We Did It

We did it or we made it. However you want to put it we went around the world and we are back home in five whole pieces. We left Bucharest on Sunday afternoon, in the end of January. A short flight to Vienna, a change of planes to Berlin. A little adventure, I booked a hotel at the wrong airport, I realized at the last moment thanks to Ina. Overnight in Berlin, a short encounter with our friend in the hallway of the airport and we got on our last flight. At JFK we got a car and drove a couple of hours toward our house. We left the children to spend the night with a friend in New Jersey and we spend the last night in a hotel. Tuesday morning we drove a few more hours, stopped at Sam's club and Aldi for groceries. We spent $500 on supplies, for the first time in ages we didn't have to calculate how much we needed to buy, we just got everything that we could think of to resupply our pantry and fill our fridge. In the afternoon, we did the last few miles toward our house. It was epic. Unplanned, Louis Armstrong started to sing on the car stereo "What a Wonderful World". We did the last few miles singing and naming all the landmarks that we've learned so well on our way home. When we entered the house there was a lot of screaming and jumping. It took a few minutes of going through the house to recognize our home. In the evening friends joined us for pizza and champagne. It was epic. We did it, or we made it, however you want to put it, we went around the world!

At the airport in Berlin, AirBerlin carousel 

Hotel Bärlin in Berlin, just a big cheap room and one short night

Winter in Berlin from the hotel

This is our hotel 50 years ago behind JFK's limousine

Berlin Airport, last flight, last signage for New York

On arrival at JFK the welcome sign has Romanian as the top language!
Nice touch - thank you!

Done, we're in. No more passports necessary.

Above our rented car, the rest area has a sign to welcome us to New York State

Home. The planning board stayed just as it was 465 days ago.

Our friends left their map, flowers and another welcome back sign! Thank you!

It all started a long time ago with the thought that if others could do this, we can do it as well. Later it evolved into a strange feeling that we have to do it, we owe it to ourselves and to our children. By the time we left we felt that it is not such a big deal and any family who wants it can go around the world with their children.  More than a year later, as we approached the end of our trip we realized that what we were doing was extraordinary. Extraordinary as in out of the ordinary but also exceptional.

Is not just about numbers. We visited so many places and we walked so many miles. It's the incredible fact that we planned for the best case scenario and we made it happen. We were prepared for the possibility that we might not last this long, but we hit all our targets and we did everything we dreamed of in a special way. With the exception of Cape Town, we reached all our destinations at the best possible time of the year and in all cases at the best time of the day!!!  The only place that was on our list and we did not go to is Petra, in Jordan. We were close, in November in Sinai and we peacefully decided against it. The financials and the political situation were against it and we had to leave something for another time. As we were approaching the end of the trip we were exhausted. Maybe not that much physical exhaustion, maybe a mental one. Simply listing the places that we've seen would make somebody space out. Most of our families and friends lost track of us at one point or another and some of them got exhausted by just following us on the map. Once I caught a very close relative who had no idea on what continent we were and I'm sure he's just the unlucky one.

I would not advice anybody to try what we did. Do your own thing and follow your own interests. Definitely fly less and visit fewer destinations for a shorter or a much longer period. Our pace and our rhythm was exceptional and looking back I can argue that is not possible to do what we did. The only counter argument is that we did it.  There is a small club of families who travelled the world and probably a few that are doing it right now. What they did seemed simple when I read about it and now I know how special they are. Maybe we did travel longer, spent more, seen more, or maybe not, it does not matter. They are all extraordinary. As you plan and execute your own trip, what you'll do will also become extraordinary.

Did we see too much? I don't think so. We had this one chance and we made the most of it. We could have gone slower and shorten our list of destinations, we could have stayed for a shorter time. We have good reasons for why we did what we did. Like I said, we didn't start by planning to do something great, it just happened. We are the main beneficiaries, so there is no point in bragging about it. We were lucky, we were smart and we were well prepared. We never fought or argued, never questioned ourselves and never worried. We stayed healthy. Ioan had a cold every other day, but he took it in stride and never complained. The rest of us fared much better. On my part, the last day that I was under the weather was in Lhasa in November 2011. Ileana Ruxandra had a serious cold in Xi'an, we had to go to the hospital, the girls had some occasional colds but we never had something serious. Our stuff held on. In the last few weeks we had more and more problems with the cameras. In Madagascar, Maria's shoes were stollen. Besides this, and a lot of holes in the T-shirts, everything else worked out really well.

On the list of our extraordinary accomplishments I could also put this blog. With more than 260 posts, half a million words and more than 6000 pictures it is much more than one can handle. Despite the clean interface and the easy navigation options, most readers cannot find their way around, they read a post or two and go by their business. It is in part by design. Blogs are for the moment, only the last post matters and it stays on top. To start at the beginning it's generally inconvenient and hard to navigate. There is a science behind building a successful blog. Not only that I didn't look for that, but I avoided the general recipes and kept a low profile, this is for us and for you. Even if most of our friends and family members didn't read most of what's here there are a few who did and we thank them profusely. But now it's over and after posting the last few summary articles of this trip, I am thinking of taking this down. It is too much information, too much private stuff, too many of our personal pictures. What should we do?

There are a lot websites dedicated to travel. There are a lot of bloggers who make a living from telling us how great travel is. Some of them are families and they keep repeating over and over how extraordinary traveling with your family is. How the children learn from the world, how they grow more confident, more social, more intelligent. How this thing is going to mark them for life and they will always be grateful for such an opportunity. The truth is that we will never know if this is going to make them better or it will give them better chances. We are smarter, better educated and we have proof that we had an amazing time. This is the message of this blog.


We will never do this again. We would do it again in a heartbeat, but we only had one chance, we didn't miss it and now we are moving to another phase of our life. It is hard for me to understand why I never thought of this until 2009. It is easy to have second thoughts about spending tons of money on houses, home improvements, decent cars, or else. I am not allowing myself to go there. Again, like I said, we had one chance and we took it. Maria turned 18 in December 2012, she is now an adult, has her own life and I will never be able to pay her enough to sacrifice another year of her life to hang out with us. Ileana, getting ready for her 16th birthday, is talking about going with her girlfriends to South America, after she turns 18. Or maybe Europe. Or maybe somewhere else, but she is not even thinking of inviting us. Ioan is only 13. Maybe we'll have another chance to spend time like this on the road, we had a little preview in our week in Scotland. Maybe.

We realized early in our travel that we live in the best place in the world. While we were gone, our little village got engaged in a campaign to be named the "America's Coolest Small Town"


In a recent web article on Yahoo!Travel they listed our region along nine other lakeside vacations that have it all. Even with us back, I am sure that it will remain a very nice place. Surprisingly or not, we didn't find any other place where we would like to move. So we'll stay here.

Home with Emma. No better place in this world.

Our friends asked when and where are we going next time. My answer is that we are never ever going to leave our house again. I never ever want to travel again. We will stay home. I repeat this all the time, maybe I will believe it. But the other day at lunch we talked about a possible trip to Mars in 2018. For those who don't know me, I never joke about these things. Ask my wife and my children.

Europe Since Then

So the last post I put up was "Europe So Far" and now we're just continuing since then.

We left off with Kutna Hora. After going around town and seeing the sights, Daddy and I caught a bus back home to Prague, and the next day we took another one for Berlin.

The first night we stayed at a very nice hotel, and Mom and Daddy went to dinner with some friends, who, starting with the next day, would lend us their apartment as they went off on vacation. The parents came home at an absurdly late hour and we were torn between worry and that "WOOHOO THE PARENTS ARE OUT AND I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT YAAAAAY" feeling that most people get when the parents shut the door. And, like most people, we didn't really use our fleeting freedom and just hung out doing whatever. And then, you know, scolded our parents when they came home at 11.


The next day, we packed up our things and moved into the friends' apartment, which was full of awesome books in various languages, and had breakfast with them before they left. Then, for the rest of our [internetless] stay in Berlin, we alternated between going through the city with one of Dad's friends and our German guide Ina, and reading the awesome books. Ioan read comics about "Mooman" (or something like that), Maria read a French grammar back, and I, after giving up on Lolita (probably if I hadn't spent read Love in the Time of Cholera I would've been able to read another book about dudes having sex with girls) I decided to read Harry Potter instead. I got through Chamber of Secrets (Lockhart is much less annoying the seventh time around*), Prisoner of Azkaban (my poor Severus), and to Chapter 28 of Goblet of Fire.

*I am on a mission to destroy our Harry Potter box set. Unfortunately, reading other people's copies does not contribute to the slow death of ours, so rereading them in Berlin was actually a waste of time. In case you were wondering, the fourth, fifth, and six books have already fallen apart several times, so I'm succeeding with them. The problem is with the first three, shorter ones.

We saw the Wall, Sans Souci Palace, a few museums, and might've gone into a church. Really, the churches are all blurring into each other at this point.

Then we flew off to Barcelona, drove to Estartit, a little town not too far away, where we stayed a few days. We ate at Xabi's, Isma's restaurant (who we met in Thailand), and the food was delicious (but there was too much and not enough space in our stomachs!!!) and then drove back to Barcelona, where we met up with our family, who were also visiting from Romania.

We had two different programs in Spain: waking up early, then most of us (us five, my aunt, grandmother, and two cousins) would go out and see something (like La Rambla), then go back to one of the apartments and having lunch, and then just hanging out for a few hours. Then afterwards, we five would go see something else (like that church by Gaudi) that we (and by "we", the parents) wanted to see.

The second program was us five waking up early, seeing something we wanted to see (like Park Guell), then meeting up with the family somewhere else, then lunch and hanging out. It is, so far, my favorite part of the vacation, though Greece is pretty determined to take that spot for itself.

After Barcelona, we flew to Milan, where we spent the night before flying to Mykonos the next day. We couldn't find the hotel, so that was fun ^^;

Then we flew to Mykonos, where the owner/manager of Evangelia's Place (where we were staying) picked us up (so we couldn't get lost), and we spent the whole time hanging out either there or at St John's, where our grandparents were staying in celebration of my grandma's 70th birthday. Well, except for that one time we walked around town. And that other time we went to that evil island. But mostly we hung out at St John's. It has a scary-huge pool. And by scary, I mean terrifying. It is too big.

(That's what she said.)

After going to the pool the first time, we discovered that my old swimsuit had stretched since camp (how this is possible, I do not know), and between mooning the world every time I put it on and buying a skimpy bikini, we decided we preferred the bikini.

On the day that we purchased said bikini, we were going to the aforementioned evil island. It was really quite lovely, we saw an excellent jaguar mosaic, the museum was pretty okay, and everything was all-in-all fine (except the burning temperature) until everyone decided, "Oh! Let's go to the Temple of Zeus up at the top of the gigantic hill!" Maria, feeling ill (and why not? They were the stairs of doom), was allowed to stay down at the museum, while the remaining six of us had to go. About a quarter of the way through Daddy asked me if I wanted to continue. I did not, so he gave me a backpack of mostly empty water bottles and sent me on my way.

"Are you sure you won't get lost?" He asked me.
"Daddy, please, there's only one road."

There were two. The right way, and some beat-up old path that led to the top of a hill from which the only way off of was either backtracking or charging through a field of sharp scratchy plants of clinginess toward a building that looks exactly like the museum but turns out to be some sort of cafeteria/kitchen thing on the other side of the island so you have to walk around people's houses until you see the real museum where you collapse just in time to see your mom coming back from the Temple of Zeus.

Not that that's the way I took.

After Mykonos, we went island-hopping, and I would like to say that these ferries are awesome. The first one was like a cross between a supermall and a casino, with escalators and fastfood restaurants, but after that the ferries were normal. You know, couches in the lounge, plastic seats on the deck, snack bar...

We went to Santorini, and missed the bus to Oia, so we had to take a cab with a driver that looked scary-alike with Jake Gyllenhaal:

At Oia, at least a bajillion tourists go to see the sunset. We did too, and I missed it. Then we went back to Santorini on an incredibly crowded bus, which was fun.

We went to Crete (where we are now) and drove around, walked 18 km through a gorge that we didn't really that much like, and spent the past couple days on the verge of tears with every movement we'd make. Then yesterday we stopped early at a hotel (where we could quite obsessively download the new Taylor Swift singles, because she is amazing dammit) and had a picnic on the beach <3 Then last night we watched a thing on the TV about the Romanian king Mihai (who is actually not king anymore) and his cars that he has and personally restored and the museum for them that's going to open, and then after that we watched a Romanian movie called Grăbește-te încet, or in English, "Hurry up slowly", or something like that. It's about a guy that, driving home, hits a guy walking down the highway. Then after that is the guilt he feels for not stopping to make sure that the guy was okay, his wife's suspicions that he's having an affair, his coworker's affair that he gets tangled up in, and his attempts to turn himself in. It was pretty funny and I'd definitely watch it again.

Now we're going to the pool before we leave. Bye-bye :)

Berlin, Deutschland

Gutten tag! 

Here we are in Goethe’s land. The first time we were here it was a few months after the fall of the Wall and the differences between East and West were evident. The situation was tense because they had just adopted the Western mark as the national currency, transforming overnight normal Easterners into poor people. The graffiti was everywhere.

The first night we roamed the streets with our friends. Mihaela and Marcello (from Napoli) are so kind and let us stay in their apartment, while they go to visit her family in Romania. We walk aimlessly, talking and catching up with our busy lives, finding more about them and Alina (her sister) and Matheu (her sister’s boyfriend). We switch from Romanian to English, then when they talk with each other it’s either in Italian or French. We ask for directions in German. I ask Mihaela how many languages does she speak: seven, all of the above plus Spanish and Portuguese. And she is not alone. Berlin is the hubbub for all the artists, a place where they can find a venue for their imagination and is not expensive to live.

Enjoying the movie "10 Months In"

We find a place that sells kebab and falafel so we sit down to eat in front of the neighboring coffee shop (conveniently closed), on the bench of its garden. 

Art with typewriters on top

Later we bought some beers and walked around (we fit right in, everybody is doing the same) and when we were done, we just left the bottles under the garbage pails. There are people who make a living from returning bottles, mostly men, dressed with care, you wouldn’t know if you just met them. I asked about the ubiquitous graffiti. Now it is part of their culture. There are people from every walk of life who meet in the dead of night, sneaking to avoid police and guards, and paint anew. In a way, it is beautiful...

After a day of active rest (we don’t visit, but search for shirts and shoes), we meet for the first time with Ina, another friend of ours. Fourteen years ago, Mihai stumbled upon her blog, where she wrote about her visit to Pitcairn Island. In those days she used to pay to work on a sail ship as a deck hand and she got to see many unusual places. They started an exchange of emails and we became friends. 

We are late getting out of the house, so Mihai goes ahead to meet her. I soon spot them in the crowd and wave a hand. Ina answers me immediately with a big smile. We start with coffee, tea and hot chocolates so we could plan the day. As an expert she takes us with the U-bahn, the subway, we stop to admire one station, change lines, telling us a little bit about the history of the place and how things changed after reunification, more construction, more life. 

Hauptbahnhof Metro station

It goes on four levels

The boulevard “Under the linden trees” is wide, one way streets on the sides and in the middle a large alley with linden trees on both margins. It is leading toward Brandenburg Gate and it was the place for a promenade. Hitler needed more space to show off and he ordered to uproot the 200 years old linden trees and planted instead nazi flags. There was a public uproar and he replanted the trees. Ina says they suffer from the salt in the winter, the gas pipes buried under their roots and the bitumen reflecting heat in the summer. So they remove and replant them one by one. 

The Brandenburg Gate is again a monument of one Berlin and not a divider. What was a deserted part of town 23 years ago is now a pedestrian and touristic area. Behind it we could see the new dome of the Reichstag, the parliament building.

We walked toward the Germany History Museum, where a whole courtyard was decorated with the heads of kings and emperors at the time of their deaths (just a kind reminder for that time's king that we are all mortal). We started with the beginning and strolled between exhibits, but again, we found that there was too much information about any subject. By the time we approached the first World War we were too tired and especially hungry.

The world after the discovery of two more continents. Ptolemy and Vespucci are presented as godfathers of the world view.

We went to Alexander Platz (plaza) and chose traditional food, which I am unable to name. It went down with white beer, colored with syrup. It was an unexpected combination, fizzy bitter and sweet; I understand that it’s all the rage in the summer time. 

We entered the St. Mary church with frescoes in which people dance with skeletons. The children were treated each with a tile to help create in mosaic what was in the frescoes, and in the same time, to finance the restoration.

Next to the church it was a parking lot painted with a map to scale of Berlin on which pins were showing the diversity of the city (people of different nationalities that used to live on that street, stores, ethnic restaurants, etc.) After the WWII West Germany needed cheap labor and Turks were the ones to answer the call. In time they brought their families, grew in numbers, kept to themselves. There were cases of old women not knowing a word in German, of rebellious young men. Xenophobia flared, then riots. The government wasn’t prepared. Now they are offering free German lessons for everyone who wants to study and they are trying to raise awareness and acceptance of the diversity.

Then we took a metro toward the still-standing part of the Wall. It was repainted by the original artists at the anniversary of 20 years since its fall. There are voices who want it knocked down, but I think it is a reminder of the unfair political game, of the lives that were lost or lived in freedom after crossing it, of the joy of reuniting, of the hope of a better future.

The other side of the wall is a fresh and new canvas, open to anyone.

...world

The Trabant, a small, reliable car that eventually worked with any combustible.

Friday, September 14, we meet again with Ina, to visit Potsdam. It is a short train ride from Berlin, where we could admire in all its beauty the Sans Souci, the “no worries” summer palace built by Frederic the Great. He wanted a place where he would feel like home, with gardens, and dogs, and close friends. He planted potatoes, people stole them, guardians wanted to catch them and the king said “Let them steal the potatoes, maybe they would realize how good they are!”  And to this day people bring potatoes to his tomb (he was recently reburied next to his dogs as he had asked in his will).

The side entrance to the garden

A column with glass rods in the Bavarian colors

The first professional stove meant that the kitchen could be closer to the palace with no danger of fire

A beautiful gallery build especially to house the art collection.

The spider ceiling in the palace.

View of the mill from the garden

There are many buildings with different styles. We visited just a few. Ina’s mom went there at least 80 times and each time she found something new.

Saturday morning Mihai went to visit the Museum Island on the Spree river, a World Heritage Site because of the 5 museums built on it. He walked through some of them and saved the other ones for later, to see them with us.

Pergamon museum was built especially to host the Pergamon temple; from Asia Minor, the Ishtar Gate from the Babylonian city, just the small one; and the Mshatta (Millet) Market. To me, they all seem crammed and squished inside. There is a controversy about their legitimacy being here, instead of Turkey. I have no idea what happened with the rest of the monuments, if they are still in situ or in other museums, but I am thankful that I can see them, and they didn’t disappear through bombing or looting, during one of those wars.

This is how it is supposed to look, larger and longer...

...not like this!

The Neues Museum, is actually an old building, damaged during WWII and renovated in a weird style. It has frescoes and painted ceilings, naked brick and mortar, and the last marble and glass modern thing. This one holds part of the treasure gathered by Schliemann. He was one of the fortunate people in the 1800s who had the means to follow his interests (archeology) and to have things to discover. He excavated the treasure in Greece, which was a part of the Ottoman Empire in that time, took it out of the country, paid a fine for tricking the authorities and another one, to be sure he was granted ownership and to have the right to exhibit them in his country. We could see a few of the real things and some gold imitations. The true ones were war booty (three gold coffers beside numerous other objects) for the Russian army when they entered in Berlin in 1945. Some were returned, but not the gold ones, and these can be seen, violating international protocols, at the Pushkin Museum in the former USSR. 

In a small case, beside small objects found in this area, from the 8th century BC, there is a vessel inscribed with a swastika. I look at it and wonder how many people notice it and if they associate the sign with Hitler. Do they know that this one means peace and the other one got its meaning after being used by the Nazis? My mind flies back in Japan, where we could find it on the shrines, in China where it was in the park, but mostly in India where it was everywhere, the original and the mirrored Nazi one. It took me a while not to react negatively to its image and some more to see it as its original message, as peace. How did this vessel come to be?

From here we go to Reichstag dome. A glass and steel cupola, built on the old Parliament building, it is beautiful, environmentally friendly (the inverted mirrored cone spreads natural light in the building and the ribs help collect the rain water) and sends daily messages to the parliament members: people, who walk on the double spirals, can see them! The Parliament is not in session when we visit, but we walk on the spiral and listen to the audio guide, telling us about the different buildings that we can see. None are familiar, with the exception of the Brandenburg Gate. We stay as long as we can, enjoying the view, and we have fun playing in the lights.

But all things come to an end. We give thanks to our friends that helped us see a different Berlin and especially to Mrs. Koys, Ina’s mom! Vielen danke!

We will come back! Auf wiedersehen!