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Italy was one of the coun­tries that was first on my pri­or­ity list even before con­sid­er­ing com­ing to Europe for an exchange. Being half Ital­ian on my Mom’s side, I was raised with a big Ital­ian fam­ily whom I see at most cousins’ birth­days and major hol­i­days, and since its my Mom who is Ital­ian, I get all the great food that comes with the nation­al­ity. So I was raised in a very Ital­ian set­ting, def­i­nitely more so then my Iran­ian half (although I would love to go to Iran one day), so Italy has always been on the top of my to-go list. When I arrived in Italy with Tighe, he stayed with us for a cou­ple of nights; he headed back to Prague to catch a flight to New York, where as I stayed in Italy and started my one month long Ital­ian adven­ture. I lived with fam­ily in Mola di Bari, which is just south of Bari, headed to Rome to meet up with Hor­atiu, lived in Bari for another week and took a break from Italy to see Greece for ten days. On our return from Greece, I lived in Bis­ceglie for six days or so, and from there I went on my back­pack­ing adven­ture through Naples, Flo­rence, Pisa, Rim­ini, and finally Venice.

Last of Tighe in Mola di Bari

Mola di Bari

Mola di Bari is a small city in south­ern Italy located on the Adri­atic Sea, just south of Bari, and it is where my Nonna (grand­mother) was born and raised. She moved to Canada after meet­ing my Nonno for a short period of time, and moved away from Mola only to return a few times in her life. My Nonna’s cook­ing was for me always num­ber one, but due to Alzheimers, it just hasn’t been the same. Incred­i­bly, the fam­ily I went to stay with in Italy made all the var­i­ous dishes my Nonna made the exact same way — bra­ci­ole (horse meat), focacci (bread, herbs, and toma­toes), meat­balls, and most impor­tantly the pasta. They fed me like a king every day that I spent in Mola, and I was not dis­ap­pointed, it was almost equiv­a­lent to my Nonna’s cook­ing, and thus, it was some of the best eat­ing I have ever done in my entire life.

As you can see, I’m really enjoy­ing myself

And this right here is why

Besides the wine drink­ing, the olive eat­ing, the fresh toma­toes and the deli­cious main courses, there was plenty of fun to be had in Mola as well. Wait­ing for Tighe and I at the ferry was my Mom’s cousin Franca and her son Luigi. Luigi is about my age and was the only one in my fam­ily who could speak decent Eng­lish, so he was the one who I spent most of my time with in Mola. Dur­ing the day, Luigi would take us around, bring us to a beach, drive to a nearby town, grab ice creams, and hang out with friends. I was in Mola for a grand total of twelve days, four with Tighe and eight with Hor­atiu, and on almost every sin­gle one of those days, we went to the beach and had an ice cream. Life in Italy, I found, was much sim­pler than in North America.

Mola’s beach — As you can see the chunks of sand are very large

In the evening after eat­ing a din­ner that would fill me to the brim, we would head out with Luigi and his friends. The night would start off with a giro (which was basi­cally dri­ving around the main city cen­ter in mul­ti­ple loops just for fun), and we would park and either hang out at the square, the cas­tle, or one of the two pop­u­lar bars, mostly Bux, the Amer­i­can bar. Most of his friends spoke very lit­tle Eng­lish, I got lucky to hap­pen to have my cousin as one of the best Eng­lish speak­ers in town, but I could still get by with the com­bi­na­tion of my bro­ken Ital­ian and their bro­ken Eng­lish. My cousin intro­duced me to a lot of friends, and brought me to a cou­ple of Ital­ian par­ties, and I had a great time over­all. There are a lot of peo­ple I would like to visit again in Mola, and a lot of peo­ple that I hope come to Van­cou­ver as soon as possible.

Left to Right: Isabela, Me, Tiziana, Vito, Anto­nio (or Pop­eye, as we called him)

Left to Right: Pop­eye, Luigi (my cousin), Hor­atiu, Tony, Tiziana, and Me

Mola was great to me; amaz­ing food, I had really fun nights out with my cousin whom I had just met upon arriv­ing to Italy, ice cream, the beach, the peo­ple, the cul­ture. Italy so far had been every­thing I was expect­ing and more, and I’m glad I went to dis­cover my roots. I plan on com­ing back and mak­ing sure I know enough Ital­ian at least enough to talk to every­one with­out requir­ing a trans­la­tor. Oh, and did I hap­pen to men­tion this is the city that has the high­est per­cent­age of gor­geous women, over­tak­ing Sara­jevo for the lead? Yeah, its true, you can con­firm with Tighe or Horatiu.

Storm in Mola

Rome

At one point in time dur­ing my stay in Mola, I took four days to go to Rome. Horatiu’s flight from Ger­many was land­ing there, so we took the oppor­tu­nity to visit one of the most leg­endary cities in the world. Rome was noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar — the Colos­seum, the Mediter­ranean look, the Vat­i­can, the food, the peo­ple; every­thing about that city makes me con­fi­dent that I will be back as soon as humanly possible.

Before I talk about how spec­tac­u­lar Rome is, I’d like to talk about the not so good part of my stay. We stayed in M&Js place, and I would absolutely NEVER rec­om­mend this hos­tel, even to the peo­ple I’m not par­tic­u­larly fond of. The hos­tel was rid­dled with bed bugs, had incom­pe­tent clean­ers, pay per hour inter­net, no A/C, ridicu­lously ter­ri­ble show­ers both in terms of the actual shower and the dif­fi­cult lay­out of the bath­room, and one of the worst staffers I’ve ever met in my life. Upon arriv­ing to Rome, I had real­ized that I for­got my shoes, as I just came in my san­dals, and since my san­dals were giv­ing me very large blis­ters on the bot­tom of my feet, I decided to buy a pair of shoes. Well, it turns out the shoes I bought gave me blis­ters that were ten times more painful, so when it came to the end of the day when I was going to return the shoes, I came back to find out that the clean­ers had thrown out my Nike bag, which con­tained the box and receipt. Idiots. Oh, and for all of you stay­ing in hos­tels, before you pick a bed, check the seems of the mat­tresses, if you find bed bugs, find a new place to sleep. When stay­ing in this hos­tel, I had at least fifty bites, all of which are sig­nif­i­cantly worse then the mos­quito kind.

Just one of the many bed bug trails on my body

Rome is one of the most gor­geous places I have ever been to. The streets are filled with hang­ing plants, lots of clothes hang­ing out, and the smell of freshly made pasta makes you won­der why any­one would con­sider leav­ing this place. The col­ors are also have a very Mediter­ranean set­ting, which is a nice change from the color scheme of the East­ern Euro­pean coun­tries. There is also no short­age of his­tory in this city, we were able to see the Colos­seum, the Vat­i­can, the Sis­tine Chapel, the Span­ish Step, and more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. I’m not much of a his­tory buff, but these things were pretty cool, and we even hap­pened to get our own free tour guide in the Sis­tine Chapel due to the fact that we met some ran­dom Amer­i­can girl who couldn’t stop talk­ing about Michelan­gelo. We even got to see a mass with the pope, which was really cool.

The Pope in all his glory — rid­ing around in his Pope-mobile

On our sec­ond night in Rome, we were hun­gry and decided to head off to get some food. We found a small restau­rant that was open late, so we thought we’d give it a shot. It turns out that ravi­oli was some­thing I could have made bet­ter in Prague, and Horas meat­balls were rid­dled with bones. We were not impressed, but, know­ing that Rome is sup­pose to be known for spec­tac­u­lar food, we decided to do some research and find a great restau­rant with rea­son­able prices. We found a review in the New York Times called “Da I 2 Cic­cioni”, which started you off with a plate of bread, beans, toma­toes, and a bot­tle of wine. After­words, we were served the first main course, a plate of pasta, which was then fol­lowed by the sec­ond main course, salad and chicken, and finally some bis­cuit. Oh, and the wine was home­made, and almost lim­it­less. All of this for about twenty-five Euros, which is a good price con­sid­er­ing the amount of food, and the expen­sive­ness of Rome itself.

Fan­tas­tic food

I had no idea what to expect out of the nightlife in Rome, but I was pleas­antly sur­prised. In our search, we found a ton of out­door bars were there are many peo­ple who sit and chill on a cou­ple drinks. After­words, we found an Irish bar, headed inside and ended up meet­ing a ton of stu­dents, both Ital­ian and Amer­i­can on exchange. We also hap­pened to meet a cou­ple of older guys from Lon­don who we chilled with, and they also bought us a cou­ple of beers. It was a fun night. One of the things I regret was not going on the Pub Crawl. I didn’t go because of how hard the one in Ams­ter­dam sucked, but after trav­el­ing for weeks, one of the things every­one tells me who has been to Rome was that the Pub Crawl was some­thing not to be missed. Dis­ap­point­ing, but Rome was one of my favorite Euro­pean cities, I’ll do the crawl the next time I’m here, which is hope­fully very soon.

Rome in all its glory

Our trip to Bugaria had started off kind of on the wrong food, but it was def­i­nitely a inter­est­ing series of events. When Tighe and I woke up to head to the train, we thought we knew where the bus sta­tion was, but we were dead wrong. We fig­ured it would take about 30 min­utes to get to the sta­tion, giv­ing us about 15 min­utes to buy the ticket and hop aboard, but after walk­ing 25 min­utes, there was no train sta­tion in sight. We decided to catch a cab, although we didn’t find one for a good 10 min­utes, and when he took us there, it was at least a 10 minute drive. When we arrived, we saw that our train hadn’t left yet, so we bought tick­ets and jumped aboard, only for the train to leave 30 sec­onds after. Now, after that stroke of luck, we arrived at our seats and were next to a cou­ple of old Ser­bian or Bul­gar­ian ladies who were adamant in talk­ing to us, although we couldn’t under­stand one word they spoke. After ten or so min­utes of attempted con­ver­sa­tion, explain­ing we were from North Amer­ica and such, this lady opens up a car­ton of cig­a­rettes and hands them to Tighe and myself. We had no idea what was going on, but at the time we fig­ured she was just giv­ing them to us since we were being nice, but we were wrong. We put them in our bag, and when we got to the bor­der, we noticed the bor­der guard ask­ing the ladies what they had to claim, one say­ing “cig­a­rette?”. They shook their heads and opened their bags to prove they had noth­ing to claim. After that whole ordeal, the lady asked for her cig­a­rettes back. That’s right, we had just unknow­ingly smug­gled cig­a­rettes for an elderly women from Ser­bia to Bul­garia, some­thing that if caught, could have got us for­eign­ers in a lot of trouble.

Sofia

We only spent a few nights in Sofia, and it wasn’t the most event­ful of places. One of the most inter­est­ing things about Bul­garia is that every­thing was in Cyril­lic, it was hard to find a place that used the alpha­bet, although I wouldn’t expect it since Sofia isn’t a very big tourist des­ti­na­tion. We stayed in the Mos­tel Hos­tel, which is the most pop­u­lar hos­tel located in the city, and a big des­ti­na­tion for back­pack­ers trav­el­ing through Europe. Although the city itself wasn’t to excit­ing, I met a lot of inter­est­ing peo­ple. I met a guy from Poland who worked as a Soft­ware Engi­neer at Google, work­ing on YouTube. I Also met a cou­ple from the Nether­lands who were on a bike trip, 18 months, across the world and were wait­ing for their visas for Iran (hope that worked out for them, although going through there at this time would def­i­nitely be a bad idea). Another inter­est­ing thing we found out while stay­ing in Bugaria was from a trav­eler from the USA who was study­ing in Copen­haggen; he told us that when he came from Greece to Bugaria, the Greeks fined him 600 EUROS because after your stu­dent visa expires, you are sup­pose to leave the Schen­gen area. We weren’t aware of this rule, although we heard it from a cou­ple peo­ple, but after much delib­er­a­tion this changed our plans from going to Greece, to instead head­ing to Croatia.

Exam­ple of the Cyril­lic spelling used through­out the city

So, Tighe and I spent a lot of time walk­ing around the city and see­ing what it had to offer. One of the coolest things we saw was the Alexan­der Nevsky Cathe­dral, which is the biggest Ortho­dox cathe­dral in the world. We also ran into a mar­ket that sold all kinds of inter­est­ing stuff, most inter­est­ing being items from World War Two. Since Bugaria was part of the Axis, there was a lot of Nazi mem­o­ra­bilia such as pocket watches, cur­rency, guns, and other things you can’t find even in the mar­kets of Berlin. I wasn’t too impressed with the food in the coun­try, although we didn’t go to very many nice din­ners, but the city didn’t have nearly as many food joints as most cities I’ve been to in Europe, and since food is kind of a min­i­mum require­ment in any city for me, I wasn’t too impressed. At night, Tighe and I went in search of bars, and while the drinks were cheap, not very many peo­ple spoke Eng­lish, so it was hard to com­mu­ni­cate with any locals, although the sec­ond night in Bugaria was a lot of fun. We met a guy from the USA who had been in Bul­garia for a week or so, and knew the best place to go. This guy was really inter­est­ing though, he told us that when he was 13, he met an exchange stu­dent from Uzbek­istan, and because of him decided to learn Russ­ian and go to the place him­self. Appar­ently bring­ing about 1000 USD for the entire year in that coun­try was enough to make him one of the rich­est and most famous guy around; appar­ently peo­ple would say hi to him and he hadn’t seen that per­son in his whole life. Granted, he could be full of lies, but I’ve never heard of Uzbek­istan before, it sounds ran­dom and small enough to be true. This guy brought us to the Uni­ver­sity grounds, which we got to by taxi, and it was one of the flashiest areas I had ever seen, it was almost like Vegas. The clubs were packed with stu­dents, most of whom spoke some Eng­lish, so we didn’t have to stay in the cor­ner by our­selves. While I was talk­ing to a Bul­gar­ian girl, a fight erupted at the table near us, with glass shat­ter­ing directly beside my foot. I grabbed the girl and stepped back, and let the bounc­ers of the club han­dle things, and after­words a friend of hers told me that there was an Amer­i­can who was walk­ing around the bar chal­leng­ing peo­ple to fights, and so he got one. He also told me that he’s sure this Amer­i­can would wind up in home town papers as a miss­ing per­son, and would never return… So for all of you who are idiots when you’ve had a few, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend Bul­garia. Also, I made sure I told these peo­ple I was Cana­dian, I def­i­nitely didn’t want to seem affil­i­ated with that guy.

Alexan­der Nevsky Cathedral

Over­all, I’m not sure if I would exactly rec­om­mend Sofia as a main des­ti­na­tion, but its worth check­ing out if you stay for a day or two. Any­more then that and I don’t know what I’d do. But the hos­tel we stayed in was great, it had free break­fast AND din­ner, not many offer that. From here we were headed to Croa­tia, and after a quick stop in Bel­grade (where we stayed in the same great hos­tel, The Black Catz), we were off to our first des­ti­na­tion, Split.

Split, Supetar, and Dubrovnik

The visa issue crushed me. I was extremely keen on going to Greece to end off this part of the trip, but instead, I felt like I had to set­tle on Croa­tia. Now, in hind­sight, even if I could go back in time and actu­ally have the option to go into Greece instead, I still would have cho­sen Croa­tia, hands down. I fig­ure if I went to Croa­tia at a later date, I may have never found one of my favorite hos­tels, the Shangri-La, where we did noth­ing but chill out in there com­mon room, go to the beach, drink and bar­be­cue. Also, if I went to Greece first, I would have never wound up in Athens and hap­pen to be there the same day DJ Tiesto was per­form­ing (but I’ll save that story for when I write up about my adven­tures in Greece).

Split, Croa­tia

So after Bul­garia, we took a quick stopover in Bel­grade and took shel­ter with hos­tel man at the Black Catz Hos­tel, and then headed off to Split. In typ­i­cal fash­ion, Tighe and I had no clue where to go, what to do, or where to sleep. We were greeted at the port by an old man who offered us a place to stay at an extremely rea­son­able price, so we jumped on that and camped out for the night. Unfor­tu­nately, the night could have been bet­ter had it had inter­net, or air con­di­tion­ing, or Tighe com­plain­ing he felt sick but sound­ing more like home­sick, but a lot of the time it seems like every­thing hap­pens for a rea­son. The next day we checked out and headed to one of the more pop­u­lar hos­tels in Split, but unfor­tu­nately (although that view later changed for for­tu­nately) they didn’t have any rooms, but we weren’t exactly look­ing to stay on main­land Croa­tia any­ways, we were more inter­ested in the islands. We booked a room at the Shangri-la hos­tel on the island of Brac rec­om­mended by the hos­tel we were at, checked out the sights in Split and headed off to Supetar on Brac.

Near the port of Supetar

After hop­ing off the ferry, we were imme­di­ately greeted by a cou­ple of girls, Dora the co-owner and Croa­t­ian native, and Holly from Boston who just came for the walk. I can’t pin­point what it was, but these two gave me high hopes for this hos­tel, and those hopes were not only met, by exceeded. We arrived to be greeted by three South Africans whom where trav­el­ing the world, an Aus­tralian named David who took the sum­mer off to work and live in the Shangri-la, and the other co-owner Vinko. The weather was regret­tably bad for the first two days, and that fact com­bined with the hos­tel only being a week old, and there weren’t any oth­ers in the hos­tel for our stay, but that didn’t make the stay any less amazing.

Com­mon room where much Entourage and Man vs Wild was watch, where Hookah was smoked, and where Kings Cup was played.

We didn’t spend much time relax­ing on a beach, but I found sit­ting in a com­mon room with strangers watch­ing Entourage and Man vs Wild while smok­ing hookah just as relax­ing, if not more so. That’s essen­tially what our first two days con­sisted of, and while that might sound bor­ing to you, watch­ing TV and doing noth­ing is dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent from every­thing I’ve been doing in the last 4 months, so this was a wel­com­ing change of scenery. In the evening, the bad weather didn’t stop the South African boys from cook­ing some fine Croa­t­ian ham­burg­ers and steak. We ate until we could eat no longer, and then the begin­ning of our night started with a game called Kings Cup, which was the start­ing point for check­ing out the var­i­ous (two) bars on Brac. They were pretty cool, although I was expect­ing more tourists; every­one there was Croa­t­ian, so there was a slight com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­rier. Although I’m sure Tighe wouldn’t exactly call it slight, as an alter­ca­tion with him and a large Croa­t­ian man almost con­cluded the night. Another enter­tain­ing thing I found out on the first night out in Brac was that there was more drama in our hos­tel between the girls and the South Africans then in high school. I won’t go into the details, but it was amus­ing find­ing out each piece of the puz­zle as the night went on.

South African boys cook­ing a mean set of meat

Dora and David

When the sun finally emerged from hid­ing, we set our sights on a beach that Tighe and I saw in many post­cards in Split, the beach that essen­tially was the rea­son we came to Brac in the first place. Its name is Bol beach, and is sit­u­ated on the oppo­site side of the island. We could have taken the bus, but that would have been dull, so Tighe and I set our sights on rent­ing a scooter. A piece of advice; if you’ve never used a scooter before, keep your legs on the floor, accel­er­ate, then lift them up after you’ve gained some speed. Both Tighe and I had never rid­den scoot­ers before, but one of the require­ments of being able to rent one was that you had rid­den one before, and it was quite obvi­ous we both hadn’t. The man who was man­ag­ing the scoot­ers was not impressed. But, we picked it up and we headed 33 kilo­me­ters across the island through one of the most impres­sive scenic routes I have ever seen, and even­tu­ally reached our des­ti­na­tion of Bol beach. We arrived, tanned, swam, and did the typ­i­cal beach thing, just relaxed. Now, the beach wasn’t your typ­i­cal sandy beach, it was actu­ally cov­ered in tiny smooth rocks, which is what most beaches in Croa­tia and Greece are like. I per­son­ally pre­fer sand, but it was still great nonethe­less. And for all of you out there won­der­ing, yes, there were many top­less women both young and (unfor­tu­nately) old, it is Europe after all. After a day in the sun, we trav­eled back, checked out some cool spots on the island and returned our scooters.

Bol beach in the far distance

At Bol beach

On our last day, we didn’t do too much. Peo­ple were still recov­er­ing from hang­overs, oth­ers were just plain tired, and some of us had long days dri­ving and swim­ming. On the last night David, Vinko and I went to watch X-Men : Wolver­ine, which was a MAR­VELous (pun intended, haha, yeah I know I’m lame) movie. We headed off to the ferry via Split the next morn­ing, and from split we caught our twenty-five hour ferry from Split to Bari. Although it wasn’t too bad, we played big two with a girl from Van­cou­ver and two girls from Aus­tralia for a cou­ple hours. Then, there was a seven-hour stopover in Dubrovnik where we got to check out the sights, it’s a really nice city I would highly rec­om­mend it. After­wards, after hours of wor­ry­ing about our visas for what ended up being no worry at all, we hoped back onto the ferry and found the per­fect couches to sleep on for our overnight to Bari.

Crys­tal blue waters of Croatia

Croa­tia was incred­i­ble. I got to do exactly what I wanted to do, relax and have fun. Tighe and I were get­ting sick of see­ing city after city, and Croa­tia was a per­fect change of scenery. A beau­ti­ful island com­bined with one of the most fun, chilled out hos­tels I’ve ever stayed in made Croa­tia a coun­try that I def­i­nitely plan on vis­it­ing again. But that essen­tially con­cludes the Balkan adven­tures; Tighe stayed with my fam­ily and I in Mola di Bari, and he was headed back to New York. Good times man, see you on the east coast sometime.

Tighe, Vinko and I at the Shangri-la