DAY 7- Sunday, April 17th (final day)

-I stayed in three different hostels and the breakfast they offered was more or less the same at each one- cornflakes with milk, wheat and white bread (sliced) with butter, coffee, tea, orange juice, and maybe some hard-boiled eggs. Is this the standard international hostel menu?

-There’s a car model in Belgium either called the Schittur or the Schitter. No matter how you spell it, that’s some name. Are they going to release the Schittur Box next season?

So day 7, this was the last day; it was time to head home. Like Steve Martin and John Candy, it was "Trains, Planes, and Automobiles" for me, in that order, in my 15 hour journey back to Izmir.

I took the train from Brussels back to Central Station in Amsterdam and I had a little bit of time before I needed to get to the airport, so I thought it would be best to savor one last Maoz Falafel for the road. With my bags, I scurried across the street and stopped at what I thought was a sidewalk median in the middle of a big street, but it turned out to be tram tracks instead. I was waiting for some cars to pass when I hear a loud horn blast at me to my right. I turned my head and saw a tram coming at me at full speed. It must have been 15-20 feet away from me, so I had just enough time to jump out of the way and back into the street I had just crossed. Luckily, there were no oncoming cars at the moment- otherwise I wouldn’t be alive to write this travelogue now. But really, that would have been a terrible way to go, death by tram. Who gets killed by a tram these days? And to get run over by a public transportation vehicle because I wanted one last plate of falafel and mayo-drenched fries? What an obituary that would have made. The incident sort of knocked the wind out of me for a moment, but I soon recovered and got that last falafel for the train ride into the airport.

Even though I tried my best to get rid of them, I still had a bunch of Euro coins when I made it to the airport. Since you can’t exchange them for US dollars later, or at least at the time that’s what I though, so I treated myself to some Haggen Daaz ice cream to get rid of my change. I must admit- I didn’t eat very well on thus trip (I went five days without a piece of fruit), yet I still managed to lose weight. I did some major walking during the week, so that must have done it.

Both flights home, to Istanbul and the one to Izmir especially, were very turbulent. There were some serious drops and shakes and shimmies, and landing in Izmir turned into a bit of a white knuckle-fest for a few moments. Apparently, there was some rare giant windstorm phenomena in action across most of southeastern Europe that day. I had never heard of it, but Maddy said it’s called a siroco (sp?). She would know, since her flight home from Crete was cancelled, and she had to take a far more expensive and circuitous route in order to make it home in time for school Monday morning. The running joke for the next few days was that it was not the sirocco winds that did us all in, but rather the far fiercer rococo winds. Yes, I’m a very silly fellow.

I made it back to the apartment a little bit past 1am. Our place was trashed. I thought to myself, "What the heck happened, and whose is all this stuff strewn all over the place?" Turned out that James stayed at our place while we were gone with his friend/sort-of-girlfriend Alanna, who was interning at another school near Istanbul. I couldn’t believe how messy the place was. Were they moonlighting as rock stars? Alanna's clothes and possessions were spread all over the living room, and in the kitchen there were plates and glasses and pots and pans all over the place. And a bunch of unwrapped food, including homemade cookies, left out on the counter to go stale. It was strange. Why go through all the trouble to make cookies and then just leave them out on the counter all night?

Well, thus ends my spring break 2005 Travel Diaries. Until my next journey…