Santorini, Pompeii and Rome

It's our last day today. I'm sitting in the kitchen of our Rome hostel, waiting for Michael to finish packing. Our bags are heavier (lots of sovieners!), our skin is tanner (hooray for laying out by the cruise ship pool!) and our portable harddrive is full of photos. We leave Rome and fly to Chicago in a few hours. It feels crazy to be going home after travelling for so long and I imagine it's going to feel crazy to be home for a while afterwards. But, before I get too introspective, I still have three cities to write about.

Santorini:

Unfortunately, Michael wasn't feeling well the day we were in port, so I stole out while he was sleeping and had my own adventure.Santorini is really beautiful and it makes sense why it would be such a huge tourist attraction. There were a TOOOOOOON of tourists--in fact, there were, at one point, seven cruise ships docked that day. This made it pretty hard to see the "real" Santorini, but I made a point of getting lost down little alleyways and trying to get away from the main tourist areas.

Santorini is the Greece we all see in the pictures: whitewashed houses, brightly colored doors and windows, bright blue domes on the churches. The city is located high on a cliff and people need to take either a cable car or a donkey up to the top. The line for the cable car was over 2 hours so I opted for a donkey. So I paid the guy my 5 euro, hopped up on a donkey and expected the donkey owner to walk with me to the top like in Petra (Jordan). But instead, he just gave it a big slap on the butt, yelled something in Greek and the donkey walked away without him. This only worked so well, however, since as soon as we turned a corner and were out of his line of sight, the donkey stopped. Just stopped. I slapped it on its butt, gave it a nudge with my heels, said "let's go" in all the languages I knew, but this donkey was not gonna budge. After 5 minutes of this, I got off and tried pulling him by his harness. As much as I pulled and yanked, this donkey was not going to move for me. Until I went to get back on him, of course, and he walked away from me. Oh, I see how it is, Mr. Donkey. This game of "donkey walks away when Jena tries to get back on" continued for another 5 minutes until the donkey gave up and let me on him. But he still just stood there. More heel nudges, more butt slapping, more yelling (does anyone know how to say "let's go" in Greek?), no moving. Until a pack of about 20 donkeys turned the corner on the way up the hill and Mr. Donkey decided to show his solidarity and walk up with the others. Geesh. I opted not to chance a donkey ride on the way down, needless to say.

Pompeii/Sorrento:

We were excited to visit Pompeii again since we had had so much fun the last time. We did a walking tour with Erin and Josh (our cruise dinner mates) and then wandered the eery streets. If you ever get a chance to visit Pompeii, do it. It's an amazingly preserved city and really gives you a sense of what it must have been like to live so long ago. We also got a chance to hang out in Sorrento, a town about 20 minutes from Pompeii, and the site of the cruise port. Sorrento is a cute Italian town and we were excited to happen upon a famous gelateria while we were there--the owner is in the Guiness Book of World Records for creating the largest ice cream cone ever (based on the pics we saw, it was huge) and the store has been visited by a ton of famous people including the Pope. And the ice cream was pretty good. :)

Rome:

Our last stop of our tour and we weren't disappointed. I enjoy Rome a little more every time I come back and this time was definitely not an exception. We did the normal touristy things (the Forum, Colloseum, Vatican, etc) but then also got to see some things we hadn't seen before such as the Jewish Ghetto and Campo dei Fiori, a colorful piazza where a lot of the young Italians hang out in the evening. We also stopped at a cafe that reportedly has the best espresso in Rome...and we concur. And, of course, we threw a coin into the Trevi fountain guaranteeing that we would return. :)

So now it's time to go. Michael has finished packing, we need to check out of the hostel and catch our train to the airport. Hopefully you've enjoyed reading about our adventures and seeing some of the images we created. Next time I write, I'll be back in the good ol' US of A eating peanut butter and watching reality tv. :) It's been an amazing adventure, an incredible journey. Ma adesso e' il tempo per ritornare alla realita'. Ciao ciao!!

Pictures as promised (Yalta, Odessa, Volos).

Today we said goodbye to our cruise ship. Sniff sniff. We had an absolutely wonderful time and would definitely do something like it again. We're now in Rome, just arrived about an hour ago. Before we left the shipe, I did have enough foresight to edit some images and put them on my flashdrive in case we stopped at an internet cafe along the way to the hostel.

This first image is from Yalta, a beach resort in the Ukraine.

The second and third are from Odessa, a city with a lot of charm and a lot of history. Unfortunately, much of the city is under construction in order to give the city a facelift but we were still able to get a good sense of the place. We were lucky enough to find a restaurant that served pelmeni (russian dumplings that were oh so yummy) and the Ukrainian specialty of vodka "spiked" with hot peppers. Michael said he could feel the vodka moving down his esophogus into his stomach. It definitely had a kick to it, that's for sure. We also happened to see a TON of weddings going on, being that it was Saturday. Outside of the Opera House, we saw four different bride and groom couples getting their pictures taken. A block away, we saw two more couples. Lots of weddings for a small city

This last image I took at the Archeological Museum in Volos, a small town on the eastern mainland of Greece. Attractions in Volos are few and far between (which makes me question why we stopped there as a part of the cruise, but that's not the point), so before going to the beach we opted to see the museum. Neither of us expected much, since we've been to at least five archeological museums already on this trip and have seen our fair share of old Roman and Greek ceramic pots, ancient jewelry and tombs. But we were in for a pleasant change in archeological museum scenery, as this museum was dedicated mainly to the old (and I mean old, as in ooooooold) settlements that had been discovered around Volos not too long ago. The figurine in this image is thought to have been created between 6500 and 5300 bc. That's between 8500 and 7300 years ago. I told you, oooooold. And there were dozens of these figurines in the museum, plus dozens of cooking items and weapons. Amazing.

We also stopped in Santorini, a famous Greek island, and Sorrento, on the west coast of Italy north of Naples. Unfortunately, Michael came down with the stomach flu the night before Santorini and was quarantined (seriously) to our room for the next 24 hours. I wasn't feeling sick, so I stole out to see the island while Michael was sleeping. Sorrento was cute, exactly what you'd expect from a touristy coastal Italian town. I'll add more narrative once I edit and upload images (hopefully tomorrow).

Michael and I will stay in Rome for three more days before heading back to the States on the 22nd. It's so hard to believe that it's coming to an end! But I won't think about that right now. I've got sightseeing to do. :)

This is the good life.

Michael and I boarded our cruise ship (named Pacific Princess) on the 7th of July after spending a day in Athens. Athens was somewhat disappointing: the city itself didn't have too much to offer and the Acropolis/ruins were teeming with tourists, covered by a lot of scaffolding and poorly labeled. The one really redeeming thing we experienced was the museum located in the Ancient Agora. It was small (only one long room) but we saw some of the coolest artifacts yet, like election ballots found in ballot boxes, stone tablets/markers used to determine who had to serve jury duty, a big tablet with their city laws written onto it and a collection of ceramic discs with names written on them to indicate an individual's vote for who should get ostracized from Athens (they did this once a month, apparently). Do you think anyone ever voted for themself?

And then it was cruise time. We got all checked in and we were led to our room where, lo and behold, they had hung "Just Married" balloons on our door and, WAY more exciting, we discovered that they had upgraded us from a room with a porthole window to a room with a full balcony! Omigosh, I was so excited and just kept giggling about how wonderful it all was. I still get gushy when I think about it. :)

This life is SO much different than the traveling we had been doing prior to this. Chocolates on our pillows before bed, fresh towels every morning (and afternoon, if we want), FABULOUS food and anytime access to the pool, casino, library, lounge, etc. Perhaps even better is that we get to wake up every morning in a different place, without having to unpack and repack every night (that was starting to get old). We've spent at least an hour every day lounging by the pool and every morning having breakfast on our balcony. It's hard to think that life can get much better or more relaxed than this.

We've also had the good fortune to have met some really good people. For dinner, if we choose to eat in the Club Room (and why wouldn't we? These dinners are wonderful.), we've been assigned to sit at a table with another young couple, Erin and Josh. Definitely a risky situation, if someone doesn't end up getting along, but we love our dinner mates. We spent last night laughing so hard we were practically crying at one of Josh's stories (if you ever meet him, ask him about the moose in the Grand Tetons) and have similar interests and senses of humor. It's been really fun.

So far we've stopped in Istanbul (second time for us) where we randomly ran into Hilary, one of our Intrepid groupmates, on the street (which called for grabbing a cup of tea and smoking a hookah together) as well as Yalta, Ukraine (which Michael aptly called Yawnta) and now Odessa, Ukraine. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures to share, not because I don't have any, but because I wasn't expecting to find an internet point today and don't have any prepared.

By the way, for those of you aware of the shooting that occurred in Istanbul at the American Embassy this week, it did happen on the day we were there. But the Embassy was located far away from where we were and, in fact, we found out about it from the television in the cafe as we were sitting down to tea with Hilary. Of course it was in Turkish, so we didn't have much of an idea of the situation until we got to an internet point to read the news online. But we're safe and sound, no worries.

Well, I'm off. We've got to be back at the ship in a couple hours and there's more touristing to do before then. до свидания! (That's "bubye" in Ukrainian)

"Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople..."

We arrived in Istanbul (not Constantinople) on Friday morning and spent the next two days being the ultimate tourists. Ultimate, as in we rushed from sight to sight trying to see everything in the time we had: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Cistern and Tokapki Palace. Ok, so it's not everything in Istanbul, but it's alot. Initially, we had even intended to see the Archeological Museum but decided that would just be plain crazy (we'll do it when we come back on our cruise).

Istanbul is a really beautiful city, but is definitely packed with tourists in comparison to the other places we've been--it seemed to have more tourists than the other cities combined. It's a double edged sword for us: on one hand, it's easier to navigate the city (maps are readily available) and you can be almost guaranteed that every restaurant you go into will have an english menu, but on the other hand, the city looses some of its "real" feel, as if it were set up just for the tourism industry.

On an upnote, I did find a super cute and super affordable spring dress there. :)

Last night we boarded our overnight train for Athens and said goodbye to our Intrepid group. It was sad to part with them--we had some good times with them and had developed a sense of familiarity and security with the group--but both Michael and I were also excited to be on our own again. The night train proved to be...an experience. It left at 8:30pm and both of us were in bed by about 10pm. However, we had to cross the border into Greece and therefore were awoken at about 1am to hand over our passports for exiting Turkey and entering Greece. From everything we had read, this would be a quick painless process. Everything we read was wrong. The 2 minutes it was supposed to take turned into 4 hours sitting in the no man's land between Turkey and Greece for who knows what reason. What made it twenty times worse is that there were clouds of mosquitoes outside and in order to keep them out of our train compartment, we had to close the window, which resulted in our compartment getting up to about, I'm not exaggerating, at least 100 degrees. For four hours. At one point, we succumbed to the mosquitoes because, really, it was better than the god-awful heat. Needless to say, we didn't sleep much between 1 and 5am. Gotta love train travel. :)

So now we're in Athens, having just come from a great meal of stuffed red peppers and pork kebab. Tomorrow we'll do the tourist thing again by visiting the Acropolis, and then we board our cruise tomorrow evening. I most likely won't be updating the blog as regularly, as I'm not sure of our internet access for the next two weeks, In any event, I'll do my best and will for sure send updates as I'm able...

Fresh trout, underground cities, fairy chimneys and whirling dervishes

We arrived in the region of Cappadocia on Tuesday and spent the morning exporing the Ilhara Gorge (like a very mini Grand Canyon). What a change from the deserts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It was wonderfully green, and we saw frogs and turtles lazing about at the water's edge. For lunch, we stopped at a restaurant located right on the river--in fact, they had piers that led out to covered platforms sitting in the middle of the river on which we sat to eat our lunch. We indulged in the local delicacy, trout caught directly from the river. The trout was cooked in its entirety and presented to us whole, aka with the head still on. Once I got over having my food staring back at me, it was delicious.

We spent the rest of the day with a local guide who took us through the underground cities of Cappadocia. The cities were built starting in 1500bc, directly in the ground down to six stories, and were used as a safe space for townspeople in case they were attacked. We spent an hour and a half exploring and apparently only saw about 10% of the city--our guide told us that the largest city could hold up to 10,000 people if needed. Whoa.

Yesterday, we hiked the areas around the city of Goreme, where we stayed for two nights, still in the Cappadocia region. The landscape was amazing, beautiful, like nothing I'd ever seen. They call the rock formations that exist there "fairy chimneys", for reasons which no one, not even the local guide, could give any definitive answer on. We also spent some time in a nearby village and took a tour of a turkish carpet co-op that sold carpets for over 400 weavers (all women) in the town.

Last night, we went to our first real tourist trap, a dinner and show of Turkish cultural dances. It actually ended up being way more fun than we had anticipated, which was probably influenced considerably by the all-you-can-eat-and-drink (emphasis on the drink part) meal we had, and the good company (about 7 of our group members made the trip). At some point, I'll upload some video of it, but internet is slow here and, in any case, You Tube is censored by the Turkish government. Who knew. The image here is of the famous "whirling dervishes", guys that spin around and around and around in long white gowns. At this dinner, they did a "dance" (aka spun around) for about 2 minutes or so under blacklights. Apparently, a couple group members went to a whirling dervishes show in Cairo and they spun around more or less non-stop for over an hour. That's a little too much spinning for me--I'll take the short version, thank you very much.

Today we lazed about before our trip to Ankara to board an overnight train to Istanbul. Our trip is technically over tomorrow at noon, although a few people will be staying on in Istanbul and we'll see the sights with them. Then we're off the following evening for Athens in order to board our CRUISE! Yay!!!