A Country That Doesn’t Exist Tiraspol is the capital of Moldova’s breakaway state in Transnistria (the Romanian name, the official Russian name is “Pridnestrovia”). By “breakaway state”, I mean that Transnistria is a fully functioning country. It has its own currency (Pridnestrovian Ruble, not accepted anywhere outside of Transnistria), border with passport checks, and government. Everything except its own language […]
Together we’ve traveled to over 60 countries across five continents. Of all of them, Moldova is the most off the beaten track. Few Americans have heard of it, much less could place it on a map. Moldova first appeared on our radar a few years ago when we shifted focus from Western to Eastern Europe – drawn by Slavic cultures, […]
We emerged from the central train station into downtown Warsaw – skyscrapers overhead, bustling streets in every direction. What a better way to enter a city than via an airport! The five-hour journey by train from Berlin was remarkably pleasant too – I worked comfortably, ate a hot meal in the restaurant car, and watched the Polish countryside fly by. […]
Berlin is about as opposite of Cairo, our previous stop, as you can get. It’s orderly, clean, cold (snowy, in fact!) and quiet. Egypt, by contrast, has filthy streets, air so thick with smog you can taste it, and a soundscape that demands earplugs on even the smallest street lest your eardrums be ruptured by constant honking. Yet people there […]
Rose and I went on a short, overnight bike trip to the tiny Peloponnese town called Kastanitsa. I made a short YouTube video of the trip. It’s my first time editing a video, but I think it turned out pretty well! Kastanitsa is an ancient town nestled between the surrounding hills. The town is known for its white and blue […]
This is the first of more frequent, picture heavy blog posts I plan to put out. Less writing, more pictures! For the last three weeks, Rose and I have been hiking in the Dolomites. The second half of August and all of September, we were climbing intensely in Slovenia. We had wanted to be in the Dolomites in the fall […]
I’ve been holding out. A bit. We have found our winter home-base in Leonidio and bought an apartment. When Rose and I left for Europe in August last year, we didn’t know exactly how it would turn out. We might get worn out from travel after a few months and return to Boulder homesick before Thanksgiving. Or we might continue […]
This Spring, Rose and I hiked the Menalon Trail. Over four days, we walked through 52 miles of rural mountains and sleepy medieval towns in the Greek Peloponnese. Following is the story in words and pictures of this wonderful and remote adventure. The afternoon before we began, we drove from our home in Leonidio to Elliniko. Elliniko is a picturesque, rural […]
With a little bit of Italy, Malta, Hvar, and Belgrade mixed in. We spent most of December in a Unesco World Heritage site. Named (in Bosnian) for it’s old bridge, Mostar nestles between three mountains in the southern part of the Balkan country of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Mostar is most known for it’s medieval bridge and Ottoman-style old town. […]
In middle school, kids tormented Rose by calling her “Barbara from Bulgaria”. We wanted to learn more about her origins so we went there. To Bulgaria. It turns out that that it would not be too bad to actually be from Bulgaria — the country is super cool! The Mountains We spent the first half of the week up in […]