Thursday, July 28, 2005

Tel Aviv, Israel:

I'm about to leave the Middle East. After scouring the bucket shops of Tel Aviv for the best rate deals to Europe, I found a last-minute ticket to Prague for about $150 all-inclusive. It really wasn't that hard to dig up; it seems there are plenty of Israelis taking vacations and long weekends in Budapest, Prague, Poland and much of the rest of eastern Europe. I won't elaborate on how ironic I find all of this, but there were plenty of flights and they were all comparable in price. My only regret was that there weren't any trips directly to Riga, Latvia or Vilnius, Lithuania. I think that in a few more years this won't be a problem.

Although the blog is now nearly caught up so far as my time in Egypt is concerned, it still needs a lot of work with regard to my several days in Jordan and 3 1/2 weeks in Israel. I'm looking forward to working on these entries because Petra, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were all high up on my list of favorite places, though for entirely different reasons. Seeing as how I am about to head for a new continent, however, and cover a lot of ground there in the next month (no slow plodding around this time), my goal for now is to update the last month slowly while also keeping current with posts as I travel through Europe.

During the course of August I plan to visit Prague, Krakow and Budapest at a minimum. I am also looking into destinations such as Vilnius (in'shallah), Bratislava and (yes it is safe) Sarajevo. By the last week of the month or so I plan to be somewhere on the Dalmatian coast in Croatia; Split or Dubrovnik or Hvar. From there I will catch a ferry across the Adriatic to Italy.

In fact, Italy in September is now mandatory. School starts in the fall, you see. In perhaps a subliminal bid to regress to my college days, I've enrolled in Italian classes at the Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, the capital of the Umbria region (about midway between Florence and Rome it is not far from Assisi; the city has about 150,000 residents and a huge number of university students, both foreign and Italian). Unless the University loses my application (which I can see happening, considering how charmingly disorganized their brochure and instructions happen to be) or the Italians decide to refuse me a permit to study there, I will be in the country for at least a month and, more likely, two months or longer. Although a significant minority of the students will be my age or older, I like to think of this experience as a chance to live out the movie "Old School" in an Italian setting.

Stay tuned for news of my deportation.