How classy do I look in my pjs?
Anyway, yeah, welcome to sunny Istanbul! Who’d have thought!
Anzac Cove, Gallipoli and more of Turkey
October 24, 2006The next day we took a bus to Eceabat, a town near Gallipoli, and the day after visited Anzac Cove. It was pretty incredible. We learnt a lot about the battle - from both our side and the Turk’s side. It was so strange standing there - Anzac Cove is so beautiful as well - and knowing that one of the most important battles in Australian history took place here. It was also strange because I felt so far away from home, and to think that these young men, many younger than me, would have had that same feeling, but died on this soil as well. Pretty horrible. We went to all the memorials for Aussie soldiers and also a major NZ one and a Turkish one. We also saw the trenches and some important landmarks in the battle. As we were walking along, the tour guide found 2 lead balls - which he gave to Thad and I - that had come from a rocket used in the war. Cool.
Now we are in Selcuk, after another long and painful bus ride - we forgot Turkey was so big! We went and saw Ephesus today - a very important city of the Roman Empire. The ruins were insane. Tomorrow we are heading to Pamukkale and, fingers crossed, from there to Olympos for treehouse accomodation and more roman ruins. Unfortunately because it’s the end of Ramazan, all the locals are catching buses everywhere for festivals, and almost everything is booked out, so we have to try and wing it. Eek.
Turkey is fantastic and refreshingly different to anything else we’ve seen on this trip. The people are very friendly (and slightly manipulative), the food fantastic, the landscape dry and very much like Australia. Because of Ramazan, Muslim people do not eat when the sun is up, so we’ve gotten used to being woken up at 3am by two men walking through the street banging big drums to wake people up so they can eat. Also, 5 times a day, the loud speakers crackle into action to tell people when to pray. Turkish people really are very friendly though. And they love Australians. We’ve gotten discounts and hand shakes and kisses and everything haha! Oh, and most Turkish people speak English with an Australian accent, especially around Gallipoli, where all the tourists are Australian. It’s hilarious. I actually asked one of the hostel workers which part of Australia he was from - his accent was SO THICK, but he’s actually Turkish. He’s becoming an Aussie citizen though in a few months, because of the passion he has put into Gallipoli and anzac cove. His citizenship ceremony is going to be held on the beach that the troops landed at. Wow.
Olomouc to Istanbul
October 20, 2006OK, Olomouc is one of the coolest places ever. It has the beauty of Prague but no crowds. Thank god. The cute “old town” architecture is present through the entire town, which is also blessed with abundant interesting churches and museums plus a high student population which means a cool bar scene! Highight was surely going to a bar in a dodgy old communist era Russian aeroplane. It still had the aeroplane seats, sold crappy beer in cans and a had a constant megamix of 80s and 90s hits playing on the dancefloor (first class). Wicked. We also, while on a walk, met up with an American who started a microwave popcorn factory here. We got a free tour of his factory and 10 packets of free popcorn. Sweet! Of course, since then, we haven’t been able to find a microwave. For god’s sake!
Next was Budapest - we were so city-ed out by this stage that we really didn’t give this city the attention it deserved. Not to mention it was GIGANTIC and largely unnavigatable. We settled for doing the main sites around the Danube - which were very impressive.
We went for a break next to the High Tatras in Slovakia. These mountains are the highest of the Carpathian Range and my god they are impressive. It was breathtaking. We chilled out a lot - drank hot chocolate and ate chicken soup and did wintery things - in between HIKING of course! Our main hike took us from 1000m (our accomodation) to 1700m in 3 hours through forest, before we took a chair lift to 2150m. Wow. It was absolutely insane.
Hell train rides took us to Brasov in Romania, a picturesque little town that gets swamped by tourists in summer because it is close to Bran Castle - famous as Bram Stoker’s Dracula castle. The real Dracula never came here but the castle itself is really cute and perched right on the edge of a cliff. Brasov itself is very cute and quaint with an interesting German Saxon history. I sort of blew our budget here by spending 100 pounds on a new winter jacket. OOPS. It’s awesome though - I look like Napoleon.
From Brasov we made an ill-fated trip to Bucharest - turns out that this untouristy city happened to be holding a karate championship and all accomodation was booked out. So back to Brasov we went and had to do the trip again the next day - only to get straight onto our 20 hour train ride to Istanbul. Fun!
The train ride we knew was going to be hell - leaving at 1pm and arriving at 8am the next day, but we secured a compartment with just us four and settled down to a long ride. I discovered a new favourite pastime - sticking my head out the window of the train. We went past the Romanian border control and had our passports checked for exit when about 5 poeple got on with many bags and boxes got on. Not uncommon on train journeys. Anyway, I was pleasantly enjoying my new hobby, which I interspersed with waving at little kids who were watching the train when suddenly there were about 4 men waving frantically from the ground. Wow, they’re eager I thought, and then looked up to see, sailing slow motion through the air, all the bags and boxes that were on the train floating away. One of the bags broke open and all these zip lock bags filled with powder dropped out and the men on the ground
desperately collected it all. There was suddenly all this yelling on the train as the people who threw the stuff off ran back to their compartments. I shoved everyone back in our compartment so as not to get in their way and waited a while, and we pulled into the Bulgarian border control - and the people had disappeared.
Things were pretty uneventful after that, although we had to get off the train at 3am for Turkish border control and to buy a visa. Beccie had trouble getting hers - at first she was told she didn’t need one and then was marched back and bought one - but it was only for 15 days instead of two months like ours. Apparently they don’t like Italian citizens too much. Bugger. Luckily, Beccie had exactly 15 days until her flight out but it’s cutting it pretty fine!
We arrived in Istanbul pretty tired but determined to see a bit, so we started off with Lunch (essential) at a cafe which was DELICIOUS. We then headed to the Blue Mosque, which was awash with people as it is currently Ramazan, a major Islamic religious festival. As we entered a man bounded up to us and began telling us about what was going on before ushering us to the entrance. Deeply offended when Claire asked how much it was to get in, he said it was free, and he was also a free guide - doing it out of the goodness of his heart. Well, the mosque was amazing and the tour great and informative - but there was a catch - he was kind enough to show us his turkish RUG SHOP! Sigh. But it was good to get a free tour. Poor sod, did we REALLY look like we could afford a rug? I mean most of us hadn’t showered for about 4 days.
Kutna Hora - Sedlec Ossuary (Bone Church)
October 3, 2006We took a day trip from Prague to visit Kutna Hora, a medieval town east of Prague. The main attraction there, and our sole reason for making this town a priority on this trip, is Sedlec Ossuary, an old church decorated in human bones.
The church itself was built in the 1400s, with a church on the top floor and the lower floor an ossuary to use as a mass grave for plague victims and graves dug up to make room for new ones.
The bones were originally stacked up in the ossuary, however in 1870 by a woodcarver was commissioned to rearrange them. Using bones from over 40,000 bodies, he created chalices, crosses, a full coat of arms and a chandelier that uses each bone in the body at each once. In each corner of the church are huge mounds of bounds decorated by skulls.
It was a creepy, macabre and unbelievably fascinating place. After spending a while in there looking at them all, I found myself feeling my face and head and wondering what MY skull would look like in the masses.
Beccie joins us in Poland
September 30, 2006We whooshed to Warsaw, Poland, where we were meeting Beccie YAY! We had to catch an overnight bus which was AWFUL because it was packed and we couldn’t even spread over two seats. We arrived in Warsaw and just slept for the first day, as did Beccie who had just spent 16 hours in a London airport. In Warsaw we spent most of our time looking at stuff to do with the Jewish population that once lived there. We visited a museum, cemetary and Nazi prison. It’s insane to see how much the Warsaw Jews were forced to suffer - of the 300,000 who lived there before the war, only about 3,000 survived. The architecture was quite grey slab like in Warsaw as well - mainly because the whole city was levelled by the end of the war and everything had to be rebuilt - for every 20 buildings, only 3 were left standing by 1945.
We continued on to Krakow, the old royal capital of Poland. Unlike Warsaw, Krakow was not bombed as badly in the war and thus stil had the pretty architecture, colourful baroque buildings a a pretty old town. On one of our days there we took a day trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest concentration and death camp in Poland, which I cannot even put into words. We saw the gas chambers and incinerators, the cramped living conditions and the warehouses of items that the Nazis kept to reuse - spectacles, shoes and gold teeth but also the hair of the victims to be made into cloth and mounds of baby’s clothes. It was unbelievably haunting. The odd thing was that the outside was very pretty - cobblestoned streets lined with trees and all the houses were cute red brick barn like barracks. But the atrocities that occured inside were just dizzying to even think about. We also visited Schindler’s factory and walked around the Jewish Quarter where we were staying.
We’ve now entered Prague and have been looking around. It is by far the prettiest city we’ve seen, with all of it’s church spires piercing the skies, but also the most touristy, in some places you can barely walk because of all the tour groups. We also popped to Kutna Hora to see a bone church, but more about that later.
Tomorrow we’re heading to Olomouc, also in the czech republic, a nice university town that was recommended to us.
Speak soon x x x
