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the ride to instabul was long, about 13 hours. luckily, we ended up on a turkish train, which surprisingly is one of the nicest night trains we’ve taken so far. we got our own room with just two bunks, not six crammed into one room, the door had a lock so we didn’t have to worry about thieves, and we even had a fridge and a sink! whoa the luxury!

the window from our room had the turkish moon and star etched into it, and with the amazing greek/turkish scenery outside, I got some great shots. here are a few.

 

(july 23rd and 24th)

surprisingly, thessaloniki is actually a cool place. lots of turks and greeks go there to hang for a weekend to shop and party. it has lots of both. we were there waiting to leave, as we do lots of passthrough places like this. we’ll get there then hang out as long as we need to until our train or plane leaves.

we enjoyed out time in thessaloniki though. ruth bought some dresses, and although i looked for some clothes and stuff, none of the euro fashions really did it for me.

we did eat some delicious food here though. in fact, we’ve eaten gyros at almost every city we’ve been to thus far (you could accurately say that we’re gyro connoisseurs), and here we got one of the best i’ve ever had -that’s a big plus, i’ve probably eaten 20+ gyros since i’ve been here.

anyway, we hung out here till we caught our overnight train to instanbul which turned out to be a beautiful train ride, even though they did wake us up every 5 minutes to show our passports. more on that later…

 

(july 22nd to 24th)

vienna was a real bummer. although we stayed with a really cool guy, georg (gee-org is how he pronounces it), and although we got to see one night of the classical music festival the night we arrived (it was awesome, it goes on for a month), the rest of the time we were there it absolutely poured. i mean like wind blowing in your face, rain drops falling sideways poured… and it didn’t stop once until the afternoon of the day we left. we tried on day two in vienna to go about the city and take pictures while sight-seeing, but about two hours into it, we had to give up. it was pouring and windy the entire time we were out, so it made it really hard to have fun and just about impossible to take pictures. so on the 24th (day 3), bummed that we had pretty much seen nothing at all, we left more than a bit disappointed for thessaloniki greece, where we would hang out for a day or so until we caught an overnight train for istanbul turkey.

on a side note, we did have a good time while in vienna. the city is full of history and the guy we stayed with was great. we hung out with him and his friend who was hosting a couple from the czech republic, so that was fun. i just wish we could have experienced more of the city, afteral,l that’s why we went.

 

(july 22nd)

ruth had come back from munich, and although we were going to leave that night, we still had time to look around more and since ruth hadn’t seen much of salzburg, i showed ruth around

i had a pretty good feel for the city, and since it’s small, we were able to see a lot of what i had seen before pretty quickly. she got the abridged tour, but that was pretty good i guess. like mozart before us, we left salzburg in search of a little bigger city, vienna…

 

well we are finally staying at a place that has free wi-fi. i’m glad, and now we’ll actually be able to post some stuff. it really think it’s stupid when places charge for internet… it’s free for them, and they shouldn’t be charging by the half or full hour to access the internet, it should be like tap water, free…

i’m sitting on a ferry boat in the adriatic sea, just feet from the croatian shore, waiting to depart on our overnight ferry to the port city of ancona italy, and if i angle my mac just right, i get access to internet from some apartment buildings across the street

boy i can’t wait till we get some normal internet access again. we had zero while in croatia and that’s no fun. we use the internet a lot to figure out how to get where we’re going and where we’re gong to stay once we get there. anyway, we’re on our way to italy on our last overnight ferry tonight. praise the lord for that! i’ll be writing more on ferry travel later. we’ve stayed on some pretty nasty boats, slept on their decks, and have resorted to sleeping on our ocean floating mats that we bought in greece just to get some decent sleep. all part of the adventure i guess.

more posts and pictures coming once we arrive in italy and find a decent wi-fi connection…

The whole trip I had been really looking forward to going to Austria. Maybe it’s the landscape, maybe it’s because my grandfather was from there (and his father). Austria has something about it that I love, and arriving in Salzburg was a great introduction to the country.

More than just the home of delicious schnitzel, good beer, mountains, the sound of music, classical music and even mozart himself, Salzburg is full of history, beauty, and fun little market squares.

The first day i spent mostly by myself. Ruth left for the day to go to Munich germany to spend time with her friend and we met up later in the day. And that day was fantastic. I walked around taking pictures, eating good food, and relaxing. There were many very talented and skilled street performers playing classical music too, so I go some free shows in which i love.

That day I hiked up a big hill and visited a historical fortress in salzburg, then walked back down narrow market streets and alleys full of cobblestone. I visited a small museum and an old ornate church with painted domed ceilings that rose 100 feet above me. It was sunny the whole day, and though it was crowded, it wasn’t to bad.

here are some pictures from that first day.

 

We were leaving budapest on yet another night train, this time to Salzburg Austria, so decided to stash our stuff at the train station we were leaving from then spend the day walking around pest (the pest side of budapest).

We hadn’t really seen much of pest since we stayed on the buda side of the city thus far so we were looking forward to roaming around it. The buda side really isn’t all that impressive, and there really isn’t much to do over there. So even at this point, I really felt like I hadn’t really experienced budapest at all. I was a bit bummed that we were leaving, but I did feel better that we were going to see at least part of pest.

The day started off nicely, it was beautiful outside, and we were finally on the right side of the city. So, happy to finally be able to stash our raincoats (it’s rained almost every single place we’d been so far), we set about pest to look around.

Ahh, this is what I was looking for. Beautiful old buildings, cobblestone streets, people actually walking around, parks, statues and fountains, it was wonderful. I had my camera out as I finally had some stuff to take pictures of. And then, like we experienced so many times so far in europe, clouds started rolling in and the heavens opened…

It’s hard to take pictures when it’s raining, it’s impossible when it’s pouring. It was definitely pouring outside. We actually had to stop and find cover numerous times to avoid getting soaked. And of course we had no rain jackets because the day started so hot and sunny.

So we walked around in the rain, trying to wait out a storm and didn’t stop until we had to head to the train station to leave. Ahh well, sometimes that happens, by now we’re used to it.

We still had a decent time in hungary, and I would go back, but this time I’d stay a bit longer and would only visit the pest side of the city.

 

After getting no sleep at balaj’s house, we awoke on day two ready to get the heck out of there and go to a hostel on the pest side of the city. I just had to tell balaj we were leaving (we told him we were going to stay two nights) and I wasn’t looking forward to that… it wasn’t a pleasant experience explaining to him why we were now suddenly only going to stay one day.

Ruth also go sick this day, and was really feeling down. We were going to leave early in the day but ruth was tired so I decided balaj and I would go to a turkish bath house for 4 or so hours and ruth could stay at his place and sleep and maybe get some of her energy back.

i am really glad we went, the bath house was amazing. the one we went to was about 450 years old. it was kind of dark in main bath room, lit only by streams of light coming in through square holes in the domed ceiling. the room was a bit streamy because of the water so the rays of light came through and hit the pools of water, reflecting off them and illuminating the room.

the room itself had 5 pools you could go in, four smaller ones in each corner of the bath then one big round main one in the center of the room. each pool was fed by a big spigot that spewed natural spring water that smelled a bit like sulfur, and each pool was cooled to a different temperature (the water comes from the spring VERY hot).

in traditional fashion, first you get in the cool pool, which is about 70 degrees or so. the second pool we went into about about 80 degrees, the third about 90 degrees, the fourth about 98 degrees (the center pool), then the fifth is super hot, about 108 degrees. that may not sound hot, but believe me, it took about 10 minutes to get fully immersed, and every time you inched yourself in, you knew for sure you were going an inch deeper.

once you go through the rotation of all the pools, you do it again, then you basically just go from hot pool to cooler pools as you like. we were there for just under 4 hours. the place was fantastic and i wish we had similar places in seattle.

in that time i did get to know balaj a bit better too. he’s got good intentions so i do like the guy, i just wouldn’t stay with him again. oh and when he drives your hands will be white from clutching anything that’s fixed to the car while you hold on for your dear life… that was fun.

so not too many pictures from this day. i didn’t take a camera to the bath because i thought there’d be a bunch of naked people roaming around. there wasn’t the bath was coed and there were actually a lot of people there taking pictures of the light playing with water.

by the time we had gotten back, ruth felt better, so we wished balaj a found fare-thee-well and got out of there. it felt great to just get out. really great… like really really good…

anyway, here are a few pics of that day

 

We were pretty excited to get to budapest. We had heard a lot of good things about it, plus, we were going to have a place to stay. We met a guy on couchsurfing.com named balaj who said we could stay with him the entire time, saving us a bit of money and giving us someone to hang out with while we were there. He lived on the buda side of the city, we learned almost on the outskirts of it, so it was kind of a treck to get there. But we didn’t really care all that much, it was a free place to stay. After we arrived in hungary though, the problems began.

Balaj turned out to be crazy, so we ended up staying with him for only the night of the 18th then we decided to stay at a hostel the next night. He also didn’t really have enough room or beds for us to stay in. Ruth had to sleep on an old uncomfortable matress and I slept on a half inch thick pad -by the way, he had wooden floors. Also, Balaj, even though he tried, wasn’t very sociable. It was kind of awkward to be around him because he didn’t know how talk to people without being kind of rude or socially strange. Staying with him that first day and night was an interesting experience. So before I feel asleep the first night, I had decided that we wouldn’t be staying with Balaj another evening. Balaj didn’t like that and he argued with me about why were leaving, he just wouldn’t leave it alone. Needless to say, we were happy to get the heck out of there.

So we walked around the buda side of budapest the first day. We learned that buda and pest are connected by several bridges, and we also learned that pest is much bigger than buda and it’s also where most of the people are. We decided after the first day of exploring buda that we’d spend the rest of our time on the pest side of the city…