London Calling!

Hello!  I am towards the end of a pretty fantastic stay in London.  This has been made even better by the fact that I am staying with a dear old friend who has also been the most gracious hostess - including spectacular instructions for using the tube (I am now a master and jump trains effortlessly), and not freaking out at having a sick puppy in her home for the past few days (me).  This city is fantastic and my friend lives in a beautiful part of London with an excellent local pub right behind her flat.  I unfortunately was down with a cold for two days, but am now back among the functioning - much better to be sick in the comfort of a friend's apartment than in a strange hotel room.

London Tower

On wall walkway and headed towards another tower

My favorite!- taken from the spot Ann Boleyn was beheaded - nice last view

London Tower - Thames side view

Big Ben

I am a huge fan of history - WWII, the monarchy, spread of the Roman empire, etc. - as well as a film aficionado and I have a special place in my heart for British films and BBC programming.  It's been amazing to actually see things like the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and walk through Hyde Park - where so much history has passed and so many film locations have been based.  Also very cool to walk on the streets that have been included in so many music lyrics - The Strand, Baker Street... I love Roxy Music... Anyway, I'm a bit frustrated that I lost a few days to a cold which most likely will nix a trip to Oxford and Windsor Castle, but I suppose I will have to come back.  I was pretty much digging hanging around the site where Ann Boleyn was executed inside London Tower and listening to all the morbid and creepy stories the guides around me were telling.  I also LOVE old cemeteries and anything that looks like it will creek when you walk on it - in other words, anything old with extra points going to architectural significance.

Parliament - Thames side

Westminster Abbey

Today I woke up late thanks to a combo of a cold and being out late last night for dinner and too many drinks (tons of fun though).  So I got up and just started walking - through Kennsington Gardens (right past Kennsington Palace) then the Hyde Park and down to Buckingham Palace, through the Horse Guards and Old Admiralty down the Strand and back to Charing Cross Road (also in the title of an excellent Anne Bancroft movie) - it was a long walk, but the coolest thing was that I happened upon a few events that I had no idea were happening and did not plan - the best way to see things in my opinion.  I get to Buckingham Palace right when the changing of the guards is starting .  Had no clue and it was incredibly cool to see while not having planned to do so.  Then an auto escort comes out of the palace as I'm headed down the main road and I turn around to look at it and inside the car was somebody obviously pretty important and in an official uniform - I won't venture as to who it may have been but I was impressed by the escort alone.  Anyeasilyimpressed, it was a very entertaining morning and early afternoon.  I finally pooped out from walking all over creation and took the train back and had a well deserved pint and an even more well deserved nap.

Kennsington Gardens - beautiful stroll

Tomorrow is my last day here and then I leave Saturday for Brugge, Belgium and will once again be pursuing travels on my own (minus the excellent company in the evening that I have enjoyed while in London).  I'm taking the train there too which will be a nice break from the airport - my flight from Greece included a full plane and in my row... a guy with a cold who never covered his face when he sneezed and coughed, between him and me was some Greek version of Butterfly McQueen - she talked to herself the whole time, sighed constantly, sucked food out of her teeth for 45 minutes and leaned into my seat and personal space for the entire flight - four hours.  On the other side of me was horrific B.O.  Needless to say, I am looking forward to a break from the trials of the international airport and am ready to enjoy a train ride through Belgium.  I think I'm also taking one from there to Amsterdam as well.

Buckingham Palace

mounted guards headed towards the palace

London has been quite enjoyable so far and I still have about 10 days to enjoy my travels before I have to return to Afghanistinkistan and back to Muslim-land.  I don't even want to think about it, but it should turn out to be a great improvement - new job, digs, people and purpose! Hope you are all enjoying your week.

Drink of the Day - an espresso for breakfast and an ice cold draft beer in the afternoon - perfect!

Welcomes! Please has the shrimps!

I am loving Athens!  I also thoroughly enjoy that almost all English speech is in plural - that will be a hard habit to break when I leave here.  Everything has an "s" on the end of it, but my favorite is "welcomes" because I hear it all the time as the people are so friendly.  I woke up pretty early this morning considering I literally passed out from exhaustion last night - after a fantastic meal of mushroom risotto at the rooftop restaurant with a stunning view of the Acropolis.

So I took an early morning jaunt to the Acropolis - missed it the first time and ended up on the hill across from it.  Walked through the woods and paths while it became closer and closer.  The sun was coming up and the parks and historic sites are very aromatic - don't know what it is I'm smelling but it's divine!  Arrived at the Acropolis before most of the tour buses and people.  I just don't even know what to say - it was amazing and the view from the top! You can see the entire city, the light fog in the mountains, the Ancient Agora and Thessieons monument and the hill that I walked through to get there.  Plus there are all kinds of interesting ruins at the bottom of the Acropolis hill (although getting used to peering over the wall at that height took some adjustment).  It was amazing!  Then I walked down the craggy Mars Hill, took a path and ended up in the Agora.  Damn was that amazing and there's a whole area full of mint that added to the already pleasant aroma.  Walked through the remains of the old Stoas, gymnasium, speaker platforms - just fantastic.  I am going again tomorrow because there is so much to see - there are some ruins around the Acropolis and on the second hill that I need to discover.  The only slight issue was a combination of disgust at the graffiti on some of the ancient walls outside of the preserved areas AND that I had to spend a portion of my stroll through the Agora with 50 screaming 13 year-olds and their whistle blowing chaperones.  I wanted to scream "shuts the mouths" but managed to avoid them where ever possible.  What would Plato have done? 

All in all it was an excellent morning - finally being in a non-Muslim country meant I could wear shorts which was nice considering I was hauling my behind up some pret-ty steep hills (it's warm here too) and off on the trails less traveled.  Being as clumsy as I am, I managed not to fall off or trip over anything - a few close calls, but I remained vertical - well done, me!  Everyone else was strolling along, but I ATTACKED the sites with fervor!  Sightseeing should be a sport...

This is a shot of inside the Agora which was filled with piles of architectural features.

looking from Thessieon through the Agora

Thessieon - and the location of the whistles and screaming kids

Thessieon from across the Agora

inside the Agora

Inside a church built in 1000 A.D. - old!

view from Acropolis looking down into this old stadium and wall

The Parthenon!

Me and the Parthenon

Temple across from the Parthenon

view from the top of the steps of the entrance to Acropolis - the Ancient Agora is down there

Another shot of the stadium and the hill in the background I walked through

ground view of a Stoa - the stadium is next to it

AnyIhatekids, I wandered back through the Plaka District and had a well earned beer before taking in some shopping and then a well deserved power nap.  This country is awesome and I haven't really even seen much of it - think I need to come back and hit a few islands (Santorini) and other areas within the country.  Love it here.


Drink of the Day - the wines and the beers - thank yous!

The Center of Democracy!

Alrighty!  Am in Athens now and love the city.  My hotel is in the old section and I can walk to all "ancient" settings.  Thankfully this morning I bothered to look at my itinerary - I thought for some reason my flight was at 6:20pm but when I looked it was actually 10:30am - hustled out of there and was actually up at 7am so I made it in time.  Two totally different settings - really enjoyed Istanbul, but am loving Athens.  Tired, but when I arrived I still managed to walk for several hours and at least tour the Temple of Zeus (right across from my hotel) and drink some wine and hang out in the Plaka district which is the old section and right around the corner.  Enjoyed some Greek wine, bought a few gifts and then had a mushroom risotto on top of the hotel with a spectacular view of the city and the Acropolis!

So I get here, upack (room is fabulous) and walk across the street to see Hadrian's Gate and the temple of Zeus - turn around and Snap! The Acropolis is right behind me - LOVE when that happens - I didn't even see it until I turned around! While I was in Istanbul, I purposefully just started walking and was literally lost in the city.  Walked for hours and started to smell spices - turned the corner and walked into the middle of the Egyptian Spice Market - where I wanted to end up.  I love being lost!  It's the best way to discover a city - keep the map handy, but just follow your instincts and see all the things hidden in the alleyways.

I am totally whipped tonight and hope to get a good night's sleep.  One thing about living in Afghanistan is that when you leave is when you realize how exhausting it is to live there.  Although you get used to all the rockets, mortars and gunfire you tend to forget that it causes not very much restful sleep. Tomorrow I am spending the day hiking the Acropolis, Mars Hill, etc - certain to be a cruel mistress, but I can't wait.  I have spent so many years reading and studying ancient Greece that to finally see it - up close and personal - is at least a two-pantie-shield experience!  I'm laying on my bed now and can see the columns of the Zeus Temple from the bed - this is really fantastic.  A travel companion would be perfect - as you travel much differently when alone - but I'm still enjoying the hell out of myself!  The Jewbilee should be here with me...

Acropolis

My hotel is between the sets of columns on the left

This is a Roman Bath in a ditch on the street

My first meal here in the Plaka District

Ruins in front of an ancient Greek church - there is a cat in there on the ledge

Hadrian's Gate on my way back to hotel

Drinks of the day - Greek wine, tea and cappuccino - I totally forgot to steal an espresso cup from Turkey which means i will have to lift two from Greece to add to the collection.

It's the Journey

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque

Hagia Sophia

Topkapi Palace Park

Ancient wall within park and old architectural artifacts

Kitties are everywhere!

Wow - what an adventure it's been so far since I left KAF!  Currently in Istanbul and am absolutely loving it.  My hotel is in the old section and walking distance from the Blue Mosque, bazaar, spice market and tons of outdoor cafes and street markets.  I have currently been awake for about 40 hours straight due to my travels, but will hopefully sleep like a rock tonight. 

There's a huge park - Topkapi Park- down the street from where I am staying.  Within the park are many museums and the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque are on the edges of the park - absolutely beautiful and interesting to see.  Maybe I can write off my trip as "research" for park planning in another Muslim country - hmmm...  Just been walking and walking today, listening to the prayer chants over speakers while enjoying the sites - totally unreal!  Tonight I am headed down the street - which is pedestrian only by my hotel - to enjoy a Hookah bar and some more Turkish food which I'm loving.  Tomorrow will be the spice market, cisterns and Grand Bazaar and then off to Athens for a few days.  This is really becoming the trip of a lifetime.  After Athens, I head to London to visit one of my old friends, then Bruge, Amsterdam, Munich and back to Dubai before I return to KAF to begin my new job.

OK, now for the awful start to my trip - which will soon become humorous, but not quite yet as it's too fresh of an experience. I flew out of KAF on a C-17 without much incident - still happy and footloose!  Get to Manas AB that evening, go through in-processing and then discover that they did not load my luggage on the plane.  They promise to do the next day, but don't and I wait until 4 hours before my flight out of there before it finally arrives on the last flight of the day.  During this time of no showers, I am issued linens and sent to a huge clam shell tent to sleep on a bunk bed with another 100 or so women AND the lights never go off.  The added bonus is that the latrines right across from the tent are overflowing and backed up - did find much better ones the next day.  This begins my stretch of no sleep.  I did meet a ton of fun people at the bar/hangout on base to enjoy the two beers a day you were allowed to consume.  That was a plus!  I also had an $8 dollar manicure and an $11 haircut at the salon on base.  It looks like an $11 haircut too, but anything was in improvement.  I had my second hair salon experience with a stylist I was barely able to communicate with because of language barriers.  This became readily apparent while she was washing my hair and I noticed a spider crawling in hers - I tell her (also because I'm scared to death it will drop on me) and she replies with a smile..."yes, yes" and then the water temp is changed from warm to scalding, leading me to believe she does not have the slightest clue what I have said - and it certainly wasn't "please burn my scalp off with the water temperature".  Finally, one of her co-workers tells her because she did overhear me and the poor gal almost had a heart attack - which is the appropriate response to one being informed there is a spider in your hair.  All in all, nice ladies and an interesting mix of the typical Kyrgyzstan citizen - either Asian or Russian -  and all Russian speaking.


So I leave for the Bishkek airport at 1am on Monday morning to fly to Istanbul.  Am dropped off at the loading dock in the back of a truly dilapidated, Soviet era airport building and escorted through the basement (that had so much mold everyone was coughing their guts outs when we finally got out of there) to the check-in.  I'm with one other military guy who is flying home.  Make it through the ticket processing and my bag is checked for the flight.  Then I go through passport control.  This is where it gets really *&!#$@ stressful.  This other guy and I are the only Americans and nobody speaks English except for maybe a few other passengers - it's still not that fluent.  They split me off from the military guy and let him go through - I am then detained and held in a holding area because of "passport issues" - which was either the only English term they knew or the only term they wanted my to know they knew.  It is basically communicated to me that i am not boarding my flight or allowed to leave because of my passport issue.  My bag - which I've only had in my possession for a few hours - is on it's way to Turkey without me.  They stand around, won't let me stand up, approach the desk or basically move/interact with anyone for about 2 hours.  Every time I do one of these things - which I continued to do frequently - the military police would run over to subdue me to keep me seated.  No explanation, no idea what's happening, no longer have my passport because they took it - sense a really bad situation.  Needless to say, I am privately freaking out, have nobody to call because now I'm off base, am fighting back tears of rage and frustration.  I'm also exhausted and trying to keep the Irish temper at bay so that I don't make a bad situation worse and end up in jail - I can only imagine what that would be like considering the condition of everything else there.  Finally, about 15 minutes before my plane leaves, they bring some guy over to translate their demands which was basically about $100 in a cash "fee" (bribe where you and I are from) for them to approve my passport.  I couldn't cough up that money fast enough.  So basically, they held me and my bag hostage until right before the plane took off to get money from me - and as the gentlemen who translated informed me... "not to make issue of it".  I had 2 hours of the most intense stress on top of being sleep deprived, filthy and contained in a shit hole. I will not return to Bishkek anytime soon.  Being tossed out in front of the Afghan airport - outside the wire - when I returned to KAF from Thailand was much more preferable than this experience.  Maybe the message here is to avoid traveling in any country that includes a "-stan" in its name.

However, all is good now and I'm finally beginning to relax!  It's all part of the adventure and will be an interesting story to tell in a bar at some point in the future.  Certainly taking adventures on your own in foreign countries has its challenges, but still worth the experience!  I have excellent internet now too so I plan to post on the blog much more frequently while on my travels.  Hope you all have an excellent start to your week!

Drink of the day/night - wine, Turkish tea, wine, Turkish coffee, wine ... you get it...

The Final Week

Let me tell you, I have had some pretty long days this past week and they will only become longer this upcoming week - my final week working here planning military bases.  Not only has the worked slowed in general - thanks to us being so good at it - but my personal workload is non-existent because I am OUTTA HERE!  On or around the 18th, I out-process at Manas AB in lovely Bishkek and then hopefully can spend a few days in Turkey (or somewhere) before I end up in London where one of my besties has lived for the past two years.  I've never been to either place and much fun awaits in London with a friend I've had since my wild 20s - we were once housemates, then neighbors and then stopped living in packs - I have a whole collection of fun memories with this particular buddy and I cannot wait to see her in her own habitat.  Let me put it this way - neither of us could probably ever run for a political office due to the amount of fun we had in "olden times".  I am very much looking forward to this mini-break before heading back to begin the new position with a totally new company.

As for the new job, as usual I am driving myself crazy wondering what it will be like, where exactly I will live and how I can impact the project in the best possible way.  This has resulted in me being antsy, checked out, impatient (I had visions of homicide this morning watching people not wash their hands before headed into the DFAC - something we are required to do to keep the ick at bay) and lost in the whimsy of upcoming travel adventures.  In short, I cannot wait to get the hell out of here and escape living with a mass of people - the majority who appear to be listless functioning idiots,  or dopey man-childs - for just a little bit.  Seriously, I don't know where the Army did it's most recent recruiting, but they are totally dragging the bottom of the barrel at this point (markedly different than other Army units that seemed just fine in times passed).   Since this most recent group showed up the base is a trash bin, common areas reek of body odor and they seem to have no clue - just shuffling down the middle of the road, throwing their garbage down and apparently unaware of the purpose of showers and deodorant.  I might add, the majority of these people live on, and will never leave, the base - it's not as if they've been out in the field for days, etc.  It's amazing how much your tolerance drops when you are so close to leaving here.

So - the leaving also means packing up my things.  I cannot believe how much I have accumulated in a 8 x 10 foot space, but it's looking like 5 storage boxes and then some random trash bags filled with loose items.  In my defense, things like blankets and pillows are space hogs but coveted at the same time - so are shoes.  I also apparently have another mouse, or seven, being that I found a good deal of mouse droppings which were not present two weeks ago.  That would be explained by the fact that I could have driven a truck over my mousetraps and they still wouldn't have gone off.  They somehow became pretty much stuck in the "set" position and therefore ineffective.  So now I don't even care - they can run all over the place, nuzzle me in my sleep, set up a circus - they are on their own to do as mice will.  One. More. Week. ... of living in a tent.

Well the new job is making me a little nervous at this point - something I just need to get over.  Jitters are common with new positions, but working here adds a whole different dimension - the safety factor or at least perceived safety factor.  While I become pretty used to helicopter rides, errant gunfire and rocket and missile attacks, I will now have to get used to what will most likely be frequent convoys in up-armored Toyotas, foot patrols through my parks and to an occasional village to meet with community leaders, and working off of base with the local Afghan government.  These are all things that literally 1000s of people do throughout Afghanistan on a daily basis and without much concern.  Seriously, there are so many civilians working over here directly with the Afghan people and government - it would amaze you.  So I try to keep that in mind when I consider what I've read in the news reports the past few weeks concerning assassinations of local government officials and the very sad story of the abduction and subsequent murder of the Scottish aid worker from DAI.  I think I am paying way too much attention to things like that and need to get refocused - fear is not your friend here as it can make you react badly to situations you are confronted with on a pretty regular basis.  I have also not been afraid since I arrived here and now is now time to start.  I think most of what is driving this is the new job, the change in duties and who I will be working with.   I know my company is not well served by putting us in extreme danger.   I will also have military escorts or private security and they will most likely greatly reduce our time in the field if things are too dicey - just like they do here as we've all been on a travel ban the past 8 - 10 days because it's getting pretty violent out there.  This new position will simply become my new "normal" and will take some time to adjust - like anything else would. 

Speaking of nastiness and war - there is often an upside to the crazy.  Last night I sat outside on top of a bunker and watched all of the flares being set off to mark positions.  We fired several missiles from base at something and then the jets were just screeching around - fast and low.  The overall effect was simply beautiful and a weird contrast because you knew what was happening but it all looked so choreographed and pretty.  In addition to the stunning night skies we get over here, it was also a crystal clear night so you could see the outlines of the errant desert mountains from the light of the flares.  Just amazingly cool to see.  It's the little things, right?

Well I am hoping that when I wake up tomorrow that I've somehow redeemed myself with my Fantasy Football scores - I have been creamed the last two weeks and need to turn it around.  I'd also like to wish my brother and his wife a Happy 11th Anniversary - their wedding in Key West was a blast!  My niece has a birthday in 11 days and I think the rest of them are having successful school, sport and friend experiences so far this year.  Go kids!  Hope the rest of you all have - or are having - a great weekend!  Can the Bengals redeem themselves after losing to Cleveland last week???

Drink of the Day - Hot Cocoa - it's a brisk 82 here today!