I'm Still Out Here

Blog oh Blog where art thou? 

This post is dedicated to Madison Wall, who informed me that she reads my blog, bringing the grand total to two people (three if you count my Grandmother’s lucky stumble upon the site).

Last you heard I was in Prague, celebrating the end of my Celta.  It’s now half a year later.  There was a quick post mentioning that I was in Albania and headed to Macedonia, but that hardly encompassed my actual progress. For those quantitative thinkers, I have included a Google map that will tell you about where I’ve been for the past six months.   That’s all well and good, but this post will tell you what I’ve been doing (at least for the past two months). 

Table of contents:

I.    My thoughts on Germany

II.   The death of my computer

III.  Olomouc

I. I dont’ really know where to start, so I think I’ll start with the here and now.  I’m on a train from Frankfurt to Würzburg. I’m looking out the window at towns set into rolling hills and amaculate factories build as neighbors to the train tracks. The train has been following a small river, no wider then several meters for a few towns.  It’s quaint, but that quaintness is a facade that covers up the truth of this country, which is it’s newness.  I have been told that there are few structures that pre-date the second World War, and that’s very visible here in the south. 

(This is part of the Old Town of Frankfurt)

Reddit produced a fascinating comparison of WWII Germany and modern Germany here.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the past two days thinking about how other spots I’ve seen would compare in a similar line-up. 

II.  I ended up in Germany because my old computer finally died.  I say died but that is a passive explination. The much more honest story is I spilled water near the sockets then propped the computer in rice for two days.  I got most of the rice out of the sockets but had to use a knife to pry those suckers out.  According to my friends, the computer was still plugged into the wall while I preformed this last act.  The computer clogged along for about ten minutes after I turned it on, and then sputtered to a halt and worked no more.  I was sitting at a table with my friends’

 Rubes and Mitch and I had a shit-eating grin on my face, knowing that I would finally be getting a new computer (the broken one was seven years old and could only run two programs at the same time).  They seemed to think this was wasteful and blasé (which is was) so they cheered on my computer to survive.  My computer ignored them and stayed dead. 

At this point I had been in Olomouc, CZ for a month, and it became apparent that I would need to find a way to get another computer, which would be much more expensive in the Czech Republic and Europe in general.  As luck would have it, my sister was heading back to the states for two weeks and then would have a 12 hour layover in Frankfurt on her way from the US to Africa, a mere 7 hours away from Olomouc.  

III. What was I doing for a month and a half in the far east of the Czech Republic?  Drinking.  Mostly beer and tea, though occasionally water and sometimes Becharovka. I hung out with friends, made some new ones, watched movies, got made fun of, made fun of other people. The kind of things you do when you settle into a place and end up being welcomed into an already established friend group (whether I was welcomed or whether I bullied my way in remains unclear to me.  It has occurred to me that I was hazed so much that I had to be welcomed in.).  We made several trips into Poland, a small city called Ceisian on the boarder of Czech and Poland, and there we changed it up a bit and drank vodka.  Truthfully though, even without alcohol, my time in Olomouc was the perfect respite I needed after spending the summer and fall in constant movement.

The other nice thing about that time is that all the faces and personas I had created to survive on the road could all be put away.  I have a suspicion I even burned a few of them.  Some of those faces were left over from way before my travels. At one point I was working on a puzzle in the living room.  It was a 1000 piece puzzle and I worked on it from when I woke up to when I went to bed.  The three boys, who I spent most of my time with, teased me and hid pieces and pretended to lose them, and I would rise to the bait and get enraged, but they didn’t stop hanging out with me (possibly because they literally could not physically get away from me because I wouldn’t leave).  When I got a little too boozy and danced on chairs, they still went out with me in public. When I came out of my dorm in the morning, looking like I had personally been in multiple Pokemon battles throughout the night,  they would still talk to me. There was nothing I had to put up a front about over the past month, and it feels incredibly refreshing. 

(Puzzles rock my world. It's a thing.)

I'd like to tell you more, but I'm a little worried that writing about my other travels will sound tedious and too much like a checklist, and less like a story.

Here is the map that shows where I've been so far :)