Pamplona

From Erti:
"Pamplona' awesome. Its nice, very easy to get around, kinda cozy!! Va says its generally a quiet little town, but the running of bulls makes it pretty razy!!!

As soon as we got off the worst bus trip ever (an overnight from Sevilla with the loudest most terrible voiced person in the world - who also smoked all night long) we were greeted by singing, dancing, and copious drinking! (also, after the bus trip, me Va and Joj were all ridiculously tired and jealous of David's superhuman ability to sleep through anything!!!)

We arrived pretty early, before the run, on friday! We huffed it to the hostel and ditched our bags and tried to find a spot to watch the run from... This was kinda tough! Every bit of space with a view was´taken up and anything that could be climbed had already been clumb. (or climbeded, whichever you prefer) We found this one little spot where we could each stick our heads in and see through about 4 by 4
inch windows. We saw lots of legs and a few bulls!! It seemed not too wild or dangerous - and we felt pretty god about our ability to brave the toros!!!

Anyways, we followed that up with a huuuuuuge nap to make up for the bus ride. The nap lasted roughly 6 hours, though david and joj got up and scouted out the town for the last 2ish hours?"

Ok, David here, and our time is running out, so this is going to have to be a to be continued...but:
- we didnt get to run with the bulls
- we all got poked and even hit with police sticks
- people are still drunk and in the streets being loud at 11am...amazing!
- knechtel says pamplona is a lot like mardi gras, sans all the boobs...
- we head to barcelona on a night bus tonight (leaving at 1am), then two days in barcelona before a night bus to madrid, a day and night in madrid, and then our flight home!

Greetings from Sevilla!

Those of you who are familiar with our planned itinerary might be a little surprised to find us in Sevilla at this particular moment in time. So, I might add, are we. Ha!

Let me start out with a little story which might tip you off as to how this happened...

Some of you may remember "the South African dude" who we met in Berlin. He told us this funny story of two guys who arrived at the airport, went to check in, and discovered that they unknowingly had arrived two days late for their flight. Now, we all know that people are late for their flight, get the wrong time, la la la, but we thought this was hysterical and have since talked about it regularly. As a result we decided to check the date of our ticket and we were surprised to discover that we were running 2 days early! Good thing we checked.

So, Milan, the 4th of July, we roll up to the airport with plenty of time, congratulating ourselves for succesfully navigating subway and airport bus without speaking Italian and proceed directly to check in. We waited for EVER but finally arrived at the desk, and boldly displayed our confirmation number to the airline guy who looked it up and proceeded to regard us with what must have been a mixture of pity and humor and informed us that our flight departed exactly one month prior.

OOPs. So now both David and I have made our error which is already quite humourous. So. All the flights to Barcelona were full until Saturday (and ridiculously expensive we might add) and we began to inquire about other destinations in Spain. Sevilla had much cheaper tickets for whatever reason so we bought tickets for the next morning and proceeded to camp out in the airport for the night.

After dinner, David and I camped out in the airport where he continued to beat me mercilessly in NERTZ while Erti and Josiah went in search of beer (alas all the gelatto and beer places in the airport closed before we finished dinner) at some supermall which looked deceivingly close. They came back about an hour later with cold fries and fanta from McDonalds where they had feasted on Big Macs or some such meaty entity.

We spent an exceedingly uncomfortable and sleepless (except me) night on metal and concrete, me very thankful for my sleeping bag. And the next morning we boarded our flight for Sevilla!!

So. We are in Sevilla, it is still awesome and I thimk we are enjoying ourselves pretty well all things considered. OUr hostel is cheap in the Bario Santa Cruz, super close to everything and it is rebajas in Spain or big sale time for those of you who havent experienced them. We went to the Cathedral and the boys took a siesta while I went to try to find my Señora (no such luck, no one answered the door and I don´t have her number) and shopping.

Last night we went to Tex MEx, watched the Yankees game for a bit, drank beer and ate MExican food before heading to la Carboneria for some Agua de Sevilla and flamenco music.

Today we had breakfast at Cafe de Indias, where Nikki, Melanie and I had coffee nearly every day while I lived here, and we are about to go do some shoping and exploring and make a new plan for getting to los San Fermines in Pamplona. All this makes me exceedingly happy.

Salud!

Needed to add...

• Our train to Cinque Terra from Florance had a change in Pisa, so we stopped for a couple hours to check out the famous leaning tower (we = va, erti, and I...Joj wasn't interested and stayed in the train station with the bags). Well, first of all, its not that tall. But man, it leans. So it was pretty cool to see. Pisa was a neat little place too, though I don't think it would be worth much more than the 2 hours we gave it.


• We went out for a nice Italian meal our last night in Cinque Terra where Joj and I split a pasta dish and "feasted" on wild boar (chops). (Feasted was just the term we assigned to the wild boar before it arrived, because you can't just eat wild boar, you have to feast on it. In the end, it was quite a small feast, but pretty tasty?)


• We didn't get a spot in the cool cheap hostel last night, but we are moving over there tonight...

Italy, the land of birds

There are a lot of birds in Italy. And they like to chirp at 6 am. And 7 am. And all other times when it is light out (which seems to be 6 am - 10 pm).

But that is not really important. Italy is also the land of Gelato (which is just slightly different then ice cream (though Knechtel will insist otherwise) and is pretty cheap and everywhere...we seem to eat it 3-5 times a day (honestly)). Oh, and the other thing you need to know about Italy is 'Prego'. To you, it may just be a pasta sauce. To Italians, it means everything. 'Hello', 'You're welcome', 'Word', 'Go ahead', 'Goodbye', etc...

We went on an overnight train from Interlaken to Venice a few (I'm too lazy to figure out exactly when) days ago. Venice was awesome. At least I thought so. Joj wasn't as big a fan. It is amazing to walk around a city with no cars. It is all just alleys and canals. We got lost a lot. But there are signs to the major sights everywhere, so we just learned what was near us, or what was near where we were going, and follwed the signs.

In Venice, we just walked around, and took the place it. It was pretty neat. We went to another Guggenheim art museum (seems to be a theme). Other than that, we just walked around. My favorite moment in Venice was one evening, having a dinner of pasta and pizza at a small resturante, when a band came and played for about 30 minutes in the street in front of us. We were just finishing dinner, so we ordered another liter of wine and listened for a while.

After a couple days in Venice (two nights) we caught a morning train to Florance. Florance was ok. It was really hot. The first day we just walked around, and hung out. The next morning Joj, Erti and I got up early and headed over to the world famour Uffizi meseum hoping to beat the lines. Well when we got there at 8, the line was long, and we eneded up waiting til 11 before we got in. Erti actually left at 10 cause he was tired of waiting. Joj and I spent 3 hours in the meseum looking at really old art and listening to our audio tour. It was actually really awesome. Saw about 6 things I was completely familiar with (which is a lot, as my art history is weak as can be). The audio tour was key, as I had no real understanding about how things like prespective and depth had to be discovered over time. So that kinda of stuff was explained to us, which was hot. We didn't go see David (we were all kinda arted out, and I personally get to see a naked guy named David all the time, so it's no big deal...). We also found a tex-mex place that had pretty good burritos (Va and Erti liked it the most, but they were both really drunk...and the meat was terrible, but the rest of the burrito was pretty good...anyway...).

Eventually on to Cinque Terra, which is these five smaller villages on the coast. It was beautiful. We (me, Erti, Va) spent a day hiking the trails between the villages (though the hike ended early when one of the trails was closed). Other than that, we swan and hung out and chilled. It was nice to relax after lots of meseums and whatnot. The beach was small and rocky. The water was crystal clear, but dirty in spots. Overall, the beach itself was pretty average. But still, it was such a beautiful backdrop...The pictures will have to do the rest here...

We stayed in the basement of this guy, Guin Luigi, who had it divided into four rooms. The room was meant for two, but we crammed in to save money and cause there werent many open spaced. He was the nicest guy, and we went to his wine shop and he would just pour us shot after shot of liquor and wine to taste.


After three nights in the village of Monterossa This morning we got up and headed to Milan. Our flight to Barcelona is on the night of the 4th, so now we are waiting to see if we get space in the good, cheap hostel, or if we have to cross town for the other. That's all for noce. Hopefully others will fill in what I left out...

Prego.

No Sprechen Sie Deutsch

A quick story we forgot to relay!

So as we were walking around Germany, for the first few days, we would try to tell people that we did not speak German, and hopefully they would talk to us in English. So we would tell people "No Sprechen Sie Deutsch." Well, on our third day in Berlin, a kid from Florida pointed out to us that we were telling people "You don't speak German". Oops. We started using "Sprechen Sie English?".

We are in Florence now, leaving for the coast tomorrow morning (with a lunch/leaning tower stop in Pisa probably). Details on Venice and Florence at a later date...

Interlaken!!

So we took the all day train to Interlaken... It was long, but we had a table for the 4 of us on the train so we had some hot cards action goin' down!!! Anyways, we got into Interlaken mid afternoon and called a few hostels.

We chose Heidi's Hostel because it was cheap and close, but it ended up being really nice. Furhtermore, the old lady that worked there (we assumed her to be Heidi?) was ridiculously nice - she kept giving us chocolate! We got a 5 bed room to ourselves with the coolest shower in the world!!! We originally mistook it for a closet/dresser. It was about 2 feet by 2 feet, but the water pressure was AWESOME!

Let me interject (this iis actually VA). There has been some contention as to whether the shower water pressure was actually awesome...David says it was average (and that he wants nothing to do with this post...)(DAVID)

Alas... back to interlaken. Interlaken is sandwiched between 2 laken (hence inter for between and laken for lakes!!!) but the other 2 sides shoot straight up into the alps. Needless to say it is gorgeous! There's tons of outdoorsy stuff to do there and more watch and swiss army shops than you can shake a stick at!

We went to grab some groceries and got caught in the rain which was actually kind of nice. Once we got back to the hostel we were cooking our less than awesome food and we met some other travelers who were cooking their more than awesome Thai which they had way too much of and we consequently ate. It was delicious. We went out with said group for beers later that night and got pysched to skydive the next day....

The next morning we got up earlyish to go SKYDIVING. Our instructor, Stefan could have been confused for the Governator based on his accent which was great and he made some reference to Cant Touch This or somethign which is apparently somehow related to Eurotrip (the movie) which I dont understand because amazingly I have never seen it.

Skydiving was incredible! Words cannot describe it-we will just have to show you our pictures.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Interlaken, losing the Bee, and chilling out playing cards at Heidis before we caught the night train to Venice.

Erti and I appologize collectively for rambling over unimportant details. But you love it. Look for updates on Italy and the first Joj post sometime soon!
AWESOME.

Munich

In trying to catch up, here's Munich:

We stayed in this place called "The Tent". It's a big tent, with a wood floor, and for €8 you get a mat, as many blankets as you want, and breakfast in the morning. This is an uber good deal compared to the €22 they wanted everywhere else to stay in
10 and 12 person bunk rooms. And they have a really nice shower facility, and a big camp fire every night. It was, however, freezing. You should have seen Joj shivering under his 13 blankets the second night.

We took a Mike's Bike tour which was pretty awesome. It covered some quick history stuff and then went through the English Garden, which was absolutely beautiful. We road to a Beir Garden, where we had huge liters of beer and Brats (well, not Knechtel). We also rode past the nudist section of the park. Our guy told us to keep an eye out for the guy they've nicknamed "Tripod". We also got to check out the Deuchess (I'm sure I destroyed that spelling, but, whatever...) Meseum. It was really cool science meseum where you could play with pretty much every exhibit. We got there when it was only 1.5 hours until closing, so we didn't even get a chance to see 1/2 of it (it had some thousands of exhibits), but it was awesome.

That night we went to the Hofbrau House, the oldest Beir Garden in Munich. We ended up talking to these two German guys, one who was an actor, and the other worked with the EU. Talking politics and history with these two was absolutely fascinating.

The next day we went to Dachau, which was pretty intense. The meseum was very well done.

The next morning we were off to Interlaken...

End of Berlin

Sorry about the lack of updates. Internet was kinda sparse in Munich, and 14 times more expensive in Interlaken (that is not an exageration...we didn't touch the internet except to race to get that one line on with our last few Swiss Frank cents). Anyway...

When we last left you, we were in Berlin. We spent our next day in Berlin checking out the Reichstage, revisiting the Brandonberg Tor (gate), and the Hambuger-Bahnhof meseum (modern art). We also had lunch at a Kabob place who's owner went by Kojak (because he looks just like Kojak). He knew about 25 words of English, and we know about 5 words in German. Somehow, we managed to talk to him for over an hour. He was a really neat guy. He brought out Turkish tea for us, which was pretty bling bling. That night the three of us had a few drinks with a South African guy (who could do some wicked magic tricks) at a small corner shop with a table outside. (The guy, like every other one we've met so far, hit on Knechtel for a while...).

The next morning we got the pleasure of meeting up with Joj, who was fresh off a 36 (at least) hour, death defying train trip from the Ukraine to Berlin. That day we walked to give Joj a quick view of the city, tried to go to another mesuem, but it was closed (because it was Monday), checked out a Guggenheim museum with lots of interesting art (and several autographed pictures, including Biggie, Gwen Stephanie, Courtney Love, Keanu Reaves, and Cameron Diaz), and Tacheles.

Tacheles is a small area in Berlin right near our hostel. Pre WWII, it was a Jewish department store. Leading up to WWII, as the Jews fled, the Nazis used the building as an administrative building. During WWII, the building was mostly destroyed. And it was still that way when the Berlin wall came down. As everyone was running out of East Germany, a bunch of West German Hippies ran into E Germany to squat, and ended up living in this abandoned building. By the time the E German government got around to organizing the land that building was on, the people were so ingrained into the community that the community protested their being evicted. The government tracked down the family of the guy who used to own the department store, and he supposedly rents out space in the building to these mostly artists for about 1 euro a month. The building is covered top to bottom in grafitti. In the rooms are mostly studios where they both create and display their art. In the courtyard, a mixture of art, a hippie bus (also covered in grafitti), a bar, and a bon fire. Every night, we heard music coming form Tacheles, though we never made it over. All in all, a pretty awesome place.

That night, we boarded an overnight train for Munich (in seats, not beds)...

(Hopefully we can get the rest of the blog caught up soon)...

Erti and David

10 cent per 30 seconds =

Quick post!


We jumped out a plane from 12000 feet!