Balkans Adventure!

Everything is going well at Space Camp Turkey, sorry for the lack of updates. Three of us just got back from a really great trip to Istanbul Turkey, Bucharest and Brasov Romania, Belgrade Serbia and Sofia, Bulgaria. It was quite a adventure to see each of these countries, we explored each of them by train and spent many of nights in 1960s era train sleeper cars.

Day 1:

Started with a flight from Izmir to Istanbul Turkey on Onur Air, a low cost Turkish no-frills airline similar to Southwest in the States. Once in Istanbul, we went and saw the amazing Blue Mosque and the famous Grand Bazaar. It was great to see some of Istanbul, because after coming to Turkey for the past three years, I never before took the time to see it’s most popular city.

We then made our way to the Istanbul train station, which was itself a piece of History. It is very old fashioned and looked like something out of an old movie. We bought a “Balkan Flexipass” which allows us unlimited train travel in Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria and a couple other places. We got a sleeper car for the long, 18 hour trip from Istanbul to Bucharest Romania, via Bulgaria.

Day 2:

Once in Bucharest we exchanged our money to Romanian Lea, a fun currency because it’s all plastic and partially translucent. We knew the name of the hostel we wanted to stay at and had a little map from our guide book so we set out on foot to find our hostel, Funky Chicken. After walking around looking at street names we couldn’t pronounce or read we decided to enlist the help of some of the local Romanians. Although they were friendly and tried to help us, they too couldn’t seem to find the hostel, Funky Chicken.

As a last attempt we hailed a taxi and showed him the address, after a few circles around the block we finally arrived and settled into our new 2 day home. At $10 a night, it was a very nice hostel, but only a few people other then us were staying there at the time. Night time was approaching, but we decided to go out and grab some food and check out the city. Bucharest was a little run down, but still pretty European. The buildings all looked very old but had character. There were many European style sit down Cafes where you can just sit for hours and people watch. After eating and walking around the city some, we went back to the Funky Chicken to sleep.

Day 3:

We woke up early to take the early train to Brasov, Romania, home to “Dracula’s castle”. Once there we were immediately identified as tourists and were swarmed with tour guides / taxi drivers competing to get us to go with them. We wanted to try to do it on our own so decided to go out in the city to get some lunch first.

Some very good advice when getting lunch in Romania, do not getting anything that looks like a bratwurst unless you are 100% sure that it is in fact a bratwurst. It didn’t quite taste like one, but we were really hungry, anyway, it really messed up the stomach and we now think it was some sort of intestine… Don’t really want to know.

Ok, Back to Dracula’s castle, after that great meal, we talked to some of the locals to get an idea of how to get to the castle from public transportation. It seemed difficult so we decided to go back to the train station and take a taxi. We negotiated a fare and got a guy to take us to the castle and fort for pretty cheap. Once at the castle, it started raining, a lot, so we waited under cover for it to calm down. Our taxi driver was amazing and was always going the extra mile, and actually convinced someone working at a stand to give us their umbrella to use while we make the little hike up to the castle. Once up at the castle, the rain stopped, to leave a very creepy but cool dark sky and fog.

We went into the castle after paying about a $1 entrance fee. The castle was full of old furniture and odd random things. It was a very beautiful area, up in the mountains. After going through all the rooms of the castle, and the secret stairwell (pictured below), we made our way to the fort, about 20 minutes away. While we were in the castle, we hadn’t paid for the taxi so asked us to leave something that we would come back for, like a passport or something, we left school IDs, because we knew if he left we could always easily get those back. We met back up with him and headed to the fort. It was crazy, and full of old weapons and torture devices, and even some skeletons buried under the floors with glass so you can see them. It was pretty creepy, and also up on a mountain, so made for some good views. By the time we got out of the fort, it was absolutely pouring rain and sooo cold. We, with our taxi driver ran down the hill of the fort and made it back to the taxi soaking wet. We headed back to the train station and got on the next train to Bucharest.

Once in Bucharest we went out for some dinner and to hang around the town. We went back for a nights sleep at the Funky Chicken, as the next day we leave for another country.


Day 4:

We made our way to Belgrade Serbia, not much to talk about for this day as it ended up being a 21 hour train ride. 21 hours is a very, very, very long time to be on a train. We were delayed for some unknown problem for about 4 hours in one city, and for some reason just kept stopping in the middle of nowhere. It was still full of nice views and an experience to say the least. By the time we got to Belgrade, it was Day 5.

Day 5:

We arrived in the afternoon in Belgrade, Serbia. First thing to do was to exchange some money, luckily the exchange rate was definitely in our favor. $1 = 60 Serbian Diners. After getting some Diners, we saw a person holding a sign for the hostel we were going to stay at, 6th Floor Hostel. We went and talked to him and he lead us right across the street to the hostel. The hostel was really nice, and yea, was on the 6th floor of this building, although nice, the elevator was pretty scary!

After settling in, our first mission was to find lunch, after the bad lunch in Brasov, we decided to hold off on trying Serbian food and head to McDonoalds… I know, that’s bad, but it was good.

We went around Belgrade that night and was pleasantly suprsied with one area of town. It was a old fortress that was amazingly beautiful and full of old relics like cannons and such. It was on top of a mountain and had a good view of the city below. The walk to the fortress was on a very European street with tall street lamps and café after café. Ice cream stands sold great ice cream in the gelato style found everywhere through Europe for a nice 20 Serbian Diners, or 33 US cents.

After walking a few miles with ice cream in hand around every in and out of the castke we headed back to the 6th Floor Hostel to get some sleep.


Day 6:

We were sooo tired by Day 6 that we were a little bit lazy and slept in, checked e-mails and so forth. We walked around Belgrade for a few hours and went back to the area we found the night before. For a Serbian dinner we went to a beautiful park that was full of almost every breed of dog, including the best, poodle of course. We went to a little stand and bought this very large pork sandwhich which was bread, pork, lettuce, an sour cream. It was surprisingly good and came with a free pepsi, total cost was a little over a dollar.

Day 7:

Started with an 8am train ride to Sofia, Bulgaria. We decided to brave the unkown and not go with a sleeper train. We were sitting up and looking outside for about 12 hours, it was suppose to take 9 hours, but there were some unknown delays. The train ride was very scenic, and got a little interesting when we go to the Bulgarian border. People were just stuffing their clothes full of cartons of cigarettes from the duty free shop, I guess they can buy them there and sell them across the border for a profit. One interesting sight was when we got close to the border people were throwing boxes of cartons of cigarettes off the train and running off into the woods.

We got into Bulgaria and went to my all time favorite hostel, Hostel Mostel. I visited there last year, but they just opened up a new hostel in a different location. The new one is even better, so amazing for a hostel. It’s clean, free internet, free pool table, breakfast, spaghetti, the rooms have keycard entry. All for, $10 a night. The staff is also legendarily friendly.

We set out for our mission of the night, find the Chinese restaurant I went to last year, it has the best Chinese food and gives you SOOOO much food for very little money. We found it, and it was amazing. It’s a very nice, fancy restaurant, and the first time we used silverware in a week. We sat down and ordered and were on the edge of our seats waiting for the food to arrive. We got it, and it was as good as I remembered.

After we were stuffed and could hardly move, we decided to walk around Sofia. The city is definitely one of my favorite in the world, the people are great, the city has so much to offer, is beautiful and, it’s cheap!

Day 8:

Our last real day of the trip, one of the goals was to see this movie, called Grindhouse in the States, it’s separated into two movies in Europe. It’s San’s favorite movie, and it was a mission, so we set out to find an English theater that had it playing. We first went to a old part of town next to some communist statues that have gotten beaten up and graffiti on them. The area was really nice though and full of fountains. We went to this movie theater, which was suppose to be one of the best, but it wasn’t showing it.

Then, I remembered last summer Kyle and I saw a movie in Sofia at a mall, but I had no idea what it was called or where it was. So we went back to the hostel and said we were looking for a really big mall that was made pretty much all out of glass, luckily they knew what the heck I was talking about and drew us a map. We went there and sure enough they were showing the movie, so we booked our tickets and had some time to spare.

We went and grabbed some lunch at Happy’s, a really great restaurant found all over Bulgaria that is most similar to Toots (http://www.toots.com) found in Tennessee and a couple other places.

After that we walked around the mall and went outside to the sound of a marching band. We look to the right and see a frantically dancing girl dressed as an Indian, she was sooo funny so we went up to her and asked her what was going on. She said it was the one year anniversary of the mall opening. Then a dancing rabbit, dancing witch, dancing cat and dancing penguin came out and we knew this was the place to be. We hung out with the dancing parade for awhile and then went back in to see the movie.

The movie was really good, which was kind of a surprise to me because the trailer makes it look horrrrrible.

After that we went around sight seeing in the city and back to the train station for our 7pm train to Istanbul.

Day 9:

We woke up at about 2am to cross the border back into Turkey, but quickly fell back asleep. We got up for good about 30 minutes before the train was to arrive in Istanbul, at about 7:45am. When we got to Istanbul we started our walk to the tram station, then walk to the underground metro, which took us to the airport. We flew back to Izmir on Atlas Jet, another low cost airline in Turkey.

Were now back at Space Camp Turkey about to start another work week. This will be the last week of the summer for office work, then its back to back camp sessions!


PICTURES:

I thought the best way to share pictures would be to put links to the public Facebook albums, just click here and you should be able to view them:


Balkans Adventure Part 1

Balkans Adventure Part 2

Balkans Adventure Part 3