Fast internet at last!

Sorry we haven't been very active on the blog lately- it is because we are too busy having fun! But now we both have to do a photo dump before our cameras are full, plus we're taking a ferry to Bari tomorrow (heh heh-- it would rhyme if not for Italians and their consistent pronunciation... it's BAR ee, like Atari). There's not much in way of cheap accomodation in Bari, so we were thinking of getting to Naples... figuring out the complications as we speak/ type.

The past few days have been among my favorite so far. We made a minor detour from our original plans, and it's working like a German train. First, instead of staying in Vienna, we spent only about eight hours there. It is near sinful to only give Vienna eight hours, but there was a little game going on there that evening: the last semi-final game in the EuroCup tournament, which they have every two years here. As a Norweigan waiter put it, "It's just like World Cup, only without Argentina and Brazil."

Basically, thinking we could find a place to stay the night in Vienna would be like thinking you could walk into a Beatles reunion concert five minutes before the show and pick up some extra tickets. So we saw the city and the fans, then made it to Salzburg by midnight. The place we stayed was listed on a hostel website, but it was actually a hotel. You cannot imagine the luxury I felt having my own room that I didn't have to share with loud/ farting/ sweating/ other people. Our OWN bathroom. And... our stay included breakfast.

Most hostels, when they advertise that they include breakfast, offer one or two choices of cereal, milk (unrefrigerated! Crazy!), maybe bread and jam, coffee and tea. Nice enough, especially when it's free. At the Hotel Lasserhof in Salzburg, we ate more at breakfast than the previous three days combined. They had cereal. (Four kinds.) They had bread and jam. (Eight kinds of jam.) They had EGGS. (Both hard-boiled and scrambled.) They had bacon. They had fruit cocktails. They had cookies. Coffee. Juice. Tea. Milk. Hot chocolate. And they had Lee and Jessica at their table, stuffing face before heading out for...

...The Sound of Music Tour! Definitely one of the most "touristy" things we've done so far, but totally fun and worth it. We even received a special Edelwiess souvenir. (It was a pin. Peter, our tour guide said they used to give out Edelwiess seeds, which will only grow in mountains, but too many Austrailians were questioned at customs. I think he made this up. Peter had jokes.)

So from Salzburg we went to Ljubljana, then to Zagreb in Croatia, then to Split in Croatia. Then the plan changing continued. We were going to take a day trip to Dubrovnik, southern Croatia, then take a ferry from Split to Ancona in Italy. However, it takes 4.5 hours to reach Dubrovnik by bus, and that's with no traffic and no border problems. (Don't know if you know-- the six countries in former Yugoslavia had a war here nigh on ten or so years ago.) Many people we've met on our travels said Dubrovnik was awesome. We didn't want to miss it. So we booked two nights here through a website, which didn't list many hostels but lots of private residences. This worried us because often when you de-board a train or bus, flocks of people will rush into your face with signs reading "Sobe. Room. Chambre. Zimmer." and try to convince you to give them money and take you far away. The place we're staying in Dubronik is very nice. It's in the home of Svee and Niko, two grandparent types who are very sweet and very non-English-speaking.

Upon our arrival in Dubrovnik, plans started falling into place. Instead of returning to Split to take a ferry to Ancona (in order to eventually take a ferry to Tunisia, Africa) we booked a ferry to Bari, which is in southern Italy and much closer to Africa. Then we booked a day trip to Montenegro, the newest country in the world. (Kosovo, number six in the former Yugoslavia, has not yet been recognized by the U.N.) We returned from Montenegro just a few hours ago and plan to have dinner with a Russian couple we met on the tour. Dinner despite HEAVY feedings on the boat. Our excursion included lunch and a snack. Well, when they brought the snack out (we were off the bus and on a boat by then) we thought it was maybe lunch and that the candy and shot of Russian grappa (45 proof) had been the snack. Snack consisted of four kinds of meat from pigs, cheese, tomatoes and a bread basket. A few hours later we had the real "lunch:" an entire fish complete with face, cucumbers, tomatoes and bread and cheese. Whenever food is included in the price we like to eat up.

But I digress. What I wanted to say is that Dubrovnik is how I imagined heaven when I was a little girl. There's an entire city walled in by a stone wall you can walk around. The ground appears to be made of marble-- in fact it is so slippery I keep almost wiping out. There are palm trees and mountains, cool breezes and blue skies and sun all day. It is, in words that fail to do it justice, awesome.

That's enough for now. I keep bugging Lee to do a post so people don't get bored of my take on things. He keeps saying, "one of these days."

Wish us luck in Napoli, land of pizza and Pompei!