My 100th post, which means I average about 18 posts a month. Is it a lot? Of course, one good post is better than five bad ones, but The Dromomaniac never posts schlock, right? RIGHT?
People often stop me on the street to ask what my favorite blog post was, and I have an easy answer: it is the last entry from my old website from Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. It’s about a picture I took of three little kids 19 years ago and how I found them again and the big surprise when I presented the photo.
I had a multi-cultural hitchhiking experience from Vienna to Munich with my four drivers: Austrian, Romanian, Czech, and a German. It was OK, but it went slower than I expected. Maybe I am losing my mojo or maybe I should have shaved.
Thursday I hitchhike from Munich to Switzerland. It isn’t my favorite route. It is hard to get out of Munich going WSW, there’s only one gas station along the way, and then it is always very slow traffic on the small road through the corner of Austria.
The real challenge is shaping up to be next Thursday when I hitchhike from Aosta, Italy straight to Milan airport. If I mess up, I miss my flight and that’s that.
My German friends go berserk with rage when I say this, but Germany is the USA of Europe. I feel at home here. I am too lazy to defend this argument, so maybe this is my first schlocky post. And no photo for you today!
Made some rookie hitchhiking mistakes and got a nice sunburn today to prove it. The second guy who picked me up had a big “XXX” tattooed on his neck, but these days it is more remarkable if someone doesn’t have a tattoo.
I always imagine the conversation in the car between an older couple as they approach me hitchhiking:
Woman: “Hey, there’s a hitchhiker! Should we pick him up?”
Man: “Where is he going? He doesn’t have a sign.”
Woman: “He looks tired.”
Man: “The kid’s probably on drugs”
Woman: “He looks like he’s in his 40’s.”
Man: “He’s probably the kind of guy who forgets his camera at home–he’s on drugs.”
It is part of hitchhiking lore that a pretty blonde girl in a convertible picks you up, but it really happened today! It’s not just hairy Bulgarian truck drivers, you know. Since no one would believe me, I asked if we could take a photo before we went, and she was amenable. Of course, this picture could be staged, Photoshopped, etc, so you have to take my word for it that she really did pick me up. There were quite a few people in the parking area that witnessed this in disbelief.
She might be the last pretty girl to pick up hitchhikers as once in Vienna there was confusion about where to leave me and it ended up being bad for both of us. We both had to backtrack after I was dropped off. My sixth and last car was a Mini Cooper, only my second one ever.
I am visiting two families here quickly. I met the girls 21 years ago and now Monika is a reporter for the national radio station and for 22 years now Judith has kept the Austrian national swimming record in the 50 meters freestyle, which is all the more amazing because it has stood up through the buoyant swimsuit era.
And I’m still traveling in circles. Something’s wrong.
Hitchhhiking to Munich tomorrow in the heat. Not good for the sunburn.
On my penultimate day in Hungary I made a culinary discovery: spicy goose sausage. It is off the charts of fantasticosity. It is a good thing it’s near the end of my trip or else I would be even fatter than now. A summer of eating horse sausage and sitting working on this damn website has made me morbidly obese.
I had a great idea: take a closeup photo of this 200 forint coin with Budapest’s Chain Bridge it depicts in the background. I walked the 3km there and then realized I left my camera back home. Ay, caramba! At a minimum, I would have certainly been short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize in photography, but now? Sigh.
Today is Hungary’s national day. Tomorrow I get to impersonate a traveler again. I am hitchhiking to Vienna.
Forgot to mention it last time, but I have been on the road for five months now. It feels like forever. Travel is always like that. Three weeks feels like three months. I haven’t “traveled” much this summer, but that will change starting this weekend.
First attempt ever at roast chicken, and look at that beauty! The problem with a blog is that the people I am housesitting for are saying right now, “Is that bastard using our cheese grater as an oven rack? Yes I am.
The outpouring of support for my new website has been overwhelming! It has re-connected me with old friends whose love for me and my work has been life-affirming. Here’s a sampling of the adulation:
“Don’t you still owe me money?”
“When are you picking up your stuff?”
“You look fat.”
You can always count on your friends! I am still basking in the glow.
It is a nagging suspicion of mine that my website is too narrow of a topic, but just yesterday my friend Caleb wrote to say that had he not followed my information, he wouldn’t have been able to fly. Caleb is a normal, God-fearing man with all of his brain cells intact, even if he is a friend of mine.
Specifically, he was flying Frankfurt-Mombasa, Kenya on Condor and he had to show a fake onward ticket in Frankfurt or they wouldn’t have allowed him on the plane. He forgot to also thank me for being the one who told him about Condor, but I blame that on the tropical heat he hadn’t been used to.
In Hungary an envelope with a black corner stripe like this signifies that there has been a death, so I use them all the time because I figure there is a better chance my letters will be treated with care and actually be sent. I am not familiar with these envelopes anywhere else in the world, and I am into all things stationery, so I am hoping the people I send it to abroad don’t freak out.
And yes, speaking of freaky, my finger is not better. I need to do something. I don’t want to have to wait until Malaysia’s finest doctors take a look at it.
Finally!
There is still the matter of bringing my old website over to the new and other things, but it can wait. I am disappointed with the front page that looks like the work of a 10 year old, but it’s functional and I can live with it for a little while.
My dream is for everyone to find my website to be informative, interesting and worthy to recommend it to others, but I am afraid it will be seen as either an elaborate love letter to myself or a cry for help–or therefore, both.
I need to thank Peter and everyone in the office for putting up with me for so long, Yvette and Samu for letting me house-sit, and Bruce at wpweaver.info for technical help. I’d also like to thank The Academy…
The funny thing about these license plates that I got in the flea market today (3200 forint together --US$15--I lost my head) is that they were from two different sellers! This picture was taken in Szimpla, one of these funky garden bars common in the Jewish quarter. The other photo is from a sign above the bar outside. It's hard to sleep for me, too, as I am just around the corner. And it's always a drunken non-Hungarian doing the yelling.
The Sziget music festival is this week. By now it is one of the biggest events in Europe. Last night Iron Maiden headlined. I am too wrapped up in this travesty of a mockery of a sham of a website to consider going. Besides, last time I went to see Iron Maiden, I was standing in line outside and someone threw a whiskey bottle from a great distance and hit me in the head. I got five stitches in the local hospital and then a nurse drove me back to the arena so I didn’t miss the concert completely. I was wearing a yellow t-shirt with blood splattered all over it and a bloody gauze wrapping around my head. No one dared come close to me.Any opinions about my website are very much appreciated. I have a contact form now. You could put a bogus name and email and tell me what you really think.
Say “Amen” Somebody! Hallelujah! Design-wise, you will look at it and say, “We waited all this time and you show us something that looks like a 10 year old made it?” Yes, I am.
I am using WordPress, which sounds easy as it’s just a template and you throw on the words and pictures and voila! But I have tried to make it more visually appealing, and for reasons too numerous and boring, the only noticeable difference between the new site and old site will be the nice header. I am shooting for a Sunday launch.
So what will be on it? Merely everything! All my travel secrets are going to be there: the hard, practical science melded together with the philosophy of one-way travel, disseminated for free, not as an e-book, which seems like a mistake.
The endless struggles and frustration with a myriad of technical problems between WordPress, my server and my brain have been partially soothed by this simple Japanese pop music video from Spitz, my favorite band. It encapsulates everything great about Japan. I can watch the first 15 seconds over and over, but that’s just me.
I bought a ticket to go to Bangkok in three weeks from Milan for 174 euros (US$229) one way on Blu Express. Major coup. For the sake of my expertise in finding cheap flights, I wish I could say I found it singlehandedly, but an Italian friend told me about it. However, it was also findable if I had followed my three-pronged attack, which will be unveiled very soon.
There’s always a little tension when it is time to book a ticket since it is a big decision and you can’t change your mind. When I clicked the “Pay” button, I got an error message saying that my card was rejected. I have to call my credit card company every two months to tell them where I might be traveling for exactly this reason, and here I had my card rejected. Like any big company, it takes forever to talk to a live person and yell at them, but I did and it was approved. I hate credit cards more than pickled cabbage.
But something else happened that gives validation to one of my travel secrets. I had been checking this flight from my friend’s house and the prices were stagnant or slowly rising, but when I checked at my friend’s office, it was the cheaper fare I had seen before. To explain why I wasn’t surprised by this, here is an excerpt from my upcoming website:
…there is “flight price creep” contend with. I’ve always felt like a half-baked conspiracy theorist about this, but I have some vindication with this CNN article. On some airline and travel booking websites, if you search for a flight, search the same flight again later, and again another time, suddenly you see the price creeping up. It is the software on the website prodding you to act and stop being a Looky Loo. To thwart this, you have to use another computer from another IP address or clear the cookies from your computer–whatever it takes for the website to think you are a new user.
Such a cliche photo, but it's pretty cool, isn't it? Parliament across the Danube.
This is the first entry for the new home of my blog which I have moved from kentfoster.com/blog to TheDromomaniac.com. Dromomania means “an uncontrollable impulse to wander or travel”. Seems more fitting.
My housesitting is finished. I can no longer go for days without a shower while I agonize over my website problems. The funny thing about the website is the final product is going to look no better than the old site with my ancient HTML that everyone in the coding community disses. The only major difference is it will have a nice header.
The website is getting me down and then I have to deal with Citibank in the local mall. The ATM always gives me large bills that people in the market can never change, so I have to go inside the bank to ask for smaller money. Twice now when I walk inside, a security guard nearly races over to block me in my tracks to ask what I want in a manner that is just a little bit on the hostile side of neutral. This by itself is bothersome, but it rankles me to see others darting past me, one woman making a beeline to a water fountain away from the banking area. Is this what racial profiling is like in practice? I pretend not to speak a word of Hungarian just to make him impotent, then I have to go home and listen to three straight hours of “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones being looped to calm down.
Speaking of horses, I am still eating horse all the time, but am more reticent to admit it.
I must be the only person who cooks horse sausage together with textured dried soy chunks (and goat cheese with chives in this photo), but doesn't it make sense, the balance?
bulgur wheat and diced turkey
dry spicy sausage, ewe cheese and potatoes
You wouldn’t believe the hell it is to get my website going. There are endless little bugs and incompatibility issues and everything takes forever to accomplish. Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it. It is maddening. At this point I don’t care and I am just going to slap it all on and tweak it later. I am aiming for the middle of next week.
I sit so long that by the end of the day I have this set-up on the left so I can stand and still work.
Plus, I dawdled too long and missed the cheap flight to Bangkok. It may reappear, but I am not optimistic. What a mess. At least I can cook, but that is coming to an end on Tuesday.
I can’t imagine doing any of this without my laptop, as idiosyncratic it is with its own bugginess. I never thought I would say this, but I am glad I have it.
A bit of Hungarian trivia: a mild swear phrase in Hungarian is literally “bass key”.
