On the move

Following the example of Diana I moved the blog. But I did it the hard way — as usual — so there will be some glitches until I revise all the posts and galleries.

On my new home I will try to integrate articles, galleries and maps on the same place. I hope you will like it. I tried to maintain the same look, but there are some amazing features under the surface.

And the software is open source.

And is hosted on my domain :-)

From now on you will find me on traversin.org.

Strange things happen

Jerusalem, 7:45 AM

Sometimes the luck in finding a ride leads to unexpected consequences. I'll meet my host after 6 PM. Mmh, that means ten hours roaming in Jerusalem. OK, let's find a place to drop the backpack and then a nice place to have breakfast!

But this is Israel: you cannot drop your luggage anywhere. I mean it. The police will come and blow your backpack just before you realise that it is raining underwear. Your underwear!

After one hour or so, I recognise a desperate glance coming from under a huge backpack: another CouchSurfer is facing the no-drop feature of this place! We decide to have a breakfast in the old city while looking for a solution.

Walking the Holy City. The holiest place on Earth — at least for a handful of different religions.

We feel the holiness raising as we approach the old city, in terms of amount of religious symbols on sale: here you can buy any kind of sacred item, ranging from Coptic Orthodox necklaces to FC Barcelona t-shirts! (I am pretty sure that there were also gondola-lamps somewhere, but to actually find it would be too depressing!)

Climbing the Via Dolorosa carrying a heavy burden makes you think all sort of strange things …

But eventually we sit on a nice café and with great relief for my soul, the morning starts looking kind of familiar :-)

—
Photos of Jerusalem here.

Hitch hiking in the desert

My two days in Tel Aviv are fast and intense. After the first night clubbing I found myself crashed in somebody else's couch with my original host and another friend. The second day I awake in a couch full of sand without any clue. But for some reason everybody I meet seems to remember me from the beach party in the preceding night. I tend to associate this behaviour with the social capabilities of the arak :-)

Anyway, a series of coincidences — typical of the hospitality-exchange world — lead me on the next day to a small kibbutz on the Dead sea (the relevant photos are here).

But the amazing discovery is that you can easily hitch hike to almost every place in Israel! You just wait in a some big junction — even in the middle of the desert! (Check the picture and count the cars on sight :-)

And you will realise soon that all class of people can pick you up: from the young religious to the SUV-family to the hippie couple in a dark green Punto (by the way, a big thank you goes to the Indian girl who translated the hindi inscriptions on my yellow bag).

So I grab my casetta and I start flashing the drivers approaching my spot with big smiles, and in virtually no-time I found myself in front of the walls of Jerusalem!

Welcome to the Holy Land

Bump!

I wake up when the plane hit the land — I mean the Holy Land :-) — and I start looking around me: I'm alone in the last row, the only goy in a plane full of happy and noisy Israeli families coming back from their Turkish holidays — the Shekel is kinda high, these days ….

My thought goes to the preceding hours — and I feel the nightmare slowly fading away. I arrived from Olimpos to Antalya very late the night before, I woke up early and I went to the airport. Turkey did not want to let me go: after discovering that I cannot go to Israel via Cyprus (because you cannot pass the border from North to South, and from Turkey you can only go to the Northern part) I somehow managed to sneak in an Israeli return charter. But, alas! the girl at the travel agency forgot to add my name to the flight list. After a couple of hours of frantic phone calls eventually I passed the check-in. Three minutes before it closed.

So, this is how Israel looks: … nice!

After discovering that I can pay the train ticket (2.50 €) with my credit card The Big Smile shows up on my face! And it gets wider when, first on the train and then on the bus, I realise that almost everyone — including the elder and the young — speaks English.

I happily settle down on my couch in Yafo while I let the hot air, the smells and the sounds of Middle-East slowly soak my body. In a few hours I realise that it will be hard to leave this place.

—
As usual, more photos of Tel Aviv here.

Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò

And the quest for the sun leads me to Antalya, in the very south of Turkey, and my thirst of blue would eventually be satisfied (see photos).

But the curse of the Ramazan Bayram (see this post) is still there: both of my hosts in Antalya are leaving for the holiday, and I grab the opportunity of see Olimpos, just around the corner.


So i grab a dolmuş to the bus staion, there the dolmuş to Olimpos, that leaves us to the main street, and from there — guess — a dolmuş to the city. City? Oops! There is no city: the place is just an agglomeration of pensions and bars lined on both sides of the only street that leads through the ruins to the beach.


But some of the pensions are of a peculiar kind: tree houses! Feeling my age slowly flowing away, I climb on the ladder to my new home.

—
More photos of Antalya and Olimpos here.

Istanbul as it once was

After a couple of hours in Ayvalık walking up and down with my backpack — that is a bit heavier every day — I decide to just go to İstanbul and from there to the next stop.

Oh, by the way, you should be aware that in Turkey long distance buses stop during the trip for washing (see photo), so you can happily wait outside thinking about how different things can be in different places :-)

But, alas! things are not always as you wish: ten hours of bus and once in İstanbul, rain. And then rain, and cold, and rain … if you lived in Treviso you know what I mean.


So I go to a travel agency, with Cappadocia in mind. And then … Ramazan Bayram! Yes, a very important holiday in Islamic countries. Like all of the buses booked for the whole week. Me not happy :-(

But a great city always reserves you more options, and mine is discover remains of the old Ottoman city in between modern buildings. Here you have some sample, mostly in the Kadıköy district.

After the sightseeing I went to a random travel agency, and I bought the first ticket for Whatever.

That's in the south :-)

Update

Thanks to Andrea, this post has new(?) photos.

A little break from the trip

OK, this one was really worth a break!

(For some reason I'm unable to embed the video here)
Ping pong estremo

Erano anni che non mi divertivo cosí!

Buckatürk?

At the beginning of the Nineties, we used to play a quite popular board game: Trivial Pursuit.

I remember a day, playing in Ally's kitchen, when the question « Who is the father of all turks? » panicked most of us. And then somebody — with the beginning of a smile sprouting from his lips — said this single word: « Atatürk? »

Many years passed, and eventually I have an answer for that: reincarnation!



Further proofs of this theory here.

A day in a words collector's life

Sometimes it is hard to be a language junkie.

You try to catch up with all the things you hear in every new place you're visiting, but it is getting harder and harder, when you are still elaborating sentences from your last country.


I want to post here a few snippets from the last couple of months.

Probably that will require a few of googling from you, but I never said it would be easy :-)

There you go!

Ty srdce v srdci mém — ty srdce v srdci všech
Bezbřehý živote, co ve mně máš svůj břeh.

« Reading a poem in translation, » wrote Bialek, « is like kissing a woman through a veil »

Güzele bakmak sevaptır

Plus a random list of words:

• Mierenneuker (Dutch)


• Χελιδόνια (Greek)


• Çiçek (Turkish)


• Salamati (Farsi)


• Terviseks (Estonian)


• НаЗдраве (Bulgarian)


• Noroc (Rumanian)


• Megszentségteleníthetetlensegeskedéseitekést (Hungarian)

Have fun :-)

—
Oh, I have updated this post, and you can find new photos here.

Treviso, close to Venice #2

This happened actually on September 3rd, at my arrival in Samos. I'm posting it today because I don't want to forget it!

It's a dialog between a New Zealand guy (working for the port tourist agencies) and me.

—Where are you from?
—Italy.
—Oh, nice! I love Italy!
—Yep!
—Is Nice in Italy or in France?
—In France.
—And Florence? And Venice? I loved that area, but I was a little drunk, so I can't remember if it was France or Italy!
—…

I smiled, skipped the Treviso-close-to-Venice part, and went to the agency next door.

Back to kebap!

I'm back to Turkey, and hungry: sewing this flags to my backpack is a very tiring task!

There is the good old kebap, but Turkish food has many many options, so I tried to taste more. Here you have a small gallery, ranging from the afore mentioned Mr. K to more esoteric possibilities: a thing with eggs inside — the name will be posted as soon as I'll remember it — that you can't actually see because my American friend put all of the bread into it (for saving time?).

A portion of chicken with vegetables and rice — with the evil green-peppers as a side dish —; a carefully prepared in nouvelle cuisine style plate of Köfte with cheese.

But my favourite so far is this home-made dinner: mushroom soup, cooked and fresh vegetables, stuffed peppers, yoghurt and dates!

Of course, if you are looking for something a little more unusual, you can pay a visit to this bar at Izmir bus station:

Blue is my favourite colour …

… as in sky and sea!

The mighty SummerCamp in beautiful Naxos (Paros, Sexos) ended, and I moved my casetta to Syros, but it was only for having a real sleep — after a week between no-sleeping and sleeping-on-the-floor — and for doing the laundry.

After that was Samos! Due to the lack of CSers there, I opted for an hotel, made sure it had an internet connection, rented a small motorbike and went for the wild-and-deserted-beaches tour.

The results are posted here below :-)

For some reason the blue in Greece seems bluer than elsewhere, thus I'm planning a little come-back on the next week.

More photos of Samos here.

Stay tuned for more blue!

Greece, fifteen years after

I'm on the boat to Samos, trying to catch up with my thoughts and feelings after a couple of weeks lived with my whole body and soul.

What I feel now is a bit of loneliness — the least one could expect after such an intense social activity. But it is a good opportunity for recovering energies and preparing the Turkey trip. And update the blog :-)

I'm sorry, but I think that this post will be appreciated — almost — only by few of you, namely the participants of the 1993 El Harén mission.



Walking the same streets after 15 years make me feel like as no time had passed — although it was the other century — and at the same time I know that I'm a completely different person (eg: I don't feel anymore the urge of climbing that headless statue, yet I can't stop laughing my a** off remembering the museum guard getting mad at us!)

And next came Naxos (Paros, Sexos).

And that wind (I still have sand in my mouth after three days). So I had to take this photos also, although the lack of our friends makes me a bit melancholic.

This is how we looked fifteen years ago!

This hug is for you, my friends.

You can find more photos of Greece here.

Language crossing in the Balkans

I've just realised that — so far — I've been in four countries, spanning four language families (Finno-Ugric / Romance / Slavic / Greek) and three different alphabets in a row!

No surprise that I feel so confused …

A note to our fellows western travellers: I'm sorry, but you can't beat the Old Continent!

And now… for something completely different:

Μέγας Αλέξανδρος

I have a list of things to do in Thessaloniki:

1. go to the Ano Poli


2. watch the sunset from the church with the peafowls


3. watch the sunset from the Λεωφόρος Νίκης


4. have a giros at Snoopy's

So far, I did #1 and #3, and I'm afraid that #4 will remain unchecked, because good ol' Snoopy seems to have moved from the waterfront :-(



I'm now in a bar on Leoforos Nikis, waiting to join a CSers mini-meeting, sipping the obligatory omnipresent frappé (technically, mine is a frappé skéto megála).