recap of a life unterwegs

As promised, my fifteen favorite photos I haven't posted yet and:


a map of all the places I went (excluding the US). In dark green are the countries I went to over the semester, in red are the specific cities, and in brown are the countries I've been to before.


Constance, March
gravestone of a Jewish soldier from WWI who died fürs Vaterland (for the fatherland)
ironic, seeing as what would happen a few years later


Berlin, April
Jewish memorial


Berlin, April
Berlin Wall, East Side Gallery


Moscow, April
That disgusting statue of Peter the Great towers over Christ the Savior, one of the most beautiful churches ever.


Cairo, May
An odd statue stands in front of skyscrapers. No one knows what the statue means anymore, tho, as the lettering at its base was rubbed off.


Cairo, May
Red sails on the Nile stand out in the smoggy evening.


Luxor, May
statue of a pharaoh towards sunset


Radolfzell, May
Birds fly over the Naturschutzgebiet on Lake Constance.


Augsburg, June
sea green and yellow light


Augsburg, June
near the entrance to an art museum


Montreux (Switzerland), June
A cruise boat crosses Lake Geneva in front of the Alps.


Zurich, June
The captains of Europe's EM 2008 teams dwarf visitors in the Hauptbahnhof.


Oslo, June
Vigeland


Dubrovnik (Croatia), July
Where's the Cheshire cat?


Constance, July
I pose for the first and only time with those weird blue statues in front of the university.

So in closing, thank you for reading, thank you for all of your comments, and I hope you enjoyed. I know I did ;)

I like words with no vowels in them,

like Srđ, or words with way too few vowels, like Srpskohrvatski - ha! But seriously, I could read a decent amount of the Croatian (and even understand some of it spoken) and ended up buying a book; I'm already about half-way through ;)

But on a more serious note, I just got back from Dubrovnik! Here is a summary of Cody and my travels:

To get from Split to Dubrovnik we had to take a bus. It was so slow that it took over 6 hours! And it was bumpy as heck since we were going through mountains the entire time.


We stopped for a break in Bosnia. It looked basically like Croatia.


Our second day in Dubrovnik (the first we just wandered the neighborhoods around our hostel) we went to the old city (Stari grad, cf. Russian Stary gorod or Старый город). It was really beautiful, but also hot (90s)!


Dubrovnik harbor

We climbed the city walls and walked around all of the entire Stari grad.


view of Dubrovnik from the city walls


Inside the city walls we went to an aquarium that had flying fish! That's the first time I've seen live flying fish up-close (at the distance I saw them in the everglades, it doesn't count).


This tortoise apparently lived in our hostel's courtyard.

The next day we went back to the old city, saw a museum of Balkan icons, several churches and stuck our feet in the Mediterranean (freezing!).


We went into this really pretty monastery inside the city walls. It was really pretty and had this shockingly modern chapel.

In the evening we went to this place called Heidi Fast Food and got cheeseburgers that were literally the size of frying pans. And they were good! Those and burek (I had more than several of these) are officially my favorite Croatian dishes.

And now I'm back in Constance. We flew TUIfly, which made me nervous, because I thought it was going to be one of those awful cheap airlines, but it was actually completely decent. Croatia was fun, adventurous and new. It was quite Western, but not quite first-world (a lot of things I've grown to expect I think shocked Cody - "accommodations gypsies", a rooster that lived next door to our hostel, naked and near-naked people on the beach - some peeing). It wasn't as cheap as I'd hoped, but I still had a great time and experienced a lot!