Massive Update (completed)

Some of you have started to wonder what has happened to me.

Sometime about 10 or so days ago, I formulated a plan to get me where I needed to be. This plan also allowed me to stop in a few cool places on the way. The plan started in Rome, with stops in Naples, Athens, the Greek island of Santorini, Transylvania (in Romania) and had me arrive in Prague just before the closing of the 32nd European Symposium on Calcified Tissues where my friend Brad and a few hundred scientists were talking about bones.

Why the delay in posts? I hear you cry.... Every time I get near decent Internet connection I've gotten distracted (played Risk in Romania) or I didn't have enough time. Now that I am in Prague, I have a decent connection but can't upload pictures due to computer restrictions... I'm flying to London, UK tonight, so I'll see what I can do while I am there.

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Now that I am in London, here is the extended summary:

Naples is a crazy dirty Italian city. The buildings are dirty and the streets full of cars and the hot and dirty exhaust they spew out. I actually felt like I was in Bangkok once or twice, save for all the Italians walking around. I stayed at a cozy little hostel called Giovanni's' place. For a late night dinner, I went down the street to a small pizzeria run by the descendants of a long line of pizza makers. A few generations back, the same family invented the calzone, the pizza folded over to make a big pizza pocket.

My four cheese pizza was great, and since I didn't want to wait for a table I ate at a bench in front of the window to the kitchen where two of the pizza making sons prepared the dough and loaded on the ingredients.

Next to me sat down a 30-something aged guy with a shaved head. Named Chiro this guy had a lot of opinions. He had lived in London for a number of years and moved back to Italy to run his ailing father's business.

Somehow, our conversation led to politics. I know nothing about Italian politics. Chiro started with the recent defeat of the conservative government led by Berlusconi to a left wing coalition. Finding that I had no Idea who Berlusconi was, Chiro literally threw his hands up in the air and yelled to one of the pizza makers "Gino!" and then something to the effect of "Can you believe this guy hasn't heard of Berlusconi?" He then went on about how Italian politics were going in the toilet, and that the whole election hinged on the issue of gay marriage. I kept on listening actively and asking clarifying while neither disagreeing or agreeing. This either drove him mad, or made him think he could get my agreement with his passion because as he talked more and more trying to convince me, his gestures got bigger and bigger until he was talking with his hands in my face. He told me about how he "believe[s] in the progress" and is "a conservative" before we both finished and headed our own ways.

The next morning I got up and took a train to the base of Mt. Vesuvius to the ancient site of Herculaneum. I almost cut Naples out of my itinerary due to lack of time, but kept it in to see a this ancient town buried in volcanic ash that I read about in Elementary school.

When Vesuvius exploded in ancient roman times, it buried Pompeii in 3 or so metres of hot ash. Smaller Herculaneum was closer to the bast of the mountain and was buried in an average of 16 metres. It was uncovered later by explorers, and is better preserved. There are still some charred timbers on that remain in place above doors and embedded in plaster walls.

I got to the site when it first opened. The air was cool and there was practically no one around. With the free guidebook in hand I explored the ruins. The town was comprised mostly of villas. At the back were a few shops, the shell of an inn, a sports complex and male and female baths.

Some of the tile mosaics were intact and some of the paint on the walls had survived. I explored about 80 percent of the site when the school groups started pouring in. With other people around me, the ruins were a whole new place. I dodged them for a little while, by exploring the far edge of the complex, but then gave up and joined the masses for the few remaining buildings I hadn't seen.







After Naples, I took the train to the east coast town of Bari and boarded an overnight night ferry to Greece. There were some Canadian girls ahead of me in the ticket line who I didn't run into later and on board in the room with airport seats where I was staying, there was a bad American movie that verged on soft-core pornography. The room was filled with travelers of all ages too cheap to pay for a cabin. Two travellers in particular caught my attention; they wore long back robes edged at the bottoms and the end of the selves with burlap. They had long unkempt hair and they smelled. They must have been going on some sort of pilgrimage because they shared a slender wooden cross about 6 feet across with a miniature of Jesus on the front.

Once in Greece, a boarded a direct bus to Athens, The toilet was locked an unusable and I almost died until the bus stopped over two hours later at a resat stop. The driver wasn't forthcoming with information. We got diverted to the port of Piraeus due to a leftist demonstration in the city centre. I got all my ferry tickets and then headed into the town which was dead due to the demonstrations and everything were closed. I tried to buy my train tickets to get to Romania, but the main train station had ticket office; A first, for any train station I've been to in any country.

I slept well in the cheapest bed I could buy on a night ferry to the islands of Santorini. When I checked into the reception, a crew member led me down a stairwell to deck two underneath the car decks and near the ship's engineering. There were no windows and I wondered about the escape route. These thoughts were overpowered by the idea of paying more for an expensive cabin upstairs of sleeping in the cheap airplane style chairs on deck six.

Santorini is an amazing group of island. The main Islands are the remains of a volcano and form a ring of islands called a caldera. We sailed through one of the gaps into the flooded volcano crater and docked at the main port. From this point all you can see are steep brown and gray cliffs made of igneous rock with the odd village perched on their crests.

I stayed for two nights in the most scenic village called IA. I didn't do a lot expect eat, walk around and read. There was a fantastic used book store where I traded a Grisham book I had for credit and got three more. I'm still working on Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," I have yet to read a thriller novel that was made into a movie with Harrison Ford, and I finished an academic book with the fancy title "Travel and Sex." Written by a professor (Of course, I only read education books on this trip), the book goes through the history of British travel from the grand tour in the 18th century to the modern package tour. Apparently all those gentlemen being sent abroad by their families to be educated were sending their sons into sure depravity. The author sifted through diary entries to find out how young men English men went abroad and spent most of their time getting drunk in bawdy houses. The book is more than just about sex, though, it catalogues changing reasons for travel, and the development of an eroticized image of tropical travel manifests itself in present day sun worshipers.







Back in Athens, I relaxed in my hostel and waned ed around town a little bit. I was starting to get exhausted (which I am still trying to overcome) but managed to make it to the Acropolis and failed in finding Socrates's' prison cell. The search did manage to lead me through a hilly area covered by Mediterranean vegetation, where I managed to find a nice view of the acropolis.







Going northward was a bit of a saga. Part of me wished I could stay in the hostel and watch "Fried Green Tomatoes" with the other guests. But no, I was determined to meet brad in Prague on time. To summarize my saga, there was a train strike that would delay my journey two days. I took a bus. Once in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. IO bought a train ticket. The train was delayed two hours. I cancelled my ticket an too a bus to the border town, A cab to the border, a cab across the bridge between the border stations (over the Danube river) and then a cab to the next town. The Romania border guard though I needed a visa (I didn't) and was pissed that the cab driver dumped me there. He did a bit of reached yelled me over and handed my passport with a loud and angry "goodbye." confused I asked "goodbye this way?" pointing back to Bulgaria, or "goodbye that way?" pointing the way I wanted to go and the way he allowed me to pass.

A micro buss to Bucharesti was dirt cheap and a cab across the whole city to the train station cost under 5 dollars. I was so lucky to catch a fast train north to my destination just 10 minutes before it left. The dining car had the best train food I've ever eaten and for only about 10 Euros. I made it in the town of Brasov by 7 pm, which was well ahead of the late train and further than I would have made it using the original no-train strike/on-time train plan.

Brasov is a former Saxon (German) town on the edge of Transylvania. The word Transylvania conjurs up a lot of Dracula imagery and thought of dangerous mountain passes and tall mountains. The tall Carpathian mountains do form a ring around the region but most of Transylvania is rolling countryside.

During my 3 days in Brasov I went to the birthplace of Dracula (Sighisoara) and visited three local castles. Dracula's birthplace is a small citadel town that was controlled by the craft guilds. They have a fun tower entrance and walls around the whole old city. The house that Dracula was born in is now a tourist restaurant but I got a picture anyways. In case you were wonders, the real Dracula was not a vampire. He was a historical figure known as Vlad the Impaler. Having been held hostage in Turkey for a number of years, young Vlad saw their methods of torture and terrorism. He remembered them and then used them on the Turks in his own back year when he was an adult. he was particularly know for impaling his captives on stakes and leaving them to die outside of villages.






Back at the hostel, I found a group of travellers around RISK board trying to figure out how to play. I taught the group what to do, and we played until about one am.

The next day I visited the three castles. The first was a hill tow citadel that would have protected a small village from the MONGOLIANS, of all people who they were petrified of. Actually there is a good reason they feared them. The Mongolians took no prisoners and were known to slaughter whole villages. The citadel was still under reconstruction. Some of the houses had been rebuilt and the gates were fitted with new wooden portcullises!






The second castle was more of what you would think of as a castle. It sat on a hill and guarded the mountain pass that was traditionally the main train route through the mountains.



The last castle was the summer residence of the first German King of Romania. Build less than 100 years ago, this castle had central heading, central vac, electric lights, and an elevator. That being said, it was the most beautiful interior I've seen so far in Europe. There was so much woodwork in all the rooms. The library had a secret door. There was a Turkish salon with comfy couches and wall hangings and beautiful halls. Unfortunately there are no photos allowed.




The night after seeing the castles, I boarded a night train to Budapest Hungary where I transferred to a day train the next morning for Prague where I ended up snuck into the 32nd European Symposium on Calcified Tissues. But more about that in the next post.