Goal 78: Thanksgiving in Central America

Annie and I have been on many wonderful adventures in the last few years. One of the first ones we went on was to El Salvador and Guatemala in Central America. We had been talking nonchalantly about a trip over Thanksgiving break for some time, but for one reason or another plans never congealed...until the Friday before Thanksgiving week when we booked flights into El Salvador for less than 24hrs later, and flights out of Guatemala, with no hotels or travel arrangements in between.

We arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador and made our way to a hostel we booked at the airport. The first day we found that street markets were all over, and that people don't generally walk ANYWHERE at night because the civil war is still fresh in everyone's mind--which is to say that people wouldn't say it's dangerous to walk, they would just strongly recommend against it.

Our first stop was to take a chicken bus out to the coast where we would take a surfing "lesson" and hang out on the beach.

Then we took busses across the country out along the "Ruta de las Flores" (roughly Route of the Flowers) stopping to take a hike out to see waterfalls and some fancy flowery restaurants.

We stayed in remarkable little hostels the entire time, and found El Salvador quite a lovely country. People were very apparently religious, and there were churches everywhere. All the chicken busses had bible quotes written all over, and there was endless religious imagery.

A lovely hostel we stayed in for our last night in El Salvador

It was also apparent that no one had any money. People drink water out of bags (instead of bottles) and even the nice areas of town were small and normal. There were no large buildings, no financial districts, no rich neighborhoods.

We took a chicken bus to the Guatemalan border and walked across to pick up another bus to Antigua, Guatemala.

The old buildings ranged from old, to VERY old

We once again found ourselves in a very unique little hostel that was basically in the heart of Antigua and was run by a very kind gentleman. We would set up here to take a trip out to lake Atitlan.

Skybridge Antigua

After about a 3.5hr chicken bus ride out to the lake, we found out we could actually boat across it to some of the tiny towns, and I'm not one to pass up a boat ride.

Goal 78: Go to an undeveloped Village

Now I've been debating with myself as to whether this should really count or not. In the end, my gut says that this is really what I was looking for (even if it wasn't what I was imagining when I wrote the goal).

This little town overlooks the double volcanos of Lake Atitlan

The town was only reachable by boat, and most of the homes were built of simple materials with no power or utilities. We walked all around it to see how people were living in this isolated spot without modern convenience.

We talked to some children who were hanging out

One of the most amazing things about it was just how beautiful the view was. It's really no wonder people would set up here.

Basically the entire town can be seen here

Next we took an overnight sleeper bus to Tikal in northern Guatemala. Theses Mayan ruins were beautiful and expansive with many towers and a huge plaza area.

A raccoon-type animal meanders about 

From the top of one of the towers you can see the rainforest with a couple other towers peeking out

Status: Happy to remember

[Volcanic Trip, Part 5] Making it Home: Germany

So we took an overnight bus to Berlin, and our trip was officially back on track...sorta. Although we had tickets to fly from Ireland, we were still in Berlin, and in time to go see Noah and the Whale in concert. We took the day to walk around the city, see the sights, and end up at the concert.

This is Red City Hall, and I'm pretty sure it represents the communist side of Berlin...I don't actually know though.

This is the TV Tower. I didn't know this was a landmark of Berlin until we got here. Neat, huh?

Here's a museum that I took a picture in front of. As you can see, I imported the antlers from Denmark. The interesting thing about the buildings in Berlin, specifically the marble buildings, is that they haven't been cleaned in a while, so they're extremely black and patchy. This was really neat to see, actually, and it makes me think of what Duomo, in Milan, may have looked if they didn't JUST finish cleaning it when we got there.

Here are some street sheisters. That guy in the jacket would shuffle around a ball under little boxes and the goal was to find the ball. It seemed extremely easy, but it was certainly a sheist. There were about five people who were part of the ring, and they would all pretend to bet, sometimes win, sometimes loose. It worked well to fool me for a little while. It was too easy though. At one point, Kenny had his foot on a box with the ball under it, and they wanted him to put money out and bet, but he refused. We stuck around for a while, but we never figured out how they sheisted someone.

We got to get inside of some nice Mercedes' at the Mercedes showroom.

Then we followed up by going to the Volkswagon showroom. No Phaetons though.

At the end of the day it was time to go see Noah and the Whale at the Frannz Club. It was good to see the look on everyone's face as I entered with an piece of antler. There was some serious confusion, and the girl at garderobe (coat check) said that it was too big to put anywhere, so I would just have to tell her to get them and she would put them in the back.

Take note of how Charlie Fink, the main guy, has a different guitar for every song.
The concert was really nice. It was mellow, fun, and very enjoyable.
They played "5 years Time" as one of their last songs, and it was fantastic to hear. Although, raw and unproduced (and without that woman on backup), the song itself wasn't as fun. But being live more than made up for it.
On the second day in Berlin, we decided to drink a bottle of cheap vodka, and see the WWII sights. We saw lots of chunks of Berlin wall.
This is Checkpoint Charlie. I'm not entirely sure why it is so famous, but there was a lot of tourist and WWII stuff here. It seems like it might have been a high-traffic checkpoint to crossover the sectors of Berlin.

I found an office chair near Checkpoint Charlie by a dumpster, so I commandeered it and piloted through the streets.
There was a woman handing out coupons for free chocolates on the street. Because we had recently finished a bottle of vodka, I wasn't too opposed to free chocolate. She gave us two coupons each, and Kenny didn't even want his second chocolate, so I made out like a bandit. The guy at the counter laughed when I walked up with my third coupon, and then he gave me his personally recommended flavor.
This green guy is the guy that means "walk" on pedestrian crosswalk signals. Apparently he's gained some popularity, probably because of his unique-ness among pedestrian walk signals.
We took some really nice walks through the parks in Berlin because the weather was wonderful. At one point, we even napped on a bench for about forty-five minutes.
This was a cool place to be in.

We saw some memorials too. This one is to all of the murdered Jews of Europe.
There was modern stuff in Berlin too. It was pretty neat.
We saw the TV tower at night, which was neat.

We went back for the night, hung out with our couchsurfer a bit, but fell asleep pretty quick. We woke up early to get to the airport. The trip was coming to a welcomed end. Here's a picture that has all of the things I brought on the trip.

We arrived at the airport three hours early to ensure that there was no overbooking of our flight that would interfere with our seats on the plane home. After a couple hours of napping in the airport, seeing our flight boarding to Stockholm was a relief. We were finally going home for realz.

The flight was smooth, and after two more bus rides, we were finally at home. I had never been so happy to walk through the doors of Junior, and it was good to know that I was back with friends, food, and a bed. More than anything, the trip made me appreciate the people that I've met while in Sweden, and it was time to work harder to build strong friendships, and make some memories. I was gone the entire month of April with limited contact to anyone I cared about, and it was a reminder of what's important.

I got home, and I smiled as I saw familiar faces and comfortable places.

Status:

[Volcano Trip Part 3] Goal 41 & 88: Italy

This is the part where the trip took a turn for the unexpected....

It's about 3 am at the Cairo International Airport when we check in and get our boarding passes all the way to Amsterdam. We were told only hours before that flights were cancelled there, so I was pretty excited to have a ticket in my hand, and a quote from the guy at the desk "Only flights to UK and Belgium and France." That was hope to hold on to.

We landed in Rome at about 8 am, and the mission was back to normal: 5 hours to see Rome. GO!!

Just like every other famous historical monument I've visited in the last four months, I walked up the stairs out of the metro and the Colosseum towered before me as if it was totally normal to have 2000 year old Roman ruins in the middle of any city.

The first thing we did was go to an internet cafe (where I dropped my camera and broke my lens filter) and check if our flight was actually flying. Everything we looked at seemed to indicate our flight was good to go.

Ruins and ruins and more ruins. We saw a lot of ruins, and it was very interesting to know that this was the heart of one of the greatest, most extensive empires in history. The ruins were everywhere.

This fountain was the last thing we saw before we had to head back to the plane station, our 5 hours were up, and we'd seen a good amount of history. We were getting pressed for time to catch the train back to the plane station though, so we had to hurry.

Goal 41: Follow advice from a stranger.

We purchased some authentic Italian pizza outside of this fountain, and we were getting ready to run to the next metro station. We asked the lady who sold us the pizza where it is, but she said it would be much better if we just took a bus, because most of the busses go directly to Termini, where we want to be. So, we followed that advice, and quickly found the bus stop. However, the busses were many and the signs confusing. We constantly ran up and down the road to look at all of the route signs, and missed one of the busses we needed to get on. Eventually we got on a line that went directly to Termini station.

However, if you've ever tried to ride in a bus in downtown Rome, you might know that tourists are everywhere, and it's likely that you can walk down the street faster. The bus continually stopped and slowed down, and we barely made it 100 meters in five minutes. We decided that we should get off the bus when it got near the Colosseum metro, and take the metro the rest of the way.

Well, as we waited for the metro, I noticed there was a coin purse on the tracks. I was thinking someone who was afraid of getting splattered all over the station might have dropped it and left it there, possibly full. So I quickly hopped down and back up with the purse, spending nearly an entire tenth of a second on the whole process. Empty. I threw the purse back down onto the tracks, and about two minutes later I was accosted by a metro attendant who kicked us out of the metro station, and told us we could take the bus... We ended up getting a taxi directly to the airport because we were so tight for time, and our plane was going to leave... or at least that's what we thought.

Goal 88: Experience something that I never would have expected.

We go to check in for our flight and that's when they finally break the bad news: "This flight is cancelled, Amsterdam Schipol is closed." However, shortly after that, they broke the good news about having a hotel with dinner and breakfast, and we would rebook our flight for the next morning. We would surely be missing our train from Amsterdam, so we decided to rebook for Frankfurt, Germany, in hopes that we could get to Copenhagen before our train to Västerås leaves.

It would turn out natural disasters are a little more serious than everyone thought, and every day we would rebook a ticket for somewhere as north as we could get, and everyday they would tell us the flights were still cancelled.

My travel plans were affected by a volcano in Iceland...

Well this is where everything changes. Our free night of hotel didn't have free internet, and we found out on the second day that we only get one free night. We had no way of sending out couch requests, no way of looking up information on our situation (such as train ticket refunds and trains from Rome), and no way of letting anyone know we were stuck in Rome.

I spent about half of my time in Rome waiting at this airport.

So the rest of this story I'm going to shorten in interest of keeping your interest.

1. Used my friend, Elis (Previously Italy) to get free McDonalds internet, because you have to have an Italian phone number.
2. Rebooked for Frankfurt. The next day rebooked to Prague. Then, rebooked for two days later for Prague so we wouldn't have to wait in line again on the next day.
3. Snuck into the hotel basement where there were empty conference rooms that we slept in. (No couches available and no money for hostels lead to desperate measures)
4. Found an Italian coffee shop with actual free internet, made friends with the owners, and we were able to get business done by going here every morning and night.
5. Saw Rome and the Vatican during Romes free museum week (what luck!).

The Pantheon

Rome Skyline

Some Castle we got into for free

Some gorgeous church (there are thousands, if not millions of these in Rome)

I swam in the Mediterranean (Two Seas in one Trip!)

I went to mass and confession at the Vatican, and fulfilled all the requirements to get a Plenary Indulgence. That was as spectacular as the altar in St. Peter's Basilica.

The Sistine Chape

The inside of the Colosseum

The Vatican

More Vatican

These were the Andersens. They were a father-daughter crew stuck in Rome from Spain. They decided they should get demolished and go out into the streets and hang out with hobos. We talked with them for a while, and it was hilarious. The father is worth millions of dollars, and whenever someone would walk by he would yell "Visa, mastercard, american express, pesos!?"

So after five hours of Rome turned into five days, we had seen most of Rome, and were more than ready to leave. We had missed both trains now, not to mention our week of classes. It was to the point where we wanted to fly anywhere, or else start hitchhiking and/or taking trains to leave.

We were in an interesting situation because we had another trip planned to Ireland and Berlin which was now being overlapped. Because we already missed classes, our goal was to get to Berlin by any means possible to see Noah and the Whale (which we had already purchased tickets for), and then get from Berlin to home by any means possible, hopefully by air with the plane tickets we had purchased weeks ago for the Berlin trip.

After looking at how the volcano was still exploding, we decided to cut our losses, and just get a ticket to Milan, stay with Elis one night, and then start hitchhiking north. I spoke to a man who said that they might have a flight to Amsterdam, and to talk to him an hour later. I decided to wait in the rebooking line just in case, and when we got to the front with the man no where to be seen, we rebooked to Milan.

I saw him again moments before we checked into our flight to Milan, and he had us wait for a little longer because he didn't know if the flight was going to be allowed to fly or not. Well, it was granted permission minutes later, and he printed us boarding passes to get on standby to Amsterdam! We would be flying to our original destination...just five long days late. It was time to get our travels back on track, time to start making progress again... We just had to figure out what we were going to do in Amsterdam, and how we were going to get to Berlin.

Status (at the time):

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