Monday, March 31, 2008

The True Alpine Ski Experience

So, as of Saturday, I can mark off one of my lifetime goals which was to ski the the infamous Alps. It wasn't like the biggest or greatest mountains, but it was pretty cool given the stature of the mountains. Now I can count off stating i've skied in 3 different countries, which is cool for any American. But the trip was interesting nonetheless

We went with a travel agency and left kralupy by bus at 11pm on Friday and headed southwest to Austria. We arrived at our destination at about 730 AM to a ski center near Salzburg. The mountain that we went to was called Muelbach. The highest peak was 1900 m (or a bit more than 6000 ft) It was pretty sweet. Most of the slopes were (for Americans) mostly blues. There were only a few greens and a minor amount of blacks.

In Europe the markings of the slopes are different. Greens are Blues. Blues are Reds. And blacks are blacks. We skied for hours and hours. We stopped for lunch at one of the slopes and I had some gulash mit wurst and we listened to a German band for a while and continued skiing til 4. The skiing was perfect. In the morning, it was really great snow conditions and then the sun came out and lit our way the entire day. It was really a perfect day of skiing. The best that you could ask for. The ride was really quite interesting even.

We went by bus and the bus advertises as a bed bus where the buses turn into beds. After a few hours, we got off the bus and they turned the seats into beds and we continued on our way. It was a bad sleep cuz i thought i'd fall off the bunk bed bed bus. But it ended ok. and we finally came back at about midnight on saturday, just in time to change the clocks for Daylight Savings Time. Wow, it was a crazy day, but well worth the fun. It was totally sweet.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Clinton Sucks

After a turn of events in the news, Sen. Hillary Clinton had a speak and spoke about her trip to Bosnia 12 years ago, she stated that, "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

You can see on CNN actually on the article here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/25/campaign.wrap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
Make sure to watch the video also. In the video it shows her calmly walking with her daughter along the tarmac. It's quite comical. But watch the video. It gives you perspective.

But the really funny thing that I can't get over was her response when she realized that she's so stupid. Her response was that she misspoke... in layman's terms... She straight lied. When you misspeak, it means you don't say something clearly, not that you say something completely different from what you actually do say. When you lie, we would have this definition.

Anyway, her response was "I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement," she said.

Poor her she says MILLIONS OF WORDS A DAY!! How can we be held accountable for ourselves when we say MILLIONS OF WORDS A DAY!! For those of us who only say thousands of words a day, now then we should really watch ourselves, but when you say MILLIONS OF WORDS A DAY, then really, you shouldn't really be held accountable for a little lie or two that you say to the media.

Hillary, you're so stupid. That's like saying, "I wanna kill myself or someone," on national television, and then I don't really understand why the police come and take me to the psych ward... I mean seriously I had already talked to so many people and talked about dinner at McDonald's and talked about my favorite color for 2 hours and stuff like that (but only to a few people), and then when I tell the whole nation at a live press conference of my intentions to harm someone or myself, I get all self defensive. That's pathetic and so are you.

Other pathetic excuses from the Clintons:
"I didn't inhale."
"That depends on what your definition of "is" is"
I did not have sexual relations with that woman"

Family of sad cases.

Monday, March 24, 2008

My Easter Daze

If you all don't know about the famous Easter celebration over here, check out my April 5, 2006 entry. Anyways, I had a funny thought go through my head the other day. First of all, Czech celebrate Easter over here on Monday. It dates back to Slavic traditions and is quite different from our Easter. Anyways, it's also a big time for many people to take trips, so many of my friends were away, but a few of my American friends stayed and wanted to have a lunch on Sunday to celebrate Easter, and it struck me as a bit of a surprise, cuz I kept thinking. "Why are they wanting to celebrate on Sunday, cuz Easter is on Monday." And then after a few more moments, it hit me that, no, we actually celebrate Easter on Sunday in America. I felt stupid, but that's ok. I didn't go anyways. I was relaxing. And now everything is happy and sober.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Freedom in My Pocket

During the long 5 day weekend that I am on right now due to Easter holiday, I've found lots of time to really enjoy myself. I've found time to relax, to spend time with an array of different people, and even do some shopping. The other day I went to the mall because I had to go looking for a new wallet because mine had unfortunately busted. Well the zipper had which contained all my coins and the such, so without gettin this fixed up, there'd just be change flying everywhere and it would be a small sense of mass chaos all over the world. So anyways, I found a sweet new wallet. It's cool. Well... it's just normal. But not bad.

In addition to this cool change of events, we ended up eating there in the food court cuz they got some wicked food there, most of it being quite expensive. But, I was figurin, "What the heck, why not. I'm allowed to spice up my life every now and then, huh." So, to the cool Indian restaurant. I'm pretty sure that I really haven't eaten real Indian food... or maybe so, but i just can't put my finger on it. So, we ate there. They even had the chocolate fountains there and I woulda gotten one, but we decided after the meal that it wasn't really sooo necessary, so the eating was accomplished in a healthy manner, and back to the homestead where life boringly continued as usual.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Cancun, Eat Your Heart Out, The Balkans are This Year's SB Extrrrravaganza

So, we got into Sofia late in the night of Saturday and on Sunday we walked around Sofia in the morning to get our car. We saw some sights on the walk and then got the car and started out on our journey. Briefly recapping it for you and then below is a bit more detail, we travelled across to Macedonia, and drove through the capitol of Skopje which seemed more like an African market, and then down south to the Albanian border where we spent tine at the UNESCO-protected Lake Ohrid. Then we continued to Albania and around the country and then back to Ohrid. Then up to Kosovo and across Serbia...wait, strike that, we were denied entrance, so back across Macedonia and the last 2 days in Sofia and Plovdiv. Hope you enjoy the pics. This is most of the fun stories I think... I'll start you off with our first story though ,and definitely our most adventurous.

In Vienna, we met a Bulgarian living in UAE. On the plane, he showed us photos and the such, and offered to take us to our hostel in Sofia. We hesitatingly accepted. After his friend picked us up, he told us we needed to go somewhere first, where he proceeded to drive in the outskirts of the city and to some dark apartments where his friend apparently lived. It was at this point we thought we were goners, cuz i thought that this guy was too nice to be real. But it ended up, that he just was that nice. He drove us and helped us out so much and even wanted us to cancel our plans in Albania and go skiing with him in the Bulgarian mountains. Well.. maybe next time. It was a great trip full of good moments.

This is called just the Russian Church, but also cool

Here is the President's Building straight ahead adn to the left is the Party Building, maybe parliament, I think. Or maybe it's some old Communist building.

This is the most famous site in Sofia I think. It's the Aleksander Nevski Church. And that's me with the church. Our rental car agency was a little past this so we were able to take a short walking tour around the area.


Lots of interesting and nice acrchitecture in Tirana. The mayor is kinda an artist so he approves all this cool new stuff. Though driving around Tirana isn't really the most advisable thing as I would suggest. Actually, it's almost outright suicide, but it was an experience that I'm happy I had. I feel more experienced now because of it. It's the craziest thing though when you're driving and 4 lanes suddenly turns into 2 lanes and nothing has street signs so you don't really know where you're going to begin with, and also not to mention that people don't really mind the fact that their country as crosswalks, nor do they mind that the streets are full of cars, s o there are also people just walking across the street everywhere. Oh yea, and let's not forget the lack of stop signs, but really it didn't really matter too much cuz even the drivers didn't bother to look at them. And oh yea, to top it all off, throw a bunch of potholes in the mix...everywhere...


But Albania was a lot of fun. We met with some of Joseph's friends there and saw lots of sweet things. We even got a cassette to listen to during our drive of biggest hits in Albania in the last year (Am. hits that is).

We spent time at Lake Ohrid both before and after our sidetrip to Albania. It was definitely worth the 2 days we spent there and def coulda spent more time there. Even the whole week. Cool. And us Americans are highly liked here. I was stopped in Ohrid for having a Bulgarian car, but once i showed him my passport, he was all smiles and told me to continue and have a nice day.

This is the kind gentleman that helped us so much. This is Kosta, from Kosta Apartments. He was maybe one of the nicest guys ever. And he really liked saying my name. Everytime I saw him, he had to scream my name and smile. He was a really nice and hospitable character and really happy. It was perfect our accommodations. And the prices were a steal.

This is the Church of St. Bogorodica Perivlepta. This is really famous and beautiful. We accidentally stumbled upon this our first night in Ohrid just walking around. We were looking for a place to eat and we saw this church. Thought we'd have a look, so we started to walk in, but as we were walking in, there was a wedding procession coming out. We quickly got out of the way, but not before I got the glare from the bride. It was funny though.

Some pictures around Lake Ohrid






This is the walkway we took one morning on a hike to the church you will visit next on the continuation of reading.

All over the Balkans they have a huge problem with stray dogs. It's really sad, but it's true. They're everywhere. But, we met this one little cute shaggy mangy dog one morning on our beginning of our hike and he decided he was up for a little adventure. He followed us up the hills and travelled with us the distance until we finally got rid of him near the theater

In one of our mornings, we walked to this church that is one of the most beautiful places in Ohrid. It's called Saint Jovan. This is the entrance.


This is maybe one of my favorite photos. This was really a cool place. This little church on a small cliff peninsula overlooking the town and the lake. Really cool

Us with St. Jovan chapel

The ancient ruins of Ohrid. maybe 4th or 5th century

This is the church of St. Clement. His remains are here apparently. We didn't look. They have here ruins of older churches and stuff and the church is just an added bonus I guess. The people were really friendly. I mean the workers were.

This is the theater in Ohrid which is 2000 years old. It was used for poetry and such but after the Roman invasion, they took out the first 8 rows to use for blood sports. You can see the restaurant maybe above the theater is called the Gladiator. Kinda ironic...


The fortress atop the hill overlooking Ohrid

Starting the travel back from Lake Ohrid, we drove north back to the capitol of Skopje and we continued farther than our years would have ever dreamt. We continued north and north until we entered the "Forbidden Land" of Kosovo (the newest country in the world according to some countries).But as we entered through the customs, we noticed this interesting little sign

After crossing into Kosovo, nothing of interest really happened. There were times when we would drive past armored tanks or something of that instance, but it was pretty uneventful. In most of the Balkans they don't really have road signs anywhere in the city, so we drove to Pristina and got easily lost, but the people there were friendly enough to not tell us how to get back on track (cuz they didn't really speak English), but rather they actually had us follow them to the highway. It was great. We decided to continue on to the Serbian border and back to Bulgaria from there, but we had a minor setback. We got to the Serbian border and the border guard just started yelling at me for something I did wrong. It was in English, but I'm still not sure what he said. Then another guy came and took our passports and came back tellin us that we can't enter Serbia through Kosovo, we have to do it from another country (I guess they just don't like the whole independent Kosovo thing, so we turned around and the 1st guard came back and said Sorry, you can enter... So I was again confused. Did they change their minds again? No, the guard really said "can't", but was more or less a jerk about it, but it was cool. Just added about 3 hours or 4 to our arrival time back in Sofia. Had to back track across all of Kosovo and then across Macedonia and back

Funny story. It's night time driving back, about 9 and we're in Bulgaria and the roads are horribly marked. At one point, we were 30 km from Sofia, but we thought we were there so we were tryin to find the center and all that but we just couldn't. I stopped frequently to ask and they'd always say a few km. We finally made it there but it didn't look like the center. It was strange. Then I asked someone where in Sofia we actually were, but they didn't speak very good English but they were having fun with it. We were in Pernik, not Sofia. I came back to the car and told Joseph we weren't in Sofia and told him we were in Belgrade. He started freakin out until he realized how ridiculous that possibility was. It took us more time to drive around in circles until we realized we had to turn around to get to Sofia, but it was good, and we finally made it to the hostel 6 hours after I had originally told them.

We travelled to Plovdiv on our last day which is a pretty big city in Bulgaria. It was really cool but trying to find the Old Town was a big pain, but we finally did. This is the Church of St. Constantine. It was cool. well, actually this is just the wall outside of the church, but it's cool enough. Driving here we had terrible fog on the highway but it was no problem

This is the old ancient theater in Plovdiv. It's the main attraction in the old town and it's pretty cool and worth it i guess to see, but it did take us about as much time to finally find the old town as it did to actually get to Plovdiv which was an hour and a half from Sofia. But It was cool. we walked around and then ate at this kinda small but good restaurant which was cheap as always.

So, in conclusion, the trip was a lot of fun. We met a lot of fun people at our hostel the last 2 nights and had some good chats. But it was really nice to get back home. After 1200 miles of driving, and after not driving for a few years that much, I was ready for a relax. I'm pretty sure I slept most of the plane and bus rides back. So, hope you enjoy the pictures and stories.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

The Kitchen of Prosperity

We go from the past...




to the future in one single bound