Epilogue

It was a long trip full of adventure, surprise, disappointment, and awesome food. There's definitely stories i've forgotten to write into the journal, or simply felt the journal was better off without, since i'll neither confirm nor deny they are about toilets and things we've found in them.

But the real reason i wanted to write an epilogue is just to go over some things that we've learned from all of this. It was a great trip, sure, but it wasn't as life-changing as New Zealand was, or if it was, it's not immediately apparent just yet. But there's definitely a few things to take away from this.

For one, we take public restrooms so for granted in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, they can be hard to come by, and when you do you often have to pay to pee. Or bring your own toilet paper, or at least pay for that.

Nextly is the water situation. I'm not sure what Switzerland's deal with the water was, i bitched about it enough in that entry, but there were other places where there wasn't free-flowing clean water in public that they were charging obscene amounts for bottles of it. We're so lucky to have fresh, potable water at the twist of a tap. We did end up paying a lot for water, because it was so hot and we were so active and needed to stay hydrated. But an interesting observation: in many European countries, soda is cheaper than water.

Don't use toe shoes as your only shoes all day every day. They've got a purpose, and that's not it.

Most infuriatingly, European trains DO NOT RUN ON TIME NEVER EVER EVER TRUST THEM TO. I don't know where Amanda/we got the impression that the Eurail was efficient, but it is a lie. I think we had three total trains out of the 20 or so we boarded that weren't late.

And all of this has been a lead-up to this one important lesson that i've picked up through all of this: trust. Trust in our fellow humans.

We spent much of the vacation leaving our things around, whether they were in multi-occupant hostel rooms, stuck in hotel luggage rooms with many other unmarked bags, slept amongst it right out in the open in public, or just abandoned at ends of trains out of our view. And nobody messed with it, ever. We, out of necessity, provided many opportunities for anonymous strangers to steal or vandalize our things, and not a soul went for it. In fact our bags were looked after by people who had no real reason to give a damn one way or the other about our things, and they remained safe and unmolested for two and a half weeks. Even in Greece, with its current economic crisis, or Bulgaria, which looks like it's perpetually poorer than anyplace else we've ever been.

On top of that, all the help we received from complete strangers, everywhere in Europe. When we were looking lost, usually someone would come ask if we were ok. If we seemed confused, they'd try to clear things up for us. And when all else failed, they'd tell us terrible jokes (in Liverpool, anyway).

So on the whole, no matter where we went, i always felt like someone had our backs.

Faith in humanity, restored.

Day 17: Budapest to Chicago

Tuesday, June 25

It's been such a long day i'm not even sure i can remember it all. It's only 5:00pm, but since we woke up at 6:00am, that means we've been up for 18 hours. Wait, really? Is that right? I'm not even tired.

Woke up in Budapest, took a shower, got some breakfast, then shuttle to the airport. Checked in without problems, saw a guy bringing in two plastic-wrapped bicycles as his checked luggage. They gave us our boarding passes for our connecting flight right away also, so that would make things much easier when we got to Warsaw.

The first flight was just a little bit late getting into Warsaw. We still had almost 45 minutes to get through a minimal amount of security, since we were going from gate to gate, but the size of the line started to worry Amanda a little. She needn't have; we were through with plenty of time to spare.

Then the delays started coming in. First of all, we thought the plane was leaving Warsaw at 11:45; that turned out to be when boarding started, to leave at noon. As we sat at the gate, we kept not getting on the plane, and the departure time crawled up by five minutes, every five minutes. 12:10, 12:15, 12:20, 12:25, as each threshold was crossed, each deadline missed.

In the meantime, i went looking for a bathroom, some booze, and sandwiches. The nearest bathroom that i could find was halfway back through the terminal and down a flight of stairs, conveniently next to the duty-free shop.

I asked the shopkeep what kind of liquor best represents Poland. I mean, Russia has vodka, Germany has beer, America has weaker beer, Ireland has whiskey...i don't know what Poland drinks. He consulted with his cohort briefly, and then led me to a shelf where he pulled a bottle of Frederic Chopin Vodka. Hey, i was at that guy's grave recently! I bought two.

Returning to the gate, i informed Amanda of the less than ideal proximity of the bathroom, and then presented her with two sandwiches, a ham and cheese (which i expected her to choose) and a salmon. I predicted correctly, but she opted not to eat until we were on the plane. At this point, we were still waiting for the original boarding time to come through, and it was getting close; she thought she should just wait for the bathroom, also, until we were aboard.

As time ticked by, she began lamenting that she hadn't chosen to go for the bathroom yet. Eventually, she said fuck it, going, and got up to do it. At that exact moment, they started letting people into the plane. It was almost 12:30.

She decided to go anyway; after all, there were so many people to load, she'd surely have time to take a quick pee before everybody had embarked. I continued to sit in our chairs, rather than lining up; no real point if we were already resigned to being last in line. As the herd thinned, i gathered up our things and casually meandered in, holding Amanda's backpack in a free hand. She came back moments later, and informed me that she had not actually used the restroom.

Her story goes like this: after finally finding the ill-marked head, she entered to find only two stalls, both occupied by shitting women. They obviously knew each other, and were chatting back and forth between turd splashes.

There was no way she was waiting around for that.

It was at this exact moment that i noticed a restroom practically next to where we were standing, at the end of the line, right there by our very gate. Of course. So she handed her stuff back to me and went for it, and ended up being very glad she did.

And then we sat in the plane for over an hour without taking off. Information on exactly what the holdup was didn't come, but it was mentioned at one point that the entertainment system was down, and they were expecting twenty minutes to fix it. Annoying, as we'd like to get going, but we also wanted that entertainment system, especially since our original flight from Chicago to Dublin was having the same woe. We'd loved the system on our New Zealand flights five years ago, and this was the exact same system.

It was just before 2:00 when we finally lifted off, but the pilots were confident that we'd still make our 3:20pm arrival in Chicago.

They did get the system fixed. I whiled away the ten hours of our flight first by playing their simple little video games; Tetris until the controller's occasional crapping out and frequent interruptions for important flight announcements irritated me too much to continue; then Battleship until i had figured out the computer's strategy and was able to beat it without it sinking a single one of my ships...five games in a row; then a casino simulator, which i won before even reaching the final casino. Then i checked out their selection of television shows. Only one episode each of about a dozen shows, most of which were uninteresting crap, but i finally viewed the pilots for both 2 Broke Girls and New Girl, which i've been hearing a lot about lately. New Girl is absolutely hilarious; 2 Broke Girls is alright. Then the movies: Crazy Stupid Love (or some such, can't remember the exact title...Steve Carrell, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, and Ryan Gosling...and funny as hell), and was working on The Informant! before the system shut down as we neared Chicago, thus ending the most boring paragraph of my whole vacation log, because in five years even i'm not going to care what i watched on the plane and you probably don't now.

The customs line for US Passport holders had easily 300 people ahead of us in line. We waited in it for a while, and then got to cut out of line to use a new, experimental customs practice: self-check-ins. Seriously! There was a woman who, every time enough terminals would clear, would come up to the line and shout, “Does anybody want to give these a try?” They're clearly brand-new. So we gave them a try. I mostly wanted to just so that one day i can say that i used them before they were an actual thing, because i'm a technology hipster.

So you just stick your passport in, it imports the data off of a scan it takes from it, then it takes your picture, you use the touch screen to answer the same questions that have always been on the page you have to fill out before landing in the US, and then it prints you a receipt with that information and your new mugshot on it, which you take to the next station. They check it out, ask you some simple questions, stamp it, and you move on to the next, where they just take it and you go free. So efficient! And i don't feel like i'm being looked at like a criminal by every anal-probing border patrol agent that lays eyes on me.

Well, that's it. Alyssa picked us up at the airport and we're on I-90 someplace in Illinois right at the moment. The vacation is over, and now it's time to move back into real life and get back to our daily schedules, until we can afford to retire fat and happy at 30 and globetrot as a profession.

So i guess i'm done waxing loquacious about all of this now. Unless i decide to write an epilogue.

Day 16: Frankfurt to Budapest

Monday, June 24

So here's us, just after midnight, sitting dejectedly in the Frankfurt Hahn International Airport, which is not actually located in Frankfurt, waiting for a bus that we've got no guarantee of even getting on.

We'd been sold tickets for the 11:45 bus into Frankfurt, a mere 30 minute wait from when we had landed. But when we got outside, the bus stop was crowded beyond the concrete block meant to contain it. When the bus showed, we shoved our things into the underbelly and got back in to what could be loosely defined as a “line.” A woman was on the steps leading into the bus, arguing loudly with the driver in German. What we'd eventually made out is that she had purchased tickets for the 12:30, and was trying to get on an earlier bus, and the driver wouldn't let her. Perfectly reasonable. But she was having none of it. Eventually someone from inside the station had come out and helped remove her. But then as the rest of us asses of masses tried to push our way into the bus, the driver halted us, ran down the bus and back, and came back up to say there was room for only two more. Amanda was already on the bus; i was stuck behind some teenagers far pushier than i. She tried to get the driver to allow me in yet, but he wouldn't budge, so she got off.

I was bitching pretty vehemently about the situation, how they'd oversold the tickets by seriously double, because there was clearly still a full busload of people standing outside in the beginnings of drizzle when the bus drove off. Amanda was being more rational, talking calmly about how we'd just get on the next one and arrive at the hotel a little later. As we came to a rest against the metal pull-down door of a closed shop, she opened the suitcase, removed a pair of pants, and announced her intention to go change as she started in the direction of the water closet.

As she was a few paces away, i tossed casually, “Did we just trade personalities?”

She stopped in her tracks. “I think so...”

When the next run of the bus came by at 12:30, we were more assertive. Baggage thrown in the compartment, came into the line right near the front like assholes, got in and sat down ahead of most of the other people. Frankfurt was not a very long stop for us; it almost wasn't worth paying for accommodation even if things had all timed out the way they were supposed to. Our train out in the morning was leaving at 6:22, leaving very little time for actual sleeping.

Our hotel was literally across the street from the train station, so that would be nice in the morning; however, it was not so great that night. The airport shuttle made a total of three stops before coming back to Frankfurt Hahn, and the Frankfurt HBF Train Station was the last of them. We got the scenic route all around the city, taking two hours before finally reaching our destination. To the great surprise of the night clerk, we checked in at 2:30am, informing him that we'd be leaving by 6.

Amanda took a shower, i took a shit and uploaded a blog, and then we slept for an hour and a half, charging our devices. Those five things i've just listed were apparently worth 50 Euros. In the morning we had our things packed up and were out of there in a record ten minutes.

Our train to St. Polten left the station exactly on time, at 6:22am. A six-hour ride, we both slept for most of it, but during intermittent moments of wakefulness we'd get some shots of the beautiful German countryside as it passed, misty-topped green mountains passing us by constantly and all that natural splendor. We knew our last couple days would be mostly seeing rural areas from trains, and this is exactly what we had hoped to see.

The train actually arrived in St. Polten, Austria, right on time as well, at 12:35. Our connecting ride to Budapest was to leave St. Polten at 12:59, giving us a window of 24 minutes to find some food and board. We had not eaten yet at all, you see, other than the chocolates found on our pillows (kind of a peanut buttery Kit Kat). Breakfast wasn't to be served at the hotel until 7, and though there were pastry vendors open at the train station, we had not had the time to stop and sample their tasty products.

But if the shock from being on a train that was on time to the minute hadn't worn off by the time we entered the terminal, it did a moment later when we discovered that our next train was delayed not by the eleven minutes Amanda had incorrectly and optimistically read it as, but by an hour and eleven minutes, leaving at 14:10. Well, plenty of time for lunch, i suppose.

St. Polten, though, is not a large train station. All we saw for food options was McDonalds. Getting to another floor, we found a tobacconist, a bookstore, a convenience store, more promisingly a grocery store, and finally a deli, where we picked up some sandwiches, a pretzel, and what we thought to be some nice fruit juices. The juices turned out to be kind of a flavored, carbonated water, and were mostly awful. My grapefruit selection was superior to Amanda's dragonfruit, but not by much.

Every subsequent time we'd check the departures board, our train would be delayed by another minute. 14:11, 14:12, 14:13, 14:14.

If only we'd been delayed in a larger station, where there's so much more to do. But no, our choices were to hang out down in the station itself, where it is warm-ish but crowded, or up on the platform itself, where it is gloomy and raining.

There's a little glass shelter with some benches up above, and so we decided to head for that. By the time we sat down, our train was scheduled for 14:17.

This sucks. We'd chosen the 6:22am train from Frankfurt because it would land us in Budapest around 4pm, giving us some time to do a little bit of exploring of another city before we had to leave. It wasn't much time, granted, but now that we're probably not going to reach Budapest until 5:30 or even 6pm, i'm sure that a lot of things are going to be closing, and we'll probably just end up sitting in our hotel with the WiFi, doing things we could just as easily do at home.

Waiting for the train now...

--

Got on the train, had to push our luggage past a parked baby stroller, containing a sleeping baby, that someone left right in the middle of the walking aisle next to the luggage racks, in order to get to our seats. We found them occupied by an older man and his briefcase. Amanda politely informed him that he was in our seats, and he refused to move, even after we showed him our tickets. He clearly spoke only German, but was waving his arms around as if to tell us to find another place to sit. Instead, we found the man who checks tickets and asked him for assistance, which he provided enthusiastically. The pair argued back and forth for minutes, and i could tell that our benefactor was on the verge of losing his shit and yelling at this pretentious twatwaffle, when finally he picked up his suitcase and left. The ticket man followed him back, so we never got a chance to thank him. I don't know what became of that guy, but i haven't seen him on the train since.

Nothing much else to report; train's been moving for a couple hours now, there's internet available on the train, sometimes, and that's pretty cool. Otherwise, just watching scenes of Germany flow past us through rain-streaked windows. Wanted to get something from the dining car, but they're not serving food, despite canned audio after every couple stops saying they are.

--

We have made it to Budapest, despite the odds.

Here's what i mean. Shortly after i finished typing out that last part of the log, the train stopped in Gyoer, as it was scheduled to do. As we were pulling in to the train station, Amanda made the decision to go use the water closet, since we'd be getting off just three stops later. It's been our experience throughout the trip that using the bathroom just before getting off the train is a good idea, since many of the stations have pay toilets, and in some countries, public restrooms at all are few and far between. But you can always count on the train to have available facilities.

A far larger percentage of the passengers than i expected began clustering up near the exits. I had expected most of these people to be going on to Budapest, not getting off at wherever we were. It only makes sense, usually the largest amount of people are going to the larger cities. But then the train shut down, and a bunch of railroad workers started coming through, telling all the stragglers like me that we needed to get off the train. It would be going no farther.

Everyone, including a man who had been snoring loudly and sleeping through his cell phone alarm for the past hour or more and had to be woken by security, disembarked. I gathered up our things, but stood there like a dumbass, waiting. They kept telling me in Hungarian or German, i'm not sure which, that i needed to leave the train, and i kept trying to explain that i was waiting for my companion, who was in the toilet. They didn't seem to understand, even though i was holding two backpacks. I was starting to wonder what the hell happened to that girl, she'd been gone an awful long time. The train had been clear for minutes. I was worried that she had come out and been shooed off the train without being able to let me know. But i couldn't make that assumption, just in case she was still in there. I couldn't leave her on the train.

The worker between me and the lavatory moved ahead of me, giving me a clear path to the bathroom. The indicator on the handle was red, meaning occupied. I knocked. The occupant made a noise indicating a human presence within, and i correctly identified it as Amanda.

“Hey! We need to get off the train! What are you doing in there?”

“What? Why?”

“I don't know, but we need to get off the train! Hurry up!”

See, this is why you shouldn't poop in public, ever.

One of the workers had said to me “autobus,” which seems to be the general word for bus in every European language but English. We got into the bus station, a dimly lit and crowded place, and saw two buses out front. One was just closing its doors. A man in a yellow vest was standing near the door. I said to him, “Budapest?” and he shouted excitedly, pointing at the one that had just closed up, of course. He rushed out into the rain, assuming we'd be behind him, and we were.

He flailed his arms at the driver, who got out of his seat and out of the bus, then took our suitcase from me and ran it around to the other side of the bus as he waved us in.

We couldn't find two seats next to each other, so we ended up sitting at almost extreme opposite ends of the bus, me two seats from the front, Amanda almost all the way in the back. The bus ride lasted for right around an hour, which i thought strange, since it was yet to be over an hour and a half by train to get to Budapest.

Then we found that we were not in Budapest. The bus had simply taken us to Tatabanya, the train's next scheduled stop.

We followed the herd of people straight onto the train tracks themselves, bypassing the station and the platforms, and loaded directly into a train car with its doors hanging open. There was a sheet of paper taped to the window that said something about Budapest, so we, being surrounded by people whose language we did not speak, were forced to assume it was the right train, but harbored doubts.

Every other train in the station left before we did. There were people crowded into the entryways, forced to stand due to lack of available seating. I later overheard some of the standing group's conversation with a woman who was floating around the aisles; they were speaking in English. The elder man was telling her that they were from Mexico: he, his wife, and their five daughters, traveling around Europe for “some time now.” Budapest was, for them as it is for us, the last stop on their journey, and they are flying home tomorrow. “Seven people, thirteen bags!” he mused. That explained why the airlock was full of luggage.

The train did get us to Budapest, over three hours late. We had been excited for this city. There was a reason we'd gotten so little sleep last night and missed the hotel's breakfast just to get on a 6:22am train: it was so we could get to Budapest by 4pm and be able to actually do some things in another foreign city, rather than just spend the day traveling again. But by not getting into the city until almost 7:30, and then finding out the airport was, again, pretty far from the city and thus our hotel pretty far from the city, we didn't get checked in until after 9.

So here we are, in our hotel, far from the city, and it's 10:00 and we've still not eaten dinner, because nowhere within walking distance is open this late. We can't go have adventures in the city because it's at least an hours' walk and we've got no transportation, unless we want to pay for a taxi again (we don't). Whatever the hell happened to that second train, it completely screwed us out of seeing Budapest other than our hotel and the airport. These last few days have been a total waste. We should've seen Budapest, we should've seen Plovdiv. If we'd known it was going to turn out this way, we'd have just paid more to fly out of a different city. Our travel planning would have been done quite differently. It was nice to save money by flying out of Budapest instead of, say, Athens, but if saving money were what this was all about, we'd have just stayed home.

We've ordered a pizza, it should be here soon. It's about the best we can do.

In the morning, the hotel has a breakfast buffet, so that's something to look forward to. After that, we head to the airport, and we fly back to Chicago at 9:30am.

It's definitely been a good time, but i'm not too sad about leaving. I'm ready to go home.

Day 15: Thessaloniki to Frankfurt

Sunday, June 23

We're basically to the end of the trip here. Our last couple of days are just seeing countrysides from the windows of transportation. Today, we have a train, a bus, a taxi, a plane, and finally another bus.

The train, as predicted, did not give much in the way of nighttime comforts. We were seated in First Class, which is supposed to be child-free but i guess babies are technically luggage, but i sure didn't see any difference between this six-person bullshit car and our previous six-person bullshit cars. Sure, since the first one, we've figured out how to recline the seats, but it's not that big of an improvement.

We pulled into Thessaloniki pretty close to on schedule, just after 6am. Our bus was scheduled to leave at 8am to take us to Plovdiv, which is in neighboring Bulgaria, but we still needed tickets for it. The ticket office was, according to our Eurail timetable, to open at 6am, but it was closed when we got there, and the posted hours read 7:00 – 14:00, Tuesday – Sunday. Lucky we weren't coming in on a Monday! That little detail was not included in our Eurail book. Also lucky they hadn't decided to take off Sundays like most agencies.

So we camped out right in front of their door. I took a moment to go score us some breakfast.

While Amanda was in the bathroom, a girl came up and was reading the new posted hours, and started freaking out a little bit. Then she asked me if i was going to Sofia, i said, “Plovdiv.”

“...I'm sorry?”

“I am going to Plovdiv.”

“What?” She spoke English, but did not know the city of Plovdiv. Which is not all that surprising. She turned to look at the hours again, in a panic.

“It's Sunday,” i said, pointing at the Sunday hours.

“Oh!” she cried out. “Oh! Oh, good! Thank you!” and then she walked over to the next pillar and sat down to wait also.

It's maybe not a very interesting story, but it's about the best one i've got for today. This log entry is going to be very short.

7:00 rolled around and the office opened right on time. We were the first in. Tickets in hand, we went back outside, and continued to wait. Just before 8:00, a driver showed up and started up the one bus sitting in the parking lot, which the woman at the counter had told us was not ours. We watched for a few minutes as he started throwing other passengers' bags into the possum belly, wondering when our bus would arrive. Finally Amanda prodded me to go ask if this bus was going to Plovdiv, so i did.

The driver did not speak English in any capacity, beyond recognizing just a few key words. When i said Plovdiv though, he got excited and assured me, in his native tongue (either Greek or Bulgarian, i am not sure which), that this bus was going there. So we pulled our luggage over, he slapped destination tickets on it, and loaded it in next to one solitary other bag marked Plovdiv.

As it turned out, this was also the bus to Sofia. It made three stops in Bulgaria, Plovdiv being the final destination.

We slept for the first two hours on the bus, then we crossed the border into Bulgaria and had to go through customs. I'm not really sure how they determine which countries you need to go through customs for and which you don't; this is our 11^th country on the trip and we've only needed visas upon entry to three of them (Ireland, France, and now Bulgaria). I wonder if we'll get stamped in Germany, coming in from here?

Just past the border, we took a break at some kind of a truck stop. It was a little strange; out in the middle of nowhere, aside from being right at the border, and it consisted of one restaurant, one grocery store (which seemed to be half cosmetics), and, largest of all, a sports shoe store. The water closets were in a different building entirely, across the parking lot.

I tried to get some reading done, but ended up sleeping for most of the next leg of the trip. We made our first destination, and a few of the other passengers got off. So far, what we'd seen of Bulgaria had been wide expanses of trees and mountains with just quaint little farming villages near the rivers, but pulling into this first city, i don't know what city, we got a good look at the urban decay. Tall buildings that looked like cinder blocks with most of their exteriors ripped away but signs of life in every apartment, crammed close together everywhere. Some buildings were just empty shells, concrete skeletons with no exterior walls offering a clear view straight through to their staircases that lead only to other blank floors.

Sofia, Bulgaria's capitol, was exactly the same. Places of business, clearly still in operation, looked like they should have been abandoned for years. Even the operating city buses seemed the animated skeletons of scrapyard scenery. I got a good amount of footage of it, but it seemed that every time i got my camera put away was when we'd pass the most dilapidated specimens of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that Bulgaria seems to be.

Most of the passengers disembarked in Sofia; in fact, besides us, only one woman remained on the bus to finish the trip to Plovdiv. We tried to get off just to use the restrooms and hopefully find some food, misunderstanding the driver's “10 minutes” amidst his foreign words to mean that we had that time before leaving again. But when we did, he called to us and motioned us back into the bus.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a bus depot. The driver let us out at one of the run-down buildings, pointed into the open door and said, “toilet,” and then i guess something about being right back. We entered the building, and the bus drove off. It was nondescript whether the restroom we found within was men's or women's, but there were two stalls, and nobody else around, so we each just went ahead and picked one.

The stalls did not contain toilets as we know them.

The facilities were of a style that i'd thought existed only in Japan. Essentially a hole in the ground with a rectangular funnel and grips on either side, to place your feet. If you're a man and you're just going #1, hey, good for you, just aim for the hole and do what you do.

Amanda, on the other hand, did not have a good time. It was fortunate she had decided to bring the day bag off of the bus, since it contained the roll of toilet paper we'd absconded from the last hotel, knowing that parts of Romania, which was originally part of our itinerary but ultimately got dropped, did not provide toilet paper in public restrooms, because neither did this one. That was a lot of commas. I'd left my HandyCam on the bus, but by chance there was a Flip in the day bag, so yes, i got a shot of this travesty of a lavatory.

Also when you went to wash your hands, the sink shot more water out of where the faucet connected to the porcelain than it did out of the actual faucet-hole, and the paper towel dispenser was devoid of supplies, as well.

We waited around in their little lounge area, still feeling a little like we'd stepped into 28 Days Later, and then went back outside. I saw a bus that looked like ours pulling around the outside of one of the other buildings and said, hey, there's our bus, but then our bus driver walked around the corner of our building, clearly not driving the bus.

That bus pulled up alongside our building anyway just as he was getting to us, and he extended a hand to me and bid us farewell. Another driver was to take us the final two of our eight hours to Plovdiv.

Our original driver had been listening to a variety of musics during our drive, mostly pop music that i recognized like Savage Garden and Red Hot Chili Peppers but also some that i must assume is regional. This new driver, however, was playing metal the whole way, at a low volume. Rainbow (Dio's band previous to Dio), Iron Maiden, Judas Priest...hell yeah. Except then he put on a movie, which drowned out the metal. I don't know what it was but it was in English and had Jason Statham. But at least this guy did not drive like The Transporter.

Which is more than i can say for our taxi driver from the Plovdiv bus terminal to the airport. Nobody in Plovdiv spoke one bit of English, but i managed to get “no autobus” out of one lady, and “taxi.” We could find no maps, so that put the kibosh on the idea of walking to the airport. Also, Bulgarian as a language seems similar to Russian, so once again the alphabet is not the same. The familiar letters are there, along with Russia's arcane glyphs and numbers used for spelling.

There were several taxis parked outside the bus station, so i approached one and asked how much to take us to the airport. I needed to know because i had no Bulgarian money; they don't use the Euro, they use the Lyra. The taxi driver had some basic English in him, and said “Twenty...or thereabouts.” I told him i needed to know because i had no Lyra, and would need to get some, pointing at the ATM. “Twenty will do,” he conceded.

Then the ATM would not give me money, for whatever mysterious reason. I tried several times, and then the taxi driver approached and said we would try another machine. He drove us around the block to another, which worked fine. I still only withdrew the 20 Lyra he'd quoted me, not wanting to pay more. I didn't really want to pay that much, but it was a bargain compared to our last taxi, which was 20 Euros. The Lyra is valued at roughly half a Euro.

I had initially thought that this guy was a more sane driver than our cabbie in Bari. Then he started passing people while straddling the center line when there was oncoming traffic. He was clearly speeding, because there came a point where he dodged back into normal traffic from his center line shenanigans and slowed way down, and then we passed an obvious speed trap with at least four motorcycle cops at the ready. Once we were a distance past them, he returned to his Sega Genesis-inspired taxi driving, if you follow my meaning.

The Plovdiv airport turned out to be far, far out of town, past rolling fields of sunflowers. Seriously, the way we grow corn in Wisconsin, they grow sunflowers here in Bulgaria. It was quite disappointing to see where we were, though, because there was still over four hours until our flight, and we had really wanted to go out and see some of Plovdiv, including getting some food. We were pretty hungry, but the food was somewhat less important than seeing another European city. We resigned ourselves to eating whatever was available in the airport and sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a full sixth of our day.

We entered the building and...it was completely devoid of human presence, save a solitary security officer making his way toward us. There was an x-ray machine immediately inside the door, which he manned presently, and had us run our bags through. That completed, he returned to wherever he had come from, and we were all alone. There were a couple of cafes, but no one to sell us food out of them. The RyanAir check-in counters were right in front of us, but nobody to check us in.

The scales were functioning, though, so we took the opportunity to weigh our suitcase, since there's a 15kg limit to checked luggage. We clocked in at just over 19. So, having so much free time on our hands, we reorganized, stuffing items into our carry-ons and throwing away things we did not need. Never have we had a carry-on weighed before getting on an airplane, and we hoped this would not be the one to break that streak, because at least mine is seriously over the 10kg carry-on limit. I'm pretty sure my carry-on is heavier than the suitcase.

Then we headed over to one of the cafes, noting power outlets within the reach of my Macbook's power cord from the table. I had to stretch it all the way out, so here we are with a cable across what should be a major walkway, ready to trip people, but as there was no one else to be seen, we didn't really worry about it. Then i logged on to the free WiFi, a pleasant surprise for an airport, because even in 2013 those pirates make you pay exorbitant amounts for a service that they limit your time with. I predict that in another five years the Internet will be free everywhere except in airports.

People started to trickle in, eventually even a cafe operator, and we got some sandwiches. The check-in lines still weren't open, though. And then, some weather started to happen.

Amanda first noted some nasty-looking clouds rolling in through the windows behind me. Then the wind picked up so strongly that the flagpoles out front started to bend. We observed a bird attempting to reach the top of the windows out front, which stretched from the floor to the ceiling approximately two, two-and-a-half stories high, where we assumed it had a nest, but it just kept getting thrown about in the air currents, sometimes falling almost to the ground and others being pushed past the point it was trying to reach. I saw a man holding a blanket as the wind ripped through it, unsure what he was doing, but then seeing him try to stuff it in the trunk of his car with little success. I think he was trying to fold it up, i'm unsure how it became unfurled in the first place, but i guess i joined the action late. Eventually he got it in there, but half of it blew out as he was closing the trunk and hung out of his car, flapping maniacally. So he tried again, and as he was doing so, i saw the wind tip over a parked motorcycle.

We were starting to have doubts about our flight. Would they cancel it? Then what would we do? Our timing is kind of precarious, for other travel arrangements, although really our endgame for the next couple days is just to get on the plane home and we're taking a weird roundabout way to get there, just to see more things and also save money. If we don't get on this flight, we can probably find a workaround.

But soon enough, check-in and gate security opened, and we managed to get through both of those things. Right now we are waiting in our terminal for our flight, still an hour away, and i might note the only flight leaving out of this entire airport all day. A good number of people have shown up for it, so i'm no longer worried we're going to be in a four-seat cropduster, as i had posited when Amanda was musing about what type of plane we'd get earlier. There's probably fifty people here.

Well, that brings us up to current. I'm going to go use the water closet, then patiently await boarding by reading either some more Neal Stephenson, or some Cracked while i've got the internets.

--

The flight ended up being a full house, every seat on the plane occupied. This RyanAir plane was identical to the one that took us from Dublin to Liverpool, unassigned seating and all. Amanda, jammer she is, cruised through the masses of people and toward the back door of the plane rather than the front, securing us some decent seats with empty overhead bins before many people had boarded. Most of them were going to the front, so choosing the rear door was really a boon for us.

This was my eighth commercial flight. I remember being somewhat terrified when we started cruising down the runway back in 2008 on our way from Chicago to San Francisco, but since that first time, takeoff has been my favorite part of a plane ride. I've long lamented not being able to film out the window, since electronic devices interfere with something or another on airplanes, but moreso the steady climb to cruising altitude that follows. With this flight taking place well after dark, i think the first of the eight to do so, i found that regret to be even more compelling.

As we pulled away from the ground, i watched the lights of Bulgaria slip away smaller and smaller on the ground. It wasn't a sea of them, like launching out of big cities is, but rather a series of unconnected pools of glowing orange, like droplets of light had rained from the sky and were collecting in the pools of the lower land. Beautiful.

Penetrating the clouds, we lost them, and then as we exited on the other side, we could see lightning dancing back and forth between the more ominous vaporous bodies that had, to our favor, passed by us in time. The flight had to be delayed fifteen minutes, but it was a nearly insignificant price to pay. In fact, despite the late go, we still arrived in Frankfurt on time.

And then they overbooked our bus by fucking double.

Day 14: Athens to Thessaloniki

Saturday, June 22

If the night is ruled by cats in Athens, then the dogs have the day. And they use it to sleep.

Everywhere we went today, there were stray dogs passed out. They were on the sidewalks with their backs against shops, in the wooded areas curled up next to (or around) tree trunks, or sometimes sprawled out literally in the middle of the street, in areas with no cars.

Shortly after midday Amanda and i got the opportunity to pet one. She was musing aloud how much he looked like Alyssa's dog Herman, and he must have picked up that he was being complimented, so he began to follow us and eventually stuck his head right into Amanda's hand. This was right before lunch; we saved some of our bread that we were too stuffed to eat to give to the dog, but we were unable to find him again.

Backing up, though. We got a late start to the day, probably because our bed was so damn comfy and the air conditioning like sweet nectar from Olympus. Once we started moving, showered individually in the tiny, leaky shower stall, and got our luggage repacked, we stored it in the hotel's office downstairs at their offer, and set out immediately for the Acropolis. As you might imagine, it wasn't hard to find.

There's really not much to say about it; you pay an entry fee, climb a long, winding staircase, and then there's the Parthenon, in shambles. It looks infinitely worse than any pictures you've probably seen, all decrepit and falling down. There's been restoration work started, but it must have began recently; they're not very far on it. Amanda's professional estimate is that tourists may be able to walk around it the way we did the Coliseum in Rome in another 50 years.

There was a second site that we were admitted to with our Acropolis tickets. It had a few columns sticking in the air, and one downed one that had split into even sections like a sliced banana, but mostly it was an open field. I'm not really sure what it was that we were supposed to see there. Ruins, sure, but there are ruins randomly scattered about the city, fenced off in the middle of commercial or residential areas, easily viewable from the roads and walkways.

And then we visited the Panathenaic Stadium, where the ancient Greeks held the Olympic Games every four years for over a thousand before Christianity rose to prominence and banned them in the third century. The Olympics would not be held again until 1896, when the Stadium was restored to its original greatness. That's when the modern age of the Olympic games began, and it immediately started moving around the world from there; Athens would not see the Olympics come home again until 2004, when some events were held in the Panathenaic Stadium (a small stadium by today's standards), and where the marathon ended.

The really striking thing about the Panathenaic Stadium is that the whole thing is wrought of marble. Can you imagine it? An entire sports coliseum, holding 68,000 screaming fans, being completely constructed of white marble? I mean, think about how much a marble counter top will run you. It's really a sight to behold.

The audio tour led us then through a cave, the mouth of which opens near the starting line on the track. This cave was used as a preparation area for athletes in ancient times as well as recently, but apparently was also used in the old days by naked teenage girls praying for husbands. Culture is a weird thing.

It leads then into a room memorializing the history of the modern Olympics. There are posters with the logos of, i think, every summer Olympic Games from 1896 through 2012, as well as a small amount of memorabilia. The audio guide didn't mention it at all, which i thought odd, but at the back of the room there are four torches mounted to the wall, and in the center of them is a golden pedestal with what looks like a gas stove inside of it. I wondered if that's where the Olympic Flame originates; i mean, it only makes sense, but i'm not sure why it wasn't covered in the tour.

As we were finishing up our audio tours of the Stadium is when we started to really notice our sunburns. We'd put on sunscreen at the beginning of the day, but apparently, upon further examination of the bottle later, it broke down after two hours. We're nowhere near New Zealand-level sunburns, but it's enough that tomorrow's probably going to be an unpleasant day for arm-moving.

Next order of business was lunch/dinner. It was already 4:00 and all we'd eaten was some pastries shortly after our initial subway ride to the Acropolis area. There was a place we had seen while lost in Plaka last night that had little menus available at the back of the building in like ten different languages; we'd taken a look, at first thinking they were maps, and were impressed by the sound of “Meal for Two: choose 5 of 13 items + drink + mineral water + bread + dessert for 28 Euros.” We'd taken the little menu with us, since it had the name and address of the place as well as a tiny map on the back, so that we could find it again today. However, we left the damn pamphlet at the hotel in our luggage. So what could we do? We started in the general direction of Plaka hoping to get lucky.

We came to the main road that had guided us back to the hotel last night, very close to where we'd joined it then, but on the opposite side, and then started trying to retrace our steps. At this point we were both getting to be quite hungry and almost desperately thirsty (it's been very hot), and Amanda's feet were hurting from the uneven cobblestone or gravel roads and sidewalks that make up most of the thoroughfares in Athens badly enough that we were now having to take breaks every now and then.

But we managed to work our way through Plaka, remembering various graffiti and odd buildings, recalling the ice cream shop we'd gotten cones at, the alley where we heard a cat fight break out, certain angles of the view of the Acropolis above. And with really only one error, we found the place. Walking up, the host saw us and waved us in, i'd say as though expecting us, but they do that at lots of restaurants in this city, whether you intend to eat there or not.

It was everything we'd hoped it would be. We sat down and were presented with water and bread immediately. There's no menu, though; the way they do things is literally exactly what was in that small flyer. It's not a special; they charge you an amount for the number of people you have, then they bring out a platter featuring all 13 of their items, and from it you pick up the ones you want. Since we were a party of two, we were allowed to select five items. We didn't exactly know what all of the things were, but they looked good, and they WERE good, so i call it victory. And for what we've been paying for food in Europe, this was probably the best bargain we'd walked into. We ate almost every bit of the five items we'd selected, and then were brought dessert, which was some strange gelatin-like thing with orange peels and raisins in it. I was a little put off by the texture at first, but was totally sold on the flavor.

This is where Amanda saved the bread for the dog. That bread is still in one of our bags. I don't know what she plans to do with it at this point; maybe save it for another one-toed pigeon.

Now full and with all of the sights we'd planned to see in Athens seen, except possibly whatever was on the top of the highest precipice in town, some kind of great white (probably marble; they've got a thing for it here) building, we were unsure what to do with ourselves. Amanda suggested climbing to that summit, but my blurting of “mother fucker” put her off of it. Besides, she reasoned with herself, her feet hurt so badly at this point that she would likely be unable to make it. Winner: fat guy.

Instead, we decided that there was a beach we'd like to see. Amanda favored heading right over, dipping our feet in for a bit and being good with it. I, on the other hand, have been itching to use my GoPro chest harness for the purpose i purchased it for: filming while swimming. So far i've only used it to walk through airport security and get some more or less interesting shots of one train station, which probably has not been worth adding it to the gear manifest on our supposedly bare-bones trip. I motioned that we return to the hotel, get our swimsuits, the GoPro, and that god damned sun tan lotion for reapplication, and then hit the beach, which Amanda then agreed to. Our train wasn't to leave from Athens until 23:55, giving us several hours still to kill, and we were both pretty sure that squeezing a meal in was not going to be necessary.

When we had completed that, it was 8:00pm, and we were heading to the beach. Maybe not what normal people do, but the sun was a good way down and neither of us particularly wanted it broasting us like juicy chickens, so a twilight dip suited us fine.

By subway, it took us 35 minutes to reach the beach, which we found to be made of gravel and garbage. This was more garbage than i'd ever seen in one place in my life, outside of a landfill, and i've seen Chicago (not New Jersey though...). We tromped through it down the beach, which couldn't have run for more than 100 meters, crushing refuse and kicking gravel underfoot the whole way. We found one patch of sand, an oval maybe two meters across by one wide, maybe enough to have a picnic on if you don't mind being surrounded by trash.

We were both quite sure that we did not want to touch the water with our flesh, so we took some pictures and dejectedly called it a day. I did shove the GoPro into the sand a little bit and let the small waves wash over it a couple times; haven't seen the shot yet, but it might be cool. But all in all, the beach was a bust, bringing a sad ending to our otherwise very good day.

The sun being just about down, we were pretty well out of things to do in Athens, so we returned to the Nafsika Hotel, collected our belongings, and took the subway one last time to the train station, to sit and wait for our train. We were there a little more than an hour early.

A bonus, though: the train station had free WiFi, something we'd not seen anywhere else, so that gave us something to do to pass the time. However, it cut us off after 30 minutes, which was probably written somewhere in that fine print that i accepted without reading, mostly because it was all in Greek and i just needed my social media fix. 31 notifications and a friend request on the Facebooks.

Well, we're on the train now, so i'd better get some sleep while i can. It's a six hour ride to Thessaloniki, where we wait for two hours and then get on a bus to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where we will get on a plane and fly back to Germany because our travel plans got weird. We are stuck in another one of those bullshit six-person compartments with two people who are reading books, a woman who is trying to sleep, and a baby. So far the baby's been quiet.

So. Far.

Day 13: The Adriatic Sea to Athens

Friday, June 21

Ermahgerd. She was so right.

That booth seat was sooooo comfortable to sleep on last night. So much better than any airline seat could have been. And we didn't have to sleep on the deck.

Around 6am, or i guess 7am since we've crossed another time zone, the ferry made its first stop Surprisingly, the majority of the people on the ferry got off there, including the snoring fellows in the next booth over. In my drowsy early-morning state, i panicked, thinking that we needed to get off the ferry, since i did not know that it made more than one stop in Greece. Amanda, probably still fully asleep, calmed me down and explained the situation without moving a muscle other than her lips. Then i freaked out again because i thought she was wrong, but noticed other people continuing to sleep and reasoned that she was probably actually right. Then i woke up.

EDIT: Amanda just read this and had no recollection of that conversation. She was clearly still 100% asleep.

I headed to the bathroom, which looked like it had flooded overnight, maybe not a good sign. I was glad i'd had the forethought to put on my shoes, but it kept me from performing the more heavy-duty actions. That can wait until we get to Athens.

I got another half hour of sleep in our little booth before the kitchen staff appeared and asked us to leave so they could clean up for breakfast. Since most of the other passengers had already disembarked, it was easy for us to score a much longer, curved bench out in the common area, where we put in another two hours of sleep before finally waking up to children watching Kung Fu Panda: The Series, in Greek. Digimon came on afterward, so we watched a little of that, because hell yes digital monsters, whether we can understand the dialog or not. After some girl muted the TV so she could use her cell phone, we went to investigate the breakfast bar.

Breakfast cost 18 Euros for a couple shitty omelets, a small roll and the condiments to put on it, water, and some deliciously juicy watermelon. We sat by the windows in the commissary facing the bow of the ship, which was a nice view early this fine morning.

Next we sorted through some of the pictures from the early part of the trip while a television show about a family with a monkey played on the TV. At first i was unsure if it was a sitcom or a reality show, but it turned out to be obviously a sitcom when the monkey foiled a robbery with the help of two small dogs. After that was a show about a family with a seal. No, really.

As the announcement came that we were drawing near to port, we packed up our things and headed back to the top of the ship, to get our first good look at Greece. It was quite windy up there and my shirt kept blowing up to my shoulders, exposing my rock-hard six-pack abs. Ladies. Anyway Amanda stole my camera at that point and wouldn't stop filming it and laughing at me, like she does.

It turned out that we were pulling into the port over an hour late. We were supposed to be off the ship at 12:30, but by the time we got to the bus stop just outside the dock's terminal, it was 1:37, and the next bus into town was expected in 7 minutes. Our bus to Athens was supposed to leave from either the train station or bus depot at 1:50.

Here's the thing with travel around Greece nowadays: it's impossible to book. I've talked about this before. We could not book trains in Greece from other EU countries, and we couldn't book the bus before we left home because the web site was in Greek and the English mirror was down, and frankly Google Translate is a gigantic failure when it comes to making Greek into English. The only option left to us was to book everything when we got to Greece.

The rails between Patras and Athens have apparently been torn up, also. Which is why we're looking to travel by bus. So when i say we missed our bus, all it means is that we missed the one we wanted, we didn't actually have tickets or anything.

I had inquired of a customer service person on the ferry as to whether we needed to get on this bus from the bus station or the train station, and she had said she wasn't sure, but thought that, since we were after a Eurail bus, we should go to the train station. The city bus #18 should take us directly there, or to the bus station if that was what we needed. When we did finally get on that bus, i asked the driver about it, and he told me bus station. So that is why we were doing everything i was talking about up there. I may have written this out in the most confusing way possible.

The attendant at the bus station told us that our Eurail passes were not good for buses, so we had to pay the full fare. All things considered, it wasn't a terrible price, and we've ended up on a bus directly to Athens. Our original plan had called for a bus to Kiato, train to SKA, and another train to Athens, so maybe this is going to be easier. As for faster, i guess we'll never really know. Actually, we don't even know how long of a bus ride this is, we've been on it for almost an hour and have no idea where we are. Somewhere in Greece by a large body of water which may still be the Adriatic Sea.

Getting on this bus was a clusterfuck. Our tickets are printed entirely in Greek, as you might expect. If you've never seen the written Greek language, here's something important to consider: they do not use the Latin alphabet like almost every other written language currently used in the world. If we can't even tell what the letters are, we've got no chance of using context to try and figure out words that are similar to other languages.

I asked the person at the information desk which of the six buses in front of the station we were supposed to get on, and she yelled at me like i was stupid. After a few minutes of verbal sparring with her, she finally told me it would have the departure time, 14:25, right on the front of it. The Greeks use the same numbers, at least, so that seemed pretty reasonable. I walked around all six of those buses, none of them had any numbers on them. Finally, after showing my ticket to three of the non-English speaking attendants outside, i found that it was the bus that was just about to pull into the station and not any of the ones already there. That bus also did not have the time written on it.

So along with the rest of the herd of highly-confused tourists mulling around the station, we finally got where we needed to be, which is here, on this bus.

Hope to get to Athens soon. Will write more once we're in our hotel room for the night.

--

So the girl sitting in the seat next to us talked on her cell phone for the first two solid hours of the bus ride to Athens.

The trip ended up being three hours, putting us in Athens around 5:30, a solid two hours earlier than we'd have been if we'd followed our original plan, which involved a shorter bus ride and transferring to two different trains.

The first trial of being in Athens, where everything is written in arcane symbols that may as well be Martian or Wingdings to the likes of our simple, American brains, was getting from the bus station to anywhere useful to us. Either the train station or our hotel would do. We walked around the bus station aimlessly, went outside and contemplated walking out there aimlessly, then instead returned to the inside of the bus station and aimed for the other side. This bus station, by the way, was more like a sprawling mechanic's garage than what we'd expect from a commercial transportation launching site, except it also had rows of restaurants and convenience stores within. The whole thing smelled of hydraulics.

Diametrically opposed to the exit we'd attempted to leave from (aimlessly), relative in distance to maybe two and a half city blocks, there was a city bus sitting just inside the garage door. A hut next to it, just big enough for a man to sit in and sell tickets out of, had literally just opened its ticket-selling window as we approached. So i asked about getting to the train station, and the occupant informed me that the bus we were looking at would take us to the city center, where we could get on the subway to finish the journey. He sold us a couple of tickets that were good for all the bus and subway rides we could use in 90 minutes for just a Euro and forty cents. That's cheaper than a one-way ticket on the Madison Metro. This is perhaps the first time ever that something in Europe has cost us less than its equivalent would back home.

The main reason for going to the train station was to book our trains for the way out of Greece, since, for those just joining us here or the kind of people who enjoy multiple flashbacks in their films, Greek trains can't be booked from anywhere but inside Greece, or their website which is written in Greek and impossible to translate. We were able to get the train from Athens to Thessaloniki booked no problem, but that's as far as Greek trains will go nowadays; from Thessaloniki, we need to get on a bus to Plovdiv, where our flight back to Germany departs from. Yeah...the last couple days of our trip are a messed up zigzag of transportation nonsense, hitting several more countries for very short periods of time, because when we were planning our trip initially we forgot to get one of our flights booked and by the time we went back for it a mere two days later, the price had doubled, and so rather than going to Romania from Greece and flying straight home from there, now what we are doing is flying from Bulgaria to Germany, then taking a train to Hungary, and flying from there to Poland and then to Chicago. Look at a map, it's really stupid. But it's going to get us home for a cost less than three limbs.

That was another huge tangent. Let's return to our story.

Our hotel, Hotel Nafsika, is very close to the train station. We checked in easily, and the man at the counter was very helpful to us. He whipped out a map immediately and drew on it where we were, where the best things to see in the city are, where the best places to eat are, and the best route to take to hit them all. Then he ushered us over to the elevator (!!!) to take us to our fourth-story room. I was so happy, every other accommodation we've stayed in, we've been on the third or fourth floor, and i've had to haul our bulky suitcase up a spiral stairway. This hotel also had a visible spiral staircase that i was steeling myself to have to use; i could not see the lift from where i stood in the lobby. So when we were led over toward the stairs and to the door next to it, i was shocked to suddenly be face to face with a thing that i have only seen once before in my life, and it was in a black and white film from the 1950s: an elevator with a regular door. As in, it's got a handle, and it swings out, as if entering a room. We closed the door, selected our floor, and the elevator visibly began its ascent. There is no other door between the elevator and the entry; you are climbing the building in a three-walled car, and the front of it sees the backside of each door for every floor on the way. Once we reached the fourth floor, we simply pushed on the door, and it swung out, releasing us from the tiny but cool in a novel way deathtrap.

We're very pleased with tonight's room. Nice comfy bed, our own bathroom, air conditioning which we can set ourselves via remote control, a mini-fridge, giant walk-in closet, TV, and a balcony, and this is the cheapest room of the whole trip. It's true that the whole thing has a very 60s vibe to it and the electrical parts of the room are wired...suspiciously, and said balcony overlooks only a back alley full of garbage, which i actually don't know if i can call an alley because there appears to be no way in or out of it, but it's still pretty nice.

Freed from the burden of our bags, we set out for Plaka, the food district.

Remember when i said that in Paris, the taggers were prolific? I've forgotten to amend that since. It's really all of Europe. Graffiti is everywhere, but nowhere is so ripe as Athens. The graffiti has graffiti. If i thought the tags were dense in Paris, i was wrong. There is not a square inch of wall left unmolested in this city.

As we neared Plaka, we rounded a corner, and suddenly, humans. Thousands of them. It was unbelievable; there was no gradual increase, no lead up, no warning of any kind. Suddenly we were just lost in the masses. At the center of it all was a stage, and some really bad dubstep music.

We moved through the writhing crowd and got to the street where all the outdoor cafes are. As we strolled, Amanda said to me, “If you see a place that you want to eat at, go for it.”

I said, “Let's just get a little farther away from this dubstep.”

So we kept walking, and i kept watching, and eventually, as the “music” subsided to an ignorable level, a waiter flagged us down, shouting above the din, “Two?”

“Yeah, sure!” i replied, sitting down where he'd motioned. He's proactive, he can win our business.

I've never really liked gyros, but i thought that being actually in Greece, i should try a real Greek gyro made by a real Greek chef, so i ordered a chicken gyro. Amanda ordered the special kebab. We'd had Greek kebabs our first night in London, so by the time we were actually in Greece, we were prepared for it not to be meat on a stick, as we'd expected that first time.

But when the food came out, my gyro most definitely did not have chicken on it. It seemed to be bratwurst. If that was chicken, it was prepared in such a strange way that i'd be fascinated to watch, just to see how the chicken got that shade of brown. Amanda's kebab was definitely chicken. To be honest, neither of us was entirely sure what a gyro was supposed to look like, so we thought maybe she'd been given my chicken gyro and i had her kebab, since she couldn't remember what kind of meat was supposed to be on it. Hers looked like the kebabs we'd had in London, though. So we switched plates halfway through the meal, and both of us were absolutely taken with how amazing each dish was. It was a truly great meal, even if they did mess up our meats. We're not sure what happened. But whichever item was the gyro, i'm a convert to it now.

After our meal, we fought our way through the street vendors, who were pushing the exact same shit we'd seen in Rome, Paris, and everywhere in between to make our way closer to the Acropolis, to try and get some shots of it lit up at night. We couldn't get very close and were really just getting ourselves more and more lost in the graffiti-lined cobblestone streets of Athens, but it worked out in the end. Once we finally found our way to a main road that we could identify on the map and set ourselves in the direction of the hotel, we stumbled across another outdoor music performance.

The band was just setting up, which we thought strange given that it was 11pm. I mean, back home, noise ordinances pretty much put a halt to any outdoor performance with a PA by 10. Even Summerfest in Milwaukee has to close down by midnight. But here was a stage facing some huge hotels and what looked like a prominent government building, still setting up for rock well past sundown.

The house music i couldn't identify, but it was clearly in English and sounded like a poor man's Tori Amos. I was thinking that, if it was any indication of the band that was about to play, they'd probably be terrible, i'd film one song for posterity and probable inclusion on my vacation movie, and we'd move along to the hotel. Then, as they were soundchecking, we heard the scratching of records. So there's a DJ in this band. I could see six people, including electric guitars and bass, so with a DJ in the group i immediately thought, shit, they're going to be like Limp Bizkit.

I was delighted to be wrong; they were not at all a rapcore band, but instead a much better throwback to the same decade: Trip-Hop. There's been precious little Trip-Hop in the mainstream since the 90s, and i kind of want it back.

They had a real indie vibe to them, too, and some rapping. If i had to describe them, i'd say The Joy Formidable meets Portishead and Tricky. If that seems as awesome to you as it did to me, check them out on Facebook, they're called Macadam Dive. They are from Switzerland.

I ended up filming the whole show. The video's kind of shit, but there should be something usable for the vacation video. The audio sounded great from where we sat, so hopefully my camera caught it faithfully, i'd love to have a good bootleg to listen to.

After the performance, i headed for the stage, hoping to score a CD and a setlist, and got one of those things. Their CD is sadly not available until September, but i'll be on the lookout for it. I'm very happy to have the setlist, and i came away with a shirt, too. They were really nice. Their singer has family in the United States, so they do want to tour on our side of the pond at some point, and when they do, i will be there.

As it turns out, there is a whole music festival this weekend in Athens, featuring live performances from bands on multiple stages across the city from 10am until midnight, June 19-24. If we didn't have historical landmarks to visit tomorrow, i know what i'd be doing. We got a program, but it's all written in Greek, of course.

We walked the rest of the way back to the hotel without incident, which made me happy. I was a little nervous to be an obvious tourist walking these graffiti-lined streets at midnight, but they were pretty well deserted. Most of the people we did see on our journey were young women in dresses and heels, so i suppose if they are comfortable traveling the streets at night, a big imposing guy like me's got nothing to worry about.

By the way, i mean “dresses and heels” in the classy way, not the prostitute way. We saw many references to prostitutes in the reviews for different accommodations in Athens, and were sure to pick a hotel that was not in any of those districts.

So here i am in the hotel room, finishing off this journal entry, and somehow it has become after 2am. So signing off from Athens, Greece, it's Trevor, and i'm going to the Acropolis tomorrow. Boom.

NOTE: I seem to have forgotten to mention the cats. This city is overrun with stray cats, they are everywhere you look. You can't pet them, of course; they will run away from your outstretched hand. But they are generally not afraid of people. There are so many of them, though.

Day 12: Rome to the Adriatic Sea

Thursday, June 20

Well, we got up an hour later than we'd planned. Had breakfast, packed up our things, checked out, and left our bags in the hostel's kitchen for the day. As we were walking down the stairs to get out, we realized that neither of us was completely sure that we'd made the reservation for the train ride to Bari. This is a crucial one, since there's only one train from Rome to Bari all day, and we need to get there to get on our boat to Greece or else the entire rest of the vacation is derailed. Everything hinges on getting to Bari and getting on that boat. I might also add here that i've never received a confirmation on our reservations on that boat, despite repeated emails to the ferry company. So we're kind of flying by the seat of our pants through a tight spot, here.

Headed back up to the hostel, pulled my binder full of important documents from my bag, and checked the spreadsheet, where we'd written in all of our trains, whether they needed reservations, and whether we had those reservations confirmed. The trip from Rome to Bari still read, “need reservation!”

Well, that answers that one.

Got on the internet and tried to book the trip, but the web site was giving us some trouble and we couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. We were taking the subway to Termini, Rome's main train station, anyway, so we figured we'd just do it there.

The customer service representative that we spoke to asked to see our Eurail passes. Even though we've booked all of our reservations under Eurail guidelines, and most of them in person with customer service at the train stations of departure, we had never been asked for the actual passes when making reservations before. We had left them at the hostel in our bags. So, the trip to the train station, waiting in that line, and now a trip back to the hostel – all a huge waste of time, cutting down what we'd be able to see at the Vatican. We saw no choice though. Back to the hostel we went.

While we were there, i suggested we check the internet again, in case it would work, because that would save us from standing in that line again, which would be especially terrible if there turned out to be no room left on the train. I had thought to at least inquire whether there was room from the customer service lady, but not until after we'd walked away, and Amanda didn't think we should wait in the line again.

But hey! What a great idea! Because this time the web site worked, and we were able to get our reservations no problem. There were still several seats available in First Class. We booked our two, and the confirmation page came up, but it requested that we save paper and have the details sent by SMS rather than printing, which i thought was a good idea, except that i've got no cell phone service here in Europe. But i did have internet access on my phone while connected to Ivanhoe's WiFi, so i had it sent to my Google Voice number.

It was taking forever to come through, though, so after a few minutes, we gave up and printed the page anyway, which i'd like to mention cost a whole Euro for one page.

Glad we wouldn't have to wait through the customer service line at Termini again, we set out on the subway to get to the Vatican.

The Vatican, being its own country even though completely surrounded by Italy, must have the loosest border in the world. We literally just walked right in. There was a row of columns, maybe four stories high, and after you pass under them, there you are. Here's my trivia fact for the day: Italy's embassy to the Vatican is the only embassy in the world on it's own country's soil.

Anyway. Once in the Vatican, we found a huge line of people underneath a stone roof held up by more four-story-high pillars, on the opposite side of a wide courtyard. There's probably names for all of these things, but i don't know them. We got in the line, assuming that it was leading us to the Sistine Chapel, but not really knowing. The line was so long, Amanda thought we'd be in it for hours. I felt more optimistic, though. It looked like it was moving right along at a decent clip, and i predicted half an hour, tops.

After a few minutes, i decided to scout ahead and make sure this was a line we wanted to wait in. It turned out to be for the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Vatican's huge cathedral. We don't really know much about the Vatican, so we thought maybe the Sistine Chapel would be inside.

The line took 22 minutes, after which Amanda had to put on her church clothes. After the thing at St. Mark's the other day, she came prepared, and had some longer pants and a sleeved shirt in our day bag, which could be easily slipped on over her athletic shorts and tank top.

The Basilica is highly decorated with sculpture and painting, as expected after the last several cathedrals we've been in. The difference is that they allowed photography and video, so i captured plenty. We walked around the nave for a good half hour, but that was all that was open to us. The Sistine Chapel was not contained within.

It turned out to be through the Vatican Museum, so we hurried over there. It was 12:00 by this point, as evidenced by the bells pealing throughout the courtyard unendingly. Two hours twenty before we had to be on that train. The hostel is only one subway stop away from Termini, pretty close, so we thought that as long as we started heading back to the hostel by 1:30 we should be in good shape. We were both getting pretty hungry and would love to have one more Italian meal before leaving the country, so we thought that if we got through the Sistine Chapel by 1, we could stop for some pasta on the way back.

We did not even reach the Sistine Chapel until 1:00. You're lead through a maze of a museum before you can get to it, and the concentration of humans in the building is too damn high. No personal space, we could barely move outside of the slowly ambling cattle-people all around us, who would stop suddenly every couple paces to take more pictures with their fucking tablets. People: STOP DOING THIS. You look like idiots. THAT IS NOT WHAT A TABLET IS FOR. Get a camera, they are pretty cheap these days! Cheaper than your tablet! And they take better pictures!

In the chapel itself, no photography is allowed. You are to stay quiet, and the dress code is once again rigidly enforced, so Amanda had to put her clothes on again. I saw security get aggressive with one guy who pulled out his phone for a picture immediately upon entry, as if he somehow missed the ten or so signs you pass while waiting in that slow-moving line.

People were not very respectful in the chapel at all. It was loud and you could tell that people were still snapping pics with their phones. Security had some kind of PA and would gently shush the crowds every minute or so, which bought approximately five seconds of lowered crowd volume, and sometimes they'd get loud themselves to remind people not to take pictures. There were additional security persons milling about through the crowd, attempting to quiet louder patrons personally and intercept any photography. They were largely unsuccessful. I imagine they must have one of the most frustrating jobs on the planet.

But enough about jerks. We stood directly below the painting of God and Adam, sitting on their clouds, touching fingers. You know the one i mean, it's called The Creation of Adam. We stared up at it for several minutes before continuing through the chapel, marveling at how one man (Michaelangelo) had painted the entire thing.

The Sistine Chapel was certainly not what i expected; it's really just one big room, covered in frescoes. I guess i had always pictured it as its own building, multiple rooms, a church in its own right, despite knowing the definition of “chapel.” Though not as grand in scale as i'd expected, it's so elaborate, so prolific, that it deserves its reputation. I just wish there had been fewer people in the room so we could have gotten closer to the artworks from wall to wall. And somehow to the ceiling.

Exiting was also difficult and time-consuming, and we didn't get out of the Vatican at all until after 1:30, so lunch appeared off the table. With a four-hour train ride ahead of us followed by a mad dash to a port, we knew we'd need some sustenance before continuing our journey, so we watched for take away places on our way back. We saw one just before reaching the hostel, but it turned out to just be coffee and other fancy drinks.

We grabbed our things and got to the train station with 25 minutes to spare, the platform for our train had not even been announced yet. We hit up a Mr. Panino for lunch, which is some kind of chain in Europe, but seemingly mostly in Italy (i think we've seen it mostly in Italy), with sandwiches. We got a couple, and a huge bottle of water since we were both feeling like Tusken Raiders could comfortably take up residence in our mouths, Banthas and all, and waited for our train. We chugged the whole bottle of water before the platform was even revealed, and i went back for a second.

Once on the train, we started in on those sandwiches, which were gone before locomotion began. They were ok, better than most fast food but not even in the same ballpark as the rest of the food we've eaten in this country. My bread was dry and hard, Amanda's sandwich did not have any sauce or cheese, which she had thought she'd ordered. Mr. Panino is disappointment incarnate.

When the man came to check our tickets, he had a problem with ours. Apparently i printed the wrong page when i made the reservations; even though there's a button to print the document it gives you at the end of the purchasing process, this is not what you need. They email you the details, including the serial numbers or whatever to confirm that you belong on that train. He kept grilling me for those numbers, and i kept telling him that i didn't have them, i didn't understand why this page was not good enough to get me on the train; clearly we've paid for these seats, nobody else has come to try and claim them, i have the receipt right here. He was demanding that i connect to the internet and get them, and i kept telling him i have no internet connection, but if the train offers one i can connect to that. He kept telling me to do it, i kept saying i couldn't see any connection, could he tell me if the train has WiFi and how do i connect? This went on and on for several minutes, circularly, until i finally just said yes, i will connect to the internet and get you those numbers. Then he went away.

Here i am, hours after that, still haven't been able to get on the internet. The train does not have any WiFi, at least not any that i can pick up, and i've gone so far as to ask other passengers if they have mobile data. Even the ones that do seem unable to connect here, so i'm not sure what this guy is expecting from me.

I've seen him come down the aisle twice since then and check people's tickets, but i've avoided eye contact and tried not to draw any attention, and both times he's walked right past us. Hopefully it stays that way, because i have no way of getting him what he's asking for, and we've got no time to mess around once we get to Bari, and absolutely cannot afford to be thrown off this train. Not that i think they'd do that, the backlash would be terrible, since it's easy to prove that we've paid. But i'm still concerned. I'm hoping that since he's gone through twice without asking me again for those codes, he'll be done with it, and we'll be fine. We've got about an hour and fifteen left before we get to Bari, supposing this train is on time, so i don't think he can do anything too drastic to us.

This train better be on time.

I guess that's as far as i can go for now, i'll have to pick up again...in the future.

--

The train was five minutes late. Not so bad. Still left us 37 minutes to get to the boat before check-in closed. We had to take a taxi across town, though.

This was the first time either of us had ever ridden in a taxi. The driver never said a word to us, from when we flagged him down to when we got out of the car, until he asked for money. But he had his radio on, it was loud, and it was playing Another One Bites The Dust by Queen for almost our whole trip. Appropriate, because he was absolutely fucking insane and i thought we were going to die.

Aside from his quiet demeanor, every stereotype you know about New York cabbies from movies is true, even if this isn't New York. He accelerated like a fighter jet, swerved around through traffic like other cars were stationary obstacles in a maze, or worse, a parkour course, crossed the center line when other cars didn't meet his rigid speed standards, whether it was a passing zone or not (It was not. It never was), and generally...you know what, our taxi driver was Jason Statham. There, mystery solved. We went like three miles tops, he charged us 20 Euros. But he got us to the boat on time, and even helpfully pointed us in the correct direction to get our boarding passes, and where to go once we had them.

So then begins our troubles with Attica Group. I had been emailing these bastards for weeks before we left home, trying to book a reservation, because calling was not an option and their automatic online system was down. We were supposed to get free airline-type seating with our Eurail passes. I filled out their online form to request more information, and in this form included identifying information about us and the date we wished to travel, and they emailed me back a form letter and an attachment explaining their policies, including that we'd be liable for a 5 Euro fuel surcharge, a 7 Euro port tax and a 10 Euro seating charge, or some such nonsense. Each. So our free seats are going to cost us 22 Euros apiece. Not terribly surprising, i suppose, and not a terrible price for a sixteen hour night cruise. Travel and accommodation for 44 Euros? Sure.

I replied to their email, saying that i understood the document and was interested in booking the trip. All i got back was the same form letter and attachment. I sent back, “Does this mean my reservation is booked?” and never heard another damn word from them. A couple further emails, nothing. Their web site said that reservations can be booked from their station before the trip, so we decided just to bank on that, in case the reservation hadn't gone through. We really weren't sure what else to do at that point.

Well, they had no record of our reservation. They were still able to get us on the boat, at least, but we didn't realize until we were already on board that we were not in the airline-type seating, which is the lowest cost option that is listed on their web site and in the attachment i keep referencing. No, we are booked in deck seating. A sixteen hour boat ride, and we are expected to ride on the deck.

I guess “deck seating” tickets also allow you to use the ship's lounges, so that isn't so bad, except that all of the bench seats had been staked out by others by the time we got on board. It looks like they've sold plenty of “deck seating” for being a thing they don't advertise.

All that's left are some chairs around tables in the lounge. As awful as that sounds, what choice did we have? We dropped our bags on a couple open chairs to claim them (seems that's the way it's done around here; lots of luggage left in seats while the owners are away), and went off exploring. Our suitcase, we left in the airline racks before we had discovered that we couldn't sit there, and decided to leave it.

We went up to the top of the ship to watch the sun set, and to see the ship leave port. The uppermost deck features a helicopter landing pad, which is cool, and i assume is only for emergencies when Medflight needs to land. Also, hanging off the side of the boat is a submarine. I've not a clue what a commercial ferry that does nothing but cross the Adriatic Sea once a day does with a submarine, but it looks really cool hanging there.

Once the sun was down and the ferry had cleared the harbor, we headed back down. Our bags remained where we'd left them, unmolested, but there was an older gentleman in the seat across the table. I felt safer with him being there. Who's going to mess with our bags while there's someone sitting across the table, right? So we carried on past that area, to see what else there was, and looking for dinner. And in the next room, we found the dinner line.

Or perhaps i should say blob. All the people were mushed into a disorderly crowd, right at the edge of the buffet bar. All the specials were listed on a board near the front of this cloud of people, and they were much pricier than they had any right to be, but again, what choice did we have? There was also an a la carte menu, which was more permanent-looking and mounted to the wall, so we were unsure whether this line got us the specials or just a la carte items, and therefore if we could just sit down at a table and a waiter would take our order. I queried a crew member and found that no, there wasn't an easy way to do this, we'd have to wait in the line, and they stop serving in 40 minutes.

Grr.

When we finally made it to the front of the line, unsure of how many filthy humans had dodged in front of us, the first thing we grabbed was a giant bottle of water (1.5L). Then i asked for the spaghetti with seafood, and was informed that there was no more. So we both got the roasted chicken. From the a la carte we also snagged a gigantic slice of watermelon, which was the best part of the meal.

Do i write like George R. R. Martin? I just suddenly became concerned that i concentrate on food too much, that's all. I've never read his books but i've heard from multiple sources that his food is more well-developed than his characters, and his characters are more realistic than your friends.

I bring up the ordering process, though, for a reason, and that reason is that after we were finished eating, we saw a man carrying two fresh plates of what could only be spaghetti with seafood to the table next to us. I've got to reason that they were making more when i asked and were simply out at the time, but i feel like they could have told me that if i'd wait, i'd get what i wanted.

Once our meal was over, we didn't leave the booth. It's at a round table, and the booth itself is a half-circle, and it is very, very comfy. In short, we decided that we weren't giving it up. This is where we intend to sleep tonight. We were unsure if the staff would attempt to kick us out of the dining room after mealtime, but we were prepared to duke it out. F those chairs, for real. So we sat, and we waited, to see what would happen when others finished their meals.

If i can back up a bit, we were really lucky to get this booth at all. We'd come toward the end of serving the meal, somehow (they must have started serving well before the boat pulled out of port – half hour late, i might add), and the dining room was still pretty full. For all the tables and regular-sized booths it has (plenty), this was the only open table that we saw. And it's so nice. Like i said, a lucky break all around.

As we sat, post-meal, talking about whatever, mostly just killing time until we could determine what would happen to this room, we started to notice other people appearing to claim the dinner tables for their own. There's a long bench that runs along one wall and serves as seating for one side of seven tables; a woman had strategically placed bags behind two of those tables and was sitting between them, doing nothing, just acting as a sentry. People in the circular booth farthest from us seemed to have pillows with them. And after a long while, the two guys in the booth directly next to us just laid down and passed straight out.

We determined that we'd be alright. I went back to the other room and grabbed our bags, attracting the attention of no one, not even the man across the table, until the bags themselves were clear. Then, a kid seated not far away got really excited, shouted to his friend, and they had our chairs in hand before i could even take one pace. Too late to go back now. But that's ok; Amanda had already expressed her intention to not sleep in those chairs, opting to curl up in a corner on the floor instead. I was thinking back to the night my niece Jadzia was born; Amanda and i had taken two chairs in the hospital, pushed them together, and slept with our legs on each other. That was easily the worst sleep of my life, much worse than the train i bitched about a few days ago where we did a similar thing, but with the gulf of an aisle between us and other people coming in in the middle of the night, and that weird girl who slept with her feet in the air.

With our bags in the booth, like a flag planted in the moon, we thought we'd head back to the top deck and see if we could see some stars. We're in the middle of a sea, after all, seems like the sky should be pretty clear. Strangely it wasn't, we could only see about four stars in the sky, but the water looked really pretty with the reflection of the moon on it. And here we saw people actually sleeping out on the deck. They had brought their sleeping bags up to the highest point of the boat, the helicopter pad, and decided to just crash there for the night. There were also people sleeping on the floors in the hallways aside the stairwells, and...well, pretty much every flat surface had at least one person on it.

Amanda asked me to go to our suitcase in the airline room and get out her blanket, and i obliged her. I found that the people in the airline room weren't even using their airline-type seats; many of them were sleeping on the floor in the aisles. This kind of pissed me off; i can't have an airline seat to sleep in because you've got it booked, and you're not even using it! I had to ask a family of four to move so i could get to our suitcase; i pulled the whole thing out, rooted through it elsewhere in the aisle, and then placed it in a different location so i wouldn't have to bug them again. I told Amanda my discovery when i came back, but she feels that our booth is better than any airline seat anyway. She's probably right, but i haven't laid down yet so i can't verify. I'll be doing just that in a moment, as soon as this log is finished.

Damn, it's already 1:30am in Greece, we're crossing another time zone here. I should really get some sleep. Although we're on this boat yet until noon, so i don't know how much it matters. I don't know if we're going to be rudely awakened when it comes time to serve breakfast. I should probably be prepared for that.

Anyway, the guy the booth next to us snores like my dad. For a while it was in stereo, as there was a man behind me also. This might be annoying to some, but i find it comforting, because it means that my own snoring should go unnoticed, or at least won't stand out in the crowd.

Well, that's that for today. Tomorrow we're arriving in Greece, where we've got no trains booked because they don't play nice with the rest of the Eurail system (see log entry for Day 9). Home of the biggest economic crisis in the world! So hopefully that works out for us. I mean, we only paid 30 Euros for our hotel room, so this is probably going to be the place to buy souvenirs and things. Assuming there's anyone employed enough to sell them.

Day 11: Venice to Rome

Wednesday, June 19

Despite an ample amount of sleep in an actual, real bed, waking up was hard this morning. Probably because we were coming from an ample amount of sleep in an actual, real bed. But we did it, got our things together, and headed downstairs to check out.

Before the hotel opened.

There was nobody at the front desk, the lights were all off, and the front door was locked from both sides. So here we are, trapped in the hotel, with our train leaving in half an hour.

Yesterday, when we had arrived at the hotel, it was like this, but there's a doorbell on the outside to summon somebody to help. We could find no such thing on the inside. I'd have popped out and rung the bell, but, you know, door locked. Needs the key to go either way.

So we set down our baggage and started hunting around the hotel lobby in the near-darkness. I was trying to find some kind of a bell, Amanda ventured off deeper into the building for i don't know what. She went back upstairs. As she was coming back down, the night security guy just happened to be coming out of the breakfast room, the door to which had been closed. So, mini-adventure over, we made for the train station.

It smelled more like fireworks and baked goods this morning than urine, like it had yesterday. Much more pleasant. Too bad this was not the day we were to be wandering those Venice streets for hours without much to do. There was only the ten-minute walk to the train station. If the morning smells those two days had been switched, maybe Amanda wouldn't be so convinced that, in years to come, all she's going to remember of Venice is that it smells like pee.

We slept for much of the train ride down to Rome, and then i actually did some of the work i'd brought with me for doing on train rides. Writing these logs has really taken up much more time than i'd anticipated, probably because i'm wordier than i need to be, and thus i've only read half a chapter of the novel i brought and done no work, although i did read most of the Kerrang! magazine i picked up in London (no CD this time). They named Simon Neil of Biffy Clyro the rock frontman of the year, which is nice, but Chad Kroeger and Fred Durst also made the list, so make of that what you will.

Rome is also hot, but not nearly as humid as Venice, and therefore much more bearable. Stepping off the train, i didn't immediately feel like i was dying, nor did i even consider bellyflopping into the nearest body of water, no matter how dark and full of garbage it might be. Oh yeah, the famous Venice canals? Full of rubbish.

Maybe you can tell we weren't overly impressed by Venice.

But Rome...Rome totally made up for it. Awesome city.

First thing we did was make for the hostel, located 850 meters from the train station by foot, although we'd find out later that the train station has a subway running under it which would have spit us out less than a block from the hostel. Not that it matters, we didn't have our subway passes yet anyway.

We first stopped into the Ivanhoe Hotel, at Via Urbana 49, thinking it was the right place, but they couldn't find our reservation. When i pulled out the confirmation, they informed us that we were not at the right place. The Ivanhoe Hostel is directly across the street, at Via Urbana 50. Seriously? You put a hotel and a hostel with the same name across the street from one another?

As long as we're on the subject, the street addresses in Rome make no sense. For one thing, they have gone straight down one side of the street numbering every building sequentially, and then back up the other. What i mean is, let's say there are 150 buildings on Main Street. 1 Main Street and 150 Main Street would be across the street from each other, as would 75 Main Street and 76 Main street. When you're moving in one direction, the addresses on one side of the street are going up, while on the other side they are going down. For some reason, there is a weird exception where the Ivanhoes are located: when we first walked up to Via Urbana 49, it was a music school. The Ivanhoe Hotel is across the street, with the address Via Urbana 49, nestled between to other numbers which follow the original convention, not sure what they were exactly but let's say 200 and 201. So on one side of the street, the addresses go 200, 49, 201, and thus there are two Via Urbana 49s.

The hostel was technically closed when we arrived, as it was about noon, and they kick out all the tenants so they can clean between 11 and 4, but we were allowed to check in and stow our bags in the kitchen. However, our host was unable to find our reservation. I pulled out the confirmation, and found that we had mistakenly booked for the 15^th instead of the 19^th. Fortunately for us, there were still beds available for the night, and he charged us the same as we'd have paid had we shown up on the correct date. This was surprisingly generous of him, since, according to the terms we accepted when we made the online booking, we should have been charged the full price for the night we were supposed to be there, and then also for this night, and lost the deposit we put down. But he migrated our original deposit toward tonight's stay, and charged us the same price we'd have paid previously, even though he was giving us a better room. So it all worked out.

We were informed that, starting at 9:30, there would be free cocktails and a disco party in the common area, which happens to be the very wide hallway between the rooms. Seemed like a good time, so i thought i'd attend whether Amanda did or not. It's not like i'd have to drive home.

I asked him about the Roma Pass, which he had a poster for hanging above his desk, figuring this must be equivalent to the London or Venice Pass, but he didn't have the information. He said he'd just put that poster up yesterday and they hadn't received them yet, so he directed us to a small convenience store the next street over.

The Roma Pass included free admission to the first two museums or archaeological sites you visited, and half price admissions after that. Also, free public transportation, including the buses, subways, and overground railways within the city, and some other benefits we didn't think we'd use. It came in a nice little package with a city map and mass transit map, a booklet outlining everything we could do with it, and a download code for an iPhone app.

With that in hand, we stopped in to a small restaurant for lunch, Amanda having some red pepper pasta and myself having pork cuts with green salsa. It was delectable, as all food in Italy seems to be. The restaurant itself was decorated in portraits of musicians, like Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Bono from U2, and Lady Gaga. Many were made from old vinyl records. Next to my head throughout the meal was a framed guitar fashioned from two 45s and some wire. Neat place.

We thought we'd get the coliseum out of the way, since it was pretty near to our hostel and the restaurant. We walked literally a block, turned left, and there it was, looming between the buildings just down the road a bit.

Walking up to it, Amanda said to me, “I bet you regret not bringing sunglasses now.”

“No, but i do wish i had a hat with a brim, to keep the sun off my face.”

One minute later, a pushy street vendor sold me two fedoras. I regret nothing.

The coliseum was pretty great. There's just a feeling you get, being in a building that is almost two thousand years old. You could tell it was trying to fall over, but people over the years had kept bracing it in an attempt to keep it together. One wall was held in place by a giant belt.

After the coliseum itself, we crossed the street to the old Roman forum, which was part of the same archaeological site. The ruins just kept going on and on forever. I feel like we probably saw every piece of ancient Rome, strewn out about a field in more or less some kind of order.

We had not expected to spend five hours in the coliseum area, but that's how it ended up. By the time we were out of there, most of the other sites that our passes were good for were closed, and the rest would be by the time we could get to them. It was starting to look like our Rome passes were going to end up not being worth what we paid for them, but then we started riding the subways. We got around the city just to see some things, and pick up a new power converter, because apparently ours pooped out on us last night. It had stopped charging Amanda's camera battery overnight before it was finished, and wouldn't charge my computer on the train.

We had dinner outdoors at another small pasta place. I had penne with salmon, Amanda had ravioli, and we each had a fresh fruit milkshake. As we ate, pigeons kept wandering around by our feet, and Amanda actually touched one. I may have mentioned before – these birds in Europe are fearless. They love people.

One particular pigeon kept hobbling around our table. It was missing all but one toe on each foot. Amanda took pity on this poor, disabled pigeon, and actually decided to hand it some crumbs from our flatbreads (we had those too). I gave it the first one, and it stopped and looked at us strangely, like it hadn't expected to get food directly from a human. It was probably also not used to getting the food as it's dropped, as the stronger pigeons kept chasing it away. But it stuck near us after that, and Amanda slipped it another crumb later. She kept a bigger chunk that she'd intended to give it once we were off of the restaurant's patio, as she didn't think we should be encouraging the wildlife to seek nourishment in a human dining area, but by the time we exited, it had flown away.

As the sun was going down, we made our way back to the coliseum, to see it lit up at night. I grabbed us some ice cream cones, and we enjoyed the nightfall over one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Except for the street vendors that came up to us about every minute, trying to sell us more of their bullshit. One even had bouquets of flowers.

Once it was fully dark, we got up and walked around the coliseum, taking pictures of it all lit up at night. Disappointingly, they use one side of it to project ads on nowadays. Seems a little disrespectful of history in general.

After that we went back to the hostel to turn in for the night, figuring that if we wanted to get through a decent chunk of Vatican City tomorrow, we'd better get up early. Our train to Bari leaves at 14:50, and it is imperative that we make that one, since it's the only train going that direction all day, and our boat leaves a scant 48 minutes after we're scheduled to arrive in the city. That train had better not be late.

We did not end up attending the free cocktail disco party, for a couple reasons. As stated, we wanted to get up early, so we should get to bed sooner, and we both needed showers. Also, we're at a youth hostel. We're the weird older people in the facility, just barely within the age limits allowed (must be younger than 30). I think every other tenant in the Ivanhoe Hostel that night was between 18 and maybe 24. Possibly even younger. Very few of them were speaking English when we came in, and when you consider that we're the type of people who tend to sit in corners and talk amongst ourselves at the parties of people who we are already acquainted with, because we're socially awkward, it didn't really seem like much of a good time. Also, all the chips and punch were already gone.

Instead i got on the internets for a while. Even though we'd purchased a new power adaptor (not a converter – only a plug adaptor. This is an important distinction to make, as US outlets are 110 volts and European outlets are 220 volts. You have to make sure your device is compatible. Fortunately, Apple makes their products so they only have to sell one model worldwide – the MacBook can handle either voltage. Pro Tip), i wanted to give our old one another shot. Unexpectedly, it worked, and i was able to charge my devices off of it. I had intended to write this log entry and post it, but i didn't. Instead i read Cracked articles and Facebook.