The Orthodox Gambit

One of the prevalent aspects of culture in the Balkan region is the largely prevalent Orthodox faith. Orthodoxy is a branch of christianity and is divided into individual churches by the country it is practiced in (Greek Orthodoxy, Serbian Orthodoxy ect.) each of which is lead by a patrician. It is not a faith which I know much about besides that it involves a great deal of icons and many small churches and monasteries. However on the train from Thessaloniki to Skopje I was lucky enough to share a compartment with a Serbian Orthodox priest who was wuite happy to share some insight on the Serbian church, culture, language and current political issues. He was returning from living in a monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece to live in another one near Belgrade and spoke good if somewhat broken English. Some of the things he was most incessant in telling me were his disappointment in the Serbian Government for instituting new passports which contain chips which allow them to track him, his disappointment in the Russian church which he claims has degraded a great deal in recent years and his disappointment in the tourists visiting Mt. Athos for breaking many of the monk's rules there (No smoking, no shorts, no travelling during certain times , and most importantly no women). He was positive as well though he seemed quite happy to discuss the finer details of Serbian pronunciation with me and shared a number of tales from Serbia including one King who led the Serbians to victory against the Turks and established a reputation of justice by executing his own brother when that man had been accused of rape.

HE gave me the ame of a Russian bishop to rad in order to understand the faith better but as I have not yet done so I am forced to go by only what I see. And as I do not spend much time in churches (at least not when there is mass going on). However one of the most visible of orthodox practices is the practice of crossing oneself before a number of activities including eating sleeping and starting a journey. Of course there is a wide spectrum of distinction among practitioners as to how much this is necessary for example the Orthodox priest crossed himself before eating a handful of peanuts and one old woman in Thessaloniki crossed herself for the entire duration of a bus trip lasting at least twenty minutes.

The Backpacker's Dream

Every backpacker, myself included (though my claim to that title may be dubious) has had at some point the dream of running a hostel themselves, perhaps in some small, peaceful village near a tourist attraction or perhaps in a major city. Regardless the dream pervades the culture. I have now had the pleasure of seeing that dream become reality firsthand as Nina, the owner of the Backpacker's Refuge in Thessaloniki did just that. She bought a flat near the centre of town and renovated into a small (six bed) hostel and has been running it for just over a year. not only is the hostel a great place (clean firendly and with all the trimmings) but she has made it into the newest edition of Lonely Planet's travel guide ensuring her a steady stream of budget minded travellers like ourselves in the foreseeable future. Open arrival in Thessalonaki we gave her a call as the guide suggested and she directed us onto a bus and met us at our bus stop to guide us the rest of the way. Upon meeting us she noticed, in David's hand, a copy of the newest Lonely Planet guide to Greece, something which is strangely unavailable in Greece itself. Turns out this was the first time she had seen it and that we were the first guests who had been directed to her hostel by it. She asked if she was in the book and upon hearing that she was asked to read it, the reveiw of her hostel was prominent and very positive and after reading it she exuberantly rushed off to buy candy for everyone in celebration. It is not often that I get a glimpse at the other side of the hostel buisness and to see it work out so well for someone certainly nurtures me own version of the backpacker's dream.

Greece in a Week

It has been some time since I have last updated, this is due to a string of smaller towns which neglect to build internet cafes. I brought it up with the proper authorities but they still seem recalcitrant. We are now in Thessaloniki a much larger city and are staying in a very interest little hostel which seems to be someone's house with a dorm room. The owner is very friendly and the place seems great. We spent the last couple days going through the major tourist sites of Delphi and Meteora visiting the ancient temples and somewhat less ancient moanstaries respectivly. Having spent some six days in greece so far we are due to leave its comforting if expensive embrace tomorrow when we will (hopefully) depart for the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia by train. I'm not sure how readily available interent access will be there nad though i'm sure that internet cafes abound in Skopje, its capital, there may be somehwat fewer in the smaller towns where we intend to stay and since some of these lodgings will be in pilgrim's quarters in monastaries I expect it will be patchy at best.

Athens

Well another summer another trip and another blog, well the same blog really but you get the idea. We have just startted our trip and already it seems that I'm already behind with the blog as I started last year's the day before I left. Regardless this year's trip is composed of Greece and the Balkans... and then Romania. We don't have too much of a plan as of yet 'winging it' as David loves to put it but so far things seem to be working out. The flight here was, as always, an adventure in and of itself this year getting to Munich was no problem at all, I would rank it as one of the best flights I have ever taken with no noisy children and plenty of films avaliable for me to catch up on my movie watching. The connection to Athens however was another affair altogatrher; due to the large ash cloud from the m ost recent reruption of a volcano on Iceland our plane had to take a somewhat more circuitous route than otherwise and thus were some 30 minutes late. Now this would normally be no cause for concern but given that we had only one hour to make our connection in the firstplace and that included getting our bags checking them back ion and going throughn security again those 30 minutes became somewhat more valuable. In the end we were at the ticket office 10 minutes before our flight departed and were being given a list of other flights we had been put on standby for when the ticket agent got a call and ltold us to grab our bags and run to the gate as the plane had been delayed for some reason. Cut to David and I dashing through the airport ridiculously oversized backpacks bouncing around on our backs and arriving in time to board our original flight, there was some brief confusion over our possession of bags which were ludicrously oversized for carry-on but we managed to fit them into the overhead bins regardless. The second flight was shorter than the first and the only other propblems with it were the number of hours that David and I had been awake by this time so after some expert navigation of Athen's subway system and somewhat tangled, narrow streets we have arrivefd at our first hostel.

Selçuk... Again

And so we returned to Selçuk early in the morning and arranged our accomodation at the Vardar Pension which a friend of ours had recommended and wasted the rest of the day going out for Pide three times and hunting down a tiny ice cream stall and procedding to sit there for the next hour ordering cone after cone.
Somehow during the midst of all that we squeezed in a visit to St.John's church which, besides being larger and rather more interesting than İ had expected contained a litter o fpuppies hidden under some of the ruins who procedded to dig in th deirt and uncover a section of mosaic. usrely this peice had already been found and then simply covered by a thin layer of dirt but the process was both adorable and astonishing.
The next day we left early in the morning intending to tour Priene and Miletus but made it only to Priene (Only being somewhat misused as the process took several hours and involved three seperate buses). Priene however more tnah made up for this fault of ours as its position on the slope of a mountain gave each of the terraces that its buildings were constructed on stunning vistas of the Meander valley below. After leaving and ahving taken the obligatory photograph with the "Beware of the Bees" sign (there were quite a few bees) we took another three buses back to our hostel and then went out again for more Pide and icecream before bed.
i was somewhat out of it the next day, having caught some heat exhaustion in Prine, but we still lmanaged to make it to the town of Bergama where we checked in to the Gobi Pension after havşng been lost for only a short time and then headed out to see the sights which we went to in quick seccesion by means of a booked taxi the Acropolis and the Aesclepion were both amazing and the Red Basilica was... Red and not much else as it took us five Lira each to learn.
The next day we made our way to İstnabul by bus and though we failed to get on a Starliner (my preferred model of bus) the ride was nevertheless made interesting by our incredibly friendly bus attendant Onur and his friend DJ Ahmed both of whom knew a smattering of English and made attempts at converstaion which were thoroughly enjoyable if not very cultured or broad of topic.
And that i neffect brings us to the present as we have checked back into the Old City Hostel where the staff still recognize us and some people who checked in at the same time as us are still here (including one weird nocturnal gu ywho just plays World of Warcraft at night) and though we have been in istanbul all of today the only thing we have really done is buy gifts for people. And so closes the Turkey trip as we will be catching the airport shuttle at some ungodly hour of night tomorrow and then embarking on the imposingly long trip home where i hope to be greeted with maple syrup and bacon and all of those other thisgn that i have missed while travelling.

A Short Stop in Denizli

It had been our plan to base ourselves from Denizlı and see the sights around but upon arriving at the Otogar and finding that our otherwise allknowing book had no suggestions for accomodation we immediatly scrapped that plan and found a Dolmus to Pammukale the tourist centre of the region and on our way there found the promoter from a hostel whose invitation we readily accepted and so we set off on our rapid change of plan and arrived at the Four Seasons in Pammukale (No it was not an actual Four Seasons) here while David was on the computer the owner boıught me a beer and thus clinched our bookings of two tours through him Aphrodisias the next day and Pammukale itself the day after. This was to prove my worst decision of the trip.
The next day we woke early and got the surprisingly long bus to Aphrodisias which was my ideal tour namely a bus that takes you there and then later, picks you up again. This was perhaps my favorite city that we had been to, the museum held an amzimg collection of statuary, all of the buildings were well preserved and beautiful and there were almost no people about, maybe fifty spread across the whole site. Thisallowed us to explore many of the areas almost on our own and we took advantage of this dawdling in the theatre and other areas. Near the end of our "tour" we hit the Stadium and ran a foot race which a kindly French man started for us and then had a game of Cribbage on the seats, David won both but he still spilled Fanta on the Lıbrary of Celsus.
We then headed to the cafe for some drinks mazed at how fast we were moving as it was almost the same time as when we left the Stadium, I then restarted my watch and we caught the nect tractor up to the bus stop and headed back into town for a relaxing day of reading and computering.
So far so good but the next tour went to hell right away, we were to be it's only members so all we got from it was some Turkish guy who rambled on in brokm Emglish as we nodded and did our best to inore him the pools at pammukale, formed from Calcium laden water, were cool and Heirepolis was interesting but all in all the day was bad as we were lead about by our poor guide and then we went for lunch.
I had been hoping that lunch would save the day as it was a buffet and neither David nor I had had any thing but bread and water for the past three days but the food was utter crap spongy potatoes and poor cuts of meat served with a heap of half decent rice. The restaurant was covered in Christmas decorations and despite our chort stay played the same terrible spanish song no less than four times accompanied by several variations of the chicken dance. For desert you were given a choice of brown goo, light brown goo, white goo, or red goo (I choose white goo and regretted it) After this the tour was mercifully short and we were soon back at our hotel consoling ourselves with Fanta. We left the hotel the next day and headed West for Selcuk.

Antalya

Antalya is a city of interesting contrast one has only to walk through Hadrian's Gate to enter the ancient secor of Kaleici or step back through it to return to a bustling and modern commercial centre. We came here and immediatly set out to wander the narrow streets of the area to be rewarded with a resaurant overlooking the old Roman harbour and near some tower or other it was on the way back to the hotel that I made my great error, deciding to book a tour to see Perge Side and Aspendos. Now Aspendos I could care less about but perge and Side are among my favorite cities and having woken up earlt and gotten on the bus with the four people we would share our tour with as well as the guide I was immediatly disappointed as the guide began a longwinded and disjointed account of the area's history that showed at best a cursory knowledge of the matter he was supposed to guide us through.
My disappointment was revisited and redoubled when we spent longer getting to Side then we spent in Side, after a brief examination of the Temple of Apollo and adjacent Byzantine bathes we began walking back to the Theatre we had passed earlier and were promised a return visit to, this return visit proved to be fifteen minutes of looking at the outside Theatre wall while we waited for the bus to arrive, I left the group nd got a quick glimpse of more of the theatre and some of the agora but still came away very disappointed.
Aspendos was a repeat of these events we saw the amazing theatre and then turned back to the entrance and ledt the site abandonning the sign post pointing p the hill and pointing to an Agora a Nymphaeum an Aqueduct and other things to see but we turned and left and drove over to a somewhat intact section of the Aqueduct before once mor leaving the site with so much more to see.
by this time I was in a very sour mood I had booked the tour not to be shown around but for the convenience of the bus from one site to another and was not happy with how it had turned out. my mood however was lifted when we reached Perge, our guides already cursory knowledge left off here and I took over the tour group for a time before we went off our own ways and spent a decent amount of time exploring this fine site.
We spent that night in thecompany of some friends we had met on the cruise and then left the next day, after having visited the Archaeology Museum (a great visit with fine statuary) before catching a bus in the evening for Denizli.