The cops led us over to the side of the street where they had a van waiting and asked to see our identification. Our Romanian pals handed over their IDs and Bedlam and I gave them our passports. My first thought was “Are these guys legit?” I had heard stories of scams where people pretended [...]
Before we arrived in Bucharest, I joked to Bedlam that to do something entertaining we should attempt to make ourselves “interesting” to Romanian intelligence services. With the upcoming NATO summit, the cops are out in full force and tensions are high, so they’re on the lookout for troublemakers. He pointed out that these intelligence services [...]
As far as hostels go, the Butterfly Villa is pretty nice. Lonely Planet rates it the best hostel in Bucharest and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a nice place, it’s not too crowded, they have all-day breakfast and free wireless internet. We met some pretty cool people our first night and since we [...]
We were about as unprepared as two people could be for an international trip to a country we knew nothing about. We spent too long hanging around the office before heading to the metro, so by the time we finally stumbled off the metro and into the airport we had about 15 minutes before the [...]
When you’re stuck in a completely foreign third-world country where nobody speaks your language and the entire place is shut down due to strikes and riots, there’s only one thing to do: pick a new country where they aren’t on strike!
Romania’s not too far away and I’ve never been there, so next week I’m heading [...]
Not content to merely sit back and let everyone be inconvenienced by their strike, Greece’s civil servants marched on the capital today protesting the proposed pension plan changes started a fight and the cops ended up shooting a bunch of tear gas to break it up. From the BBC:
In central Athens, police fired tear gas [...]
I had an unexpectedly awesome St. Patrick’s Day in Athens. The two guys that I spend most of my time with here are from Holland and Britian, so the Dutch guy doesn’t care about St. Patrick and the British guy rolls his eyes at the mention of anything Irish. Greece is something like 98% Greek [...]
Greece seems to have gone on strike. First the utility workers went on strike, so the power sporadically goes out all over Piraeus. Then the garbage workers went on strike so there is garbage piled up all over the city. Next the railworkers went on strike so the trains aren’t running half the time. Finally, [...]
One thing that I’ve heard repeatedly since arriving in Athens is that it never snows here since it’s too warm and we’re too close to the sea. It might snow in the villages and in the north, but it’d never snow in Athens itself.
You can imagine my surprise when I came back to Athens from [...]
Since everyone’s been asking what Athens is like and bugging me to post pictures, I finally got off my rear end and uploaded a few. You can check out the Athens photo gallery.
I labeled them in iPhoto right after I uploaded them, which means the captions didn’t make it online. Doh! The Athens photos are [...]
Copyright © 2010 valtrain.com.