Thailand, aka Tropical Paradise

Thailand, you devilish temptress!  We arrived in Thailand to massive rainfall that wouldn't stop for days.  It was a bit disheartening, to say the least.  Staying in a locale surrounded by such natural beauty but experiencing torrential downpours on a constant basis is tough.  However, the rain stopped (at least for us....Thailand had floods in 61 of 72 provinces when we left and was facing essentially a national disaster).

I'm going to try to let my pictures do more of the talking for the Thailand leg of the journey than my writing.  It's a pretty difficult task for someone like myself that happens to be afflicted with a severe case of diarrhea of the keyboard/fingers.  But I'll give it a go and see what happens....

So, in a nutshell, here's what we did:  Arrived in Bangkok.  Flew to Phuket (pronounced Foo-Ket, not the other way...get your mind out of the gutter).  Stayed in Phuket for around one week.  Took a boat to Phi-Phi island (prounounced like Pee-Pee, not the other way...mind can go right back in the gutter for now).  Stayed in Pee-Pee, err, Phi-Phi for a couple days.  Took another boat to Ko Lanta.  Stayed in Ko Lanta for about four days.  Then back to Phuket for a night, back to Bangkok for a night, and flew on to Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia.

Phuket:  We stayed in a wickedly badass bungalow at a place called Bangtao Beach Chalets.  So, even though it was raining cats and dogs and elephants and sperm whales...wait, what?...we had a nice room to bide our time in and get some reading and relaxin' done.  Like I said, eventually it stopped raining and we did some stuff.  We checked out our mucho-super-mega-kickass beach (Bangtao Beach) which was a 2km  long stretch of amazing white sand and mellow waves.  We also rented a beater Suzuki Jeep, grabbed up some random Chinese folks who happened to be around when we rented the Jeep, and took a drive down to crazy ol' Patong.  Patong is where you can find ladyboys, ladies of the night, massage ladies, maybe ladybugs, probably a malady or two, and all sorts of debauchery (if you were so inclined, of course).  We, being good and responsible tourists, just grabbed some food with the Chinese folk and spent some time at the beach there.  The beach there is crowded but really fun.  Parasailing, jet skiing, and all sorts of other activities predominate the coast line in Patong.  Really, we just chilled at various beaches and relaxed the entire time in Phuket.  It was real nice like.  By way of proving my point, witness:    

So top to bottom, here's what you're seeing:  
Bitchin' dinner at Lotus restaurant on beach
Sunset on Bangtao beach
Our own little beach in Bangtao
BABY ELEPHANT CHILLING ON THE BEACH!  Crazy, eh?  Take that, India beach cows!
Our hotel pool at Bangtao Beach Chalet
Leann at the hotel entrance

After that we motored on, via boat, to Phi-Phi Island.  Now, people freakin' love this place.  In fact, this place was more recommended than anywhere else in Thailand by the folks we talked to before we left.  Uh, I think either things might have changed in the last few years or unbeknownst to me my friends are actually drunken fratboys.  Phi-Phi is a maze of vendors, bars, and clubs all packed into a tiny, dirty little area.  It's the kind of place where you only have to wait outside your hotel room for five minutes to hear the magical mating call of the sorority girl ("Oh my god, I'm sooooo wasted!").  That said, the island, without the people jammed in, is amazingly beautiful.  We took a boating and snorkeling trip out to a couple different islands, including Phi-Phi Leh, where they filmed the movie The Beach with Sir Leo DiCaprio, esq.  This definitely was the highlight of our pee-peeing.  As evidence, I present to you:

           

From left to right and top to bottom:
Mystery Cove
Serious lovin' in Maya Bay (where The Beach was filmed)
Entrance to Maya Bay by way of old rope bridge-like thing
Pretending I'm a scuba diver
Sea urchin
Slayer for mayor
Chillin' in the cove
Angel fish


After Phi-Phi, we went to Ko Lanta.  I'd made reservations with a small place that had a few bungalows on the beach.  I mentioned to them that it would be Leann's birthday when we arrived.  To my surprise, they had a bunch of little cakes ready for us and "Happy Birth Day Leann" spelled out on them!  How cool and kind is that?  The people in Thailand are so incredibly friendly and generous.  Ko Lanta was kind of our tour place, despite having yet another paradise-like beach front about 12 seconds from our front door.  We did a couple tours in a pretty amusing way.  The owner of our beach cabins, Annie, speaks some English but not a ton.  I speak zero Thai, outside of "hello" (Sawadee Kop!) and "thank you" (Kapun Kop!).  So when she asked me where I wanted to go the next day, I replied "well, maybe we'd like to see some islands."  She then proceeded to go ahead and book a full day tour for us.  The problem was, well, we had no idea what islands we were going to, what we'd do on these aforementioned islands, if there were actually multiple islands or just one, what we'd need to take along, or even when we'd get back.  So the driver came and picked us up at 9 the next morning and we were off.  I thought it might be good to ask him some of the questions about our trip, so here's how that discussion went:

Us:  "Excuse me, but where are we going?"
Driver:  "To the pier."
Us:  "Uhh, ok.  What are we doing?"
Driver:  "No worries.  You come back today."
Us:  "...."

Leann even asked a fellow sitting next to her on the boat where we were headed to.  His reply?  "German."  Uh, yeah.  She asked me to speak to him in German, so I asked if he had any idea which island we were headed to.  His response?  "Keine Ahnung (no idea)."  And off we went.
Screw it, we're in paradise, right?  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, before your mind gets the better of you, let me alleviate your fears by letting you know that not only did nothing go wrong, it actually turned out to be a really outstanding trip.  We stopped at the base of some cliffs.  As I looked around to see where we could actually enter on to this island we'd reached, the boat captain busted out a bunch of snorkeling equipment.  All righty then.  Apparently we were on a snorkeling trip!  It was sweet.  Awesome coral and food to feed the fish, resulting in a feeding frenzy of epic proportions.  It was so thick with fish that if you stuck your hand out, they'd nibble away on your fingers.  Fun, fun.  We snorkeled in another spot or two (sorry, no underwater camera this time) and spent a couple hours eating lunch on a super outstanding beach on some unknown island off the coast of Thailand.

We also took a combo tour that had us riding an elephant and checking out a waterfall.  Our elephant, Bao, is the biggest pachyderm in all of Thailand.  He's a huge feller, checking in at over 11,000 lbs. (I think....translating broken English as well as kilograms to pounds can be rough).  The trek to the waterfall took us by some fossilized snail shells in a limestone cave with bats.  Good stuff.  Seriously.  No, really.  I can prove it:

     

I lost a bunch of the Ko Lanta pictures!!!!  Hopefully it's only temporary, but I'm getting a "cannot use this card" message with the memory card that has a bunch of the awesome pics.  Cross yer fingers.

So that's about it for Thailand.  We're leaving Bali tonight on a brutal flight that takes off at 11 pm and lands in Darwin, Australia at 3 in the morning.  Ouch.  We then wait for several hours and head to Cairs, Australia, arriving at 8:20 am.  Great Barrier Reef, here we come!

Egypt and India (and a little bit of Thailand)

We are now in Phuket, Thailand, a little island off the western coast.  We arrived here a few days ago to buckets and buckets of heavy rain.  It was a pretty huge bummer for me, as Thailand was one of my most looked forward to places of the entire trip.  Thailand has a hefty reputation for having the best beaches in the world.  Tough to explore beaches when it's raining hard enough to drown fish.  The weather forecast was for rain, rain, heavy rain, massive rain, and brutal rain.  Feeling depressed about our prospects in Thailand, I even went so far as to consider rebooking some flights to get us out of here earlier.

Well, teaches me to have any faith in weather forecasts.  After about two days of sucky rain-all-day-you-can't-leave-your-hotel-room action, it cleared up.  Now, don't get me wrong.  We're here in the offseason which means that really nice hotels and resorts are really cheap.  Our place is kind of a bungalow-ish place that looks like the penthouse at the Four Seasons but only costs like $38 a night.  I mean, if it's gonna rain might as well be stuck in a place like this.

So, yeah, it stopped raining and we rented a crappy, beater Suzuki Jeep and started checkin' stuff out.  This place is amazing.  White sand beaches, really cheap and delicious food, not that many people right now (do to it being offseason), and really friendly folks.  We're looking at booking an all day boat trip that goes to a bunch of islands including "James Bond Island" where parts of "The Man with the Golden Gun" were filmed.  We will probably roll on to Phi Phi island soon and perhaps make our way down to Ko Lanta, another island nearby.  Hopefully super-sweet blog updates will apprise you, fair reader, of what we've done.

OK, so here's the quick and dirty about where we've been for the last while.  After departing Greece, we headed to Cairo, Egypt.  We did the whole tour thing there since we were a little a-scared about the political situation.  After that we headed to Goa, India, a former Portugese colony on the southwestern coast by way of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India.  Mumbai has gotten a bunch of press in recent times for the terrible terrorist murders that took place at high end hotels back in 2008.

So I think I'll start talking about Egypt by presenting a quick fact sheet:

Number of people in greaer Cairo, Egypt area:  Somewhere around 16,000,000
Number of traffic lights in greater Cairo, Egypt area:  Somewhere around 3
Chance of scoring some booze outside of your tourist hotel:  .00001%
Chance of scoring some booze inside your hotel next to a pool while smoking shisha from a huge hookah:  99.9%
Number of huge-ass blocks in The Great Pyramid:  2,000,000
Percent of traditional Muslims that look like ninjas to me:  50%
Amount of time I would survive if I drove the roads of Cairo:  3.2 minutes
Manner of death I would likely suffer on said Cairo roads:  Crushing
Highest number of people seen piled onto one scooter:  Four
Number of dudes observed fistfighting while on camels:  Two
Number of times Leann and Chris got interviewed by Egyptian television:  One
Reason that King Tut is so famous:  Tomb was full when found (others from more important Kings were already looted)

Cairo is crazy.  Crazy cool, but crazy nonetheless.  There are a LOT of people there.  The streets are absolutely insane.  Like I mentioned, there are no traffic lights.  People just go.  All of them all the time.  There are also not really any lanes on the roads.  Cars, trucks, scooters, motorcycles, and everything in between just pack themselves in to one road as closely as possible.  Pedestrians risk life and limb constantly by trying to maneuver across packed roads, often having to stop in the middle of the road at each "lane".

Well, we got picked up at the airport by our Egyptian tour company (Emo Tours --- highly recommended and much less emo than I had feared.  No angst-ridden teenagers cutting themselves the entire time in Egypt, to my knowledge.)  They took us to our hotel and hot damn!!! it was a nice one.  I guess the hotel is only a year old.  We had a choice between three, four, and five star accomodations and picked the four since it was comparable in price to the three and the five was significantly more.  This hotel was bad-motherchuckin' ass.  We spent time in our spacious and exceptionally clean room and puncuated the ends of tour days by relaxing next to the 8th story rooftop pool whilst sipping on a cool Sakara beer and even smoking Egyptian shisha (it's just flavored tobacco....relax) out of a huge hookah.

We spent three days touring and here's what we saw:

The Pyramids and Sphynx:  The pyramids of Giza are right outside of Cairo.  In fact, Giza is a city that's connected to Cairo and you can see the pyramids clearly from the city (when it's not too hazy from pollution).  There is a series of three pyramids right near each other, with the Great Pyramid being the largest by far.  This one, also called the Pyramid of Cheops, is the one with more than 2,000,000 limestone blocks, the largest of which weighed an impressive 80 tons.  This pyramid was finished around 2560 BC and was the tallest structure in the world for over 3,800 years.  If you're not impressed, you should be.  These pyramids are absolutely amazing and the fact that they're so many thousands of years old and have held up so well to the rigors of time should give a person a healthy respect for the engineering skill of the ancient Egyptians.  We also got to see both women vendors fistfighting and dudes on camels fistfighting.  Times are a little tough in Egypt right now because the tourist industry is in shambles due to everyone's fear about the safety situation.  The Sphynx was actually smaller than I'd pictured but still very cool.  It combines a lion's body with a King's head.  The nose was chiseled off by a particularly enraged Muslim fundamentalist who took issue back in the 16th century with Egyptians making offerings to the Sphynx.

Two noses, six eyes, three heads, and one fantastic photo opp.

The Egyptian Museum:  A modern, if perhaps a little overpacked, museum that has probably the most wonderful collection of archaeological artifacts in the whole world.  That statue you're looking at over there?  Yeah, that's 5,000 years old and in perfect condition.  That chair over there?  That's King Tut's real chair.  This place is incredible.  Everything is so old and everything is so incredibly well preserved.  It's like an archaeologist's wet dream.  Don't worry, I kept all my fluids to myself while there.

Khan el-Khalili Market:  A huge, sprawling bazaar with every kind of offering you can imagine.  We were given a pep talk by our awesome guide, Mamdouh, before entering into the market.  Yes, you need to haggle prices.  No, you shouldn't tell anyone you're from the United States.  "Tell them you're from Holland.  People from Holland are famous around here for never buying anything or paying too much."  Who knew?  So, yeah, I inevitably ended up in negotiations with some dude named Hassan in his "brother's" shop over a soccer jersey and a shawl for Leann.  Negotiations actually got pretty heated, mainly because he was trying to tell me that his initial offer of well over $100 US was a good deal and that my jersey was "authentic, not polyester" despite the tag on the jersey itself that said "100% polyester".  Leann and the pseudo-brother guy were pretty amused during the whole affair.  The brother even suggested that Leann take a picture (she didn't, but it probably would have been funny).  Well, I got the stuff for under $20 and we shook hands and everyone was happy.  I think I still probably paid too much but the experience was pretty memorable and fun.

Bizarre?  No.  Bazaar?  Yes.

Mosque / Temple / Church / Citadel tour:  Our last day we toured one temple (it sadly got damaged during the revolution by some overzealous jerks), one church in Coptic Cairo, and a couple different mosques.  During this time we asked our guide various things about Islam that we didn't know.  He told us the world to the call to prayer that everyone in the whole city of Cairo hears through loudspeakers multiple times a day.  He told us cool stories about his family and life as a Muslim man in Egypt and allowed us to witness both the washing ritual, including feet washing, and actual prayer at a mosque.  Very cool.  We also toured the Saladin Citadel in Cairo.  The place was built at the end of the 12th century to protect from Crusaders (who never ended up coming).

I feel like I could write for days just about Egypt even though we were there such a short time.  Know this, though:  Egypt is absolutely safe (unless you're a camel ride operator, apparently).  The people there are kind and giving and extremely and deservedly proud about their revolution.  Things are all up and running.

However, it's also crazy in Cairo, like I mentioned.  40% or more in the city live in poverty.  Some of it is really extreme poverty.  A particularly shocking example of this is that the huge Cairo graveyard, named "City of the Dead", has now been somewhat renamed to "City of the Living."  Why is that?  Well, a huge population of people has taken to living in the actual graveyard.  There is a whole microeconomy happening in there --- shops, restaurants, everything.  It's apparently very dangerous to go to and most Cairo locals avoid it.

Still, I'd advise anyone interested in one of the world's oldest cultures to go visit.  Probably a good idea to book a tour, unless you're extremely adventurous, but don't feel afraid to go.  We had a wonderful time.

After departing Cairo in the middle of the night (our flight left at midnight), we rolled on to Mumbai, India for a night before heading to Goa.  Mumbai is even bigger than Cairo in terms of population.  There are over 20 million people in Mumbai.  The first thing we noticed as our plane landed early in the morning was the vast spread of shanties built up around the airport.  These shacks are constructed from, well, pretty much whatever.  Most of them have corrugated metal roofs but the walls are built from bricks, tires, and everything else you can imagine.  There are a million people per square mile in Mumbai.

The second thing we noticed upon exiting the plane in Mumbai was the smell.  It was terrible, like raw sewage.  Leann had known about this in advance but I wasn't prepared.  This initial experience set the table for what turned out to be an experience in a place of extremes.  The India leg of the journey is one with which I reflect on with the most mixed emotions.  Don't worry, though....India gets significantly better after the initial shock.  But before it gets better, it stays pretty bad.  Let me explain.

We, through a series of poor planning and failure to understand date changes correctly, ended up canceling our hotel booking in Mumbai for the night before we flew to Goa.  So we needed a hotel upon exiting the airport.  We found a very helpful young lady at a hotel stand and she found a hotel near the airport that would come and pick us up and was pretty reasonably priced.  Side note:  Mumbai is, unbelievably, one of the most expensive cities in the world to own property.  More than 50% of the city lives in one huge slum but it's also the capital for India's elite.  A distressing study in juxtaposition and contrast and serves to heighten one's feelings of the extremes that I mentioned earlier.

So, yeah, we got picked up and headed through the smell to the hotel, driven by a nice young kid and his sidekick that work at the hotel.  Sidekick offered us a driven tour of the city.  We deferred until later as we were dead tired.  Upon arrival at the hotel, everyone was mega nice and extremely helpful.  They took our bags up to the room.  The room.....ugh, the terrible fucking room.  This place was dirty.  Now, normally I'm not really all that sensitive to hygiene of a hotel.  I mean, I can stand a lot of stuff....probably much more than the average traveler.  But this room was grody to the max.  It smelled, there was trash on the floor and in the bathroom, and (and this is the worst part by far) the shower that I unwisely chose to take made me smell like open sewer myself.  I had never had a shower that left me dirtier than when I'd entered.  It was bad.  The restaurant I ate at, that Leann smartly chose to skip, was also disgusting.  Again, the people were very nice and some of the food was just fine.  However, I ordered steamed rice to go with my masala (spicy red sauce Indian food).  I spooned up a mouthful of rice, brought it to my lips, and..... stopped dead in my tracks.  The rice was obviously cooked in the same nasty water that I ended up showering in.

Not to be a wuss, but this was a pretty tough start to our India adventure.

Anyways, we took off from Mumbai and flew to Goa.  In Goa we'd rented a small studio apartment.  We were picked up at the airport (which, I'm extremely delighted to report, smelled just fine) and driven to our abode.  This abode abides (crappy Big Lebowski reference, sorry).  It was slightly musty due to the massive amount of humidity but comfortable and large.  We rented a scooter, scooted all over town and to nearby beaches, and spent some serious beach time at Vagator Beach alongside the cows.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Cows.  On the beach.  Beach cows.  Lots of them.  In fact, there are cows all over the place around Goa.  No one messes with them and they pretty much just cruise down the street at a leisurely pace, ignoring protestations and honking from blocked drivers.  In a particularly humorous instance, a couple cows got real aggressive with some tourists on the beach we were lying on.  The cows saw that the people had brought some food and essentially just started to help themselves to it.  One guy in the group grabbed up the food and moved away from the cows with it.  The cows gave chase, running after the guy.  He ended up emptying the contents of the food package on the ground in an effort to escape the attack of the herbivores.  Pretty classic stuff and pretty sure you won't get a scene like this on many other beaches in the world.

Our time in Goa really eased our fears that our entire time in India would be similar to our time in Mumbai.  Goa and surrounding areas operates at a relaxed pace.  We were just in a beach town, like most others in the world.  There were open-air beach bars with delicious food (Indian food is my favorite type of food in the whole world and the fare there didn't disappoint) and cold beverages.  We were also impressed and awed by the incredible Indian culture.  There are gazillions of religions, although Hindu predominates the country everywhere else but Goa.  Goa has maintained its Portuguese roots by having a significant amount of Roman Catholicism, as evidenced by the many roadside Christian shrines and churches.  The clothing is colorful and fantastic.  I could really dig Leann in a sari, for sure.  One particular scooter ride we took might have afforded us the most beautiful scenery on our entire trip so far, no small feat.  We scooted over a bridge to another beach town and the entirety of the bay and ocean spread out before us, complete with palm trees (ones with coconuts in India...the ones in Egypt had dates) and beautiful jungle scenery.  The place is like a postcard on steroids in just about every location.  Oh, and the bounty of vendor ladies that approach you near the beach all use English-sounding names like Julie and Sue and stuff.  This is supposedly done because Americans and others cannot remember Indian names.  Probably right.  We're not an attentive people all the time.

Things in India are CHEAP!!!  This was by far the cheapest place we'd visited.  A beer in the bar is about 60 cents.  A meal is a buck or two.  I got a pair of swim trunks and a t-shirt for about $3.50.  There are a ton of expatriates from all over the world in coastal India and I know why.  You can essentially save up for a flight to India, rent a room or an apartment by the month, buy a scooter, and live there indefinitely.  I'd say that after you got there you could live very nicely, apartment and scooter included, for six months for $5,000.  Shoot, probably less than that.

Most of our time was spent relaxing in India on the beach or at our apartment complex pool.  We ate, we drank, we slept, we beached it up, and we generally just refueled the soul for a while.  Overall, a very positive time in India despite the rough start.  In retrospect, maybe we should have spent more time in India to see more of the country.  However, like Egypt, it was one of those "big unknown" kind of places.  I can see why India is often referred to as a place that people either love or hate.  Hell, we loved AND hated it all in one short trip.  I have to say, it's tough to see the kinds of conditions that the most impoverished people live in.  Yes, it's an eye opener and, yes, it's probably important to see things first hand rather than just hear about them on Fox News, but it's not easy.  India is famous for both some of the most amazing and beautiful things in the world but also for incredible poverty and poor quality of life.  I understand just a little bit better now that both reputations are deserved.

So I'm having some upload issues yet again with the pictures.  I really want to add some shots in here from our Egypt and India stints as they were so cool.  I will either do a separate blog entry just with some pictures or will edit this post and add some in later.  In the meantime, wish us luck here in Thailand and much love from your itinerant traveler friends / family, Chris and Leann!

Italy and Greece

So we're actually in Goa, India currently but there is such a huge divide between Italy/Greece and Egypt/India that I've decided to split those locations into two separate blog posts.

So, without further ado, here's the lowdown on Italy and Greece!

We started our Italian adventure in the canal-rific city of Venice.  Let me talk for just a minute about Venice.  It's a weird place.  Undeniably beautiful and certainly romantic and all that.  However, the town has become so incredibly mega-touristic that, apparently, soon there may not be any actual Venetians there.  That's right, a city wholly composed of restauranteurs, street hawkers, and clean up crews that come in from their homes outside the city to serve the whims of the hordes of tourists.  Now, this information I'm imparting to you was derived from a second-hand source, so do your due diligence and go check it out.  Regardless of whether it's specifically true or not, it's obvious that Venice is totally geared to tourism.  That in itself is little surprise, given the city's (warranted) awesome international reputation and the great sights.

We arrived in Venice from Vienna via a train/bus combo.  The train trip was frickin' sweet.  Beautiful landscape everywhere as we made our way through the Austrian and Italian Alps.  It was like watching The Sound of Music through the window of our train car.  We switched to a bus with about 3 hours to go in the journey (a nice, new double-decker tourist bus, I might add) and rolled into the Venice bus station as the sun was beginning to set.  We had booked a hotel in advance, so spent most of our time wandering the streets, looking for good Italian eats and checking out the super cool canals.  In a nutshell, we saw St. Mark's square and accompanying cathedral, we dined on the best damn gelatto ice cream money can buy (Italians make a damn fine ice cream, I tell you what) in a secluded park, walked around the various canals, and strolled via beach boardwalk halfway around the island. 

We debated long and hard about whether we wanted to take a gondola ride.  Well, the desire was unquestioned.  Of course we wanted to take a gondola ride.  I mean, when you go to New York you check out Times Square, when you go to Sydney you go to the Opera House, when you go to New Mexico you eat the green chile, when you go to Mexico you get murdered by drug lords......wait, what?  Anyways, we decided that $100+ per person for a 40 minute ride wasn't right for our budget.  We had some consternation about that decision but haven't really had any active heartache about it since, so apparently it was fine.

After Venice, we flew on a short flight to Rome.  As a quick side note, flying was cheaper and easier than pretty much any other mode of transportation, usually at least, in Europe.  Everyone seems to be under the (mistaken) notion that trains are cheap in Europe, or at least cheaper than planes.  Not true.  There are some Eurail Passes available that could provide decent bang for the buck but they are either very restrictive (3 adjoining countries, for example) or very expensive.  It sucks because not only are planes far worse for the environment, we also really wanted to experience more train action in Europe!  When last I was there, trains were easily the most affordable and flexible method of travel.  This is no longer the case.  Probably doesn't help that I'm a decade past qualifying for a student discount, either.

So, yeah, Rome.  Rome, Rome, Rome.  Rome was INCREDIBLE.  I had no idea what to expect other than more art action.  I just didn't know that Rome was this amazing.  It's like a massive city built around the most beautiful archaeological sites and monuments in the world.  On your left is a nightclub, on your right is a bar, and in front of you is ---- The Pantheon!  We tried to build in as much tourist stuff as we could during our Rome stint, but it's just not possible.  Rome has all the luxury and frills of a modern city, except that some of the world's most beautiful places are sprinkled right in the middle of downtown.  We checked out the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and Vatican City, among some other things.

Pantheon ---  This used to be a temple to the old Roman gods but has since been converted into a pseudo-Catholic church.  In reality, it's a tourist destination but a wonderful one.  Some very famous Italian artists are buried there, including Raphael (remember him from the Prado?) and Caracci.  Most striking to me was the incredible dome, also called the rotunda.  The center of the dome is open to the air, allowing for a ray of sunlight to beam down into the middle of the structure like some sort of beacon from Gawd.  Amazing stuff.

Colosseum ---  Have you seen Gladiator?  Yeah, well we just saw the real thing so hah!  All kidding aside, this structure is where the blood-crazed ancients carried out gladiatorial bouts with bears and lions and such and even reenacted naval battles using a sophisticated water tunnel system with levers and gates.  The thing is incredibly advanced for when it was built.  There is an entire, now exposed, underground system beneath the floor of the arena where the participants were made to wait and also where, again if you remember the tigers in Gladiator, other surprises awaited the victim/hero/fighting dude.  This place is HUGE and also houses an impressive collection of old Italian artifacts and stories about the history of the structure and surrounding Rome.  Again, this is pretty much right downtown.

Vatican City ---  I am thinking of renaming our blog to "Chasing the Pope".  We Poped it up once again in Vatican City, even getting to witness (via huge screen TV in St. Peter's Square) a live Pope-cast.  We tried to get to the window where he was speaking live but had a hard time finding it among the seven hundred gazillion gawkers.  Vatican City is home to one hell of a museum, creatively called the Vatican Museum.  This place houses works by Caravaggio, Da Vinci (heard of that dude?), Raphael, and Fra Angelico, among many others.  The tour that we took of the museum ended up in --- drum roll, please --- the Sistine Chapel!  Not the Sixteenth Chapel, as it is so fondly referred to by the, uh, uninitiated.  So I'm sure most of you know that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.  What you might not have known is that he didn't know how to paint when the job was commissioned.  He was a sculptor.  So, yeah, he got offered the most massive job in the history of the painting world and took four years off in order to learn technique, particularly that of fresco painting.  This painting was meant to last for centuries and it has.  It got cleaned not too long ago (1999) and looks as bright as the day it was done, one can cheerfully assume.  Pictures are not allowed in the Chapel itself, so I can't show you what I'm talking about here, but the place is almost overwhelming.  There are six huge fresco paintings on each side.  One side is the story of Moses and the other the story of Jesus.  The front wall where the altar is located displays The Last Judgment where there's a cool part where sinners are being dragged down to hell (I dig that kind of stuff....sue me).  The ceiling, probably the most famous part of the chapel, shows just about everything Biblical that you can think of.  Yes, there's the amazing part where God is reaching for Adam's finger (The Creation of Adam) that you've seen a zillion times before. 

"Dude, pull my finger!"

Ah, one last thing about Rome.  We stayed in an apartment that we rented for a few days online.  The apartment, I kid you not, had a section of the old Roman wall in it.  It was encased behind glass right in the living room behind the couch.  If that's not cool to you, you need to get your coolness detector adjusted.

After Rome we flew on to Athens, Greece.  Greece, if you've been even passingly checking the news, is going through some pretty serious economic troubles right now.  The government has responded to the poor economy by pissing everyone off through austerity measures.  Once again disaster capitalism is in full effect, with international corporations benefiting from Greece's troubles once Greece denationalized industries and sold off national interests to private companies.  The Shock Doctrine, which everyone should read, is now being enacted in Greece.  Massive protests have been happening in Greece for quite some time about these measures and we were affected a little ourselves when a 24 hour strike took place in the public transportation sector.  No buses, no trains, no taxis, no nothing.  We had to take a taxi to our early flight leaving Greece (taxis came off strike even though the rest did not).  Expensive, but not a huge deal.

So while in Greece we stayed in another apartment and spent our time eating the great food (hot damn, do I love gyros....plus, Leann had some ice cream that almost gave her an orgasm) and checking out the sites.  Now, Italy was very cool and I thought that the stuff there was old.  That stuff was practically out-of-the-box new compared to what Greece had to offer.  Most of our couple days was spent doing two things --- going to the Acropolis and surrounding archaeological stuff, and going to the island of Aegina.

Acropolis ---  The Acropolis is actually a whole series of badass buildings and sites situated on a hill overlooking the city of Athens.  The most famous of these buildings is, of course, the Parthenon.  Also up on top are The Erechtheum and The Propylaea and a bunch of other awesome, old buildings.  The earliest of the buildings were begun to be built in the 6th century BC.  Crazy, right?  There are also a whole host of archaeological sites surrounding the Acropolis hill, including the Agora theater and a Temple of the Sun.

Aegina ---  An hour long ferry ride will take you from the the port area of Athens called Piraeus to the island of Aegina.  We shopped, ate lunch, soaked in some rays, and took a dip in the water.  We wanted to roll on to the tiny island of Agrisi but storm clouds thwarted us.

OK, I'm running out of time in this Internet cafe here.  Today is a national holiday celebrating Mahatma Ghandi's birthday (yay!) and is also a dry day in the whole country (boo!).  No booze for you, India!  We are excited to fill you in on Egypt and India but will have to try and make that happen elsewhere.  We'll also try to get some more pictures up on Flickr as well.

Another quick shout out to my brothers at Bataan Park, who are now three time defending national Guts champions and will be heading to Kyoto, Japan to represent the United States at worlds next year.  You guys rule.

Hope all my New Mexico brethren enjoyed the fair and are enjoying the balloon fiesta!  It sucks to miss Autumn in New Mexico, but we're making do out here in tropical paradise.  

Check in with ya soon!