details

ok, ive stopped in to an internet cafe so that i can use a proper keyboard. the hostel has this weird rubber pad with touch buttons that basically have to be pressed one at a time. its awful.

ill sum up the time in budapest first. it really did rain there the whole time i was around. i went for a few walks, and on the last day actually got in a good tour of the central part of the city. i was out with a guy named robert, and we put in a full day walking tour of the castle hill district, then across the river to tour around the cathedral and the parliament. theres a building across the street from the parliament where there was a machine gun massacre many years ago. theyve filled all the bullet holes int he building with these large steel balls, so that you can walk around there and actually tell where the shooters were by the placement of the holes in the walls and pillars. very interesting.

another highlight was a place called Heroes Square. the statues here were unbelievable. it took a million phots. matt, youre going to love some of them. the central area has this hugely tall spire with a statue on top of it, but at the base, on an elevated platform, are 7 medieval horseman outfitted in hungarian battle dress. these things are like 20ft tall weathered bronze (meaning theyre green and black), and theyre all carrying huge axes and maces, swords, armour, shields, etc. one of the horses had these stag antlers strapped to the side of its face, and man did it look bad ass. it was bamf. hope those pics turn out well.

otherwise budapest was ok but not brilliant. sarajevo, however, is brilliant. the hostel here was, as i mentioned earlier, a little overwhelming at first. looking back, i can understand why - weve all become good friends in a matter of days, so new people walk in a feel like theyre imposing themselves on an established crowd. the beauty is that you can -establish-yourself in a matter of hours.

by the way, theres no apostrophe to be found on this keyboard, but otherwise its nearly normal. the only other weirdness is the z and y are reversed. when it gets weirder ill start using my magic keyboard translator, but at this point its not necessary.

so, Sarajevo. wow, this city is amazing. the people are very nice and the old town is brilliant. its not exacty the most beautiful place youve ever seen, but its picturesque and macabre at the same time. There are still many, many signs of the war that was fought here. the city was under seige from the serbian army four 4 years between 92 and 95, and the evidence is everywhere. theyve rebuilt the majority of it, but the patchwork is still evident and there are bullet holes all over the place.

today we took a tour of the city with Haris, the host of our hostel. we went to the tunnel museum, which is the old house from which the Sarajevans built a tunnel underneath the UN-held airport to open territory on the other side. the Serbs had them boxed in except for a narrow route through the north, and the airport blocked access to that escape. the UN would apparentlz not allow them to cross for fear of losing their impartiality, so the serbs built an 800 meter tunnel. throughout the war over 3 million crossings were made to bring in food and weapons to the 250000 people that remained in the citz. they had a movie that they played for us that had footage of artillery shells landing amidst cars dodging and weaving down the street, and sides of buildings being blown off while people tried to escape by climbing down the rubble. crazy.

Haris himself is actually only 19 years old. he and his parents decided to open a hostel in order to pay off the loan they had to take out in order to rebuild the 2nd storey of their house. Haris is the only one that speaks English, so he basically runs the place while the family lives downstairs. i understand that theyve almost paid it off, which is pretty impressive given that they had over 40000 Marks to pay. thats 20000 euro or roughly 27000 CDN. theyve done it in three years, at the same time aquiring a nice van to do tours, modern laundry, vacuum, etc etc. The only downside is they have to put up with 25 rowdy travellers every day!

the old town is very neat to walk around, and its particularly cool because all the locals frequent the shops, cafes and restaurants too, so you dont feel like your getting ripped off by buying and eating there. A .5 liter beer is around 2CDN and a basic meal is about 4. a nice meal at a nice restaurant where you sit down and are served can be had for less than 12 CDN with a couple beers. sweet!

So far Im way under budget, so im going to try to do something interesting in montenegro, like head up to their national park and go whitewater rafting or something. the weather appears to be breaking, as the clouds are randomly parting today and letting through some very strong sunshine. its pretty much off and on still, with bits of rain, but it should get hot and sunny again soon.

people here seem to think that my plan to hit northern albania and then go into kosovo is a good one. i hope itll be relatively easy to figure out. more on that as it develops.

next ill be going to Mostar and then Dubrovnik, where i want to do a sea kayak tour if the weathers nice. One more full day here in sarajevo before leaving, and ill be traveling to Mostar with a friend named Tim. We may go on to dubrovnik together too, although well be splitting there as hes booked ona one week cruise of the dalmatian coast, while ill be going south into montenegro. anyway the train to Mostar is supposed to be beautiful, so were going to get up early and take the morning train isntead of the one at 9pm so we can do it during the day. ill try to update again once im there, but i am planning a shorter stay in mostar, so it might not happen until dubrovnik. i guess that will be thursday or so. man, its hard to keep track of which day it is. i love it!

hope all is well back home. thanks for all the comments thatve been left, its a treat to read them!

cheers,
bms

sarajevo

hi everyone, im in sarajevo now and really enjoying it. staying in a crazy hostel. walked in to this place to find 25 drunk, screaming people. hard to take after a 12 hour train ride... but no options. anyway, as those of you who have travelled a lot would guess, its turned out to be a great place to stay. been hanging out with all these people all day- nearly all of them are traveling by themselves.

this keyboard is just bizarre so i cant go on too long. town is fantastic- very very interesting. still waiting for the rain to end, hopefully in a couple days.

cheers,
bms

big walk - i'm outta here

today I went for a LONG walk with a kiwi named Robert. I'll fill in more details when i have some time - hopefully - but for now just a quick post to say that Budapest was good and this hostel was great. The weather was a real downer, but at least today was ok.

tomorrow I have a 12 hour train trip to Sarajevo. it leaves at 930am so i should be up by around 7 so i can eat, shower and get to the train station by 830.

i managed to get my banking sorted out, so that was a major plus. Mom, i tried to call home using the same borrowed calling card but it didnt work. not sure why. i'll try again from sarajevo.

cheers,
bms

big summary of events

ok, things are rolling here now and I'm feeling like i'm hitting a groove. it's my second full day in Budapest, and even though its been pissing rain here and quite cool the whole time, i've been enjoying myself. met an Aussie guy named Mike (hey, I can remember that) who in turn introduced me to another girl, and from there a couple of English guys named Paul and Andy. Today I spent the morning and early afternoon with those two at a Hungarian bathhouse. man am i relaxed now! We didn't spring for massages, but hit a bunch of different temparture pools and a sauna in various sequences. One warm pool had a water spouting statue that was gushing warm water in a heavy stream. sitting in front of that, letting it pound you in the back and neck, was like a mini massage in itself. it was great. The building itself was amazing, and fortunately i was able to snag some pictures of it from the inside. i may try to post one or two here later, but i'll finish this and save it before i try such a radical experiment.

The rain has been a bit of a bummer. i really haven't done as much wandering as i normally would, just because it's so difficult to stay dry, and once you get wet, drying clothes and shoes is pretty tough. I am pleased that i brought both my jeans (for heading out at night) and these super light nylon pants (they dry almost instantly once you're in from the rain). It's also hard to take pictures in the rain. Despite all tihs, i did go for a hike up the hill in Buda and saw this cool cave-church. Yes, it's actually a church built inside a cave, with little rooms branching off in all weird directions. Very neat.

Still having a bit of trouble with the time zone shift. I get tired around 4pm and have a hard time sleeping soundly past 5am. I think it's getting better though. Today's jackhammering road constructing at 7am didn't help though, let me tell you!

One thing I've been enjoying is some good breakfasts. i made a poiint of buying eggs and veg at the market and so i've been having omellettes with hostel-supplied toast in the mornings.

After this post i'm going to try to figure out where to go next. my original plan was Belgrade followed by Sarajevo, but i was thinking that i might just go where the sun is actually shining. unfortnately, a quick search shows that its raining throughout this entire region right now, with sun returning around Sunday. i may just go directly to sarajevo and then try to hit the coast by sun or monday. stay tuned for further details on that front.

Well, i'm going to go make some food and then probably have a nap. i'm meeting the guys at 'half seven' to go out for beers. i'll probably grab another bite later in the night, so now's a good time to eat. oh, i almost forgot, i have to get myself to a phone to call CIBC and have them unlock my online banking. somehow it got locked out and i can't get in there to transfer money from my line of credit to my chequing account, which of course is where all the atms try to draw money from (there's no option to select account). hopefully this does not turn into an ordeal.

iPod emergency

OK, I'm back in the hostel after a quick wander around town. It's not exactly pouring rain here, but it's definitely a steady shower. I've wandered around a park over in Buda (on the other side of the river) and climbed the hill there. Found a shallow little cave to hang out in during a particularly strong downfall.

I thought I'd tell the ipod story, since it really had me stressing out. Basically I noticed the symptoms of a dying hard drive starting up again the day I met Rico in TO. Most of you know that I had previously fixed just this problem by opening up the 'pod and putting a paper shim on the hard drive spindle. I figured that since it was starting up again, though, that there was no way I could fix it again. What would I do, put in a thicker shim? So, I asked Rico to drive me to an electronics store (ended up being future shop. lame eh?) I bought a new 80 gig video iPod, briefly felt like shit for spending that much money, and then set to the task of getting my music on it.

Now, let me make it clear that facing two months on the road, alone, with no music was not only a shitty prospect, it was into the 'unthinkable' realm. This is a project I was strongly committed to finishing, to say the least.

So, first thing: find a computer we can use. Rico hasn't moved his from his old place yet, and even so it's really old and has USB1.0. That would pretty much make it impossible to move all 30 gigs of my tunes. Instead, Rico said I could use Morgan's computer, even though Morgan wasn't home to approve it. I figured that this meant I should find a way that didn't involve installing software.

So, the process: plug the old ipod into the machine. Error, cannot read. Shit! Plug it into the USB port on the keyboard: error, USB hub does not have the power required to run device. Uh oh, i'm starting to freak out. Finally I crawled under the desk, moved a few things around and plugged it directly into the back of the machine. -pause- Sucess! It mounts as a new drive.
OK, this is the part where I'm glad I know my way around a PC. I went into the hidden folders on the ipod drive, found all the music files (they're just numbered mp3 files on the ipod) and then started a huge file copy to the PC. This ran for about 40 minutes, so Rico and I went for a cruise on the boardwalk at the beach. Nice.

Get back and the copy is done. I figured out how to launch iTunes using a new, empty library and then imported all the mp3s that I had copied. It ignored the numbered file names and pulled all the info from the id3 tags, just like I hoped. Again, success! Finally I plugged the iPod in, formatted it and then started the sync. This also took a while, so we went for late lunch-early dinner. Got back, and bingo: new ipod, same music! I recreated a few of the 'word find' playlists that Matt had suggested and we were off.

Crazy eh? At first I was pissed that it happened, but later I realized that it could have happened 24 hours later and I would have been totally screwed. So, in that way, it was perfect.

update

Ive eaten now, at a cheap chinese food place. uhmmm, thats all i have to say. gnight

erk

OK, it's almost 8:30 and I'm absolutely starving. I'm in my hostel in Budapest and will be heading out for some food in just a moment, but i noticed that the computer here was free so i figured i'd post this first. i'm dead tired, hungry (worth repeating) and totally disoriented and pretty much alone. There's a bunch of people around here, yes, but i'm so whacked out right now that I can hardly stand straight never mind hold down a conversation. I'll leave that for tomorrow. not sure how long i've been awake, but its gotta be over 36 hours now. I did manage to scrape up the energy to have a shower. that was nice, even as it alternated between scorching and freezing. yes, I know i'll have to get used to that.

Lots of weird things happening so far; maybe I'll be able to describe them in more detail later, but they involve an emergency ipod replacement and subway evacuations due to suicides on the tracks in Toronto and a steep fine for misunderstanding the Budapest metro system (there's no transfer from one subwayy train to another on a single ticket, apparently)

k, that's it for now. Rico's good, btw. his new place is cool.
bms