Unforeseen Events

Things are rolling along nicely on the world trip. Shannon and I are back in Greece for a moment now, just waiting for our train to Istanbul. And so, with not much exciting on the traveling with which to update, I'll take a few lines here to talk about other strange happenings.

Packing for an 8 1/2 month trip was a tough thing to get through, but I think I did pretty well back in October. I even was careful enough to consider my slightly excessive sweating problem (hooray for hyperhydrosis!) and pack 8 or 9 t-shirts instead of a more idealistic 4 or 5. Still, seems 8 or 9 just wasn't close to enough, and now, despite picking up and extra 4 shirts along our travels, I've pretty much ruined, to the point of not being wearable, all the shirts in my bag. Yep, between 24 hour train rides, hostels with no usable shower, long hikes in the hills and my own nasty sweaty-ness, it's reached the point where I'm just going to have to bit the bullet and purge my bag from every shirt in it and start from scratch.

So, why's this worth mentioning? Well, purchasing a new upper-body wardrobe wasn't really on the budget agenda at the start of this trip, so if in my photos (that I will one day upload) you notice a sudden switch to rather tacky-touristy shirts that no self-respecting person would wear, well that's just me pinching pennies in an effort to smell a little better.

There was a big earthquake in Italy last night, happening just hours after Shannon and I left the country. Like the Mumbai attacks in India and the airport closure in Thailand, we were close to this incident and had somewhat planned to be traveling through the area, but I don't think realistically there was much of a chance of us being there when it all went down. Still, it's neat being so much closer to all these freaky big events as they're actually happening.

On our big trip here, Shannon's applied to do her Masters in Environmental Resource Management, which she just got accepted to the other day. Pretty good on her too, since she basically put the application package together while tinkering at internet cafes in various countries.

Hmmm, seems I've got time to kill now, rather than my usual rush-rush get-it-done kinda blogging. We're catching the night train to Istanbul, in a sleeping car too. A little more costly than the 2nd class one, but we've spent a few crappy nights on trains and boats, so it's time for a treat. Oh, but speaking of train tickets, I've got a little beef to rant on about here. We were traveling from Patras to Thessaloniki in Greece (check it out on a map http://www.greece-map.net/images/greece-map.gif) and the bus was rather expensive, 40 euro a ticket. So, I figure the train, while longer, will be a better deal. Turns out it is, only 20 euro a ticket, and so I try to book it, but I have to speak to a different lady to book, and she tells me there's no cheap seats available. This doesn't seem right though, as it was one of those times you just know you're being lied to. So I leave the train station and tell Shannon to go try, cause the lady's being horrible to me. Shannon heads to the train station, finds a nice lady to deal with, is about to have the tickets booked, when bitchy lady shows up again, and the nice lady and bitchy lady start bickering about things in Greek. Who knows what exactly was said, but now the nice lady has to apologize for the fact that there are no cheap tickets available for us. And so we bought the expensive bus tickets. I hate, hate, HATE losing money when people are being jerks to you. I don't mind getting ripped off sometimes, or splurging on a meal or dessert I want, but when someone just refuses to help you when you need to get something done (generally transportation), I lose my mind.

All right, I think I've had enough computeral diarrhea for a while now. Hope everyone out there's doing well!