Favorite Photogs From Eurotrip

I have been too busy to sit down and write the rest of the Eurotrip adventure. So, I’m going to just sum it up as quickly as possible. Greece was okay I guess, we were only there for two days and didn’t get to see any of the Greek Islands, so I won’t pass any crucial judgment on it yet. But Italy, oh Italy. I fell in love with Italy. Everything about it was awesome. I really can’t wait to go back and visit again.

We only had a very short time in our trip, and we covered three countries in that short time. So, if anyone ever thinks you need more time and will just wait until you have more time: don’t. Take the opportunity you have. We surprised many people that we met along the way on how much we were getting accomplished with our very limited window. We were going non-stop on our fastpacking backpacking trip.

Well, here are a few of my favorite pictures from my time in Europe:

Eurotrip Part I: Turkey, Day 2

Before I begin explaining our second day in Istanbul, I realize I left out talking about going to the Grand Bazaar. That place was nuts. So many people. So many little shops. So many rugs. Seriously, every corner you turn in the Grand Bazaar, or all of Istanbul for that matter, someone hounds you about buying a rug from them. “Turkey, best rugs. You buy.”

We had already been up since 3:30 a.m. Once we had our free hostel breakfast with Düc, we started pondering what else we should do in Istanbul. So, once again, we started walking. We decided to go to the water and take a ferry over to what is called the Asian side of Istanbul. We walked downhill, which clearly indicates the direction in which there will be water. Yep, we found it. We walked along the entire seawall that was probably built a long, long time ago. It was ridiculously long and we seriously underestimated the length of time it would take to walk. Fail.

So, after figuring out which ferry is the correct one, we jump on it and head on over to the Asian side. HUH? Is the Asian side any different? No, of course not. We got off the ferry and just kind of looked around for a while, then hopped right back on the ferry and headed back.

We didn’t have too much more excitement in Istanbul, just some more walking around trying different eateries’ food. Trying the food everywhere we went was pretty much one of the main points of our Eurotrip. The one thing about Istanbul was that we COULD NOT GET AWAY FROM KABOBS. Everywhere you went they had kabobs, and pretty much only kabobs on the menu. It was purely a kabob nightmare. We sat down at this one restaurant, they handed us a menu, and we open it only to find three items on the menu, two of them being kabobs and the other being some sort of greenery that I did not have enough trust in to eat.

This was one of the two kabobs on the menu

Also, the water is outrageously undrinkable in Istanbul. Everywhere we went there were signs saying things like “Please, for the love of ___, don’t drink the water.” Bottle water was very plentiful. And it was cheap as hell. Some machines we found bottled water for the equivalent of about forty cents. Another also, I like eating. I like eating until I feel satisfied. That was something that didn’t happen. Their portions are nothing. I’m so American.

The Man of the Gym

I go to the gym. A lot. It makes the whole day better when I get a great workout in. HOWEVER, I never seem to make it out of the gym without having some sort of interaction with a random person. Even though I love meeting new people and try to be friendly to everyone, most of the time these encounters are nothing but awkward. It usually goes down like this:

I get to the gym, do some warm-ups, then start my workout for the day. Everything is going fine, I’m minding my own business lifting weighted objects. THEN, I can feel it. That undeniable feeling that I’m being watched. Should I scope out my surroundings for a possible rogue? No, I’ll keep staring at the floor or the ceiling. I still feel like I’m being watched. I’ll take a gander. BOOM! I have made eye contact with someone who has clearly been watching me workout. I look away. Nope, doesn’t help. They start approaching me. FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU

Google Image; This is how you workout

They introduce themselves. I shudder. Like I said, I like meeting people, but these encounters are ALL THE SAME.  Oh, yeah, one thing I failed to mention: it’s always dudez. “Hey man, what do you do to get bigger? Do you take anything?” EVERY TIME. NEVER FAILS. I think I’m nice, so I indulge them with my rantings of what to do and what I take. HOWEVER, everyone is different. What works for me may not necessarily work for you. I am to the point where I just want to say, “See that weight? Just lift it above your head several times. That’s all there is to it.”

One way I have tried to block out giving these lectures is by wearing my headphones, but all that happens is they stare at me more intensely, penetrating me with their “TALK TO ME NOW” eyes. Maybe I should just be happy about this. Maybe I’m the most approachable man in the world! I just hope it starts happening with the babez.

Eurotrip Part I: Turkey, Day 1

On August 12, I went over to my travel buddy Aaron’s house in San Marcos to spend the night and do a last minute check to make sure we had everything we needed to get us through 12 days of travel in Europe.  After taking several things out of our backpacks, and adding several random items, we were ready to start our adventure.

We woke up early the next day to make sure we arrived in Austin in time for our flight. Aaron’s girlfriend was oh so kind enough to provide us with the vehicular transport to the airport. Thank you Acsa. We had a flight out of Austin to Newark, New Jersey, from there to Zurich, Switzerland, and from there to Istanbul, Turkey. All of that flying took so much time, and we didn’t even sleep, my guess being our excitement was way too much for our feeble minds to handle.

Looking out the window of the plane over Europe

Aaron and Jared land in Istanbul. We grab out backpacks, head out of the plane, and head towards passport control in the Istanbul airport. Once we made it through, we stopped, looked at each other, and Aaron said, “Well, we’re here.” We immediately started looking for people that could possibly give us a sense of direction and possibly point us in the direction of some hostels to stay in. A man that was sitting at a coffee shop called us over, because, let’s face it, we probably looked extremely lost and confused. He circled some things on our map that we had to see and told us where the hostels were and how to get there.

Our help

So, we headed downstairs, withdrew some Turkish Lira from an ATM, and figured out how to buy a Jetton (token) for the metro. After figuring out the stop to switch trains, we hopped off and wandered around as confused as ever. We happened upon a sweet girl that knew some English who was more than happy to help us. She even said she would take us to the district where there were a bunch of hostels. SCORE! We settled into a nice little dungeon-style room in the Orient Hostel, and then headed off to explore Istanbul. We wandered aimlessly around the city, being awestruck by the mosques that tower over everything in the city.

Being extremely tired and showing early signs of jet lag, we ended up falling asleep at like 7 p.m. in our dungeon of a room. We woke up around 3:30 in the morning, covered in sweat, smelling worse than the bathrooms, and confused as to what exactly happened. After getting our minds straight, we both took a shower (not at the same time) and went outside to see if there was any nightlife going on around us at 4 in the morning in Istanbul. The answer to that is no.

So, we decided to just hangout for a while outside of our hostel, because it was cooler outside than in our dungeon room. Then, the unthinkable happened. We met a fellow American. I use the word unthinkable because this guy was something else. His name was Terry. I think he was from Ohio or Iowa or something, I don’t know, I can’t remember because I was too awestruck at the other things this guy was saying. He introduced himself to us as a “Type-A Alpha Male.” If that doesn’t piss you off immediately, you’re better than I am. He then goes on to tell us him and his wife got a divorce a while back, and all he asked for in the divorce was a lump sum of money. He used this money to travel. He travels to different places and teaches English. This is the only cool thing about him. Now, back to his awesomeness. I guess just by the way Aaron and I look, that he assumed we wanted to talk to him about girls ‘n shit. He basically told us he loves traveling around and getting lucky. That’s cool, but to go into details with people you just met and don’t know left me at like 75% weirded out. Two of my favorite things he said were he “loves chasing snapper” and “he had more snapper before we were born than both of us combined today,” which now brought me to 100% weirded out. At this point, Aaron was hungry, but I was not, because I lost whatever appetite I had on listening to this guy talk. It ends up, Terry had been doing some drinking, and was more than happy to take us to one of the only spots that was open this late…

…And when I say take us to, I mean get us lost 3 times. Sigh. Oh, Terry. Being lost was cool and all, but we eventually found our way to the eatery, which ended up being a five minute walk from our hostel. I learned one thing from these eateries: they really don’t like serving foreigners at this time of the morning. They told Aaron they were out of bread, when they had stacks of bread right there in plain sight. I tried to get dessert from the place next door, and they said, “not right now, maybe tomorrow.”

We walked back to our hostel, where Terry left us to go to bed. Then, we met probably the most interesting person in the world: Düc (Duke). He is a 70-year-old Vietnamese-Canadian who has traveled to every country in the world. He was in Istanbul on his last stop on a trip throughout the entire Middle East. Yes, that includes Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Crazy, crazy old guy! He also showed us an article that was published on him titled “Family Travels 100 Countries in 7 Years.” I wonder where he gets all his money??

This Will Be Comical

In about two weeks, I will be in Europe with my travel buddy Aaron. We will be traveling to Turkey, Greece and Italy. This trip is only 11 days, so we will be doing some speed traveling through these countries. However, the conundrum we have ourselves in is we are flying in to Istanbul, Turkey and leaving from Milan, Italy. So, we have to figure out how to get to Milan with perfect timing so we won’t miss our flight. Today, Aaron and I met up at The Coffee Pot in San Marcos to come up with a tentative travel schedule.

We are such newbies with this whole Europe thing. It seems like we have more ideas for doing goofy stuff rather than being serious about the pivotal nature of finding our way to Milan. For instance, an idea was brought up to go to Sparta just to see how many times we could say “This is Sparta!” while we are there. Then, we laughed at it for a bit and considered actually doing it. Finding information on traveling from Turkey to Greece is rather difficult, unless you want to fly. I would say it took us a good 30-40 minutes to actually come up with the start of our plan because of these shenanigans with finding information on the interwebz.

One main part of this trip is that we want to go diving in one of these countries, whether it be in the Aegean or the Mediterranean. Finding information on scuba diving in these countries is rather tough as well. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can and will find diving websites for these countries, but to me, most of them look rather shady. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t really want to trust a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1997.

So, what we have come up with, well, at least for the time being, is:

1) Land in Istanbul, Turkey and stay there for a couple of days.

2) Take a flight from Istanbul to Athens, Greece and go diving around the Athens area.

3) Find our way to Patras, Greece.

4) This fourth step is my favorite. We are planning to get on a ferry in Patras to take us to Brindisi, Italy. We are going to buy deck tickets for this ferry and will get to camp anywhere on the deck, so the website says.

5) Get a train pass and make our way to Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan.

We may not stick to this exactly, and we are still a little unsure of how long we will be in each place, but it’s a start, and it makes it a little more exhilarating not knowing exactly where we will be each day or what we will be doing. So, this should be pretty funny for us. I will be blogging about this experience on here. I will have my phone to give mini-posts whenever I find WiFi.

WISH US LUCK!

“Predator,” A (horrible) Movie Review”

Last night, some friends of mine wanted to get together and go see a movie. The chosen movie was “Predators.” Why this movie was chosen, I will never know, and quite frankly, I never want to know. I’ll just stick to the idea that it was the only viable movie choice (even though I know that is the worst lie ever).

The first irritating part of this whole “Predators” movie experience was the trailers for upcoming movies. When these kind of horrible trailers are showing, you just have this sinking feeling that you just paid ten dollars for something you’ll be making fun of for several weeks.

Then, the movie began. The opening scene had the whole movie theater puzzled. The movie really didn’t do a good job explaining how these people got on this planet, and they kind of just slap the audience in the crotchal region, leaving the audience saying, “HUH?”

So the main Adrien Brody dude  figures out they are on a game preserve, being hunted. Cool. He is smarter than I am. If I just fell out of the sky on to a strange planet, that’s the first thing that I would think would be happening to me. So then, these horned-dogs come out of nowhere. This group of people on this game preserve start unloading on these things and no, they don’t die if you unload clip after clip at them. If you fire a single bullet, that seems to do the trick. Then, the first dude dies, and no one really cares at all.

Oh, the movie was titled “Predators,” right? Yeah, it’s about 20-30 minutes in to the movie before you even seen a SINGLE predator. Predator. Not plural. That single predator is tied up. Awesome. Then the movie gives you an example of the title, by all these explosions and guns going off. So the title isn’t really lying, but the trick about these predators is they are almost always invisible. When you get treated to some tasty predators, you can’t really see them.

I’ll save some excruciating time by giving a short summary of the middle of the movie: they find Luarence Fishburne, he ends up going crazy, he gets killed by a single predator, they run around for a while, they want to use booby traps, they want to find the alien ship and fly it back to earth (huh?), and the skinny idiot from “That ’70s Show” ends up being an asshole. The reason I gave a summary of most of the movie is that it doesn’t explain much and there is an unreasonable amount of talking and not a reasonable amount of predators. I’m sorry, I thought that was the title of the film?

Dang, the ship blows up and everybody pretty much dies. Oh, and did I mention there is an Asian guy who finds a sword and fights a predator with it. Thanks Hollywood!

YEP

20/20

So, it has been one day since I had my LASIK surgery, and I must say, it is quite amazing. I could see about 75 percent better when I first got up after the procedure. I had to go home and sleep for at least four hours, and let me tell you, that was ridiculously hard. The procedure itself wasn’t all that bad, but my eyes were killing me when it was over with, and it was so hard to sleep because of the pain. I was eventually able to fall asleep and when I woke up, I could see perfectly. UNBELIEVABLE. I had been in glasses or contacts since I was 9 years old. For anyone looking to at LASIK as a option for correcting your vision, I say do it, it is fantabulous!