Warsaw

No, I haven't fallen off the edge of the earth. Yes, I do exist, even if it's been forever since I last posted here.

As my previous post mentioned, I did a last-minute trip to Warsaw over the bank holiday weekend at the end of May. A few of the photos are online here.

I arrived midafternoon on Saturday, ventured through the streets of the Old Town section and explored a bit. That evening was spent with a few others I met at the hostel, after they decided I needed to learn the virtues of the various different Polish vodkas. Let's just say that there is quite the selection available!

Sunday morning, I went to mass, which was quite the adventure given it was all in Polish! I then ventured through a market to find a kielbasa and some pieroghi for lunch, before heading into the city to tour the war memorials and the New Town area.

Monday, I watched the city come to life from the first story window of a coffeeshop, while reading a book, before heading off to the airport.

I'm glad I took the trip and visited Warsaw, but it's not on the list of places to which I must return. It's definitely a bit of a culture shock, as the city has never fully rebuilt following the bombings from World War II. Many of the parks in the city are located where portions of the city were just never rebuilt. Likewise, those areas that were rebuilt tend to have large concrete block buildings from the Soviet era.

Plans

Last week: "Yeah, sure, let's maybe try Ireland."
Tuesday: "Okay, no worries, I'll find something to do."
Friday 3:30pm: "Uh oh... I have a three-day weekend coming up with no travel booked. Where can I go, cheap?"
Friday 4:00pm: "Hrm... Krakow or Barcelona?"
Friday 4:30pm: "Ooh, I can get direct flights to Warsaw, cheap!"
Saturday 10am: I leave Heathrow for two nights in Warsaw. Should be fun!

Selcuk, Ephesus and Izmir

We had originally booked Thursday through Saturday nights in Izmir, the town from which we were flying home on Sunday. Alex, the guy who helped us reunite with our tour group in Eceabat, had recommended that instead of staying in Izmir and doing day trips from there, we instead stay at a place called Atilla's Getaway that was about 60k further south in Selcuk. After looking up the place online, we decided to change our reservations to spend Thursday and Friday nights there, then just Saturday night in Izmir.

On Friday, we walked up the mountains behind his place to the Virgin Mary House, where she spent her last days. From there, we walked down to Ephesus. The ruins of a 250,000 person city, millennia later, can be phenomenal to walk through! We spent some time on the common walkways and around the major reconstructed sites, but then walked off on some trails into less-crowded areas where it was much less well-trodden. Somehow, over the course of that afternoon, I took more than 200 photos. A selection of them are available at http://picasaweb.google.com/trenshaw/turkey.

In all, this was a phenomenal trip! I was able to disconnect from work and mostly from technology overall. Meandering for hours on end through ruins, losing myself in my thoughts while on a long bus trip, seeing ridiculously grandiose mosques next to abject poverty... no regrets whatsoever about taking the trip!

Gallopoli and Troy

On the Tuesday of our trip, we met the tour group outside at 7am. We had a 20-person bus with only six of us on it... it was great to be able to breathe, have plenty of space and meet a few others doing similar travels!

We went first to ANZAC beach. Now, I'd heard of ANZAC Day and the battles that took place in Gallopoli during the Great War, from having lived in Sydney during ANZAC Day several years ago. This was a nation-defining moment for Australia and for New Zealand, yet we do not hear much of it in the States. Chris and I got quite the history lesson from one of the Aussie guys on the trip... he was infinitely more knowledgable of the events than was our tour guide.


That night, the tour guide dropped us at our hotel in Eceabat, a small town across the water from Canakkale. She told us that another tour bus would pick us up outside at 7:30am the next day. Knowing that, we checked in, looked around town, and promptly decided to take the ferry across to Canakkale to have dinner over there where there looked to be a bit more activity.

We sat on the second level of the ferry, looking out over the bow toward the approaching city. While we were sitting there, a group of kids about 12 years old came over and sat next to us. They started talking amongst themselves in Turkish, laughing a bit, pointing at us, giggling and just generally seemed amused by two tall English speaking guys. After a few minutes of this, the group pushed one kid forward who stuttered nervously, "Where are you from?" in English. Chris and I both responded. He clearly understood, but the others started laughing at him and whispering other questions they wanted him to ask us. He ended up translating between the group and us for a while, until we got close to the shore and the group had to go back to get on their bus to continue its trip.


The next morning, Chris and I went downstairs for breakfast in the hotel lobby. We were two of four people staying in the entire place... the other two were a mother and daughter from Australia who were also in the breakfast area. We talked a bit then, before checking out. The hotel owner walked them over to the ferry right after we went outside to wait for the bus to pick us up. Like throughout the rest of the trip, there were stray cats and dogs just about everywhere. This is a shot from where we were standing on the street corner. Unfortunately, I didn't get a shot with the roosters who were also in the street.


At 7:45 or so, when we still hadn't seen the bus, we decided it'd be a good idea to try to get ourselves across to Canakkale on the 8am ferry. I wrote a note and was about to leave it with the hotel proprietor in case the tour group showed up. As I turned to go back into the hotel, though, the ferry left. Apparently that one is at 7:45 instead of 8, so locals can get to work in town by 8am. Oops. We tried calling the tour company office in Istanbul, to no response. I then emailed them with our situation and our mobile numbers, and then we sat down at a coffeeshop nearby, figuring we'd get on the 9am ferry if we didn't get a response or see them before that.

Now, throughout this, the hotel proprietor wasn't particularly useful, as he had very limited English fluency and we had absolutely no ability to speak Turkish. One of his friends walked over and found us at the coffeeshop a few minutes after we sat down. We chatted for a bit, then he told us that we'd been supposed to be on the ferry and that the tour guide had been calling the hotel asking where we were. Um, oops! It would have been great if we'd actually been told that...

This guy went back into the hotel, called the tour guide, then drove us down to a faster ferry that left at the same time as the 9am we'd been waiting for. By the time we got across the water, the tour group had been waiting there for more than an hour for us. Oops...

Later that day, we went up to Troy to see the ruins, then walked around town in Canakkale. We had (another) phenomenal kebab for lunch. Now, kebab (kebap, sometimes) in London is usually from a dense conical thing that you might guess was meat several years and processing steps ago. It's one of those things that sounds like a good idea only at 3am while waiting for a night bus home. In all of Turkey, though, you could actually tell what the meat was, and it tasted amazing!

Istanbul

As I mentioned in my previous post, Chris and I booked a trip through Turkey during the first full week of May. Prior to leaving for this trip, we had booked only our flights and lodging, with little planning for what we'd actually be doing on the trip. I bought a tour book in Heathrow on the way out of town on Saturday morning, knowing Chris also had the Lonely Planet Turkey book. Between those books, we figured we'd have everything we needed to make the trip happen.

The H1N1 flu scare began about a week before we left for this trip. As of when we began our travels, there had been several confirmed cases in Western Europe, including the UK, but none in Turkey. All of the ground crew at IST had masks. Granted, as you can see in the photo, not many of them were using these masks particularly carefully.


Shortly after taking this photo, I got a text message from Chris. I'd booked us into a two-single bed ensuite room at a hostel in Sultanahmet, but they didn't have a room available. He was at a hostel down the street, where he'd been able to find us a place for the night. As we found out later, the hostel's reservations system was, um, lacking. I'd initially made a reservation online for four nights. However, when I realized we only wanted to be there for three nights, I tried to modify the reservation. The only way I could do so online was to cancel the existing one and create a new one. I'd done this several weeks before the trip and thought nothing of it. Apparently their reservation system was keyed off of arrival date and last name, not a unique reservation, so they ended up cancelling both of my reservations for arrival (the three-night and the four-night ones). Oops.

We ended up spending that first night in a 30-person dorm at the other hostel... not quite what we'd expected or hoped for, but I at least got a few hours of sleep. The following two nights in a two-bed, two-person room were MUCH better, though!

During our three days we spent in Istanbul, we walked all through the touristy areas, saw the Blue Mosque, Ayasofya and the other normally crowded tourist destinations.

Ayasofya Cami

Blue Mosque

The night before I left London, a friend here had told me "I know some guys who were in Istanbul earlier this spring. They said you absolutely HAVE to go to the Roman Sewers... they're unbelievable!" As I'd done little substantial research of the sites to see in Istanbul, I took the pointer and figured I'd look them up online at the airport or when we got to Istanbul. Needless to say, I couldn't find anything about them, anywhere. However, on our second day there, we did go into the Roman Cisterns. These were absolutely huge underground structures used to store drinking water for the city millennia ago. Slightly different term than originally expected, but definitely a good recommendation!


On our last full day there, we started thinking about logistics for getting ourselves to Canakkale, our next destination. According to Lonely Planet, the best bet was to just go to the bus station outside of Istanbul and find one of the bus companies that has multiple trips per hour. Before doing this, we decided to stop by a travel agency next to our hostel and see what they recommended. After a few minutes of discussion, we signed up for a two-day trip that included the bus to Canakkale, tours of ANZAC beach and other sites in Gallopoli, then also a tour of Troy.

These photos and a few others I'd taken on the trip are posted to http://picasaweb.google.com/trenshaw/turkey/. If you want full-res copies of any of these or want to see the full set of 600 or so photos from the trip, email me!

Decisions

I've now been here in London for eight months, although it doesn't seem like it's been that long. During those months, my opinions of the city have continued to evolve. As you can tell from a few posts I've had, I'm not impressed with the unreliability of public transit or the ridiculously short days during winter. However, there are many more things that I've been noticing recently that make me like the city more and more.

In talking with a friend back in the US last week, I realized that this eight months is the longest I've actually fully lived in a single place since graduating. Yes, I paid rent on my Jersey City apartment for two years and also rented from Kai for over a year, but it'd be a stretch to say that I genuinely lived in either of those locations. I'd been working in other cities, generally spending at most weekends in New York and sometimes not even that. That was a phenomenal experience that I don't regret in the least, but I think it's going to be a challenge to go back to that type of travel and transient life... I've gone from 54 round-trip flights, mostly for work, in the year before moving to London to now having taken only two work-related flights in the past eight months.

I had no idea how much spending three or four days of the week in a hotel affected me... I'm actually able to go home every night now in London, plan events in the evenings with friends without having to wonder whether or not I'll be in town, and not spend half of the weekend unpacking and repacking for the week's travels. Granted, there were some perks that came along with the travel, but I'm not sure that long term they make up for the instability caused by it.

I'm not saying I necessarily want to stay here long-term, although that's certainly something that's gone from "why would I ever do that?" to "well, it certainly is tempting..." over the past few months. The biggest drawback to doing that would be the distance and time difference between me being here and friends and family being in the States. There are also career decisions related to this... what the different opportunities are in each country, if or how I would consider grad school in either country, and the like.

No, I don't need to make a decision for a while regarding what happens at the end of my currently 18-month commitment, but this does affect what I want to do during the remaining portion of the 18 months. I'm actually settling into living here and am developing a life with friends and colleagues in the area. If I'm going to be here longer term, I'd like to spend more weekends in London and with friends here. If I'm only here through next winter, though, I feel like I need to do as much travel as possible, as it's going to be my best opportunity to see parts of Europe I'd probably never get to while living in the States.

No answers here yet, but I did just book a trip with Chris, who's now living in Zurich, through Turkey. We're meeting each other the Saturday of the May bank holiday weekend in Istanbul and returning our separate ways from Izmir a week later. We have yet to plan much more than that at this point, but will do so over the next week or so, as this trip is quickly approaching!

Easter

A while back, John and I had considered going sailing over Easter weekend. He has a small-ish sailboat that we could have taken out in a regatta off the south of England each day... the plan was originally to do that and to camp somewhere nearby each night. Alas, the weather decided to complicate our plans.

On Wednesday, two days before we were planning to leave for the trip, the forecast called for heavy winds (too heavy for us to sail) and rain on Friday, Saturday and Monday of the four-day weekend. After a whole string of messages back and forth that night, we decided to cancel the trip and find something else to do.

I frantically looked for alternatives... could I book a last minute flight to somewhere in France or Switzerland, find a hostel with an open bed and ski for the weekend? Were there affordable flights to Ireland, where I've been considering for a while now that I want to spend at least a long weekend off in the countryside? Whenever I had a few minutes that Thursday morning at work, I was on travel websites trying to figure out possibilities. As you'd expect, everything was much more expensive than I wanted to consider paying, but I wasn't about to spend the weekend at home.

John and I ended up talking later on Thursday afternoon and decided to go to Wales instead. His girlfriend plays in the BBC orchestra in Cardiff and had just recently moved there... so we had a place to stay as a base for the weekend, and it was only a few-hour drive to get there.

We drove up there Friday afternoon (yes, it took just about the whole afternoon... it took more than 90 minutes to get from Lewisham just to Heathrow), cooked dinner, then explored town a bit at night, playing with night photography... a few of my photos are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/trenshaw/Cardiff

Saturday morning, walking through town, we found that there was a Cardiff v. Toulouise rugby match that afternoon, with tickets still available! Of course, we had to go! Great time, great tickets, and I'm actually starting to be interested in the game... maybe not yet a fully hooked fan, but definitely interested and much more readily able to follow it.

Sunday, we drove up into the Brecon Beacons, went on a short hike, drove through the hills, explored a bit and eventually made our way back into London that night. It was a great way to get out of London for a few days, relax and see Wales!

Now, for the fun part... it'd been raining when we left London on Friday. By the time we got to Cardiff, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The weekend was a perfect spring weekend... warm, sunny and great for being outside. We saw sailboats out on the harbor in Cardiff and had this nagging feeling that we may have missed a great weekend of sailing. As we crossed the M25 coming back into London on Sunday, though, it started raining again. Apparently the weather had been miserable down here all weekend. It may have been dumb luck, but no complains here!