Wroclaw to Krakow, Poland

Hi from Ukraine!

First of all, my mom (who is technologically challenged) was very confused about how to comment on this blog, so I did some looking around and I have a solution that everybody can use. If you have a gmail, wordpress or aim (or a few other) account, you can easily enter that information when you comment. If you don't, you can use a gmail account I just created. The email is katiewsimonblog@gmail.com, and the password is "whereskatie". I don't think it's going to ask you, but the security question is What is Katie's hometown? The answer is Newton. Just remember to sign your name in your comment, because otherwise we won't know your identity!

Now...
At the beginning of the week I was in Wroclaw, a small city in the southwest of Poland. It seemed like it would be a cool place to live for a while- there were a lot of students and good places to eat, and old buildings and park to walk around in- but there wasn't much to do other than walk around the city, which can be a bit disheartening when you've traveled for hours to get there. But I found a very good Polish vegetarian fast food chain, Green Way! I was in Wroclaw for two nights, and paid about $9.50 for a bed in a dorm that was over half empty. Two German guys taking leave of university were biking from Berlin to Kiev and beyond, and had a really cool speaker that was about the size of a ping pong ball with excellent sound quality. They usually camped out in farmers' fields so being at a hostel was a bit of a luxury. We swapped a lot of travel stories, which reminded me of this report I've been reading on trains and buses through my blackberry about the social hierarchy of the backpacking subculture. I came across it randomly one day while looking about salsa lessons in Mexico or something along those lines. It's really entertaining to read because a lot of the author's "findings" are very legitimately valid! Check it out here: http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/A/Anderskov_C_01.htm

Also in Wroclaw I found the Soul Cafe, a more upscale place that served excellent cakes, tea, and delicious dessert wine. I went there both nights I was in Wroclaw and just sat and read my book, I Capture the Castle.



I went to Wroclaw, which I refer to as "gnomeland" amongst my friends from Poland, partially on the recommendation of Meri, Hunna and Meri's brother David who had a great time hunting for little metal gnomes scattered throughout the city as a monument to the city's history of protest, for which the gnome was a symbol.


I'm going to cut myself off here as it has been about 60 hours since I last slept, and I can feel my brain struggling. This is both what I currently look like, and how I feel.


More tomorrow, hopefully, before I head off to either Odessa or Yalta, or maybe both. This week will either have 5 overnights on transportation or four, in eight days.

Love,

Katie

PS Thank you Jane Levitt for my collapsible water bottle! It's really good.

Bialystok to Warsaw to Wroclaw, Poland

Hi!

I left my wonderful hosts Dominika and Karol (as well as Karol's parents and dogs) in Bialystok yesterday for Krakow via overnight stopover in Warsaw. They sent me off with plums from their garden, homemade french fries, hardboiled eggs and a full stomach of blueberry soup with rice and homemade mushroom soup from mushrooms I picked with them while I was there. Karol's mother was an excellent cook and one of my favorite memories from those few days was going out with Dominika and Karol's father to a delicious gelato place late at night (or early, by their standards- Karol DJed from 10pm to 5am).

I returned to the same hostel I stayed at in Warsaw my first two days, but was assigned to a different room and met some cool Australian girls, a Canadian guy, and one of the Australian girls' brother, who was too hungover to leave his bunk and say hi properly. Everybody but the brother went out to check out some train tickets at the central station, then on a wandering walk to a supposedly beautiful park which I am still not sure we ever found, though the park we did end up in was quite nice. We talked about stereotypes about different travelers--apparently Americans are identifiable by their tendency to wear running shoes all the time (I was, in fact, wearing running shoes that day) and North Face clothing (I just bought a North Face rain jacket before I left). I've found that more or less all the stereotypes about travellers have some truth to them. Luke, from around Vancouver, told me I had to try a Lion chocolate bar, so I went ahead and bought one out of a convenience store for something around $.30 US. It's kind of like a Twix bar mixed with a Milky Way mixed with something else- salty and sweet and crunchy and squishy and really, really good. Thanks Luke! The Australians recommended I go to Wroclaw, which none of us could pronounce, but I had read that it rivaled Krakow in beauty/architecture/history, and the aussies showed me a bunch of pictures of the gnomes that are the signature of the city, spread out as a reminder of protest back in the city's communist days. We called it gnomeland and I went to look up train tickets. When we got back the hostel I took my first shower in a few days, as Dominika and Karol did not have a real shower to speak of in Karol's house and it would have been a bit of a hassle to go back to Dominika's house just to shower. My standards of cleanliness have definitely gone down.

Despite the snoring Turkish guy at the foot of my bed and my extreme dehydration, which I only noticed when it was too late to do much about, I got a fairly good night's sleep. The next morning I packed up, probably in more like 40 minutes (I'm getting better) and headed out to walk around the area of Warsaw that used to be the Jewish Ghetto during WWII. I had limited time, so I headed for the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, old Jewish cemetary, and the oldest Jewish synagogue left in the city. I never made it to the synagogue, and the monument--if I found the real one, which I'm still not sure about--was pretty disappointing, but the cemetary was a powerful place. I walked along the wall for a while to a plaque that explained the significance of the cemetary and that the very wall I had been walking along had once been part of the Ghetto's wall. After access to this official cemetary was cut off, Jews in the ghetto had used a former sports field to bury their dead. I had been particularly drawn to this bit of Jewish history because in middle school I read a book about a kid surviving in the Warsaw ghetto, and some of the imagined scenes had really stuck with me. As it turned out, those images were probably very inaccurate, but seeing the real thing made an impact on me, and I think that for the rest of my time in Poland I will make an effort to explore more of the Jewish history here.

It was raining pretty heavily once again, and I underestimated the walking time, so by the time I got back to the hostel to pick up my backpack I had to run to catch my train. Because of this I failed to pick up food, and having only eaten a handful of cereal that morning I was much too hungry for the roll and hardboiled egg (thank you Bialystok friends!) I had with me. My pack with food supplies was way up on a rack, and as there were seven people and several bags in my 8-person train compartment, I did not feel it would go over well with the conservative-looking grandmother types to mess around with an overstuffed pack just to find some crumbly cereal and further mess up their train compartment. This train was similar to the one I took on a ridiculously hot day from Zagreb to Budapest, at least in set-up, but it was newer and had a certain Hogwarts Express-style charm accentuated by the multiple food carts selling tea, coffee, and other things that came down the hallway every once in a while. Also, we were in a bit of a cold spell, which is much more pleasant to endure while on a crowded train than is a heat wave. Eventually my compartment's inhabitants thinned out, and soon I was left with three grandmother-types. They took pity on me and fed me some grapes and cookies, a welcome respite from my attempts at distracting myself from my hunger by plowing through I Capture the Castle, which I'm loving to read. I had estimated the time of the journey wrong, and it turned out to be an hour longer than I thought it was.

When I arrived in Wroclaw, my first impression was not so great. It looked a bit like Bialystok (a small, fairly industrial town far from any cosmopolitan center of culture) might look on a Sunday, but today is Monday. However, as I walked closer and closer to my hostel, the city transformed. Somewhere between the late night open air flower market, the super cheap dinner and hostel bed, the gnomes I started to see and the massive ratusz, or city hall, in a square with people of all ages walking around despite the chill, I felt myself relaxing and beginning to actually enjoy this city. It didn't hurt that I got some dinner in there. Wroclaw was the first city ever in which I arrived with no hostel reservations, but there were no problems. I think you just have to be aware of festivals, weekends, and school/work holidays in the area, and then you can plan accordingly. I opted for the ten-bed dorm rather than the eight-, figuring that the difference in price would work out as I was so beat from the train ride I figured I could sleep anywhere. As it turns out, there are only about four people sleeping in the ten person dorm! I went out for a nice dessert at the Soul Cafe, which I really enjoyed after my day of fasting, and it cost, at $9.50, more than my hostel had. I realized that I have lived off the money I withdrew from the ATM my first day here, a little more than $150 US. Not bad, considering it includes all food, hostels, buses, trains, and entry fees for seven days. If my whole trip costs this much per week, I'll be good to keep going for quite a while.

I've been thinking about how I can use all the knowledge I've amassed about traveling throughout my life. I think it would be so cool to do some sort of consulting business for students looking to travel alone/independently on a budget or to unusual places. I just sent an email to my older brother Alex explaining how he should advise his friend to search for cheap plane tickets to Africa in December, and realized that I really have learned a lot, just from planning this trip. It's cool to realize you've learned something without noticing.

LOVE from Wroclaw (which I would pay you to pronounce correctly--I have enough trouble with thank you, which sounds like chingku-yeh, sort of)
Katie

Warsaw to Bialystok, Poland

Hi!

On Friday I left Warsaw to come to Bialystok, Poland, where I am currently staying with friends of friends. Friday I woke up and timed myself with how fast I could pack up and leave the hostel. Including getting ready, packing, getting all my stuff off of my 9-ft-tall bunk while not waking up the British guy in the next bed, checking out and doing lots of other random stuff like leaving behind my first completed book and filling up my water bottle (turns out you can NOT drink Polish tap water), it took me about 49 minutes to get out the door.

I finished my first book, The Lottery, by Patricia Wood, my last night in Warsaw. If I keep reading at this rate I'm actually going to NEED to go to English language bookstores, rather than just want to. Inspired by my friend Will Watkinson's Rumi exploration earlier this summer, I'm reading another Sufi poet's work--Hafiz. Then it's I Capture the Castle, Everything is Illuminated, the end of the second Lord of the Rings, and my central asia guidebooks. And Letters to A Young Poet. It's always interesting to juxtapose what I'm reading with where I am.

The young couple I am staying with here in Bialystok can't understand why I like exploring places outside of the main tourist sites, and it got me thinking about that as well. A friend's parent described Poland as a "brown and crumbling place" before I left, and I realized that those words are pretty much the sole criteria for what makes a place worthwhile for me- if it's a little rough around the edges, has a complicated history or confused identity, then that is what I am looking for. The couple also has been off work for about a year, ever since they got back from the United States where they worked for several years. They actually met in the United States, although they live within a few blocks of each other here in Bialystok! I love stories like that, where fate seems to go out of its way to get two people to connect. But the way they live without having the structure of a job seems like it would be more challenging to me than actually having a job. I don't mind changing the structure of my life so much when I am on the road, but at home it's nice to have a routine of sorts to structure the day. But for them, I think it makes total sense, after living for years in a foreign country in order to earn more money, to take a bit of a sabbatical.

Headed back to Warsaw in order to get to Krakow, hopefully in the next day or two depending on the transportation situation... I'll keep you posted! And I'm working on connecting a map to my blog, so you can actually see where I am. I think my hosts think I'm crazy for being on the computer as much as I am!

Katie

Newton to Boston to Frankfurt to Warsaw

Hi!

First of all, I want to say thank you to everybody who has helped me put this trip together, including my parents and brothers, my friends, some of my teachers, family friends, and the random travelers I have met over the past few months.

A rough itinerary update: it looks like I am headed to Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Egypt, and Israel this year, though everything after Uzbekistan is subject to change. I'm hoping to put a map up on this blog, but in the meantime...

I am in Warsaw, Poland, staying at the Oki Doki hostel. It's a colorful place full of young European tourists, but it has a tiny common room with a lot of people drinking beer right now so it's a little hard to type this out. The summary is this.

I lost my phone in the Logan airport--seriously. I am always really careful to not lose track of my important stuff- passport, computer, phone, ipod- but I managed to leave behind my phone at the check-in desk. I only figured this out when I had about ten minutes before my flight was supposed to depart. I ran back to the security checkpoint, where the femal security guards were all rude about it and the guys were really sweet, and when they rescanned my bag and couldn't find anything I asked if one of them could run through and get my phone since I knew it was there and otherwise I would miss my flight. They refused, and told me to choose between my phone and my flight. In my frenzied state I actually calculated the cost of missing my flight versus the cost of replacing my phone. Obviously, I chose the flight. And then as I was running through the gate, I spotted my phone at the desk of the gate. They had brought it through security for me! I was so relieved that it was the first thing I told my seatmate, Deven, a student at Endicott College on her way to study abroad in Florence. Normally I can sleep on red-eye flights, on overnight buses, on airport floors, whatever, but Deven's excitement was infectious and I spent a good share of the night talking with her and Sandra, a German au pair on her way home.

When I arrived in Warsaw it was raining. I needed to find the 175 bus to Centrum and then some form of public transport to Swietokryzska (you try pronouncing that on no sleep). I got directions from four people and eventually found my hostel, where I was not allowed to check in because my bed was not ready. I arrived in Warsaw in a skirt because that gets the least stretched out and unwearable after a flight, but it was freezing! I changed and then went out to find food. The rain was pretty heavy and my pants were soaked by the end of my walk, despite my umbrella--a last minute addition to my suitcase--and my new, very effective rain jacket. Lunch was cabbage, cabbage, and more cabbage. Not joking. I got two things and both of their main ingredients turned out to be cabbage. My other two meals here have been dumplings- which came with an unadvertised side of cabbage- and an Asian stir fry- which came with cabbage in the stir fry and an unadvertised side of cabbage. I think that if you were on an IV, they would give you a side of cabbage, or maybe blend it up and put it in the IV. I was very excited when I found pierogi, Polish dumplings, that were vegetarian, as I have been on a dumpling hunt that began with Willie in Hungary a few months ago. I headed back to the hostel around 3:30pm, wishing it were later so I could go to sleep, and then I got very lost. I usually have a very good sense of direction, but the lack of sunlight and the fact that the rain prevented me from opening a map created a confluence of events that ended up with me, totally soaked from the waist down, with blisters from wandering around in wet, new shoes. I lasted about an hour from when I arrived back at the hostel to when I fell asleep. My roommates here are solidly male, from Switzerland and somewhere in Asia, from what I can tell, and not the most outgoing, which always sucks when you're staying at a hostel. After greeting a couple of them and getting out most of my stuff, I slept--for sixteen hours straight. I did not know it was possible to sleep that long.

Today I showered, washed my clothes from the plane, and realized that when vitamins say take with food, they really do mean take with food, or else you end up with a stomach ache and you have to eat immediately. It was not raining much in the morning, and the afternoon was rain-free except for a light drizzle once, so I enjoyed the weather and wandered around until my dumpling lunchtime and then a quick visit to the Royal Castle. Nearly everything in the castle was reconstructed, which was somewhere between disappointing, saddenning, and entertaining. Included in the display of national talent and grandeur were two busts- one of George Washington, and one of Thomas Jefferson, gifts from the U.S. Embassy. I tried reading on a bench on the street outside the Polish president's house and then, when too many people tried to sit down right next to me, I went over to a big, beautiful park and sat there, where mainly families and businesspeople were walking, so I was not disturbed. I then had dinner at a very cheap, very good Asian diner that lonely planet recommended and went back to the hostel. Tomorrow I go to Bialystok to visit the daughter of Wiecek, who does work on my family's house, and I'm staying with her for a couple of days. I am very excited to hang out with a real Polish person- I have yet to learn any of the language.

Some of my favorite things about Poland so far have been:
-the pierogi! They totally fulfilled my dumpling quest.
-the way everything smells like rain (though not the rain itself)
-the warm blanket in my hostel bed
-the fact that it is 8:30 local time and I am still awake!
-the way the young people dress- like they all are buying Eastern European knock-offs of New York City high fashion
-my first waiter, an abrupt, serious old guy who only smiled when I tipped him.
-the fact that all my stuff has so far dried really quickly

Follow me on my new twitter account, @katiewsimon.

Many more posts to come...

Katie

Istanbul to Goreme to Antalya to Olympos (Turkey)

Hey Everybody,

First just wanted to say a massive thank you for all of your comments to posts and emails to me at katiewsimon@gmail.com. Whenever I am waiting for a late bus, or trying to fall asleep in an overheated hostel, or caught in the rain in my only pair of clean shorts, it means a lot to me that you're all "with me" in some way.

I'm now in Olympos, Turkey, on the western Mediterranean coast. It's a bit of a hippie/party beach town, but it's got cool old ruins and a nice beach and is in a gorgeous valley and very near Chimaera, a cliff that naturally lights on fire, and has been for the past few thousand years. I'll be here for the next couple days, though I may move over a kilometer to Cirali, which is a bit quieter, especially on a Friday night, tomorrow. Over the past three nights I've been on overnight buses for two, so I'm pretty tired from all of the collective non-sleep. The one night in between buses I stayed up late watching a world cup game and was woken up at 4:30 by the call to prayer from the mosque a block away, so this chiller area feels quite good right now.

But let me back up a bit. On Monday night I boarded a bus in Istanbul for Goreme, Cappadocia. I had a woman's ticket, meaning I had to sit next to a woman on the bus, and I thought I might have gotten a seat to myself but about an hour into the ride a rather large woman filled up the seat next to me. And then her kid-not an infant, I might add-got on top of her lap. It was one of those things where you just realize that it could, possibly, be worse somehow, so you don't want to jinx it by feeling too sorry for yourself. Sure enough, they played a world cup game VERY loudly for several hours, but when all was quiet I managed to stay asleep, on and off, for a decent period of time. When it got light we were amidst fairy chimneys in Cappadocia. If you don't know what they are, google them, I honestly cannot explain the science of it even after going on a tour with an expert, visiting a museum, and reading about them in my guidebook. They stopped in Nevsehir, and tried to get us Goreme-bound backpackers to board a minibus, but I had been warned not to do this because they almost always try to charge you extra for the ride. It all worked out and I found myself at Rock Valley Pension in Goreme. I didn't get a chance to see other hostels, but I would HIGHLY recommend Rock Valley. For about $10 US per night, you get breakfast (real breakfast with eggs, bread, jam, veggies, olives, cheese, etc) and a perfectly cool swimming pool, which is amazing when it's hot during the day. I arrived right in time for breakfast, which was perfect because I got to meet all the guests. There were three Canadian guys who had just finished university and two girls from Liverpool who went to college in Newcastle and London. Despite the bus ride, I rallied and spent the day with the girls, Jess and Beth (who were awesome! if they're reading this, hi!). We bought a picnic for about $1.50 each, visited the Open-Air Museum with lots of ruins of old carved churches and buildings- it was cool but a bit repetitive- then got on a local bus to a neighboring town where we hoped to hike to some fairy chimneys. We ended up hiking through a ghost town, which was cool during the day but would have been super creepy at night. The old towns are carved into the rock of the cliff, so they're essentially elaborate abandoned caves. Anyways, we got to the top of the hill and saw fairy chimneys for miles and miles in the distance. It was quite hot so we finished out hike there and had our picnic. That afternoon we hung out by the pool and I researched the end of my trip and then we went out to dinner. Cappadocia has these sealed-clay-pot dishes, so Jess and Beth split that and I got vegetable borek, kind of like cheesy veggie spring rolls. It was a fairly expensive restaurant but it had an amazing few of the sunset and the whole town, which was good because the Canadian boys had rented scooters and were supposed to be back, but Beth and Jess were worried because we hadn't seen them. It turned out they were fine, because after dinner we found them at Fat Boys, a local bar/cafe, where they were watching a world cup game. They were with this really nice Mexican man whose wife had planned a whole trip through Turkey for him since she herself couldn't make it. It's really cool meeting all these people!

The mosque woke me up quite early the next morning, and I had expected the girls to wake me up at 5 so we could climb up the hill to watch all the hot air balloons float through Goreme in the morning, but they decided not to so I slept in a bit. That day I went on the Green Tour, visiting rock-cut churches, a gorgeous valley, an old monastery carved into the rock that was kind of like a playground with all the climbing and jumping and scrambling we did, and a seven-story underground city, complete with tiny passageways and rock doors and a huge winery (of course-what else would you do if you lived underground all the time?). On the tour was a university student from Spain who had managed to study in Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland and Australia. I talked to him a lot and we had the idea to rent a car in Antalya with the English girls and do a bit of a coastal road trip. We got dinner when we got back and the girls weren't sure about the road trip, so we met up with them after that night's overnight bus, in the Antalya Otogar (bus station). We researched cars and found that gas was almost as expensive as the actual cost of the rental, so we backed out of that idea and the idea of visiting some local waterfalls with it. Andres, the Spanish guy, and I got breakfast for free at the hostel (White Garden, I believe it was called) that Jess and Beth were staying at in Antalya, which was awesome! We wandered around old Antalya, which is quite touristy but still pretty and nice, then got lunch. Andres and I headed out to the bus station again. We had both been headed toward Olympos, where I am now, but Andres changed his mind at the last minute and went to Fethiye or Kas, not sure which, so he could hike part of the Lycian Way, which I would actually have loved to do if I didn't have to go back to Boston in a few days!

I'll update you all on the rest of the trip soon, but for now, I'm going to get some dinner! Keep the comments and emails coming!

Love,
Katie

Istanbul, Turkey

Hey,

The last week has been a whirlwind of mezze, baklava, roasted chestnuts, the biggest stuffed baked potato I have ever seen, and some kickass lemonade. For five days Willie and I discovered some of Istanbul's finest offerings, focusing on food but also exploring a few sites, bazaars, and side-streets. Some highlights:

Roasted Chestnuts: Street vendors sell food all over the place here, from mussels with lemon, to sesame pretzels, to bananas, to corn on the cob, to arabic ice cream, to fresh cherries, to turkish delight, to fish sandwiches and to roasted chestnuts. My favorite has been the roasted chestnuts. They, along with market vendors, restaurant advertisers, and pretty much anybody selling anything, has been unfortunately misinformed that the correct way to solicit customers is to say "yes, please," as in "yes, please would you like some chestnuts?" often followed by an address of "lady," as in, "hey lady, get out of my way." Willie and I started saying "no, thank you" in reply, just for symmetry's sake.

Baklava: Compared to baklava I have tried elsewhere, this baklava is pure heaven. It's crunchy, it's nutty, and it's completely soaked in honey, but without being sticky- somehow it's just juicy. There are lots of types of sweet pastries, but my favorite was the walnut baklava. I also tried chocolate-coconut baklava, which was interesting, but not quite as good as the real stuff. My favorite store to get it from was Koska, which is actually a chain of baklavalaris here in Istanbul.

Turkish Delight: It took me a while to try Turkish Delights. I have never really liked it, but finally, Koska was giving them out for free and I found that I quite liked it, especially the varieties with nuts and coconut shavings. The vendors always want you to buy by the kilo or at least half kilo, and get exasperated when I request just a few squares.

Mezze: Willie and I had mezze for practically every dinner while we were here. My favorites: dill/parsley hummus, okra with tomatoes, eggplant with tomatoes, yoghurt with garlic and parsley, and walnut/tomato paste. We realized after a few nights of getting ridiculously full that we were each eating at least a full breadbasket each.

Stuffed Baked Potato: One day Willie got lunch at the Istanbul Modern art museum's cafe, but after all of our eating escapades I wasn't yet ready for another big meal. So, I waited until later that afternoon for lunch, and ended up eating a massive stuffed baked potato. They carve out the potato and mix it up with butter and then put the potato back in the shell. You can choose seven toppings out of about twenty, and I had, among other things, cheese, mushrooms, ketchup, spicy corn, mixed vegetables, and a few other unidentifiable items. It was the most disgusting and yet simultaneously light foods I had eaten. A baked potato, light? I guess all of the toppings helped even out the load.

Lemonade: Our search for lemonade and other refreshing beverages of the like took us to cafes and restaurants across the city. We had ginger-mint-lemonade with delicious apple cookies on the side which was especially refreshing, fresh mint limeade, and your everyday average lemonade. A couple times we ended up at Starbucks, partially for the familiarity of the drinks and decor, but also because it has some of the comfiest armchairs and undeniably the best air conditioning in this city. God knows how hot it was midday.

We saw the usual sites- Topkapi Palace, Hagia Sofia, Blue Mosque, Grand Bazaar, Spice Bazaar, etc. but also took the time to go to a few of Istanbul's less-visited locales. This brought us to a franchise of Boston-based The Upper Crust, apparently a massive success here in Istanbul and possibly the only non-Boston location of the chain. We had several public transport adventures, and once stood on a bus for twice as long as it took walking. The subway system uses tokens, not tickets, and they're usually bright red, plastic, and look like toy money. One day we spent hours in the Istanbul Modern, possibly the best modern art museum I have visited, ever. The quality of the art was outstanding, as was the design of the museum, but I think what made it so good was the art's simultaneous relevance to Turkish culture and history and its independence from any collective stereotypes. I tried going back today, but it was closed Mondays.

A very "Turkish" experience, I guess, had to do with pants. Yesterday morning Willie departed to return home to Boston after five months of being abroad (!) and for the first time I was on my own in Istanbul. It was so hot that I had been wearing shorts and skirts during the day and at night, so when I got on the subway to buy a bus ticket to Cappadocia, I thought nothing of the shorts and tshirt I had on- nearly exactly the same outfit I had worn with Willie a few days earlier. I got a lot of weird stares, but I couldn't figure out if this was because I was a woman alone, a Westerner in a predominantly local area of town, or something else. It became pretty clear when a random middle-aged guy came up to me and started yelling in Turkish, gesturing at my legs. Apparently, while it's okay for a tourist woman to wear shorts when accompanied by a guy, that is not the case when you're traveling alone here. The only pants I had were black skinny jeans- not ideal for soaring temperatures- so that evening I set out to find pants. Naturally, my height made this difficult- I have never bought a pair of pants that fit me without having to cut the legs shorter. So after finding pants, I attempted to find a tailor. I went into a suit shop and a chain clothing store, and nobody knew where I could find one. I finally went into the United Colors of Benetton, where a very nice man from the store walked me around the corner to a tailor, helped me negotiate a price and pinned the pants for me. He may have received a referral commission, but I was grateful nonetheless.

It was interesting that the man who yelled at me was not the only person to attempt to communicate with me in Turkish- a woman today had a whole conversation with me in Turkish, and all I did was grunt and nod and smile as I did not want to embarass her by admitting that I had no idea what she was rambling on about. Later that night I changed into pants, and my ambiguous foreign?/local? identity became further ambiguous.

I'm finally off to Cappadocia- Goreme- tonight after a failed attempt at the journey yesterday. In Turkey, apparently, there are men's and women's sides of buses, and all of the women's seats were sold out yesterday. Hopefully more pictures soon, but until then...

Katie

Budapest, Hungary

Hey,

From Saturday evening through Tuesday morning I was in Budapest with wonderful Willie Levitt! Willie was coming off a semester in Bologna, Italy, where he ate a ton of gelato, learned enough Italian to eavesdrop effectively on all the Italian tourists we ran into in Hungarian restaurants, and spoiled his appetite for anything below the standards of Italian food... which is, you know, everything else.

Despite the nearly unbearable heatwave that made us stop at least five times a day for juice, cocktails, coffee, water, ice cream, and pretty much anything cold and edible, Willie and I enjoyed visiting a city with such an interesting combination of old and new, east and west (and north and south) cultural influences. Our first day we trekked across the Danube up Castle Hill, where, of course, we spent way too much money on unfortunate food for our first meal. The views were cool, and the architecture reminded us of Disneyland. We had another bad dinner at a bar, but later that night we found one of the best desserts I have ever eaten, a strawberry/rice pudding sundae at Gerbeaud, one of Budapest's famed coffeehouses. The waiters in Budapest were strange- they never seemed particularly interested in waiting on you, and seemed irritated when you asked them for something like a bottle of water, or, you know, a meal.

The second day, we visited Budapest's main indoor food market, a massive complex selling every type of meat and fish, sausage, cheese, pickle, vegetable, fruit, prepared Hungarian dish, imported specialties from Asia, pastries, bread, cookies, fresh juice, touristy knick-knacks and, of course, paprika. We sampled donut-hole style potato pastries (addictive), then I got a massive profiterole with pudding-cream and Kool-whip and confectioner's sugar- spectacular. We also bought the wrong cherries, but in doing so we discovered what cherries in pies and maraschinos must be made from. We went to the City Park, which would have been pretty if it had not been under construction and an extremely hot sun. Willie and I split off then, and I went to the public baths. At first it was a little disconcerting, being in a big, lukewarm, sulfurous, shallow pool with a bunch of elderly strangers, but after a while I slowed down and unwound in the water. It wasn't until thirty minutes before I was supposed to meet up with Willie that I found the massive outdoor pool in a beautiful old courtyard. Too bad, but I enjoyed the experience all the same. The courtyard was painted, the street signs, construction cranes, many houses and apartment buildings and metro lines, a macaroni-and-cheese color of yellow/orange.

Then I met up with Willie at a really cool cafe-bookstore. The bookstore was modern and reminiscent of a Border's or Barnes and Noble, but the cafe, a high-ceilinged dining room in the back, was more ornate than many of the sites we had been seeing. The food was also some of the best we found in Budapest, and the air-conditioning was a god-send. Called Alexandra Books & Wine, a major section of the ground floor was dedicated to selling wine. It was sad to leave this cool (in both senses of the word) haven, but less than a block later we found ourselves sipping tomatillo-garnished pina coladas at a cafe across from the opera house, so not too sad.

That night we ate at a semi-vegetarian organic restaurant that, for Hungarian food, was quite good, but now that we're in Istanbul, seems a bit lacklustre. We had reserved tickets for a night-time boat-ride along the river, but we had a bit of extra time so we sat in the lobby of a Marriott and thought up excuses for why we were sitting in some random hotel's lobby. It's fun and kind of thrilling to do this. Crashing nice hotels became a bit of a pastime for us. Afterwards we went on a night cruise of the Danube, and saw the sites lit up. It was cool, but the distances were much more manageable than I had expected, so it probably would have been just as cool to walk up and down the river on foot. We planned on going back to Gerbeaud for another sundae, but by the time we got back to land it was closed. Despite the heat of the past few days, by our last night we both wished we had brought sweaters.

Overall we found Budapest to be a bit bewildering, a bit confusing. It was certainly beautiful at times, but it was also dirty and undeveloped in other areas- and these two components were often right next door to each other, literally. Our hostel staff and waiters at restaurants were generally well-intentioned and kind, but also generally had no idea how to do their jobs. Our hostel staff once called a friend to get (faulty, as it turned out) directions to the airport, and they could not point us in the direction of good, cheap Hungarian food, which seems like something you would know if you worked at a hostel in Hungary.

The last morning we got more pastries and fruit from the market before heading to the airport by metro and bus. The airport is two entirely separate locations, so you really have to know your terminal. We flew away from Hungary and headed over to Turkey, hoping for better food and looking forward to air-conditioning at the next place we were staying.

When I looked at the map of Europe in the in-flight magazine, I realized how far I had come, by bus and train. Athens to Budapest is no small journey! It gave me a nice taste of overland travel, and I'm looking forward to future overland travel, some of which I'll be doing in the coming weeks through Turkey.

More later on the availability of roasted chestnuts, how to select toppings for massive baked potatos, why buying six pieces of baklava at once is not necessarily the best decision, and other food misdemeanors with Willie in Istanbul...

Katie