Update

Hi there. We've been a little lazy lately, but we will soon be adding updates from our somewhat recent cross-country trip, our move back to Los Angeles and our upcoming east coast trip. So, sit back, relax and we'll be in touch soon.

Congrats Phillies!

What a ride! We managed to see quite a few games this year and all of the post-season games. Congrats to the 2008 World Series Champs!

An update and some answers

We apologize for the sporadic posting since early August, but a lot has been going on. First off, we wrapped up our time in Europe and flew back to the US for a bit. We had planned on staying in Europe until mid-September, but after just over two months of touring around the continent, we started to get worn out by seeing similar architecture, hanging out at cafes, dealing with too many tourists and spending way too much money for accommodation and food in an area where the US dollar was incredibly weak (and yes, we are a little ticked that the US dollar has gained considerable strength since we left the Euro zone).

So, we came back to the US to decompress for a little while and to figure out what our next move will be. After some considerable thinking, we decided our next destination would be South America for a few months or possibly to just end this portion of our travel all together and begin our “normal” lives again. We gave ourselves 3 weeks to come up with that decision and fortunately we had a mutual understanding that we want to stop traveling for now. The reasoning being that so much of the excitement of a new place has been lost on us several times and we don’t see any logic behind spending money to go through the motions. We also miss our friends, our families and our stuff. Now, we are not materialistic at all, but it gets tedious after traveling over a year living out of these backpacks:
We started the trip with a wish list of places we wanted to visit and we have since added to that and will eventually re-visit many places when we’re not so worn out from the act of traveling itself. In the meantime, we have decided that we want to move back to Los Angeles. We will shortly be on the road again from the east coast back to California. On the way, we plan to make several stops and will visit a lot of the places we missed early on when our trip started in August 2007. There will be posts about that trip and our future trips, but we won’t bore you with our day to day lives once back in LA.

Some answers:

Since we have been back in the US and have decided to suspend traveling, we have been asked a lot of the same questions by many people, so here is a FAQ of sorts with what we hope are good answers:

Did you run out of money? No. We would have never quit our jobs and set out on this adventure if there was ever a chance of running out of moolah. We worked hard, made a lot of money, saved a lot of money and made great investments. We understand that our culture is focused more on materialistic tendencies and many people live hand to mouth on top of massive debts, but neither of us have ever understood that concept.

What did you learn? We are bound to miss something on this and we may even need to give this its own post. Here are a few things we learned:

It didn’t matter what country we were in or who we were talking to, but everyone we encountered did not have any issues with us being American. We heard the rumors that we might have issues in certain places, but we can assure you that is not the case. If anything, it just made people more curious to learn about our culture and often times they seemed envious of the opportunities we have here in the US.

The world wants you to vote for Obama. While most people enjoyed talking about American culture, they were all the same when it came to politics – they can’t stand Bush and they all want to see a change in the White House.

The food overseas is so much healthier: Finding low cost, locally produced food without preservatives was so much easier to find overseas than in the US. Yes, there were times we got stuck eating McDonald’s because it was easy and cheap, but more often than not, we were able to eat very good fresh food at great prices. We kept a list of our favorites and hope to re-create them at home (insert Kelly dreaming and drooling over Laksa and Char Kway Teow). Also, when we re-entered the US, we had stomach issues. This probably has a lot to do with all of the preservatives in food and the corn syrup in almost everything.

We need very little to live. Each day all we needed to do was find a place to sleep and food to eat. Everything else was for purely for enjoyment/entertainment. You saw the pics of our packs up above – those included mostly emergency medicines and things we never used (pack towels, packable sheets and various non-necessities). We brought very little clothing and one pair of shoes each and guess what….we survived! The remainder of the weight was from books and toiletries.

What was your favorite place? This is so difficult to answer after about 14 months of traveling in such different places. How do you compare visiting the Colosseum to snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef to participating in a traditional Fijian kava ceremony under a perfectly clear sky in the middle of nowhere? You just can’t. We plan on writing a separate post to answer this question.

When will you start working again? We’re not quite sure yet, but we’re aiming to start working around March 2009 (give or take a few months). We want to get back to Los Angeles and settle in before working again. This means we’ll have time to do a lot of the activities we missed out on while living there before because we were tied down with the day to day nuances involved with working. So, Billy will look to play in a baseball league and get back into his guitar playing while Kelly will look to continue her new bike riding hobby, possibly start playing soccer again and look into some volunteer opportunities. People say we’re lucky to have that opportunity, but our answer is that we worked to get ourselves in the position and it wasn’t handed to us.

What did you miss the most? This is another tough question because we could have a long list, but most of it is superficial. Of course we missed the regular interaction with our friends and family, but we still had email to keep in touch. We missed our bed, our TV, American sports, and having a fully stocked kitchen, but all of that was easily forgotten when we were visiting such incredible places.

Berlin

Berlin was the last city we visited on our European adventure. We were there for just a few days, but it quickly became one of our favorite cities. We walked miles upon miles every day and saw everything from Brandenburg Gate to the remnants of the Berlin Wall to Checkpoint Charlie. The history there is incredible and often heart breaking.

When we were taking breaks from exploring, we were once again eating some great German food that consisted of currywurst, mounds of sauerkraut and potato dumplings.

Berliner Dom with the TV Tower in the background:
A portion of the Berlin Wall:
Billy in front of the Berlin Wall:
Checkpoint Charlie:
On our last day there, we stumbled upon a local festival (Gauklerfest) with comedy acts, jugglers and magicians. We hung out for several hours watching the acts, enjoying the local food and imbibing our favorite dunkel beers. Here is our favorite dish of the day - mushrooms in gorgonzola sauce:

Prague

Prague is really packed with tourists. This was Kelly's 3rd trip here and Billy's 1st, but we still managed to see all of the main highlights of the town over a few days. To escape the crowds, we found a great hotel in the outskirts of Old Town that gave us the peace and quiet we needed along with a nice stroll through some great neighborhoods.

We saw everything in Old Town ranging from Tyn Church to the Castle across the river. One of the days we got stuck in a downpour while trying to traverse the jam packed Charles Bridge. Fortunately, we were able to duck into a cafe for a break from the rain.

For nourishment, we found that beer was cheaper than water or soda and the food itself was as heavy as a brick. Most dinners included bread dumplings, lots of pork and plenty of sauerkraut. Most of the time, we ate near our hotel in the outskirts because it was a lot cheaper and definitely more authentic.

At this point, we were getting a little burned out with Europe in general. After seeing "old towns" for 2 months, spending many days wandering around looking at churches, bridges, and various types of architecture, everything started to look the same and a lot of the initial excitement was getting lost on us. For this reason, we decided to skip a few of the smaller towns nearby and just headed up towards Berlin to end our European adventure.

The Jan Hus Monument:
The Charles Bridge:
View of Prague from atop the Castle walls:

Bratislava

We took a quick train ride from Vienna to Bratislava for a day. We arrived pretty early, dropped off our bags and headed towards Old Town Bratislava. Before we began our wandering, we filled up on a delicious meal of Cabbage and Pork Knee soup and some schnitzel. There's nothing that gets the day going like some simmering cabbage and fried pork.

With our full stomachs, we walked through the Old Town gates and discovered that Bratislava is one cool town. It has similar architecture to Prague with the cute old buildings and cobbled streets, but without the insane crowds. We walked up to the castle for some panoramic views of the city, the river and the UFO Bridge (basically a bridge with a UFO looking contraption on the top). After the castle, we went on a scavenger hunt to find the hidden landmarks and statues around town. Here are two of the many we found:

Paparazzi statue behind a corner building:
This manhole statue had to have its head replaced several times from cars that got too close:
After our day of exploring, we retired to our hostel for the night. First off, the hostel appeared to be pretty cool and it even had a "Hostel" theme in its basement bar from the notorious movie of the same name. However, their bull dog Tyson caused some problems. He seemed okay at first, but then he started getting on our nerves with his constant drooling, loud snoring while awake and incessant barking. Finally, he decided to violate Kelly's leg when she was just hanging out on the patio. Here is Tyson taking a nap after taking the innocence from Kelly's leg:

Vienna

We spent a couple of days in Vienna after our stint in Budapest. Our guesthouse ranked in our top 10 places we've stayed so far and once again we were hooked up with a nice kitchen for cooking in.

Our first day we were able to see all of the main sites around the city and the old town area, which was good because it pretty much rained the rest of the time we were there. The old town area is filled with too many tourists and way too many horse drawn carriages. Someone seriously needs to do an air quality test there from all of the dried horse feces that get blown throughout the city. It was truly disgusting.

When we were able to finally dodge the horses, we went to the place famous for inventing Sacher Torte. The price of this piece of cake was ridiculous and it wasn't even that great:
We washed down our cake with some beers from Centimeter Bar, where they serve their food and beers by the centimeter and in some cases by the meter. This made ordering confusing when we asked for a foot long beer.

We walked by this Mozart statue and flowers on the way back to our place:
We enjoyed Vienna's graffiti and advertisements quite a bit. Here is an ad for the Museum Quarter in the subway station:
This little creature was painted on a wall near our guesthouse:
Here is Kelly with a giant Milka cow that she tried to sodomize, but she missed by a few feet:

Budapest

Our train from Cluj to Budapest allowed us the rare privilege of an entire compartment to ourselves. So, we took advantage of it and laid down to sleep for the entire ride. The exception to our nap was at the border crossing where they took our passports off the train, walked around with them for a while and just as we thought they were going to drag us off and perform cavity searches, they gave them back to us.

We decided to rent an apartment in Budapest because you can get a really great place for a relatively decent price compared to a hotel or hostel room. We expected a one bedroom with maybe a small kitchen and a living room, but our place was bigger than any apartment we have ever lived in. The best part was the well equipped kitchen, so we cooked at home every night.

As with every city we have visited, we walked a lot every day. It's great exercise and we get to see so much more than if we took cabs or public transportation. The Pest side was explored first and we went everywhere from the furthest train station to the market on the other side of town with stops in between at St. Stephen's, the Opera House and every other important site.

The next day was spent exploring the Buda side. We walked across the Chain Bridge and went up the funicular with some great panoramic views. The castle area was pretty neat, but way too crowded with tourists.

View within the castle walls:
View from the top of the castle hill with Parliament in the background on the other side of the Danube:Our favorite lunch in Budapest was at a place not far from our apartment. They served traditional Hungarian food (lots of sauerkraut and paprika). We ordered a cabbage roll, but it came with pork, sauerkraut and a ring of pork fat that was so incredibly amazing, we went back a second time just for the pork fat:
We found these candy bars at the market across from our apartment. We think they are either really discriminating towards heavy people or there was an error in the English translation:
While waiting for our train from Budapest to Vienna, we spotted this Wiener (notice the magazine in his bag):

Romania

After our crazy 24 hours of travel and disappointment, we finally arrived in Brasov. Our massive guesthouse was right in the center of old town and occupied by yet another hilarious Romanian, his wife and kids. They really helped us out with lots of tips to explore their country. This was quite common for Romanians - after hearing so many negative things from people in neighboring countries, we found the Romanians to be incredibly friendly, helpful and eager for us to thoroughly enjoy everything their country had to offer. Another added bonus is that everyone there speaks English and they love to practice with tourists.

We spent our first few days exploring Brasov. It's a decent sized town and serves as a starting off point for exploring Transylvania. The pedestrian district was quite similar to most we experienced in both eastern and western Europe and was filled with outdoor cafes and bars.

Here is a view from old town Brasov with their version of the Hollywood sign up in the hills:
Kelly in the middle of the narrowest street in Europe:
We fell for this Pschitt in Paris, so we weren't falling for this Crap at the local grocery store:
Towards the end of our stay, we took a bus to Bran. Bran is supposedly known as an area that Dracula (really Vlad Tepes) hung out for a while. There's a big castle and a small town that really goes out of their way to sell loads of Dracula paraphernalia. The castle was pretty neat, but after seeing plenty of castles, a lot of the excitement was lost on us.

The most interesting parts of our trip to Bran were the bus rides. On the ride there, we piled into a stinky and ancient bus with a driver that had a serious road rage problem. He also decided to decorate the bus like this - aka the Porn Bus:
Not wanting to risk our lives on the way back, we hopped into a mini-bus with a driver that was smart enough to swing by the bus station just a few minutes before the regular bus and offer the same rate, but a faster ride. So, we hopped in along with a few other tourists and got back to Brasov as promised. He only tortured us slightly with his terrible music selections.

From Brasov, we headed up towards Sighisoara. We didn't know at the time, but there was a large festival going on while we were there. We hopped off the train, left our bags at the station and headed towards the town. We first encountered a bunch of food tents that had meat grilling and smelled reminiscent of the cevapi we had in Bosnia. It wasn't quite as good and was a bit more expensive than we would have expected for a festival, but we shrugged that off because we were hanging out with a bunch of locals and spotted very few tourists for once.

We made our way up to the top of the hill where the center of the old town exists. There were bands, arts and crafts and tons of people. It was pretty rainy that day and on the way down some wet, wooden steps, Kelly took a tumble that scared both of us for a bit. She survived with just a big bruise on her elbow and some scraped up hands. We rounded up our time there with a quick visit to the house where Vlad Tepes was supposedly born. There wasn't much there other than some cheesy Dracula posters.

Here is the view of Sighisoara as you walk towards the old town:
From Sighisoara, we took another train up to Cluj-Napoca. It's one of the larger towns in Romania and we would have loved to spend more than just a night there, but we were headed to Budapest the next day. Plus, our hostel was one of our top 3 most disgusting places we have stayed on this trip. We didn't even shower there before catching our bus because the showers were so bad we probably would have caught something.

Not your typical day

7:00 am: Alarm goes off, wake up, shower in the sink (see post below), pack our bags

7:45 am: Go to store to buy food, wine and accessories for our upcoming 24-hour train ride to Istanbul. Yes, we said 24-hour train ride (to include our own sleeper cabin complete with beds and sink)

8:15 am: Train arrives. Board train. Our sleeper compartment does not exist. What does exist is a shoe box filled with 6 seats that convert into tiny beds. Immediately we were both pissed because 1. This is not what we paid for and 2. There is no way we were going to be cramped into this space for 24-hours with four other people.

8:17 am: Get off train. Head to main ticket office to see what the heck is going on. Conversation:
Kelly: We have these tickets to Istanbul and have paid for a private sleeper compartment, but our assigned compartment consists of 6 seats. We would like to have a compartment that aligns with what we paid.
Ticket lady: Oh, we can give you a refund and then you can pay the conductor for the seats.
Kelly: No, that is not what we want. We want our private compartment that has already been paid for.
Ticket lady #2 (the nice one): Let me make a phone call. (insert lady making call, sitting on hold, hanging up) OK, go back on the train and you will see that you have the compartment you requested.
Kelly: are you sure?
Ticket lady #2: Yes, I am sure. Go see.

8:30 am: Back on train. Same shitty compartment. Hop off train. (train is set to depart at 8:40)

8:32 am: Back at the ticket counter. Explain to the ticket lady (#2) that there is still no sleeper car. She comes out to escort us to the train and finally believes us. She talks to the conductor for us and they agree to make sure that no one else will be allowed in the 6-person compartment and we will be fine. We get back on the train and reconfirm this with the conductor, but now his story has changed and he says, "Well, I can't guarantee you will have this to yourselves. Once in Sofia, who knows." We ask him why he lied to us before and he just shrugged his shoulders. (we found out later, he would have accepted a bribe, but we had already paid a lot for the tickets and were not going to pay even more to a crooked conductor)

8:33 am: Kelly and Billy in the compartment trying to figure out if we can handle this for 24-hours.

8:34 am: Kelly and Billy jump off the train and head to the ticket counter. We ask for a full refund and they actually give it to us. We are excited for a moment.

8:35 am: Fuck. What do we do now? We have no train tickets, no accommodation, we're stuck in a city filled with angry protesters and we just want to get the hell out of here.

8:36 am: Let's head back to the hostel and see if they'll let us use their computers to do some research and possibly let us stay another night if we get stuck here.

9:00 am: Back at the hostel. The super nice staff agrees to let us hang-out, store our 24-hours of food in the fridge and use their computers.

9:10 am - 9:45 am: Start researching. We were planning to go to Romania after Turkey, so that was the natural place to look. We met some great travelers (Lil and John from New Zealand) that were also headed to Romania. They passed along their travel info and research they did to get there. It's decided, we are going to Romania in the afternoon.

9:50 am: Back at the train station to buy our tickets to Romania. We fortunately got the same guy we bought our Istanbul tickets from. He felt horrible about what happened and he assured us that our sleeper train to Bucharest would be private and what we paid for. He also was adamant that he would personally escort us onto the train to ensure we were fine. Half way through this ticket purchase, the following occurred:

Kelly: Ok, so we definitely have a sleeper car, right?
Nice Ticket Man: Yes.
Insert random person coming into the front of the line to interrupt us. He sounded like one of the Festrunk Brothers from SNL (two wild and crazy guys)
Yortuk Festrunk: Excuse me!! I have a question that is funny for you!!! (insert image of him "swinging") I am looking to buy some international bus tickets!!
Nice Ticket Man: (holding back laughter) But, you are at a train station. There are no buses here. Go to the bus station!
Yortuk Festrunk: What??!! (big smile on his face) Well...OK!!!

10:15 am - 3:00 pm: Back at hostel. Work on booking hotel, seeing if we can get a train up to Brasov right after getting to Bucharest the next morning (no desire to stay in Bucharest). Hang out more with the hostel people, plan the next few days out and just relax.

3:00 pm: Head to train station. Find the Nice Ticket Man and he shows us where the train is.

3:40 pm: Board the train. Nice Ticket Man comes on board to ensure we got on ok and have the right compartment. Amazing.

3:41 pm: Inspect our compartment. It consists of two bunk beds, a sink and a floor that hasn't been cleaned since 1831.

3:42 pm: We meet our neighbor, Larry from Texas. He's one of the few Americans we have met on this trip and he's in the area on business. We continue to chat with Larry for the better part of the trip. The conversation ranges from baseball to Karadzic's capture to travel. (thanks, Larry, for hanging out with us!)

3:35pm - 11:30pm: Talk with Larry. Meet some Serbs that are going to Romania to hopefully play pro soccer. Drink Serbian wine. Get comments from border control, "OH, Serbian wine!" (they must be proud of their wine?). Eat our food that was meant for our ride to Istanbul. Drink more wine. Discover that the bathroom at the end of the hall has quite possibly the worst smell we have ever experienced.

11:30ish - 5:30am: Crashed.

5:50 am: Arrive in Bucharest just a few minutes late. This is surprising considering EVERYONE we met in Serbia complained that our train into Romania would be several hours late. They were adamant that Serbian trains always leave on time, but once in Romania, they are destined for delays. (so wrong!)

6:00 am: Quickly secure tickets for the 6:30 train to Brasov. We couldn't get 2nd class because it was full, so we had to fork out for 1st class. Ooh la la.

6:30 am: Board train. Have to navigate through the swarms of people selling everything from magazines to food to chickens.

6:32 am: Arrive at compartment. Encounter the strangest and funniest Romanian on our trip. We were so tired and wanted to sleep, but this guy entertained us for the duration.

6:35 am - 9:00 am: The Romanian guy (whose accent made him sound like Borat) continues to entertain Billy, Kelly and the other 3 passengers in our compartment. He just came back from a Metallica show in Bucharest, was excited and a bit wired.
Borat Guy: Who here has seen Metallica??
(silence)
Borat Guy: Well, I have! TWICE!!!! (he raises his hands in celebration)
slight pause.

He starts to open his backpack and proceeds to take out the contents, which consist of a Romanian flag, ski goggles, a winter hat with rooster combs, a camera with no battery, apples, and two lighters. Basically they were all the necessities for a Metallica Show.

As he began to show us everything, he was also trying everything on or demonstrating each thing's use. It's important to note that he was doing all of this in English for our benefit because the other 3 passengers spoke Romanian. First came the flag that he draped on himself like a cape. Then the goggles went on (for "skying" as he said, but then he apologized for his terrible English...which was really quite good). After the goggles came the hat. Now that he was in his full dress costume, he pulled out the camera with no battery and began taking "pretend" pictures of all of us. He pointed to his head and said he always keeps his pictures in his mind. At this point, all 6 of us were laughing hysterically.

Next, he handed Billy the first of two lighters and asked him if he could figure it out. He did. The Borat Guy responded with, "OOOHHH, we have a Scientist here!" Next came the apples, which he offered to everyone by saying, "Who wants apples?". At this point, we were convinced he was insane, yet entertaining. He eventually calmed down, but only after he played some Metallica tunes for us on his MP3 player.

9:00am: Arrive in Brasov.

(note: while we are really sad we missed Istanbul, it's not going anywhere and we will eventually make it there at some point in our lives. Also, it was a good thing we missed it at that time because there were some bombings that would have coincided with our visit there)

Our sleeper compartment to Bucharest:
Kelly on the top bunk: