This is the last posting of Wanderlust, coincidentally on Christmas Eve.  My travels are at an end for now and hence I am putting Wanderlust on hold until my next big trip which hopefully won’t be too long from now. You’re going to have to mosey on over to 390nm if you want to keep getting a glimpse of my photographs.

My time spent in Europe has been unbelievably good. I feel that I have learned more about the world in the past few months than I do in 5 years living at home. The people I have met and the things I have experienced have been absolutely life changing. Some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, I met during this period of my life. The only downside is the inevitable goodbye that had to happen. Over the past month people have been heading off to their respective homes, and being one of the last people to leave, I had to watch them go. Naturally, this sucked a great deal. My only consolation is that I hope to do a European reunion tour as soon as possible.

This photo is from the last full night I spent in Brno. I’m glad Nina and George were there to show me off. The last words I shall post come from the great J.R.R. Tolkien who states that “Not all those who wander are lost”. I wholeheartedly agree.

Well I’m back from Belgrade. It was a pretty swell trip. We stayed at a hostel named The Chillton. The excellent punnery gave me a chuckle. Other highlights include eating a kilogram of meat at a restaurant that opened in 1823, checking out the largest Orthodox church in the world,  walking on what may have been an active mine field and going to see Nikola Tesla’s ashes.

Oh we also climbed on old Soviet tanks.Here’s that big ol’ church I was telling you about. A bartender and her daughter that we met at a nearby establishment showed us around. It was fun. If you look closely you can see my travel companions Robbie Bishop, Ciara Capozzi and Jaden Fedorová.The day before we left for Belgrade, I helped my good friend Ksenija cut down a Christmas tree and hoist it up to her balcony (which is somewhere around 10 metres from the ground) using an ingenious clothes-line rope.  We then decorated said tree as well as made wreaths. It was fun. Note that Ksenija herself took this photo of our captured prey.Oh right, I lied earlier. I’m not ‘back’ from Belgrade because I have yet again left Brno. The only difference is this time it’s permanent. I’m writing this from the Wien airport, starting the trip that will return me to to Canada. For those of you who live in a box, the weather all over Europe has been messing with flights pretty bad so there is a decent chance I’m going to be spending Christmas in the Frankfurt airport. Wish me luck.

This also means that last night was my last in Brno with all of the amazing friends I have made over the past several months. I shall be posting tomorrow for a special edition of Wanderlust centered upon how difficult it was to say goodbye to everyone.

Since I am in Belgrade for the weekend, I shall not be posting on Sunday. Instead I am posting a photo that has nothing to do with my trip.

This is Louise Magliano. She is from Rome and is an amazing dancer.

Schedule for this ongoing week:

Saturday – Study. Write a paper till 3:30 AM

Sunday – Study

Monday – Write two exams. Study

Tuesday – Write two exams. Study

Wednesday – Write an exam. Study

Thursday – Write an exam. Study I don’t have to write my Thursday and Friday exams. It’s a Christmas Miracle!

Friday – Write an exam. Bus to Vienna. Fly to Belgrade

Pictured is Adam Lewis, Robbie Bishop and myself up till 5:30 AM studying for our Czech exam on Tuesday. I would not recommend doing this.

Well folks, I’m back from Poland. It was a very awesome trip despite the six hour ride in a disturbingly stuffy bus each way. The Polish have been some of the friendliest people I have met in Europe thus far. Most of our time was spent in Krakow, but we also visited Wieliczka and Auschwitz. Krakow was super cool and we got to see a bunch of places where scenes from Schindler’s list was filmed. One of the girls we were traveling with happened to run into a McDonalds to use the washroom. This is what it looked like.There was also some really cool stuff such as Nicolaus Copernicus’ house and some less cool stuff such as a legend of the Wawel Dragon. It’s not that this legend wasn’t interesting, it was just that it was repeated to us so many times I almost would have preferred listening to a Justin Beiber song rather than hearing the story one more time. Almost.

The organizer of this trip happened to bring her dog. This dog got her own seat on the bus and came pretty much everywhere with us. Pictured is her sitting in Wawel Castle which apparently cost somewhere around 2 billion present day Euros to build.Next up is Anna Antal from Hungary, chillaxing outside of the aforementioned Castle.On Sunday we headed up to Wieliczka where we toured a salt mine that has been operating since the 13th century. This makes it the 13th oldest company still in operation. This mine was one of the most incredible sights of my life. I cannot do it justice in words or photos. The mine is absolutely huge, being around 300 km long and reaching a depth of 327 metres. As the tour guide said ‘if somebody gets lost, it usually takes around a year to find them’. There are statues and carvings throughout the entire place and the walls, the floors, the statues, the ceilings are all carved from rock salt. If you rub your hand on a wall and lick your fingers you can taste the salt.

The closest thing I can think that anybody could relate to is the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings. I mean honestly, check this out. This is a cathedral around 130 metres underground. You can even get married here.This mine helped make Poland rich in the 1500′s as a barrel of salt was worth enough to buy an entire village.

You may have noticed I have taken Frowntown down for now. This is because I have been having some major problems with the coding I was using to display the photos. Frowntown will have a reunion tour once I can manage to get it working properly again.

Nothing too cool has happened in the past few days. I’ve been studying and juggling a lot but not much else. While working on a paper the other night I noticed how my laptop lit up the room and totally dug it. Here is a picture of it.Oh by the way everybody – I am not planning on bringing back individual presents for anybody. It’s far too stressful to try and find stuff for everybody and I don’t have much room in my backpack. I apologize for the inevitably offended sentiments I just created.

Ahh Bulgaria… where do I start? I suppose chronologically makes the most sense. This trip was pretty haphazard and there was a definitive lack of information or planning on any of our parts, particularly myself. I was essentially clueless going into the trip about social norms and what to expect from the trip. I had never really done that before, nor have I spent any real amount of time in a country where I didn’t speak even a single word of the language before. Spanish, French, German, English and Czech have served me decently well in the past but were all useless in the face of Bulgarian. Thankfully we had one person in our crew who was able to read the Cyrillic alphabet as she had studied Russian for a spell.

We arrived in Bulgaria early Thursday morning and were instantly accosted by an old friend I haven’t seen in nearly a year – snowfall. I was stoked on this but I suspect I may have been the only one. We then had to walk several kilometers to the other airport terminal so as to catch a bus going downtown. Here is a photo of the trek. Pictured from left to right is Ciara Capozzi, Iris Wu and Robbie Bishop.I feel it necessary to point out that I didn’t bring my normal camera to Bulgaria for fear of it being stolen. Thus I brought my old point and shoot which is absolutely awful if you haven’t read my rants back on 390nm about it. To partly compensate for this I decided to only shoot black and white photos while on this trip. There were a few exceptions but overall I have managed to stick to my plan and I rather dig the results.

We spent most of our trip in Sofia which is the capital of Bulgaria. During this time I think I experienced the most culture shock since arriving in Europe. Stray cats and dogs roamed the streets and were allowed into most businesses. People were driving horse drawn carriages everywhere, even around the downtown core. The Soviet influence was extremely apparent all over the city, which was littered with statues from the era of Communism.Throughout Sofia there appeared to be a huge inequality of wealth. At one point I saw a $100,000 car parked next to a carriage such as the one pictured above. It was pretty depressing.

Many adventures were had such as befriending this adorable creature who Iris dubbed Aslan after the lion in CS Lewis’ classic tale. He followed us around for a while and just seemed so pleased to have a pack to hang out with. I was sad to leave him behind.On the 2nd to last day, the group of us traveled to a Monastery high in the Bulgarian mountains. Our mode of transportation: a bus that apparently won the 1993 Coach of the Year Award. It had not aged well.

On the way to the Monastery, I had the experience of seeing people plowing fields by horse and hand, some beautiful forests and a mountain completely devoid of life. I suspect this may have something to do with an ecological disaster during Communism but I have no way to confirm this. I also unfortunately don’t have any photos of it. At the Monastery, Robbie and Ciara both decided to pick up some unknown substance in a white cup which turned out to be buffalo yogurt. Apparently Bulgaria is the birthplace of the culture which grows yogurt. As shown by Robbie’s expression in the following photo, it was somewhat less than tasty.Lots of other stuff happened such as being shouted at in Bulgarian by a bus authority, stumbling across a giant fair and watching some sort of singing ritual in an ancient cathedral, but I figure this post is long enough. If nothing interesting happens between now and Sunday I might write a Part II to this post but if not, just ask me about the trip in person.

Also there are a few new pictures on Frowntown for your viewing pleasure. I am having some technical difficulties with Frowntown so if you’ll all just bear with me I’ll try to have it sorted out sometime soon.

I just realized that despite the name of the last two postings, I never actually uploaded there aren’t actually any pictures of Žygimantas (Jesus). So here you go.

I will now explain the photo. Turns out Czech currency is called the Czech Crown (you can also call it a Koruna). Anywho, Žygimantas happened to pay a deposit on the hostel we were staying at. Therefore we all owed him money. This resulted in me getting to say the delightful sentence “Ok guys, we all owe Jesus 23 crowns”. It gave me a chuckle. Pictured is Jesus holding said money.Also it is Spirit Day today, so all you awesome folk out there: break out the Purple! I know I am.

Homophobia sucks. Just sayin’.

Since I doubt you want to read about me doing homework all week I am going to write a bit more about last weekend’s Praguian excursion. During one of our outings the group of us decided to hike up a ‘mountain’ (also known as a hill).  Here is a photo of (left to right) Jovita, Aukse and Aiste walking through some orchards on the way up.About 4/5 of the way up, we heard a rather loud explosion. All of us were startled and reasonably confused but continued up the hill. Before reaching the top several more explosions were heard, all of which kept making me jump. By the time we reach the top I am very curious as to what keeps blowing up at the top of the hill. Imagine my surprise when we come across  what I can only describe as a Renaissance Fair. The explosions were the sounds of muskets being fired. I was utterly delighted by this and had a great time. Here is one of the costumes.In the middle of the Fair there stood this tower. The tower had nothing to do with the fair, but just happened to be located within it’s grounds. We climbed up the staircase and during so I shot the following picture depicting Nina and one of the guys dressed up for the fair. I hope he normally dresses like that. I would also like to take this time to complain about the terrible ‘MyCoop’ site that UVic utilizes to find us jobs. Last year when working on applications I would often be working late into the night and found that at 2:00 AM the site shuts down and refuses to load. I am not sure how long it stays like this, I believe it’s between 1.5 and 2 hours but I must say it is intensely aggravating  if you’re working on a job application due at 10:00 AM the following day and you’re kicked off by their ridiculous system. Eventually I just learned to avoid working that late on applications while back in Canada so it wasn’t really much of an issue after I figured out what was going on. The big annoyance now is since I am currently 9 hours ahead of Victoria time, MyCoop shuts down at 11:00 AM which is prime application time for me. I don’t understand what kind of shoddy system UVic decided to work on so that they have nearly 10% downtime on their server. Preposterous.

I sometimes am very surprised by some of the subtle differences between North American and European culture. The following photo is an excellent example of this. Pictured is my good friend Wiebke. Wiebke was born and raised in Germany and is another purveyor of the photographic arts. She shoots with the same ballin’ camera as Jordie Hein, which is the excellent Canon T2i. We occasionally walk around Brno taking photos of whatever interests us. Earlier this week, Wiebke and I were walking around a park when we came across a baseball field. After a few minutes of walking around the field Wiebke said something very surprising to me – ‘This is a really strange looking football field.’ Turns out this was the first time she had ever seen a baseball field in her life. Concurrently, this is the first photo taken of her on a baseball field. Boggled my mind entirely.On a completely different subject: a few years back I discovered the site Futureme.org. The premise is that you write an email to yourself that will be sent at a time specified. I wrote an email to myself in November 2007 that I received a few days ago. It was pretty interesting seeing how my perspective has changed on a lot of things. It was also very nostalgic for me as it was written during my first year of University. My favorite part was when my past self expressed envy towards me because ‘by the time [I] receive this, George Bush will no longer be president of the United States.’

In media news, I recently came across this video which I think is totally awesome. You should watch it but be warned, there is rather offensive language within so those with sensitive ears may want to stay away.

Over the weekend I traveled to Prague with Nina (mentioned several times on Wanderlust) and a group of Lithuanians: Žygimantas Jašinskas (Jesus for short), Aiste Lukosiute, Aukse Trapnauskaite, and Jovita Vitkutė. If any of you anglophones reading this can pronounce the last names of these folk correctly on your first try you will have my everlasting respect. The following is a picture of a bizarrely decorated TV tower. Yes those are enormous babies with no faces crawling up the structure. Horrific. I am a bit proud of this photo as it is entirely post-processing free. The glow effect was a combination of overexposure and intentional fogging of my lens.I really like Prague but I am definitely glad that I am going to school in Brno instead. Prague is a bit too big for my tastes and I don’t much care for tourist towns. Visiting is fine but I just wouldn’t want to live there. It’s far too busy, prices are much higher and the people are less friendly than in Brno. The last photo is a candid shot of Aiste walking around a harbor or something. I can’t quite remember.