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Archive for July, 2005

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We*re ın Istanbul, not Constantinople

Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

It ıs morning here ın Istanbul and I am tired and this keyboard is completely messed up. I cannot find the apostrophe key, so I will not be usiıng any contractions. The i key ıs somewhere equally difficult to find, but as it is hard to avoid using it, I think this will necessarily have to be a short entry. Already this has taken me almost fıve minutes to type.

We never made it to Varna as we found out it would take as long to get there as it would to just go straight on to Istanbul, which is what we did. The train took over 24 hours to get from Bucharest to here. The Bulgarian border patrol was a nightmare, and gettıng a visa at the Turkish side took time, but it was worth it in the end. I was even asked to smuggle a bag of mystery contents across the border by a gypsy…how exciting!

[read on]

Caves, Baths, and Dracula

Friday, July 15th, 2005

Our day of caving turned out to be so much fun in Budapest. We nearly missed the trip, though, when we realized that the meeting point was at a different train station than we originally thought. We had to sprint (as always) to the tram and jump on without a ticket and hope that we wouldn’t get stopped. It turned out all right in the end though, and we met up with the group and went by bus to the caves. We got to wear these incredibly sexy caving jumpsuits that were caked in about an inch of dried mud. The cave expedition was so much fun. It was pretty tough at times, and more than once I looked at a hole that I was supposed to go through and I thought to myself, you want me to do what? All of us made it through, a bit bruised about the knees, but we had a great time and met some really nice people.

[read on]

When will the rain end?

Tuesday, July 12th, 2005
It has been raining for about as long as I can remember. It stops, I think the sun is about to come out, and then it starts drizzling again. What happened to the beautiful weather we had in Spain? Ever ... [Continue reading this entry]

In the land of Miami Wice

Sunday, July 10th, 2005
I know I just posted yesterday, and not much has happened since then, but I'm in a hostel that has free Internet and I just can't resist! Plus, I just spent half an hour waiting and I want to get ... [Continue reading this entry]

Thinking of London

Saturday, July 9th, 2005
I just want to start off by saying how sad the news of the London bombings was. We were still at the house in Austria when we heard, and we sat in front of the TV for hours as news ... [Continue reading this entry]