I’ve passed my six month mark of traveling, and I have to say I’ve become quite used to flitting from place to place. I spent another week in Turkey after “celebrating” the new year on the farm (aka going to bed at 11:30pm). I said goodbye to my new friends at the farm, with the possibility of seeing them again someday, and boarded a bus back to Istanbul. I couchsurfed one night with a guy named Yasin, who lived close to the airport. He was a great guy and we had fun talking about our travel adventures, but a real highlight was meeting his parents, who were in town to visit from a village near the Black Sea. Neither of them spoke English, but we tried to communicate with my limited Turkish, a lot of hand gestures, and last-resort Google Translating. Yasin’s mother made his favorite dish for dinner- dolma, grape leaves stuffed with rice. We also had tahana, a soup made from sun-dried tomato powder and wheat. It’s made during the summer months to be enjoyed during the winter, and it was delicious. For dessert we had a dish of kadayif threads fried in butter and sugar water, with hazelnuts sprinkled on top. It was quite decadent.
The next morning, after a Turkish breakfast of bread and fresh fruit complete with homemade butter, cheese, and jams from Yasin’s mother, I said a bittersweet goodbye and headed out. Yasin’s father was kind enough to take me to the airport. I arrived early enough to enjoy a guilty-pleasure Starbucks latte and spend the last of my lira on chocolate-coffee truffles, which I ended up eating for lunch, along with a few mandarins and some hazelnuts that Yasin’s mother packed for me. These last moments in Turkey were enjoyable- it’s not often that I get to spend time with families, though when I do I’m usually treated like a member. I was glad to be apart of Yasin’s family for a brief time. It filled my heart with warmth before I boarded the plane, Prague-bound.
While planning my trip in the United States, Turkey was as far as I got. Everything after I left will be something dreamed up or happened upon during my time in Europe. The first of these adventures was visiting my friend Ryan and his wife Kiki in Prague. Ryan, formerly known as Griffin, was one of my co-workers at American Village, and we had a blast there.
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Griffin making s'mores
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Ryan teaches English in Prague, and Kiki is a freelance graphic designer. It was great to crash with them for a few days, and spend some time exploring a place I had already visited in 2013. They pitched me a tent (literally) and gave me a not so touristic tour around the city. We visited Plzen, home of the original Pilsner beer, and went on a brewery tour (my first!). We also checked out the Slav Epic, Alphonse Mucha’s masterpiece, which I had seen a few years ago with my friend Marissa. It was really great to spend time with people I already knew, and Ryan and Kiki are great company. I was really impressed by the lifestyle they had cultivated in Prague- what a great way to spend your late 20s. It gave me ideas for the future- traveling and volunteering on farms is nice, but I think it would be cool to stay somewhere for a longer period of time, to fully immerse myself in the culture and learn a new language. Prague is definitely a cool place to do that!
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Kiki and Ryan |
On the days that Ryan and Kiki worked, I was free to explore the city on my own. I skipped the castle and bridge, the tourist attractions I had already seen in 2013, and went to Vysegrad to wander around and holed up in several coffeeshops to read and start studying. I have plans to take the Graduate Record Exam in March in Bucharest, and want to take the next couple of months to relearn math and work on my vocabulary. After a fairly lengthy hunt through a multilevel bookstore, Ryan and I found a reasonably-priced GRE book, and it has been my steadfast companion for the last week.
After six days in Prague, I hopped on an early morning train to Budapest. The ride was almost seven hours, but very pleasant. There was wi-fi on the train, and I had a section to myself, so I could spread out my work on the little table in between seats. For lunch I had cream cheese, a wheat roll, a small tub of black olives, and a banana, all purchased at the Billa before hopping on the train. I just started an online Coursera course on the U.S. Food System, offered through Johns Hopkins, so I was able to watch all the lectures for the week, do the readings, and take the quiz. It’s been almost three years since I graduated college, and I must say this online course really refreshing- I miss learning in an academic setting. I signed up for another food/nutrition course offered through Stanford, and I suspect both will help me keep busy during my time house-sitting in Romania.
My time in Budapest was brief, though I had visited before (again in 2013) so I just hung out with my CS host, Laszlo, the entire time. He really wanted to make pad thai the night I arrived, so we went to a specialty store close to the main market that had every kind of Asian sauce you could want, plus herbs, spices, noodles, and other gourmet ingredients from all over the world. I spied a large sack of masa harina flour, and bought it to make corn tortillas at the house. As you could probably understand, I’m very excited to start cooking again.
My full day in Budapest consisted mostly of walking around the city and seeing neighborhoods I hadn’t visited the last time. Laszlo was cool with me cooking for the both of us, so I made scrambled eggs and peppers for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and pasta with mushroom and tomato sauce for dinner. It was simple fare, but as always it’s nice to share a meal with somebody.
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| Main Market in Budapest |
Another early, long train ride, and I was back in Timisoara, Romania (you can read about my first time here). I was fortunate enough to stay with my Couchsurfing family, and we had a really great reunion and catch-up. Bogdan and Mihaela invited me to a dinner party with their friends, and the next day I went to their son Alex’s English group. All of the kids were ages 13-15, and spoke excellent English. They had a great time peppering me with questions about my life and I asked them about living in Romania and learning English. Overall it was fun to hang out with Romanian kids I could communicate with, and get a better idea of their lives in Romania.
After the class, Mihaela and I went to the train station to pick up Allison- I’m not sure how much detail I’ve given you about this house-sitting experience, but I have a partner in crime, so to speak. Allison's been hopping around Europe for almost three years, mixing travel with au pairing. She's also a graphic designer and pretty amazing artist. We’re the same age, and she’s from LeRoy, Minnesota, which made me think I’d get along with her pretty instantly- something about meeting people from the Midwest, let alone Minnesota, gives me a good feeling. Anyway, it was kind of fun to play the role of host-ish, as I was the one being picked up from the train station and taken to the pub for lunch three months before. I’ve become a vegetarian since the last time I was there, so I didn’t order ribs this time around, though I highly recommended them to Allison!
We had a fun evening with Bogdan and Mihaela, but unfortunately our train to Brasov was the next morning at 8am. So we woke up early and packed our provisions of bread, cheese, red pepper, oranges, bananas, and (of course) dark chocolate, which would hopefully get us through the 9 and a half hour train ride across Romania. The snow gradually appeared as we made our way further into Romania. By the time we reached the Transylvania region, it was snowing quite heavily, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was in Minnesota, but Allison just came from Austria so she was quite used to it.
Our train arrived about half an hour late, which wasn’t bad compared to Romanian standards (in the past I’ve been on 2+ hour delayed trains). Colin, the owner of the house in Bod, met us at the station, and drove us in his massive Land Rover to the village, where we have remained ever since! For the next week, Allison and I are going through “orientation”- seeing how the house works, meeting neighbors, learning Romanian- yesterday we spent three hours on that topic alone. Colin is English, but has lived in Romania for over 20 years, and is a really good Romanian teacher. It helps that Romanian is Latin-based, since I've formally studied French and Spanish, and know some Italian. We hope to have at least the basics down before he leaves in a few days.
I think that’s it for now!
If you’re interested in learning more about Allison, or reading her blog as she memorializes our time together in a tiny village somewhere in Transylvania, you can check it out here.
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