Ember Travels

Good morning/good afternoon/buen dia where ever you are in the world! It is a lovely Tuesday morning in Sevilla, Spain and this marks the two month aniversary of my journey! I want to thank all of you, who I know and don`t know for your comments, messages and endless enthusasium for my travels. Your support has been amazing and it´s always nice to hear from a familiar face! A little bit about my travels...I am excited to be in a country where I  finally  speak the language! I arrived in Spain yesterday and plan to spend a few days in Sevilla, then head to Grenada where I can hopefully find a place to settle down for a month or so to practice my Spanish and meet some locals. Keep your fingers crossed, I´m not sure how the whole, "I want to rent a room for just a month" thing will go, but things always seem to work out, so I´m not too worried. A friend recently commented on my luck saying that I may actually be the center of the universe, so I´ll just bank on that :) Either way...

In the late 80s a striking hotel was built, jetting 17 stories above the water and situated only a few kilos outside of Dubrovnik. Hotel Belvedere was a five star oasis, boasting gorgeous views of the Aegean and Dubrovnik for the wealthy who could afford it. Just two years after opening,, Hotel Belvedair was bombed in the civil war. The structure is still standing,, all of its luxury trapped in time with blown out windows and rooms filled with remnants of an extravagant past. Being one of the most talked about and mysterious landmarks in Dubrovnik, Ruud and I decided to take a look for ourselves. Approaching the hotel, we were filled with excitement and anticipation of what we might find. It's not everyday that you get to explore a bombed building left untouched. Entering the hotel was like taking a step back into that fateful day in 1991. It was as if time merely stopped when the rest of the world kept moving. There were cassette tapes scattered on the floor, trays with wine glass...

I must admit, one thing Greece has going for it is the ferry system. Apart from the ridiculous and inconvenient schedule, they are always punctual and spend a mere ten minutes at port unloading and reloading semi trucks, cars and passengers before they are on their way again. The Greeks don't mess around and their ferrys mean business, unlike those of Croatia.  On Sunday morning mom and I went to the port in Bari to check the ferry schedule and purchase my ticket to Croatia. The terminal was dead. Note to self: never try to get anything done in Italy on a Sunday because everything is closed.  In addition, every travel agency was closed, so I decided to buy my ticket online but the ferry line forbade me from purchasing my day-of ticket on the Internet. Panic. This was another awesome ferry schedule that only came a few times a week and if I didn't get the Sunday boat, I would have to wait until Wednesday night. Luckily, when we arrived at the port that night, the ticket window ...

Im not gonna lie, mom and I were not terribly heartbroken to be leaving Greece.  After one too many run-ins with rude Greeks, an inconvenient and incomprehensible ferry schedule and a non functioning bank card, we were ready for a change in scenery and language.  Italy has everything I need to survive-cheap coffee, cheap gelato and delicious pizza. Unfortunately, I only have twenty-four hours to bask in its goodness, then I'm Croatia bound and mom is Rome bound. Our final days in Santorini were wonderful. We rented scooters again and  zipped around the island and spent a final night with our new American friends enjoying live music at our favorite Spanish-themed cafe before our one A.M. ferry departure.  This is where the journey starts to get really interesting, and we start wishing Greece was never even placed on the map.  We decided to book a hotel 3 Km outside of the main city on Kos Island.  It looked really nice online, and we thought something out of...

I haven't been on top of the time situation, so I hope you're not disappointed by my lack of countdown.  I will be boarding the plane for Istanbul in a few short hours, and I am lucky enough to have my mom joining me on my journey for the first two weeks!  The past month has been full of browsing online travel forums (Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forum has saved my life many times), getting travel vaccines, memorizing airport codes and vigorously studying world geography.  The last one wasn’t so hard since my shower curtain is a map of the world.  Needless to say my obsession with maps paired with said shower curtain was probably not conducive to saving water.  Now, I have everything necessary to live stuffed into my little backpack and I am ready to embark on my new career as a nomad. When I tell people that I'm traveling the world, I get one of two responses. 1: wow, that's awesome, I've always wanted to do that, I'm jealous! Or (the critical) 2: Is that saf...