No-one else can describe train traveling more beautiful than Paul Theroux. His book ‘The Great Railway Bazaar‘, which traced the author’s train journey from London to India, uncovered a desire long buried ever since I first saw a passing train when living in Ho Chi Minh City. Like many Vietnamese, I never rode the train. It was not a common type of transport unless we needed to travel over very long distance. But Vietnamese did not travel much if not at all. If we did, we preferred motorbikes, buses, mini-vans and airplanes. Trains and rail tracks were often associated with negativity. Whenever I read about it on the news, I found only train crashes and people getting killed trying to cross over unguarded tracks.
15.7.2012 I arrived in Moscow, Russia, which effectively ended my travel project to see all 50 countries in Europe.
Anything about Europe will be tagged under the tag 50europe.
Phew! Now I swear off doing anything quantitatively for a while. What’s next?
It’s the beginning of the Trans-Siberia and beyond.
No other country in Europe, except Albania, did I hear many disheartening comments like Georgia. “People are a little strange.” “Men there are like monkeys; They will rape you.” “How about you have a kid, wait until he grows a few years then you can go.” To be fair, Georgia, as we know it–thanks to the media–isn’t a sunny beach resort where tourists go to get a tan or a cosmopolitan capital lined up with coffee bars and restaurants. It isn’t a peaceful village where cows roam on green pasture, nor it is a place where one escape to the cottage in the summer. Georgia, as we know it, is the South Ossetia four years ago with vivid images of tanks, flying rockets, and bombed buildings. When I found out the mountainous area I wanted to visit, Kazbegi and Svaneti, located in proximity with the problematic autonomous Abkhazia and Chechnya, I seriously wondered about the environment surrounding this country.
Finally, it happened to me. I lost my ATM Visa card on the very first day of my trip to Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia). This is the kind of region where CASH is the primary currency of business transactions. Credit cards were not accepted in many venues, including the less popular American Express, the only card I had left.
What could I do except dialing the people whom I knew and kindly asking them to ‘show me the money.’ Thanks to all the friends, I learned about all different means to send and receive money abroad.
I went to Khankhali House to have dumplings. As I was waiting for my food, a group of three in their early 50s asked if they could share my table. The waitress brought the dumpling on a small plate, a fork and walked off. I asked for a knife. “NO.” It wasn’t the waitress who refused me but one of the men. I looked at them, pointed to my dumplings indicating that I needed to cut. “Spoon?” “NO. NO. NO.” They vehemently confronted me. One of the men removed the fork from my hand, stuck it to one of my dumplings at the top where the sag tied up, flipped it over, held it with one hand, blew to cool it down, took a bite and sucked the juice. “See? Do it.”
Christian Ronaldo is hot (OK I admit it.) The perfect-haired lover-boy is always seen in tight jeans, clean-shaven legs, occasionally dressed in pink and sometimes with flowers on his hairs. He is by all accounts the metrosexual icon of modern football. Adored by young football fans around the world and worshiped by many in his native country Portugal. It came as no surprise when the most recognizable face I saw in Lisbon was who else than the Ronaldo on many ads and posters.
I had never sampled so much new food in just one day let alone one sitting. Usually, it took an entire trip to get down only a few dishes.
Dan, my host, took me to lunch and ordered a tableful of Georgian dishes. I was still under the Central European time; that means I had lunch at 10 o’clock in the morning. I ate so much I almost fell asleep in the car after and had to pinch myself to stay awake and chit chat with Dan.
I got really nervous just by the thoughts of handling all these administrative stuff just so that I would be able to drink vodka every day and maybe shake hand with Mister DO-IT-ALL Putin.
My super-easy, spontaneous traveling days in non-restricting Europe is over. I can’t leave on a last-minute impulse, showing up at the bus station to get on the next available bus ride to wherever I want. I can’t take advantage of promotions and book flights leaving a few weeks later. I have to plan a lot, and this distressed me.
I walked behind a bus, waited until the engine roar and inhaled a deep breath. I turned to Jarda and said: “Honey, you’re right. It doesn’t smell at all.” My boyfriend told me how Sweden was environment-friendly. Their vehicles didn’t produce the stuff which turned the sky black and your face red coughing everything out. Buses’ emission didn’t pollute the environment as confirmed by my mini experiment. But come all the way to Sweden and smell the bus? Well, Whenever I visited Scandinavia, I somehow got bored and did strange things.
Say cheese! In 2007, a series of surveys about happiness ranked ranked Denmark as the happiness place on earth. Two years later in 2009, OECD – the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development agreed. Like other Scandinavia and Nordic countries, Denmark scored high on education, living standard, salary, health, etc. The one thing which set them apart was while others were a bit depressed and ‘suicidal’, The Danes were a jolly bunch. Danes called it the happiness factor.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
