It’s finally time for David and I to head out on another trip! For this trip, we are taking more of a well trodden tourist path through the Southeast Asian nations of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. All in twelve days, because that’s how I party.
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I’ll be honest, we ended up in Kosovo on a technicality. When I spontaneously switched jobs last fall and decided to take an impromptu trip through the south Balkans, we were thinking primarily of Buzludzha. We tacked on Macedonia to Bulgaria for Skopje’s space age Brutalist masterpieces and the relatively undiscovered Lake Ohrid. We only ended up in Kosovo because it was cheaper to fly into Pristina than it was to fly into Skopje.
But boy were we glad we did. We spent three days there, between Pristina, Pec, and Prizren, and while we loved the latter two towns, Pristina (bad weather and all) was the Kosovar city to really win us over. Read more
The places that David and I frequent when we travel generally fall into two categories. The first of places we’ve seen, researched, geeked out over, and fallen into rabbit holes about for months (or years!) leading up to our departure. Places like Buzludzha, the Hara Submarine Pen, Gergeti Sameba Church in Kazbegi, and Gozo’s Azure Window fall into this category. The other category is a rarer breed – the kind of place that takes you by surprise. The type of place that you see on a whim, without expectations or prior biases.
The old Subotica Synagogue is this latter, more elusive type of place. Read more
I think it’s common knowledge that the quickest and easiest way to get to know a place is with someone who lives there and knows its ins and outs. It cuts down on the learning curve, which can be especially difficult in places off the beaten path – like some parts of Serbia that aren’t as frequented by tourists, especially in the winter months. So when I was doing my manic googling (as I do before any trip), I was very excited to come across the Subotica Greeters Program – a program that enables tourists in the Vojvodina city to explore with someone who knows the city well and has access to all of the gems it has to offer.
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I don’t talk about it much here, but in the list of hobbies that form the foundation of my adult identity, fitness ranks pretty highly. In fact, after puppies and travel, I’d say fitness, and running in particular, is a close third.
David and I run several distance events every year, ranging from half marathon to ultramarathon distance, so staying fit when we travel is important to us. That isn’t to say that we actually do train when we travel, but rather we usually think aloud about how we aren’t doing it, then proceed to stuff additional cheesey carbs into our face holes. After all, the base of the traveler’s food pyramid is cheesey breads, am I right?
The title to this post makes me grin from ear to ear. It is a microcosm of everything travel-related that I’m living for these days – road trips, Balkan destinations, and the stuff for which this site is named. I think if a single post were to encapsulate the way I love to travel, it would be this one. So with that, let’s dive headfirst into the wacky world of Bulgarian monuments.
The major draw to Bulgaria (and the whole Balkan region, to be honest) was the ability to visit Buzludzha (more to come on Buzludzha!), the showcase, now-abandoned, former meeting hall of the Bulgarian Communist Party. As it is inaccessible without private transportation, we rented a car for the Bulgaria portion of our trip. A rather unexpected side benefit to this was being able to pull over whenever and wherever (within reason, of course) that we wanted.
As it turns out, there are roadside relics of the Communist era all over Bulgaria. Quelle fortune!
It seemed as though everywhere we went there was a random, totally wacky structure, monument, or sculpture – and our job was to spot them as we went on the most fun game of “Where’s Waldo” ever played. 
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One of the great parts of our most recent trip to the Balkans was that it pushed me out of my comfort zone. Normally when I travel I obsessively and compulsively project manage the living hell out of the whole thing. To the point where almost every minute of every day is accounted for in some way or another. I’d attribute this proclivity to my business training, but that’d be lying – I’ve been like this forever. But anyway, being that there was only a week between booking tickets and departing on this adventure, I didn’t have the time to plan everything. And thus, I didn’t realize when we left that we were destined to fall in love with Skopje, Macedonia.
I mean, what’s not to love about all of this quirky, Yugoslav-era, “communist” architecture?
I am a fledgling urban explorer. Urban exploration, or urbex in shorthand, is the exploration of man-made structures, usually abandoned ruins or not usually seen components of the man-made environment. Photography and historical interest/documentation are heavily featured in the hobby and it may sometimes involve trespassing onto private property (thanks, Wikipedia!). Urbex is becoming more and more popular as a mainstream travel interest, evident by this year’s induction of cultural industrial complexes to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.
My interest in urbex started with our visit to Chiatura in Georgia last year, and is largely intertwined with my interest in Soviet/Communist era brutal (and largely abandoned) architecture. The former Soviet states are an urban explorers dreams, with many former Soviet military and government buildings empty for the exploring. So when we (let’s be real, when I), started planning our Baltic Road Trip Honeymoon™, I knew urbex would figure prominently into our plans. You can read posts I’ve written on urbex in Estonia in Tallinn and in the nearby Lahemaa National Park. Read more
When you’re on a road trip (through the Baltics, or anywhere, really), one of the challenges in keeping things interesting is finding places to stop in between your destinations. I can say from experience that this can be difficult when you’re driving, for example, the vast stretch of land in Southern Idaho – just flat enough to be totally boring, and conservative enough to be pretty scary. However, when driving from Klaipeda to Vilnius in Lithuania, as we did on the last day of our Baltic Road Trip Honeymoon ™, we found no lack of interesting/kitschy/somber roadside attractions to keep us entertained.
The Hill of Crosses
The Hill of Crosses is located just north of the city of Šiauliai in North Central Lithuania. I know that every time I talk about a church or other religious site, I preface with the fact that I am not a religious person. Let me repeat that, I am most certainly not a religious person. That said, I very much enjoyed visiting the Hill of Crosses. Gift shop aside, the site was very impressive. Hundreds of thousands of crosses piled on top of one another as a monument to the nation’s Catholicism. It is uncertain when folks started placing crosses there – Wikipedia says sometime in the mid 19th century. The real action at the Hill of Crosses, though, took place when Lithuania was under the Soviets. The story goes that the Soviets tried many times to destroy the monument – burning the crosses, bulldozing the hill, etc. But the Lithuanians continued to put crosses there in silent religious protest to the atheist Soviet regime. Read more
Where to start? My life has been a crazy whirlwind the past two weeks and I want to tell you all about it. Where to start…
David and I got back from our honeymoon on September 12. On September 11, a random on Linkedin added me to his network, and I confirmed about midway through the week on September 16. Turns out, it was a recruiter, and I ran through about six rounds of interviews with a major company in Seattle, let’s call them…Ahab’s Tea…and last week (September 30) received a ridiculously generous offer from them.
October 1, I put in notice with my current job, with my last day being Friday, October 9. Also October 1, I confirmed with Ahab’s Tea that I would start on October 22.
So…I know what you’re thinking – there’s a 12 day gap between those two dates. We’re taking a trip – looked around for cheap(ish) airfares, and landed on a trip overland, starting in Pristina, Kosovo, through Macedonia, and into Bulgaria.
Here’s what I’m most excited about, and what I’m reading to get me excited:
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