So this year’s travel will be a little shorter than last year’s. But it’ll still be some pretty good stuff. It’ll be my first around-the-world trip, and I’ll see a pretty wide variety of cultures, climates, and activities. Throw in some friends and some friends-of-friends, some good physical adventure, and entirely too much tech gear, and I think it’ll be a pretty great time. Here’s the itinerary:

Stop 1: Tokyo (July 28 – August 1)
I’ve never been to Japan, and it was time to fix that. I’ll be spending 3 days in Tokyo, which is both exciting and a little intimidating. Fortunately I’ll have a local guide for some of that; my friend Sègun “Shuggi” DeSilva has spent quite a bit of time there, and one of his local friends is going to kindly help me out. It should be a blast. And there has been some mention of “wine bars.”

Stop 2: Dubai (August 1 – August 4)
Too good to pass up. By all accounts, Dubai is just crazy. I’m a bit of an architecture geek, so I just have to see the ridiculous buildings (no, I’m not staying in the Burj — rooms started at US$600/night). But there’s other interesting stuff, and it’ll be interesting to contrast this relatively new city with the ancient places I saw in Jordan and Egypt last year.

Stop 3: Abu Dhabi (August 4 – August 7)
Also in UAE, Abu Dhabi gets less press than Dubai, but looks pretty amazing as well. I’m actually not at all sure what I’ll see or do here, but since it’s two hours away from Dubai and a good friend (hi Steve!) spent a lot of time here, I figured I had to see it.

Stop 4: Switzerland (August 8 – August 19)
This stop merits a whole post in itself, which I’ll get to at some point. The short version is that I’ll be climbing the Eiger and Monte Rosa with the Climb For Kids crew. There’ll be some time in Zermatt, and my first experiences with Alpine huts, and my second experience outdoor climbing. But we’ve got great guides and I feel pretty good about it (though I’m sure I’ll be utterly terrified when the time comes).

We’ll also spend time in Grindlewald and Wengen, two of my favorite places in the world. Heck, everyplace in Switzerland is one of my favorite places. There’ll just be a day or so in Geneva at the beginning/end of the climbing trip, but I’ll take advantage of that too. Geneva is one of my favorite places in the world.

Stop 5: Warsaw (August 19 – August 23)
Kind of a random choice here — I needed some place to spend a few days between Switzerland and Valencia, and Warsaw’s been on my radar for a little while. It’s got an interesting (and often depressing) history, and I’m definitely going to track down the Enigma machine at the Polish Military Museum. And hey, a 5 star hotel for US$60/night? After a couple of weeks of climbing and hiking and stuff, I’ll be ready for the luxury.

Stop 6: Valencia (August 23 – August 28)
What better way to end a month of travel than being covered and soaked in tomato? Yep, I’m going to hit La Tomatina, and I’ll do so in the company of Dara and Glyn, two friends I haven’t seen in years. La Tomatina is only an hour and I’m in Valencia for four days, so I’ll also get around and explore the city.

Know someplace cool along my itinerary? Know someone who’d want to get together for a glass of wine? You know how to find me!

So I just recently graduated from the UW Executive MBA program. It was a challenging but rewarding couple of years, and I learned a ton. If there’s interest, at some point I’ll write about the curriculum itself, but today I’m going to talk about the actual school experience.

When I first took the GMAT, and even on the first day of class, I had no idea what to expect from an MBA program. I knew there were huge gaps in my knowledge, and I was tired of trying to cram on every business subject as the need arose. Over the past two years, I learned a lot a about business, but also about business school.

An MBA is a High Level Overview
I entered the MBA program with the expectation that it would impart deep knowledge of accounting, marketing, management, finance, and so on. The reality is that each area of business is a huge field in itself. People have whole careers (and get PhD degrees) in specific areas of accounting, or marketing, or finance.

An MBA program is about exposing you to a wide range of skills at a fairly high level, not teaching you everything you need to know about anything in particular. I left with the feeling that I know enough to manage all of these different areas, and that I now have the base knowledge necessary to pursue one or more of them more deeply. But a marketing (or finance, or operations) guru I am not.

(E)MBA Students are Not Stodgy
I can’t speak for kids who go straight from an undergraduate degree to an MBA program, but the people in my EMBA program were, almost without exception, real characters. There was a lot of laughter in the class, and there was a wide variety of rich personalities. I don’t have actual stats, but I expect the average age of my class was about 45, with a standard deviation of 5 years. These were working professionals, established in their careers and lives, who were not afraid to be themselves. It was a lively and sometimes… surprising class environment.

We had classmates dressing in drag, demonstrating their ability to blow bubbles from their eyes into a water-filled snorkel mask, and mixing cocktails for class presentations. Heck, that was all just *one* classmate. There were 36 more! We really had a lot of fun, and that was something I was not expecting.

Structure is Valuable
A lot of the EMBA program focused on the basics: accounting, statistics, and just generally a whole lot of math and terminology. I could have learned that on my own. Heck, I could have learned it on my own twenty years ago. But I didn’t, and probably never would.

The structure provided by the program and the relatively heavy workload meant that I was dedicated to the reading and assignments on a pretty much constant basis. Left to my own devices, I would never have done the most difficult (and beneficial) work. It was the difference between an immersive language experience and just trying to read an “Intro to Spanish” book before a trip.

A Good Team Matters
I don’t know how other MBA and EMBA programs work. The UW EMBA is based around teams of five to six people who work together, as a team, for the entire duration of the program. Every group project is with the same group, and the group meets in between classes to review projects and to discuss individual assignments (while individual assignments were to be completed individually, most classes permitted and encouraged discussion).

That sounds a little insane. I do not know what I would have done if I hadn’t gotten along with my group. But I really could not be happier – my team had a broad distribution of backgrounds and skills and very different personalities, but we really bonded from the very beginning.

There are two great things about the team approach. First, it means that there is usually someone who is better than you at any given topic. It was a rare occasion indeed that my entire team was stumped on a difficult topic. And second, it gives you something to live up to. As a totally independent student, I would have put less work into some of the projects and assignments because my slacking would only affect me. As part of a team, there is a gentle sense of obligation that really fosters great work.

Graduate School is Not At All Like Undergrad
I can’t stress this enough. Being a college dropout, I had real reservations about returning to school. Would I manage to attend classes this time? Would a lot of the material be so remedial and boring that I would lose interest and fail?

The EMBA program was a great fit for me: the students were already working professionals, so everyone wanted to be there. Nobody was there because their parents expected them to get an MBA, or because they read somewhere that getting an MBA adds $X to annual income. These folks were already successful and were going back to school to get better and what they do. That made for a great learning environment.

The students’ life experience also meant that people were opinionated. In most cases, classes weren’t boring, dry, “in theory” lectures. For the most part, the professors had actual working experience in their fields. And the students knew enough to raise good questions, to disagree with professors on some points, and to contribute constructively to the conversation.

“Good Enough” is a Good Enough Philosophy
This may be controversial. I know there are people who think that anything less than 100% effort is a sign of personal failings, and that complete devotion to projects should be everyone’s ultimate goal. But not me. Especially not after the MBA program.

Way back at the beginning of the program, one of my group’s assignments was to write a charter. It sounds a little cheesy, but it was a good way to get six people who were going to have to work together for two years to be explicit about expectations, to define how the group would be run, and to communicate our priorities to each other.

I am really, really happy about one of the things my group decided right off: that our goal was simply to graduate. Not to get 3.8 GPA, or to be in the top X% of the class, but just to get the job done. Which isn’t to say we slacked off – it was a huge amount of work, and we did a very, very good job of it. But we had the freedom, when a group meeting was running past 9:30pm on a Wednesday night and we were all struggling with some arcane economics question, to just throw up our hands and say “good enough.”

In fact, it being business school, it’s probably not surprising that we sometimes took the time to figure out that a particularly irksome question represented 10% of the grade on a homework assignment that was 25% of the grade for a class that weighted homework as 25%, and that the class itself was a 4 credit class out of a 68 credit program. That question, then, was just 0.037% of our total GPA, and really any answer at all was going to be good enough. These are the calculations that put everything in perspective.

This Stuff is Actually Valuable
Someone in my MBA program once commented on the value of an MBA during job interviews. “If the interviewer has an MBA, they think it’s really valuable. If they don’t have one, they think it’s a waste of time.” I’ve already seen this in the real world, and there’s a lot of truth to it. But how about the real world, outside of interviews?

For my part, I’ve already had cases where specific knowledge gained in the program has helped me make better decisions, to communicate better with people in different business roles, and to better understand the implications of business decisions. I’ve already had times when the key question or issue arises from what I learned in the program. And I am already better at what I do.

I also have to admit to being a little surprised at the amount of value I got from some of the squishier material. Readings and discussions about corporate culture that seemed abstract and esoteric at the time have often come back vividly and usefully in my dealings with Fortune 500 consulting clients. People, structure, culture… indeed.

But Would You Do it Again?
I get asked that a lot. The EMBA program was expensive, time consuming, stressful, and challenging. It meant getting up at 6am every other Saturday, and educating friends that I was simply not available Wednesday nights, ever. It meant almost no football and only one day of skiing across two years. I missed a lot of social interaction… and I can only imagine how tough it must have been for people who have families and traditional jobs.

But yes, ultimately, it was worthwhile. I do think the financial return will come, and there is just a simple joy in getting better at doing things you enjoy.

“Well, I don’t want to leave money on the table.”

I’ve heard that a lot recently. And it’s driving me insane. It’s a perfectly good metaphor, but as a business concept, it has almost no relevance to industries or businesses that are in emerging or growth stages. In the tech industry, and especially for emerging products and markets, the resistance to “leaving money on the table” is basically a shorthand way of saying “we have no long term strategy, so we have to maximize short term returns at all costs.” If the market is growing, it’s often more profitable to have more competitors than fewer, and to have partners who are more profitable rather than less.

Extracting every bit of possible profit from potential partners means that you’re making it just-barely-worthwhile for people to do business with you. It means that every single person you’re doing business with is on the verge of walking away. And it means that people you don’t even know about have already chosen not to do business with you based on word of mouth or your marketing collateral.

Sure, if you’re Walmart, and you’re in a mature to saturated market, you have to claw for every penny, because every little bit of profit that you pass up is gone forever. And if you’re Walmart, you have the market clout to extract so much profit that you can actually ask vendors to sell to you at a loss just so they can enjoy economies of scale and actually turn a profit selling to other customers. But if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably not Walmart. You’re probably a consultant or a strategist looking to launch a product or technology. And in that scenario, critical mass is far more important than maximization of this quarter’s revenue.

And that’s why I always leave money on the table. I’ll pay a little more than I have to for contractors, and I’ll take a little less than I could from partners and clients. I will allow and even encourage development of add-ons that enhance my ventures, even if I could probably squeeze a bit of cash out people interested in doing so. In short, I’ll leave money on the table in the short term because I know that the industries I play in are very early stage, and the long term returns from being part of something huge are worth far more than whatever additional revenue I could squeeze out of partners and clients today.

Note: I’m posting this on behalf of the lovely and talented Anna, who took it upon herself to write the wrapup when it became apparent, after only two months or so, that I wasn’t going to. She originally wrote and posted this as a Facebook note, and I’m reposting it here for those who didn’t see it there. -Brooks

We hit London after a couple days in beautiful Croatia. It was hard to believe we had only a couple days left in our trip and it was surreal to hear English being spoken after not hearing much of it for the previous six weeks. I’ve wanted to go to London *forever*. Really. Some of my favorite things are from England, so I was super excited to “mind the gap”, ride the odd looking taxis, watch the double-decker busses pass and check out the nifty red phone booths. It turns out that the phone booths are generally covered in porn business cards. And No, I didn’t take any. Brooks and I were both really excited by the prospect of eating in a real British Indian Curry House. More on that later.

As excited as I was to see London, I was most excited to meet my friend Simon. Yes, meet. Simon and I “met” several years ago (egad this is geeky) playing online cribbage. Somehow this turned into a real friendship. We turn to each other for advice, to chat, or for no reason at all. Never mind that we hadn’t yet met in person.

It was truly wonderful to meet Simon. We were immediately talking a mile a minute and could have talked all night, except that Simon had to catch the last train home. We decided to meet the next day at Piccadilly Circus. Simon and I met up in the morning and started walking. And walking. And walking. I have no idea what we saw, besides damn near everything. Highlights included the bridge that got blown up in the last Harry Potter movie, walking along the Thames, and a bunch of old stuff. Much of London is really quite old. Oh yeah, I also skipped rocks on the river. It’s a bit of an obsession for me. I try to skip rocks whenever I can.

So after our epic walk, Simon and I split up for a couple hours. I needed to rest a bit because I was sick again. Ugh. I caught a terrible cold that ended up taking about three weeks and a round of antibiotics to fight off. Apparently, my superpower is not my immune system. Brooks has that one. Nope. I’m not jealous at all.

So dinner. Curry. London is known for it’s Indian food. Probably because actual British food is terrible. Brooks and I met up with Simon, his wife Jane and their friend Tree. We trooped to a randomly chosen curry house and happily stuffed ourselves. It was a wonderful evening of conversation, laughter and food. We were very happy to eat tasty food. Brooks and I were so happy that we went to curry the next night, too.

Sadly, my second day in London was spent almost entirely in the hotel room. I was just too sick to do much at all. I made it to Marks & Spencer, where I bought a sweater and lunch. I like a store that has both clothes AND quite good food in a little mini-grocery store containing almost entirely lunch-y stuff. Brooks went out on his own, including to the theatre in the evening. He very much enjoyed the play and I was sorry to have missed it. But at least I had my Kleenex.

We said goodbye to London and boarded the uber-posh business class of British Airways. I was happy to not be right on top of other people since I was a snot factory. I honestly thought I was going to blow an eardrum on the descent. It was extraordinarily painful. I took as much medication as I could get in me, but it certainly wasn’t enough.

Overall it was an amazing trip. As some time has passed, certain things have crystallized in our minds as highlights. The Sinai trek by far had the most meaning. I treasure the opportunity I had to see how another culture really lives. I also realize that I am very lucky to be a woman in a secular country.

I fell in love with the city of Istanbul. It was the only city on the trip (besides London) that I felt like I could move to. I’d most like to return to Turkey and Jordan, although I want to wait about 10 years before going back to Amman. I want to see how it changes, because we could tell that the changes will be massive.

A few snapshots that will stay with me forever:

* Rounding a corner and suddenly seeing the first large façade of Petra. It gave me butterflies.

* Snorkling in the Red Sea and then floating the Dead Sea in the same day.

* The many military check point soldiers draped in automatic weapons saying “Welcome to Jordan!” with a huge (and genuine) smile.

* Playing with the Bedouin children in the Sinai.

* Our Sinai guide, Fraij, giving us the itinerary for each day: “We walk over zare… and zare… we eat… we rest… we walk… eez good.”

* Coming out of the Sinai and suddenly being on the Red Sea. Then add the happiness we felt to see an inch of foam mattress to sleep upon and gorgeous water to swim in. (Although Lars and I learned that it doesn’t work to wash your hair in cold salt water.)

* Having the waiters sing Happy Birthday to me at the Yalla Bar in Dahab.

* Lounging on the felucca in the Nile. And swimming in the Nile, for that matter.

* Punning continuously with Lars, Brooks and Luke.

* Feeling happy about the fact that I could be with Luke and Lars for over two weeks and still like them.

* Being even happier about still liking Brooks after over six weeks of constant togetherness. Heck, I’d so far as to say that we still love each other. But the liking part can be a lot more difficult that the loving part, if I were to tell the truth.

* Walking through the blue blue blue city of Chefchouen, Morocco.

* The mosques, markets and general mood of the city in Istanbul.

* Hanging out on the beach with Brooks and Fred in Hvar, Croatia.

* Wandering through London with Simon.

The Rock Skip Report:
• Red Sea (in Jordan & Egypt)
• Dead Sea (Jordan side)
• A spring in the Sinai
• Nile River
• Adriatic Sea (Croatia)
• Danube River (Budapest)
• Thames River (London)

By The Numbers:
• Countries: 9
• Continents: 4
• Flights: 12
• Days: 38
• Air miles: 19,000
• Types of transport: 11 (plane, train, taxi, ferry, felucca, foot, camel, bus, rental car, range rover, back of pickup)
• Books read by Anna: 23
• Books read by Brooks: 2
• Rounds of antibiotics: 2 (both Anna’s)
• Flies: 8 trillion
• Pitas: 8 billion
• Bottles of wine: not nearly enough

The Sinai trek was the original reason for the trip. I’m so thankful the rest of it got added in as well. We saw people and places that very few Americans see. It was a trip of a lifetime and now I want to travel even more. I want to meet more people, see more things, explore new (hopefully tasty) foods, and experience more of life. I’m thinking next stop… Thailand. And possibly Vietnam.

The world is a funny place.  Usually in a black comedy kind of way, but sometimes in a lighter hey-this-world-thing-is-ok-even-if-it-is-trippy sense.  Take day thirty-five, for instance.  Here are Anna and I, more than a month into a combination adventure/whirlwind trip, and we’re swimming in the Adriatic and chatting with Fred, who I’d met when rafting the Futaleufu river in Chile.  It was welcome and refreshing, both the swim and the opportunity to speak English to someone other than each other for the first time in weeks, but it was just kind of funny.

Jump back to the beginning of the day: the plan was to make it to Hvar, where I knew Fred would be stopping from 1pm – 6pm, thanks to the magic of the Internet (and thanks to Luke, who had also been rafting in Chile and who had been with us for the Egypt portion of this trip, who connected Fred with our itinerary, making it possible for Fred to discover that we’d be in Croatia at the same time).   Sorry for the long paranthetical there; I used to be worse about them, but I haven’t kicked the habit entirely.  Anyways, so we’re up around 8am and decide to see if we can get to Hvar.  That’s not as easy as it sounds, since we didn’t have Internet access in Stobreč, and all we knew was that there was a ferry of some sort leaving from somewhere in Split.

But, hey, were adventurous, right?  So we hopped on a bus to downtown Split, and as the bus headed into town, we started seeing signs for the ferry terminal.  Hey, what luck!  Sure enough, the bus stopped near the terminal, and from there it was just a matter of finding the ticket booth (success on the second try!) and figuring out the schedule.  As it turned out, there was a high speed ferry leaving at 11:30.  Sold!  The only downside was that there were no return ferries from Hvar, so we’d have to catch a bus to Stari, another city on the same island, for one of the return ferries.  But there were lots of them, running as late as 11pm, so it seemed ok.

So 11:30 found us seated on the second high speed ferry of the trip, heading towards Hvar.  Somewhere I had read that it was a 3 hour trip, but that was unclear about whether it was 3 hours in the high speed or regular ferry.  We had no idea of arrival time.

After just an hour, we found ourselves pulling into Hvar.   Heck, we had plenty of time.  As we walked around the marina area, but became clear that Hvar is just terribly cute in that way that only Mediterranean resorts are: ancient churches and buildings, a town square area with shops and restaurants, multimillion dollar yachts parked everywhere, and people walking around in various stages of undress.  I could live that way.

We heard from Fred around 1pm, and sure enough he was on his Seabourn ship in the harbor and would be in town by 2pm.   Anna  and I took the time to wander around some more, get some ice cream, and generally enjoy the resort town.  And then, around 2pm, we headed back to the harbor area and – wow – there was Fred.  Yes, we knew we were going to meet him and had arranged it, but it still felt a bit surreal.  I mean, I’d met the guy two years ago, 8000+ miles away, and on another adventure trip.

Anyways, it was great catching up with Fred (hi, Fred!), and the three of us hung out and swam for an hour or two, enjoying the sea water and just taking it easy.  One of those life-is-good afternoons where you just kind of idle and chat.  Then, after a quick snack, we said our goodbyes and parted ways.  Fred, back to his all-inclusive super-luxury cruise, and Anna and I off to find the bus to the other city to find the ferry back to Stobreč, which, while it’s charming in a small-sea-town kind of way, is completely incompatible with the word “luxury.”

The bus, while so packed that Anna and I had to stand for the twisty 30 minute ride, was easy to deal with, as was the ferry back to Split.  By this time we were old hands at Croatian public transit, and we had fantastic luck hopping on the bus back to Stobreč, which had just pulled up when we got to the stop. 

In the evening, we wandered around town a bit more, then got a quick dinner at one of the small local restaurants.  And then it was back to the hotel to sleep – really the last off-the-beaten-path hotel and sleep we’d have, since tomorrow we’d head to London and would be in a Hilton for the remaining days of the trip. 

We woke with a combination of relief and maybe a bit of disbelief that we were on our way to our next-to-last country, Croatia.  After Croatia, it’d just be London before we’d return home to our kitties, friends, and meals that don’t involve french fries or pita bread.  But first, getting to Croatia.  We started at our locationally challenged hotel somewhere between Budapest and Vienna, but since all we had to do was get to the airport by 1pm or so, it didn’t really matter.  So we slept in a bit and grabbed a ride on a hay cart in to town to where we could get a taxi.  Ok, ok, it wasn’t quite that far out; the hotel just called a taxi for us.

From there it was the usual blur of airports and lounges and waiting until we landed in Split, Croatia.  We found a taxi outside the arrivals area, and gave the driver the hotel name and address that we had.  If anyone from Hollywood is reading this and is looking for an absolutely archtypical heavyset, sullen, slavic guy… we may be able to put you in touch.  Our driver pretty much exuded weary disgust.  He didn’t know the hotel.  Podstrana was a big area.  How could we not have a phone number?  And so on.  He wasn’t angry, and certainly didn’t refuse to drive us, he was just kind of grumpy about it.

We eventually made it to Podstrana, a cute-seeming suburb of Split, maybe about 10km outside of the town center.  It’s probably a great place to stay.  We wouldn’t know.  After our taxi dropped us and drove off (fare: US$70 for 30km, and yes, it was metered – we’ll return to this point in a later day), the Hotel Stipe informed us that there had been a mistake and that they didn’t have a room for us… but that they’d arranged on in another hotel.  Fair enough.  Except the other hotel was too far to walk.  And a taxi would be expensive!

We ended up waiting about a half hour for a bus, and taking it three stops for about 5km to nearby Strobec, where we walked another kilometer or so to the new hotel.  Which hotel was at least decent, but by this point in our travels we really didn’t need the extra time spent on logistics or extra bus/walk.  So it goes.

By this time, it was 5pm or thereabouts.  We hung out in the room for a bit, resting, and then headed down to the hotel’s bar, where Anna proceeded to win two games of Scrabble in a row, which was kind of irritating (though not unusual).  Then it was dinner at Etupa, the local restaurant that the bartender recommended.  It’s probably a great fish place, as evidenced by the fish on their sign, the live lobster tank, and the pretty much complete taxonomy of fish laid out on ice at the restaurant’s entrance.  Not  a great place for steak, though: my pepper steak tasted of fish, and Anna’s Beef Stroganov tasted strongly of fish.   Those of you who know me will understand how I felt about that.

Finally, we headed back to the hotel, with tentative plans to make it out to the island of Hvar the next day, since in one of those small-world coincidences, a buddy who I’d met when rafting the Futaleufu was going to be in Hvar for a few hours during a stop on a cruise, and it seemed like it’d be entertaining to meet up for a bit.

When we’d originally planned the trip, Anna and I were faced with some challenges.  Because the tickets we chose to use were based on total mileage traveled, not number of flights or time, adding additional cities was essentially free, especially if they were along our planned route.  We could have flown from Istanbul to London… but adding Budapest and a spur out to Croatia added a total of something like 1000 miles.  Since we were well under the 20,000 mile limit, it was easy to say “hey, we both love Budapest, and Croatia sounds interesting, let’s add them.”

And I’m still glad that we did, but there is definitely a fatigue factor to changing hotels ever couple of days and flying every two or three days.  That hit home when we checked in for our flight to Budapest a around 11am on day thirty three.  Thing is, the agent gave us our boarding passes for Istanbul/Budapest… and also or boarding passes for Budapest/Split.  Since we’d have less than 24 hours in Budapest, it counted as a connection.  As Anna noted, it’s a good thing we weren’t checking luggage, because it would have been checked through to Croatia, skipping Budapest entirely.

So after a quick flight, we found ourselves on the ground in Budapest.  Neither of us had arrived by plane before, and we didn’t know where exactly our hotel was, but Anna had found a reasonably priced place that seemed fairly central, so we gave the address to the taxi and sat back for the ride, enjoying the approach to the city.  And enjoying the bridge over to the Buda side, which was a little surprising since the hotel had mapped as being on the Pest side, but whatever.  The ride up past Buda Castle was pretty as well, though once we left that vicinity and continued east, into suburbs and residential areas, the drive started to seem a little long.

The driver was, in fact, quite correct: our hotel was in the boonies.  It had a reasonably good view of Budapest, off in the distance, but it was decidedly not a centrally located hotel.   There’s this annoying thing about Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and pretty much every online map service I’ve run across: if they don’t recognize a street address, they’ll fall back to mapping where the city is, and put a handy little pushpin there, as if it were the address you’d asked for.  Oops.  Anna had fallen prey to this annoying quirk, and a hotel that was so far out that its street name has apparently not yet been transcribed to digital form (the maps of this area are probably moldering in a sub-basement of a rural bureaucracy’s abandoned headquarters) was mapped as being literally at the center of Budapest.  Argh.

Still, after more than a month of travel, this kind of snafu didn’t phase us.  Well, ok, Anna was phased about 10 degrees, but that’s not that bad.  We cleaned up a bit, asked the hotel to telegraph a cab for us, and headed back into the city proper to get dinner and do some quality wandering.  This was the first city either of us had bee to before (as adults, anyway), and since we’d both bee there before, we didn’t have the same pressing need to walk all over the place and see everything that we did in totally new cities.  So it’d be a relaxing evening.

We started with a pretty nice wine tasting spot near Buda Castle, and then I felt I had to have my craving for goulash fulfilled, so we asked the staff there for restaurant recommendations.  They helpfully suggested Pom d’Oro, down on the Pest side.  So Anna and I hit the funicular (which is, admittedly, pointless but just plain fun, hence the name), and made our way to the restaurant.  It was cute!  We sat down, admired the decor, got our menus, and realized it was an Italian restaurant.  No goulash for me!

Ah well, it was still a great dinner of carpaccio and cheese, and after dinner, we kind of just walked around the city, taking in the sites.  Budapest is just a beautiful city, and with the great architectural lighting everywhere, it’s hard to go wrong with pictures.   Unless you have recently purchased a really crappy camera, like I did, and it can’t deal with city pictures at night even when braced on walls and stuff.  Argh.  Oh well, you’ve seen pictures of Budapest at night.  It looked like that.

And then, at the end of the evening, it was back to the hotel, which was still a cab ride away (it hadn’t gotten any closer).  We made it to the room around midnight, and we were looking forward to getting back to entirely new stuff the  next day, when we’d head to Croatia.

Day thirty-two’s entry (yes, this one) is going to be short, because it was a bit of a crappy day.   The day started well enough, with Anna and I planning to walk down to the ferries, to catch a ferry across to the Asia side of Istanbul, and to walk back across the huge suspension bridge (about a mile long) connecting the Asiatic and European sides of Istanbul.  So far so good, right?  Sounds like a fine plan?  Yep.

But we had no sooner gotten off the ferry and started walking than I found that my right knee hurt.  Which is odd, because that kind of thing rarely, if ever, happens.  And then it was my left ankle.  Well, ok, maybe I’d walked too much while wearing inappropriate footwear in the past few days (we had certainly walked 15 miles or so over the past three days, with me wearing flops or loafers).  So I pressed on for a bit, and we walked into the market area on the Asian side of Istanbul.

And that’s when things got rougher.  I started to feel weak, the joint and muscular soreness appeared in my back, shoulders, calves, and forearms, and over the course of an hour or so I went from “hmm, something may not be quite right” to “something is most certainly not right here.”  It’s not a great feeling to become palpably more sore and ill feeling with each passing minute. 

So I’ve traveled with enough people (*cough* Anna *cough*) who don’t slow down when they’re getting sick and basically refuse to deal with it until it’s completely debilitating, and I know the best thing for it is to just rest, drink lots of water, and get medical attention if it’s getting dramatic.  Well, ok, I made that last bit up, and I’d be as slow as anyone to go that far.  But I did pull the plug on walking over the bridge and the rest of the afternoon’s walking / exploration, and Anna was kind enough to accompany me back to the hotel, where I rested, feeling like utter crap, for the afternoon.  She headed out shopping in Pera while I napped.

Here’s where things could become “and that’s how I was diagnosed with swine flu and rickets,” but where they fortunately did not become so.  After three or four hours of rest, lots of water, 800mg of Ibuprofin, and some chocolate… I was pretty much better.  Whatever it was had hit me like a ton of bricks and then evaporated.

So, after not really doing anything for the day, I finally got moving around 7pm, and Anna and I hit a cleverly named but unfortunately signed “Faces” Italian food restaurant (hint: if you’re using that name, don’t use an upside down “e” for the “a”).   The dinner wasn’t the spectacular gourmet fest that the previous night’s had been, but it was good solid non-Turkish food (Penne Arrabiata for me, a beef noodle Thai-style concoction for Anna).

See?  Short day.  I was just happy to not be genuinely sick or at risk of amputation or something when so far from home.  With renewed health and after a fantastic time in Istanbul, we called it an early night.  Tomorrow would be our oh-so-brief visit to Budapest, a city we’d both been to before and which we couldn’t pass up when the opportunity presented itself.

I have a confession to make.  I’ve fallen terribly behind in writing.  As I type this, I’m sitting in Split, Croatia, about to head off to Hvar.  But that’s another story, one that I’ll probably get around to writing in mid-October, at the rate I’m going.  Anyways, back to Istanbul for now.  When I left off, we had just spent the day wandering the city, and I had narrowly escaped a fate wherein I grow old, endlessly walking the streets of Istanbul, looking for our hotel.

Day thirty-one opens with us heading out of our hotel around 9am, the plan being to head to the east part of downtown to see the Hagia Sofia (Ha-gee-uh So-fee-uh to me, apparently Ai-uh-sof-ya to everyone else), since the lines had been too long the day before.  We got there around 10am, and there were already quite a few people there, but not so many as the afternoon before.  We were able to buy tickets and walk right in, or at least to stroll at near-snails-pace right in behind busload after busload of tourists.

I am happy to report that, as far as gigantic, historically important, awe-inspiring pieces of 1500-year-old architecture go, the Ayasofia does not disappoint.  It’s very, very big.  They’re currently in the process of restoring the highest ceiling mosaics, so we saw it with an approximately 25-floor scaffolding taking up about a fifth of the tallest part.  It’d probably be even more impressive without the scaffolding, but as a geek it was interesting to see the scale of even the maintenance equipment required to tend to the building. 

This is a travelogue, not a guidebook, so I’m not going to go into great detail abou the building.  Suffice to say, it’s well worth making a point of seeing if you find yourself in Istanbul, and likely worth heading to Istanbul just to see if you’re very into historical architecture. 

After the Ayasofia, we headed right next door, to the Blue Mosque.  This was a bit of an odd experience because it’s still an active mosque, and while tourists are only allowed in during certain hours, worshippers are welcome at any time.   We followed a short line of tourists as they navigated the “please take off your shoes” and “here’s a loaner head covering for women” staging areas.   Anna and I weren’t as mystified as most, and Anna had a scarf ready to go.

Once inside, the mosque itself is very impressive, but the huge number of tremendously long wires for the light fixtures turned what could have been a stunningly tall and open space into a kind of densely-black-striped, perceptually-low-ceilinged space.  The sheer number of wires and cables couldn’t have been accidental; it had to be an intentional choice somewhere, and the architecture suffered from it.  Well, from the wires, and from the huge number of tourists demonstrating various degrees of respect for Muslim sensibilities.

Most Muslims who visit the Blue Mosque wisely stay away from tourist hours, but there were some people praying, and I felt kind of sorry for them, what with Texans in shorts lining up a few feet away to take pictures of them, and a lot of women who opted to go bare-headed and bare-armed (Muslim men don’t go bare-armed in mosques).

So call the Blue Mosque worth seeing, if a little bit for the wrong reasons.  It is right next to the Ayasofia, so it’d be senseless to skip it, but I would recommend doing the mosque first so it’s less of a comparative letdown.

After seeing probably the two most famous historical sites in the city, Anna and I wandered a bit, walking up Kennedy Cadessi, or Kennedy Street, complete with a statute of John Kennedy.  Why?  Well, if we had done more research in advance, I could probably have told you.  As it is, I don’t know.  But I plan to look it up at some point.  From there, we walked back through the Grand Bazaar and discovered that the necklace Anna had fallen in love with the day before – a really nice modern piece with a series of asymmetric circles – was white gold and diamonds, making it not only cost prohibitive but downright scary to own.

And then we were kind of done with the south peninsula of Istanbul.  We said goodbye to the shopping district that Hotel Bar In was in (along with Hotel Balin and Hotel Baron) and grabbed a cab over to the next night’s hotel, which was in the Pera district.  We’d booked it during a 15 minute Internet cafe stop the day before, based largely on one or two restaurant reviews indicating that there was good food and nightlife in Pera.  But we had no idea what to expect.

Brief tangent here: at some point, I’m going to write an essay about the way different cultures look at maps, street signs, addresses, and finding unknown places.  We’ve seen everything from having taxi drivers wave off our totally accurate maps in favor of asking random people on the street every 100 meters to seemingly helpless drivers who act like an address that they don’t know must simply not exist and obviously can’t be found.  There’s a project here, plotting different extremes of social interaction styles in an n-dimensional space and…

Right, back on track here.  Our cab driver found our new hotel (by asking two other cab drivers).  Anna wasn’t feeling well and decided to rest for the afternoon, and I headed out to explore (making more careful note of the hotel’s name an location than I had last time around). 

And here’s one of those times where the difference between turning left or right makes a pretty big impact on one’s perception of a city.  I turned left, walked two blocks, and found the motherlode of Istanbul shopping.  I don’t have the street name handy, but it was a giant pedestrian street, about a mile long, with nonstop shops, restaurants, and malls, and with every side street just packed with more restaurants and bars.  It was like, um, that one huge street in Budapest, set end on end with that one huge street in Paris, except busier.  If that helps any.  I even found the local metal bar, Dorock, subtly cued by black and silver awnings with lightning bolts and flames, and of course the obligatory contingent of long haired, black t-shirted, band-logo-emblazoned metal types.  It was kind of cute.

So after a whole lot of walking, I started to head back to the hotel, hoping Anna was feeling better and ready to get some food.  Along the way, I ran across a bunch of barber (“berber”, in all seriousness) shops and decided that my hair had grown out enough to annoy me, and that it had to go.  I popped into one shop and tried to communicate that I wanted my face and head shaved, straight razor and shaving cream style.  As it turns out, I got a very nice (face) shave, and a pretty decent haircut.  Still, it was short enough to no longer be actively annoying, so I was happy.

Fortunately Anna was feeling better, so we headed out to find food.  After much wandering around and deep sighs at most of the options (“not another kebap place”), we happened upon a French restaurant, denoted by “brasserie” in the name.  What’s more, they had Chateaubriand on the menu.  I love Chateaubriand.  So Anna and I had the second truly gourmet dinner of the trip, with some wonderful rare beef and an absolutely stellar Turkish Cabernet Sauvignon, whose name I remember only as “Blubluyeg”, or something to that effect, the 2005 reserve.

After dinner, we wandered some more, stopping for wine and dessert at another restaurant, and then, well, and then it was 11pm.  And I just couldn’t resist checking out the local metal scene.  Anna opted (wisely, as it turns out) to head back to the hotel, and I returned to Dorock (or “Do Rock”; I’m still not clear).  Yes, it was going to be cheesy.  And yes, it was cheesy, all the more so because the band, Murder Kings, turned out to be a cover band.  A good cover band, but I didn’t come to Istanbul to hear Metallica covers.  I drank about half of a beer and listened to two or three songs, then headed back to call it a night for real.  After all, tomorrow we were planning to walk to Asia.

Having arrived after midnight, and not having procured a guidebook or map or anything in advance, Anna and I hadn’t really seen much of the city, and didn’t know much ll about its layout, where our hotel was, and all of that good stuff. Which is why, when I awoke around 8:30am and found Anna completely sound asleep, I waited for a bit and then decided to head out on my own, leaving her a note suggesting a noon rendezvous in the hotel lobby.  Our hotel, by the way, was the Bar In Hotel, or perhaps Barin Hotel.  It did, in fact, have a bar in the lobby.   But nevermind that, I was itching to explore a new city, and so I headed out.

You can learn a lot more about a city by walking it, preferably at random, than you can from any number of guidebooks and maps and tours and whatnot.  Just exploring and meandering around a new place lets you following roads that are interesting, see distant landmarks and make your way to ‘em, and generally get a feel for the layout, the people, and the mood of the city.  Walking around Istanbul, I was immediately struck by the fusion of European cosmopolitan and middle east Islamic cultures.  Just visually, there are mosques everywhere.  I don’t think there are more here than in, say, Amman.  But there are a whole lot of huge mosques.  The scale of the minarets, visible over every corner of the city, is really something to see.

And see it I did.  I wandered eastward from our hotel, happening upon a huge square with Istanbul University and the entrance to something called the Grand Bazaar.  The scale, I cannot stress enough, is huge.  Once I entered the Grand Bazaar it was clear that these Turks do not mess around with their shopping.  The first street/aisle I walked down had felt like it was a mile long, and comprised almost entirely of jewelry shops.  And unlike the souks and bazaars of Cairo and even much of Tangier, these were proper storefronts, with great lighting, glass cases, and so on.  It was a bit overwhelming.

Making it through and to the other side of the grand bazaar, I wandered a bit more, mostly on shopping streets but also through a bunch of plazas.  Eventually it was 11am and time to head back to meet Anna, so I turned back west and… found that I had no idea how to get back to the hotel. I backtracked a bunch, finding landmarks and hotels that I had seen, gradually narrowing the search area down until… nothing.  The hotel, as far as I could tell, had simply ceased to exist.  It was at this point that I started asking people if they knew the hotel and discovered, to my dismay, that the same general area has, in addition to the Bar In Hotel, the Balin Hotel and the Baron Hotel.  I found both, multiple times, thanks to kind passersby.

Tiring of the fruitless search, and without a map or a phone (I’d left both my cell and satellite phones in the hotel room, of course), I went back to the plaza with the entrance to the Grand Bazaar and found the entrance where I had actually walked into the plaza.  It turns out that just a subtly different angle puts one in an entirely different place.  Who would have thought?  So I eventually found the hotel, and Anna, only 20 minutes late (and after only an hour or so of increasingly frustrated being-lost).

Anyways, once we finally met up, we headed back to the Grand Bazaar, and this time I had a better idea of the layout of the city.  And Anna, being resourceful and stuff, had procured both a guidebook (Fodor’s Istanbul, 2001) and two maps.  So we were a little more directed than I had been. 

The rest of the day was  spent wandering through the shopping district, the bazaar, and briefly stopping by the Hagia Sophia (aka Ayasofia), the one thing of historical import in Istanbul that I did not want to miss (I did, after all, play Civilization, and I know my wonders of the world).  The lines were huge, though, so we planned to return the next morning, and just wandered our way through the day, stopping with purpose only to make hotel reservations for the next few days (in a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn from our current location, just to mix things up) and for some pretty disappointing local wine at the Internetly popular, but also somewhat disappointing, Orient Express Wagon Bar.