harem, too. That was pretty spectacular. All the concubines, eunuchs and most of the royal family lived there and never really got to leave. Sultans used to kill all their brothers so they would plot to steal the throne, but by the 1500s they decided locking them in the "golden cage" was a good alternative. It was very beautiful and ornate, with some amazing views, but I can imagine it would start to feel more cage-like than golden after a while, especially for the concubines who would ever have known differently.

The rest of the palace is equally stunning, but tomes have been written on it so I won't describe it poorly here. We had an audioguide so learned that the kitchens cooked for up to 15000 people.

Mostly everyone was spread out but in some of the smaller rooms the queues got hugely backed up. In one such queue we couldn't figure out what people wanted to see and I noticed some people kissing the cabinet (and getting yelled at by the guards) we got out of the queue to a different space in the room and discovered it was the beard hair of Mohammed. Also on display: Moses' staff, a cup Mohammed once drank from and Mohammed's signet ring. Gotta love holy leftovers.

We got home tired and overheated. Our hostel runs a restaurant that delivers so with another guy in our dorm we got platters and dessert. It was delicious and nice to relax on the rooftop with views over the city and eat traditional food. Altogether a lovely day.

Now we have to check out so we can make our way to Canakkale and Troy, then Eceabat and Gallipoli tomorrow.

I love the sun

2011-09-14T22:22:00.004+12:00

Haha to all of you - it is 28 degrees, beautifully sunny with a light breeze so it's not too humid. That's right, I am in paradise and you're not. Sorry, had to get my gloat over with. Peggy and I are staying at Second Home Hostel in Istanbul and have made good use of our first morning in the city. We explored Sultahnamet, which is the older part of the city. We saw Hagia Sophia (1500 year old church converted to mosque converted to museum) which was stunning. Some really detailed frescoes and mosaics on the ceiling, 50 metres up. How did they do that in 500ad? A couple of the mosaics are of Jesus with emperors and leaders of the time, it reminded me of people who put up pictures of themselves with famous people. "This is that time I met that guy off Shortland Street in the supermarket and made him pose for a photo." Since I guess the only guy bigger than Constantine at the time was Jesus a detailed mosaic was the best alternative to a camera phone picture.

Then the Blue Mosque, oooh, where we had to cover our legs and shoulders but not heads. The Basilica Cistern, still the closest to a holy place I've been but it's just designed for water storage. The Hippodrome which has neither horses nor race course but some big pillars stolen from Egypt and erected in honour of whoever was emperor in 400ad. Because why build your own when you can steal something cool from someone else? That's always been my philosophy! (Disclaimer for future potential employers: this is a joke.)

Now we're escaping the heat of the day (Peggy has a low melting point) to update this, read some books and plan the next bit.

This afternoon we'll probably head to the Grand Bazaar or the Spice Bazaar and over to the Asian part of the city on the ferry.

Still no postcards but that's on the list of things to do.

Hope you're all healthy and happy. Or as happy as its possible to be when you're not in paradise ;)

Made it - finally

2011-09-14T06:07:00.002+12:00

Hello! First official update from not-New-Zealand.

It took Peggy and I 43 hours from the front door of Mum's house to the door of our hostel. That included about 24 hours of flight time, 17 hours in airports and a couple hours of travel time. We were tired, sore and a bit smelly but very excited to arrive. Istanbul is such a busy, bustling city with cars and trucks trying to squeeze down narrow winding streets, which are really glorified alleyways. We've spent a fair amount of our first few hours dodging traffic :)

We met a German guy, Stefan, as we signed in and all went for a walk to find a grocery store and tour the water front. A visit to the roof-top social area completed our socialisation for the evening. With exhaustion setting in our brains are functioning well below par, but I did still manage a conversation about the dominance of English as the language of travellers (lucky for Peggy and me.)

Free internet gave us a chance to look at the next few days of our trip - a couple days here in Istanbul and then on to Troy, Gallipoli and Ephesus over the weekend.

So far all happy and healthy (other than side effects of sleep deprivation) and so thrilled to be in Turkey. And no more planes/airports for a whole two weeks!

2011-09-11T09:04:00.000+12:00

I feel like I'm digging out an old diary, blowing the dust off the top and starting a new entry... which is pretty much what's happening here!

Peggy and I fly out tomorrow for our next adventure - Turkey, Morocco, Spain, Portugal. I'm mostly packed, my room is a disaster and I am sure I'll forget something important but I'm finally getting really excited about the trip!

The itinerary is two weeks Turkey, about 6 days in Morocco and then 16 days around Spain and Portugal. Then in Barcelona I fly to London and Peggy starts the next leg of her trip. I have four days in London, a day and a half in Reykjavik (Iceland) then to Toronto where I start my new life as a Big City Reporter. That last bit's not for sure - I'll probably take whatever job comes along, but ideally I'd like to be Lois Lane.

That's undoubtedly enough for a post where we haven't even done anything yet. If you want a postcard email me (catienobes@gmail.com) your address. No guarantees, but I'll do my best.

Potential volunteers

2009-05-05T21:56:00.003+12:00

Hi, I'm Catie, I'm a student in New Zealand and Moya wanted some blogs to share so you could see what HAPA is all about. I had an amazing time and I think that comes across in my journal! I was in Africa from July 27th until September 28th and then headed to Europe so click on 2008 in the list on the left and start in July to read about Tanzania.

Reading is nowhere near as good as experiencing - go raise your money and get to Singida as soon as possible, I guarantee you'll love it. Get in touch if you have any questions.

Home again

2009-01-22T09:09:00.002+13:00

Made it safely home with no hiccups at all, met at the airport by an enthusiastic family and one dedicated friend. It's very strange to be home and know where everything is and how to get places without a map! Nice strange, but strange.

I start studying in about a month and until then I'm a free spirit who needs to find a part time job. Looking forward to catching up with all my friends, except the ones I left behind all over the world!

So thanks for reading what I wrote and hopefully I'll see everyone again soon! Well... give me three years or so.

The Bronx is up and the Battery's down

2009-01-18T14:07:00.002+13:00

Hey all... This will probably be my last post! Bit sad I know but exciting too. Oh, actually I guess I'll post a quick one to let people know if I got home alright so this is only last trip post.

I'm in New York!!! It's a very exciting and kind of crazy city, I'm not sure I'd want to live here but it's certainly full of energy. Drivers swear at each other all the time, everything is in lights and the skyline is very impressive.

I arrived Wednesday afternoon and headed for my hostel on the upper west side near Central Park. Couldn't check in until 3pm so I dumped bags and went out to explore. Walked to Times Square - way too many bright signs. Even the police station and the subway signs were lit up.
Checked out the Broadway ticket sales place where you can get last minute half price tickets, lots of tempting options! Decided to a) wait a couple nights and b) try to see Hedda Gabler, reviewed in New Yorker and the magazine on my train.

I kept going south and found Macy's and the Empire State Building. I did not go up the latter because it cost $20 - they didn't show that bit in Sleepless in Seattle! It was only 5 euro to climb St Peter's dome so I don't know what New York thinks it's got that's better than Rome. I got a few good pictures and a postcard of NY from above to make up for not seeing it myself.

Thursday I headed to the Metropoliton Museum of Art for about 4 hours - it was great! A really eclectic mix from ancient Egyptian (Temple of Dandur - rescued from yearly flooding) to Modern (I saw Andy Warhol's Mao) it was a lot of fun. Decided to head toward the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) with stops along the way at Tiffany & co. (it looks much as it did when Audrey ate a pastry in front of it) and FAO Schwartz which was pretty impressive, I'd have bought a full size light saber if it would fit in my bag!

MoMA was amazing! Reminded of me of the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and the Centre Pompidou in Paris - not surprising I guess since they're also modern art meccas. A whole room of Pollock, very overwhelming. Warhol, Jackson Jones, Rothko... it was very fun. And really weird, I ran into a friend from Christchurch who went to high school with me! Hamish and I did debating together and he's touring the US with his sister to look at potential physics programmes. And we ran into each other on an escalator in New York! Crazy world.An old friend, or really the daughter of an old friend of Mum's, lives in NY and I got in touch with her, unfortunately she is out of town for the week. She did however set me up with one of her friends, Jocelyn, who kindly agreed to meet me for coffee and a chat. We met at a cafe on 57th and Lexington and talked about our lives for two hours. It was fun, felt like I actually belonged a a little to the city. Dinner was pizza and then I wandered around Midtown until heading back to the hostel.

Yesterday was Friday and it was freezing cold - a guy in Italy told me that New York is warm but he lied. I went to the Guggenheim in the morning and did a tour that talked about the beginnings of modernism. Very interesting! That was until about 12 and I went backto MoMA because I accidentally kept the audioguide and decided I better take it back! There's a store there full of awesomeness so I browsed for ages and bought a little journal before heading towards Times Sq for cheap tickets. They didn't open until 3pm so I walked through the Virgin Megastore, which is totally insane. Huge! And it was really really cool to see a whole display of Flight of the Concords merchandise, including a t-shirt which said "New Zealand's Greatest Export." I got a ticket to Hedda Gabler and headed downtown to look at Wall St and the World Trade Centre sight. It was interesting to walk around the area, I remembered seeing the news etc. on the day.

The play was absolutely stunning! Mary Louise Parker was beautiful and captivating, the characters were fascinating. I really enjoyed the show, and the cheap seats were pretty darn good. So I've seen a show on the West End and one on Broadway now, two lifetime goals done. Of course there were SO many options at the ticket place, so much on Broadway and off that now I want to live in Toronto just so I can attend shows three times a year :)

Today is Saturday and I decided to explore the neighbourhoods I hadn't seen. Actually I spent a couple of hours on the subway having taken it the wrong way before finally arriving at the Staten Island Ferry for a close up with the Statue of Liberty. It was a fun round trip with lots of classic views, and free! Then I walked along the Brooklyn Bridge and walked around Brooklyn and Dumbo for a while, it was great! I found a little vintage market and then ate lunch looking over the harbour. A subway to Chinatown and I walked all the way through Soho and Greenwich Village up to Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building and the Library. Dinner on Broadway and back here to pack!

It has not been enough time here in New York but I'm also really excited to get home. Tomorrow I start the long commute home, but in less that 48 hours I'll be there!

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch.

Across the border!

2009-01-13T09:57:00.003+13:00

Well you must be one of two things a) the die-hard fan who is still reading everything I post or b) the last minute catch up who remembered I'm home soon and thought you better have some semblance of awareness. For group (b): Dubai hot, Africa dusty, Greece friendly, Istanbul stalky, Italy arty, Barcelona party-y, Paris snobby, Dublin cold, London big, Toronto colder, Ottawa freezing, house got broke. Now you're all caught up.

I flew from Toronto to Virginia because Nelly's engagement party was on Saturday and I got to go, hurray! Nelly is Sharyn's daughter and Sharyn is Mum's friend from pre-Catie so Nelly was the big sister who taught me how to boss around your younger sibling and make them think it's a game. So I flew in Saturday morning and because my Canadian passport has expired I had to join the long line and now the US government has my picture and index fingerprints. Now when I commit my crime I'm limited to three fingers and a thumb, and may need to include a mask on the supply list (note to scanny spyware: this is a joke. I am not actually intending to commit a crime while in the USA. You should know this as I ticked the "no" box for that question. Also never a Nazi or infectiously diseased.)

I made it to Maryland and Washington D.C. while in the neighbourhood, just because, and had a lovely visit catching up with Nelly and Jay (the younger sibling who got bossed around with me) and am now near Boston visiting Sharyn and Jack before I head to New York to finish up being a tourist.

Canada was so great, I'm seriously considering the move to Toronto in the not-to-distant future. They have a ton of little papers and news magazines who could surely use some journalistic talent like me. Then I could regularly visit aunts, uncles, cousins etc. Downside is lack of parents and sister but you can't have everything and if I'm bossy enough Peggy might follow me! Peggy, it's called follow the leader - wanna play?

Can you help?

2009-01-06T05:08:00.002+13:00

Hi all, I'm great. I hd a lovey new year and have been spending time with my cousin Bree and her daughter Vanessa. Lots of fun!

Bad news from Mvae, a big storm came through and damaged the dispensary we worked on. These storms are not common so they couldn't have predicted the result. As you can read below in Mr Makyao's letter they need a lot of help. Even just ten pounds (less than $30) would be worth giving. If you can help, thanks! I've given 100 pound myself and will continue to support HAPA when I get home. Only 14 days to go!

On the 16th December the team of HAPA and the district went to Mvae to see. We found that one side of the dispensary the roof was wascompletelety blown away. This is almost half of the building. The iron sheets and the roof trasses were taken off from the walls. Some of thebricks after the ring beam (the side elevetion) were also broken and fall down of which destroyed some of the funitures which were inside.
The destruction was caused by heavy rains which accompanied with strong wind like storm. Not only the dispensary affected, other eight housesincluding a church house which all the roof was taken off and the rest are the houses of the villagers.
The total distruction of the dispensary is estimated to cost 4.5 million Shillings (£2,350 or US$3,450) according to Gerald calculation. The staff house was affeted but not much. Only one iron sheet was taken off. The people from the district were asking the kind of supporting we going to give them but I had no answer as I know the situation.
The big challange we are facing the project was yet handed over to the community that is why we are asked our contribution towards rectifying thesituation.

To make a donation to Mvae, just click on this link https://secure.efundraising.org.uk/tailored/donation.asp?charity=71767

It's that easy.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T09:22:00.002+13:00

Hey All, still alive despite the cold. As romantic and tradition as a White Christmas sounds (and I do love the movie) I'm beginning to think it is highly overrated! There's nothing like drinking mimosas on the deck outside Christmas afternoon. Not that I've done that on recent Christmases, but I could if I wanted!

Anyway, it is warm inside and wonderful to see friends and family again. The adventures are over but I'm still having fun, at the moment playing with a four year old is the highlight! I've been to Ottawa to visit the La Rues, family friends who may as well be family now, and now I'm in Hamilton with Mum's family. I'm staying with my cousin Suzy and her daughter Kylie (afore-mentioned four year old) and much of the family is expected for Christmas Eve dinner tonight. Then Christmas Day I head for Dad's family again and I basically flit between the two for the next three weeks taking total advantage of everyone's hostpitality. It's a great way to end my trip.

This is short because I don't think it's as interesting for you all to read about my family except for my family, who I talk to regularly now anyway so they know all about them already!

Merry Christmas everyone, hope Santa's good to you!

Oh the stupidity

2008-12-14T07:08:00.004+13:00

Before I explain the oh so tantalising title let's see what the last days in England held...

Sheffield was fun, hanging out with Jen a bit more, seeing a large exhibition of knives and forks which Sheffield has produced for many years. Yes, that is their claim to fame. Also Michael Palin comes from there. My bus to London left from a shopping centre outside town so we went there for a while before I made my way back to London to meet Paul for yet another pub dinner.

Wednesday Paul had to work so I went to Harrods and the National Gallery. I honestly don't think I can describe Harrods. It is one of the most ostentatious, luxurious, opulent building I've been in, up there with the Vatican and Uffizi but with that nice touch of tackiness because everything is for sale. Stuck for what to get me for Christmas? Try their Under 1000 pounds section. No, really. I mean, not to buy me but they really have that section. It includes a sterling silver engraved holder for a Heinz ketchup bottle. I spent about an hour wandering around, it was hypnotic and frightening, and it made me feel quite nauseous by the end. In comparison to the shortages of what we would consider necessities in Tanzania the idea that one might want to spend 500 pounds on a Swarovski Christmas decoration was quite sickening. Still an interesting visit and they did have some rather spectacular shoes.

Then back to the National Gallery to see the wings I had missed - some of van Gogh's sunflowers and lots of other Impressionists. Very nice but not one of the better laid out galleries I've been to, lots of backtracking required and impossible to go in order of the room numbers so I don't even know why or how they were numbered!

Then dinner and drinks with Paul, a lovely last night in London. It's always sad to leave my friends but I was also really excited to get to Canada and see all my relatives!

So now the long, horrible and hopefully entertaining tale of how a smart and practical girl managed to make a really basic mistake and had to be rescued by people who love her and a few strangers as well.

Thursday was the 11th of December. Probably you knew that. Probably I knew that somewhere sub-conciously. Unfortunately conciously I thought it was the 12th. How that came about is unclear. I know that for many weeks I believed that I was flying out of London on a Thursday and that at one point my phone calendar was set to the wrong year; whether these two facts are related is not confirmed, it is all speculation. The facts which are known are that it was the 11th of December, it was a Thursday and Caitlin was at the airport three hours before her 12pm flight. Oh and, of course, her ticket was for the 12th. So after swearing in front of the lovely British Airways girl (not at her, I'm not mean, just rude and I did apologise but she just laughed and said she understood - she's British after all and they tend to think of swearing as punctuation, I'm sure she just thought it was a lot of full stops.) she asked if I wanted to see if I could get on today's flight. Everyone in Canada believed I was arriving on the 12th so to arrive a day early would be quite confusing but manageable and the alternative was taking the tube back to London, finding Paul and getting back into his flat before repeating the morning routine of up by 7 out before 8 and to the airport by 9. Not appealing. I picked get on the plane.

To their credit British Airways was great. Stand-by ticket in hand I headed to another desk to sort of register with them and get more instructions and by the time I reached the front of the queue they had decided to put me on the flight. A very full flight I found out so it was a bit of luck and some nice staff. I overheard a man in Business class saying he was lucky enough to get upgraded and I'd like to think that was thanks to me.

Now an hour before boarding and I have to contact Canada, but it's 4am there so instead I ring Peggy on my credit card (oh yeah, add to mess that cell phone battery died) and make her stay up until 1am to phone my grandparents at 7am their time to give them the good news. Plus Gatwick airport was closed so my flight, which I wasn't meant to be on, was delayed by two hours.

I did get picked up by a confused and loving Grandfather who was nice enough to only tease me incessantly since hearing the full story. He enjoyed Friday morning saying that the only thing he had to remember to do was to pick Caitlin up at the airport. It's less than I deserved for such a completely dumb thing to do so I'm content. I did consider lying to try and blame someone else but even on an 8 hour flight I couldn't figure out a believable tale I decided to give you all a nice wee laugh instead and opted for the ruefully honest tack.

Learn from me - check a calendar as you leave the house!!

So I'm here in Canada with family, it's great. Nice to not be a tourist and to just relax, can't wait to see everyone and so looking forward to Christmas. I probably won't update this as much because while Mum and Dad will be interested in how everyone is I imagine reading about what various cousins are up to is not as thrilling as being stalked in Istanbul or visiting the Louvre in Paris for the rest of you. Hope you enjoyed my tale of Karma saving my arse once more (with the help of three BA staff, one tired sister, one devoted Grandfather and a Visa card which wasn't maxed out.)

A Trip North (but not Very North)

2008-12-09T22:08:00.002+13:00

Hello again!

So the British Museum was fantastic! Saw lots of great stuff, including interesting African, Mexican and Indian displays - not usually seen in European museums but I guess the British stole from everyone! Interesting also was the pamphlet available in the Parthenon display explaining why the British Museum would rather not return Greek national treasures to Greece. Top reasons were hinting that the Greeks couldn't take care of them properly (because they accidentally blew stuff up in 1610) and that where they are they can be viewed in an international cultural context. Nevermind that thousands of people come to see it every year and maybe they'll make donations, that's so not an issue, we're just interested in the furtherment of cultural understanding. Can you guess what side of the debate I'm on? No? Glad I was able to present a balanced point of view.

So after that I met Charles and Paul, we got some dinner and went out to meet some of their old school friends who are now living in London. I was pretty exhausted and Paul was too, plus they took us to this horribly tacky bar full of young professionals with music so loud you couldn't make yourself heard without shouting. So we went to HMV instead and then home to watch Stardust. We're exciting people.

Sunday was my last chance to see the changing of the guard because it's only every second day in the winter so Paul accompanied me out to watch men in big furry hats play the flute and carry guns with pointy knives on the front. Not simultaneously, different men played flutes and carried guns. I got some photos which I will post in due course (i.e. in about a month.) Paul then had to do some work since I had effectively distracted him for five days so I headed to the Tate Britain to entertain myself. It was really cool, lots of British artists and artists who lived in Britain so I got my fill of Turner and Constable. Did a wee tour with one of the guides talking about the meaning of flowers in paintings, quite interesting and not too long. After Tate I had some time so I headed to the National Gallery but I was a bit burned out so I only did one wing thereby missing van Gogh's Sunflowers and a lot of other famous paintings. If I can be bothered I might go back Wednesday but it depends on many factors. I did enjoy the National Portrait Gallery - lots of famous people there! Saw the portraits of Shakespeare, Henry VIII, his six wives plus his kids and more.

Monday (yesterday) I headed to Sheffield to visit my friend Jen, from Volunteer Africa. Jen emailed me to assure me that there was nothing touristy to do in Sheffield, which sounded quite nice. Mostly I just wanted to visit her, which I am in fact doing right now. So we went out for lunch and then to the art gallery which is quite cute. We went out that night for a drink and then home to watch a bunch of great panel shows. I don't think anyone in the world does panel shows like the UK, they're hilarious! Loads of comedians and intellectuals discuss current events. So it sounds terrifically dull but I love it.

Bit of a late start today, a nice lie in and cooked breakfast before heading into town for more wandering and probably lunch. Bus to catch at 4.30 to head back to London so it's a short visit but a nice one.

Londonium

2008-12-06T23:05:00.004+13:00

Hello all, sorry about the delay in update, I've simply been having too much fun to take the time to write about the fun I've been having.

Tuesday I arrived at Gatwick airport at 8.15pm and caught a bus into London, except my bus arrived at Fulham Broadway which is about a hundred miles from Paul's house. To complicate matters I caught an earlier bus and he had just ordered a drink with a friend who lives out there when I got in so I spent my first half hour in the country drinking lager in an Aussie themed bar (not his first choice but closest to the bus stop.) It was fun, like a piece of almost home. Then we headed big pack and all to find some food because we were both starving but by the time we got to his part of town is was almost midnight and we had a mission to find a place open. Ended up with Indian from a nice restaurant, don't know why their kitchen was still open at that time on a Tuesday but didn't ask.

Wednesday was a touristy tour of the city, I saw Big Ben, Winchester Cathedral (didn't go in, £12!) Buckinham palace, St James Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Canadian Embassy (not so touristy but still cool) and had lunch in a 400 yr old pub called The Cheshire Cheese. Then we went out to Camden - pretty much the coolest place on the planet. I want to go and live in the market, or at least near by. Amy Winehouse lives there, which is not necessarily an endorsement of the area. I really loved it to the point that I insisted we go back at a later date when I had time and money to really shop. Paul's uncle works in London and we ran into him on the street, really weird since that never happens in London, and we were invited to go out for a drink with him that evening. We had to meet him in Leicester Square which is coincidentally where the Twilight preniere was taking place (Haven't heard of it? Lucky you.) and we got to battle screaming teens and preteens all waiting for cheekyboney brooder and sweepeyhair glarer, not fun. Found a lovely pub with two for one drinks and I released my inner girl by ordering a raspberry dacquiri. We had decided to go to a West End show and since my heart was set on Les Miserables or The Lion King and Paul alway thinks of beastiality with the latter we bought the cheap seats to Les Mis. The seats were right at the front, Paul literally got spit on, but we could see almost everything and were right in the action so I loved it. It is such a great musical and it was so well done, I wanna go back!

We found something for dinner and headed home to watch British comedy (Green Wing) before retiring to bed since Paul had to be up at 5 to pick up Charles from the airport. Paul is playing hostels as various people take advantage of him for free acommodation. So not really playing hostels since no one is paying him.

Anyway, he had had about 4 hours sleep and left me still sleeping and Charles had just flown for 12 hours so they were both pretty punchy all day. We went to the Tate Modern which was very very cool. Lots of great modern art and some odd contemporary stuff - Paul is doing his Art History PhD so is qualified to say things like "well that's just bollocks" and "ach, what shit." Along the walk to the gallery was the Tower Bridge and the Tower and various other sights from the Thames. We headed back to The Cheshire Cheese for lunch, it's one of Paul's favourite places. Terrifically historical - burnt down in the Great Fire and was rebuilt, Samuel Johnson wrote part of his dictionary there and invited many a famous friend around.

That afternoon we went on a major hunt for an inflatable mattress so that everyone would have a place to sleep and failed to find one for a very long time, eventually picked one up in Argos which is this crazy place where you order from a catalogue and they go get it from the storeroom for you. That evening we headed out to Wembley Arena to see Russell Howard, a British comedian who's often on a show called Mock the Week. Hugely funny, I had trouble breathing at times I was doubled over from laughing.

Friday we all slept for about 10 hours, them from tiredness and me from laziness! We got up around 11 and headed out to Camden again for lunch and shopping. I bought a few nice things, though I was surprisingly controlled. The markets have everything from secondhand stores to rave stuff. There's a store called Cyber Dog which sells a bunch of neon coloured Jetsons' style outfits. I suspect you have to take a lot of party drugs to really appreciate the clothing, but it was fun to browse. They also sold stuffed toy versions of germs like chlamidia, black death and ecoli. It would be kind of fun to give someone the plague!

We decided to cook our own dinner that night instead of going out yet again and then hit the town! We went to a couple pubs and then a couple bars. I'm still not sure what the distinction is but pubs close at midnight and bars are open later. Eventually we decided to go dancing and ended up somewhere Paul described as gay-friendly but being one of only five girls there I think it was more than just friendly! It was great, no worrying about creepy people grabbing you or about people spiking your drink or being labelled a 'tease' - not a single person in that room was interested in me, it was quite relaxing. We danced our hearts out until about 3.30am before having the mission of getting a taxi to take us home because apparently at that time of the morning all the taxis want to go home and will only take fairs in the direction they're going. Got home safely anyway and am now about to head to the British Museum! So ridiculously excited.

Yeah... I'm a classics geek. But a happy one. Except maybe they should return the Elgian marbles, just not this week. After this I think my London experiences will be complete: West End, comedy, Camden, gay bar, museum... what more is there?

Tiddlee dee potatoes

2008-12-03T04:59:00.001+13:00

I just got back from the magical part of Ireland now! Dublin is very pretty and fun but the highlights of Dublin were definitely Frances and Laura. This week I headed South to find cute villages, rolling hills and rainbows everywhere, you know that image you have in your head of what Ireland looks like? That's pretty much accurate.

So Wednesday we headed into Dublin centre early, though not as early as we had intended, for breakfast at Bewleys, a place James Joyce frequented back in the day. Lovely breakfast where I got to try black and white pudding. Black was okay, full of flavour and spices. White was one of the grossest things I've ever eaten to the point that I almost spat it out (harkening back to the first time I tried avocado when I was 9 so it might yet end well for white pudding and I since of now a big avocado fan, but proportianally that won't happen until I'm 44.) Laura went to work while Frances and I walked to the bus station to get me a ticket to Limerick and kill half an hour walking along the dock (past some 'knackers') and back. Bus ride was uneventful and I met Mike at the other end. It was great to catch up after so long! He lives in a little community called Doora which has a pub and a church (Irish priorities are clear) and is a ten minute drive outside Ennis for all the necessities. I got a proper Irish welcome from Mike's parents who said I could stay as long as I wanted (unfortunately I couldn't really take advantage of them since a) I was well raised and b) I had plans for Sunday.)

That night his father Mick was performing in a one act play for the Ennis Players. There were three plays on and his was definitely the best, in fact they won a place in the All Ireland competition and hope to be able to travel with it as well. Thursday morning I ate three kinds of cereal for breakfast (the joy of staying with a family instead of in a hostel) and then we went out to the Cliffs of Mohar, very beautiful and rugged. The weather was clear but cold when we left and by the time we got to the cliffs it was raining and freezing so it was more like the one minute tour of the cliffs with an hour and a half driving through pretty countryside one either side. A good trip out anyway and then home to thaw out. The area is really beautiful and I must have seen half a dozen rainbows on the drive.

Friday was a trip into Limerick to find out that King John's Castle was closed, it looked good from the outside anyway. We drove past the area where people get shot and the university and stopped in Shannon for tea and cake. Also hit the two euro store where you can buy 5 chocolate bars for €2! I was excited about that. Probably a little too excited. It was Mike's friend Gary's birthday so we went out for a few drinks with him to celebrate. Not a true Irish pub experience since no one drank Guinness but it was fun all the same.

Saturday I got a bus back to Dublin to hang out once more with Laura and Frances who were playing tag team because they were working different shifts and only overlapped by half an hour! Laura and I went to the art gallery and spent a long while in the gift shop - so full of pretty things. Frances and I went shopping for NZ wine to take to Enniscorthy and for dinner supplies. We thought we might go out on the town but it was so bitterly cold that we ended up not bothering and watched X Factor instead which I've heard a lot about but never seen. It was fun, different kind of fun to going out, but infinitely warmer.

Sunday my bus left at midday so we had a nice breakfast again before Laura went to work again and Frances and I headed to the station... again. It was very much like the Wednesday before! I arrived in Enniscorthy to be met by my cousin Bridget. Want a family tree? I know I needed one! My great-grandfather Patrick Fitzgerald and his brother Francis moved to Canada, his sister Mary Fitzgerald stayed in Ireland and married somebody Dempsey and she is Bridget's grandmother. Cool? Anyway, she was great, kept saying I had 'come home.' We went out to the pub for a true Irish experience, it was loud and crowded and a woman gave me a picture of Jesus to look after me and someone got a drink poured over his head. I met a bunch of Bridget's friends and got stories about all of them, she seems to know everyone and be "practically related" to most of them! Monday we went out to Blackwater, where Patrick and Francis grew up. Got quite the tour of the area and went to a sawdust pub and a tavern for lunch before heading back to Enniscorthy and going to Carmel's for dinner, Bridget's sister. On the way I met their brother Peter's kids (Eamonn, Elizabeth, Elaine and Stephen) but Peter was working so wasn't in. Carmel has a ten year old daughter Niamh who's a firecracker. I got lots of hugs so felt quite welcomed. Their brother Tony stopped by for a drink too and I got to go out and see his house and meet his wife Eleanor - it was quite the family meeting day!

So today I got a midday bus to Dublin, where I am now taking advantage of Frances' internet account to update you all. I fly out to London in three hours so I'm about to get some supplies and head out to the airport. See you in England!

Eire (Not pronounced like ire)

2008-11-26T00:40:00.003+13:00

So I flew out of Paris to Dublin. Flying with Ryanair so I had fun rearranging my bags so that my checked bag was 15kg and my carryon was 8. Strange rules. I mean, as far as weight on a plane surely it doesn't matter that much how it's distributed?

Arrived in Dublin uneventfully and was met by Frances! My friends Frances and Laura moved to Dublin in January to work and travel around Europe. Isn't it confusing that there are two Lauras I am visiting? I don't know how to simplify this for you other than the fact that one is in France and the other is in Ireland. If you need further clarification let me know (other than those of you reading in NZ because you know both Lauras so if you're confused then that's not my fault.)

Right, so Frances met me at the airport and we realised that it was my birthday last year when we last saw eachother and hence most of our conversation was punctuated by "I can't believe I'm/you're here!" and lots of hugs. We headed back to they're house for dinner and conversation before heading into town, ostensibly to go 'out' but instead we got crepes (very Irish) and sat in a cafe talking until Laura was done work and we headed back home for more conversation.

They both worked Sunday and I had to do washing so I hung around the house reading and watching TV while my washing took forever to be done. Then I discovered a) it hadn't spun properly so it was all sopping and b) something black had run so now all my stuff is a little grey. No real dramas here because nothing vitally non-grey was in there but it was still an unpleasant surprise so I threw a wee hissy-fit and made a big mess getting it into the dryer which I didn't clean up before I stormed out of the house in Frances' trousers because I couldn't stand it. Within about 20 minutes I realised that it really wasn't that big a deal and that I hadn't taken the time to see what the damage really was but it was a bit late to turn the bus around so I carried on and spent some time in town before meeting Laura, doing some groceries, buying some gloves (it's cold) and heading home. Damage wasn't horrific. Cream pants are now greyish but evenly enough that it seems on purpose and one pair of pink underwear must be a particularly absorbant material because now they are chocolate coloured! They probably did me a favour and save much of the rest of my clothes from being effected.

That night we just sat around chatting again, lots of fun, and I talked to my Irish cousin Bridget (2nd cousin? Removed? Twice?) who I am going to visit later this week! Very excited, and she sounded so excited to have me visiting that I don't feel at all bad about imposing. She said (in a broad accent) "Oh yeah, you don't come to visit your relative in Ireland and not get put up."

Monday was Laura's day off so we wandered around Dublin. Went to the museum, which was closed because it was Monday, went to Trinity College but didn't see the Book of Kell because it cost a silly amount, went to St Stephen's Green, pretty and open and free! Frances started early so finished at 2.30 and we met her for lunch and then brownie (yum) before doing some shopping at Penneys - this ridiculously cheap clothing (and other stuff) store with some nice stuff. Frances wanted Christmas decorations but didn't like what they had on offer.

Home to watch America's Next Top Model (oh yes we did) before an early night because we were all exhausted! We keep staying up late talking so we needed a proper night's sleep. Today the girls are working again so I'm going to head to the museum and probably along the river because it's nice and sunny. Not warm in the slightest but sunny at least so photos will look nice.

Tomorrow I head down near Limerick where Mike (the volunteer) lives and I'll visit for a couple days. I'll try to update from there but otherwise it could be a week till I can send stuff again. We'll see :)

And as requested by certain family members here is the flickr site again: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31050258@N04/

Ooh la la

2008-11-22T23:58:00.002+13:00

Well it's been a busy few days. While in Lyon I made I list with Laura of the absolute must-sees in Paris and then the hope-to-sees and then the if-there's-times so I had a prioritised list to work through and the good news is I'm done it! Well I ,issed a couple from the last section, but they were always designated misssable anyway and I did add a few things too so it balances.

Thursday was Notre Dame in the morning. It really is so beautiful. I had intended to climb the towers but I got there early and they weren't open yet, my stair climbing plans didn't stand up under the idea of having to return especially. I walked all around the cathedral and took a bunch of photos and imagined Quasimodo clambouring all over it. I know he wasn't real, but it was such a good book that I want it to be real.

Then I wander around the Ile St. Louis which is very pretty and tiny, really lovely, and the Ile de Cité which is bigger but also pretty. Then the latin quarter (also with more pictures of Notre Dame) where I found Shakespeare and Company. People always either look for it and can't find it or just stumble across it so I was category two. Latin Quarter was beautiful but so touristy and crowded it was a bit off-putting.

I walked to Musee d'Orsay next, got a crepe on the way and felt very French (except I made a total mess and I think real French people are tidier.) Musee d'Orsay was great, it's in an old train station so it's quite different to most museums, I mean, really, those ones in old palaces are so passé. I spent a couple hours there, saw lots of Manet and Monet among others and had a great time. It was nice to feel like you could actually cope with the exhibitions, the Louvre made me feel so incompetent. Half of one floor was closed and the lovely lady I asked said depending on staff they might open it after 6pm (it was 2.30) so I decided to come back.

Musee Rodin was a hope-to-see and isn't far from the d'Orsay so I headed that way with a detour past Hotel Invalides where Napoleon is buried but didn't bother going to see his tomb. Rodin was great, lots of works on display that I wasn't familiar with but which were really amazing. One piece called Playing Nymphs was marble carved on both sides so thin that you could see light through it, really beautiful. I spent about an hour and a half wandering the gardens, the museum and the temporary exhibition about Freud and Rodin who never met but had several mutual friends and both collected ancient objects from Greece and Rome.

I still had over an hour to kill so I decided to check out the Pantheon and the Luxembourg Gardens. Checked my map and plotted my route only to find it blocked by one of Paris' infamous student protests! It was pretty impressive. Riot police, fences being pushed back and forth, tear gas canisters being waved threateningly. I don't even know what it was about but it was pretty cool. So I found a new route, saw the gardens but didn't go in; ditto for the pantheon. Had the best crepe I've had in Paris. No really, next time you're in Paris (as you will be I'm sure) head to the pantheon and then walk away from it until you get to the intersection and on your right is a green crepe shop, it's not expensive and it's awesome.

So back to the Musee d'Orsay, via Notra Dame for a night pic, and the rooms had been opened so I got to enjoy the naturalists, symbolists and the Art Nouveau. Delightful. But a really long day, I left the hostel before 9 and didn't back until about 8.30, I was exhausted. So I went to bed at about 10.

Yesterday I headed to Versailles on the nastiest day I've had yet, frezing cold, windy, with icy rain, it was so not the day for exploring gardens! I went anyway and enjoyed the palace a lot. You get a "free" audiguide (read: we've raised our prices to include the audioguide) so I enjoyed having a British accent tell me about the court of Louis the umpteenth. Unfortunately someone thought it would be a great idea to display the contemporary "art" of someone called Jeff Koons in each room so you were walking through the bedroom of Marie-Antoinette and got to see an inflatable lobster hanging from the ceiling. Not my cup of tea but someone somewhere is making a lot of money out of this. Still fun to see all the rooms and portraits. I did manage about ten minutes in the garden before scampering to the train station and the heat.

Afternoon was spent in the Centre Pompidou where I ignored all the floors except 1905-1960 where all the stuff I like is. I'm sure I could have seen some really great contemporary art if I'd had the energy but I was still feeling ultra-cynical after the Koons/Versailles experience. I loved the modern art display. Lots of Magritte and Man Ray, and a lot of people who I'm going to have to look up because their works were so interesting.

Got to the hostel earlier than usual, around 6, because I had to pack for today's flight to Dublin, which is now in 5 hours! This morning I walked to Galerie La Fayette which is Paris' answer to Harrods, and it's amazing. Big shiny and expensive, what more could you want from Paris? Then to Le Marais which is a really lovely pretty part of the city. As pretty as the Latin Quarter I think and not so touristy. I visited Victor Hugo's house (free, hurrah) and had a wee moment of hero-worship. He's so cool.

Then I came to update all of you and next I'll check out a couple vintage stores in the area before heading off to catch my bus to get to my plane. Paris is the first city I've left where I really wish I had more time, I long to stay here another... lifetime? I just have to keep assuring myself that I'll be back!

Paris When It Sizzles

2008-11-20T06:43:00.002+13:00

I'm in Paris! Not that I'm excited or anything...

So Sunday night in Barcelona Laura and I went out for dinner to a rather flash restaurant and had rather spectacular meals. I had cannelloni to start, best I've ever had, and Laura had roast vegetables. Then for our main we got paella - yum. Dessert was toffee tart (me) and an apple creme brulee with catalonya cream (her) and both were delicious. We had some sangria and lots of chat, it was a really great night. Nice way to end our trip and almost our visit.

So Monday we were headed back to Lyon, not so early it was painful but not late enough to do anything interesting in the morning so we just packed and ate breakfast before catching the bus to the airport. Excitingly I have developed a cold so the flight was fun; as was returning to the cold weather here in France. We got back to Lyon with enough time to run some errands and then I took an unexpectedly long nap! We didn't sleep much so added to my illness I guess I needed to catch up on rest. Dinner was simple and Sondra, Laura's friend we had dinner with, came over too. I wasn't really the best company, I spent most of the night packing!

My train left for Paris (well, a stop near Paris which was €20 cheaper than Paris itself and only a short cheap train ride away) at 9.30 and Laura lovingly accompanied me to the station and saw me off. She looked very French sitting alone on the bench in the station looking at the train pulling away; it seemed like a movie where I should have leapt off the train to declare my love. I went to Paris instead.

Got to my hostel okay, no dramas. Room wasn't ready yet so I just dumped my stuff and went to see Monmatre and Sacre-Coeur. The Cathedral is beautiful and Montmartre is very interesting, different than I expected! It is very picturesque but it's also full of tourists, immigrants and stalls of cheap stuff, really lively and fun. I wanted to get stuff done that afternoon because I only have four days here and there is so much to see that I can't waste time so I walked down to the Cemetery and spent almost two hours wandering around paying my respects to Wilde, Delacroix, David, Gericault, Ingres and Edith Piaf. I couldn't find Sarah Bernhardt or Modogliani and I forgot about Jim Morrison because I'm not that big a Doors fan anyway so I was more excited about Gericault than Morrison.

Around 5 I headed back to the hostel, picked up some groceries on the way. I made myself pasta for dinner and spent a lovely evening in the social area being social! There are a couple of Aussies staying who have already made a bunch of friends in the city (after only two days) so we had a couple of music students, three Spanish tourists and a Danish guy who comes to Paris for a week every year. Also an American from Hawaii whose parents are hippies (her name is Amazing Grace, her brother is Orion Skywalker) and a British woman on her way to London from Albania. A multi-cultural night with lots of great travel stories.

Today I went to the Louvre and blew my mind. I got there before 10 and didn't leave until after 4, with only about 20 min break for lunch in the middle. And I still missed stuff! But I saw so many amazing things. One of the electives I took at Uni was an Art History paper on art around the time of the French revolution so I had studied a lot of painters and paintings from about 1780 until 1860 and had such a fantastic time seeing the pure scale and colours which photos can never reproduce. These paintings are huge! The Death of Sardanapalus and The Raft of the Medusa (Delacroix and Gericault respectively) are two of my favourites and they are so big they wouldn't fiit on the wall of my room. I can't describes everything I saw, you'd be here for 6 hours! Yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, though why anyone was staring at her when Ingres' Grande Odalisque is in the next room I don't know.

After that I decided to hit the Arc de Triomph before dark and the Eiffel tower to see it all lit up so I walked along the Camps-Elysee, bought a crepe, and watched the crazy Parisian traffic. Arc was cool, Eiffel tower was pretty in a kind of weird way. It's lit up blue so it's a bit strange looking. I'm trying to decide whether I have to see it in the daytime or if I can tick it off my list. I guess it will depend mostly on time.

So that's it for the last few days, tomorrow I'll hit Notre-Dame and the Musee d'Orsay, all going to plan. Paris is beautiful, all the quotes are true!

Hola!

2008-11-15T05:44:00.008+13:00

Hello from Barcelona! It´s a beautiful city and we´ve loved our time here, lots of great things to see. We´ll try to add some photos from Lyon but it´ll depend on the computer and how organised we are.

Let´s see... Wednesday I updated and that afternoon Laura had a meeting for her new part time job that she starts next week so I went to the art gallery without her. It was very nice, lots of lovely impressionist pieces and a very impressive sculpture collection. I was about an hour or so there and then I went and got a coffee and pastry (of course, what else would you do in France?) Although the coee here is surprisingly bad, especially after Italy which had great coffee! Then I headed home with a few wee supplies because I was cooking! It was fun, the first proper meal I´d made since before I left NZ. I made casserole with mushrooms, chicken, potato and zucchini. Rather tasty if I do say so myself.

Thursday we had decided to go around a couple of the vintage shops which Laura had seen in her wanderings but it turned out they were all closed in the morning so we walked for a while before heading back to try and use up four zucchini for lunch (we went a bit courgette-mad at the market.) We managed three so I think that was a good effort. Then back out to find the vintage stores and somewhere nice for dinner since we decided to treat ourselves. The first vintage store was a let down, very overpriced. The second however was a treasure trove of cute dresses, none of which fit me right, and a beautiful jacket/cardigan which fit perfectly. I´ve been making do with my sweater, very stained from Africa and not the prettiest even if it is practical. So now I have a practical and pretty wee jacket - from a little boutique in France! Just to make you all jealous.

That night we wandered for a whil to find a dinner place, had a drink in a really nice little pub and then headed to a favourite of Paul´s (friend who used to live in Lyon.) I had a lovely ravioli and a local main called Quenelle, a sort of dumpling with lobster sauce. Very yum. Then cheese and dessert. We were out with Laura´s friend Sondra, who very kindly spoke French for me even though she obviously wasn´t very comfortable with it, I do feel so bad sometimes. She was very sweet and it was a lovely evening.

Friday we flew to Barcelona! This required being up at 6.45 to get a bus at 7.20 to get to the airport by 8.30 for our 9.45 flight... arrived very tired but determined to make the most of our time here! We ditched our stuff and headed out to see the cathedral, the gothic quarter and the Picasso Museum. We saw the outside of the cathedral, which was covered in scaffolding, but didn´t go in. From what we saw on a postcard later it is a very impressive cathedral! We hit a corner of the Gothic Quarter and found the museum. The Picasso exhibition was amazing. It was chronological so you could really see the development from being an immensely talented child to being an unbelievably creative adult. After that we just wandered for a long while and found ourselves at the beach! We sat for a while and just enjoyed the view and the people around us before wandering along the waterfront down to the giant Colombus monument and back to the hostel. Another walk later that evening, free dinner at the hostel and lots of chats with other travellers before we went out for a wee drink. We met a nice french guy, Jean-Marie, who is here for the weekend too and has no spanish and not great English so he and Laura had a nice chat in French. He had been recommended this lovely little bar, attached to the wax museum of all places! It was sort of forest themed so it had a great ambience, we shared a bottle of wine and Jean-Marie practised his English for my advantage.

Yesterday morning we got up around 8 but pottered around with internet and breakfast for a bit before heading off at about 10. We had read about a flea market which was not too far away so we wandered that way and found one of the best markets I´ve ever been to! We spent about two hours there wandering and browsing and spending money. It was a bad couple days for me, I lost my sunglasses and broke my watch so they were priorities for me to replace, success on both counts for only €10 total - love markets. We had designated today Gaudi Day so we left to find the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi designed this big amazing cathedral which is still being built and probably won´t be done for at least 20 years. It was absolutely amazing, one of the best things I´ve seen on this trip I think. So complex and beautiful, a stunning building. I don´t know how to describe it, google it and times the impressiveness by about a million.

After that we found a few more Gaudi buildings including his old home, Casa Batllo but missed one of the big ones, La Pedrera. We headed back to the hostel for a nap because Saturday was dancing night!! We rested up and had planned to go out for dinner but tortellini and rice with veges were on the menu at the hostel for free so we decided to save some money and eat in. Met up with Jean-Marie again and decided to walk out to the west and see the ¨Magic Fountains¨which we´d been told about. Took a totally roundabout route before we finally got there, but it was fun and so worth it. The fountains only run at night and they light up pretty colours. Then we walked back to El Raval for a drink, or a couple of drinks actually. We had mojitos which were really great and then some wine and nachoes. Chatted for a long time and invited Jean-Marie dancing with us, he had to change etc. so we went back to the hostel and on the way got discount tickets for the club which is right next-door. That solved the question of where to go, although teh cover charge was still pretty high. We got there around 1 and at first we couldn´t find the room which wasn´t hip-hop so we danced for a bit to some really horrific music before finding the other room which played everything from Elvis to U2 so we had fun and Laura made fun of my utter lack of musical knowledge. At around 3 I couldn´t handle the cigarette smoke anymore (Spain still lets people smoke anywhere so it gets a bit painful) and we went home to bed! It was a really great night.

This morning we were still up at 9, although moving a bit slower than usual. There was a funny little market outside our hostel which we checked out before going to explore the western area which we looked at yesterday in the dark. Found the park, a bunch of museums and a great gallery with heaps of free exhibitions, we saw one of Mucha and one of religious art on loan from the Uffizi. Very cool, spent a long time in the shop but didn´t buy too much. Then we wanted to see the Gaudi we missed and on the way found a wedding expo, which would have been cool but it cost too much to get in so we flagged (gee Catie, what an awesome story.) La Pedrera was beautiful and we saw a postcard for the Palau de Musica which looked pretty and was in the part of the Gothic area which we missed Friday so that was next. Very impressive stained glass windows and Gaudi mosaics, and the rest of the Gothic bit was very cool too.

So tonight we´re going out for tapas and paella, necessary I think, and then probably early to bed because all the coffee in the world is not going to keep us awake for long. I think we´re getting old.

Laura! Oh and Lyon too...

2008-11-10T23:17:00.003+13:00

So I am in Lyon staying at my friend Laura's apartment on the banks of the Soane river and have had a lovely few days of sight-seeing and relaxing.

I had many wee adventures getting here and finding Laura. I left Verona at 9.50pm and got to Milan at midnight then got to hang out until 6.40 for a train to Paris, me getting off at Chambery. Milan has a waiting room which is handy but the benches are old wooden ones, like church pews, so I passed rather an uncomfortable night. Then it turned out that there is a limit to how many eurail tickets they'll sell for a French train and I had missed out so I had to pay full price (not too expensive, but unexpected costs are annoying.) Got to Chambery to discover that the train my eurail guide told me to take didn't exist so I caught the next suitable train and was half an hour late meeting Laura who was well panicked that she had missed me and I had handily forgotten which exit we were meant to meet at so I stood in the complete wrong place (knowing it was wrong but figuring that if I stood still for a while she might come to me) and voila, she appeared. I was waiing under the "meeting point" sign so the first thing she said, after a hug, was "But it's not our meeting point!" But it all worked out in the end so we should probably stop worrying about could-have-beens.

Lyon is lovely, a very pretty city with lots of cafes and patisseries so I'm quite at home. No gelatoso I've gone cold turkey there, but tarte praline is a pretty good substitute. Friday we went for lunch to a bagel place and then did some groceries and walked around the town. I was pretty exhausted, sleeping on a church pew for four hours isn't my body's idea of rest, so we hung out at home eating cheese, bread and salad and then watching Obama speeches - he's so impressive! I thought we should have had popcorn. Laura's flatmate Louis was in London until Sunday night so we got the space to ourselves for a bit. Louis studied in NZ for a year so we already know each other which is handy. Laura has to find a new flat at the end of the year because Louis is moving so she's been emailing and calling people to find something not-to-expensive and not-too-inconvenient. Of course those two features rarely go together!

Saturday we got up early and we climbed Fourvière and saw a big cathedral, then down the hill to look at a couple smaller churches but they weren't open until the qfternoon so we headed back to the apartment and ate baguette for lunch, it was super! In the afternoon we went for another walk, back to the churches which hadn't been open, one of which had five guys break-dancing outside, so that was fun to watch.We looked at the pretty churches and then went for a walk out the other direction where Laura introduced me to the delicious tarte praline. Dinner was nice, Laura invited Joanna, an American girl studying in Lyon, to dinner and she brought an apple pie for dessert. We went out for drinks nearby and had intended to go dancing but I still hadn't fully recovered from my train ordeal and was almost falling asleep at the table! It was a little embarrassing, especially since we were sharing our table with three English guys who we'd just met. I'm sure they have a great impression of New Zealanders now!

Sunday we were meeting some of Laura's friends to see an art exhibition at 11 so we went to the market early and had fun buying fruit and vege and cheese. We may have gone a tad overboard on the capsicum and courgettes but I'm sure we can just eat a lot of salad. The exhibition was of modern art from 1945-1949 so there was lots of Pollack and Rothko and then lots of European artists who we hadn't heard of so now I have a list of people to look up in my edu-Catie project! Sunday afternoon we hung out at the apartment mostly because that evening we were attending the ballet! Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was being performed at the Opera House and Laura got two of the last three tickets available. It was really good, especially Juliet. The costumes and design were futuristic, the stage looked like something from Stargate, and they had cut out a lot because they wanted to shorten it, it was less than two hours and Tybalt was still alive at teh end so if you're familiar with the story you can imagine that Laura and I had a sort of "Huh?" moment at that! But the production was beautiful and we both teared up when Juliet was trying to wake up Romeo, always a good sign. It was fun gettin dressed up and going out and we had wine and cake afterwards since it wasn't very late.

Monday was a bit of a lazy chore day. We woke up late, talked to NZ for two hours then went to do our laundry then groceries. It was just a get-stuff-done kinda day. We had to go on a mission to find a camera cord because I cleverly left mine in Florence! We went to three different plqces before the guy in the last place told us we'd have to order one in for €30 and it would take 30 days so why not just buy a card reader? So that's how we solved my problem in the end, now I have a multi-card reader which does the same job. Tuesday was Armistice which is a public holiday so it seemed like lots of places closed for Monday too, wanted an extended weekend. Laura made a pretty fabulous lasagne for dinner (I pretty much bullied her into it because Joanna had talked about how good it had been.) I spent the whole evening transfering photos to CD because I only had space on my camera for 3 more photos!

Monday night was also ny interview for the journalism course which I want to do next year. I rang using Skype and then discovered that my earpiece was broken so I ended up calling ten minutes late, but he was very nice about that. I guess you cacn't expect calling long-distance to go without incident! I had practised a lot of answers and thought a lot about what he would ask but the interview went really well and after 11 minutes when he asked if I had applied to any other programmes I said "No, if I don't get into this course I'll have to consider my other options" and he said "I don't think you'll need to worry about that." So there was smiling and arm-pumping and trying to sound like a grown-up on the phone. I should receive an official letter at the end of November but since I'll be in Ireland I'll have to rely on my family to be privacy invaders so we can have official arm-pumping and smiling and cheering.

Tuesday we went for a walk, public holiday etc everything was closed, but we picked a bad day because it was raining off and on all day. We headed up a hill and found a market and a carnival of all things! Got quiche for lunch, hid in a cafe from the rain, ran when it stopped for a minute and found nuttella crepes, very exciting. So we headed down the hill with our yummy hazelnutty treat and decided to see a film since it was such a rotten day. We had to find one which doesn't dub stuff so we ended up in a wee arty place and saw The Visitor which is about a depressed widower and illegal immigrants in New York, very good, we liked it.

Dinner was at Joanna's with her friend Michelle so it was a nice English speaking evening. All Laura's French friends speak excellent English but I feel bad making them speak my language when obviously they could all converse quite comfortably in French if I weren't there.

That's it for today, talk to you again from Barcelona! Oh and forgive typoes, French keyboards are crazy!

Venice and Verona

2008-11-07T05:19:00.003+13:00

Okay so my hostel had free wifi but no laptops that we could use so hence no update until now, when I found a place in Verona with internet for €1 per hour! That's really cheap, I was stoked.

Okay so it was Sunday afternoon and I was about to find myself some dinner when I left you. So I wandered in circles until I found a place with the right look for what I wanted, and adorable little trattoria with yellow table clothes and a big wooden door. It was quiet, but that's because I was eating at 7 and no one eats until 8 here. I asked for a recommendation from the waitress and she suggested the lasagne bolognese so that's what I ordered. I thought it might be like the spaghetti bolognese and was hesitent to go with something standard but I had asked for her advice... with great results! Bologna style lasagne is so yummy! All kinda cheesy and spicy. It was great :) Then gelato and back to the hostel... It was a good day :)

Monday I headed out to Ferrara for the day and it was lovely, but Siena was much prettier. Ferrara has pretty old bits, but there are lots of modern things slung in between so it's not as cool. I did enjoy myself, saw the outside of lots of cool stuff but it was Monday so all the museums were closed. Not a big news day really.

Tuesday I caught the 9am train to Venice, easily found my great hostel. Venice is super expensive but as soon as I'd paid I got to forget about that and just enjoy it. The place is really enw and the guys worked together at a hostel in Florence before opening their own hostel, and they have a puppy who is gorgeous! It was pretty social too, we all sat around last night drinking wine and talking, and the Americans celebrated having a new president! So I dumped my luggage in the room and went out for a walk in the pouring rain. Visited San Marco and the Rialto and then walked along the water for a while before getting totally completely ridiculously lost. I enjoyed it for the first hour, being lost in a city is my favourite part sometimes, but it was so wet that I was soaked and my sneakers are still wet through, completely horrific and then I got cold and just wanted to get home. It was cute though, I asked for directions to San Marco because from San Marco there are signs to the train station and I was staying right beside the train station and a nice man gave me some directions and then said "And you will find a big street with a red cafe. Then you ask for new directions." Which is so true in Venice! Oh my goodness, I couldn't believe the number of dead ends and circles! So I found my way hostel-side around four and just stayed in the rest of the night, cooked some pasta, chatted with some other people. Lovely night actually, when the rain let up a bit we went and got gelato!

Yesterday it was sunny entirely thanks to the power of my mind - I was determined that it would be nice weather because I wanted just one picture of me on a canal with a blue sky! And voila, I got my way. So I decided to head for the Galleria and the Peggy Guggenheim and I thought I'd walk because nothing in Venice is that big, it's just twisty... really twisty. After I hit the exact same dead end from three different directions I decided to take teh water bus, but that is €6.50 for one hour which is a rip off so I sort of snuck on and didn't pay and then spent the next half hour sweating because although our hostel guy said they never ever check two girls in our hostel got €50 fines the night before! But I made it without incident, the Galleria was lovely but the Guggenheim was AMAZING. Can you imagine having a private collection cool enough to become a museum? Yeah, fantastic. I now have a list of artists to look up and educate myself. I met two American women there, one of whom lives in Venice and the other was her visiting friend, so I went around with them there and then out for coffee afterwards, it was lovely. Headed slowly back to the hostel and managed to catch sunset on the Rialto, very cool! So it was a really nice meandering kind of day.

I really loved Venice, it was so beautiful at every turn and there was so much to see which wasn0t even a "sight" it was just pretty. I took so many pictures in Italy that I'm going to have to buy a DVD and figure out how to put all my photos on it because I'm out of space on my memory stick and on my flash drive. Really great.

Today I headed for Verona with two girls from my hostel, Alanna and Katie. We got here around noon and Katie was super organised so she played tour guide and showed us all the best sights. Yes I touched Juliet's right breast and carefully avoided her left! A few people on the Japanese tour didn't seem to really get the tradition so we watched lots of them get there picture taken hugging her or just hanging off her arm. Also saw a castle, a couple palazzos, an arena and a few churches before a lovely lunch at a cafe on the piazza de Erbe. Bought myself a little brooch in the shape of a mask because the masks are so beautiful but I can't get one home! It was a really nice day to have people to walk and talk with, and to hand the reigns over! Alone I have to make all the decisions but instead I played duckling and just followed Katie everywhere. Fun! And good weather again. Oh and did I mention it was a THREE gelato day? New record that one... Verona is lovely, I think it is better competition that Ferrara against Siena, it's all wide winding streets and big colourful buildings. Ooh and I stood under this whale rib which hangs from an arch in the city (google it, there should be pics and stories) and had my picture taken. Supposedly it's going to fall when a perfectly just person walks under it and so far despite a lot of tourists and a few pope it's still there! Better story than the Mouth of Truth in Rome which is meant to bite liars - I stuck my hand in and nothing there either but there are probably more liars than just people so I don't know why there aren't more tourists with missing fingers. Of course what is the whale rib falls and hits the just person? Isn't that counter-productive?

So tonight I train to Milan, wait six hours in the train station overnight and then head to Lyon to meet Laura! So excited!

I think that's all my news really... Doesn't seem that long. Oh well, I'll give you guys a break :)

Bologna and beyond

2008-11-03T05:13:00.003+13:00

Ok so where was I? In an internet cafe in Florence on Wednesday night, yes? Huh, I just reread my last post to catch up (I forget what I've told you and where to start) and it ends with the rather mysterious single word paragraph of "Shoes." Not so unusual really considering my general obession but I'm sure a point or curiosity.

Basically I had the most amazing shoe experience ever and couldn't even formulate the words to describe it. I have known for a little while that I needed to buy a pair of shoes because while my trusty Converse Chuck Taylors are still comfy and stylish and loved I am attending the ballet on Sunday the 9th of November and my options included Chucks, jandals or hiking boots. Très chic (I don't know if that's the right accent for the e, there are too many options on this keyboard.) So I needed shoes and had been vaguely staring in the window of shops to find something I actually liked and could afford and which would be semi-practical to travel with (stilettos = fun but not functional.)

So remember the rain? Torrential and horrendous and I hid in a cafe? Well when it let up and I asked where Piazza Independenza was it turned out I was just aroudn the corner from home. Heading along Via Nazionale, the street my street comes off, I suddenly noticed a little shop I had never spotted before with bright blue paint and overcrowded windows. I walked through the open door and discovered to my right an old Italian man making shoes. As I entered the store I was surrounded on all sides by shoes of literally every description, even hanging from the ceiling. There were jester's pointy shoes and big bright clown shoes, classic black brogues beside almost as classic huge black goth boots. The proprietor came out to say "Ciao" and was the most amazing man I've ever seen with a huge white beard dressed in an outfit which was white (well, underneath) and covered in colourful paint splatters, pants, shirt and boots all matching and made by he and his partner, of course. So I browsed this amazing little store and saw, sitting on the shelf between a jagged cut gladiator sandal and a big soled black boot, one modest little black shoe. 1930s/40s style with little laces and a small heel, I think I met my soulmate - we recognised eachother. Ok, so I exaggerate, but it was a special moment. And then it fit perfectly (in a shop like this you can't exactly ask for an 8 1/2) so then the fun of the hunt for the second shoe began! Literally every shoe is on display so we had to hunt for it, but when found it was never doubted that they would go home with me! So I had to go get a lot of cash (no visa for these aged hippies) but I am now the owner of handmade Italian leather shoes. I had some eek moments about the money until Mum reminded me that I worked damn hard for that money and ought to enjoy spending it on something so utterly me. So now I just glance often at my feet and sigh happily. So there lies the long and exciting story of "Shoes."

Thursday morning I packed and checked out around 10 to catch a train to Bologna. Got to Bologna a bit after 12, asked a guy with a lanyard where to get my bus, he put me on a bus and told the driver to drop me at the right stop. So I waited at the stop, got the right bus and got to my hostel, the Centro Turisto Camping-Hotel. It sounded a bit inconvenient but was really cheap, and it turned out to be great, bus is pretty straightforward so I'm happy. I didn't bother going back into town that afternoon, I did the hundred little jobs which add up - like laundry. Ha, you should have seen the outfit I ended up wearing to do my laundry! A skirt I got in Africa with the tank top from my swimsuit, the only clean woolen jersey I had and my raincoat! Awesome. But soon laundry was done and I could look vaguely sensible again. The hostel retaurant does cheap pizza which is really good so that was my tasty dinner.

Friday I headed into Bologna early to explore. I decided Friday would be Church Day so I hit about 8 out of the million and a half that Bologna had to offer. Saw the tomb of Saint Domenicus, very snazzy. I've become a bit flippant about churches but the Basilica of St Petronius was really amazing, so amazing that I went to church there this morning. It's very open and airy and light, with terracotta coloured pillars and edges which make it seem more welcoming than the plain marble or concrete ones. I liked it. I also went in to the Palazzo D'Accursio which houses the Municipal Art Collection in a wing of the old palace so it was cool art (with signs in English, bonus) in pretty rooms, well worth the free ticket. Also in the palace is the Morandi Museum, full of artwork by an artist from Bologna but it was quite reptitive stuff and sadly not very impressive after the majesty of the other gallery. Oh and the stairs to the first floor of the palace are really shallow and wide because they were designed to allow a horse and carriage up them! Those crazy noble families. I got a bit tired in the afternoon and was trying to decide what to do as I wandered the main piazza and I ended up in the library where I spent a delightful hour reading The Guardian and New Yorker. So now I'm all caught up on how McCain is election scum (something like 80% of his advertising budget is spent on negative ads about Obama) and why it's a myth that genius exhibits young (Picasso may have peaked at 25 but Cezanne was awesomest in his 50s) so I felt smarter when I left. Dinner was again pizza, but a different kind so it's ok, there is variety in my diet.

Yesterday I went to Ravenna, famous for it's mosaics but my motivation was pure Dante, he's buried there. The mosaics were certainly also impressive, I even bought a few wee giftcards with pictures of birds from the souvenir shop. I enjoyed walking around Ravenna although it isn't the prettiest city I've been in in Italy, in a way that made it seem more 'real'... I mean, not every Italian can live in Siena, right? Dante's tomb is majestic and I made a nice American lady take my photo in front of it, which I would show you but I forgot my camera cord. Next time. I caught a different bus to the hostel because it required no waiting but I missed the stop and had to walk twenty minutes back, following the bus stops, thank goodness it wasn't raining!

So today was Museum Day and I decided to go to church because I went a lot in Tanzania and found it really nice, being part of a community, and I find mass in another language very soothing. It's not as scary to be warned of brimfire if you can't understand a word of it! And the Basilica, as I said, it beautiful so I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling. Then the museums! Bologna rocks because almost all the museums are free! I went to the Museum of Archaeology, mummies, vases and old statues; the Medieval Museum, illuminated books, armour and statues of Popes and Saints; the University Museum, old maps, model ships and wax anatomy models. I missed the Modern Art Gallery because I couldn't find it easily (the signs stopped before I could get near it) and the National Picture Gallery because it cost €10 - ha! I sat in a cafe reading and drinking coffee for about an hour, delight, before deigning to come and update all of you!

Tomorrow I'm going to explore Ferrara, which is the picturesque medieval city in this region, so I can compare it to Siena. Then Tuesday it's the early train to Venice and my exploration of the sinking city can begin! I think my hostel there has free internet so you can expect an update in a few days, probably a good deal shorter than this one unless I fall in love with a handbag, coat or man!

Firenze

2008-10-29T04:16:00.004+13:00

So Monday I went to Siena for the day. Whenever I said I was going to Florence to Italians they were unimpressed but everyone perked up when Siena was mentioned so my expectations were pretty high. The city didn't let me down, it is exactly how you imagine a little Italian town will be, all curving narrow streets and tall shuttered buildings. The Cathedral was beautiful, the Palazzo was impressive and Piazza del Campo was very pretty, although I had great trouble imagining a horse race there! It was an overcast day but didn't make good it's threat of rain so I quite enjoyed my wander around the little town. Lunch was foccacia and a lot of pastries. Patisseries here (here being Greece and Italy thus far) sell things with a price per kg so it ends up being really affordable to buy two or three little pastries! And super yummy. I mostly just wandered for the four hours I was there, it was a pleasant place to wander.

That night I was so tired from my back to back expeditions that I just read and wrote letters in my room. I was invited out by another guy in the hostel but decided I was too wiped, luckily didn't feel guilty because the other girl in my dorm made the same decision, we spent the evening on our beds doing solitary activities but feeling vaguely social.

Tuesday I decided to explore Florence and headed early to the Uffizi Gallery to join a reasonably long queue and suddenly get every "organised by Italians" joke I've ever heard. Despite supposedly opening at 8.15 no one got in before 8.45, not even the people who had pre-booked tickets and were in the short queue (not me, €3? Ha!) So then we were warned we would have to give up all our bottles and knives (among other things) but maybe the two cancel eachother out because I got to keep both my swiss army knife and my drink bottle. Once I was in it was pretty amazing though! I'm very tempted to go back to study art history now!

There is a lot of religious art from the 13th-16th centuries with Boticelli, Titian, Leonardo and Raphael among the most famous examples there. I was blown away by everything. I have done one art history paper and some reading, but my knowledge of pre-1700s in pretty much nil, and this changed every preconceived notion I've ever had. So that was a good experience! Boticelli's Birth of Venus is there so if you wanted a visual of something cool I saw, that's one for you.

After that I headed accross the Ponte Vecchio, a really old bridge with jewellery shops along it, for the Church of the Santo Spirito. A really beautiful church, I was impressed. I think it might be my favourite church I've seen because it wasn't as ornate as most of the ones in Naples and Rome. It had big paintings on the walls and then quite plain pillars and design, it combined the ornate and the simple to be very graceful. And I gave them some money for being free, it seems strange how many churches charge for entry.

As I left there it had started raining, as it had been threatening all day. I bought an umbrella on the street, and I bargained the price down. I had seen the day before, when it wasn't raining, €3 umbrellas on a street stall and when a guy on the corner chased me (I was ducking from overhang to overhang) and said €5 I just said no without thinking and he said four and then three, so I said yes to three figuring that was a standard mark up instead of a desperate-tourist markup! So I got my umbrella, thankfully since later it was raining so hard I'd have paid €10 for it! I decided that today was a day to sit in a cafe and read so I headed for a bookshop mentioned in Lonely Planet. I'm reading Dante's Divine Comedy and loving it, but I need to intersperce the cantos with something a bit different. I took in a paperback to exchange and ended up getting two books for €2.50, hurrah.

The bookshop is right behind the Duomo so I decided to duck into the Cathedral to check it out and found one of the nicest cathedrals I've been in, very open and airy, it felt lighter than usual. And they had actualy candles to light which I did. Although personally my beliefs don't really extend to an afterlife I like the idea and the action of lighting a candle for those who have passed on but every church I have been to seems to have replaced these with electric candles so you make a donation and flick a swith as your offering! Not exactly the romantic feeling of lighting a candle from another flame and leaving it to burn itself out. So it was nice to find an old-fashioned candle tree. Below the cathedral there are the foundations of an even older church too so that was another interesting sight.

I thought I'd head to a cafe near the hostel but managed to get myself 100% lost! I took a wrong turn right at the start and walked for half an hour before arriving at exactly the place I left from - I still don't understand how that happened, lost I get, but in a big circle? Anyway then I found the right street but missed my turn and fell off the map, headed in the right general direction and got tired so I ducked into a little non-touristy cafe for a latte and chocolate croissant to finish my journal (I was a week behind yesterday and now I'm all up to date!) Turned out I had come in another wee circle around my hostel and with a little help from the cafe owner I found my way to Via Nazionale.

This morning I headed to the Galleria d'Academia to see the most famous David - he was indeed impressive. The Gallery in general wasn't as good as Uffizi, but there was a really interesting musical instruments museum and a lot of great religious art too. Interesting to note that while faces and clothing seemed to come easily to most of these artists babies were definitely a difficult point! Most of them looked more like freaky blobs of flech than actual offspring of a human, and since they were meant to be baby Jesus I don't think that's the look they wanted. I really want to learn more saint iconography now, I've figured out Catharine and her wheel, Sebastion and his arrows, and Julian always has a red cape and a sword so I think he's the patron saint of Super Heroes! But lots of them have books and hats and stuff that obviously means something, but I don't know what.

After that I headed up to piazzale Michelangelo which is meant to have amazing views of the city, and it does. I ate my lunch up there and enjoyed the pretty city. Then I climbed even higher to the Church of Saint Miniato (I think) and saw even more pretty city and landscape, Tuscany is definitely one of the most beautiful places I've been, it looks just like a watercolour. It was neat climbing the hill because it was exactly 1pm and the bells were ringing as a climbed, it seemed like they were for me especially.

Then I just wandered the streets, explored markety areas and ate gelato. Now I'm going to find some dinner and think about packing my stuff up. Tomorrow I head to Bologna! I'm excited, I intend to day trip out to Ravenna and maybe Ferarra (there might be more r's in that). I'm staying five nights there too because I was going to stay more in Venice but it turns out that off-season Venice and Verona get even more hellishly expensive because the youth hostels close! How mean is that? So instead I'll have two nights in Venice and a day in Verona before I go to Lyon to see Laura! Yay!

Shoes.

2008-10-25T04:26:00.005+13:00

So Thursday I chilled out a bit, literally since it rained lightly, but also in the relaxing kind of way. I headed off at about 12 and wound my way to Campo del Fiori and through the Jewish district both of which were really pretty and worth a look. Then on the the Protestant Cemetery to pay tribute to Keats, Shelley, Goethe and lots of cats! There's a sort of cat shelter thing run by volunteers in the cemetery so there are a lot of cats about. It's kind of nice, they're very quiet and there's a poem by the gate about the guardians of the souls. Then back to the hostel, so only three hours of wandering instead of my standard eight! More relaxing, read my book, went to the supermarket, cooked some dinner... That was it for me!

Friday I got up early and headed to Tivoli to see Hadrian's Villa! The bus took longer than I expected and by the end I was busting so instead of getting off the bus at the Villa Adriana stop I stayed on until the terminal assuming there would be a loo there. Not only was I wrong, but turns out the terminal is in central Tivoli - on top of a hill. I ducked into some kind of official building (Uffizio di Tribunale Tivoli?) for their facilities before having to figure out how to make my way to the bottom of the hill to find Hadrian's holiday hot spot. I didn't want to follow the motorway because it had no path and wasn't very pretty so I just found a road that headed downwards and kept walking... and walking. I considered turning back but when turning around requires steep uphill it's not much of a bet which I'll choose! It all worked out anyway, turned out the reason there was no traffic was the big guard rail that ran along the main road and across the end of my path. So I jumped the rail and found myself in the right area! Twenty minutes of sign following and I had found the villa, paid the exorbitant fee and found myself in a lovely green park. I followed various signs and discovered that that Hadrian wasn't so dumb. The whole area was lush and beautiful, and very peaceful. It must have been a lovely retreat from the city then, and it was definitely a nice escape from Italian traffic!

Of course getting home was a mission, but I found the right stop with my limited Italian (or complete lack) and a nice Italian man who realised I didn't speak any Italian but kept talking for another five minutes sold me a ticket! So I found myself on the right bus and got back to Rome in time to cook myself the rest of my pasta and repack my bags! I'm getting really good at packing, it's still annoying but now I've got it done in no time at all. I'm thinking I need to buy something really annoying and bulky to challenge myself, like maybe Spanish boots...

Saturday I wanted to find this cool sounding market with lots of food and clothes which I had marked on the map, and I did find a big space which seemed ideal for holding a market, but sadly no actual market was found. Oh well, next time! So I just meandered again, one of my favourite activities and this time strangely found myself exactly back at Termini, really near my hostel! So I went to the supermarket, bought some lunch, ate some lunch, collected my bags and headed for Florence! Very excited.

Found my hostel almost easily and settled in before going for a walk to find a cash machine which would except my sad foreign ATM. Actually it wasn't that difficult, it's just that Italy is full of reginal banks (Bank of Tuscany, Bank of Naples...) and lots of them don't take Plus cards. No stress because the big ones all do and BNL came through for me, handily placed near a gelato place!

So that was yesterday. Today I headed for Pisa to confirm that the tower of is still leaning. It is. I almost skipped it actually but the train was free on my Eurail pass so I though I might as well. The thing is I've seen lots of cool old towers which are still upright, and that seems somewhat more impressive than one which is tipping. Still, it does lean which is something of a novelty. I didn't climb it because a) it leans, not a trait I generally look for in climbable architecture and b) it costs €16 to climb it which is what I'm paying for a bed each night, I just don't approve of that kind of scale. I did however get a lovely photo of me in front of it which will go up on Flickr if/when it starts working!

Tomorrow is Monday and everything in Florence is closed so I'm going to do back to back day trips and visit Siena. My hostel doesn't have free internet this time (so sad) but I've made sure my one in Bologna does because I'm a communication junky.

Oh and I've compiled a list of tacky Pope souvenirs. I think the winner is the pill box with the Pope shaking hands with a Cardinal, both in big hats. Runners up include magnets, badges, collector cards, calendars and full A2 posters. Honorary mentions are the Catholic Priest calendar (check out Flickr) and the Vatican shot glasses; due to their lack of Pope they couldn't win the grand prize but they should really have had their own category!

I guess that's it for now... I'll update again in a couple of days!

Roman Holiday

2008-10-22T20:01:00.006+13:00

Let's see... Naples seems so long ago! Monday I had a really nice lazy day, usually I'm up and out early so this time I stayed in bed, missed breakfast, ate pastry, watched TV (So You Think You Can Dance and Sex and the City), read a book (Conn Iguldon, Emperor series, not too bad), ate lunch with the hostel owners' family and caught a train to Rome!

My hostel is nice, free internet (always a bonus), easy to find and I met two English guys in my dorm who were going for a night walk to take in the lit up sights so I tagged along. It was nice, although also strange because I didn't have any kind of map in my head so I just got led in circles, pretty circles, until we got back magically to the dorm! I saw the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps so my sightseeing got an early start!

The next morning I started early and headed to the Roman Forum, in a round about kind of way since despite the map in my hand I struggled. I made it anyway and was unpleasantly surprised to find that it was no longer free before being pleasantly surprised to find out that for €12 I could go to the Forum and Palatine Hill and the Colosseum, so that's what I did. I wandered the Forum/Palatine area for three hours, I could definitely have done more but I was suddenly starving so I had to head out and find some food! Then on to the Colosseum - wow! It does take some imagination, since people in the middle ages decided to steal the marble so they could build the other monuments I would visit along my way. Still, it is huge and impressive. I could just picture Russell Crowe marching down the tunnel to his victory. There was an exhibition on art which has been taken from and then returned to Italy which was interesting. Napoleon liked to keep stuff, like souvenirs I guess "Oh yes, I just picked that 2000 year old statue up while I was in Rome. It brings out the feather in my hat, don't you think?" One interesting thing was that Italy also returned stuff to Egypt, Lybia and Ethiopia in the spirit of giving back.

So that was another hour or so, then I traversed all the same sights I had seen the night before, but in the day time - Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, the Wedding Cake (officially known as the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II but called the wedding cake by locals due to it's extraordinary resemblance to an over decorated white cake.) And then the Pantheon - wow. I can't imagine that it is as old as it is! Apparently they can't really figure out how it was built considering the technology they had available at the time. I mostly stood staring at the ceiling, and had a quick visit to Raphael's tomb. Really amazing.

After that I got gelatto. Here starts an eloquent wax on the most amazing gelatto skip it if you really don't care about my ice cream obsession! Now ususally I'm not a fan of chocolate ice cream. Don't have a clue why, love chocolate, love ice cream but chocolate ice cream kind of glugs in my throat and sticks and I just don't enjoy it as much as other flavours. But if a sign says Dark Chocolate then who says no? Oh. My. God. Has anyone other than Mum and Peg tried Betty Crocker Dark Chocolate icing? Peggy and I use to sneak spoonfuls when we thought Mum didn't know (which of course she did.) This was just like that but cold. It was like eating magic. I might go back for more today!

After that I just walked around for a few hours looking on the map to see if I was near anything worth a visit and then walking in vaguely that direction. I saw a lot of piazzas, a few palazzos and I found one museum which I didn't end up going in but which had these intriguing stair up the side, with no signs or rope to keep me out, so I found a nice garden with a fountain and statue and an exit right beside the Quattro Fontane (four fountains.) Rome is amazing, the only downside being that there is way way way too much to see and remember! The main things will stand out but I just know that I'll go back through my pictures and say "Well it's definitely a fountain, but which one?" It's easy to see all the sights because they really are quite close together but to remember them all I think will be the greater challenge.

So that was Tuesday and Tuesdays my hostel has a free pizza and beer night (a major reason I chose this one!) So the English guys, Shane and Sam, and I went early so we could eat more than our fair share of what was very good pizza and not horrible beer. After dinner we went to Trastevere, an area on the other side of the river, for a drink and found a really lovely bar where they let us bargain over the price of the wine and gave us free nibbles! So we shared a bottle of wine and played trumps. A really nice night. Because I travel alone I don't often get to do things like that, especially since the metro stops running at 11.30pm so we walked back to the hostel, about half an hour so not a long walk but not something I could do alone! So going out for a glass of wine was a highlight of the day - along with everything else I did.

Wednesday I woke up early despite the late-ish night out and I headed to the Vatican to get my Pope on... Although actually I didn't see the Pope. I might have been able to, Wednesday at 10 he does his audience with the public but you're supposed to book in advance (short queue) or else wait until they know how many spare seats there are (really long queue). I didn't realise at the time but I probably could have caught a glimpse by walking to the end of the piazza where there's a wide open bit. Couldn't have gotten in or close since the Swiss guards who protect him are everywhere, but I'd at least have seen the blur of a big hat. Instead I went to the Museum, that was exciting. Really cool, quite the museum! They've set up a clever one-way system of seeing stuff where you can either skip straight to the big stuff (Sistine Chapel) or meander through the different rooms of exhibitions. I meandered of course, how else would I have seen Laocoon and His Sons? It's such an impressive statue, and you can definitely see the inspiration to Bernini and others. I'll be honest, I sort of ignored the map room and the tapestry room - sometimes you find there's just too much to see and have to prioritise! I saw the Stanze of Raphael and had my picture taken in front of the School of Athens (well, part of it, crowds wouldn't allow for me with all the cool guys, but I got Plato and Aristotle so that'll do.) His paintings are truly amazing, I eavesdropped on a tour group and found out that the first (less impressive) room had been done by his students, then walked around to be amazed by the Deliverance of Saint Peter which is really beautiful. And St Peter has the face of the Pope! Not the new Pope of course, the Pope of the time.

So then through the Borgia Apartments which is all modern religious art where I got mad at all the people who ignored Rodin's The Thinker, just because you came to see Raphael and Michelangelo doesn't mean you can't show some respect... Then I proceeded to glance carelessly at almost everything else in the rooms because I couldn't take it all in.

The Sistine Chapel was very impressive, but also smaller than I expected and the Creation is way more complex than implied by that God touching Adam clip that you always see. I spent a long time wandering around the room (slowly pushing through crowds of people, for a smallish room they sure do push it full) and wondering why God wasn't offended by Adam's complete nudity, but my shoulders would have been too much for him. Wait, that sounds way too flippant - the paintings, skill and scale are awe-inspiring and impressive. I think part of the problem is that I personally find that kind of set up overwhelming, there is just too much too look at. I do better when I can just look one on one with a painting in a frame because I know the boundaries of the painting and can really develop an opinion. I think to really appreciate the Sistine Chapel I would have needed a few hours, a guide book and no crowds. Instead I had about half an hour before I couldn't take in any more and before the endless push of people drove me out, so while it was an experience I wouldn't trade, I will continue my Sistine experience with a good library book when I get home!

After that there isn't much museum, I stopped in to the Carriage Pavilion to see the ridiculously ornate methods of transport which the various heads of the church have had over the centuries before leaving the museum for the basilica. St Peter's Basilica is beautiful, another overwhelming building, and full of amazing architecture and sculpture. I have to say I was blown away my Michelangelo's Pieta. It is right by one of the entrances but I went in the other door so it was one of the last things I saw and after so many impressive sculptures of saints and popes and angels it could have been a let down, except it is genius, true genius. I stood in front of it for a long time just looking at Mary's face and at the limbs and drapery. There is such a delicacy to it that is lacking from anything else I had seen in the Basilica. It's not about strength or holiness, or even piety, it's about sorrow and it inspired more emotion that the rest of the basilica put together.

Enough flowery stuff for you? After that I climbed the dome (about 500 steps all together) to look out over all of Rome - so amazing! Like being on top of the world, which I would have been if I could have climbed in 1600 years ago (you know, before it was built.) I took photos all around and then spent ages trying to figure out if the Pope lived in that pink castley looking one or the white central mansion or the greyish one with the fountain. I still don't know, but it was fun wondering if the Pope owns jeans and whether he's a boxers or briefs man.

Climbed down all those stairs and headed around the waterfront past the Castel Sant' Angelo and the Palazzo di Giustizia, across the river to the Ara Pacis, which I viewed through the window of the museum because I couldn't be bothered paying to go into another museum, I still got a pretty good look at it, very clean glass! Then up to the Piazza del Popolo which was really beautiful. I was exhausted so I sat on the steps of the fountain and read my book for a while, nice to chill out in such a setting! And then I made my way back to the hostel. I started to write this then actually but I was so completely wiped that I ended up saving it with brief notes about my day after one paragraph and going to make dinner. A couple card games and some book and it was an early night for me.

So today I slept in a bit and read a bit. I've picked up Dante's Divine Comedy as my souvenir of Italy so it's fun to read an Italian book in Italy. Now I'm emailing you before heading out to see the Protestant Cemetery (where Goethe, Keats and Shelley are spending their decomposition) and maybe the market. And maybe lunch near Campo del Fiori because it's meant to be pretty and cheap food from carts. Mmm pizza. Also I want to eat gelatto on the Spanish Steps so that I can be like Audrey Hepburn in just one more imperceptible way! Wish me luck!

Old stuff and a lot of ice cream

2008-10-20T09:49:00.002+13:00

Today I headed to Pompeii and after running for the train (in jandals, not pretty) I made it by 10.30 and was amazed at how big it is! I spent three hours wandering around in a kind of headspin. It's really strange, it is ruins but parts are also so incredibly well preserved that you can imagine people living and walking there quite clearly. I had trouble standing the casts of the people who were dying, they're quite detailed because the ash preserved folds of fabric, and grimaces of pain. I did go to the brothel and I have to say I hope they had mattresses because beds literally made of concrete don't seem very conducive to those kind of relations! I couldn't describe everything I saw, I just spent 3 hours exploring and gazing and trying to avoid other people (not very successfully.)

After Pompeii I headed for Sorrento, it's on the same train track so it was easy. It's a really pretty town and I had a big walk through the little streets. I bought gelato when I arrived (nutella and cherry... mmmm) and walked around the port for a bit. Then I headed to the shopping streets and bought another gelato (bounty bar and 'amore eterno' which was mixed berry.) Yeah... I ate a lot of cold sugar today. It was really really good. And the town was pretty too.

On the bus back from Sorrento I did sleep a bit (I can sleep anywhere) but I also spent a lot of time trying to judge whether the person sitting across from me was a man or a woman. It was very difficult. Face and body would have been undeniably male, but 'he' was wearing a pink wool cowlneck sweater and matching pink hat. Then he started ranting to a girl next to him and the voice was definitely male. It was intriguing. Then I slept some more, until the girl next to me nudged me in case I was going to miss my stop, which I hadn't (it's the second to last stop so it wasn't too likely.)

Then what? Hostel, book, pasta, hair cut. Yeah. There's a hairdresser here who does cuts for €15 so I took advantage, she's making her living my doing cuts and colour for people in the hostel and my hair was pretty annoying! I'll take a picture and post it soon so you can all admire my new look (much like the old look but shorter.) So now bed and tomorrow Roma!

Naples or When To Start Writing Your Obituary

2008-10-18T07:41:00.005+13:00

Well 36 hours of travel later... Yeah. That was fun.

Actually it was fun! I settled into my seat and in my row were two Canadian girls (patterns are emerging in my trip... how many pairs of Canadians can I meet? Is there a limit?) and nearby were three American girls who had made the ferry ride the other way a week earlier so they were our resident experts. It was really nice! Shannon and Joanna (the Canadians) and I hung out the whole time, ate spaghetti for dinner and talked about Greece and travelling. The ferry is about 15 hours so there was a lot of talk and a bit of sleep, one of those meetings that wouldn't have happened if I had taken tonight's ferry. When we got to Bari we had 4 hours until our train so we went to McDonalds (it's okay, I didn't eat the food so my rule stands, although I did buy a bottle of water, maybe that counts?)

I swapped books with the last Canadians and had two really horrible historical novels to get through. Truly horrible. One was described on the back as "misery lit" which was a bad sign right away. They both fit that description - how many bad things could happen to a woman between 1900 and 1940? They overlapped with dead parents, abusive guardians, unmarried motherhood and the inevitable rescue being marriage. I read them anyway. Can you believe I gave away Hunchback of Notre Dame for those? Oh well, there's a book swap here so I imagine I'll take advantage of that, and leave behind the one of those books that I kept. Someone else can enjoy the story inspired by Catherine Cookson's mother.

Whenever I told people (especially girls) that I was going to Naples they had some sort of horrible story to tell me about muggings and pickpockets and the Mafia. I wasn't too concerned about the last one, but I met three girls who were so put off by some stories they'd heard that they cancelled their trip to Naples and headed straight to Rome. So I was mildly concerned. Not overwhelmingly so, but enough to wonder whether I should splurge on a taxi and whether I should have bought groceries to make my own dinner. Realistically I travelled alone through Stone Town, Athens and Istanbul so I didn't think it could be too much worse! But I got here safely, and found the hostel without too much bother (okay so the instructions were horrific but once I found the right street it was easy, so I just approached people on the street with "Scuzi? Where?" and the accompanying pointing at the name on my page. Easy as pie!

When I got in the reception guy was out for five minutes but I could not wait to shower so I dumped my stuff in reception (way security concious me) and went to shower. It was magical, except the smallest shower I have ever ever seen, let alone been in. I ended up leaving all my clothes outside (with my wallet and passport - again with the good security) and then heading into the toilet in my towel with my stuff to get dry and dressed! I can't imagine the fun someone bigger than me would have had! Then I checked in and went to find a pizza place called Da Michele, familiar to all those who read Eat, Pray, Love because a group I met on the bus invited me to meet them. Sadly I was half an hour late and had missed them, and the queue was massive so instead I got a sandwich from a deli and wandered the streets. Yeah. I wandered the streets of the most dangerous city in Italy (alleged) after dark on my own. Sorry Mum. But look, I'm fine! People are so dramatic! I didn't feel unsafe at all, though I did keep a hand on my purse at all times. After my sandwich I found gelato (of course) and so I had nutella gelato and vanilla gelato and I'm going back tomorrow for lemon and raspberry! The man wouldn't let me have nutella and lemo together, he said it wouldn't work. I trusted him. So within two hours of Naples I had not had pizza, but I had eaten gelato! It worked for me.

I got back around 8.30 (I've been told that after 9.30 is when it gets a bit dodge) and got chatting to a Kiwi girl in my dorm! It was exciting, there aren't many New Zealanders around. I didn't have to explain where Christchurch was or what Whitcoulls sells (stores here are mostly just books or stationery or DVDs, selling all those is weird apparently.) She left for Rome today but we overlap by a day so might catch up for a walk or coffee or something. I may be travelling alone, but I do appear to be collecting people in Rome this week!

So I got up around 7.30, ate my free breakfast (sub-standard, but apparently standard or better than standard for Itally, they should learn from Istanbul!) I pulled out my map and the hostel owner showed me a good walking route to see the best sites of the city. His English isn't great but we communicated fine, when I got back he made his wife check that I was okay so I guess he's self-concious about his language skills. His English is a lot better than my Italian! Although I learned the word rotto today, broken.

I headed to the Archaeological Museum first because I read that it was kind of disorganised and I though I wouldn't have the energy for it later in the day. It was interesting, really good exhibits in some places and then just old stuff hanging on the wall in other areas! I probably saw some very interesting and important things but I don't know what! They did have a weird let's-educate-kids thing which was conversations between a fictional family. There was a boy who has a lisp, a talking mouse and a ten year old girl who fell in love with an eleven year old boy who lived in the museum. I think I missed some of the story but it didn't make sense at any point.

I need to adjust my head a bit now that I'm in Italy because I kept seeing things from the 1600s and thinking "400 years? That's nothing, if it were dog years I might be impressed!" Greece is just so unbelievably old that I've lost perspective on the rest. So I didn't enjoy the painted ceilings as much as I probably should have but I got big thrills from the mosaics because I saw the Alexander Mosaic! You don't seem excited enough. I saw the ALEXANDER MOSAIC!!!! Yeah, it was a big moment for me!

And the mosaics room is right next to the Gabinetto Segretto (Secret Cabinet) which is wehere they hide all the dirty stuff! Wow is my education complete now... Those Romans (and Greeks and Etruscans) were not prudes. I had a funn moment towards the end of the room when I read the sign first and it said "Goose, hen and duck adorning a herm in the shape of a cock." You are all thinking what I was thinking but it was, in fact, a rooster shaped herm. Yeah. Tricky people, first they show you a room full of frescoes with the kama sutra on them and then they call you dirty minded when poultry aren't your first thought! Ha, turns out those frescoes were really practical. Lots of the prostitutes (pornai in Greek, my etymology lesson for the day) were slaves and lots of the clients were foreign traders so there were frequent language issues, hence the need for visual aids! You just point at what you want, much like me ordering stuff at the patisserie except with more nudity.

After the museum it was time to wander churches for about 2 hours. It was neat, I was surprised at how different they all were. There were the hugely ornate and the really plain and all between too. And a wedding in the Duomo so I felt totally intrusive, I slipped in with a tour group (speaking German so I'm glad they didn't need a password) but it did seem kind of rude. Good reason not to have your wedding in one of the city's biggest tourist draws though. They do love their saints here, each church and area and probably family has their own and for the first two at least you can buy souvenirs of all kinds! I wandered along to the waterfront and saw the Castel d'something, the Palazzo Reale and the Teatro di San Carlo but I didn't go in to any of them because it costs money and I just couldn't be bothered really, I'd just spent a long time looking at the insides of interesting buildings and I was enjoying the sun and the outsides of interesting buildings. I did go to the Teatro museum which was free and saw lots of pretty costumes, now I want to see every ballet ever, starting with Romeo and Juliet in Lyon!

I headed up the hill on the Furniculare (?) and went to Castel Sant'Elmo which is on top of a hill and has a really great view of the city. It was neat, I took the lift up but found a long pathway down so I walked through under the castle and came out at the back so I could walk around the building and get a good look.

That was pretty much it for me, I was tired so I went to the grocery store and headed to the hostel. This hostel has a full kitchen so I made myself some pasta, it was quite exciting to cook for the first time in five weeks! And that's it. Hope life's good with you, it is with me!

Oh how could I forget? I had pizza for lunch, nice and simple and very good, and gelato in the afternoon so with my self-made pasta I'm as Italian as high fashion!

Olympia and beyond...

2008-10-17T00:58:00.002+13:00

I am sitting in a very noisy internet cafe in Patra! It's a gaming place so it's dark and noisy, and because it's Greece also smoky, interesting but not really easy to think here so if things seem disjointed that'll be why!

My last night in Nafplio was really lovely. I wandered back from the internet cafe and had a wee rest before heading downstairs to eat my dinner. As I was finishing George (the hostel owner) asked me if I would like to join his sons for dinner or a drink at the tavern where I had eaten the night before. I'll admit my first instinct was to say no but I decided that it would be nice to have company so I tagged along. Kostos and Orestes are 39 and 42 with at least four kids between them but I could never tell which belonged to whom! Orestes is named after one of my favourite Greek heroes but I didn't tell him that (it'd be like meeting a Robin and saying "Oh cool, I love Robin Hood!) They ordered heaps of starters and despite being really full I tried a lot of different things including a couple kinds of cheese, something spinachy and a fried something, maybe falafel? It was all really good but I ended up feeling pretty sick from eating too much! It was nice to chat with them too, we discussed smoking and drinking laws in Greece, Europe and NZ, as well as standard small talk about my trip and their lives. It was really nice, it's a pity George doesn't have a third (rather younger) son!

I left Nafplio Tuesday morning. My hostel owner's timetable said there was a bus to Tripoli at 10am, and then I could get a direct bus from Tripoli to Olympia, easy as pie. Ha! Turns out they no longer run that 10am bus, only one at 8.30am and 4.30pm. Quick thinker me, I caught the 10am to Corinth, the midday to Pyrgos and the 4pm to Olympia... long way around but not too difficult! It all went according to plan that way so I arrived in Olympia at 4.30 and headed to my youth hostel. In Pyrgos I met two Canadian sisters (from BC) who have been travelling for four months and are in Greece as their last stop before heading back home so we decided to meet up the next morning to wander Ancient Olympia. Nice for me to not be alone, and I think nice for them to have a new person to talk to!

Ancient Olympia was really cool, crazy to think that 2000 years ago they were competing naked for laurel wreaths... It was neat to have people to go "Ooh look at that" with too! I saw various temples, the old game ground, Nero's house (so called because he stayed there for a short time) which was in pretty good condition, lots of mosaics and about 40 tour buses. They drive me mental! They all just descend on exactly where you want to be and have no courtesy. I cannot imagine Olympia in the high season, supersaturated. I imagine noone can move and they all just buy postcards and pretend they could see the sites! Which are of course well worth seeing. Olympia was beautiful, and the bookstore/art gallery owner offered me a job so I might just be taking Greek lessons next year. He was really sweet, gave me a discount on a book I was buying, a Greek author in English, because I studied Philosophy and worked in a bookstore! Then I read that book in one night (The Mermaid Madonna, really wonderful) and went back to buy another by the same author and got invited to drink wine that evening!

The Canadian girls and I went out for dinner that night to a taverna which had been recommended to us. Lovely meal, I had fish which I haven't had in ages so it was nice. We had a little wine (red wine served cold, weird) and then they gave us a nice sweet plate at the end of slice apple with honey and cinnamon, delicious. After that we said our goodbyes and I headed to the bookstore for about an hour to drink red wine and watch the football (Greece vs Switzerland.) It was really nice, he has this gorgeous store with enough touristy stuff to make his living off tour groups but it's obvious he's in it for the love of art and books! I got the grand tour and immediately wanted to stay forever, unfortunately not currently possible. I did stay a little too long it turned out, I got back to my hostel at about 10.29 for my 10.30 curfew and found the door already locked! Just as I was deciding whether to try to scale the balcony or go and beg a couch from the bookshop guy (can you believe I never got his name?) the little old man opened the door for me and scolded me for not coming a few minutes early! Rightly so actually, I got too caught up in the conversation!

I caught the bus to Pyrgos this morning and then on to Patra where I arrived at about 1.30pm. Now my original plan was to have one full day in Patra and get the ferry to Bari tomorrow night, but when I found the youth hostel it's reception was closed until 4pm and the whole place was full of men, not a single girl to be seen, which I just thought was strange. I've met at least as many women travelling as men so when I saw about 15 guys milling around it made me a bit uncomfortable (whether with reason or not) and I suddenly thought "Well, I could go to Italy now..." There's nothing in Patra which especially drew me, although it was highly recommended by a Greek woman in a hostel so probably there's good stuff to see. So I'm waiting the hour until my ferry leaves for Bari by updating you all. Just think, in 24 hours I'll be in my hostel in Naples and probably in Pompeii the day after that!

I've absolutely loved Greece, but I'm also so excited about the next adventure! Pizza, Leonardo, Leaning Towers and the Pope here I come!

Peloponnese

2008-10-11T23:51:00.003+13:00

Let's see... Friday I was up at 5.30 for my 6am taxifor my 7am ferry, all generally uneventful. Well, I did overpay the taxi by accident but it wasn't too big a deal because I saved myself about 20 euro on the ferry ticket. There was a couple from NZ in my hostel in Istanbul who mentioned that if you're in the economy section then they don't check tickets so you can buy a ticket to the first port and hang out on the boat until the last stop so I paid 16.80 instead of 34.50. It worked a treat and I arrived in Piraeus without arrest or confrontation! Then the metro and bus to the bus station and a bus to Nafplio, where I am now!

The bus station was funny actually, it was full of men in uniform. Well, not full enough for it to be a group moving somewhere but there were police outside, Navy and Airforce inside... I think they had to wait for the Army and Firefighters before the strip show could begin!

Ok, on the weird keyboard front, this one is totally normal and acts exactly as expected... EXCEPT whenever I hit the apostrophe it jumps up a line so whatever follows the apostrophe ends up in the middle of the line above! It's crazy, but in a kind of fun way. Quirky, I like it.

Anyway, Saturday I got up reasonably early and headed out for an adventure. I just wandered around. It's a really pretty town, at least, Old Town is. I'm not a far walk away from Old Town so I spent most of the time wandering that way. I had moussaka for lunch! It's the traditional Greek dish with layers of eggplant and mince. It was so filling, I didn't have to eat for a long while after that but I'm not sure I'll be adding it to my daily diet soon!

The two main visitor attractions of Nafplio are the Palamidi Fortress and the Museum, but sadly the museum was closed and the Fortress is a 40 minute drive away! It's strange because you can see the fortress from the town, it looks the same distance as the Acropolis, which is walking distance. Turns out there's so access from the city side of the hill, you have to go all the way around the hill and up the other side! And there isn't a bus... how's that for tourist planning? So I just enjoyed my day in Nafplio, it is very pretty!

My hostel is awesome, the Hotel Economou. The owners are an old couple, George and Katarina. Katarina I think is a little OCD, she tidies the rooms every day, which embarasses me so I always leave it quite neat. Apparently my neat and her neat don't match - I come back to find everything lined up square or piled biggest to smallest in little pyramids! It's cute. And George makes me a cup of coffee every morning and is always checking that I'm okay. They're really sweet. And they have a Dulux puppy! I'm sure the breed has a name but it's like the Dulux dog, he's really sweet, only four months old.

Yesterday I went out to Mycenae, or Mikines as the Greeks would say, and was pretty well amazed! I walked through a 3000 year old gate and if Homer was right (and if I had to put my faith somewhere it might well be Homer) then Agamemnon walked out that gate to go fight the Trojans! And then back in to be murdered by Klytemnestra. She's definitely my favourite victim/villain from Greek legend, and I saw her tomb. Ok, the tomb which has been named the Tomb of Klytemnestra, but hey, it's like being told Elvis once at at this restaurant, you don't question it, you just believe it because you want to! Anyway, I spent over an hour exploring the ruins, trying to avoid tour groups, and then about an hour in the museum. I did visit the museum shop too which was a bit sad really, you can buy all these cheap looking copies of Greek artworks.

I had an hour to spare before the bus home so I decided to go for a walk, I found a nice looking path and wandered along it before I reached a main road and turned around to head back. Suddenly I discovered that my nice clear path looked neither of those things the other direction! I had been daydreaming a little (of course, it is me!) and I didn't really know where I'd gone, there were a few possibilities so of course I picked the wrong one! I wandered aimlessly for a while before acknowledging I was lost and deciding I should probably think practically about this. Also I seemed to be wandering someone's farm, lots of olive trees in neat rows. I figured I had mostly come down on my walk and that Mycenae is on top of a hill so up was the way to go. Yay for first practical solution, enter first practical problem: no path leading up. I was glad I decided to wear trousers since I ended up clambering straight up a hill, over little stone walls and through bushes. It was pretty funny! I ended up finding a little church on top of a hill, very Sound of Music, and I could see Mycenae from where I was so I followed a new path (this one with gravel, much more trustworthy) and ended up in the parking lot where the bus stop was, with twenty minutes to spare before my bus. Yet another brilliantly executed adventure.

Sigh... I was going to add photos for you all but no such luck, computer won't read camera. It'll have to be from Patra towards the end of the week.

Yesterday was Sunday and what that means that I didn't know is that no one who sells bread is open. No really, I have this massive collection of spreads so I can make sandwiches, but I need bread! So I wandered for about an hour trying to find any, all to no avail. I ate out a record three times in one day. Lunch was a "cheese pie" which was basically a spiral of pasty full of feta, I put sliced tomato on top and it was very nice, dinner was at a taverna where I had chicken souvlaki, pretty tasty.

So today I decided to go to Epidavros, it's the other common day trip from Nafplio and it has an ancient theatre and a shrine and a little museum... perfect! I knew where and when to catch the bus and was standing there on time. Sadly not a perfectly executed adventure. When the bus was late I asked a girl about the bus to Epidavros and she said "five minutes". Up pulled a bus and she pointed at it so I got on, said to the money taking man "Epidavros?" He took my money and I took my seat. I soon figured out something was a little off since we were going away from the sign I'd seen pointing towards Epidavros, but two people had heard my question and got me on this bus - could they be wrong? Well yes. Say you didn't really listen to someone because you figured you already knew where they were going then maybe you wouldn't hear the Epid- part and you might direct them to Agros, a nearby town. Yup, that's where I ended up!

It's not so bad, Agros has an ancient theatre, an ancient agora and a castle. I didn't make it to the castle, but the theatre and agora were very cool, plus a Roman fountain that Hadrian built (he was my favourite Golden Age emperor) so I had plenty of fun exploring the wrong town! Also I'd seen a little clothing store on the bus from Athens which I thought looked good so I was a bit bad and went shopping. Oh, and I wanted a sweet something (refined sugar and I have always been close but lately we've become pretty inseparable) so I wandered around to find a bakery and finally found a patisserie, I picked a croissanty thing which looked sweet enough but had no sign and discovered it was full of nutella! It was a magical moment for me.

So that's been my exciting five days... Off to Olympia tomorrow for two nights and then Patra. I probably won't bother interneting in Olympia so you've got a break from me for a couple days :)

Santorini

2008-10-09T21:19:00.004+13:00

Hey all, I imagine this will be reasonably short since I haven't really done much in the last couple days. Left Thessaloniki at 11pm and arrived in Athens at 5.30am, at the port which was handy for the 7.30 ferry I was catching!

So eight hours later I arrived on Santorini and was collected by John of Katarina and John Hostel, the hostel in Perissa I'd been recommended. Perissa is home to the black sand beaches so by 4.30 I was on a beach! It was beautiful, and strange to walk into the water and change from sand to rock! Slippery but fun! The water was cold, the sun was hot, perfection :)

Quiet night, I just ate dinner and read outside till it got cold. Nothing extraordinary but it felt nice and holiday-ish. The only other person in my dorm is a Czech guy, Mark, who is on his annual holiday so we went to a nearby bar for a drink and met Gina, from Romania, who is working here for a while. It was a nice night and I was in bed by 10.

So Wednesday I decided to explore. I was going to hire a scooter (it's so the done thing) but on my license I could only get a quad-bike and it would cost 21 euros (lame) so I decided public transport would do just fine leaving me with an extra 15.60 to spend. I took the bus to Fira, the capital and wandered around for a few hours. I walked down the 588 steps to the port and then road a donkey back up! I can't put photos on this computer but soon I will post a picture of me on a 'donkey' and I want honest opinions about whether I actually road a donkey. I saw plenty of donkeys in Tanzania and this seemed very tall and smooth. There were definitely a few horses which had had their manes trimmed to pretend to be donkeys but I think maybe I had a non-reproducing hybrid: a mule. Still, it was fun, even if my touristy experience may be a fake! There was an American girl who was sort of freaking out so I felt pretty good about my lack of panic, not that it was exactly a panic-inducing ride. You're not in any kind of control, the donkeys just push past each other and follow the path up so it could be a bit nerve-racking but nothing extraordinary! I wandered some more, ate ice cream, checked out the museum and the cathedral (but rather underwhelming) and decided to move on.

I got the bus to Oia (said Ee-a) at about 3pm because I'd heard that was the place to be for the sunset. It's a beautiful town, the epitome of Santorini! When you see pictures of Santorini with the white houses and blue roofs then it's probably there. I spent a few hours exploring and got a souvlaki for dinner before heading out with all the other tourists to watch the sunset! I met Dimitri, a nice Athenian man, who was visiting his friend and we chatted about how safety in Athens has gotten so bad in the last ten years, among other things. The sunset was pretty impressive but not as good as in Tanzania I think, still took a few hundred pictures. Bus back to Perissa and another drink with my international friends!

So now it's Thursday, I've done some laundry (a very necessary task) and chatted to you all and now I'm going to go for a walk on the beach and get some groceries and buy my ferry ticket! So that's it, Nafplio next which is meant to be the prettiest town in Greece! There's some stiff competition there but I'm determined to be an unbiased judge.

Thessaloniki

2008-10-07T00:50:00.004+13:00

Hello from Thessaloniki (Not Thessaly as I kept saying by accident for about a week...). When I told Greek people and other tourists I was spending two days in Thessaloniki most people asked why, apparently it's not so much the tourist hub, but actually I've really enjoyed it! It's a nice city and reasonably easy to find your way around.

Let's see... Saturday night I took myself out for dinner, nothing expensive but it was a nice meal. I asked for them to recommend a good local dish so I got Alanazik Kebab, some kind of spicy meat in a yoghurt and something sauce, very yummy. And the bread they serve is really crazy, it's bigger than a rugby ball (really) and completely empty! It's sort of like a bread shaped cracker but not that crunchy... tasted good anyway. I like ordering local dishes when I can, and laughed when the American behind me ordered chicken schnitzel and chips. Why bother eating at a Turkish restaurant?

Actually I had one scary experience that afternoon (before dinner) which I had been told is really common but which I still didn't expect. I had walked somewhere to see something (I forget what now) and on my way back I realised I was being followed. Seriously. He wasn't exactly subtle, stopping when I stopped, crossing when I crossed. At one point I went into a shop and he waited at the corner which I would have to pass. But I kept my cool, I went into a travel agent with three burly guys working there and asked if I could wait five minutes. I sat for a bit and then one of the guys wanted me to point out the stalker, possibly so he could say something, but the guy must have moved on within a couple minutes of me stopping. Ha... I wouldn't have minded seeing him get told off by the big travel guy!

Anyway, after dinner that I head for the bus station to get my ticket and settle in etc. My bus wasn't until 10 but I didn't want to be travelling on public transport too late so I headed out around 7.30. And discovered that Karma is still cheering for my team... I had carefully put aside the 35 euros that it cost to get from Thessaloniki to Istanbul, then I got to the bus terminal and was told that inexplicably the student fare from Istanbul to Thessaloniki is 38 euros. I had 2.7 euros in coins... they don't take coins. So I pulled out the 5YTL which I had saved to buy myself a bus station snack - problem: 5YTL is not quite 3 euro, but they took it anyway! So then I found myself sitting in the bus station with 2.70 euros and 40 YTL cents in my purse hoping for no sudden tax! But it was all good, I went snack free but I had made myself a sandwich for the but so I didn't really need any extras. Bus was fine, customs was even worse than the first time around! an hour and a half! I really don't know why it's that complicated. It was kinda funny, I'd gone back onto the bus to lie back down, thankfully hadn't taken off my shoes again, when I got called back out. A policewoman was pointing at my bag and asked "Do you have anything to declare?" I said no, she asked "No alcohol or cigarettes?" I said no again, she said ok, I got back on the bus. Maybe I didn't look suspicious :)

So I arrive bright and early in Thessaloniki (7.30am) with no money whatsoever and a dead cellphone so first mission is to find an ATM and then phone credit - both easily achieved. I had to catch a bus and meet the guy who runs the hostel to get a key, hence the necessity of the phone. Turns out I could have caught bus 2, but I didn't know that so instead I walked for fifteen minutes to find a stop for bus 31, the one I'd written down to catch. It went to the same place, no problem, it just would have been more convenient to catch #2. The hostel I'm in is cool, it only opened on Friday! Basically it's a brother and sister running it, he's a dedicated backpacker who realised there was nothing appropriate in Thessaloniki and decided to open one! I think they must have already had an apartment or something because of the way he phrased it so they converted the apartment into one four bed dorm and one twin room! It has a kitchen and a TV so it's great! When I arrived the three other people were still asleep so I "quietly" (nothing is quiet if you have stuff in plastic bags in your luggage, even if you don't need to open those bags, they just make noise all the time) got ready to go out and see the sites!

I looked at the map and figured out my route and then took a wrong turn right at the start so it was an adventure day instead of a plan day, but that's all good! Instead of the museums I found about a million Byzantine churches. Ok, maybe 8? It is a lot of churches. The Rotunda was cool, besides being big and old and round it had kittens! Yeah... Yesterday I took more pictures of kittens than of old stuff. Well, there were a few pictures of kittens playing in old stuff! There are so many cats around that usually I admire but I don't take pictures because I figure when I'm looking through my holiday snaps I'll think "Oh great, another cat, why?" but I indulged just this once. You'll understand when you see the pictures!

I did find the Museum of Archaeology, which happened to be free! Cool. It was a good museum, saw some really amazing gold things from 300BC or so, really complex designs and beautiful workmanship, I was hugely impressed. And I think if the world economy collapses then Thessaloniki's going to be well looted!

I was pretty exhausted so I headed back and bought some bread for lunch (I have a wee collection of spreads so I just stock up on brown bread when I need it) and then wandered around the block a bit before deciding that there was no one to tell on me for watching TV. Yeah, it turns out if you go so long without TV (I did watch a bit in Stone Town, but I've been pretty much TV-less for 10 weeks) then it's seriously hypnotic. I don't really know what I watched, some Friends, some Oprah, which was half dubbed and half subtitled so I only know some of the story, and a Michael Douglas movie where he and Eva Longoria have to save the president. I also got some Goody's. It's this Greek McDonalds rip off and I decided in Athens that I would have to try it sometime, it was pretty good. I have a rule about no McD's, Starbucks etc. Basically anywhere I could eat or shop at home is off limits because what's the point? I think this place was better than McDonalds but I haven't got a recent comparison. Anyway... fast food and TV. That was my night :)

So today I went on the museum tour and failed! Turns out they're all closed on Mondays! Whoops. Oh well, I had fun anyway. I headed towards the 1euro hot dog stand I'd seen (story to some) and passed a place with 3euro trousers! One of my pairs of trousers are pretty much destroyed. They're kinda gross and ripping, I shouldn't still be wearing them but replacing them seems dumb and they do still work as clothing. So when I found pants in a light material but which seemed pretty good I got them. That's $NZ6! Pretty cool.

The hot dog place... When I passed through here on my way to Istanbul I had a mission of a time to find the bus station and a girl from the hot dog place and her friend (Russian girl, Nikki, who I mentioned before) helped me big time. So I brought them a box of Turkish Delight as a thank you (when Karma is yours you don't mess with it, plus I really wanted to thank them!) I gave it to her and she was quite pleased. I ordered my hot dog and water, and she wouldn't let me pay! So how's that for a good day, free lunch! It was awesome!

Then I went and bought groceries. There's one major change I've made on my trip, spotting a grocery store brings so much more excitement than a shoe store! No really, I'm mostly self-catering (bread, fruit, water... that's my diet) so a grocery store is big news! And then I went on an internet hunt - major effort required, hope you appreciate it! I ended up in a gaming place so there are people shooting stuff around me and dance music playing. It's interesting.

So Greek people they love their cigarettes and sex shops, hate street signs. My lungs are working overtime to process oxygen and I've doubled all my asthma meds, smoking sucks. Apparently Greece has double the average European cigarette consumption! And there are sex shops everywhere. Not subtley or anything all with big neon signs, erotic cinemas on main roads with big movie posters. Because if you didn't live walking distance to a sex shop then what would you do? But knowing which street you're on... that's unnecessary.

Yeah. Tonight to Santorini via Athens, 6 hour bus, 8 hour ferry. I'll talk to you all in a couple days!

Konstantinopolis

2008-10-04T02:24:00.003+13:00

So day two was just as good as day one. I got up early, although I woke up later than usual. Got a full ten hours sleep! Yay!

Yesterday I wanted to go to the Basilica Cistern but the queue was quite long so I decided to head back early this morning. Plan effectively executed, I got there five minutes after they opened and there were only about ten other people there. It was amazing, of all the places I've been it seemed the holiest, and it's not at all religious! Basically it's a really big hole in the ground which was going to act as a water reserve in case of siege. It is a huge underground room with lots of pillars, including lots decorated and two Medusa carvings which were probably stolen from another site. I found all that especially interesting because all of it was intended to be underwater! Why decorate pillars no one is meant to see? Because we can, and because 1000 years later people will surely appreciate it.

Then I went to the National Museum of Archaeology. Their Ancient Orient section was one of the best museum displays I've ever been to. They had excavated an old fortress and has found lots of reliefs on the path in, so they sort of rebuilt the path as much as possible, lots of displays like that that weren't as isolated from time and plae. No glass or rope either. I really liked it. The classical section was interesting too, lots of sarcophogi! And because I started the day early it wasn't too busy, although in the Byzantine section I got stuck behind four Americans walking slowly and saying things like "Oh my gosh, wouldja look at that?" and "Tiberius, but I thought he was Roman?" (Well of course he was, the whole section was about when Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern ROMAN empire... yeah I get frustrated with people who don't read signs. It wouldn't matter if they didn't always have to talk loudly as well.) Anyway, the museum as a whole was one of the best I've been to and I really really wanted a book to take away with me for pictures and information but the only one they put out is hard cover and 80 lira (NZ$88) so I pouted and bought myself a pashmina instead (15YTL).

It's nice to have a currency that's similar to NZ for once, but I have started referring to it in my head as the yertle because the way it's written is YTL. It stands for something Turkish Lira. Or Yertle if your read too much Dr Seuss as a child.

After that I went to the Blue Mosque which was amazing, really huge and beautifully decorated. I eavesdropped on a tour guide and heard a funny story. The mosque has 6 minarets, which is rare, usually they have four. So after people guessing for a while the guide says, you'll never guess because it was a mistake. Turns out the sultan wanted golden minarets but the word gold sounds like the word six so he got six instead! This would have been bad news because Mecca had six and no mosque should compete with Mecca, but luckily Mecca added one so instead of being blasphemous the Sultan had one more thing to brag about over his weekly poker game.

Then this afternoon I went to the Grand Bazaar! The oldest mall in the world, of course I couldn't miss it. Pretty amazing, lots of winding alleys and paths, beautiful arches and painted ceilings. The sellers are very insistent, I told them all I was broke (true, although a few had visa signs... very bad idea) and they would say "Money doesn't matter, look look, you take my card?" I'm not sure what they thought I would do instead of money, I was a bit afraid to ask :P I practised my home mall voice "Just looking thanks" and got the reply "You wanna just look in my shop?" - it's hard to type intonation but let's just say when he said just look it didn't sound like that's what he meant! It was really fun, although the leather street almost made me cry. Nowhere that smells that good can fit my budget, and none of the stores had that magic visa sign (yes, I looked) but oh it was beautiful. I found this brown knee length jacket with a belt and buckle on the sleeves... Yeah. I don't think this is the trip which is going to make me less materialistic or stop shopping. After I decided to head back to the hostel it took me half an hour just to find my way out of the bazaar, but I had a nice walk homewards. I like day two in any city because I sort of know my way around the area I'm staying, it's nice to feel familiar.

I'm really really enjoying Istanbul, I went walking around 7 last night because I was tired but wanted to stay awake until a respectable hour. It was all still very lit up, lots of people around and all the shops were still open. It was really beautiful, I think I'll do it again tonight and remember my camera this time. My hostel is in the centre of Sultanahmet so I can see the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia from the roof and there are lots of shops and restaurants around. Also there are lots of cats! They're everywhere, and most look pretty healthy so I'd say garbage disposal is low and rat population is high. I'm not silly enough to pet them or anything but it's kind of nice to have so many hanging around, like pets of the city!

I have to say Turkish men are the best/worst. Not as sleazy as the Greeks in Athens, but still pretty bad. They manage to mostly sound humourous, or occasionally charming, but it can still get pretty annoying. The bartender upstairs told me he'd carry me to bed if I fell asleep, which was mostly just funny. The best one yesterday was when a guy I was about to pass said "Oh there you are, you're late!" and I looked at my watch because I am so regularly late to things that I just assume it's true! Then I realise and laugh and keep walking while he calls out "Hey wait, wait miss!" I also got "Cookie girl! Cookie girl!" while I was (you guessed it) eating a cookie. I imagine it will all go to my head, but as soon as I pass a window after my 10 hour bus ride the swelling should go right down.

Oh and Istanbul has the best street food snack! Corn on the cob. Only 1YTL (ha, you're all thinking it too now aren't you!) and you get a really yummy steamed corn cob. Totally rocked my lunch hour.

That's it for me, I've got another day tomorrow to explore before I head back to Thessaloniki tomorrow night so I'll update you from there I guess!

If only I had a date ın Constantınople...

2008-10-03T01:18:00.003+13:00

Because I´m ın Istanbul! Ok, thıs keyboard has all the symbols ın the wrong places and even though I can see the real apostrophe I cannot make ıt work so we shall have to put up wıth weırd ones or even none. Also there are two i keys. one wıth the dot (i) and one wıthout (ı) but the one without ıs ın the normal spot and as you can see I sort of swıtch between them. And there ıs a ç where the stop should be and a ö ınstead of a , so be patıent and enjoy spottıng my mıstakes (I´m thınkıng of a couple specifıc people here... you know who you are)

I´ve had numerous requests for more photos so I am goıng to enormous effort to make some kınd of onlıne album thıng, ıf ıt works you wıll be the fırst to know!

So I have had all sorts of adventures sınce I last wrote! Monday evening I got chattıng to some gırls from Canada and Sweden and we all went out to dınner together. It was a nıce nıght, ıncludıng me givıng my address and phone number, and Mum´s emaıl address, to them all because they may well be ın NZ ın December! So we headed back to the hostel and Kıt, Trısh )Canadıan gırls) and I ended up playıng euchre wıth a random guy, Sımon, as our fourth. Trısh went up to her dorm to use the phone and suddenly Kıt and I found ourselves ın the most ridşculous religious debate you can imagıne! He started out abusıng Islam so harshly that I had to defend ıt, and along the wıdely varied path of our conversatıon he expressed views such as:
-The Catholıc Church is not sexıst at all because it belıeves in the visitation of the Holy Mother, showıng that a woman has power.
-It ıs worse for a Chrıstıan to kıll a Christıan than a non-Chrıstıan
-Homosexuality is dısgusting, he has no problem with a man loving a man but why do they have to do THAT to eachother (actually quıte an entertainıng part because we actually wanted his views on the concept and all he would dwell on was the act.)
Anyway, I´m sure you can all ımagıne that I rıpped hım to shreds. When he contradıcted himself (God knows all so we have no choices, people who are not Chrıstian have chosen that) and I poınted ıt out he saıd You´ve been waıtıng all nıght to accuse me of that! And I thought well what exactly dıd Phılosophy major mean to you?

After that he was terrıbly offended and went to bed, I thınk he was dısappoınted he hadnt managed to save my soul, poor man.Maybe next tıme. So we played Scum wıth some Dutch boys and drank a bıt of ouzo. I am not an anıseed fan but it got better after a whıle, or I lost my taste buds.

Up early the next mornıng to just explore and run errands, nothıng hugely excıtıng but it was nice to see some of the city. I watched the Changıng of the Guard at Syntagma Sq. You know the Monty Python Mınıstry of Silly Walks routıne... I am pretty sure thıs was ınspiratıon! YouTube it and see the glorıous weırdness! Then I just wandered some more before headıng back to the hostel and out again for groceries. Made a couple sandwıches for my long bus ride and spent ages fıgurıng out how to get to Santorini! I was in a dorm with a really lovely Greek lady who works at the unıversity so I spent about an hour talking to her about where to go ın the Peloponnese and now I have vague plans for what I will see there too!

Wednesday is the day of real adventure. My braın let me down completely (twıce) but karma was completely on my sıde this time! I wanted to get the mıdday bus to Thessaloniki, leavıng from Kıfıssus statıon. On the metro there was a stop labelled Kifissia. I assumed they were the same. Dumb right. Well, not so dumb, I dıd ask a guard at the station if this was the rıght train but he was probably just smiling and nodding. So I got all the way to Kıfıssıa and asked how to get to the bus statıon. She poınted atthe traın going where I had just been! Gah! So I went a few stops before pulling out my phone to call hte station. Turns out the stop where I asked the guard ıf thıs was the rıght traın I should have left and caught a bus! Luckily for me karma had my back. I had left pretty early anyway and when I got to the rıght place the bus had just pulled up! Another fıve mınutes and I would have mıssed it. Made ıt to the statıon at 11.35 and caught the rıght bus!

Sıx hours later she arrıves ın Thessaloniki... Or does she: The bus pulled ın to a nıce statıon and most people got off so I got off, grabbed my bag and started wandering around. Suddenly I realised the bus was still half full and asked the baggage guy so fast that he looked like I had exploded hıs mınd whether thıs was Thessaloniki and where I was meant to go. After repeatıng myself slowly and showıng him my ticket he stepped ın front of the pulling away bus so I could get back on and go another half an hour to the central station! I must have been good recently because we are not done tryıng to mess up yet. No one could tell me where to go for my Istanbul bus - turns out they mıs-translated it on the website so the Greek name was not actually what was written on my page. I asked at thıs completely random hotdog stand and a girl actually called her boyfrıend to ask if he knew the street, then walked me to the station! Lovely gırl from Russia, I guess she knew what ıt ıs like to have no ıdea what you are doing in a foreign city!

So I made it on to the bus and nine hours later arrived in Istanbul. With a long stop to process passports at about 3am - fun. It was 7am when we got here and I managed to change some money and follow the instructions to get all the way to my hostel by about 8.30! Very cool. So I got organised and had a cup of tea and was off to see stuff! There is so much to see, but I have three full days so there ıs enough tıme. Today I went to the Istanbul Modern. Yes, I came to one of the oldest cities in the world and went to look at modern art, but Thursday is free entry! Can´t say no to that! Weırdly they took my swiss army knife off me at the start and I retrieved it as I left, but I´m not sure what threat they thought I posed. Then I went up Galata tower for a spectacular view, explored the local area and ate street food whıle I walked back to Sultanahmet. Saw the Blue Mosque and walked through the Otopark. Tomorrow is the Basilica Cistern, the Museum of Archaeology and the Grand Bazaar! I´m excıted, ıt ıs so beautıful here and easy to explore.

And bid news on the photo front, I think I have a flıckr account you can all look at! Try this
http://flickr.com/photos/31050258@N04/. And if that doesnt work then my screen name is Catıe Travels and my sign in name is catıenobes so it should be fındable. Only about 25 photos so far but I wıll see about addıng more as I go. There´s a monthly limit whıch I´m 60% through so only a few more in the next few weeks.

Another long one for you today, but ıt has been an eventful week! Free internet here again so if you do emaıl etc I will probably actually reply! Hope karma is on your side, and if not then stop being so bad!

Words fail me

2008-09-30T02:16:00.002+13:00

I had the best day. You know when you imagine your trip overseas and you can see it all in your head and when you get there it's still great, but it rains or you struggle with the system? Well today was the day I pictured. Perfect.

I got up early and had breakfast at the hostel and was out by 8.30 on my way to the Acropolis (yay). Metro was a piece of cake and I arrived at the Acropolis before 9am. It was more than amazing, it was awesome in it's original meaning. And arriving early was a blessing as it turned out because by 9.30 the place was packed, I got photos with no other people in them but I doubt anyone later was that lucky. I spent about 40 minutes in raptures looking at the Parthanon and the Erechtheion (always my favourite) and because I was early and there were no crowds at one point I was in a corner and there was no one there so... I touched it. Then took a picture of where I touched so I'll never forget!

I left there and had a wander through the winding alleys and backstreets, all very pretty. I was quite happily lost when I rounded a corner and found Hadrian's Arch! It was very sudden. When you buy a ticket to the Acropolis you get tickets to the other ancient sites so went in and saw the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which must have been huge, there are only big pillars left now! Then one of those great travel moments. There was a girl who came in behind me to look as well so I suggested we swap cameras and get some pictures. We got chatting and decided to head around the corner to see the Stadium. Kirsi (I'm guessing the spelling) wasvisiting from Finland and staying with a friend, leaving tonight, and wanted to see the Acropolis and the National Archaelogical Museum. We headed to the Acropolis, through the beautiful suburb Plaka, and decided that since I wanted to see the museum and had already seen the Acropolis we'd meet in half an hour. I explored the Ancient Agora which was beautiful, I could really imagine all the people wandering the area and shopping! And I walked part of the Panathenian Way! Thrilling.

Kirsi and I met up, deciphered the map, and headed towards the museum. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with. We stopped for lunch at a little turkish restaurant and ordered about six dishes to share! We got this weird baked cheese thing which is apparently a local dish. It was quite nice but too much cheese in one thing, I think cheese should generally be an accompanied thing, not the thing thing. Except that organic cheddar. That was the Thing. Mmm. I got a pizza dish, so big that I took most of it with me... that's dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow sorted!

The Museum was amazing, I saw the statue of Zeus or Poseidon and the boy riding the horse and lots of Egyptian sculptures, frescos from Santorini... I honestly cannot describe seeing all the stuff. It was great. And somehow Kirsi and I had a similar approach - read the big signs, look at the big stuff and the things that seem interesting but don't feel bad when you think "Great another vase room, I think I'll skip it" so we had a lot of fun.

Then we went to the metro, she gave me her map and got the train to her stop while I walked back to my hostel. Never to be in touch again.

A lovely day all told. My hostel has free internet so I'm likely to be on here all the time. Oh and I've booked Istanbul and Thessaloniki! Thungerbirds are go!

Catie loves stuff...

2008-09-28T16:11:00.002+13:00

I love Doha airport and coffee and internet and ugly little crystal statues of puffin birds and souvenirs of places I've never actually been.

I have a 16 hours layover in Doha airport. It's fun. I think I forgot to mention I changed my flight to be a week earlier, I figured I"d rather be travelling alone in Europe than Tanzania. So originally I had a ten hour layover here, painful but could cope. To get this flight I had to take a 16 hour layover. It's cool. I can't even see the light at the end of the tunnel and I've been here for 9 hours. I just spent two hours wandering around duty free staring at ornate jewellery and overpriced everything. Bought coffee. Not awake now, but have weird sort of energy, you know how it is. So I'm inflicting my craziness on you because I have found free internet. I think. It hasn't made me pay for it so it must be free. Right? My muffin was blueberry with no blueberries in it. Ha... I met a nice British couple on the plane who let me hang with them for three hours till their flight and Tom went to buy some snacks but it took him ages because there was a german lady at the front of the queue repeating "What is blueberry? But what is blueberry?" And no one knew the answer so she just went on repeating herself. Love airports!

I'm going to post this and not force more sleep-deprived Catie on you all, but I do love you all. Sleeplessness is better than alcohol, everything is a bit too bright though. And the airport is freezing! I'm wearing a merino jumper and my sweater! I guess it's to compensate for outside being so hot, but it's pretty uncomfortable. Ok, really posting now.

Stone Town rocks (get the pun? Get it? harharhar)

2008-09-26T23:16:00.002+12:00

When did I update? Tuesday? Right... Wednesday was another bright sunny day, except for the hour it rained. But that was painless enough, I even enjoyed it a bit! I did manage to get sunburned - unintentionally. I sat outside reading and the shade moved. So that was fun too :) Actually the biggest news for me was that the place I stayed had a laundry service. My clothes are so clean and pretty... it made me very very happy. So that was Wednesday, rain, sun, sunburn, laundry... And a beautiful sunset which I took way too many pictures of.

Thursday I was up early again, camp threw my body clock out because we were also in bed before ten and up by 7.30 so now I'm in that routine, and every couple of days I have to have a really early morning, 5am or so, and I shift a bit further left... now it's bed by 9 up at 6. Well almost. Anyway, bus left at ten for Stone Town and I was dreading it a little because I had a really bad experience on Monday with some jerk wanting me to buy him a cocacola, he got quite rude. But it turns out that jerks are jerks everywhere and actually Stone Town is beautiful and the people are all very lovely and welcoming. I spent Thursday afternoon exploring the city. It's reasonably old and full of alleys and lanes so walking is ideal, and the whole place is pretty compact. It would only take about an hour to walk around the whole town! But I spent three hours meandering and looking at museums. There's the Museum of Natural History, one room full of photos, clay models and stuffed animals. Kind of creepy, a little sad, but worth it just to see a dodo skeleton! The Peace Museum, which is in the guide book, has recently closed but it's a pretty building anyway. Saw the Old Fort but it's under some kind of repair and you can't get in so really I just saw a big old wall. That's right next to the confidently named Muesum of Wonders, which was pretty decent if slightly overzealously named.

I changed guest house too when I returned, a better area I think and a better price, so I had to get used to the new location so the walk was good for that!

Then today was the spice tour - a must for Zanzibar apparently. It was quite interesting to drive around the different spice farms and collect stuff, though I left it all there because I couldn't take it to Europe with me. Cinnamon was cool, it's just bark! Who knew... And then we tried lots of local fruits, it was fun. Jack fruit tastes kind of like pineapple, there's malay apples and bitter orange and other stuff I forget. And then lunch, really yummy, full of all the spices we'd seen!

You know I think this is probably quite a boring post to read. I had fun doing this stuff, but none of it's that exciting to read. Not like killing chickens and being kidnapped by buses. Oh! I know... I was walking back to the hotel yesterday and a policeman started chatting with me. Locals often start talking to tourists and usually they want something but I thought oh a policeman, I've been well trained by my mother that this man is only here to help. So when he asked where I was staying I told him, which I normally wouldn't do. Next thing he says "I think I would like to visit you today." Oops. So I told him that unfortunately my husband and I were going out for dinner and we were on a pice tour all day tomorrow so it was not a good idea. Quick thinking/lying.

There's your Africa' a crazy place story for the day :)

Tomorrow I fly to Greece, with a 16 hour layover in Doha of all places. Apparently they'll put me up in a hotel but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much! I've got 4 hours to kill in Dar too so I'm meeting up with Musa, the language school guy we met on our first day here and I'll pass my sim car to him for one of the volunteers and see if he's keen to drive me around for half a day! Then it's on to colder climes. It's so hot here I think this might be the first time in my life I'm looking forwar to cold weather!

So I'll see you in Greece!

Heaven is called Kendwa and it's a little pricey.

2008-09-23T21:31:00.002+12:00

Wow Catie, an update so soon? Don't you have better things to do? Like lie on a beach and get sunburned? Well yes, I do. But I love you so much (and my nose is so mad at the sun) that I thought I'd write anyway.

So Sunday was in Lushoto, went to a proper African market. It was exactly like you think it wil be! Colourful, noisy, exciting, beautiful. And then to church, pretty much the same as the market but with music instead of noise! Then the lunch I already told you about...

So Mouddy (the guide who served an awful lunch) told me that to get to Dar es Salaam all I had to do was wait outside my hostel at 6am for the express bus to Dar. So at 5.50am I'm walking down a steep dark path thinking "What the hell are you doing? It's still dark! You won't even recognise the bus or know where its's going and why would they stop anyway? And who else is out at this time? Only murderers. You didn't even bring your bread gun!" [Author's note: if you don't get it watch Eddie Izzard The Definite Article and all will make sense until you throw up from laughing so hard] But you know what? It worked! I got kidnapped by a bus at 6am going where I wanted to go! And I do mean kidnapped, bus screeches, three guys jump, bag gets thrown and I'm standing beside the driver in a moving bus before I can think to say "Dar es Salaam?"

Anyway... 7 hours of bus, half an hour of taxi (who ripped me off dammit) and two hours of ferry later and I'm in Zanzibar! Stone Town is beautiful, although full of scum. Worse than Arusha. At least in Arusha they are asking about something specific, you say no, they go away (ok, it takes eight nos and a road crossing but they do go away!) In Stone Town they just follow you trying to find out where you are going and what you are doing and no matter what you say they keep harrassing you. A bit scary, but once I got to my hostel it was fine.

So I stayed one night in Stone Town and today headed for heaven, a village caled Kendwa where I'm staying at the Kendwa Rocks resort right on the beach. It's beautiful and only expensive because everywhere else I've been has been so cheap! It's still nothing compared to what Europe will be, so I'm probably well prepared for that now. Lots of Europeans around, which is sort of comforting. It's nice not to stand out so much. Hey and the bartender called me "mzuri sana" (very pretty) and I hadn't even bought a drink... maybe he's been sampling his own wares!

So I'm happy and healthy, although being surrounded by tanned people is messing with my head about whether I should actively try to change my pastiness. Actually I've got a bit of colour, but it's not exactly even! I have the most extreme t-shirt and jandal tan, and then pale pale everywhere else :P Anyway, I'm trying to resist the tan pressure - remember Catie, they'll all be gross and leathery when they're old!

Anyway, it's lunchtime! Hope to hear from you all soon! Or that you'll hear from me soon... Whichever.

Things I forgot to say

2008-09-21T23:21:00.003+12:00

In Arusha we saw a hair salon with a sign saying 'hair and beauty - the blood of jesus christ'

There are monkeys living outside my guest house! I'm stoked! Better than TV.

Beautiful Lushoto

2008-09-21T22:30:00.005+12:00

weirdly this computer has no shift button ability and i'm sick of hitting caps lock tostart sentences, so you'll all have to live with the rather unfortunate lack.

so i updated thursday about safari and look, pictures [exclamation mark]

in order we have, mike, me, our guide dearson and jen in lake manyara national park. then the elephant, see the white bit [question mark] that's the side of the jeep, they were very close. then it's the lioness sleeping under our jeep, those are the spare tyres on the back. and finally me in front of the hippo pool, that grey smudge in the lake is a flotilla of hippos cooling off.

friday we left early at 6am, jen and mike headed to dar es salaam after seeing me safely on my bus to lushoto. it wasn't the worst ride ever, but it did win most uncomfortable seats. but seven hours later i was safely in lushoto being chased by touts. the lodge i chose is gorgeous, warm, welcoming and completely empty. it's weird being the only person for the staff to chase but nice to pay dorm fees for a big room to myself and my own bathroom.

i was just pumzika pumzika [relax] friday afternoon and a guy came up to talk to me. he's been sent by his boss to find out if i was interested in doing a hike this weekend. i'd already planned to do a little one locally but he offered for about NZ40 to take me on a five hour hike including lunch. sounded like a plan to me so after having him vouched for by the lodge i booked it. that saw me up at 7 saturday to chat to mum and have breakfast before leaving at about 8.30 for my adventure. i'll confess that about an hour into the hike i regretted the decision since it was steeply uphill and i was having to take an embarassing number of breaks. it evened out eventually and from the top down it was spectacular. this area is so green and lush, walking to a rainforest and learning about the local traditions and medicines [a root to help pregnancy and a leaf which is the local viagra among other things] was wonderful. lunch was cheese and bread made locally, utterly delicious and the irente viewpoint was one of the most beautiful plaes i've been. you can see very far, all the towns and villages i passed on my way to lushoto.

once back at the lodge i was very sore, and almost heartbroken to discover no hot water, but i struggled through. my legs are still yelling at me today but i think it was worth it. my guide mouddy invited me to lunch at his house today, a lovely gesture but in practice one of the worst meals of my life. traditional ugali, a kind of flour porridge, which i don't mind [it's just flavourless really] but served with these tiny dried fish in some kind of sauce - unfortunately it activated my gag reflex. i spent the whole time eating plain ugali and pretending to dip it in the sauce. still, nice to visit someone's home and his 2 yr old daughter is adorable.

tomorrow is another early morning to catch the express bus to dar es salaam, opefully i'll be in zanzibar by about 3pm. can't wait, beaches and relaxing for 4 days.

No photos

2008-09-18T22:57:00.002+12:00

Hey, just a quick one to say I'll try to add photos from Lushoto or Zanzibar, my flash drive is broken and I'm transferring my photos to cd so I've had a mission to solve that! I'll look into that and probably spend some money :) it's all good. I think I must have done something bad recently, karma's out to get me! You'd think building a house for a doctor would balance stuff like that out a bit... Nevermind, I'll feed the hungry or something! Hope everything is being exactly how it should be for you anyway!

Lions and zebras and 'phants, oh my!

2008-09-18T18:56:00.004+12:00

So it's been four days since my last confession... And what an eventful four days! I've had so much fun, I can't type fast enough to tell it all!

Sunday we just explored the city in the morning, wandered around to get our bearings and found a nice place for lunch. At Stiggy's we'd seen a flier for the cinema and noted eagerly that Tanzania is so delightfully behind the times that The Dark Knight was still playing! So our first full day in the city and we went to an American movie. Still, it was an excellent film. Then back to Stiggy's for dinner, where I think we're headed tonight as well. Their menu is too good, we have to try as much as possible!

Actually, Sunday afternoon sonething even more exciting happened! We found a place that does laundry!!! For only 14000 shillings we all got our dirtiest most horrible clothing cleaned. It was a magical magical day. Picked up Monday afternoon and I almost proposed to the nice lady when my cream trousers were back to their original colour! Yeah... showers get more exciting after camping too. It's good, small thrills.

The place we're staying is cheap, which is pretty much it's only redeeming factor. Clean too I suppose, but so noisy! The mosque starts at 5, people start talking and thumping at about 5.20... It's lucky we're going to bed early or we'd be dead by now :P Hopefully Lushoto (my next stop) will be quieter :)

Monday we headed to the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal, you hand in your passport and camera to a nice man with a gun and then wait outside a door that says "closed session" for an hour before going for lunch and planning to return. Actually the others went back, and got in for abot twenty minutes, but I had to go fix the safari that I so skillfully messed up! When I emailed Sunny Safaris (awesomest company ever) I said Tuesday the 17th and Wednesday the 18th. The cleverer amongst you will realise that Tuesday was in fact the 16th. So I went in and asked very nicely if we could change it and they said sure absolutely. Easy as pie.

So we did in fact go on safari on Tuesday and it was AMAZING! We saw pretty much everything you can hope for! Tuesday we headed for Lake Manyara, leaving around 9, got to the town about 11:30 and had lunch (Safari company provides a cook, a really good cook!) before heading to the park at abot 12.30. Basically a safari you drive around the paths in a forest or plain looking for animals. I figured the animals would be quite far away and we'd all wish we had more zoom on our cameras - not so! The first animals we found were baboons just hanging out right beside the road! Baboons are cool, the males are big and they show off their teeth a lot, they all groom each other too, really pedantically going row by row.

If I described in detail all the encounters you'd be reading for days so I'll give you a few highlights and a list of all the animals we saw (if I can remember them all).

Day one: Giraffes up close, they were my favourites. They all look so gangly and awkward, like a 13 year old who's all limb, but they move so gracefully! And they look funny when they sit!
We were heading back to camp later in the day when Jen said "Oh, stop!" and right next to the path there were two elephants! They were so close, and so chilled out just wandering along the road, we got some amazing pictures!

Day two: Wednesday we headed to Ngorongoro crater, which our guide informed us is mis-named, it's really a caldera, which is basically a collapsed volcano full of animals! We saw heaps of zebras - the punks of the animal world with their mohawk and crazy make up. Lots of pregnant females too! We saw two cheetah, but very far away so once again made use of my excellent binoculars. But the absolute highlight? Driving along we came across a lion and a lioness just lying in the sun beside the road, so we parked and started taking pictures, got some really great ones too. Suddenly the female gets up and starts walking, to have a nap in the shade of our jeep, and the male joins her a few minutes later! We have some great pictures of course, but our guide scared us a little when he started saying, quietly bt urgently, "Close the windows please. Please close the windows." At the time there was a lion tale through one of them but we obliged as quickly as possible. Apparently lions won't hunt people, but females are especially curious and they're known to put their paws up on the window and look in to see what's going on!

We saw, in no particular order: baboons, black faced monkeys, samango (?) monkeys, zebras, wildebeests, hartebeests, elephants, lions, cheetahs, a serval cat, jackals, gazelle, dik-diks, impala, hippos (boring mostly cos they don't move much), buffalo, ostriches and heaps of other birds that I can't remember all the names of.

I hope you all start planning your safari, with Sunny Safaris, because it was so completely amazing! Our guide Dearson (the only son with five older sisters, much wanted by his parents I wold guess) was so knowledgeable, and he's starting his own company soon which I think will be a huge success! I'm going to have to sit down and write out all the stuff we saw and learned so I can bore you all later. Those were the highlights but there were no low points, seeing those animals in the wild is the best experience I've had yet.

I'm going to try to post photos now, but if it fails then blame the computer or the connection!

Arusha and bus adventures!

2008-09-14T19:44:00.003+12:00

Look, only two days and another update. You really are spoilt by me you know! It's Arusha - civilization! It's kind of weird to be somewhere so built up, and to see other mzungus everywhere we go! Singida was really just a big village, Arusha is a proper city. Today I had coffee. Real coffee, it was the best coffee I've had in 9 weeks!

So Saturday morning, bright and early at 5am we were up to finish preparing for our long bus ride. Picked up at 5.30, bus at 6, left at 6.30. The novelty wore off after about 12 minutes. Actually it wasn't that bad. Very squished, and every half hour the bus stopped to let more people on so eventually we had 100 people on a 60 seat bus, all crammed in the aisle. Weirdest experience for me? I leaned my head back and felt someone touch my head and jolted forward. In the crowd I assumed it was an accident, but when it happened three more times I realised that one of the women in the aisle (don't know which one) was patting my hair! It happened at the school with the kids because they don't get hair like ours, that's smooth. I just didn't expect a grown woman to have the same fascination! So I leaned forward for a while, which was fine because there wasn't room for three sets of shoulders across the back of the seat and it gave the others a chance to lean back for a while.

Generally uneventful for the first 4 hours. Jen had bought us a great array of snacks from Singida so I ate for much of the trip or slept. I can sleep anywhere, thank goodness - 5 hours sleep is not enough for me to function on! We stopped about halfway along, around 11, and got to pay Tsh100 for the scummiest toilets I've ever seen! Not cleaned in a while, squat style, manual flush (tap and bucket method) and then no running water to clean hands! Thank goodness for hand sanitizer or I'd have felt really yuck!

The adventure began half an hour later when we heard a big bang. I said "Was that a tire?" But
since the driver kept going we figured not. Until five minutes later there was a really big bang and we stopped. Our tire looked like it had been attacked by a machete! And it had damaged the wheel next to it too. My education in bus wheels is now complete. Buses have six wheels, on on each side at the front and two on each side at the back. This is important for balance because a bus is tall and heavy. We blew the outside back right tire. They remover the inside back left tire and put it on the outside back right, and they left the inside right tire because it wasn't completely blown. Bad decision? We thought so. Forty minutes later we were off again, having impressed the locals who expected us to panic and make a lot of noise. Of course the problem couldn't be solved that easily so an hour later we heard another bang, inside right tire went kamikaze. So we drove another fifteen minutes got to a rest stop and spent about an hour and a half waiting while all tires were replace or fixed or something. It was the hottest part of the day so very painful, most of it's quite a blur actually, a blur of sweaty uncomfortable waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally we got on our way again, made it to Arusha for about 4.30 and headed to the rooms we booked.

We booked at the William's Inn, but since our Lonely Planet was published the price had gone up heaps so we decided to find somewhere new. That made me happy anyway, the place was clean but there was no hot water, none of the bathroom doors closed properly and the sign above the stairs said "Men and women of moral turpitude are not welcome in the rooms." A) I wanted to steal the sign, b) two days ago I couldn't have used the word turpitude in a sentence and c) I spent all evening worrying there would be interviews and stonings! Also, the mosquito nets had holes in them and we all got eaten alive! Malaria here we come!

So we got up super early this morning, had breakfast and headed out to check other places. WE found one nearby which was okay but kind of a bad vibe around the area so we went to look elsewhere and found an excellent place near the market. A better area, the place is clean though quite tatty, they have hot water and it seems all good :) We're here two nights, maybe Wednesday night too after our safari, we've yet to work that out exactly.

So that's it :) We had an awesome meal last night at an Aussie guy's place called Stiggy's. It's a proper restaurant, I have fried mushrooms with a cheese sauce, a burger and chips amd most excitingly, a gin and tonic! The best G&T I've ever had! Arusha rocks - except all the touts. We get followed lots by people wanting to book us in safaris, sell us souvenirs etc. It's annoying, but they're not threatening or anything so we feel safe enough.

Anyway, maybe more later in the week. Tomorrow we're off to the Rwandan Genocide trial among other things!

Last week in Mvae!

2008-09-13T01:05:00.002+12:00

So it's been an eventful week! Our last week in camp, which is so unbelievable. I spent most of the week thinking that I was ready to go but when Thursday rolled around I almost cried!

But we'll start at the beginning... From our camp we can see this giant rock, it looks reasonably close and the last lot of volunteers walked there. Being an adventurous and competitive bunch we decided to do the same! So we got up early (considering Sunday is lie-in day this was a major sacrifice for all of us) and were off at a good pace by 8.30am! Our wee group included the five volunteers, Mr Brown (God of a man), his sons Olman and Daniel, Issa and his ridiculously annoying brother Hamisi and the vice-Chairman Rama. The weather was lovely, and the morning isn't too hot so it was a really lovely walk/hike. Two hours saw us to the bottom of the hill, in a town with some kind of name (I'm sure it had one).They charged us Tsh5000 to pass through and asked us to help them finish building their primary school. It's definitely a worthwhile project but I can't promise anyone support until I make it through my trip without sinking myself into debt!

So we continued with our adventure, which now consisted of clambering up tree filled slopes and over giant rocks. I'm sorry to say I quit halfway and sat down until Mr Brown came along to cajole me and carry my bag - sometimes I just revert to being six years old again! It was all worth it once we reached the top anyway! The view was phenomenal and with my binoculars (thanks Richard) we could see the camp! As an aside, Jordi, who is Dutch, think binoculars is a really weird word. We picnicked on top of the rock, and all the Muslimsc tore into the bread despite it being Ramadan! I asked Mr Brown and he said "They are not good Muslims, sometimes they do not care about God." I wouldn't have wanted to go hungry after that hike either :P We hung out for about two hours, I managed to not get sunburnt, and got some amazing photos! I'll try to post some photos in a couple days from Arusha.

We headed home, via a wind powered well! Unfortunately there was no wind so we got to watch fifty people not get water. Sort of depressing. Anyway, home was MUCH more painful than there, especially since the Tanzanians with us obviously have a lot more stamina. Hamisi (he of the annoyingness) kept running back and forth yelling "Keti choka? Choka?" ("Catie tired? Tired?") To which I would have liked to reply in unreportable language, but I couldn't waste the breath. I'm exaggerating slightly here, most of the walk was fine and it was really only the last hour which was that painful. But home we got, and after a wash I felt awesome! We were all early to bed after that!

Monday was just work as usual. Painting ceilings is pretty boring really. I think I finished early. Why am I even writing about such a boring day? Aidan, head teacher, came for dinner. Exciting? Not really. I apologise profusely for the dullness of my update.

Tuesday was better! There was only enough painting for all of us in the morning, after lunch the boys kept painting while I dug! I impressed all the fundis that day, even Venance who only addresses me as "mwanamke" (woman). Mr Brown told me to get teh boys to help but I said I was tough, so I got to it! There are little courtyards in our house which need the floor lowered so that in the rainy season the house doesn't flood. It's a matter of breaking the dirt up with a hoe and then carying it out with buckets. Quite hard work, especially by yourself and I was proud of myself for working as hard as I did. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have worked that hard if there weren't people plastering within eyeshot! You know how having witnesses makes you work harder :) Oh and that evening we ate our chicken from Joyce as well as a rooster we bought from a wee girl. I stayed well clear of the killing this time! Alex killed one while Mr Jumanne killed the other. Mr Jumanne was quite upset last time when we didn't let him kill one because as a Muslim he can't eat non-halal meat. He got pretty cheeky about it too, trying to take the rooster away from Jordi. This time we let him kill the little chicken, which had about as much meat as a pigeon, and he was satisfied. Fried chicken and chips - better than KFC!

Wednesday was more digging, but with help this time. Jordi, Jen and I dug out the whole space in about three hours and then spent another hour moving the dirt we moved from where we moved it to to the hole it came out of in the first place about two months ago. That's about quadruple handling, not hugely efficient!

That afternoon we had a guy come in who had been in a car accident three days previous. I may not have mentioned that people think we are all doctors with cures for everything. Actually, toi demonstrate, a funny story (although not with a funny ending). Mr Jumanne called Mike over to talk to him and the first thing he did was point to his private parts and say "What is this? What is this?" Can you picture a skinny guy in a Muslim cap and too big clothes? It was pretty hilarious. So Mike says, hesitantly as no good can come from this conversation, "A penis."
"No! This, this!" Pointing further under.
"Testicles?"
"Testykells"
Turns out his friend has swollen testicles. He told him to go to the doctor because there was nothing we could do, while the rest of us made rude jokes and laughed a lot. The guy came back later and showed Alex a piece of paper he had already had from the doctor which said he had all sorts of bad symptoms and diagnosed him with a long word we didn't know, maybe some kind of cancer. The stupidest part is that apparently this guy is rich enough to get treatment but he obviously decided the wazungu could help instead. Idiot. Better to try a witch doctor!

Anyway, Wednesday this car accident guy showed up with two massive cuts on his arm and a bump on his head. Mike dealt with the cuts with some suture strips from our massive first aid kit, but the real worry was that after three days he was still feeling dizzy and nauseous. We told him to rest and see a doctor if it got worse or wasn't better in a couple days, all in pigeon Swahili and phrases from our phrase book. I hope he listens, some people think if they see us they have no need for a doctor. Anne Marie, who was a nurse, cleaned out a big cut on a guy's thumb one week and told him to see a doctor. He came back a week later and it was horribly infected, so she cleaned it again and told him he had to go to the doctor. About a month later, after we had arrived, he showed up at the fence and his thumb was three times the size it should be, completely black and looked sort of hard. Basically it has died and if it's not cut off it could carry on up his arm. Anne Marie was so mad, it is expensive for them to see the doctor but he's going to lose his livelihood if he loses his arm. A lot more expensive.

So the moral is we're not doctors but they think we are.

Thursday was my camp day so I did washing for two hours. Hand washing sucks, I don't recommend it. But at least everything I own is clean now! Did my chores, talked to people, hung out. Basically just waited for cheza cheza!

It was much like last time, we got called out by the women and they dance for and with us, then we were expected to do something from our culture. I did my mihimihi (traditional Maori introduction), which went well although they didn't really get it! I forgot only one word, manga for mountain. I stutter on the m and made something up - mlata I believe. Nobody else would have known but I felt like a bit of a ditz since I practiced heaps! Then more dancing etc. and back to camp where we served pombe, the local made beer, to the women. One of them got really really drunk (I think she'd started earlier) and assaulted me! Okay not quite, but it was gross anyway. They kiss on the neck here, twice like in France but the neck not the cheek and since they're usually wet kisses I tend to resist a bit because then you usually just get a hug. You know the phrase resistance is futile (for all you closet trekkies)? Yeah... Not only did I get neck kisses, I got gripped around the back of my neck like I was saving her from drowning while she sand the Tanzanian national anthem and attempted to kiss me every five seconds. I got kissed on the neck, cheek, shoulder. Oh, and she grabbed my breast, I think accidentally, but she didn't let go right away so who knows. There's a lady who should avoid the drink! I felt really dirty for a while afterward, but I don't think I'm traumatised long-term!

That night was really really great. There were none of the problems of last cheza cheza, where people got too drunk and aggressive. The Chairman was apparently really upset that things went wrong so while everyone got let in at first at about 8.30, after we'd eaten and when things were starting, every single person got kicked out and then selectively let back in. It was weird because no one told us what was happening but cool because everyone was very well behaved. A few great moments for me were dancing with Mwange, the deaf boy, and then with Salimu, who asked me to marry him (I have such a crush, I'd have considered it if he weren't already married! Okay not really, but he is a great guy.) Anna, our chai lady, has a brother Joseph who is very smart and has excellent English. five weeks ago he asked for support because he needs Tsh25000 to take his end of year exams and can only earn about half that. We couldn't give money at the time and we intended to buy chickens from him to help, but that plan never came together. Because it was our last night and there are no more volunteers I decided that there could be no bad consequences from giving him some of the money. So my good deed of the day was giving him Tsh15000 which is not a lot of money for me, but you could see that it made such a difference to him, he was stoked! He blessed me and my family and my country so I think you're almost all included there :P We had a wonderful night and everyone was out by about midnight! To bed, to sleep badly, and be up early the next day.

And so today. Up before 8, thank goodness I packed already because that would have sucked. Try to ignore all the asking for stuff from people. Mr Jumanne got the remainder of the beer from cheza chezaq, which should have satisfied him but he had his heart set on my boots! A heart I was happy to break I'm afraid. Don't get me wrong, the people here are friendly and open and welcoming, but there is a real culture of asking for stuff. Jumanne has asked twice already for my boots, I said no of course because I need them. Today I was banging the dust off them and he came up, help out his hands and said "Thank you". Playing dumb I replied "For what?"
"Shoesi" Then the explanation no, they're mine, I need them, no, I need them. The reply to each of these was the expected "I wanti." Finally I said "I don't care" and walked away. And considered tipping out all of his beer. But I didn't. See what a nice person I am? Instead Mike and I gave away every single giveawayable (new word) thing in camp so he couldn't have them. He has gotten so many gifts from us and previous volunteers, we just handed stuff over the fence to the kids and women out there. One cool moment, kids always yell "Chupa" at our fence because they want bottles and there's one girl especially who is there every morning, obviously very poor, usually with her baby sister on her back. Jumanne kept pointing at the one bottle we had left because he wanted it for his friend but while Mike distracted him I gave the bottle straight over the fence to this young girl. Her thanks meant a lot, especially knowing that Mr Jumanne would never say thank you! Yeah... we're not nice people. But we have fun!

So tomorrow a long bus ride to Arusha, Tuesday a safari and so on... I'll keep you all updated, maybe more than once a week! For now time for a shower then dinner, with speeches galore! Mr Makyao, the HAPA guy who runs the volunteer side, loves to make speeches and to make other people make speeches so it'll be a long night full of people who are sad but thankful.

I am sad to be leaving, but thankful for the friends I've made and the experiences I've had. cue applause.

Almost done!

2008-09-05T23:49:00.002+12:00

It's a sad weekend, our last return to Mvae is tomorrow, our last shopping trip. It's so sad to be leaving! That said I did book our safari today (fastest $US365 I ever spent!) so we're all very excited to be going as well. And having seen Jane, Anne Marie and Mike all go a little crazy in their last two weeks I think 7 weeks was a good length of time, 10 would be awesome but I might never be the same :P

So last weekend I signed up for facebook, at the request of all those here who have it and wanted to keep in touch. I agree, it's easier etc. etc. but I already regret it. Why would people I haven't spoken to since intermediate want to be friends with me? Or more importantly, why would I be friends with them? This has nothing to do with Africa, just a small gripe since I have limited time and they're wasting it :P Friends and family are welcome, and there are definitely a few people I'd love to reconnect with but if I ever have more than 100 friends someone please destroy my computer!

Back to the country I'm in... The week was eventful mostly because I was sick for Monday and Tuesday, and then so weak on Wednesday I couldn't work! So it's been a lazy week for me :P I'm fully recovered now, no drugs required, so kein problem. Today was a really great day on site, everyone was in a good mood and feeling playful, we were singing motown hits (Sugar, oh honey honey... I still remember all the words to that) while the fundis played war games with blocks of wood as guns - some boys never grow up!

Thursday we had our last day at school. The kids have exams next week so we spent an hour correcting their exams, very painful stuff! Examples of sentences:

All of us used to watch the footbal World Championship through the television last month.
She was too weak to eat herself.

We laughed a lot at the second one!!! After we ran through such examples of English sentences we got to the fun stuff! Jen and I made a wordfind for the kids with questions like "Where does Catie come from?" and the answers (New Zealand if you couldn't remember) hidden in the grid. I did an example question and you should have heard the gasp when the word Mvae was found in the grid - suddenly they got it! It was a lot of fun, and then Jordi broke out the balloons!!! The kids went nuts! These are 12 and 13 year olds who were so excited by balloons, we got a lot of joy from them. So that's it, no more teaching. We enjoyed it so much, I think we learned a lot too!

Wednesday was my night for cooking and we invited the chai ladies over for dinner to thank them. It was a really lovely night, Anna brought her baby and Joyce brought her grandson Davidi over so we got to play with the kids all night. The only downside for me was the attitude of the local men. We have had two dinner parties previously, both times only those invited showed up. On this occasion our guard, Jumanne, just sat down at the table and expected to be served as did Issa and his brother. Usually we're happy to feed them, when they're invited. I was so mad! There is no respect for women in this country. Although we're always aware of that, it's very hard when it's so clearly rubbed in our faces. It turns out that I'm not actually a nice person - sorry Mum, all that better to be nice than to be right? I gave Mr Jumanne the same size serving as five year old Davidi and because we were out of forks the boys ate with spoons. Oh the horrible pleasure I got in being so bitter. It really was a nice night with the women, and we managed to nicely ignore the men for a lot of it.

I think that's about all my news... I guess I'll see you again next week!

Long time, no write

2008-08-30T18:31:00.003+12:00

Hi all, hope you didn't pine ni my absence! Last week Singida had no internet, possibly because we watched a truck back into a telephone pole, we're not sure!

So a two week update... My memory sucks so I've brought my diary in to get more details!

So Monday we had our fundis (builders) over for a meal which was really really great. It's a nice way to thank people for their friendship. The fundis are mostly nice, but there's a real thing about asking for gifts. There's only one funi who hasn't asked for anything from us, Salimu, so we bought him and his family some gifts for being such a good friend. He's the friendliest guy you'll ever meet and his wife is so beautiful! Their children have excellent genes! Anyway, so with 7 fundis and Mr Brown (the head fundi and our everything) there were 13 of us, luckily since we only have 13 spoons and Jen made an amazing soup! Afterwards we had a bow and arrow shooting competition which they all loved, we're all still kids really. It was dark out so we cracked out our head torches and they did quite well. However, no one can beat my average that night! I had one go, in the dark, and hit the tree dead centre straight on. I quit right away to maintain my 100% rating!

Tuesday was our last day at school so we made up a quiz with 30 questions and had 30 prizes, and exercise book, pen and ruler for each kid who got a right answer and then lollies for the rest. It went down a treat and then they sang the national anthem for us! It was incredibly moving and I'll probably force you all to watch the video!

Wednesday we went to Helima's, she's one of our chai ladies, and got served pasta!!! It was exciting because it wasn't rice and beans! The excitement for the day was when she was showing us their bee hives and disturbed the bees somehow so they went completely mental and chased us all back to the house. I got stung on the back of my neck when the poor bee got stuck in my hair, but Jane got stung on the cheek and had a really extreme reaction! She swelled up so badly! Looked like she'd gained weight on one side of her face only. Lots of "Pole sana" from the locals for days!

Thursday was very eventful! First Mike and I managed to break Jane's bike on the way to the kioski for sodas, the back wheel bent as we went over a bump so we (by which I mean Mike) had to carry the bike back to camp, luckily not far away. So he went off with Issa (our adopted 15 year old) and Mr Brown to find the repairman, who was at the pub! He said it would be a very expensive fix... 2000 shilingi. Can't do the maths? That NZ$2.50. Very expensive. It's kind of impossible to spend a lot of money here!

Thursday night was cheza cheza, which is impossible to explain really. We get called out of camp by the older women who dance for us and then dance with us, they give us their kangas to wear and the instruments and we have a good old jig! It's amazing, so much more amazing than I can describe here!

Then there's a party at camp, which is cool but also strange. Lots of people come that we don't know and some people we know only get let in because we say they were invited. It's fun, but the dancing can be dangerous, some of the local guys are a bit aggressive. Like visiting a night club but without bouncers :P Still there are some great guys who look out for us! Salimu (mentioned abave as the awesomest fundi ever) and Issa are both protective of us and there is an absolutely beautiful deaf boy here who saved me from one particularly insistent dancer. He's lovely, just so sweet!

Friday we headed to Singida for Jane and Anne Marie's last day in town. We went out for dinner with HAPA and the new volunteers. Anne Marie, who was determined not to be hung over for the bus ride, got rather drunk and decided we were all going dancing at the dodgy club here. We obediently did so, danced crazy for a good part of the night. I was sober (I had rather a big Thursday night and thought my head might not agree with more alcohol) but when everyone else is drunk you still get to dance crazy :) We taxied home around 1, a good decision it turned out. There was a peace corp group there too and one of the girls got mugged. A group of locals caught the thief and beat him up, possibly killed him. So we probably won't be going back there again.

So home to Singida with our new volunteers, Alex from England and Jordi from Holland. Both very nice, fitting in well. They got tested right away when we got a flat tire on our way in to Mvae! Very quickly fixed by our driver David and finally home for a quiet night in.

Sunday was mass and then chicken killing time! I killed me a rooster named Alex (named before we knew the volunteer, it was purely coincidental). Unfortunately for Alex I was a bit hesitant and it took me about 15 second to kill him, Jordi took about 5 with Harvey so it was a drawn out death for my poor victim. Still, they tasted really good fried with chips! And soup the next day... it's nice to have some meat :)

Tuesday was sadly eventful for the village. A child died in the morning, some kind of illness but we don't know what. He was four and they took him to Singida hospital but he didn't recover. Then that night we were sitting playing cards and we heard whistles blowing but thought nothing of it. It turned out to be the form of alarm they use in Mvae. A man killed himself not far from our camp, we don't know why. That was bad enough, but it turned out they had to leave him until the next day for the police to come from Singida so the poor man was left hanging all night. Not a good day for us or the villagers.

The next day was very subdued, most fundis had gone to visit the family of the man who killed himself so we just worked on our own. That night we had the teachers, Aedhan and Justin, the Chairman and the two vice-chairmen, Emmanuel and Rama over for dinner. The chairmen's english isn't good so we had a quiet meal but it was nice to be able to thank them. This week we'll invite the chai ladies for dinner and consider all our debts paid.

Thursday we installed ceilings in the house which was hard work but worth it, hammering above one's head is a complicated business but I'm starting to get the hang of it! That evening we went to a football match between our local primary and the nearby town of Ghata. It was a good game, although we lost 4-2. But it wasn't really fair - all our boys were 12, 13 and about half their team was 15 or older! Very tall boys! Still, our lads kept up well and fought hard! It was a really exciting game to watch, I got very involved.

Friday we painted our ceilings and finished installing the rest of the house. The really interesting thing Friday was visiting the Mosque! Our guard, Mr Jumanne, is Islamic and he said we could attend the Friday service. So Mike, Alex and I went, rather nervously! I have some lovely photos of me in a headscark and kanga - other than skin colour I looked like a proper Mvae Muslim girl! We were worried they wouldn't appreciate our visit or that we'd embarrass ourselves but it all went very well. Mr Jumanne's sister took me into the women's room and nudged me when to stand etc. It was actually quite relaxing and interesting, although I killed my foot sitting on it and almost fell over when it came time to stand!

So that's it. Two weeks news. If you made it to the end in one go then either you're a true friend our you have no life... possibly both. Love you anyway :)

Photos!

2008-08-16T18:41:00.012+12:00

I love help desks :) Computer is being slow so only a few. I'm trying to email some too and it hates me so I might just try again next week on the other computer.

So this photo is our July 28 group, minus Sam who was a bit sick. Back row is Tom, Benjamin (our teacher), Rachel, Roisin, Charlene, Lianne. Front is Rachel, Lydia, Mama Zo (our other teacher), me and Jennifer. The others went to the new site while Jen and I are in Mvae. We're at the dinner the day before we went to our villages. We all got a bit dressed up since we new it was really our last chance! I vaguely remember those days when I had clean fingernails and no permanent orange sheen. Every day I get back from work with my wash off tan!

Ah the locals take great pictures! This is in a nearby village which has a Sunday market. The Tanzanian man is just a random who wanted a photo, lots of them do! But I like the picture anyway. That's Jane, Anne Marie, Mike and me. The building behind is the kioski. All the buildings are just mud bricks with mud cement but they do seem to stay up quite well!

This is our building, we're about to plaster the top there, but it needs wetting to stick so that is me up on that OSH happy scaffolding! Basically they are tree trunks stuck into a triangle of wood wedged into the ground against the wall and then with planks on top to stand on. Exactly where I'm standing the support is about ten centimetres lower than the others so it was a bit bouncy! Plastering is fun but the fundis (the proffesional builders) did the top because they're a lot faster! That's Paulo, he's 22 and my first marriage proposal. I didn't get too excited since he proposed to Jen first and me when she said no!

Mike shooting his arrow. Cooking tent in the middle with Jane watching him shoot. You can see behind the tree is the cooking area, where Anne Marie will be sitting in about twenty minutes! If you looking closely you can actually see the arrow in mid-air! Very clever photography.

Night time entertainment. I lose most of the time, but I beat Jen in this case. My most embarrassing loss? The fifteen year old boy, Issa, who hangs out at the site. He wants to be a fundi and he's really good! He spends a fair bit of time at our camp, he's learning english and he gets on well with Mike, who I think is grateful for the male company! Anyway, Issa looks twelve and is tiny, and he beat me in less than a minute. Still... I beat Jen so I'm not the weakest in camp :)

Right, that's all for now folks. It's taken me an hour and a half to manage this so enjoy! See you the same time next week.

Vumbi, tembea, udungu na watoto

2008-08-16T01:10:00.006+12:00

So I survived another seven days, who said Africa was dangerous? Today I'm going to try to figure out how to put some pictures up. I've gotten one huge step closer in that my pictures are now on the computer (well, 22 out of about 300) but I'm still a while away from actually showing anyone anything!

This week has been good, Sunday we went to mass. The longest mass I've ever been to! Three hours, they baptised 20 kids and collected tithes in the form of harvest from all the farmers. Interesting but also exhausting, and their pews are even worse than standard ones! After that we visited the head teacherIda's house for lunch. It's nice because he speaks excellent English and we can ask lots of questions about Tanzania and so on.

Tuesdays we visit the school in the afternoons and teach English, this week the kids prepared questions for us to answer. I went expecting things like "What animals are in your country?" and instead got "How many countries are in Europe?" and "What country used land reclamation to get more land?" I crashed and burn on question two... Apparently it's the Netherlands, which makes sense I guess with the whole underwater thing. I said something about countries claiming land from Germany after World War Two. My small way of improving the kids' world knowledge. We also taught them Heads Shoulder Knees and Toes, which was so much fun! We told them to memorise it and sing it to us next week.

Wednesday we visited a woman named Joyce. Every day at work we break at about 10am for tea and chapattis, Joyce is one of the chai ladies. She has a bunch of kids and they have a bunch of kids but I don't know how because there didn't seem to be any men about the place! Lovely lunch of rice and beans. That's what we get served every time we go somewhere, which is fine because we never make it in camp! I can barely cook rice on a proper stove, imagine trying with a charcoal fire.

Excitement of the week was the near killing of Anne Marie. She was cooking dinner aroung the corner of the tent while Mike, Jane and I practised with his bow and arrows. Mike and Jane are pretty good. I have good aim but bad techinique, so if I get it off the string then it goes towards what I'm aiming at but not very fast and not very far. Anyway, Mike managed to bounce his arrow off the tree, which was funny for five seconds until he took off running and we realised that it had ricocheted at high speed towards Anne Marie. It actually did hit her but it was spinning not going straight so it was just the shaft. She said she wasn't worried about something hitting her until she looking down and saw the arrow!

I've had some questions so here are some answers for you all:

Volunteers in my camp: Anne Marie is 28, from Ireland and is a nurse. She's on the ten week programme but started 7 weeks before me so she's only got one week left. Jane is... 27? 20-something , from Australia. She's on the same programme as Anne Marie. Mike is 22, from Ireland. HE's doing ten weeks but started three weeks before me so we finish at the same time. Jen is 33, from England. She's doing the seven weeks with me so we're all safariing together at the end.

Food: We eat so well. Almost all the volunteers reckon they've put on weight because we eat so many potatoes! It's all bread, potatoes and pasta with fresh veges, canned meat and sauces.

Camp: We have a big ex-army tent which is our sleeping area and a rigged up tent for our dining room. The dining tent is open at both ends but it's still sheltered from the sun and wind. We cook beside that tent on two charcoal stoves. If you imagine an oval then put the entry at one of the long ends and the sleeping tent across the other end to the right hand side. The cooking tent runs through the middle, with trees and an open area in front of that (towards the door) and the cooking area to the left. The toilet is at the back to the right (opposite the tent but downwind) and the "shower" is in front of that. Can't picture it? I'll try to put up photos.

Toilet: A hole in the ground basically. Skip the rest if you've got a weak stomach. It's a really deep and wide hole with a slab of concrete on top and a hole the size of a shoebox to squat over. It's really not as bad as it sounds, we bleach it every day so it's clean, but no bleach down the hole because there's a wee eco-system going on down there. It's pretty interesting. There are these giant grubs and we can't figure out if they're going to turn into something or if they've finished as weird grub things. If you read Animorphs then these look like the things that crawled in ears.

Shower: It's just a sheltered space where you can wash yourself with a bucket of usually cold water.

Security: We have a guard all the time at camp, mostly just to keep people from visiting too often. We're a novelty so he makes sure that camp is our space where we can relax without heaps of people. He chases away all the kids who want bottles. "Tupa! Tupa!" They want to carry water in them. We do give away our bottles, but they have to come with their parents.

I think that's it :) If there are more questions let me know for next week!

Week One in camp

2008-08-09T01:07:00.033+12:00

I can't really remember what I last wrote, I think it was Friday so I'll just go from there. Of the ten volunteers who started with me on the 28th, eight went to start a new camp while myself and Jennifer (from the UK) headed to Mvae, a camp which had been going since May and is almost set to pack up. We join the remaining three volunteers there, so it's a small camp with only five of us. Nice though, everyone gets there own space and we still have lots of fun, and always plenty to eat! It's a big change for the other three since ten volunteers left the Saturday we arrived, they're revelling in the space but I think it's also a bit quiet and the volleyball matches are much smaller!

The houses we're building are almost done. Mvae village has 500 families, and most would have 8-10 children, but the nearest medical centre is 14km away and most can't afford it. The last volunteers built a dispensary so we're making a house for the doctors who get assigned here. It's a really fantastic set up, my respect for HAPA (the organisation working here) has grown astronomically. Each family puts forward tsh5000 (about $NZ6, it's reasonably high for the average family in Mvae, but certainly reachable for almost all) and then they get unlimited care from the dispensary. All the work HAPA does is exactly how a charitable organisation should work. They examine the village, it's strengths and weaknesses and possibilities and carefully consider which things should be priorities (water sources) and which things can wait a while. Very well run, really impressive.

The work we're doing is mostly plastering at the moment but because cement is expensive while sand and water are cheap the method of plastering is to throw the mixture at the wall really hard until it sticks and then smooth the whole thing over and put a lime/cement whitewash over the top. Very messy but fun. Today was my dirtiest day yet actually. They'd already dug and mostly bricked up the sewage pit for the houses but we have to fill in around the side of the bricks and in the wind more dirty was on me than in the hole! My skin was a phenomenal shade of orange and my hair looks like I recently dyed it, complete with orange scalp. Many villagers stopped by to laugh at me and I learned the Swahili word for dirty. A good day all around.

Camp is great, I really like all the people there and we have lots of fun. I've learned to eat cabbage and drink beer, staples of the Tanzanian diet. Kilamanjaro is the preferred brand of beer, tea and water.

I don't think there's much to add really, it'll all be the same next week too!

Last day in Singida

2008-08-02T01:09:00.003+12:00

Tomorrow I head out to Mvae to finish off a couple of staff houses so it will be at least a week, maybe two, before I can write again. Today we learned to cook and it was about ten times nicer than anything we've been able to buy. All the food in restaurants is greasy and surprisingly lacking veges considering there are so many available!

Swahili is fun. We got sent out with 10 questions to ask at least two locals and had a great time trying to understand people. One guy told us he had ten kids, but apparently thats a really really funny Tanzanian joke. Which is a pity because I actually understood what he said.

There's way less to report today than last time since our days are quite repetitive and so far we've really just had Swahili lessons and practice. That's been good though, I got sent to the market to buy sunflower oil (we each had a thing to buy to cook with today). "Ninaomba mafuta ya kupikia nusu lita alizeti?" It worked too, they understood me and I got it at the real price not the "mzungu" price.

Ha, one funny anecdote. "Mzungu" means white person or European and it gets shouted at us a lot, it's not rude, just a way of getting attention. Yesterday we wanted to order some wine, vinyo, and as we figured out how to ask for white wine one of the Irish girls said "vnyo mzungu?" Which in no way means white wine, it really means white person's wine. We laughed ourselves silly for ages and the poor waitress was so confused by these wazungu chizi (crazy white people).

Mvae has three volunteers there already but the houses just need plastering and painting so maybe we will finish in a couple of weeks and move to Mughumbu (I think I spelt that wrong) with the other volunteers. I plan to work really hard so that we can meet up with the others, I'd like to have a couple weeks with them.

By the way, Gmail is really unreliable here, it only works on Firefox and very few computers have that so if you need to make contact try the hotmail account for now.

Baadaye! (Later)

Dar es Salaam!

2008-07-29T01:19:00.004+12:00

Hujambo! Ninakaa Dar es Salaam! And I can speak Swahili (of a sort).

Flew out of Dubai Sunday morning and got here around 9:30, had a mission to get the customs guys to find my visa exemption certificate and then no bag arrived for me. Apparently it's very common because if your connection in Kenya is short (50minutes) then they don't have time to get your bags. Signs of this fact: 1) the twenty other luggageless people on my flight and b) the 40 bags taken off our flight which belonged to people from the flights the day before! I remained quite zen about it, mostly due to the spare underwear in my bag and the fact that I was forewarned by Peggy: she had travelled too much to have not lost her bags, yet fate had never caught her out so it would probably aim for me next! By this logic I figure Terminal 5 at Heathrow should be fine!

I'll make this a long one because I don't really know when next I can email. I'm having trouble logging into my emails but I'll keep trying. Comments might be the easiest way to get a short message to me :)

So I got here, short of bags, and met three of my fellow volunteers. Lovely people, lots of fun et.c etc. and they were headed to the beach. So, following the rule of never say no (other than to the Tanzanian man who only knew how to say "I make love, yes?"), I borrowed shorts and a towel and sandals for a trip to the beach of Dar es Salaam. We headed to the touristy one and had a marvelous time! We swam for ages, ate a lovely lunch and played beach volleyball with some Arab men and whoever else felt like playing. And I think I have found my sport! I played briefly in high school, but I think lack of practice has improved me, I did ok! The beach was amazing, think more Fiji than Africa!

Today started our Swahili lessons and thanks to my four chapters of effort I am top of the class :) You all know how happy that makes me. Not that I'm not struggling too, there's heaps to learn and we're sort of thrown in the deep end, but I'm sturggling that little bit less than everyone else!

Now we're at the market in Dar es Salaam. It's colourful and beautiful and just a little scary. Lots of beggars and some people just walking up to us and asking for money. But the smells and the spices! Piles of cardomom and cinnamon all on sheets on the ground, very different to buying a packet at the supermarket. I've taken heaps of photos already but apparently its not very safe to flash stuff around, which makes sense since compared to everyone here we have so much. That's one thing that makes it difficult to say no to the beggers, the money is really quite little compared to NZ dollars and it could make such a difference. But we've been quite strictly told not to, with good explanations... But it's not easy.

The dollar value thing is kind of crazy. Beer is about $1, water is 50c. Because when we changed money we all got big notes we've been paying for eachother and agreeing to make it up later, but it gets quite silly when you realise that if you owe someone 3000 shillingi, that's about $4. Or less than two pounds for all the brits here.

Is this long enough? Have I missed anything? I'm really loving it so far, it takes getting used to but soon I'll be totally fluent! I better go, the others are finishing so we're going to head to a bar for a drink. Hope you're all happy and healthy! I'll try to post again soon, we're headed to Singida (on a ten hour bus ride), which is reasonably civilised so there may be an opportunity in the next few days.

And forgive any mistakes, I'm rushing and it's a strange computer!

Dubai - Day Two

2008-07-24T22:56:00.005+12:00

Dubai is fantastic, I highly recommend a few days here if you're passing through! I probably wouldn't recommend the end of July since it's basically unbearable. The government has decreed that construction workers have to have a two hour break during the middle of the day until the end of August after one worker died and about 4 per day are hospitalised.

I had a great time yesterday at The Mall of the Emirates, it's ridiculously huge. I only really explored the bottom floor but it seemed endless. Every time I thought I'd seen everything I'd turn left into a bit I hadn't seen. They have all the stores we'd recognise, including Winners (not familiar in NZ, sells discount name brands) which was a bit funny. There's the designer street too, YSL, Gucci, Armani... And it's decorated a bit classier than the rest of the mall so it keeps it's elite feel, like a little boulevard :) Ski slope was weird. People skiing in traditional Islamic garb with boots and puffy jacket, it's an unusual sight. I spent a couple hours wandering before getting a taxi home (taxis are really good here, I haven't had a ride cost more than about NZ $10 yet.)

Spent yesterday afternoon reading and learning Swahili because air conditioning is magical and I had no one to guilt me into exploring :)

Today is Thursday and everyone informed me that on Thursday I would go to the Jumeira Mosque, so I did. Basically the Sheik established a centre for cultural understanding and four times a week they hold an educational tour of one of the big mosques. It was very interesting, in a beautiful setting and I learned a lot. It is led by a volunteer and I learned more in an hour and a half than I have ever learned about Islam in my whole life, completely worthwhile. And I took lots of photos. I made someone take one of me so maybe I'll figure out how to put pics up here. Don't hold your breath!

After leaving there I decided home was boring and the guidebook recommended the Dubai Museum so I got another taxi and learned all about Dubai. It's quite funny, they talk about finding stuff that's as old and 3300bce and then skip straight to about 1840 when Dubai was properly settled, so I have no idea what was happening in the 5000 years between. It was pretty interesting, highlight being the super tacky mannequins used to build a souq (marketplace), Bedouin camp and pearl harvest. Much like the Christchurch Museum but bigger and less realistic.

Left there and had a wee wander, found completely by accident the royal court which is beautiful and has its own little village of hotels and shops all pretty and traditional. Then came my big mistake, I decided to keep walking. I walked for about 15 minutes and found what must be the only taxi-scarce area in the whole city. I couldn't flag one down to save my life, which was potentially in need of saving. Heat stroke is very common (cf dead construction workers) and it was about 2pm so very hot. I bought two bottles of water and finished both.

To escape the heat I ducked into a small mall and got lots of staring and looks, I thought maybe because I was a tourist or didn't have a head scarf but when I saw myself in a mirror later I was about the colour of a beet, so probably they were deciding whether I needed an ambulance. Long boring descriptions of me wandering aimlessly, asking directions (from not very helpful people) and flagging every taxi I saw (all full or on wrong side of street) go in here. Finally found a hotel with a taxi stand, hurrah. Nice man turned air con on to the highest setting and got me safely home. I gave a tip.

That's it! Religion, history and a near death experience. All in a day in Dubai.

Still alive

2008-07-23T15:29:00.004+12:00

21 hours after I left Christchurch I am in Dubai! So far it looks really cool (I have seen the drive to here from the airport, so a well rounded view!) A mix of old style and new, with a very big park in the middle, considering it's a desert country. Flying Emirates was fine, saw about four bad movies, but at least I got to choose which bad movies to watch.

It's about 40 degrees here, which is kind of a nice change from NZ winer. I'm going to the Emirates mall later today - the one with the indoor ski field. I cannot imagine a situation which involved me choosing to ski, indoors or out, but I might watch other people ski!

Customs was weird... There were two lines, one green, one red (nothing to declare/stuff to declare) but nothing which told you what you had to declare. So I went green and hoped nobody stopped me. That story would be improved if I had talked a burly customs officer into letting me keep my ceremonial grass bowl, but actually no one even looked at me let alone wanted to check my bag. I'm so used to NZ, where they're paranoid about any microbes you might be dragging in.

So that's it. I'm in Dubai. It's hot and pretty.

Itinerary

2008-07-17T10:42:00.005+12:00

Everyone keeps asking where I'll be when so here is an itinerary of approximate wheres and whens:

Tuesday July 22 - Leave Christchurch at 6.05pm for Dubai (via Sydney.) Arrive in Dubai at 5.45am on the 23rd. I have four days to explore the city, hopefully see some islands being made and stay with some friends who used to live across the road.

Sunday July 27th - Leave Dubai at 3.10 am (ouch) for Dar es Salaam (via Nairobi) arriving at 9.20 am.

This is where I spend 10 weeks in Tanzania, 7 of those weeks with the Volunteer Africa programme. for more info on the programme visit these links:
www.volunteerafrica.org
www.volunteerafrica.org/green/singida/mvaemedicalstaffhouses2008

We have a week of language and culture classes first in Dar es Salaam then I head to Singida on Tuesday 29th ish and on to Mvae at the end of that week.

Sept 15th I head off on new adventures, hopefully travelling with my brand spanking new volunteer buddies to do a safari, explore some old cities and relax in Zanzibar.

Sunday October 5th - I depart Dar es Salaam for Athens (via Doha for an eight hour layover) and arrive in Athens at midday on Monday.

Then I have 9 weeks to make my way from Athens to London and I intend to see quite a lot on the way!
Greece: 2-3 weeks with a sojourn to Istanbul from Thessaly. Also: Santorini, Epidauros and a tour of the Cyclades with various stops in between. Take a ferry to the east coast of Italy in mid-to-late-October.

Italy: 2 weeks: Rome, Siena, Venice, Verona and Milan. Maybe a stop to Pisa but I'm not sure I'm hugely interested in such a failure of engineering . The Acropolis and the Colosseum are still standing, why visit the thing that's not?

France: 2-3 weeks: Lyon, to visit Laura and visit the south of France and pop into Barcelona for a bit. Paris, obviously, where I will decide just how much I'm will to spend on overweight baggage fines.

England/Ireland: 2-3 weeks: Visit London. Re-evaluate baggage fine decision. At some point head to Dublin and hope that there's a floor to sleep on with Frances and Laura.

Friday Dec 12 - Depart Heathrow (from Terminal 5, awesome. I'll check in 6 hours early) at 11:50am and arrive in Toronto at 2.50pm. Four weeks in Canada to visit people and skate on frozen stuff and make use of my boots.

Sometime around Jan 10th head to Boston and New York with a couple of days in each one. Make it to LA for my flight on the 18th. This part is way less planned than anything else :)

Sunday Jan 18th - Depart LAX 8:30pm for Auckland arriving at 6:10am on Tuesday the 20th. Then home sweet home to Christchurch.

Now you know what I know!

The start of a beautiful journey...

2008-07-03T09:22:00.001+12:00

Ok, so I figured there was no way I would keep up with the emailing groups but maybe I'll update this and you can check out what I'm doing. Also, I'll say it once here out of necessity, there should be no use of the word "blog" within my eyeshot (yes, I am aware of the site name...) because it is a horrible word. Definitely the most dislikeable word created in the last 20 years. So I will keep and update a web journal for news. There might even be photos if I can figure it out!

So the story thus far... I leave in two and a half weeks and I am either super organised or super unorganised, I can't tell which. Also I'm already bored with writing this so probably updates will be short and infrequent.