Stephen’s Travels

In case you didn’t know, one of the most important parts to taking a shower is drying off. Most people use a towel for this, but in my hurry to pack for Europe last summer, I forgot one. What I had to do over those two months was be creative, and look for the inner towel essence of other items.

My first shower was in Paris, several days into the trip, and pictured above is that creativity in action. Some people might see it as an international Coca-Cola Comforter, but not me, it was a towel.

My favorite towel was a pillowcase and boardshorts (swimming trunks). Pillowcases are notorious for their non-towel characteristics such as being smaller than a towel, not as absorbent, terrible drying time, and of course its being a holder for a pillow. Once I honed this technique, my shower ritual shower went something like this:

Step 1: Take a shower
Step 2: Put board shorts on, dry off hair with pillowcase
Step 3: Air-dry until satisfied

Pretty genius if you ask me.

One problem I ran across was that of mildew smelling pillowcase. This was mostly caused by my apathy to letting it dry out before balling it up and tossing it in my backpack, and also its non-towel characteristics as I mentioned above. After a while, you tend to stop caring about the scent because you will never see these people again, and chances are, they smell worse. In the end, it was a great experience, because I realized that I take towels for granted.

Currently, I have 2 wet, mildew smelling towels balled up on my floor. I’m going to use one to shower and I couldn’t care less. Also, showering is over-rated.

After my unfortunate experience in Romania it was about time to head west before my flight home from London. I left Bucharest around 5pm and ended up in Zurich, Switzerland about the same time the next day. I am over trainrides. I did some quick calculations and figured that I will spend over 1 week of time on trains this trip.

Anyways, I made a stop in Vienna for about an hour…which was just long enough to walk around in the blazing heat and get all sweaty. Luckily I found a grocery store so I could stock up on food, as I hadn’t eaten since I left Bucharest. Once my train left Vienna, it was non-stop beauty as the train zipped through western Austria and into eastern Switzerland. Zurich to be exact.

Zurich was/is one of my top five favorite cities. There was an amazing art museum, loads of shopping (though I had no money for that sort of thing), and great people watching. Most people spoke English which was nice. Actually, most people speak 3-4 languages. The city was really beautiful with a great public transport system. I really want to go back some time, you should try to get there.

No pictures of Zurich because of the whole camera incident in Romania. Oh well, at least I have a good story to tell now.

I apologise for the misleading title. They don’t. Well maybe they do, but that is a seperate issue. What some of them could use is a lesson in how to not steal cameras from travelers; namely myself. But I digress…

I decided to go to Bucharest after Budapest because one of my friends from school was going to be there and I thought it would be fun to meet up in her home country. So after my night train from Budapest, I walked the city until night time. The next day I went to the Parliamentary palace built by the ever so communist Nicolae CeauÅŸescu. The tour was nice, short and full of information. On my way back to my hostel via a delicious kebab place I found the day before, little children surrounded me and were successful in stealing my camera. What a shame. Luckily I had been removing the pictures every so often so I only lost a couple days of pictures. Sadly, I am currently unable to take pictures.

I cant remember if I let everyone know that I updated all of the pictures up through Prague, but I did. So go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesearer to see them.

Well, I decided a couple days ago to make my way even further east before heading west. So here I am in Budapest, Hungary.

At least one of the 2 people that casually read the random things I write are thinking Eastern Europe? Why? Well here is why:

First of all, There must be something good about an area if everyone is fighting over it all of the time. Secondly, it isn’t communist anymore. Thirdly, Why not.

So far I have trekked around quite a bit, seen some new things. St. Stephen’s Cathedral was very nice, thought I need to make my way back at night. I am going to go to the communist statue park tomorrow to see all of the old statues of Stalin and Lenin and that whole bunch. There was also another really great church called Matyas church, I didn’t go inside but it was crazy/cool/interesting on the outside.

Ok last but not least, I uploaded all my pictures until my new ones from here. so go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesearer for that

have a great day,

Steve