Oct. 21, 2008
Sometimes when you start travelling too quickly from place to place you stop taking in the sights of a place and start running errands. Visiting the monuments, cathedrals and battlegrounds can become chores in and of themselves when in the back of your mind you know that you have to figure out how to get to the next place, keep all your belongings in order and decide where to stay.
Even eating becomes a hassle. Especially alone.
Eating out is expensive. Many people told me, you go to Italy to eat. Besides one pizza in Rome after visiting Vatican City, the only Italian food I ate was some crusty bread and Nutella.
Cooking is the cheapest way to eat on the road, but it's a pain to buy food and cook for one. Most of the places I've stayed, I've been lucky enough to meet people who will join up to cook a meal. But not always.
In several of the places I've visited in the past few weeks, I found that I spent more of my time running errands than enjoying myself. Finding cheap Internet can be difficult (hence the prolonged gaps in keeping this sucker updated). In Prague the errands began with laundry and catching up on the blog. In Florence, I decided I really needed a haircut and found a place in the basement of the train station where they did a damn good job for only €15.
Planning how I was going to get to Istanbul from Florence to meet up with a friend took days of Internet searching, reading, and futilely asking for help at travel agencies. When I booked my train from Florence to get to the port in Brindisi, I told the ticket agent that I needed to get to Greece and wanted to make use of my Eurail ticket.
"There is no way to get to Greece," said the woman. "It is impossible."
"Yes, I know, by train, there isn't a way, at least not through Italy, but by ferry I mean," I stammered. "I want to use my Eurail. I've been told it works on the ferries."
"No, there is no way to get to Greece," she said.
She was wrong of course. I knew she didn't understand what I was asking. But still her words echoed in my head.
I made it though, to Turkey, with a brief stopover in Corfu. I'll tell more about all that soon. But let me tell you one thing. Never attempt to do laundry in Istanbul. Especially when it's raining.
2 comments:
Wow, I can relate. Three weeks, 8 cities from Dublin to Italy in August, peak of tourism. I carried 5 days worth of clothes, did laundry in Cologne, Venice, and Paris. It was an adventure just trying to find the place I had planned to stay after stepping off the train.
Laundry has been one of the biggest hassles on the road. That and staying healthy. Being sick and trying to get well again away from home while moving from place to place does not work. I've been carrying this sniffly nose, sore throat, cough thing for weeks now, since London. But it's all part of travelling, I guess. And I've learned that I sometimes I just need to stay put in a place for a while, do my laundry, sort out my email and get my health in order before moving on. Thanks for your comment and for reading.
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