Belgium. And Getting Home.

These are some very out of order pictures from my time in Belgium. Mostly we just hung out at Elizabeth's.

My new amazingly delicious favorite snack. Good with peanut butter too. Elizabeth said she would send me some soon.

Fancy schmancy home made ice cream from an ice cream shop nearby. Hands down the most delicious meal. And it was served to us with menus and a French waitress. It's ice cream.

Some treats we made, Nutella cupcakes,

And pepper jack cheezits.

A very pretty avenue to the airbase.

Look how miserable (but great) this weather looks. Also admire the crookedness.

And our dog sitting adventures:

These are just a few that I remembered to take pictures of. We had our hands full my entire stay. 

We did plan a day to train to Brugge, a very beautiful city about an hour away. But the one day we can make it work, a torrential downpour appears ALL DAY. And since neither of us have umbrellas, well, it's not really an option anyway. And it's so fun to touristy around while soaking wet. Belgium just didn't want me to go anywhere this time. Next time.

So I left Belgium and started on the very long ride home. I'm now in Mass with family, so I'll consider this home for now and say the journey was for the most part, hassle free. It did help that most of the way was in English, but here is a little how my endless day went.

Catch 10:17am hour-long train from Jurbise to Brussels Airport and arrive two hours before my flight leaves, because early is better than late.

Farewell weird leprechaun singers of Belgium. I got video too. But I don't know how to post that in here. 

There was an encore.

3 hour flight from Brussels to Reykjavik.

2 hour layover.

6 hour flight from Reykjavik to JFK.

Now it's 7pm local time, and 2am my time. And I haven't spoken in like 12 hours. (I really don't like traveling alone.)

After getting on the wrong train and circling the airport terminals for a good half hour despite all the signs in English...I get on the right train and make it to the place where my hotel shuttle picks me up. Finally check in the hotel at 9pm.

I fall asleep at 10pm and set every alarm I have to loud and repetitive, because who knows what jet lag will do. Alas, I wake up almost each hour, and by 4:30am I'm just wide awake and decide to get up. I have four hours till I leave the hotel, so I get ready and eat breakfast with the utmost slowness.

Take the E Train from nearby station alllll the way to Penn Station which takes about an hour. Then realize I'm still too early for my train, and so I people-watch at the station for two hours. The announcer for the station sounds like Dave Foley, so the wait is rather enjoyable. 

The train has wifi and outlets, and I take a moment to appreciate traveling in a first world country once again.

Oh! And I have working cell service.

4 hour train ride later I arrive in South Station, Boston. And it's been raining all day along the way. My aunt picks me up and I'm with family!

So as long and boring as that small part of my journey was, I'm very glad there were no crazy stories to relate, because I'm so done with those.

Prague Pt. 2

We joined a free walking tour that started at 11am, which is way too late by the way. And I did get a fair amount of sun. But we learned a whole lot of history, and I can't wait to look up more about Prague when I get back. And since I don't have any particular stories to relate at the moment, here are some pictures.

(After the pictures there may be a story.)

First, this is one of the statues on Charles Bridge. I think the pinwheel hats are a little avant-garde but--wait, they're halos? Never mind.

The astronomical tower! Extremely pretty and so incredibly detailed, I loved just staring at it. But the on-the-hour "show" that's so famous? One of the most overrated touristy things ever. I did get video that I might share later.

View from the side of the square, to the left where you see the church, is where the main area opens up. But this corner looks huge with the panorama.

In the Jewish Ghetto. This clock runs backwards, as expected.

A statue of....anyone? Anyone? No not anyone. Specifically Franz Kafka. Author of The Metamorphosis and other stories. He's from here. Born lived and died here, actually.

A bad combination of a black building, and sunlight in the back. But it is really this dark in real life. Used to store gun powder for the city.

This artist (of a random door at a garbage facility) is actually the architect for some famous things, including something or other from the London Olympics last year. The heat was getting to me, I'll admit my mind wandered.

Tessa being a bad vegetarian.

This guy was one of our roomies (we had to switch rooms for the second night.) but I never saw him awake. When we got there he was asleep, and he slept all day, and then later when we came back to go to sleep, he was out with the other three dudes in the dorm, until 3 or 4am, when they all came back and fell asleep. And he was still asleep when we packed up and left in the morning. He had a sombrero. 

These random-words Coke bottles are everywhere in Europe, and we can't figure out why. For fun I guess. Tessa sure got excited upon spotting this one.

This is my horrible attempt at a Star Wars impression thing. What it turned out as: a too-skinny backpacker trying to swat a fly with a cape on.

Tessa's worked out better. She had been wearing the shirt all day anyway like that, to avoid sunburn. And in case you're wondering, this building behind is a very famous concert hall where Mozart conducted at, and parts of the movie Amadeus were shot. And the statue is in honor of the opera Don Giovanni.

And for all those Lemony Snicket fans (this includes me and Tessa) well take a look, they're everywhere....and this weather did take a very frightening direction from the norm, a few minutes after this was taken.

~~~

And you thought the post was over, no? No. See, as we did our last outing and looking around for postcards...well we had another close call with the apocalypse.

I almost bought a water color from an artist on the Charles Bridge, but I wasn't sure how I'd bring it back. But as we explored the old town that afternoon I thought and thought about it and decided I really wanted it, and would find a way to get home. 

So we're walking back, about a 20 minute walk to the bridge, and it starts to rain a little. This was in the forecast, so we expected it. But I had stupidly worn my sandals anyway, and of course a tank, because it was still insanely hot out. But within 10 minutes, gusts of wind were shooting through the small streets and into the shops, and the sky got dark, and rain started coming down sideways. I was reminded of the movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Since the shop windows and doors were open to all the tourists, things were flying around, and breaking, and we still slowly made progress, ducking in the eves, toward the Charles Bridge. People were rather freaking out, and we found ourselves against what seemed like every tourist in the city. Why was everyone going this way? It's hard to walk against a frightened crowd.

Tessa managed to get some video clips before it got too bad. 

We finally get to the bridge, and realize we can't see it at all, which is not a good sign, and so we hide with a bunch of other people in a tunnel nearby for about 15 minutes, waiting to see if it will let up. 

Well it didn't.

Since our hostel was about 100 meters after the bridge, once we crossed it, we would be good. So we take a deep breath and start sprinting in bursts again. We meet a lady on the edge of the bridge, in a covered area, and she says, "I got halfway across before I had to turn back!" Cue our horrified faces.

Apparently some sand is mixed up in the tornado-like weather, so as we finally brave our way across for the next 20 minutes, sand is stinging every part of our exposed skin, and we are soaked to the bone, and Tessa is trying not to have an asthma attack.

By the time we make it to the other side, the weather is okay enough to take out the camera, and look at the famous bridge...with no tourists on it! 

Happy ending.

And I'll leave you with a very nice view of our dorm window. The calm after the storm. 

The Spoon Man

I promise I didn't forget about blogging. (Or globbing as Tessa calls it.)

Workawayers usually get a day a week off, so we took our first free day to go touring around the area. Cathryn has her car that she shipped overseas (after literally filling it all the way up with Trader Joe's groceries) so she took us to a few villages nearby.

Viscri

The name may sound familiar. There's one UNESCO site, an old church. It was one of the coolest churches I've ever been to. There's a tower in the middle and then a wall full of rooms surrounding the area, with a courtyard too. It's all very quiet and accessible. 

(I forgot to take a picture on my phone.)

Prince Charles owns a few houses in Viscri but apparently his wife doesn't let him stay there because it's not super fancy and she's kinda spoiled like that. At least that's my interpretation. 

We bought some local honey:

Sighisoara 

The Spoon Man.

At the top of a hill where a famous church stands, we hung around for a little while to take pictures. Soon we spotted a crafter's booth with a bunch of spoons on display. They were very beautifully crafted and the guy sitting there started telling us about these spoons. Only two countries are known for their spoons, Romania and Wales. And this is when I notice he is actually carving one at the moment. His explaining wasn't at all trying to sell to us, spoon wittling is just a family tradition of his. His whole air was just so genuine and he got really enthusiastic in telling us what all the designs mean...

I couldn't help but buy one. It's about 10inches long.

Let us hope it makes it home all right...!

(Made of linden wood and glazed in beeswax.)

His website is thespoonman.ro and it's all in Romanian. So if you want to learn about any of the stories or meaning behind his spoon designs you can just use google translate or something, maybe recall your Latin studies.

We got ice cream at the bottom of the hill. All natural yummy. Tessa got black vanilla (we still aren't sure exactly how/what that is) and coconut. I got strawberry and kiwi. The day was a hot one, so this refreshed us!

Back at the farm, look at this awkward adorableness! (Baby buffalo: "what the hell are you doing at my fence?")

And this evening a new volunteer is coming to the farm, a guy from Puerto Rico who is cycling around Europe. Yeah. On a bicycle. 

Now there will be five of us! Cathryn, Philippe, me and Tessa, and soon Puerto Rico.

Krishan's still in Bucharest, we aren't sure if he is coming back today.

Thrifting

While venturing out to the train station today we stumbled upon a huge flea market thing. It was along a whole block, and about five rows. I didn't really take pictures because its not touristy at all and  I didn't want to bring attention to myself, but I have a couple on my camera. Tessa has a few on her iPhone that I'll post below. From silverware to used socks to watches to a bucket of nails, and don't forget the vintage My Little Pony thing, we were entertained for hours walking along and looking at everything.

So if the 80s went to Estonia (hm I don't think I ended up blogging about that before.) well then the 70s moved to Moldova. Talk about vintage clothes and stuff from that era. Tessa found a billion things she could potentially sell on her Etsy shop and it's all so cheap.

We haggled this down a bit with broken Russian and English. Was about $6. Now I'll really fit in when we get to Romania. People might think I'm the gypsy! 

And I also couldn't help but get some old paper money. Two of them are old Soviet Russian and one is Moldovan.  All for about $1.20. They're not in good condition or anything, but I collect it all the same. And bank notes are light, which is a bonus.

We wanted to buy everything. Tessa and I figured we could live off this place...not that we would want to live here. But it's so cheap for us, it's almost sad. 

Tessa thinks there will be huge garage sales/flea markets like this in Romania as well. Now we regret bringing any clothes at all, so we could authenticate our wardrobe here...alas...not enough room on our backs!

You can get the gist of it pretty well from those two pictures, actually.

~~

Also! Slightly related. We're finally at a hostel that's legit, and there are books here! We found the only two English ones (as opposed to none before this) and grabbed them for the road. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and a collection of essays by Umberto Eco. It's been a month since I've read a paper book...I need my fix!! :)

On the road again.

You guys caught up now? I took a day or two off writing posts just so you wouldn't get too behind... (Not because I was lazy or anything.)

A few days of new places for us before we can hang out in one spot for a longer period of time.

After touring Tallinn for the day yesterday, we trained back to Pärnu on the slowest train ever (really, cars were passing us) and left this morning with some very sad goodbyes...Sandra's grandmother was pretty much crying as we left. Really, it was awesome staying there. Now we will miss our five traditional meals a day from our legit Estonian grandmother. 

Our bus arrived at the Riga airport (bad memories.....) and we took a city bus to the hostel. Which kinda sucks considering we have to bus right back to the airport in the morning to Chisinau, Moldova.

 On the corner near our hostel was a grocery store so we bought a jar of tomato sauce and a head of broccoli to go with our pasta we have been carrying around since Paris. We miss Estonia already. Have you gotten that impression yet? 

Now after cooking in an actual kitchen, not a hallway, we turned down an offer to explore downtown Riga with some very nice Spanish people. It's almost 9pm, and they seemed like genuinely nice people, but Riga is kind of known to be Amsterdam's younger sibling. We could tell they were as poor as us and wouldn't go all partying or anything but we really have no interest in Riga. It needs to make it up to us somehow. Maybe next time.

At this point, after watching them walk down to the bus stop together and out of sight, Tessa and I kinda looked at each other and thought, wow, we are really antisocial people right now. We've realized since we are traveling together, it's a level of comfort and "well I'm not by myself" so why would we need to interact with other people? 

This is a very bad state of mind to be in while backpacking Europe, obviously.

So we decided the next opportunity that comes across looking benign and interesting, we will probably take it. In the Crap Hostel of London, we did chat in the Hallway while making dinner, with an older Italian guy who was pretty funny, but other than small conversations with a few people, we haven't gotten to really connect with any other backpackers/travelers yet. We haven't needed to. So now it's time we two introverts start branching out.

From this point on, as far as we know, it'll all be hostels and maybe some couchsurfing. No more staying with friends. This will help, I think. Community kitchens and hang out areas of hostels are perfect for that kind of thing, right?

We'll work on it.

Ciao

Some pics from the last few days:

We took a side trip to hell; here's the devil himself.

We took a hike in the woods outside of Pärnu and it was very beautiful. The woods turned into bogs at the end of the trail, before looping back. Lots of people swam, but since the bottom is unknown, we decided not to.

(Top of a random watchtower from ages ago. See where it gets light green? That's the bogs/marshy/swamp area.)

In Tallinn I had an orange cinnamon coffee at a small cafe, or Kohvik as it is in Estonian. There were actual slices of oranges in it. (In the background is Sandra's banana coffee)

This is some more of the food we miss:

Some chocolate cake thing, baked aubergine, and a radish sandwich. Their radishes are very sweet, like a dessert, and they don't find this out of the ordinary at all. YUM.

Egg and till (dill) on toast, which is what they call a sandwich, always open faced. And then a creamy oh-so-tasty soup that touched my soul almost as much as the  porridge.

(Mini strawberries, porridge one last time, yogurt to drink, and a carrot pastry) (and a walnut pastry in the middle, but we were too full to try by then....)

Ah, I will miss this toit. So much. So, so much.

Oh and this is from the website of the hostel we are at right now. Read: "squee!" .....mhm. Well they are nice.

Midsummer!

Midsummer is a big deal here in Estonia. That's why we originally planned the trip around this week to be here, now.

Today we walked around with Sandra doing slightly touristy activities. It was pretty hot and humid, so we got our vitamin D in, making up for three weeks of rain following us. And we went inside buildings a lot. I got a pin, and a postcard to send.

Estonia, and other Baltic countries like Latvia and Lithuania, are known for amber. You can find it in any souvenir shop, and in stands along the street. It's pretty cheap too. I got some earrings and a ring today, for under 10 euro together.

There are a number of malls in town, and we wandered in a lot of them, observing everything, and Sandra kept laughing at things we took pictures of. We went into a bookstore that was pretty much a B&N. I started eyeing all the foreign editions of my favorite books.....so hard to resist....and I couldn't. I just found a book by my favorite author, it was in Estonian, and normally 15 euro but was on sale for 3 euro!!! How could I pass that up!? Well I didn't. Not sure how it's coming home yet. And I don't know a lick of Estonian or anything related to it, but it looks so cool!

Another place we found in the mall was a small science centre place, which was very odd, and we lost about 12 years of maturity while looking at things inside.

Also a cheese store! A whole store just for cheeses. We got to sample one that was 7 years old, one that tasted like pizza, and the one that won the world championship last year. Yup. It was actually really good cheese, too. Juustupood. Cheese shop.

By now it was about 8pm and the sun was still full blast in the sky. We wandered toward the opening festivals and there was a band playing near the water, fireworks off some boat..pretty neat. The weird thing was, everyone, the whole crowd, was just quietly standing there. It was so odd. Sandra kept apologizing for the laziness and lameness of her people, but we thought it was amusing. A big name band was even playing and people just stood and watched them without even moving to the beat at all. If you YouTube this, you will find the band and song:

Põhja-Tallinn - Meil On Aega Veel (Official HD)   

It's been stuck in my head all day now, but I really like it! Notice though, how non-expressive everybody looks. They're like that in real life, too. Estonians are just super low key here.

While waiting for the bus to come take us back home, an old woman came up to us. She started talking to Sandra in Estonian, and then...she started to sing to us. Sing! It was so random and cool! After she left about five minutes later, Sandra translated for us, what she said and sang. Apparently she took one look at us and decided we were young enough not to have "found a man yet" and she said there's still one for us: Jesus! Sandra even explained we were both atheist, but she said it was fine, there was still time. And her song was about God loving you, and Jesus loving you, and just lots of love. It was hilarious. We had no idea the whole time, and she was about 86 years old. After, she shook our hands and walked away. Very strange ending to the day.

A couple other words I learned in Estonian:

Thank you: aitäh (eh-tah)

Water: vesi (veh-shee)

The population of Estonia is only 1.3 million, and about 20% of those are Russians. Estonian is dying out because only about one million people speak it. I think it's very pretty looking and sounding, even though I have no idea what people are saying.

And also, did you know pretty much the whole country has wifi? Like everywhere?  That's pretty cool.

Pärnu finally! And food.

Sandra had gotten food ready for us, so we ate (porridge!! So tasty!!) and then slept for four hours, and then ate again. To wake us up, we explored the town with Sandra. Pärnu is very, to use her term, depressing. Our walk took about an hour and a half, and you can see the flats where Russians live, and the overall poverty of the town. It's a safe area, but there's just no money to renovate old buildings or build new ones. I'm learning a lot of history here, firsthand. I took some pics:

Tallinn Bus Station: in Estonian.

Look guys. Slippers for house guests!!!!!!

This whole area of the world kind of reminds me of back east. Maybe it's because I've never been to Northern Europe before. I like it a lot.

Tessa and Sandra looking to see if the Russian church is enter-able...it wasn't.

At the grocery store I bought some plum flavored ice cream!

Salsa nuts! Blue cheese nuts! I just love foreign packaging way too much...