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While the castle itself is picturesque, it’s hard to get passed the thousands of tourists and dracula souvenir schlock…all in all I was not that impressed. For a more authentic Dracula castle experience, check out his mountain-top fortress at Poeinari (near Curtea de Arges). No tourists and some of the best scenery in the Carpathians makes this place ideal.

Step 4: vaccinations, well not complete, but underway…to be complete in two weeks.

Step 3: buy tickets from DC to Seattle, COMPLETE! So I sort of got out of sequence (still need to buy tickets from London to Athens), but whatever…

I’m kind of regretting I told my friend I would attend her wedding…flying from DC to Seattle before heading on to London is going seriously out of my way.

I went to UPS and spent four years in Tacoma, and while we all complained incessantly about the lack of anything, I really did enjoy Tacoma…it has several small, quirky neighborhoods, an abundance of good beer, coffee, and food, and of course good people. Although it doesn’t offer the same kind of advantages as a large city like Seattle, it is charming in its own, awkward way.

Visit Tacoma institutions like Bob’s Java Jive, Gateway to India, 6th Ave, The Waterfront, Point Defiance, Antique Sandwich Company, The Glass Museum, Tacos Guaymas, Proctor District, The Blue Mouse, The Grand, Stadium Video, MSM Deli, The Parkway, The Hob-Knob, Queen Anne Thriftway (NOT Metropolitan Market), and of course the UPS campus and the North End are very nice…

The creepiest thing is when you realize the piles of bones and skulls aren’t just a few feet deep, but are tens of feet deep, sometimes extending back as far as 50 feet…

Step 1: buy tickets from Seattle to London, COMPLETE! The only thing deterring my exuberance at this point is the cost of said tickets.

Step 2: buy tickets from London to Athens…

I may take a pre-European trip adventure to New England, New Brunswick, Novia Scotia, and Prince Edward Island at the beginning of June. Plan is to quit my job before Memorial Day, move out of my apartment and do some local travelling before flying home for a wedding and then departing for six plus months in Europe and Australia. Of course that will cut into my savings for the big trip, but I think it will be well worth it…I’ve lived on the East Coast now for a year and a half, and have seen hardly any of it.

Azerbaijan first came onto my radar when I was looking into joining the PeaceCorps, and looking for a Central Asian country that fit the cultural criteria I wanted (at the crossroads of cosmopolitan Europe, Russia, China, and the Middle East), and it stuck out because according to what I read, it doesn’t get brutally cold there in the winter. So I’ve been doing some more reading, and found out it is a Shi’ite Muslim country with little sense of nationalism but a strong regionalism and sense of religion (despite the fact that some of the more strict Muslim social codes are not observed). Apparently oil money has flooded Baku, but is not trickling down to the countryside, which is widening the gap between economic classes as the nouveau riches westernize, at least superficially, and the peasants long for their Communist pensions. Perhaps the one thing going for the country, aside from oil (which could work both for and against Azerbaijan, depending on how it’s managed), is that Turkey has significant influence here…if only because the Azeris are a Turkic people with a similar language.

Seriously, you can get almost any beer you can think of here…the book-of-a-menu is extremely impressive. The sheer volume and quality of beer available trumps the complete lack of atmosphere and the occasionally dodgy service. A DC institution for sure.

I’ve always heard from people that Turkey is more “western” than the rest of the Muslim Middle East, but decided to do some research. To get ready for my trip, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learned something interesting last night; that the current system of government in Turkey is based on an ideology of secularization, not necessarily democracy. This approach works in modern Turkey because of the cultural legacy left by the tolerant and multi-national Ottoman Empire, although today there is a growing movement of more traditional Islamists (not fundamentalists). In a way that seems at odds with how the rest of the Middle East is trending, the growing Islamist movement in Turkey wants democracy. The U.S. does not want Turkey to embrace democracy. Hypocritical on principle, although I can see how the U.S. has what it deems its “best interests” in mind, even if I disagree with them. So I’m excited to see what public opinion and the political climate are like when I go there, especially city vs. rural.