Obrigado!!

Just wanted to drop by and say thanks to everyone!!! Including but not limited to:

• Jason for keeping this blog alive and kicking and for all the memories
  
• Our parents for putting up with this/mustering up untold levels of support
  
• All our hosts as listed by jphan
  
• Hongdae Guesthouse/Mary Wang/Mary's daughter's muffin recipe.
  
• JLC: for all blog consultations, google mapping, trip planning, and for somehow waiting for me for TREKKK!
• Phoebe for teaching me the ropes of Junior Monopoly
• Julian for teaching me to appreciate life through many a 200 km/h near-death countryside driving experience
  
• Buster the Black Lab for providing pillow services in a pinch
• Hostel Brothers for the cake and beer
• Hassan from Sunshine for his infinite wisdom
• Anthony and Ruby for the Beijing tour
• Switzerland ... for nothing
• Germany for your sandwiches and wealth of doner kebab
  
• The Knight Residence for broadcasting TNG
• Congee ... just for being you
• Spain for the quasi-tan
• Portugal for the homecoming

and everybody for reading!!!

Last Blog!!

At the airport on the way back to LA. Its crazy how fast this trip has flown by, and it seems like yesterday when Dan and I were daydreaming away the details of this trip in his Sansom West apartment. Its been an incredible journey...or more appropriately, a whirlwind adventure filled with lots of random and unexpected twists and turns. There have been lots of great memories, and, of course, some easily forgettable ones (and definitely those that we vow to never talk about again). I've had a really great time exploring new places and experiencing new cultures. It was also really fun to meet random cool people and reconnect with old friends.

I've put together a list of some notable points of our trip:

Favorite buildings:
-Dom (Cologne, Germany)
-Blue mosque (Istanbul, Turkey)
-Alhambra (Granada, Spain)

Best scenic views:
-Sagres (Portugal)
-Yueliang shan in Yangshuo (China)

Epic failures:
-The car in Barcelona
-Regensburg/Munich
-Switzerland (yes, the entire country)
-Shanghai

Food:
-Samgyeopsal (Korea)
-Kro's nest (Beijing)
-Shengjian baos (Shanghai)
-Tongyi Lucha (China)
-Doner Kabobs and Kofta (uhh....everywhere)
-Currywursts (Dusseldorf and Berlin)
-Pasties (UK)
-Francesinha (Porto)
-Bifsteaks (Portugal)
-Iskender kabob (only the one in Selcuk, Turkey)
-Lahmacun (Turkey)

Foreign phrases:
-Mitfahrgelegenheit
-Hauptbahnhopf
-Tschussy
-Inshallah
-Otogar
-Quid
-Kuai

Best Hostels:
-Hongdae Guesthouse (Seoul) -- Mary was the best hostel lady/owner ever!!!
-Brother's Hostel (Cairo) --Muhammed, Mustafa and Ahmed were incredibly nice and awesome....they even bought Dan a birthday cake
-Lisbon hostels: traveler's house and lisbon lounge ...they're like the top ten in the world on hostelworld.com...amazing service, ridiculously clean, great location
-Overnight trains... okay, these don't count, but I did have some of my best night's sleep on these

Worst Hostels:
-one of them in Munich (hella drunk teenage kids running around everywhere)
-all of our Barcelona hostels (lots and lots of elementary school kids running up and down the hallways)
-our Aswan and Luxor hostels (not the cleanest, no hot water)

Least heterosexual moments with each other:
-Night date up to Namsan Mountain
-Dinner and river cruise on the nile
-Bamboo raft ride in Yangshuo
-Sharing beds all around the world
-Moonlight walks

Amazing people we either met or met up with (in chronological order):
Seong eun
Park yoon
Justin
Anthony
Ruby
Chi
Calvin
Tim
Emily
Yin
Jens
Alison
Robin
Anton
Claudia
Julian
Sarah
Phoebe
Chi (again)
Jan
Max
Camilla

So, I'm sad to say this, but this is probably the last blog entry for this site. Its been fun and I hope that all of you out there have also enjoyed your time here!

Third one!

Ugh I feel so gross now =(

Just ate another one!

Incredible! This one had an egg sitting on top of it, made it so much better.

Francezinha

My new fav dish. Its a Porto specialty....imagine a grilled cheese sandwich, except stuffed with beef, chicken, and chorizo. Then topped with this tomato-y sauce, and even more melted cheese on top. Oh yeah, surrounded by fries too. Absolutely incredible....and probably a one-way ticket to a clogged artery. =)

Damn we must be lucky charms!

Deja vu!

Dan and I got into Porto today, a nice little city right on a riverbank. So we hear about this game tonight, FC Porto vs Nacional. We go out for a walk and see this random outdoor tv, so we sit on the ground and start to watch the first half....Porto scores and is up by one.

It starts to rain so we relocate to a random Portuguese bar. Porto wins! The place erupts and it empties. As we're walking out, I'm joking with Dan, "haha this'll be funny if there were a riot too..."

We step outside, and..... There's a riot.

Granted, it wasn't as crazy as Barca....no bonfires, flares, and craziness....but apparently with that win, Porto had just won the championships in the Portuguese league!!

We must really be good luck charms, eh?

On the edge of the world!

Picture from Sangra...quite literally on the edge of the world! Look at a map of Portugal, and its on the southwesternmost tip...and by default, the corner of all of Europe. Quite cool.

So we left Spain today! It was a really really beautiful country:

Granada was awesome...the Alhambra (no, not the city in LA) was gorgeous! The Nasrid palace in particular was spectacular, a combination of islamic/moorish styles with Spanish styles, with ornate carvings and mosaics.

Sevilla was my favorite Spanish city. Its got a very quaint downtown with lots of hidden cobblestone alleyways...its really cool to wander in and just get lost and immersed in everything. Plus its got a really cool looking cathedral that towers over the city.

Oh man, as of right now, we have exactly one more week left!!!

Cadiz (again)

I was just informed that this was where Christopher Columbus first set sail!

Now as I'm sprawled out on this beach and soaking in some rays, I'm thinking...really!? why on earth would anyone want to leave here and sail thousands of miles to the 'end of the world'. I mean the Americas are great and all, but totally not worth leaving this Cadiz. Columbus must have had some serious mental issues.

Cadiz!

Chilling on "la playa a la victoria" in Cadiz, Spain, which is considered one of the best beaches in Spain. Life is gooood.

Now as I had mentioned before, my days in high school spanish consisted mainly of either sleeping or playing copious amounts of gameboy. Had I actually relied my brain instead of my charm and dashing good looks to get A's, traveling around Spain would be sooooo much easier. So here's a funny story related to my pathetic spanish:

We had just driven into Sevilla from Granada, had found parking and was looking around for a hostel to stay in. Street signs in Spain are ridiculously hard to find, so I walked into a store to ask the store keeper what the name of the street was:

Me: "uhh....cual es....este....calle?" (What is this street?)
Him: "que?" (What?)
Me: "uhhhh.....este calle.....uhhh....nombre?" (This street.....name?)
Him: "que???" (What???)

This goes on for awhile. I get frustrated and he gets frustrated, and this is clearly going nowhere. We're about to leave when all of a sudden it hits me... he looks asian, and I just noticed that there was some chinese writing in his notebook...

Me: "ni hui shuo zhong wen ma?" (Do you speak chinese?)
Him: "hui" (yes)
Me: "YYYESSS!!!!"

And then we have a lovely chat where he gives us directions, sells us some stuff and we go on our merry way.

Thank god for immigrants!

Lesson Learned

What Jason learned today:
Don't try to learn how to drive stick by yourself in a foreign country. Bad idea.

=(

(To my credit though, there's absolutely no way I could have ruined the clutch in just 15 minutes of driving. No way.)

Attempt to mobile upload a pic from my blackberry of the riot:

Bonfire in the front, red flares in the back, lots of happy Barca fans in the middle.

CAMPEONES!!

Unfortunately due to unforeseen technical difficulties, we will no longer be able to post pictures on the blog. We apologize for this inconvenience and hope this will not deter our loyal readers from continuing to enjoy this fine website. On the bright side, we'll be home in two weeks, so ya'll back home can see our pics then!

We had an absolutely crazy night.

As we were walking around downtown yesterday, Dan and I notice a sign at a bar advertising the Barcelona vs Real Madrid league game tomorrow night..which is one of the biggest soccer rivalries in Spain. Immediately I'm like, okay.. we HAVE to watch that game.

Flash forward to this morning: To get psyched for the game, I splurge 15 euros on some sexy FC Barcelona boxer-briefs. Hot. (btw I also love Barca because their colors are straight up Penn colors....beautiful)

Flash forward again to the night: We show up at a bar to catch the game. As we expected it to be, the bar was absolutely filled with people...standing room only. The following two hours was the most incredible football watching experience (in a bar) in my entire life. The whole place erupted every time Barca scored (which was quite often), and hordes of Spaniards would just break into chants and loud fight songs....it was absolutely incredible! If it weren't for the fact that I spent my three years in high school spanish either asleep or playing gameboy, I would have totally joined in with them and screamed my heart out.

The game itself was a blowout. Real came out first and scored fast, but then Barca totally ran off with the win. It was a 6-2 blowout, which totally reminded me of playing against Robby in WC'98 (just kidding, love you man). As the game ended, we left the bar and started walking. Then Dan and I started to chat about what we wanted to do tonight. After deciding that we were feeling cheap, we just started to walk around. Pretty soon we ran into a throng of Barca fans chanting and singing: "CAMPEONES CAMPEONES OLE OLE OLE!!"

Then it hit me. By beating Real Madrid so badly, Barca had practically won the league championships! And here we were, stupid foreigners who didn't even realize what was at stake in the game!

Soon people were climbing up lampposts, spraying beer everywhere, and burning Real Madrid uniforms. Right in front of our very eyes, a full-fledged riot was starting. Soon the crowd grew to at least a few thousand. It was a giant mob of red and blue jerseys and flags, and they were all singing and jumping and screaming. It was insane!! This one poor lamppost had at least 15 people swinging from it. Then it got absolutely CRAZY. They started firing fireworks. People started lighting red flares and running around. The absolute craziest thing was right in front of us, someone started a bonfire and everyone went bezerk. People were screaming and dancing around it and some dudes were even jumping across the flames. It was insane!! And it was amazing that no one got injured (at least from what we could tell). Pretty soon I was yelling and singing (incoherently) with all of them. Oh man, it was ridiculous.

Now I can say I was part of a riot in Barcelona, my life is now complete.

Not trying to generalize but...the guy that works the front desk of our hostel totally looks like Pau Gasol. Except a lot shorter...and he doesn't have Pau's homeless man beard.

some more pics..

Photo dump!

Selcuk - cute little city. very touristy because its where everyone stays at when they go to ephesus...


The Citadel


Funniest merchant sign ever!!


Ruins at Ephesus




Some gorgeous views of Istanbul from the Galatas tower (an ancient tower built by the Byzantines)...








Yet again another pic of my fav mosque at night

Incredibly laaame exhibit in the Turkey military museum that basically tries to calls itself victim to the "Armenian terrorists"...when in fact the world knows that Turkey had in fact committed genocide against Armenians at the time. I mean I loved Turkey, but the way the country has dealt with this whole issue and the fact that it tries to hard to rewrite history by blaming the Armenians is incredibly pathetic. Like ridiculously pathetic. I know this is a big issue as the country is applying for EU membership, and while Turkey and the EU (especially its relations with Islamic countries) have much to gain by Turkey joining the EU, I certainly hope that its rejection is rejected until it decides to take full responsibility and accountability of what has happened. Yes I know, a little long winded, but I just had to get it out there.

absolutely brotha

I need to be British; that pretty much sums up my visit to the UK so far. Added to the list of new food obsessions I've picked up abroad (kofta, congee, McVitie's, and toast lady being the major highlights) are tomato basil pasties, steak and kidney pie, jam roly poly, Jonathan's crisps, lion bars, rowntree's fruit pastilles, and, to top the list, evening tea. Currently in Edinburgh looking at all of the pictures/videos I've accumulated in the last week. There are several epic ones that I'll post when I have the wifi capabilities. Until then, here is my personal fav

Lovin' Turkey!

Istanbul
Probably one of the prettiest cities I've seen so far on this trip! The entire city is on three coasts, with the Golden Horn flowing right through it. And its pretty cool because one side is geographically considered Europe while the other side is Asia...so you're literally at a crossroads between the two continents. The history and culture of this city is literally a hodgepodge of eastern and western influences...which I find incredibly fascinating.

Okay on to pictures!

View of the Aya Sofia (right) and the Blue Mosque (right) from a water taxi

The Aya Sofia, which was originally a church, then a mosque, then a church, then a mosque...

Inside the Aya Sofia. When it was built by the Byzantines, it was the largest dome in the world...and I totally believe it, that thing is huge (twss). Anybody read Arabic? I'm curious to know what is written on the signs...i'm guessing something like "no flash photography" or "no shoes, no shirt, no service" ??

The Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii)...such an EPIC mosque, I absolutely fell in love with it.

Inside the Blue Mosque

Really nice evening view of the city

At the Ritz Carlton, drinking a specially imported 2 liter bottle of Tongyi Lucha and watching the Lakers roll over the Jazz in Game 1 of the first round of the playoffs....life could not be better!

Antalya
Took an loooooong 12-hour overnight bus ride from Istanbul to Antalya, which is a very picturesque coastal city along the Mediterranean.

On a boat cruise around the city

Olympos
A little backpacker's haven about two hours away from Antalya. Its right by some really cool ruins and a very nice beach. We also went on this crazy 4 hour night hike to the Chimera, which are like naturally occurring fires on the cliffside of this mountain....and it was funny because the guy from the hostel basically said "oh yeah its not far at all to walk...just four kilometers from here. Alls you gotta do is walk down to the beach, turn left, walk a little bit, turn left at a restaurant, and then keep going and you'll hit it". When in reality it took about half an hour to get to the beach (even more creepy because it was pitch black and there were ruins all around us). It took another half an hour from the beach to the "restaurant", which turned out to be a little town...that had at least 50 restaurants! So by the time we found out where to actually turn left (it wasn't at a restaurant, but like a half hour walk past the last one), we had to eventually hitchhike to finally get to the base of the mountain...which then was a good 30 min climb up. At that point I definitely wanted to kill that guy at the hostel. But it was pretty worth it.

The Mediterranean!! It's an incredibly calm body of water...and also a really cool deep blue color

Yeah even though the water was definitely coooold, I just couldn't resist the urge to go for a swim...it is the Mediterranean after all

Took another long overnight bus to Izmir and then to Selcuk. Off to see Ephesus tomorrow!

Happy Birthday Grandma!!

Not travel related but I just wanted to wish Grandma Phan a huuuuuge Happy Birthday!!! She turns a big 9-0 today, which is absolutely incredible! (Though someone please help her blow out the candles). Here's to my Grandma and many many more years to come!

No. Not the bird.

I'm in Turkey ya'lls!!!!

WENT TO AN ARSENAL GAME, EEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

So, thanks to Jullian's generosity (Dan's family friend), he was able to take me to the ARSENAL VS. VILLAREAL FOR THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE QUARTERFINALS. I apologize for the all-caps, but i was JUST THAT EXCITED. and it was incredible!! not to mention my first live football game ever...what a way to start!

(He could only get one ticket for tonight, so I went, but Dan's going to a more ridiculous Arsenal vs. Chelsea FC Cup Semi-final game this Saturday that will be out of this world)

Emirates Stadium!

Sportin my new Arsenal scarf

And the third/last goal of the crazy 3-0 rout against Villareal...which was a pleasant surprise, given that the two teams had tied in the first leg of this qtrfinal

Awesome game!!

One month left!!

Hard to believe but we only have a month left!! Time has been flyyyying by, but its been tons of fun. What's left?

4/15 - London
4/18 - I go to Turkey, Dan is exploring the UK
4/28 - Amsterdam for Queens Day!
4/30 - Barcelona where we'll have the next two weeks to explore Spain and Portugal by car
5/15 - I'm back home in LA and Dan's in NY

Craazy.

Places that unfortunately didn't make our cut: France, Prague, Vienna. =( that just means another trip, right?

the 'Dorf and the 'Lin

Went to Dusseldorf (dDorf) for a few days and visited Alison and Robin. Made pizza! And you know much I love my pizza.

Alison makin the dough

Robin kneading that dough...an d kneading it well

Stirrin the sauce (and of course gchattin' =P)

hella toppings!

our first of like eight pizzas

This is a meter of beer...

This is no longer a meter of beer...

Then we carpooled to Berlin...

Berlin Wall!

And naturally there's a Mr. Potato Head on the wall..

Brandenburger Tor

Yeah Reichstag

Mitfahrgelegenheit!!!

My absolute new favorite thing--mitfahrgelegenheit! Literally means organized hitchhiking. So Dan and I searched at this mitfahrgelegenheit website for postings, and we found a lady to take us from Berlin to Leipzig at 3 pm and another person to take us back to Berlin at 3 am (all for a cheap 10 euro per way fee).

Now if only the US didn't have so many creepos, this would be such a convenient and cool way to get around.

So now we're off to 12 hours in Leipzig!

Unforgettable Egyptian folks

Hustlers in training from Banana island.



Black cab driver who's car had been carpet bombed from the inside. Busted by the cops after dropping us off but back in action by the time we finished at the Citadel.



Hassan from Sunshine (felucca Captain). About to yell at this cruise ship "Helll0oooooooo Plastic tourists!! You have wasted your money!!"



Habbibi habbibi!!! (Sorry man, I tried to find a flattering one, but this is the only pictorial evidence of you)