Public Footpaths.

I've made it to my new place, and have been through my first week of classes. There's not too much to report about the actual program except that it involves massive amounts of reading (to have been expected, I suppose), so I'm just glad once again that I've found a field that I'm a good match for, with my normally amorphous interests and all.

Per the location, I love it. Durham (the town, cathedral, and university) has more of a Harry Potter/Hogwarts ambiance to it than I would have thought possible.

Let me illustrate one apparently common institution here in Brittan that has no equivalent in America, that I think is just the bees knees. Public footpaths. You see these inconspicuous little signs all over town, that point the way to one end of a path designated for foot travel only. These signs are irresistible to me, because its impossible to predict what you're getting yourself into if you don't know the layout of the town very well. Most of them in town are narrow little back-alley shortcuts, but some on the edge of town represent the beginning of a trek through farm land and the countryside to the next suburb over (or even further). The paths are maintained and legally protected for public foot travel only, and network the entire country. I'm seeing how easily and joyfully one could walk all over Brittan if they wanted to. Like I said, there's no equivalent in America. As anyone who's ever had the idea of making a journey on foot knows, the only practical option is to follow the highways.... not at all a peaceful, meditative, stress-free or very enjoyable task.

So in conclusion, horray for public footpaths.

gathering no [more] moss

An opportune moment for an update has finally come, at long last. Yeah, the last post is both old and sparse, but it has been a more-or-less adequate appraisal of my situation for just so long. Now, there is activity and movement and kinetic purpose returning to my limbs!

I haven't exactly been idle for all this while. But there wasn't anything going on that merited an entry into my travel blog while it was happening and it doesn't merit a summary now.

The point is, I'm off to school again. I actually conceived of the idea (rather on a whim) last year in Greece to apply to some grad schools, and well, it panned out. (Lets just say... I mean, It took an awful lot of contrivance and effort by way of endless applications and letters and standardized tests and general displays of ambitions, but besides all that, it really just fell into my lap, this new direction.)

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

So, in 3 weeks, it seems I'll be off to Durham University in the United Kingdom to work on a 12-month masters program in Evolutionary Anthropology. yeesh.

Where I'm at

Nothing to see here, just posting for the purposes of updating my location -->

Spagetti Westerner

I'm in a rural valley in the region of Puglia in southeastrn Italy. This is another farm listed on the WWOOF network. A little more than 2 weeks ago I left Greece to see a new place. That, and they kind of needed some extra space there because they had too many volunteers there at once. So I took the opportunity to relocate. I got in touch with a family of 3 that has a house in the country and about 2 acres filled with olive trees. It's Franco, Germana, and thier 2-year-old son Adriano. They invited me to stay for a while and do some work on their property.

The trip over was a bit difficult because of ferry workers on strike. (I found out that strikes are regular and casual in Greece. I've been told that if there is a holiday and workers get a 3-day weekend, they'll go on strike to stretch it to a 4-day. Power to the people!) So I ended up taking a different overnight route to Bari instead of Brindisi, and took a train to the place we were originally supposed to meet. I called Germana and we finally met up in Ostuni.

The overnight ferry trip was an odd experience. They sell cabin rooms for sleeping in, that cost about the same as a hotel room. -OR-, you can get a "deck" ticket for 25 Euros, and sleep wherever you can. I ended up trying to sleep on the floor in a lounge with about 50 people passed out around me on the benches. I had a little fort of empty charis set up around me, and I would have slept ok if it weren't for the floor that was vibrating form the engines all throughout the night.

But as I said I finally met up with Franco and Germana and they took me to their place. They have a guest house that I have all to myself, it's actually rather awesome. It's called a trullo, which is a house with each room rising into a cone-shaped dome of white masonary. They are traditional and pretty regular out here and I'm told there is a village nearby of nothing but trullos. Mine has 4 domes, 3 are over really small rooms including the bathroom. The main room is bigger with a loft for the bed that I sleep quite well in. I generally work alone and at my own schedule every day. I prune the olive trees and "excavate" the stone stairs in the terraces that are about a centry old and completely grown over. Some days I help Franco with building projects for his new house.

That's about it, it's a bit boring really. But I have plenty to read and this is a nice area to go running in. I'll be here 2 more weeks, then I'm heading back to Texas. It's been a great trip but I've missed the Rangers in the World Series (!!!), Halo Reach, lots of friends and family, I'm flat broke, and it's time to call it a day, so to speak. It will be great to be home for the holidays. I have plans and backup plans for 2011 so don't consider this travel blog closed just yet.

WWOOFing @ Corfu

I know the updates have been scarce so far, but I've got lots more time on my hands now. I've arrived at my first WWOOF farm, so obviously that means things have slowed waaay down. Things are going perfectly according to lack of plan.

The first month with Lydia and Suzie was great. It was a bit draining financially, but easily worth it. We got a whirlwind tour of Prague, saw Das Beinhaus (bone chapel) in Kutná Hora, drank wine from an underground fountain in Budapest, tip-toed through radioactive Chernobyl, got chased by wild dogs all through Kiev, broke bread in Sighişoara, Romania (the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler), grinded an endless rail through Bulgaria, got a Turkish bath in Istanbul, and took a boat tour up the Bosphorous. We set foot in the Hagia Sofia and were entranced by the call to prayer.

Needless to say, I'm not going to make it much further traveling like that. I'm not a rich tourist, or close to it. Lydia and Suzie flew back to LA from Istanbul, I continued on to Greece. The night train to Thessaloniki was much more comfortable than the Bulgarian version. I finished off my rail pass getting to Kalampaka, the town underneath the monasteries of Meteora. Really spectacular place. The monasteries are on top of huge cliff-like rock formations. Some of them are just cylinders, high-up islands of rock. I stayed the night and climbed to the top of one of them the next morning. That afternoon I took a bus to Igoumenitsu, where I got on a ferry to the island of Corfu.

Here I am. The WWOOF farm here is a kiwi farm/horse riding center. I've been working with the horses for the last week and a half. I can stay here as long as my visa will hold out (as much as 2 months), bed and food are free for the work I do. I'm working 6 hours a day. It's a diverse group of people here. There are 2 other volunteers, one from Hungary and one from Kyrgyzstan. There's a Brit here who runs the kiwi farm and a couple other Brits who I work with at the horse stables. There's a few other riding instructors, Hungarian and Brazilian. The owner of the whole estate is a nice old Greek lady who really likes animals. This place is a zoo.

We eat dinner together each night, so I'm getting some good Greek home cooking. The island is a really nice place to be. They actually filmed a Bond film here at this very estate (For Your Eyes Only). The other day we drove out to a cliff-side beach that I enjoyed a lot. We swam out around the cliffs and found a flooded cave, swam through it and found another beach. It felt like some dreams I've had.

I spend most mornings shoveling out horse s--t, so it's not all wine and roses. But it's not a bad arrangement at all. I'm looking toward what I'm going to do next, but that's still very much up in the air.

People Misbehavin' on Trains

We had a charming 32-hour journey from Sighişoara, Romania to Istanbul. This included a 5 hour delay in the middle of the night at a rustic train station in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria. Hot sleeplessness and a conductor wandering the aisle in a wife beater and a cigarette hanging out his mouth, who's english vocabulary consisted of "money", "mafia", "internet", and "passport", defined the trip.

Istanbul is a lovely crossroads of East and West.

warning... obligatory Czech pun ahead

I made it to Prague, the Eastern Europe tour is underway. I've managed to join forces with some friends from L.A. to tag along with for the month, then things will start to get real. I found a community on the WWOOF network in Greece that essentially operates like a commune. Not to make any political statements or anything, but I think that would be an interesting thing to try out for a while. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I expect I will be spending some time there after I part ways with Lyd and Suz at the end of August.

But we still have plenty of places to hit up before then. It goes Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Transylvania, and finally Istanbul. So far Prague is one of my new favorite cities in the world. It's very beautiful, and almost more importantly, very laid-back. I don't know... something about it. I'll keep this one in the back of my mind as something to remember to do again in the future someday.

Czech Mark.