Surrounded by family in Ireland

Today my sister and baby niece and I spent five very cold minutes at the beach in Salthill. It's been almost three months since I started this trip by touching the other side of the Atlantic. Clearly today called for a brief but eloquent speech on the smallness of the world and the interconnectness of all its people.
"Brrr. Ok, I'm done. Coffee?"
And on that note, I'll leave this blog too. It's been a good journey, dudes. If you've read this far, thanks for coming with me :-)

In Brussels train station

My favourite thing about central Europe is how everyone speaks four languages. The woman in the cafe here told me the specials in English, then fielded a question in French from the table behind, interrupting herself to share a joke in Dutch with a passerby. It's astounding.
I said "Hallo!" to the man at the ticket desk and he started out in German, switching fluidly, mid-sentence, to English when I said "Wait, I mean 'Hi!'". It makes me feel like a slacker: I can sort-of-kind-of follow what's happening in German if everyone speaks slowly and uses small words, but it's not enough to pull my weight in a conversation; I can barely get by in Irish for that matter. This relaxed and easy multilingualism is a wonderful thing. I love it.
My other favourite thing about central Europe is bread. I could live entirely on bread and butter here. And the other best thing is cheese, of course. And the way that enormous dogs come up to talk to you in cafes, though I admit that this doesn't always happen. And pedestrian streets and plazas with markets on them. Those are great. And bikes, too, and separated bike paths and miles and miles of canal paths to ride along. Or riverbanks where you can sit and think and watch ducks. Although, actually, big train stations with lots of platforms are even better than any of those. All of those trains heading off to everywhere. Trains and trains and trains. Europe is amazing at railways.
I love trains. That's pretty much why I'm here, travelling, I mean, instead of being a productive member of society. I wanted to sit on a lot of trains. Europe has the most fantastic network of high speed services. I have a timetable here for international trains from Brussels: in the next few hours, just to list a few options, I could take the TGV to Nice, the Benelux IC to Luxembourg or Amsterdam, the Thalys to Paris, or the ICE to Frankfurt. From each of those cities more lines spiderweb off in all directions. If you've got your visas sorted out, you can take trains from London to Tehran and beyond. How cool is that?
International railways feel positive and optimistic to me. It takes time and effort and cooperation (and a huge pile of money) to build them and, if you stop being friends with your neighbour, you can't just point them off in another direction. Wars happen and borders close and the tracks sit there, getting grassy, waiting for people to get over themselves and reconnect. Just think about that! The conflict fizzles out and the engineering is ready to go again. Cooperation and trade and unity, all symbolised by parallel lines running off into the distance. Wonderful!
I do realise how cheesmongery this sounds, but I can't help it. I get pretty excited about railways :-) And individual trains, for that matter. My favourite days on this trip have been sitting by the window watching the countryside go by, reading for a bit, maybe talking with other passengers, just sort of logging out of the real world and into the train world, and getting such a kick out of the parts of the journey when the train is going around a curve and you can see it out of its own window. That just about makes my day.
I'm about to get on the Eurostar to London. This time tomorrow I'll be on the Dublin ferry, and then off to Galway on the last train of my trip. I'm looking forward to seeing you, Ireland-people!

On the Rail. Way. To. The. Euro zone.

(Joel says that isn't as hilarious as I think it is.)

Right now I have fourteen currencies in my bag, including a Sri Lankan two rupee coin, an inch thick wodge of Uzbek som and some goaty Mongolian tögrög worth $120. If asked at some border to declare the money I'm carrying, I think I would lie.

But no new currencies for me for a while, because it's eurotime! I'm writing this on the Spirit of Zurich, a lovely red Railjet train bound for Austria. This wasn't in the plan, but I suddenly realised I could have breakfast in Vienna tomorrow morning and there was no good reason not to. I'll get an early train from there to Munich so I'll have daylight for looking out the window: the internet says that it's a scenic part of the country. That said, the only part of Germany I've ever been in is Frankfurt. Let's just say that the bar is low :->

We had fun in Budapest. It's a peaceful place to walk around and look at things, and it's insanely beautiful at night. The wind was too cold for us to work up enthusiasm for the baths, but we saw the synagogue and the cathedral and the castle and Buda's old town and some bridges and a Christmas market. That actually sounds much more productive than we were: mostly we just sat around and ate things. It was pretty great. More of that kind of thing.

Budapest is funny because it starts off so hostile. You get off the train in a station that has few signs and no ATMs. Guards stand blocking the doorway for no obvious reason. You leave the station and go down the street to find an ATM between a gambling hall and a sex shop. Then you walk along a building site until you notice steps leading down to the unmarked metro station. There's a woman selling orange paper tickets at an unofficial looking desk near the top of the stairs. When you see a more traditional ticket booth inside the station, you wonder whether you just bought a black market metro ticket or maybe entered a raffle. On the platform, there's no subway map and no list of stops for the line. Many of the other stations have both, but I guess they want visitors to prove their worth.

I mean, obviously it's saner than the MTA -- the one time I took a bus from Montreal to New York, the gate from the bus station to the subway was locked and I had to find my way out to the sketchy, poorly lit street, cross over, then navigate through a party of winos to get to the A train. Where there were rats on the platform. Welcome to America, Canadians! -- but that's New York for you, bless its grubby, surly heart. We expect better from you, Hungary! Be more Central European! Aw, ok, or give us more of that bean soup and we'll call it good.

Btw, I feel like I must know someone who lives near Munich. If that's you and you'd like to have dinner, please drop me a line.

On the Bosfor Express

The restaurant at Istanbul's international train station is called the Orient Express. I found myself humming "I would have liked to know you, but I was just a kid", wishing for the romance and adventure of the Paris-Istanbul train. Aw, even by the time Paul Theroux did it in 1975, it wasn't too exciting any more, but the legend is good enough to withstand any kind of reality check. RIP, Orient Express, 1883-2009.

By the way, Theroux's short story, Misery on the Orient Express is great fun and I thoroughly recommend it: http://m.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/75jul/misery.htm It's expanded in his travelogue, the Great Railway Bazaar. I'm only half way through that and I recommend it too, but the short story is magic.

The Bosfor Express goes to Bucharest. Joel and I are on it! Istanbul is one of the best places it's possible to be, and we were almost hoping the train would be booked out, but time is tight and it makes most sense to move on to Bucharest tonight and then Budapest the day after tomorrow. Joel will fly out from there, and I'll continue to Munich and then probably go home via Brussels rather than Paris because I don't know what Belgium looks like. Everyone is a monk or a politician, right? And the streets are paved with waffles?

We crammed a lot into three days in Istanbul. We took a boat to Asia and bought berries from a street vendor. We devoured pomegranate molasses and figs and a view of the city at a new-Turkish rooftop restaurant. We admired recreations of machines and winced at surgical implements at the Islamic Museum of Science. (Upstairs: astronomy, navigation, clocks, warfare, medicine. Downstairs: chemistry, mathematics, not sure what else because the museum closed.) We drank endless glasses of lovely tea. And of course we saw the Aya Sofia and several impressive mosques and the fantastic haunting Basilica Cistern, which would be one of my favourite things on the planet if only the other tourists would just stop chattering for ten minutes. Grr.

It would take a long time to be bored of Istanbul, and then you'd just be a few hours away from any number of other wonders, so it'd be hard to stay bored. Istanbul is great. We'll be back.

But for now we're in our own little compartment for two on this pleasantly rumbling train and it's about as good as it gets. The carriage was built in a time when wood panelling was the classiest of all possible decor, and it has a little wash basin and tons of storage space and tiny reading lights. We love it, but feel that we dressed inappropriately for the occasion: those hooks should have hats on them. We should probably be smoking. There is insufficient intrigue.

Look, seat61 has pictures of train compartments! Scroll down a wee bit to see the Bosfor:
http://www.seat61.com/Turkey.htm#What%20are%20the%20trains%20like

At Ankara Otogar

The bus from Trabzon blew a tire, so we had a bumpy journey and then a two hour delay. We also had an unscheduled stop at a petrol station because some idiot foreigner got food poisoning and needed private time. It was dramatic. But we made it in the end.

The good news is that I have a ticket to Istanbul, or actually to somewhere called Bayrampasa, which probably means Istanbul. With luck, no unscheduled stops this time, but I'm not going to risk eating anything for a while.

Stranded in Trabzon

I'm still on the Black Sea, this time in Turkey. Trabzon is probably an ok city, but tourists mostly come here to change buses. It's the easiest stop between Georgia and Istanbul.

Except, wow, it turns out that every seat on every bus to Istanbul is booked out for the next _three days_. I managed to get the very last ticket to Ankara instead, leaving tomorrow night. It gets me closer at least!

Ankara is six hours by bus from Istanbul (if there are any seats left) and I get there around eight hours before Joel lands in Istanbul, so this can still work... *cue dramatic theme music*

In Georgia, trying to get "Georgia On My Mind" out of my mind

"A khachapuri please. What's the difference between Imeretian style and Megrelian style?" "Imeretian has cheese on the inside. Megrelian has cheese on the outside too". Wow. You have to admire a cuisine whose food options are "lots of cheese" or "seriously, tons of cheese".

I'm in Batumi, a port town on the Black Sea, just north of the Turkish border. The Stalin museum is sadly closed for the season, but I took a bus out of the town to see the Roman fortress at Gonio, then went to the beach and added the Black Sea to my short list of maritime firsts for this trip. (Also on the list: the Yellow Sea; the Pacific Ocean from this side. I could have added the Caspian too, but I decided against touching that. I don't know where it's been.)

I think a lot of people fall madly in love with Tbilisi on their first visit. That didn't happen to me. It's a nice looking (though kind of decrepit) town and I liked it plenty, but I was waiting for the magic that entices everyone and it never appeared. Maybe it's weather related. We had miserable sleeting snow, and power outages kept taking out the streetlights, so that didn't show the city at its best. It's probably more magical with dry socks.

I dutifully saw some churches and I  got a violent massage at the sulphur baths, but mostly I spent my two days in Tbilisi randomly getting into  conversations with strangers. That always happens a bit, but it was unusually constant in Tbilisi (maybe that's the magic, actually), and I had fun dialogues on subjects as diverse as Armenian politics, spoons, special relativity, nomadic dog ownership,  the Norwegian film industry and evangelical hitchhiking. The last was enlightening: I didn't know that being a Hitchhiker (as opposed to just hitchhiking) was a Thing, but apparently they have events and competitions. Behold:

http://hitchwiki.org/

Tomorrow I guess I'm going to Turkey somewhere, but I don't have anything approaching a plan. Three sleeps until I meet Joel in Istanbul!

Leaving Baku

Wow, Baku is expensive. A manat is worth around the same as a euro, but it doesn't seem to go as far. I've made six separate withdrawals from ATMs in 48 hours. After Uzbekistan, everything costs a shocking amount of money. You want to charge me $3 for tea? You thief! Going back to New York will take some adjusting.

It felt like a month since I'd met a fluent English speaker, so last night I dragged the two Japanese kids from our hostel to the local Irish pub/restaurant, Finnegans. Jackpot! The oil industry means tons of expats working in construction, and we got talking with an Irish architect and a bunch of Liverpudlian builders, all apparently called Danny. "There's no building happening in Liverpool now", Danny told us, "and we heard there was lots of work in Azerbaijan.". "I bet I know what your first thought was", I said. (In chorus) "Where the hell is Azerbaijan?"

We went to hear a live band at a gay bar where my Japanese friends danced and I got all the English conversation I could wish for. I can survive another week of talking to myself now. And I got a cultural experience to boot: a gay bar in a Muslim country is a new one for me.

Yesterday I just walked around a lot, enjoying the difference between the old town and the rapidly developing new city. There's a great promenade along the water, very striking in cloudy weather when the (oily) water, the seagulls and the distant smoky ships are all starkly black and white.

The old town here is quite lovely and well preserved. Wooden balconies covered in flowers hang over busy flagstones streets. It's a good place to stroll. On Thursday I had dinner in the old town with people from the hostel, one Japanese and one Turkish. We went to a caravanserei -- a sort of old travellers' inn with little stone rooms around a courtyard -- which is now converted into a good restaurant. Carpets and kilims covered the walls, and the rooms were lit by little gas fires and candlelight. A band played Azeri music, which sounded great to me but infuriated the Turk: he ranted (at great length) about how the Azeris are exceptional poets and musicians and how the tourist-quality music wasn't acceptable to his ears. Apparently the Azerbaijan Philharmonic is incredible, if you're in the neighborhood.

Today I visited the Shirvanshah's palace, a surprisingly big complex of mosques, mausoleums, galleries, etc, connected together with steep stone stairs. I played with some cats and sat in the plaza watching people go by. It was relaxed and easy.

And I drank a lot of tea. There's good chai in these parts.

In summary, Baku is a pleasant place to be. As the capital city, it's probably not at all representative of Azerbaijan, and I'm curious now about what Azeri people are like. I won't find out on this trip though. To Georgia!

In Baku

Aw, I take it back. Baku seems rather nice. I auditioned the city on the walk to the train station, and concluded that I should stay for a second night. Besides, who knows when I'll have a reason to be in Azerbaijan again.

Azeri appears to be Turkish with a French accent. Who knew?

Killing time in Tashkent

I've sorted out my next visa, collected my next ticket, and handed off a load of laundry, and now there's nothing to do but sit in a cafe and read the paper. You could argue that Tashkent has attractions, buildings, statues, etc, that any worthwhile visitor would go look at, but after Bukhara and Samarkand I have monument fatigue. I have seen enough wonderful blue tiled buildings with beautiful domes, thank you. I'll just sit here with my coffee and cake.

Pictures are at http://whereistanya.smugmug.com/Uzbekistan/ if you'd like monument fatigue too.

Tomorrow I'm going to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. From my brief reading about Azerbaijan, it seems that this is one of those places that have suffered horribly from finding oil and having sudden wealth: their environment's fouled up, their hotels cost a fortune, but somehow the average person is still broke. The Lonely Planet's suggested three day itinerary includes places that it later describes as "spirit crushing","mesmerising ugliness", "infamous pollution", "a nightmare vision of leaky small-scale oil detritus and rusting old boats". (I know at least two people reading this are buying plane tickets already).

I do enjoy horrific decay as much as the next person, but this, the book reckons, is the very best the country has to offer if you only have three days. If you visit for a whole week, who knows what kind of oily adventures you get to have. Poor Azerbaijan.

[Side note: six months ago, Tanya's knowledge of Azerbaijan was: 1) beside Armenia, right? 2) probably has a complicated relationship with Russia 3) um...? Since then, she has skimmed a pdf version of an out of date travel guide to the country. There is a reasonable possibility that she has no idea whatsoever what she's talking about. Azerbaijan might be perfectly charming. Also, Baku's old town has UNESCO world heritage status, so it does have some nice things and stop being mean.]

Anyway, I'm flying to Baku tomorrow afternoon. I've got nine days to get from there to Istanbul, so I won't be there long enough to see much of anything, nightmarish or otherwise.

Having to fly is disappointing, because I'd hoped to go by land, but without a Russian visa the options were
- wait three weeks for a Turkmenistan visa that's 50% likely to be rejected for no reason, or
- go back through the border crossing of doom, spend 84 hours on a train across Kazakhstan, then wait around until a cargo ship is crossing the Caspian sea. Since they'd like me to be back in the office at some point[1], Tashkent airport, here I come.

[1] Probably. It's likely that I've been automated by now.