I'm Back! Let's Rehash This Blog!

High Five! We're posting again! Saranda, Albania

I'm back baby! It's been a long time since I've posted anything in here... the monotony of the Peace Corps life seemed like it had lost its pizazz… I felt as though my readers (as few as there may have been!) may have gotten bored with reading the same things day in and day out, but alas, here I am again. New format, new attitude, new life.

Life has changed drastically for me over the past six months. I have been traveling extensively through Eastern Europe. What was supposed to be a nice three month trip before returning to the States has manifested itself into a love of travel; into seeing the world in its entirety, and delaying really growing up for as long as possible. But as great as taking a billion pictures is, writing down the experiences so I don’t forget them seems just as important. Many people has displayed interest in following these travels, so I thought I’d get back on this blog and slowly start replaying the crazy last six months that I’ve had.

Not a shocker if you’ve read this blog, but there has been a lot of beer and some great times with amazing people. However now, the stories have changed and it is not the same thing every day. Rather, I have experienced so many different cultures and met so many different people from throughout the world. Now I’d like to share those experiences with anybody interested and willing to read them. And, as always, there will be many pictures to accompany them. Quickly, I’d like to run through the trip that I just had, and outline what I think is coming in the near future.

I will go into more detail in later posts and rehash the end of my Peace Corps experience, but I have learned that six page posts are just too much for people to read, so now I will be posting more often and they will be much shorter and easier to read.

My Euro trip was something that I thought was original. I was wrong. There are so many people that travel, and there are so many interesting stories and routes that I have heard. Here was mine, in its absolute simplest form. I put the country names in bold font because there were many cities in some of the countries:

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Casablanca, Morocco (overnight)

Milan, Italy (one day layover)

Tallinn, Estonia

Riga, Latvia

Vilnius, Trakai, Lithuania

Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Poland

Prague, Czech Republic

Budapest, Hungary

Belgrade, Novi Sad, Serbia

Skopje, Macedonia

Thessaloniki, Athens, Nafplio, Meteora, Santorini, Greece

Bucharest, Sinaia, Brasov, Romania

Sofia, Bansko, Bulgaria

Zagreb, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Split, Croatia

Sarajevo, Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina

Kotor, Montenegro

Tirana, Berat, Saranda, Albania

Pristina, Kosovo

            That was the entire last trip. I have since started a new one that began with ten days in Israel through the Golan Heights, Tzfat, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the Negev Desert in the south. From there I flew to Istanbul, Turkey for four days, and am currently sitting in a hostel in Izmir, trying to plot out the next few days before a pilgrimage back to Burkina to see Tanya and some other good people before some more crazy traveling… It’s a strange route, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to see the people you love. After Burkina, it'll be back to Turkey for maybe a couple weeks, and then a quick jaunt through Armenia and Georgia, and just maybe Azerbaijan. Then, the tentative plan is to travel through Southeast Asia. I've got the travel bug, and it's been biting me pretty hard.

            That’s all for now, I don’t want to bore anybody on the first post in a very, very long time. More to come later. As has become a bit of a cliché in this blog, I’m saying now that I will be updating regularly. Until next time fellow humans!

Here's just a couple pictures, because they are more fun than words. Formatting them into the blog doesn't make sense for this post, so I'm just going to blast them all at once. This is a random snatch and grab, not a very systematic choosing of photos; there are too many!

With Tallinn, Estonia at night in the background

With Jessica (fellow PCV) & Roel, a new friend, in an ice bar in Tallinn

Childhood best friend Mike came to visit for a couple weeks. Sunset in Athens

New friends Tim and Tania inside of Bran Castle (Dracula's Castle) in Brasov, Romania

Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Second largest government building in the world. Can you guess the first?

Tanya came to visit me in Greece. She and I in Meteora. Truly an incredible place

Meteora is so beautiful.

Torturous food challenge in Riga, Latvia. That is a big slab of pork.

The rolling mountains outside of Skopje, Macedonia

Palace of Culture and Science shrouded by fog in Warsaw, Poland

My brother Nathan came to visit me in Croatia. This is in Split.

New friends in Kotor, Montenegro. It looked like a painting in real life. Amazing!

Disclaimer: Most pictures here are not of their original quality... they take forever to upload so I lowered the quality and resolution. I have the originals if anybody would like to see them.