Hungary Like the Wolf

As you can see, I've been letting the vacation mentality get to me this past while and have fallen behind on my blog posting. The pictures that went up today and yesterday are from last week in Bulgaria and Romania.

I now find myself in Budapest, Hungary, at a very delightful hostel that makes me never want to leave. I extended my stay by a night to give me time to get my shyte together, but will take off tomorrow mid day for the Lake Balaton region (the largest freshwater lake in Europe out of Scandinavia). I'm assured that the temperature will be cooler and I'll get an eyeful of the gorgeous Hungarians on the beaches. (No, Robin, you didn't just read that.)

My big splurge in Hungary - aside from my nighttime taxi ride to the hostel upon arrival at the dodgy station - was a bike tour of the city yesterday. I managed to get a semi-private tour with another hosteller, and we went for a 3 hour adventure all over the city. Thank goodness for "it's just like riding a bike"; I don't reckon I've ridden one in almost 10 years. This inexperience showed when I wove all over the bloody place and bumped into a few walls... I won't even mention the Japanese tourist that I just about creamed. It was a splendid way to see this amazing city, though my ass is paying the price today. 3 hours of riding on a hard seat over cobblestones will get the best of us!

So far no exceptionally comedic (mis)adventures in this part of the world, but I sure am enjoying this city. I'll be home in less than 2 weeks now!

View of the mountains, Brasov, Romania

View of the mountains, Brasov, Romania
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Yellow building, Brasov, Romania

Yellow building, Brasov, Romania
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Patterns in the water, Bucharest, Romania

Patterns in the water, Bucharest, Romania
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Heavy riding in the Bulgarian mountains

Heavy riding in the Bulgarian mountains
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Close buildings in Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Close buildings in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
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Veliko Tarnovo statue

Veliko Tarnovo statue
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Young drinkers in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria

Young drinkers in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
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Friendly tree in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria

Friendly tree in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
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Church top in Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Church top in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
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Ro-mania!

It's been a crazy few days; sorry I haven't been able to post here to tell you of all of my wild and crazy adventures. The last few hostels have offered free internet, but for only a few minutes at a time.

So I breezed through the picturesque towns of Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria last week. They were both really scenic and delightful, made all the more so by a nice collection of fellow backpackers who I got along with splendidly. Bulgaria was quite a lot of fun; once you get past the baffling cyrillic alphabet, you can decipher that beer costs about $0.70 for a half litre and the accompanying meals are also plentiful and cheap.

Adventure in border crossings also proved to be plentiful and cheap. When a threesome of us set off for Romania on Wednesday, we were armed with no native-language speakers and train tickets for only half of the journey. (The ticket agent inexplicably only gave us tickets to the mid-way point). It turns out (thanks to the translation help -- Bulgarian to French -- of a 27 year veteran of the Bulgarian opera) that the way for us to stay aboard the train all the way over the border was to effectively bribe the (ununiformed) train car conductor 5 euros apiece. This did the trick, and we eventually made it over the border, but only after having declared that we hadn't visited any slaughterhouses or played with any dead chickens in the past month.

Bucharest was grimey, so we only spent one night there en route to Transylvania. The city of Brasov is lovely, and notably less dirty than the capital! But we got our first taste of gypsy hospitality on the public bus from the train station, when our travelmate got pickpocketed and lost a chunk of money plus his bank card.

Anyhow, all is well in the grand scheme of things. I have a clean bed to sleep in and haven't lost anything valuable yet (... except perhaps a bit of my sanity??). I'll return to another cafe soon to get some pictures up. I have some real gems!

Bulgarified

Hello/Bonjour/Merhaba,

My trip out of Ankara started on a high note: the rediscovery of my beloved camping knife! I may have been too quick to judge the passive-aggressive cleaning tendencies of the hotel staff, but their cleaning style must indeed have been too vigorous if it landed my knife under the TV where I found it. (Honestly! Who thinks to look UNDER the TV?)

After a whirlwind dance bar visit with Banu and Basak last night, I hopped on the 1 a.m. bus to Istanbul, and then on the 9:45 a.m. bus to Plovdiv, from where I'm writing you now. I'm already having some mini culture-shock after the month in Turkiye. All the signs are written in cyrillic, and nobody would react if I tried some broken Turkish on them. The women are all uncovered (some to an extreme degree, in fact!) and I've left the comforts of my single hotel room in Ankara to a bunkbed in shared 8-person coed dorm room in a hostel. In an hour we'll go check out the food around here. I'll be altogether too happy to eat real food, as I had to sustain myself on roasted chickpeas and snack cakes on the bus for the last 1.5 days! (Mom, take heart: I also ate two small apricots for their vitamin content).

Should be an interesting few days. I haven't any clear plans yet, but the other travellers are really friendly and all English-speaking, and we're all glad to hang out as a group. In fact, our dinner reservation is for 14 people!

Please keep visiting here, leaving comments, signing the guestbook and emailing.

Gearing up for the Turkey hangover

Hard to believe tomorrow will be my last day in Türkiye. I've been here almost one month now, but will set sail for parts unknown (ie. Bulgaria) late tomorrow night.

I've gotten hooked on playing hookie these last few days. I think I have drained every last bit of interesting anything from the hospital, and am going full-on bonkers there now. I actually did learn some medically-related things on Tuesday night, when a Obs/Gyn specialist friend took me on a bit of a tour of his hospital. In the span of a few hours I got to perform an ultrasound and a digital exam (for the non-meddies: no, this is not the opposite of 'analog' in this case), watch an episiotomy repair and a C-section delivery of twins. After that action packed night I managed to justify a sleep-in to myself yesterday, and also jetted early before I gave myself whiplash in the Diabetes clinic from one of those embarassing fall asleep - snap your head awake type cycles.

I've also opted for a non-academic morning today and am about to head into the city to meet up with my friend Banu's sister, Başak.

I will do my best to keep these posts happening once I get into Bulgaria and beyond, but I can't make any promises about their frequency. All the best! Keep visiting and emailing and posting comments!

I've always wanted to visit a Tatooine parlour!

It's true - all you fellow Star Wars nerds out there can rejoice - I visited Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine last weekend!

Yes indeedy, I took a tour to the magical Kapdokya (Cappadoccia in it's more irritating English spelling) region last weekend. This series of valleys and canyons has massive collections of post-volcanic rock formations called 'fairy chimneys' into which the early Christians carved out elaborate homes, monasteries and churches to hide out from persecution. (They also served as the homes for assorted creatures on Tatooine. Need evidence??) They are absolutely phenomenal - what an unlikely place to come across fantastic 1000+ year old frescoes! Mom, take comfort: I reckon I visited more churches last weekend than I ever have in my life. Ironic that it was with a tour group who were primarly Muslim, wouldn't you say?

I wish I could report more details about each photo, but our tour guide had an annoying habit of trimming down the English translations of his verbose speeches to approximately one twentieth of the detail. I actually learned more from a Turkish friend who translated Guidey's speeches to French, which I could then relay to the other frustrated anglophones. It was like a multilingual game of 'broken telephone', played in a series of dark caves.

Another cool stop en route to Göreme was the salt lake (see below). This inland lake has such a high concentration of salt that you can walk on it, like sand or snow. The locals believe the water also has healing powers, but I didn't get a chance to confirm this myself.

Anyhow, enjoy the photos. There are plenty more where these came from!

Moon over the fairy chimneys

Moon over the fairy chimneys
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Sunset over 'the camel'

Sunset over 'the camel'
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'Fairy Chimneys'

'Fairy Chimneys'
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Reflections in the salt lake

Reflections in the salt lake
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The Perils of a Cleaning Staff-in-Training

It's clear that I've been too long in this country. After a few weeks of a goofy keyboard, I now try to type the letter 'i' altogether wrongly.

I was treated to a delightful lunch out today, which meant that I didn't feel another restaurant meal was in order for the night. Around 7, I felt a bit peckish and thought I would slice up some fresh tomato to put on some bread with cheese. Sounds good, right? Well it did to me as well... until I discovered my knife had gone AWOL. For those of you hardcore followers of my blog, you might remember how proud I was about the acquisition of the lovely all-in-one camping cutlery set from MEC. (Robin can also attest to how long I stood before the camping cutlery rack, pondering my options carefully, before excitedly deciding on that particular set.) The knife even had a built-in can opener! What more could you ask for? Well, the very presence of the cursed knife would be a start.

A frenzied search of my hotel room confirms that it really is missing. And judging by the surprising lack of items sitting upon the desk in the room, I suspect that the poor knife fell victim to an overzealous cleaning rampage by the young student hotel employees. I trust that they have good intentions, but their cleaning style is plain weird and a bit passive-aggressive, if you ask me. Sometimes they just kind of move my garbage around ever so slightly, and other times they take matters into their own hands and make decisions about what I intended to throw out. Unfortunately, they tend to guess wrong on the latter issue. Hence, I suspect, the untimely disappearance of my tomato slicing device, along with some cute food packaging that I'd purposely hung onto so that I could cut out bits for my journal. Grr!

I suspect I'm being irrationally upset by matters, but these things tend to get to a person. Especially when the only reassuring comfort place for me is the 'home' that I've carved out in my small hotel room. Is even that not sacred?

I maintain hope, though, that the knife situation will get better. Turkey has an abundance of peculiar streetside sellers, who sell everything from bandages to roasted corn on their tiny trays. As I made my way to the cafe this evening, still seething over the loss of my knife, I noticed that one of my neighbourhood's vendors sells forks (along with hair clips and underwear, of course). Thus, there is hope.

RIP handy 2-in-one knife! I'll miss you!!

The Kindness of Strangers

I must confess: I've been going mildly squirelly at the hospital here. Despite the best efforts of the very kind residents, I understand precious little of the frenzied patient-doctor exchanges (in Turkish). Even if I were to understand perfectly, there would be very little educational value in whole mornings full of watching chemo prescription refills. Today I got to have a bit of a change of scenery when I went on a guided 'tour' of the bone marrow transplant facility at Gazi.

I'm trying to keep my wits about me, though. It helps for me to refocus on the positive aspects of my adventures here. Today I had a really nice surprise at the Internet cafe, of all places. As I was trying to get the mic and headset set up, the friendly cafe worker (who speaks zero English) brought another employee for back-up while they frantically waved a 20 lira bill in my face (value of about 15 dollars). They returned with a written message (from some secret english translator looming in the dark recesses of the cafe) explaining that the 20 YTL had fallen out of my pocket last week and they'd kept it for me. How adorable! I'd probably have been even more shocked, but this is the perfect example of just how kind strangers have been to me these last few weeks. I'd like to share with you a few other such examples:

- Multiple waiters in İstanbul, realizing that Jane and I were alone and trying desperately to use Turkish as best we could, brought us assorted cups of tea 'on the house';

- As I tried to figure out the ferry station to travel to Haydarpaşa station in İstanbul, a kind employee, realizing my confusion and disorientation, came to check on me repeatedly as I waited for my ferry to indicate when the proper boat had arrived;

- On the (very long and very hot) train ride between İstanbul and Ankara, a kind woman insisted that I share some of her picnic lunch. A nearby passenger (who had initially been watching me with the utmost suspicion) soon struck up a 'conversation' with me, and enthusiastically shared her ice-cold water and baby wipes to help beat the heat;

- When an older man noticed that I was hesitant to cross the road in front of my Ankara hotel (6 lanes of traffic and absolutely insane drivers, but no designated crosswalks), he gestured to me to come with him and he helped me to time my crossing just right;

- A young Turkish couple befriended me at - of all places - the Canada Day party at the Canadian Embassy, and have since invited me to their home for an evening;

- A patient at the hospital (with whom I've only been able to exchange smiles, 'hello's and 'goodbye's) gave me some gifts yesterday: some leblebi (toasted chickpeas) and rainbow-coloured toe socks

This is a country full of contradictions and chaos. But despite the perpetual madness, I can always rely on people to be exceptionally warm and kind to me.

New fire pics

Check out the links at the bottom of the Fires Burning! post to see some press pictures of the fire.

In related news, the Ankara newspaper featured a picture of yours truly at the Canadian Embassy on page 2 of their Saturday edition. I'm already a celebrity around here!

Adventures in Ankara

Sunset in Ankara - supposedly always this nice!

With my new friend (ironically, Turkish) on Canada Day at the Ambassador's residence.

The pancakes that I made for Canada Day. Not bad when I had to eyeball the quantities - nobody uses actual measuring devices for cooking/baking in this country!

Some much-appreciated (and altogether too rare) nature at Lake Eymir, near Ankara

A woman makes some traditional bread for the gözeleme that I had for dinner last night. She was parked just out front the little take-away diner thing by the lake.

Some nice farmland near Lake Eymir. I was assured that this is very typical Anatolian landscape.