It's been a while

It's been a while since we last did an update. Last time we wrote, we were unsure as to where we were going. After some debate and an extra night in Salzburg, we headed north to Berlin. We'd heard plenty of good things about Berlin from all of the other travelers we'd talked to, so it was a relatively easy decision.

Our hostel was one of our favourites so far (The Circus). It had a great location, all of the amenities and we really had nothing bad to say at all. At night, we were recommended a Swiss restaurant in a park that is supposedly Brad Pitts favourite restaurant in Berlin (we doubt it). We checked out the bar in the hostel afterwards (where there is a ton of stuff advertising David Hasselhoff - apparently he is big in Berlin), and went to bed.

The next day, we signed up for a free walking tour of Berlin that would take us to many of it's famous sights. Here are a few..


One piece of the outer Berlin wall. Not much of it is left standing. I was unaware it was taken down so recently.


Me with the same piece of the wall.


While this grouping of trees does not look like much, it is actually quite famous. This was the site of Adolf Hitlers bunker. Between the three trees is where he was buried after he killed himself and was burned. Many people like to spit (and do other things) on these trees.



Just down the road is the controversial memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. As Ryan shows us, many of the columns are quite high. One reason it is controversial is that it is only for the murdered Jews, and not other groups of people that were killed. Each column was also treated with an anti-graffiti chemical, but after this was done it was realized that the company providing the chemical also provided other "chemicals" to Nazi death camps.


The Berlin TV tower at night.

That night we went on a pub crawl throughout Berlin. It was one of the better ones we've done so far, judging by the fact that we don't remember much of it.

The next day we boarded a train to Amsterdam, as we near the end of our European visit. We had booked a popular central hostel the first night, and something a bit of a walk away for the next 2.


Part of the Red Light district at night.

Taking pictures in the red light district is not allowed (especially of the girls), but this is one we managed to snap. No matter how much you hear about it, it's still unbelievable to see.

After wandering the streets for a while, we stopped to checkout a couple of Coffee Shops, where we spent some time watching action movies, and then "Mega Builders".

The next day we switched to our hostel across town. This hostel was a Christian hostel, but it was pretty cheap and had availability so it was an easy choice. Guys and girls have separate floors (no mixed dorms), and our room has 18 beds, all full.


This sign blocks the door on our floor.


One of the canals of Amsterdam.

The next day we made our way across town to the Heineken Brewery for a tour. The actual brewery has since been moved, so it's essentially a giant commercial for Heineken. 3 beers were included in the price, and a free gift, so it's not that bad. We didn't really learn anything, but got to go on an exciting ride of what it's like to be a bottle of beer.


Some video mail we sent ourselves.

After some much needed shopping, we wandered the streets some more, visited another coffee shop, and spent our first night in the Christian Hostel.

After lunch at the Hard Rock Amsterdam today, we visited the Van Gogh Museum. Once again, no pictures are allowed. It had a fairly large collection of his paintings, yet many of the most famous ones were not there.

Our plans are pretty much set for the rest of our Europe trip. We have 1 more night in Amsterdam, before travelling to a beach hostel just outside of Amsterdam (everything was booked!), where we will try and celebrate Ryans birthday. Monday afternoon we are flying to London where we have our own accommodation for 2 nights. After this, we will attempt to meet up with some of Ryan's family.

Now it's time to get a bite to eat, and find something to do for our last night in the heart of Amsterdam.

Yet another change of plans!

Well, our plans as far as Venice goes have changed yet again! While in Munich we reserved our seats for the next train to Venice. Just after Jordan made our last blog post we left the Internet cafe and headed to the train station to catch it. Unfortunately we miscalculated the distance we had to walk to the station and it was pouring rain to boot. So, despite our best efforts to run with our backpacks we weren't able to get to the train station in time and we missed our train. We looked into other options to get to Venice but they were all sold out. We had to make a quick decision as to where we wanted to go so we pulled out the Europe map and picked a central location between Munich and Venice that we wanted to go...Salzburg, Austria is was! That is where we are now. The original plan was to use this as a stop over on our way to Venice but we just found out that there is some kind of rail strike that wont allow that to happen. So, it is looking like Venice isn't going to happen for us, instead we are formulating a new travel plan but that hasn't been finalized yet.

Anyway, like I said we made a split second decision to come to Austria and we are glad we did! The city we are in, Salzburg, is pretty small but it is defiantly one of our favorites so far. The people are nice, the city is clean, and the scenery is amazing! Day one here we didn't have time to do a lot but we did go for an amazing dinner to celebrate Jordan's birthday courtesy of his parents (thank you so much Mr. and Mrs. Thompson!).

One of Salzburg's claims to fame is that "The Sound of Music" was filmed on location here. So, we started today be watching this movie in the hostel while we did our laundry. After the movie was done we toured the town and did our best to spot all scenery from the movie, amongst many other things...


A picture of the river that runs through Salzburg with the picturesque mountains in the background.


Me in front of a large fountain featured in "The Sound of Music"


"Festung Hohensalzburg" is a castle that over looks the city. It is the oldest and best preserved castle in Europe. We took a tram up there and toured around it.

Jordan at the top of the castle

Me at the top of the castle but with a different view

Inside the castle they had a few museum's. This was the armoury display, I felt like I was under attack!

Finally, we have Jordan in a cool looking garden that has the castle in the background. Again, this garden was in "The Sound of Music".

As I have already mentioned we are still planning our next move so we will probably spend one more day here and then we will let you know where in the world we end up!

Willkommen zum Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest has come and gone, and here are some pictures:


First entering the fair grounds.


After a couple litres of beer we thought it would be a good idea to buy some Bavarian hats.


Ryan pokes at the remains of the half chicken he ate for dinner. These were very popular...


After some more beer buying souvenir t-shirts seemed like a good idea!


I bought my shirt the next day.


The waitresses are quite aggressive in bringing the beer to the tables (you have to be when it's that crowded). This was an average amount, some would carry 10-12 beers.


Ryan mows on a 1/2 meter Bratwurst sausage.

All of the beer is in massive 1 litre steins, and you drink it in one of many giant tents that house probably 5 to 10 thousand people. They get pretty rowdy with singalongs (we quickly learned the "I'm toasting" song in German).

You have to be seated to get a beer, and it's very difficult to get a seat without reservations. After a while we figured out the best way to get one was to budge into a place we called "Stand up city" where you stand at the tables instead of sitting. Actually, once people get drunk they stand on the sit down tables. After a few giant beers we would hit the festival grounds for food and roller coasters. As you saw above, some of the food is strange. Half chickens are popular, so is schnitzel, bratwurst, and lots of chocolate.

Here's a couple videos of us in one of the tents. Don't laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25LhvpSPoc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92fMPREA1mM

Now we're about to get on a day train back to Venice to make up for what we missed.

A slight change of plans...

To start things off here are a few pics from our Greek travels:


The view of Santorini from the ferry.


The red sand beach that Jordan spoke of.


We rode our ATV's to the top of a hill in Santorini and got this lookout...


And this one.


Jordan on his ATV.


This is Fira, the main city in Santorini. This is also the place where we had lunch.


Jordan stands in front of Oia, another city on Santorini.


At one of the beaches we stopped at for a dip this dog came running at Jordan barking. Slightly startled by this Jordan sat up and the dog promptly sat down on his towel. It took quite a bit of work to retrieve the towel from this stray mutt but we finally did it.


This is the last pic we took on out ATV trek, another shot of Oia.


Just before leaving Mykonos we came across this disturbingly large pink pelican.

Well, as the title reads there has been a slight change of plans...actually, more like a big one! We posted not long ago that we had booked a couple ferries and a flight that was to take us from Santorini to Myknons and then back to Athens where we had a flight to Venice. Unfortunately, GA Ferries had a different plan for us. We had tickets for an midnight ferry out of Mykonos which was delayed one hour. No delay is fun but 1hr we can deal with, especially with rumors flying around that due to the weather the ferry might not even show up at all. So, we happily boarded the ferry on our way back to Athens. Well, about 2hrs into our journey they pulled the boat in to the port at Syros island and told us they couldn't go any further until the weather improved. At this point we had about a 6hr cushion before we were in danger of missing our Athens flight so we weren't panicking too much. Well, 6hrs came and went and the boat still had not moved. So, at this point we have missed our flight out of Athens and we are stuck on a boat that we cant really get off of for risk of it leaving at any moment. We tried to sleep away as much of the time as possible but there are only so many ways you can try and position yourself in the extremely uncomfortable chairs we were sitting in. We sat there for nearly 28hrs before they finally announced that the boat was about to depart, we were ecstatic to say the least! After another 7 hours on the boat we finally docked in Athens. Happy to finally be on dry land we hurried to the airport to see what options we had to get out of Greece. We wandered the airport for about 6hrs shopping for our best option. The original airline we had purchased from could do nothing to help us so we had to kiss that 147 euros goodbye and buy new tickets with Alitalia. Unfortunately these tickets were considerably more expensive and flew to Milan rather than Venice. But we obviously wanted to make it Oktoberfest on time so Milan it was. We are going to try and make it to Venice after we are done in Munich.

We arrived in Milan around 10pm and took a bus into the downtown district. By now it was about 11:30pm and we wanted nothing more than a shower and a bed. We found the nearest hostel in our travel books and headed towards it. We found the spot where the hostel was meant to be but all we found was a large graffiti covered wall with a gate, a buzzer, and a tiny sticker with the name of the hostel. So, we buzzed and the gate swung open to reveal the most disgusting trash filled courtyard I think I have ever seen. We made a split second decision that no matter how cost effective this place may be we will not stay here. So, we turned to leave as the gate swung shut. In the dark we struggled to open it but couldn't....it was like something out of a horror movie, we were just waiting to be grabbed from behind. In panic mode I scrounged through my backpack for a flashlight....I found it!!! With the light we found the latch and hurried on to the street, safe at last. At this point time was rapidly passing and we had nowhere to stay yet so we opted to stay at a hotel, despite the price. We found a 3 star hotel that was willing to drop the price for one night to 100 euros since we were checking in so late. This was way above what we normally pay for a night but we really had no choice. Our room was a glorious sight! It had two huge beds, a huge bathroom, and everything else we could imagine....we had the best sleep of our whole trip here.

Morning came way too early and we booked a night train to take us to Munich (Oktoberfest!). We now had the day to kill in Milan so we hit the streets. Milan doesn't have much to offer in the way of tourist attractions, it mainly just caters to those with ridiculous amounts of money to spend on clothes. This is a picture of the Duomo, one of the rare tourist things there was to see:



We have now arrived in Munich after our 12hr overnight train from Milan and we are about to head over to the Oktoberfest show grounds where we will also be celebrating Jordan's birthday tomorrow. We will be sure to report on that very soon!

The Vomit Comet

Well, the long ferry ride we were taking ended up feeling a lot shorter than expected since we slept most of it. We had reserved seats and it was more comfortable than sleeping on a bench on the deck (which we have done on some of our other ferries).

When we arrived at the port in Santorini, we went to the "meeting spot" where the hostel was supposed to pick us up. There were swarms of people trying to sell rooms to people who just got off of the boat (including us) so it was hard to find the guy we were trying to meet. We eventually ran into him, and he was the rudest person we've met the whole trip.

The hostel we were staying at was really nice (and great value), just meters from the beach. The first night we spent an hour so tanning (on black sand), went for dinner and a couple of drinks and called it a night.

In the morning we decided we would rent ATVs for the day and drive around the island. The first place we went to was the red sand beach on one side of the island. Santorini has tons of beaches, and they are all pretty different - we'll show pictures later so you can see. From the red sand beach we drove to the top of a mountain where there is a monastery, and panoramic views of the island. We took some pictures and then headed to Fira, the main town on the island for lunch. After Fira we drove across the island to another beach in Oia, which was all black rocks, and spent an hour or so in the water and tanning.

After all of this we were ready for the drive back to Perissa beach (where we were staying) for dinner, but there was one problem: Ryan's ATV was flashing empty on gas but mine still had half a tank, and the nearest gas station was a 20 minute drive away. The solution? Ryan decided he would try and syphon gas from my tank to his. This didn't work so well, and after a few mouth fulls of gas, he decided it would be better to try and make it to the gas station (which worked out well). That night, we rode around our beach on our ATVs for dinner, and then headed to a bar for a few pints.

In the morning we made our way to the port to catch a ferry to Mykonos. The ferry was a Fastcat, similar to the ones BC ferries purchased. Since economy class was full we purchased seats in business class. Everything started well on the ferry (for the first 5 minutes), then it started rocking pretty heavily and people were running to the bathrooms vomiting. 3 and a half hours later on the Vomit Comet and most of the people on the ship had made at least one trip to the bathroom. We didn't think we'd make it but managed to escape OK. I'm not sure if all of the fast ferries have this problem, but it's pretty rocky weather out there right now so it may have just been a bad day. Either way, I definitely prefer the big ferries that can handle a bit of waves, and don't think I'll ride a Fast Cat again!

Our new hostel in Mykonos is pretty nice, although it's up a giant hill that does a number on your legs. Mykonos is really windy, but overall a fairly nice island. Midway through our day the power went out island wide (probably due to the rocky weather), and it was pretty difficult to find things to do. It was out for probably 3 or 4 hours, and finally came on while we were eating dinner at a pizza place that had it's oven going. At night we went to a bar in town after drinking a bottle of 9 Euro vodka at our hostel, and had a pretty fun night.

So, now we are partially checked out of hostel, waiting for midnight when we have a ferry to get to Athens. The "reception" guy said no boats are running today (again, the windy weather), and that we'll probably be stuck here another night at least (some people were stuck here last night as well). We are hoping that our ferry is running, since we have a 3pm flight from Athens to Venice that we don't want to miss!

For now, we're going to get lunch and head down to the port and see if they are running any boats. Here's hoping...

Athens is in ruins

We are now on day two in Athens, as Jordan said we took a 7hr bus from Igoumenitsa to get here. We did our best to sleep on this bus trip but it wasn't all that comfortable. To make matters worse about half way into our trip we were startled awake by police officers who had apparently pulled us over and boarded the bus while we were sleeping. They checked everyones passports and then proceeded to take about 10 people off the bus and arrest them. We still have no idea why they did this but we think all the guys they arrested were from Estonia. We lost a little sleep but I guess the good news is our bus never got hijacked, or worse!

Finally our bus arrives in Athens and we get to our Hostel around 3am. We walked in carrying a pizza box that contained the remains of our lunch. The guy working at the Hostel was willing to upgrade us to a better room for free if we gave him the pizza. Instead, we ended up going on a cigarette run for him in exchange for an early check-in time so that we essential got 3 nights accommodation here for the price of two. Also, in going on this errand for him we got our first look at the streets of Athens. This city completely lives up to its reputation as a dirty dirty city.

We fell asleep around 5am and woke up again around noon for a day of sightseeing. We started by taking a look at The Acropolis and the surrouding ruins. There was very little signage at any of these structures so for the most part we were pretty confused as to what we were looking at. Also, given that most of this stuff dates back to 5 BC we were pretty much just looking at piles of rocks that were once buildings.





The above two pictures are of a mystery building at the Acropolis...Well, at least it was a mystery to us.


This is the Parthenon, it was mostly under scaffolding as you can see.


It was a bit of a hike to get to the top of the Acropolis as Jordan shows us here.

At this point we were pretty tired and decided to call it quits for the day. We headed back to the hostel where we rested for a few minutes before heading out for dinner. We also were looking for something to do so we decided to go see a movie. The selection of movies wasn't all that great so we ended up going to see Zodiac which was in English but with Greek subtitles. The movie was long and pretty slow but luckily it seems to be common practice in Greece to have an intermission in the middle of the movie...much to our shock, we thought the projector had broken or something.


Day two we went to see the Temple of the Olympian Zeus (pictured above with me) and the 1896 Olympic stadium where the First Modern Olympics were held (pictured below with Jordan).



We also booked a ferry today that will take us to the island of Santorini at 7am tomorrow. We should arrive there around 3pm where we have booked a hostel for two nights. From here we plan to vist one other island (which we have not chosen yet) and then return to Athens for our flight to Venice, Italy.

Yiamis!

Well, we've moved on from Italy (for now) to Greece. We took an overnight train from Rome to Brindisi, and got in around 8am. After that we found our way to the ferry port and caught an 11:30 ferry to Corfu, getting us in just after 7pm Greek time. A Pink Palace bus was waiting for us and took us to the hotel where would spend the next three nights.


The long ferry we took from Brindisi to Corfu.

When we checked in we were given a free shot of Ouzo (the local Greek liquor which tastes like Sambucca), and taught how to say cheers in Greek ("Yiamis!").

Dinner was included at the Pink Palace and it was quite good. It's not exactly busy season, so tons of the tables are empty and the bar isn't as busy as it would be in July or August.

At night we went to the night club at the hotel and had a few drinks and had some much needed sleep.

The next day we woke up relatively early to do laundry, and signed up for the quad safari tour of Corfu. It took us to a few great lookout points at the tops of mountains, a beach to swim at, some off roading, and several bars for a few drinks.All in all, it was a good way to see Corfu.


One of the lookout points.


Ryan at another lookout point.


The last lookout point, where you can kind of see the area where the Pink Palace is.

After the quad safari we had some dinner, drank a cheap bottle of Vodka and headed to the hotel bar again.


Some of the people on our quad safari that we hung out with at the bar.

We drank way too much and slept in until 2pm and didn't leave the room until 4pm for lunch. It was a rough morning. Unfortunately, we had to get ready to do it again as Saturday night was the Toga Party. We picked up our Togas and headed down to the bar again after dinner.

We realized that we look ridiculous, but so did everybody else.


Us in our Togas.

Around 1am there was a big Ouzo circle where everyone sat on the dance floor, and they poured you Ouzo shots and smashed plates on your heads.

The night was a bit less messy than the night before, but we had to get up early to checkout by 9am. We finally found a bus that would get us to the ferry terminal at 1:45, and headed down there not sure where we were going next. There were no ferries to Patras (to get to Zakynthos), but we found one to Igoumenitsa, and that's where we are now.


Arriving in Igoumenitsa.

We've got an 8:45pm bus to Athens that will get us there in about 8 hours (we think), so now we're just killing some time before we leave. We plan on spending a couple of days in Athens, and doing a day trip or two to some of the Cyclades (Islands) nearby. After that, we have to make our way back to Italy to see Venice, before heading to Oktoberfest!