Zehr Goot!

We made is successfully to Vienna, Austria and what a great city this is! It is very clean and has many little parks and benches to rest on. We found a great park near a beautiful cathedral and had our lunch there. The city has great lounge chairs that are available to anyone free of cost, so we grabbed two and spent a good amount of time there. In fact, that's probably where we're headed as soon as we leave this internet cafe.

When we first got here, we arrived relatively late, so we got a restaurant recommendation from the hotel. The restaurant had quit serving food, so we enjoyed two great Austrian beers and ate afterwards at a street vendor which was DELICIOUS!! Haha! Filafel (sp?) and some chicken wrap. A few things were a little lost in translation. Phill asked what his options were for meat in his wrap and the vendor told him either chicken or bird. He went with chicken! Everyone is very friendly and helpful though!

Our hotel has two resident newfoundlands that hang out everyday in the courtyard in the back. They're absolutely massive and very friendly. The hotel also has an incredible breakfast buffet and a great, rickety old fashioned elevator.

This city has an entirely different feel than any other city we've visited yet. Without meaning to, we were really able to stay off the main tourist track for the majority of the day yesterday. It wasn't until we accidentally popped out on the shopping mecca of Vienna that we realized other tourists were even here! And of those tourists, we've heard very, very little english speaking folks.

Trekking North

Well, we reluctantly left Mark and Adrienne's small village in Greece and headed north to Athens by bus. We're out into the wild again! We were quite spoiled with delicious, authentic food and the quiet atmosphere of the small village. And of course, you can't beat the 5-star accomodations of Mark and Adrienne's home!

We're happy to report that the bus travel went a million times smoother this time around. We had added an extra day in Athens a while back when we booked our hotel and flight. After the fact, people kept telling us that it was a dirty city and not all that great. We were really wishing that we didn't have three nights there. But, it's turned out to be a good way to see Athens. It's extremely hot here, so we have a tough time doing all of Athens in one day. The extra days allow us to see it at our leisure. So, yesterday we read books and lazed around our air-conditioned hotel until about 2pm. Then we braved the city!

We spent some time shopping in the Plaka and then made our way to the new Acropolis Museum. They museum only costs 1 euro currently as a promotional price for the first 6 months. They had a great video playing that talked all about the history of the Parthenon. It's pretty fascinating the way that it was built. There's some optical illusions engineered into the construction. During the Ottoman Empire, much of it was destroyed and Lord Elgin took four large pieces from the marble freize - the Elgin Marbles. A museum in Britian currently houses them and they have yet to return them to Greece. The new Acropolis Museum has a place saved in the museum for the marble pieces on the chance that they are returned.

We're spending the day today slowly sightseeing as well. We'll go see the Acropolis and an old stadium (blanking on the name) and some other Athens sights. I imagine we'll call it a night early and head back to our hotel for some sort of picnic dinner in our room. We've been eating at our hotel restaurant which is not very adventurous, but we aren't feeling too guilty about that after all the great food in the village!

We have a flight to Vienna tomorrow afternoon. Greece and Italy have been incredible, but we're really looking forward to heading north for some cooler weather. We've heard Vienna is in the 70s, so that will be such a nice break from the heat. We've also heard all about Viennese coffee and coffeehouses. We'll keep you posted on what we find.

The Greek Way

World languages are really fascinating. Adrienne had a party at their house the other night and the mixture of people was neat. All of them have some connection to the Greek culture, whether it be a spouse, parent, or they themselves live in Greece part or all of the year. Most of them speak Greek and English, but a couple speak only Greek. To listen to the way that all of our diverse backgrounds and languages mixed and communicated was so interesting. Some speak, some translate...and overall we all get the same enjoyment you feel at any dinner party of friends. It was great to listen to.

We walked around the village with Adrienne and looked at the stone houses and restaurants and tried to imagine what it must have been like here during the Turkish occupation. Adrienne walked us up to the mountain where the village water comes from. It comes straight from inside the mountain and diverts into all sorts of little canals that run throughout town next to the buildings. They're really cute. Adrienne challenged us to see who could keep their feet in the water the longest because it's so painfully cold. Phill won! Mark says they used to take a watermelon (kar-poo-zee in Greek) up there and put it in the water until it would eventually burst open.

Afterwards, she took us to this little cafe for a soda. We met a guy in there named Nikos. He gave Phill a sip of whatever he was drinking which we think must have been the equivalent of Greek Moonshine. Grinning, Nikos called it "medicine."

We've been eating so much great Greek food. Greek salad, souvlaki, mousakkah, dolmades, etc. Yesterday we had red mullet fish (bar-boon-yahs in Greek) that are fried whole, heads and all. I think the Greeks might eat it that way too. I cut the head off, opened the fish up, pulled out the spine and ate the meat. It's kind of a lot of work for a little bit of meat, but delicious!

We spent the day at Monemvasia yesterday which is an old city on a rock on the southern coast of Greece. It was the cutest little place with some tourists shops and old ruins of churches. Some people still live there, but houses are around 2 million euros if you can imagine - and they're tiny. We spent the afternoon swimming in the Mediterranean. As Uncle Louie put it yesterday - "It's another damn beautiful day in Greece."

Big Fat Greek Vacation

We made it to Greece on Friday evening after about 37 hours of traveling! The majority of the travel wasn't too bad. We caught a metro out of Sorrento at 6am on Thursday, a train at 10am, another connection train around 1pm, a bus to the ferry terminal in Bari, and then an overnight ferry to Patras, Greece. The ferry was actually kind of fun! We met two Canadians from Montreal traveling to Greece that we hung out with in the ferry terminal and the entire time on the boat. We spent the evening playing games and enjoying the boat with them. I think we must have stayed up until 1am or so, which included a "Disco Tech" bar which was totally empty and hilariously lame. We asked them to play some North American music. Didn't get any really, but we did happily belt out Toto's "The Rain's Down in Africa" together. Good times! (the song's been stuck in our heads for days now!)

Sleeping accommodations were too funny. It's not a normal ferry. It had a pool, restaurant, bar, etc. I know that sounds incredible...but picture a ferry version of a pool. It's not the glam of a cruise ship. But nicer than a train nonetheless. Our ticket gave us an airline-type seat, but they hardly reclined at all, so we ended up sleeping on the deck with all the other backpackers. You should have seen it! People and their stuff sprawled out and sleeping in every little nook and cranny of this boat. One guy was spread eagle in the kid's playhouse area of the ship. So, we got into our little sleeping bag things and crashed on the floor also between chair legs. It was quite an experience.

Then our bus trips in Greece were an entirely different story. It was a complete nightmare!! I don't think the Greek people were very thrilled with us Americans. They were less than friendly - to say it politely. And then our bus broke down on the trip from Patras to Corinth. No one spoke English to let us know what was going on. All we knew was that the bus driver had several belts on the ground...no good! And then in Corinth they were downright nasty to us and would tell us that we couldn't get on the bus and that another would be there in 5 minutes...which it wasn't! At any rate, we did finally get onto a bus that was an hour and fifteen minute standing room only. We didn't care. We were just glad to be on it.

The remainder of our Greek experience, however, has been incredible! This village is the cutest, most quaint little place. We are totally in love with this place. Mark and Adrienne's house it incredible and the view is unbelievable. We had dinner last night with several of the people from the village which was the best experience. Everyone was so friendly and told us all sorts of stories from their past village experiences. These are exactly the authentic experiences that we wanted out of our Europe trip.

We wanted to post some pictures of our adventures. They're from Rome to now.

Quick Post

Unfortunately, we haven't had as much access to internet as we originally had thought, so our posts have been slow in between. I have to keep this brief as well, but wanted to update you on our recent whereabouts. Since our last time we posted, we've been through Siena, Rome, and now we're in Sorrento, Italy. They've all been great for their own unique traits. I think Sorrento will probably be our favorite thus far, thought Rome is kind of unbeatable in many ways.

When in Rome...
- the crazy guy on the metro actually kicks a passenger that denies him money. Wow...really!?! Haven't even seen that in DC yet.
- there's that really pleasant big city smog cloud. Lovely...
- internet is slower than Red Creek dial up. How is that possible?
- the history, however, is beyond cool! Hundreds of years beyond some of the oldest ruins we saw at Mesa Verde on our way across country.

Rome is a noisy, busy and chaotic city, but once you get past that, there's acres of ancient city all at your fingertips. You don't just read history here...you see it. It's amazing to think that we've walked on the same roads that Mussolini, Michaelangelo, Julius Ceasar (just to name a few) have walked on hundreds of years ago. It's truly a phenomenal place.

We're in Sorrento for the next couple of days. The coastline is gorgeous. We plan to take a break from sightseeing for a couple of days and really enjoy some vacation time in this cliffside mediterranean (sp?) village.

We will be in Greece with family within the next couple of days. Will do our best to post pics there.

Pictures

Sorry to be so brief on this post, but we're headed out this morning to our next stop - Siena, Italy. We spent the past two nights in Florence which was really nice. We walked around town the first night until our feet about fell off, but we found a great park with an incredible view of the city, so that made it all worth it. And then we took a day trip to Greve in Chianti yesterday and tasted several Chianti Classicos - the region's claim to fame.

I wanted to attach a few pictures of our trip so far just so that you could see them. We're struggling a bit with loading pics, etc. on internet cafe computers, but I think this link will work. We'll update again soon.

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e248/mac030307/?albumview=slideshow

Living on pizza and prosciutto

We are in Milan today. It wasn't exactly how we had planned it, but we think it will work out better in the end. Our plan had been to go to the Cinque Terre region and a lack of accomodation options left us with few choices, so we bagged that plan and headed for Milan. We'll have to do Cinque Terre at the end of our trip.

Our day today was pretty lazy. We actually slept away a good 3 hours of it, but we must have been still catching up because it felt great! Then we walked into downtown to see the Duomo which was spectacular! Apparently it is the fourth largest in Europe. I can't even begin to guess how many ornately carved spires come out the top of this church. The stone they used is a white-ish color, so it reminds me of an elegantly decorated wedding cake. Even the buttresses are carved and fancy. And of course the inside was just as impressive. The ceilings throughout the nave and the entire cathedral are incredibly high - moreso than the National Cathedral. It is able to seat 10,000 people. The stained glass inside is some of the most beautiful glass I've seen. Instead of pieces of glass put together like a mosaic, it's more like many, many squares painted on and put together to create a scene. The windows directly behind the altar were enormous. It was a beautiful church overall. I would say the trip to Milan is worth is just for this building alone.

Milan is very different from Venice. It has a very designer-esque feel. If you like shopping, Milan is the place to be.

We spent the evening taking it relatively easy. We were beginning to feel really dumb not knowing a word if Italian. We found that when anyone would utter a single word of English to us, we would automatically give up trying Italian altogether, which really isn't very nice considering we're visiting their country. So, we sat in our room this afternoon practicing some basic and essential phrases. We can say things including: we'd like...beer...wine...table for two...check please...where is...what time...to go please...etc. We practiced tonight buying our prosciutto pizza and vino rosso from the local pizzeria. (by the way...you really can live on pizza and wine here we've realized). It worked out pretty good for us and we're already feeling a bit more confident. We have another 10 days or so here...we'll be pros in no time. Ha...right...

We want to include pictures eventually, but we haven't found a computer that wants to download them yet. We're searching and will post as soon as we can.