Quik Thinking

One of the salient pleasures of travel is sampling the local foods. Despite mild trepidations about a meat-heavy diet, I was curious to try Eastern European food. In Budapest the food tasted great but was often counterbalanced by rather poor table service. At some of the less touristy places, English menus were hard to come by so we took to just pointing at stuff. We were occasionally charged for bread, which surprised us because we were used to bread being a freebie, although the cost of bread was always trivial (about a dime per loaf). Grocery stores seemed to have roughly the same assortment of food that one would expect to find in the US. Brasov has a panoply of local restaurants that are are reasonably priced and tourist-friendly. Although there was little else to see and do there after the first day, we were certainly not bored by the restaurant scene in this little town. In fact, it would put any American town of comparable size to shame in a heartbeat. In Plovdiv the food was thrillingly cheap and the open-air farmer's market delightful. We discovered tasty new fruits whose names we learned only through sheer happenstance. There was a fruit expert at our hostel and he identified them for us as Chokeberries and Cornelian cherries. Although we ate a lot of different things in Istanbul, my memories are dominated by two items in particular that we ate repeatedly: lahmacun (Turkish pizza) and baklava. I was always amused by the fact that "vegetarian" lahmacun inevitably tasted like lamb!

One of the other popular activities while travelling is trawling for bargains and souvenirs. Because we had to carry everything on our backs, I wasn't inclined to acquire anything large or heavy but it was hard to resist picking up a few little things. I was delighted to find a pair of pants in Plovdiv that fit me perfectly and cost only $15. And while we were at the monastery near Plovdiv, I bought a jar of locally made marshmallow paste. In Istanbul I found a jar of chilli-infused nut-butter that proved to be delicious and I'm now struggling to pace myself so I don't consume the entire thing at once. I also ended up with a t-shirt that says "Istanbul" in a font that looks a lot like Arabic.

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Today was my first aerial silks class at Circus Center. The last time I was at a circus school was 7 years ago and in Ottawa but the general atmosphere at this one was practically the same: a bunch of acrobats practicing on a variety of equipment in a big gym and no real semblence of order to be found. I was able to locate my instructor my asking around and was glad to find that she was both empathetic and competent. However, apparently there were supposed to be 2 instructors but one of them quit to go work for a real local circus and now we have a 6:1 student:teacher ratio, whereas the maximum we're supposed to have is 4:1. She told us this would be OK for the first 3 classes but after that she'd either need to find another co-instructor or a couple of us would need to switch to a different time-slot.

She seemed a bit shocked that I was in the class at all when I told her I'd never tried silks before so I assured her that I could climb up a rope just fine, having done so several times at a climbing gym. Ironically, the first thing she had me do was grab a ribbon with each hand, wrap them around my arm and flip over so my legs pointed straight up: exactly what I've been randomly doing with ropes at Mission Cliffs lately! We did a few more such excercises and stretches before she taught us our first skill: how to tie a knot around one foot with the other so we can safely hold up our entire bodyweight with very little effort.

She also had use climb up the ribbons a couple of times. Evidentally I'm the only one who can do that easily. I guess it helps that everybody else taking the class are women, most of whom have backgrounds in dance rather than rock-climbing. On the other hand, this might be the first time I've been told I need to work on my flexibility.

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We stayed in hostels while travelling through Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Here's a quick recap of my experiences with them.

Plumbing has always been a pivotal issue for me when evaluating places to stay and this is equally true with hostels. While I'm generally capable of sleeping on any reasonably soft horizontal surface if the lights are out and nobody is talking, I cringe at the thought of using a toilet or shower that is breeding new forms of life or lacks decent water pressure. I'm also finicky about having hot water on demand and being able to control the temperature easily. So I definitely appreciate good bathrooms in hostels. Fortunately I was not disappointed by any of the three at which we stayed.

We slept in bunk beds in all three hostels and I always took the top one because Eliza was mildly concerned about falling out and I like climbing. In Romania we shared a large dorm room with several others but noise was never an issue. In Bulgaria we were assigned to a 4-person room but nobody else ever turned up so we effectively had a private room, which was great. In Turkey we ended up sharing a 4-person room with a middle-aged French couple who proved to be the worst shower hogs I've ever met but at least they didn't disturb us while we slept.

Although I brought the OLPC XO with me, it's track record at using wifi was most discouraging so we tried to pick hostels that offered a shared computer from which to get our Internet fixes while travelling. In Romania the computer worked just fine when I used it but there was often a lot of contention for it due to the number of people staying at the hostel. In Bulgaria the computer worked fine the first day but subsequently got infected by a virus and couldn;t access Bulgarian websites. You wouldn't think this'd be a problem for us, except that teh Googles has an annoying habit of automatically redirecting browsers to the local version of their home page. At least we were able to use Facebook. In Turkey we randomly ditched the hostel we booked because nobody was at the front desk to check us in and ended up staying in a nearby hostel whose proprietor seemed nice. They didn't have a computer for guests but he was happy to let us use his, although on the 2nd day his DSL connection went down and it didn't start working again until the day we left.

One of the advantages of hostel accommodations is the company. We met some pretty interesting people while hanging out at the hostel in both Romania and Bulgaria, although not so much in Turkey. I noticed that just about every British traveller seems to smoke, despite that not being the case when I was in London itself. Perhaps the particular demographic of Britons who tend to stay in hostels has a proclivity for smoking. It was also interesting to talk to travellers form other European countries, nearly all of whom spoke English fairly well.

At the beginning of the trip we were both pretty worried about being robbed but the atmosphere at every hostel we stayed in made me feel pretty relaxed about that, although we did use lockers when in the dorm room in Romania. Most hostels frown upon bringing outside guests over so, despite the high guest turnover, you do get a moderate sense of familiarity with the faces around you.

After my disheartening discovery that Budapest does not have laundromats, I was overjoyed to discover that the hostel in Romania would actually do our laundry for us at no additional charge and jumped at the offer. In the end I had to spend a fair amount of time disentangling my clothes from the pile of clean clothes they dumped on a table and I did lose one shirt - fortunately not one I was particularly fond of - but it was nice to have clean clothes again. Eliza, not being as lazy as me, just hand-washed her clothes everywhere. I actually ended up buying some new clothes in Bulgaria and Turkey, which allowed me to make it back to London without having to hunt for a laundromat again!

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