39,000 Miles

Sorry for the long absence friends, but as I’ve said before, the more fun I’m having, the less I tend to blog.  Good for me, bad for youse.

The Fern and I are now in Dubai, visiting F’s old friend from high school, Sherif, who picked us up from the airport and is graciously housing us during our visit.  Unfortunately Sherif’s very pregnant wifey, Nisreen, isn’t here now but hopefully we’ll catch up with the three of them again soon!  Their apartment is GORGEOUS.  I want everything in it, or at least I want them to come decorate our house, whenever we get one.  It’s going to be very easy spending a few days here while Sherif is at work, watching cable TV, laying by the pool and using limitless interweb.  Oh yeah, and I suppose we might go see the city or something.  This post will unfortunately be photo-less, as the UAE blocks flickr (really… flickr?).

So where did our adventures leave you last?  Well we finished the Gullet cruise (which I can’t recommend enough), and spent a day just chilling in Fethiye, a sleepy sea-side town on the Med.  We seem to be going to a lot of sleepy sea-side towns.  Who wouldn’t like sleepy sea-side towns?  After that we headed to Pammukale, which means “cotton castle” in Turkish, home to the ancient city of Hierapolis.  Hierapolis was built on top of a gigantic white “castle” of travertine (a stone material currently used in hip kitchens and patios), which formed giant pools and trippy walls that look like bubble-wrap.  The site was much bigger than I’d originally thought, and we spent a good part of the day walking around, watching tortoises have sex amongst ancient ruins, watching enormous Japanese tourists groups with their often puzzling ensembles (are those arm warmers?), watching tanga-clad Russian tourists striking ridiculous poses in photos, and generally being amazed that we were being allowed to clamber all over structures that were built in the 2nd century BC.  Holy crap that’s old!  I thought we were still swinging from the trees back then, fighting the dinosaurs!  I was never really any good at anthropology.

After Pammukale, we went to another ancient ruin, Ephesus.  It sounds petulant, but we started to feel like once you’ve seen one 2000 year old city, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  I mean, sometimes there’s not much left.  For example the Temple of Artemis, Wonder of the Ancient World,  is no longer the colossal beast it must have been a bazillions years ago, but a single stone column surrounded by souvenir stands and chickens.  We had a curious tour guide that day, who always referred to us as “dear guests” and constantly whipped his Turkish worry beads in small circles about his fingers.

We took an overnight bus to Istanbul that night, arrived early in the morning and went back to the hostel we stayed at previously, the Agora Guesthouse.  They let us have a shower (bliss!) and store our bags, and even refunded us the money from a tour we had canceled.  Score!  F has already written about our little adventure getting into Greece, which can be summed up in this nifty little saying: fortune favors fools.  I like to think of that as the theme for our trip.

The four of us, F, Nicole and Jack, and I hung out on Thessaloniki’s Perea Beach for a day, then decided to rent a car with the intent to drive to Athens.  That was, until we discovered how far Athens actually was and that the tollway costs 25 euros.  Scrap that idea, what’s closer than Athens?  What’s this island, Corfu?  Let’s go there!!  We crammed like circus clowns into the world’s smallest rental car and zipped off in a Westerly direction.  The rental car guy laughed in our face when we told him we didn’t have a GPS and said dryly, “good luck.”

That night we stopped in Ioannina and had yummy gyros and Greek salad for a steal.  15 bucks for the 4 of us!  We had an “early” start that morning, at 11, and caught the ferry over to Corfu, which took just over an hour.  Not knowing where to go, we stopped at a few beaches before finally breaking down and getting online to check our beloved HostelWorld for hostel recommendations.  We found a great hostel called Sunrock, which is on a short cliff above a small, pristine beach with amazing sunset views.  Breakfast AND dinner is included in the price?!  We’ll stay 3 days.  We had an awesome time on Corfu, and celebrated Ferna’s 35th birthday there as well!  One of our new friends at Sunrock asked F how old he was turning, and after F replied, this 22-year-old backpacker replied, “holy shit.  That old.“  I did get stung by a wasp on his birthday, which, 6 days later is still swollen.  Nicole and Jack routinely kicked our asses in Scrabble but F got a bingo (where you use all 7 tiles on your rack) with the word PIEHOLE.  Turns out “piehole does not appear in Merriam-Webster’s Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 3rd Edition” according to Scrabble.com but I think maybe the 4th edition should consider adding it and stop being so elitist.

We had an uneventful drive back to Thessaloniki, since we used the tollway this time which cut our driving time down to 6 hours from 8.  Since we didn’t learn our lesson from last time, we again showed up to a bus station, hoping to buy a ticket on the overnight bus back to Istanbul, which left that night.  It doesn’t take a genius to guess the bus was sold out and we ended up having to travel the next day, my 30th birthday.  I was sort of bummed about having to take a 12 hour bus on my birthday, but oh well, unfortunately I don’t control the Turkish bus schedules.

All in all, it’s been a very fun and busy 2 weeks.  If  we are remiss again on our blogging duties, check out Nicole and Jack’s new blog about living in Prague: Czechin In!