Rhodes, Falikari, Lindos, Greece

 Greece

Lindos

Faliraki

I just arrived back in Salzburg from Greece yesterday.   I had a good time and enjoyed the warm weather while it snowed and rained in Salzburg.

For those of you who don't know, we have two weeks for Easter break.  I say "have," because the first week was spent in Greece, and we're currently just starting the second.  It was a few weeks before break, that Akasha and I decided we wanted to get out of Salzburg for awhile for break, and we didn't want to spend a lot of money.  We looked at various places: Düsseldorf, Bremen, Munich, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, and they were all too expensive.  Originally we were looking at four nights, then I mentioned Greece, even though I thought it would be too expensive, but checked on it anyway, and the flight availability presupposed a week-long stay, but a week in Greece was about a third of the price as four nights in Munich, and less expensive with the flight too.  The catch was, we had to fly out of Düsseldorf--an eight-hour train ride.  But with the price, we couldn't pass it up.

And so we were off on the first Saturday of break.  The train we took to Düsseldorf was really nice.  It was a CNL (City Night Line) and we had our own compartment, and the eight-hour ride didn't seem too long. After arriving at the Hauptbahnhof, we took a train to the airport.  Unfortunately, we went to the wrong airport, which proved to be a somewhat costly mistake, as we had to take a taxi to the correct airport in order to catch our flight.  We went to the international airport, and the correct one was actually a smaller airport that the British used during occupation.

Then we hoped on the plane for the ~3.5 hour plane trip to the Greek Island of Rhodes.  I slept most of the plane ride, but woke up as we were circling the few islands.  From that high, they looked like ink spots on an ocean without texture, as we approached, the mountainous terrain reached up at us.  I find flying boring, long, claustrophobic, and all together uncomfortable.  Landscapes usually prove to be bland, but this was something else entirely.

Lindos

  
We arrived at our hotel at about three pm and then set off for food.  Which we found, ate, then headed back to nap.  After not getting much sleep on the train, we were both exhausted.  After a short nap we just walked around for awhile and visited the beach.

Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

It just happened to be luck, that we worked it out to arrive on Sunday.  We knew we'd be tired, and most things are closed on Sundays anyway, so we explored a little and oriented ourselves with the surroundings before heading to bed.

We were also both lucky and unlucky in our timing.  We arrived right when it was warming up, although it was a little cooler when we first arrived (mid sixties), and warmed up to eighty by the end of the week.  But it was also the beginning of tourist season--the first week, in fact.  So there wasn't a lot of touristy type things open, but we had a lot to ourselves, and it was quiet.  We shared one of the largest and cleanest beaches in Europe with just a handful of other people visible in the distance.

Eventually, we took a bus into the main town on the island, Rhodes.  About 100k people live there, and is the closest thing to the city of small villages knows.  They had the best strawberry ice cream I've ever tasted in my life.

It was also quite convenient that the price of both of us to eat was usually half as much as in Salzburg.  At one restaurant, the price of drinks, bread and two orders of lamb chops was about fifteen Euros for both of us, and for lunch the price for both of us was often under ten.

Anyway, Rhodes was interesting.  The old part of town rests inside a castle.  It houses stores, restaurants, and small shops.  The people are extremely friendly.

 

The landscape is interesting.  It's overgrown and dry, almost like the old west with mountains and rocks juxtaposed with the beaches and villages.  Lindos was especially this way, as the houses, shops, hotels and restaurant ran up the mountain and came together at an acropolis exclaiming the entire village on a much larger scale and darker color than the the rest of the white structures.

Lindos

Rhodes

The people are some of the friendliest I've ever seen.  Everyone is eager to help, from shop owners to hotel managers, to taxi drivers.  The small hotel we stayed at was family owned, and the owner helped us get around Faliraki, explained how to travel to Rhodes by bus, and many more things.  However, on our way back, I was both happy to be back in German-speaking territory in Düsseldorf, but disappointed by the change in weather from eighty degrees to thirty.  Then once we arrived in Salzburg I was again disappointed, because I've grown a distaste for Austrian German.

Summer 2011 just for giggles

Rhodes, Greece

So...  I guess many of you who read my facebook status are waiting for the explanation on why I had to call the Greek 911 equivalent.

It was about five-thirty in the morning, when I hear a banging and crashing.  I thought someone was just outside being drunk, which would be pretty typical.  Then the crashing was coming from inside our small hotel, and eventually right outside our room, then glass breaking.  At this point Kasha had woken up, and I told her to put something warm on.

Then a rapping at our balcony window.  Keep in mind, we're on the second story.  So I tell Kasha to lock herself in the bathroom.  I look at who's on our balcony, and I recognize him as one of the Swedes from next door.  His hand bloodies from breaking the window in the hall so he could climb out on the balconies and climb over the dividers separating them.  So now I'm stuck with some random guy on my balcony a story up.  Perfect.

I tell him to back up to the railing, and turn around before I went out there.  He was very drunk and scared, and he said he lost his friends and zombies attacked them, and told me I didn't know what was going on, and asked me where all the people were--the only plausible answer for their absence at six in the freaking morning obviously being a zombie attack.  Eventually, I convince him to climb over to his balcony, and he does, and I ask him if he wanted to just wait there for his friends or if he wanted me to call the police.  He said call the police, so whatever, I did.  They put me on hold forever to the tune of "it's the end of the world as we know it," and right after the police figured out where we were, his friends came back.  So then I waited for the police to show up, they did, talked to them for awhile, they were pretty nice.  Mostly I just didn't want to be blamed for the broken window at that point, and we weren't.  So everything worked out, and they didn't bother us for the rest of the week.

Lindos

The wildlife there is pretty cool too.  At first, we were confused how many tourist shops had cat-like items, but it didn't take long to figure out.  Stray cats are all over the entire island.  You see them more frequently than you would squirrels.  Some of them are timid, others territorial, and others will pose as you take their picture.

We ended up returning to the beach several times.  Towards the end of the week it became much warmer, climbing to about eighty-degrees.  I think it was on our second to last day that I had a minor sunburn, but it resided in about a day, luckily.  The train and plane back to Salzburg would have been miserable with a bad sunburn.

We ended up returning to Rhodes for a second time,  but the ice-cream place was out of their strawberry ice-cream.  We got some, anyway.  I don't even like strawberry ice-cream normally.  It was that good.  In fact, we almost returned before our flight, because we had several hours between when we had to check out and our flight, but we decided against it.  The buses were usually crowded, and neither of us wanted to haul around our stuff all day.

Other than that there isn't much going on.  I'm back in Salzburg, and my roommate is off traveling around Austria, so I have the place to myself for the rest of the week.  Then next week classes start again, and there's another month until the next break at the end of May when I go to Berlin.  Then another month and I'm back in Ohio.  At least the weather is nicer.  The best part of the week in Greece, was that for a week the weather in Salzburg was really crappy, cold, rainy, and even snowed. Now that we're back, it's getting warmer again, but the cloudy weather is pretty typical.  In Greece it was just clear skies with a few puffs of clouds.  They have 300 days of sunshine a year.

Then Easter we spent on a plane and a train.  It was all right.  We spent most of the flight playing games on Kasha's tablet, and then some of the train ride watching a movie on it, which is also how I was able to use facebook occasionally while in Greece, because I didn't bring my computer.  It felt nice to come back and have a keyboard again, and I fixed my "M" key.  So that's good.  This is one of my favorite keyboards, so now it's enjoyable to type again.

These small pictures don't do them justice.  The full sized pictures are much better, but I figure it'd be annoying to have to side-scroll.

I'll have another update eventually.  Probably after Berlin, maybe before, depending on if anything interesting happens by then.

Update

The long awaited update is finally here.  I have probably been out of contact with many of you, who are currently reading this, for at least a few months, probably close to six months if not more.

Much has happened since I've arrived.  There have been trips to Vienna, to Munich, and Linz, an upcoming return to Berlin, school work, stress,  people leaving, dropping, and arriving, bar hopping and roof-terracing, warm weather and cold weather.

I'm not going to go into detail about everything, because then I'd be here forever.

The weather is getting warmer, and I'm just a few weeks removed from a month-long vacation in February, during which I did nothing for a variety of reasons.  I have the first two weeks in April off for Easter, as well, and some vacation time in May.  I'm looking forward to them by virtue of time by means of acceleration.  Since I lived in Munich for a year, the culture shock wore off more quickly for me than most, and afterwards everything just fell into routine.  At least the weather is getting warmer, and my disposition about being here as somewhat improved.  Mostly, I'm too distracted with school to focus on anything else, but I don't particularly want to be there, either.

I've settled in.  Not to say I wasn't settled in before, but if you're forced to spend a year with the same twenty people, be sure you choose carefully.  I'm as much as six years removed from some of the undergraduates, who make up the majority of the already small group, including having one as my roommate.  Most of the time I just want to be left alone.

At least the weather is getting warmer.

Two graduates have already dropped out, and another has promised to drop out after the end of this semester.  One of them was a good friend of mine, Kristen, who left at the end of January.  So that sucks.

Salzburg is quite quaint.  A smaller city with a somewhat bigger feel, but more of an antique feel than a large feel.  You can walk from one end of anything important to the other in about an hour and a half to two hours, but bars are plentiful, and the food is, well, mostly Italian.  Any actual Germanic food you can find is mostly touristy-German-pseudo food, mostly serving Schitzel in it's various forms, yet the best kind--Jägerschnitzel--is curiously absent from most venues.

Being in Salzburg does offer me the unique opportunity of being able to visit Munich, and one of my best friend's that I had there, Maxi, who has changed considerably since I left Munich, but we had no problems picking right up again.

Maxi playing Chess

I actually started writing a mass e-mail in the beginning of December, but after reading over it, I found it to be too long and often irrelevant.  Much of what I had written has changed, anyway.  My old roommate moved out, and I got another one.  It's unfortunate.  Not that we don't get along, we get along just fine.  But I'm not a roommate person.

Moreover, something is caught in my freaking "M" key, and it's really irritating, because I have to use my keyboard so much.

The winter in Salzburg wasn't pleasant.  I had been going out about twice a week until February, when it became freezing cold, and I spent most of my time wrapped in a blanket and in the fetal position rocking back and forth, clicking my ruby-slippers and hoping for spring.  It would be dark by about 3:30 pm, which made my long days at the university seem even longer.

My keyboard is really irritating me.  Why am I constantly having keyboard problems?  Doesn't even seem to matter what kind of computer it is.

Now it's dark between five and six, and this semester's schedule is better than last's.

Since school started, however, I've been having a very difficult time sleeping, and I don't think I've had such consistent trouble sleeping ever before.  It's close to five-thirty in the morning right now.  In fact, I'll be exhausted around 10 pm, fall asleep for two hours, then I'll be awake for the entire night.  It's quite irritating.

There's been other stuff that's happened, like group excursions, like snow-shoeing for example, where we climbed up a mountain in snow shoes, then essentially ran down.  It was almost like skiing downward, and I'd say how deep the snow was, but I'm too prone to exaggeration, but I can tell you if you took a step too hard, you could suddenly find yourself chest deep in snow.

At least the weather's getting better.  I forgot what it felt like, to be able to go outside without a coat.

Something amazing happened a few weeks ago, which hadn't happened since October.  The sun came out.  It  only emerged for an instant, but it came out nonetheless.  Thankfully, it shines now with more frequency and longer duration.

I've been thinking about some sort of keepsake I should buy, but can't think of one.  I have yet to really buy anything substantial since I've been here.  The only thing I've bought is a hat.  Actually, two hats, but the second one doesn't count, because I got it for a few Euros at some street stand, because the wind was blowing cold air, and my ears were hurting.  That was the day Akasha, Matt and I went for a hike.  It was a Saturday.  That was nice.

     Of course, it wasn't a hike as much as it was a walk for a few hours.  Now that the weather is getting nicer, I want to go out more.  People generally aren't sick of the bars yet, but they have start to become a bit drab, while in November they were a nice escape from the cold and the dark.  Plus, until about the middle of November I still spent most of my time with Kristen.  But she dropped out and went home.  She was nice; you would've liked her.


Without a hobby, one is completely lost.  I've been writing more than I should, because it's sort of distracting me from my studies, but I ended last semester with a 3.7, so I have to be doing something right, and the more I relax the better I do.  I relax until I feel a little pressure, and then I do my best work.  I wrote a semester thesis on Nietzsche, on whom the program director who also traveled with us wrote his dissertation, (he was also the prof for the class, for which I wrote the semester thesis).  I ended up with an A, even though Nietzsche is one of the most difficult German writers to understand.  This semester I've started working on my Master's thesis on the Bildungsroman, and started reading Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, so that is factored into the amount of credits I'm taking.

I've also started working out on a somewhat relative basis.  Last week I never made it to the basement of the building where the gym is, because I've been having a hard time sleeping, and I have been way too tired.  Dropping weights on my face seems like a bad idea.  I could be wrong--it's just a hunch I have.  But it mostly helps with the stress and the overall miserable atmosphere in Salzburg.  People like to stare, and they regard you with a somewhat mild reluctance not unlike a stray dog.  I've acclimated to strangers not interacting with you, ignoring pleasantries so common in American culture.  I kind of like it better.  A few new Americans moved in half-way through the year, and I'm starting to understand the stereotypes about Americans being superficial and contrived.

I speak a lot of Russian.  There are a lot of Russians here.  I have some Russian friends.  I should be in bed, but it's Saturday so there's no reason for Russian to bed.

I love my camera.  I use it often.  But I find landscapes dull.  I prefer people, and despite the size of my camera, I no longer feel conspicuous using it.  Our program director encourages me to write for the school's and publish some of my pictures, and someone in Bowling Green noticed one of my pictures, and asked permission to print it in some magazine or something.  It's not uncommon for me to take 800 pictures in a full day.  But the shutter goes up to six frames a second, so some of it is exposure bracketing and some other things that it's quite technical and uninteresting to most people, I'm sure.

From the top of the universities language building

 This is the most recent picture of myself I have, taken just a few days ago.  I've developed an aversion to having my picture taken.

I'm taking a Sozialphilosophie (social philosophy) course, which is in a different building and much more aesthetically pleasing.  The floors are marble and the building itself is significantly older.  The view from the lecture hall consists of the Residenzplatz and the facade of the Salzburg Cathedral.  It's nice to escape from the language building.  There really is no "campus."  Instead, university buildings are scattered throughout the city.  The weeks have been going by fairly quickly, and it helps that I only have two classes a day.

This is however, the end of my update.  I'll try and write something more often, and some of the entries might be retroactive as things occur to me, thus this might not be in chronological order whatsoever.  It just depends on how much time I have and what I feel like doing.

Damn "M" key.

I hope everyone is doing well, and I cannot wait to come home.  You can write me at SHOBSON@BGSU.EDU

Schöne Grüße,
Seth