Plovdiv

So I've been here a few days now, obviously.  A week or so.  I've settled into my temporary apartment, set up my workspace somewhat, ambled about and seen so many stray cats, just so many...and finally tonight, cooked for the first time as a nomad.  Turned out better than I expected, quite honestly, though that was a low bar as I scraped a burned layer of rice mash off the bottom of the pot.  But it beats my first meal in the place which was still kind of charming in a way.

My apartment has a pretty sketchy entrance that should be scouted for a horror movie...but honestly it is a downright adorable little place.  If that desk weren't sized for someone much smaller than me, I'd be pretty content here for a while - the bed isn't amazing but I've adapted, the kitchen is small but functional...really one of my only complaints with the construction is the standard "I'm tall" issue that is pervasive everywhere.

This past week also marked my first attempt to find pole dance classes overseas.  Story time.  

I found a gym in Plovdiv that had advertised pole dance classes.  The stairwell kicked off the hardcore gym vibe, and the "rules" poster tried to reinforce it (but a typo or mistranslate sold it even better).  It takes me a minute of navigating language barriers with the woman working the desk but I finally get signed up for the pole dance class.  I get changed, find the classroom, and start stretching out a bit.  As is common, I'm the only man in the room, and I'm getting slightly confused looks from the other students as they get ready for class.

A few minutes later, another woman enters and starts speaking to me.  Now, I've learned the simple phrase "sorry, English" as a basic survival thing because unlike China, I don't stand out enough that people assume I can't speak the language here.  I hadn't realized just how useful being different was in that regard - it was actually quite rare for anyone in China to just start talking at me full speed in Mandarin, and many lead off with gestures and the simplest words spoken slowly.

Not in Bulgaria, boy.  I look local enough, I guess, that Bulgarian at full speed is the common starting point.  So I've worked out the easiest, shortest way to tell people I can't do that and tried to drill it into my head.  It's actually been pretty effective...when my brain works.  You see, one of those delightful little quirks of autism spectrum disorder is "Selective Mutism," a phenomenon where emotional tension of various kinds can actually sort of disable the speech center of the brain (or something, I'm not a doctor).  So when someone starts in with Bulgarian too quickly, I can short-circuit and just stare for a minute until I remember, oh yeah, I've trained for this.

I'm so flustered by this woman that it's actually one of the other students who suggests English, after which the woman switches to rapid, slightly broken English, saying her class is only for women.  She was nice, apologetic, but clearly had no interest in discussing it.

So I got a refund and went home.

Here's the thing: I've known for months, a year or so maybe (idk what is time), that pole dance is a rare space for men.  And I've been prepared for some places to turn me away.  I didn't expect it to happen the very first time, nor for it to be quite so explicit, but hey, at least I know where I stand.  I don't begrudge her choice to keep her classes just for women, nor did I consider writing a complaint or bad review on Google about it.  I'm the outsider, and that's just how it is.

But I did learn from that, and before I showed up at the other studio in town with pole classes, I sought out a way to message them and ask.  Turns out I didn't have to worry - the instructor at this other studio is male.  That's even more rare than another guy being in a class, but I'm grateful for it.  He also has pretty strong English, which makes the classes easier.

I've only taken one so far, but the second will be tomorrow.

As often, I mostly have just a big blob of pictures with little to no real structure.  As I start writing less about the traveling itself and more about the experiences I'm having along the way, I'm guessing the photo dumps will subside and things will be more purposeful.  For the time being, though, have fun just leafing through and maybe sometimes wondering if a given picture even belongs in this set.

An Amster-gramme is better than an Amster-damn

 My references can sometimes be pretty obscure.  Curious how many people will get that one.

It's Day 4 in Bulgaria.  Landed here with a mild fever after two straight days on trains, so it's been a bit of an adjustment - hence the delayed update.  I think this one will cover Amsterdam and Munich, since most of the Amsterdam pictures are just a photo dump anyway.  I'll point out a handful in particular, but I have captions on those that need them and the rest just kind of exist.

I got to Amsterdam fairly late in the evening, late enough that the train station was fairly quiet.  Got some food (apparently kebab is a type of food, not just an individual dish, and that's something I learned in Amsterdam), struggled to figure out how to exit the station (turned out to be way easier than I thought, but I just hadn't KNOWN how), and got a taxi to my hotel.  For the uninitiated, a capsule hotel is a format used in high-density areas to keep costs low by basically squeezing every possible inch out of the building's square footage.  Shared bathroom, shared shower (gender-separated in both cases, though there was, I think, a bathroom that wasn't).  Really cool design though; the place had a modern aesthetic that, while it sometimes lead to confusing choices like a sink with a faucet so short it barely even reached the basin, was still rather hip.  An interesting contrast, really, to the general older style and vibe of the whole city, which has been maintained and built up in roughly the same architectural style.  I think.  I didn't get out very far, so it's possible that more distant areas, suburbs, etc might have more contemporary building approaches.

An amusing story about the food, though.  As the caption says, this was from "The Doner Company," which I later saw was kind of a fast food chain-type place.  I'd never had it before, and found it quite tasty, particularly as probably the first real food I'd had that day.  The worker at the counter came over at one point and asked how it was.  I expressed how much I was enjoying it, and I think I caught a slight eyeroll, as if his thought was "how do you find this good, stupid tourist?"  Not in a malicious way, but clearly not proud of the product the place was selling.  I found it funny.

My main stop in Amsterdam, however, was actually to get some vaccines I needed for my travels.  Three in particular were offered at a clinic in Amsterdam.  Yellow Fever, Meningitis, and Typhoid.  These cost 260, 190, and 180 in the US respectively.  The three together in Amsterdam was only about $216, making it not much more expensive to detour for the day and get them here, even after hotel.  US healthcare, folks.  Gotta love it.

After that appointment, I wandered around a bit before heading back and resting up.  Munich was next, with another photo dump.  I was a little surprised to find Munich so colorful - it's the kind of vibrancy I'd expected in The Netherlands, honestly.  Not complaining, though - the architecture and style were all pretty gorgeous (my hotel room, on the other hand,  was spartan but not unpleasant).  I was also intrigued by what was being staged there; a musical adaptation of Pretty Woman is apparently also going up, which is also...a choice.  Guess they're digging into that nostalgia.

A day of wandering Munich preceded the real 'fun' of this whole section of my adventure - a two-day haul from Munich to Plovdiv, where I currently am.  I'm going to save that for a future post, as it looks like I haven't uploaded my pictures yet.  Plus I haven't yet modified my workspace adequately and typing for too long is still hard on my back and shoulders.  A new chair and a desk upgrade are about 4 days out, and will likely be a normal part of my nomad adventure - get to a new place, buy stuff that the host gets to deal with when I move out so that I can work effectively.  So until then, I'm trying to moderate my time at my computer so I have a functional body for actual work.

I may have said before, but I'll repeat: I honestly don't recommend this journey.  I mean, if you can make a day or two to stop in each place, and a few along the way, it's been fun and interesting.  But full-day train trips every other day or so for nearly a week, and especially a two-day marathon, are draining and stressful.  I wouldn't do anything differently if I had it all to plan again except maybe a day in Craiova or something to recover/break up the blitz, because I am on a timetable of sorts with having to make income still - and every day I'm 'on the road,' I'm mostly unable to work.  It's been a real stretch and I'm super glad I did it, and I'm super glad it's done and I won't have anything similar in the foreseeable future (trips between here and Turkey are a day at most, Turkey into Georgia a day or so, and the train across Kazakhstan I think is maybe a day and a half at most).  I'm glad to be stopped for a while where I can actually learn my way around, find things I like, and get a kitchen/cooking pattern of some kind down so I'm not eating out all the time.

Once again, I'm not sure how to end one of--

 

Zut Azores!

 Hey look, I'm alive!

 I'm not sure how to start this one, honestly.  It's been about two weeks since the ship departed, about 18 days since I actually left home.  In that time I've gone from Colorado to Germany via Spain and Amsterdam.  Suffice to say, it's been quite the journey; outside of the cruise, it's been predominantly bouncing from one train to another.  Where I currently am is about a 7 hour time difference from Colorado.  We covered most of that difference across 5 or 6 days at sea, early in the cruise, with the last one being about two days before we docked.

 In short, I'm pretty disoriented in a few ways, and a little worn from all the travel.

Still.  This is what I chose and I wouldn't change it.

Anyway.  Last post was pretty much just "I've made it on the ship" so I have a bit to catch y'all up on.  I participated in a handful of activities during the cruise, including an origami class ('talking' dog and samurai hat - and no, I don't remember how to make them), ice skating, and language classes in Polish, Tagalog, and Portuguese.  I'm a bit of a nerd.

I also took pictures of all the different towel animals that the stateroom attendants made: a dog (whose head fell apart when I tried to move it), a birb, meditation bear, elephant, monkey, carnation(?).  Not pictured: dinosaur, because I guess I didn't get a picture of that one somehow.  The area around the ice rink had joke posters and this one in particular just tickled me.

The first port of call on the trip was Ponta Delgada in the Azores.  It's an island chain a ways off Portugal (about 870 miles, to be specific). I'll be honest, my pictures here are mostly just scattered views and sights, with no real rhyme or reason to them, so I'm going to just link the album.  I've put a few captions on things that feel like they'd benefit from them, but for the most part they're just kinda thrown in there.  Imgur uploads have been an issue in the past few days so there's a lack of ordering AND potentially some duplicates still floating around.  Eventually I'll switch to another hosting service that's easier to work with, but this will do for now.

Second was Cartagena.  I did even less sightseeing for this one, having decided that the most important thing here was getting to a laundromat and cleaning a larger batch of clothes.  The shipboard guest laundry service was...just ludicrous really.  $2 per item just for a clean.  So I didn't use that substantially.  I got perhaps half my dirty clothes done in Cartagena, and forgot to take my customary laundromat picture there (which is a shame, it was kinda cute).  Anyway, here are some assorted pictures from that walk as well as four pictures of the harbor where we docked.  And as always, I'm tall and the world doesn't always make that easy.

Somewhere along the way on this trip, between Azores and Cartagena, I picked up a cold.  This endured through about two days ago, and there's still the occasional bad cough popping up.  As a result, I don't even have a good picture of the harbor for Mallorca, the last stop in the cruise.  I spent pretty much all my time in self-imposed quarantine to try to limit the spread - everyone knows cruise ships are germ incubators, but that doesn't mean I should just go around coughing on everything.

Finally we disembarked in Barcelona.  The train from Barcelona to Paris and Paris to Amsterdam had some neat views shared here with no particular rhyme or reason.  I didn't realize we were this close to the shore at one point, and as always, I'm tall, huh? 

The next post will be about Amsterdam, which should begin a pattern of shorter posts as I start having less going on in each place and fewer things worth taking pictures of.  Something I haven't really expressed is that my general approach is to take mostly pictures of things that interest me in particular, whether I can explain why or not, rather than taking pictures of popular or common sights since you can just look those up or see them in documentaries/travel shows/whatever for any given area.  There will be occasional exceptions - Amsterdam pictures will be a spread of famous/recognizable things and general shots of the area, but...yeah.

Anyway.  That post will come later, possibly not until I've settled in Bulgaria in four more days.  By which time I'll also have a little post about Munich to throw together, and perhaps more about the ongoing travels from there.

The adventure begins

 Whew.  So this is a little overdue because I don't have a good way to post from the 'road.'  I'm pretty dependent on my laptop and wi-fi to update this, which normally won't be a problem except that between leaving Friday and actually settling into the ship Wednesday, I only had little pockets here and there and most of those were sleeping or switching trains or what have you.  So it's been a few days of new pictures and travels.

Buckle in.  Or, ya know, read this in chunks.  

Or don't read it.  I'm not your supervisor. 

In preparation for leaving the country, on Thursday (April 24th) I climbed Prospect Mountain, on which my parents' house is built.  It's a terrible view; I don't know why anyone likes it.  I did find a pretty large quartz boulder (I think) on the hike.  Prospect Mountain is a chill afternoon hike, but I was still a little proud of completing it.

The journey started proper on Friday (April 25th) at the Denver Amtrak station, Union Station.  I realized for perhaps the first time that the reason so many train stations are called Union Station (Chicago and Denver both use that name, and I think New York City does as well) is that Union Pacific was one of the major railroad operators and owners in the early days of train travel and expansion.  I'm not sure on that and I'm too lazy at this moment to research it, but it does make sense.

The train left in the evening, around 7pm MT.  I was lucky enough to land a front row seat which had, as it turned out, actually about the same leg room as the other rows, though without a seat in front of me there wasn't the seat incline to change the spacing.  The trip from Denver to Chicago went overnight 25th-26th, meaning there wasn't really anything to take pictures of (it was dark before we even got to the Colorado border).  We arrived in Chicago early afternoon, where I met a friend/coworker who dragged me around Chicago, first for dim sum at Triple Crown, a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, then to a small store with classic unusual flavors (I taught English for a year in China, so this kind of thing was not that strange to me).  Then he took me through downtown with some historical descriptions of the buildings, down to the waterfront for a view of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline.  A handful of pictures from that: 1 2 3 4 5.

The train from Chicago to New Orleans left later in the evening, so again the first part of that trip was in darkness.  I believe we were in southern Illinois, though, when we got back to sunrise.  In Louisiana, the view was certainly much different than what I'm used to in Colorado.  The train went over part of the bay via long bridges, with more scenery on the other side before getting in to NOLA where my friend Kelsey picked me up and we wandered around a bit.

NOLA itself, I don't have a ton of pictures of because if you want to see downtown/French Quarter and such, there are better quality pics on the internet.  I did take a couple, including this grossly cute sign advertising the restaurant's options for pets.  Another waterfront here to take a few pictures of, as well as Jackson Square where some horse-drawn carriage horses had nail polish.  There was also this house of distinct historical significance (the bottom plaque says "on this site in 1897 nothing happened).  We had an absolutely divine dinner, creole alligator for me and etouffee for her.  Then we went to the motel I'd booked, crashed for the night, and the next day began our trip across Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle with a hell of a breakfast at Brick and Spoon near Mobil, Alabama (clockwise, that's Bananas in Pajamas, breakfast tacos, beignets, and creole omelette with grits).  We also made a stop in Navarre Beach for a quick walk along a white sand beach.  More assorted pictures from that section of the journey: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 

That leg ended in Jacksonville, where another hotel stay at what is supposed to be a non-smoking hotel preceded meeting the Amtrak down to Miami.  They're trying to appeal to the youth with somewhat anime-styled "see something say something" posters. No pictures from that, though there was a very understandable three-hour delay in Orlando.  They did give us little snack packs during the delay, which was thoughtful.

My hotel room in Miami had another terrible view that was definitely not good enough for a selfie the next morning.  Contrary to what the name suggests, the hotel also had a lobby bar that wasn't exactly in the lobby.  I did a quick walk through downtown to a Target for some last-minute things, passing some interesting things along the way.  This nifty statue was near the Museum of Ice Cream, which I did not go into but did see the exit and gift shop for.  There was this store that sold apparel for the Terminator T1000.  So that's neat.

From there, it was finally on to the ship itself, just as grandiose as you'd expect from a modern cruise ship.  My room was oddly charming (requisite bathroom picture), and the ship has some very cool recreational options on board. I got numerous pictures of Miami, from in dock and after we set sail, so here's another dump of those. 1 2 3 4 

To cap off this post, here are two pictures that are particularly meaningful to me: a picture of my past life growing distant behind me and an open, uncharted future ahead.  I expect that will be the last time I see any part of the US for quite some time.  It's interesting how little weight that carried for me, really; such a heavy, life-altering moment still just felt kind of normal.  Perhaps it's the nomadic nature that lead me to this life in the first place that just softens the impact of such changes.  Perhaps it's the experience of moving to China just 7 years ago that got me kind of used to it.  Whatever the case, I feel completely ready to begin the next chapter in Europe, as though it were just another stop on the train or another new apartment I'm moving to in the States.

 I feel like this post requires some kind of sign-off or closing "button"...but when my life itself doesn't currently have that, maybe the most atmospheric way to end this is just to--