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.

I couldn’t sleep the other night so at 2:30 I grabbed my old photo-capturing friend and headed out from my room. Unfortunately it was, according to some Spanish folk I ran into in the hall, ‘even too cold for Canadians’ outside so I was confined to my residence building.

This first shot is a self portrait lit by an emergency light that’s always on in the corner of a common room. The second photo is the hallway outside my 4th floor room.

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.

If you are reading this it means that I haven’t yet returned from Poland where I am currently traveling. Actually there is no chance that I have returned yet so I suppose it means that I figured out the ‘auto post’ feature of Wanderlust’s hosting program.

Pictured is a cigarette butt I found the morning after a party. It was in a designated smoking room in my residence. Because it is acceptable to smoke inside here. This is likely strange to most of my North American readers but is pretty normal in most of Europe.

Sorry about the late posting everybody. My residence here is sort of falling apart and the internet was down in half the building yesterday. My half. The worst part is they never tell us anything so I had no idea why it was down or when it would be back up. I also missed out on a few job applications which bothers me. I couldn’t even go to an internet Café  or something because it was a national holiday in the Czech Republic yesterday.

I did however, get to take part in the holiday celebrations which were pretty cool. There was a giant lantern parade across the city in memorandum to the Prague Spring. The Prague Spring occurred in 1968 when the Russians invaded to stop political reforms that were occurring in the Czech Republic at the time. Once getting to the end of the organized parade, a few of us were trying to walk back to our dormitories and got rather lost. Took us around two hours instead of the estimated ten minutes to get home. It was a fun adventure though.

Here is a photo of the parade. All of those white streaks are lanterns people were carrying.

I had planned on going to another city in the Czech Republic yesterday but we ended up missing our bus. Instead a trip to the Zoo ended up substituting. As the zoo is quite a distance away from my dorm, we took public transit. Here is a picture of the tram rounding the bend by my dorm. I am not sure whether that bird makes the picture or breaks the picture.I hadn’t been to a zoo since being a small child and I was pretty excited to head out to this one. I was unprepared for what I would find. I’m not sure whether all zoos are like this, but the Brno zoo borders on animal abuse. The size of cages for most of these animals were ridiculously small. There was a giant barn owl that had a cage slightly larger than an SUV. The poor creature would fly from one corner, bounce off the cage on the other side and then fly back to the first corner. This happened the entire time we were watching him. Birds weren’t the only animals in small enclosures; I’ve been in living rooms larger than the swimming pool they had three seals stuck in. Total bummer. There was also a section of the zoo that was full of animals from Canada including both grizzly and polar bears, arctic wolves,  beavers and lynx among others. I got a bit homesick due to this (or it could be sadness at the deplorable living conditions of these animals).

Then I saw some monkeys and they cheered me up. I also found the llamas particularly humorous. Look at this guy’s expression. Stupid expressions, just like animal abuse, was not limited to one creature at this zoo. Indeed this fellow bears an uncanny resemblance to the llama pictured above. There was this little kid walking around with a plastic bag on his head. He was walking with whom I presume was his grandmother and she did not appear to care at all about his plastic-y attire; she was just chatting with him. I tried to pull out my camera as fast as possible but I got unlucky as the child removed his death bag to yell at some emus. I missed a perfect shot by seconds but here is the aftermath.I have been trying to keep up with Canadian news once in a while. While watching some streaming news I came across this story about a bionic eye that is working extremely well. I’m pretty stoked for all those blind people out there.

Let it also be known that on November 4th, I was outside wearing a tee shirt, shorts and flipflops at 7 PM. I was not cold. Strange weather this Brno. Strange weather.

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.

Last Saturday I went on a delightful day trip to a small town called Kutná Hora. This is a town famous for it’s cathedrals as well as the ‘Bone Church’. Now as you may recall, I have already visited the catacombs underneath Paris so I was a bit skeptical as to whether this small church would live up to them.  I was delightfully surprised. The Bone Church and the catacombs are completely different concepts. Whereas the Parisians seemed far more interested in storing a large amount of bodies, this Czech church had the goal of arranging the bones in an attractive manner. Instead of stacks of bones with simple designs, the Bone Church had extremely elaborate structures built out of femurs and adorned with hundreds of skulls. I had a bit of trouble capturing anything really amazing but here is a photo of one of the very simple designs. I will play around with some of my other photos and see if I can get a more impressive photo up sometime soon. There was also a wedding going on during our visit to one of the cathedrals and I quickly snapped this from my hip so that they wouldn’t notice my creeping disposition. This design was outside a Cathedral finished in 1894. A friend of mine pointed out that if one were to quickly glance at it they may think it reads something completely different than what the designer likely intended. In other news, here is my address just in case you need me to dispose of some evidence for you or something. Alternatively, I suspect that mailing yourself here would be very cost effective in comparison to a plane ticket.

Kobi Thomson

Koleje Vinařská, blok A1

Vinařská 5

603 00 Brno

Czech Republic

I haven’t taken a picture of anything particularly noteworthy since Sunday so these photos will be unrelated to my story.

On every Monday, a laundromat a few tram stops away from my dormitory plays a Czech film. This laundromat is pretty neat actually; it has a room for bands to practice in, a foosball table, a full bar and some board games and stuff. Anywho, I’ve been going to see these Czech films and they are extremely awesome. I highly recommend Rebelove which is a pretty cool musical made in 2001. It has totally balling cinematography too if you’re into that kinda thing. I also just watched Kolja which starred this guy who I believe is the Czech Republic’s answer to Sean Connery. Watch out though, Czech cinema WILL leave you depressed. That’s their style.

Photo number 1 is a continuation of the funny faces post. This light fixture was installed in the side of a castle which further increases it’s awesome factor.Photo 2 is an extremely confusing label on the side of some tonic water.

This Saturday it was the birthday of my Slovenian friend Ksenija. Since we live in an international dorm, there are people from all over the world present at her birthday party. As a result there was singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ at this party in more languages than there are blemishes upon George Bush’s reputation. It was very awesome. Also it turns out that it’s a Slovenian birthday custom that instead of having drinks bought for the birthday recipient, the person in question buys drinks for everyone at their party. I am really digging learning the small international tweaks on customs that I am used to back in Canada.

Here is a picture of Ksenija (right) and Nina (left) that I pulled off of Facebook. I don’t feel too bad about this because I am pretty sure that it was me who took the photo with Ksenija’s camera. If that is not the case I apologize to whomever’s intellectual property I just stole.Saturday was certainly an interesting day as beyond Ksenija’s birthday, I also got to tour some pretty awesome looking caves that were first explored somewhere at the beginning of the 20th century. There was also some water in some of the tunnels and so we got to boat around in the network of caverns. Having to duck out of the way of overhangs as we zipped by in our vessel was pretty fun too. The low light made it rather difficult to take many good photos but here is one of the few that even came close to turning out.After the caves we then went to a traditional Czech brewery. This company has been in the same building since it’s founding in 1620 and is extremely traditional in the way it brews. I chatted with the brewmaster and was surprised to learn that they fermented their alcohol in a room that is around 3 degrees which is much lower than the temperature Ryan and I generally ferment at. I assume it improves the quality of the alcohol but takes much more time. I then also got to pour my own beer right out of their maturation chambers which is pretty much a highlight of my life. Fun fact: this brewery brews 3 batches per day and each batch is enough for 33,000 half litre beers. That is nearly 50,000 bottles for you fellas back in Canada.