About to leave for home

After 5 days out in the wilderness (well, not so much the wilderness as small farming towns), I am back in Gura Humorului. As I said in my last post, it is a very small town, so it is rather funny that it feels like 'civilization' compared to where we've been. Of course I will be posting nice detailed entries complete with pictures when I get home (I'm a bit dissapointed that I couldn't post them while actually in Romania. It was nice having all of you follow along with my adventures.), but I'll just give you a quick run down of where I've been and where I'm going.

First things first, where I've been over the past week:
-From Gura Humorului, we headed out to Vatra Moldovita (tiny farming town surrounding the Moldovita Monastery), where we stayed in a traditional Romanian farmhouse for two nights.
-After two days without a shower, we were ready to move on, and we left for Suceavita. Suceavita is another small town, but with less farming. Most of the activity in Suceavita seemed to revolve around the Monastery. There was not much to do or see in Suceavita, so we moved on after one night.
-After hitchhiking to Radauti to use the ATM, we caught a train to Putna. Putna is about 10 km from the Ukranian border, and the monastery there is actually home to a very active community of monks. We befriended a preist who spoke English, and stayed for two nights in the campground run by the monks, after which we returned to Gura Humorului.

Where I'm going now:
-I am leaving for Cluj-Napoca by train at about 3pm today. Patrick is staying in Romania for another two weeks before heading back to France until mid-August, so he will acompany me as far as Vatra Dornei. I will arrive in Cluj at about 8pm.
-I had hoped to spend the night in Cluj, but I don't think that is going to work out, so I will get on a sleeping car at about 1am bound for Budapest. My train will arrive in Budapest at about 8am.
-My flight leaves Budapest for London at about 3pm. So that gives me 7 hours to get from the train station to the airport (more time than strictly necessary? I think so).
-I'll get into London Gatwick at around 6pm on Tuesday. My flight to Detroit Metro leaves Wednesday at around noon. Because London is ridiculuosly expensive, I plan on spending the night in the airport. So I will have about 16 hours to find England football jerseys. Wish me luck :).

Bucovina

Here's a quick update to let you all know where I am and what I am doing! I am currently in the town of Gura Humoruliu in the Bucovina region of Romania. Bucovina is in northeastern Romania. If you look at the map, it is the orange region at the top-right. Gura Humorului is a little over 30 kilometers west of Suceava, which is on the map. I haven't been able to update lately because it is a very small town, and I haven't much hope of finding somewhere that has wireless internet. Therefore, I am writing this update from a computer in Gura Humoruliu's one "Internet Cafe" (which is less of a cafe and more of a room full of computers where adolescent boys sit and play video games). However, I have been taking lots of pictures and writing detailed updates on my computer, which I promise to post as soon as I can. Unfortunately that may not happen until I am back in the U.S.


The study abroad program is over, as I may have mentioned before, and I am now traveling with my friend Patrick. He is a photo journalist, and he is in Romania to develop a story on the Painted Monestaries of Bucovina and tourism in this region. If you'd like to see some of his previous work from China and northern Michigan, visit his website at www.pwellever.com. Today we visited the first of several monestaries, Voronet, which is also the most famous. At 4 kilometers outside of Gura Humoruliu, it is the easiest to get to from where we are staying (we are staying in a hotel room that costs aproximately $14 per night!). Tomorrow we will visit the next nearest, which is called Humor, and from there we need to decide how we are going to get to the other monestaries (all of which are out of walking distance). It is wonderful to be back in Romania, and the hospitality here is amazing. I don't know how I'm going to leave to go home!

Thanks for all the comments and emails! I love reading them!

Noapte Buna! (good night)

The Black Sea- Friday, June 23

The following day we did not have class, as it was a Friday, and so we left at 11 am for the beach. Koc University is not far from the town Kilyos on the Black Sea, in fact you can see the point where the Bosphorus opens into the Black Sea from the campus. The beach was nice; it wasn’t too crowded or anything, and we had very nice weather. It was hot and sunny (as it was for my entire stay in Turkey), and the water was clear and refreshing. The Black Sea was interesting in that it was salty and had waves like the ocean, but like a large lake, it did not seem to have very dramatic tides. From where we were located, we could see ships lined up waiting for their turn to go through the narrow Bosphorus. At first it didn’t seem like they were moving at all, but throughout the day, we noticed that they slowly moved south and then disappeared, replaced by another ship. Folke, his wife, Omatee, and their son, Stefan, came with us to the beach. It was a nice relaxing day of reading and drinking wine on the beach and swimming in the Black Sea. We stayed and had dinner in Kilyos before returning to campus.
Beach on the Black Sea
The girls on the beach
Folke and his son Stefan

Istanbul (not Constantinople)- Thursday, June 22

On Thursday, June 22, we finally made our first excursion into Istanbul. I don’t know if I have mentioned this already, but the ride down from Koc (be it to Sariyer or to Istanbul) is always a bit of an adventure. Istanbul and the surrounding area are rather hilly, almost mountainous, and of course, many of the streets were built before the advent of cars. This means that the streets are narrow and wind up and down hills like crazy. To complete the rollercoaster-like effect of traveling in and around Istanbul, the bus and taxi drivers have absolutely no fear, and some are downright crazy. They don’t like sitting in traffic, so oftentimes we found ourselves hurtling through a maze of side streets in order to move ahead of the throng. As a result of all of these factors, there was never a dull moment on the hour-long ride into Istanbul, and I always felt a bit ill by the time we reached the city.

When we arrived in Sultanahmet (a tourist area in the European side of Istanbul), we set up a time to meet for dinner, and we set off to take in the sites. Because we had class that morning, we only had a few hours to explore before dinner and before all of the museums and tourist attractions closed for the evening. After a brief visit to the Blue Mosque, which as you can see below is amazingly beautiful, I set off for the Topkapi Palace.
The Blue Mosque
The Ayasofia (originally an Orthodox Church, it was converted into a mosque during Ottoman rule)

The Topkapi Palace was the home of the Ottoman Sultans during (surprise, surprise) the Ottoman Empire. The palace has been transformed into a museum displaying not only the rooms of the palace, but also the jewels, treasures, and religious relics of Ottoman times. However, I am getting ahead of myself. It took me quite some time to locate the palace.

Following the map in my handy Istanbul guidebook, I wandering into a park that surrounds the palace. The park was very picturesque, and it was filled with couples of all ages walking hand-in-hand or sitting on benches in semi-secluded alcoves. When I entered the park, a young Turkish security officer yelled to me from his motorbike: “Hello, my friend! Welcome to paradise! How are you?” I continued to walk through the park looking for the entrance to the palace, but instead I found a tea garden on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The view and the simple fact that I was in Istanbul were too much to resist, so I took a break from my palace-hunt to sit and enjoy the view for a bit.
The park surrounding the Topkapi Palace
Tea Garden overlooking the Bosphorus

The Topkapi Palace was beautiful, if a bit expensive, and the best part of it was the Harem. In Ottoman times, the Harem was the private quarters of the Sultan and his family, which consisted of the Mother Sultan (i.e. the Sultan’s mother), his wives and concubines, and his children. The Harem also housed the eunuchs who guarded the harem, a hospital, and a school for the Sultan’s children and concubines. Concubines were instructed in the arts, including music and dance, and the most beautiful and intelligent among them were also instructed in reading, writing, etc. in order to prepare them for the possibility of being the keeper of the treasury or the Mother Sultan (both of which were powerful positions within the Harem and in the Empire itself) in the future.

The outside of the Topkapi Palace
A terrace in the Harem
Throne room in the Harem

My first trip into Istanbul also introduced me to two of my favorite things about the city (and one of my least favorite, but I’ll fill you in on that when I write about the Grand Bazaar): the call to prayer and the multitudes of minarets. One of the five pillars of Islam is prayer, specifically prayer five times a day. In order to fulfill this pillar, Muslims are called upon to pray at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, early evening, and dusk. Every day, at each of these times, mosques all over the city broadcast the ‘call to prayer’ from tall, thin towers called minarets. The called to prayer is as beautiful as it is incomprehensible (to me as a non-Arabic speaker), and it is one of the things that I will miss about Istanbul. The other is the effect that the mosques have on the city skyline. The city is dotted all over with thin, pointed towers, sometimes standing alone, sometimes in pairs. The result is a beautiful and constant reminder that you have ventured into the Islamic world.

Good Morning, Bulgaria

It is 11:08 am on Sunday, July 2nd, and I am writing this entry from a train somewhere in Bulgaria. The study abroad program ended on Friday, and we all went our separate ways. Megan and Rachel left for 12 days in Germany, Ravi and Jack for a month in Brussels, and everyone else headed home. My train left Istanbul at 10 pm Saturday, so I had one last day at Koc and a final evening in Istanbul. I got to the train station two hours early and had dinner and apple tea in a little outdoor restaurant near the Sirkeci Station. The table where I sat was in the shadow of a small mosque, which meant that I was able to listen to the call to prayer one last time.

When I boarded the train, I was pleased to discover that I had a compartment to myself. I reserved a bed in a second-class sleeping car (second class means three of four beds), and I had been a bit worried about sharing a compartment with two strangers. Once I got settled on the train, I met the two young men in the next compartment over, Matthew and Dan from England. They have a Eurorail pass for a month, and they have been traveling all around Europe for about two and a half weeks, staying one or two nights in each city, and spending about as many nights on trains. We chatted for a while, and I told them about Alex’s request for a Peter Crouch World Cup jersey. They filled me in on ‘the Crouch’ as they called him, and they even demonstrated the robot dance that he does after scoring a goal.

At about 3 am, we finally reached the Turkish boarder. We were instructed to take our passports and get off the train. I did so, taking my purse, containing most of my valuables, with me. When we got to the platform, the immigration window was not open. For some reason, we could not go through customs, and so we waited, milling around with no explanation for the delay. After about five minutes, it really began to bother me that my computer was still in my unlocked compartment (you can only lock them from the inside), so I went back to the train to get it. When I returned, the situation had not changed. The situation did not change for a total of TWO HOURS, after which they finally opened the customs office, and we formed a line. It was 6 am before we finally left the station, so I think we might be two hours behind schedule. Thankfully we did not need to disembark on the Bulgarian side. They simply stopped the train for about an hour and took our passports, while we were treated to the delightful early morning sounds of loud Bulgarian children playing on the platform. So there is the story of my journey thus far. I finally got a few hours sleep after we crossed into Bulgaria, but according to my original ticket (and I wouldn’t be surprised if we were two hours late) I still have about six and a half hours before I reach Bucuresti. Which means I might finally get my blog up to date!