mikey_e's VirtualTourist Home Page

The last month has been incredibly hectic, and, despite uploading some of my pictures from Montreal (a form of stress relief, I suppose), I've been rather negligent about changing this page and updating my status. Since the end of July, I have made a huge change in employment (first a promotion, and then an entirely new job) and have moved to a new city (Ottawa). The changes should mean more pictures and tips, especially since I'm in a new part of the country on which to report, and also since one of my goals is to become better acquainted with Québec. My new job will also involve international travel (definitely in January/February, if not later on in 2010), so I hope to have many more pictures, tips and stories of (hopefully) new places to share over the coming year.

So, sometimes things go horribly wrong compared to what you had planned you would do. Two months after leaving for Barcelona, I returned to Canada, unemployed. Nevertheless, despite making a terrible mess of things in Barcelona, I managed to spend a fair amount of time (and an even fairer amount of money) traveling. In total, 11 countries on both sides of Europe, with over 1200 pictures to boot. It will, obviously, take a bit of time for me to get these up, tagged and the tips written, but hopefully I will be able to finish it all within the next few months. So stayed tuned for new or updated pages on the following locales: Barcelona, Puigcerdà, Toulouse, Pau, Bayonne, Donostia, Pamplona, Brussels, Budapest, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Podgorica, Skopje, Thessaloniki and Athens. And who knows where else I get to (probably in Southern Ontario, so it's not like the tips will be interesting), before I finish this slightly mammoth task.

Why are many of my pages lacking anything, despite being well-known tourist destinations? Well, I started traveling quite young, usually with my father and, although we have some pictures of our travels, they aren't easily transferable to digital media, nor do I remember quite exactly what we visited and when. The list of my trips, as far back as I can remember, is:

2009*
January-July: Kitchener-Waterloo
March: Stratford
April: Boston and Cambridge, MA
July: Niagara on the Lake; Montreal

2008
January: Ottawa
May: Moscow
July: Ottawa, Barcelona, Puigcerdà and the Cerdanya
August: Toulouse, Pau, Bayonne, Donebane Garazi, Donostia, Iruñea, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Novi Sad
September: Belgrade, Sarajevo, Podgorica, Pristina, Skopje, Thessaloniki, Athens
October-December: Kitchener-Waterloo

2007
June: Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania
September: Buffalo, USA

2006
January-June: Barcelona
January: Tarragona, Catalunya
February: Ripoll and Ribes de Freser
March: Lisbon, Portugal
April: Toronto; Sitges, Catalunya
May: Bologna, Firenze and Modena, Italy
June: Trieste and Gorizia, Italy; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Zagreb, Rijeka and Pula, Croatia
December: Santo Domingo, Rep. Dominicana

2005
June: Southern Italy
July: Edinburgh, UK and Barcelona, Catalunya
September-December: Barcelona
October: Puigcerdà, Catalunya
November: Gerona
December: Bilbao and Portugalete, Euskadi; Puigcerdà

2004
February: Vienna, Austria; Bratislava and Trnava, Slovakia; Budapest, Hungary
June: Savannah, Georgia, USA
August: Havana, Cuba

2002
August: Mallorca, Spain

2001
April/May: Los Angeles and Anaheim, California

2000
August: Spain, Portugal, France, Andorra

1999
June: Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, France

1998
August: France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Monaco

1997
June/July: Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Canada; Vermont, USA

1996
August: France, Spain, Portugal

1994
June/July: Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Liechtenstien

1993
May/June: Germany, France, Spain, Andorra, Switzerland

1992
August: Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, France, Vatican City, San Marino

1991
August: South Carolina, USA

1990
August: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Germany

My parents have always said that I liked to travel because I liked languages and, naturally, visiting other countries was a surefire way to be exposed to new modes of communication. Perhaps this is true, although this could be a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, since foreign languages are very handy when you travel to foreign parts. Whatever the origin, language has now become a major part of my travels, one that is as ingrained in the preparation process as checking up on hotels and ensuring I've stocked up on clean underwear before I leave. Language has also been the key to making trips unforgettable because it helps create such unusal experiences as: chatting with the Imam in Arabic at Hjuncar in Skopje about Muslim culture in Macedonia; fending off a cell-phone store employee in Bologna looking to crash at my apartment in Barcelona; joking around with the Turkish owners of a döner shop in Vienna; and explaining to our host in Havana that my sister and I were just quiet and not extremely devout.

Ok, now there's little reason in searching for the source of my wanderlust: I travel because I enjoy traveling, simple as that. The challenge now becomes where to go, how to get there and when to cram in the trip between faimly events, schooling and job searches that never seem to end. Here are the places I'd like to visit sometime in the next 5 years and the reasons behind my choices:

Armenia: Brooding mountains, fantastical architecture and a people who survived a Genocide

Georgia: Rustaveli's Knight in the Pather Skin, the Rose Revolution, languages that are group together only by virtue of being spoken close to one another and mountains, mountains and more mountains

Turkey: Ottoman architecture, Atuturk's dream, dervishes, Greenmantle, the Corto Maltese series by Ugo Pratt (The Golden House of Samarkand)

Brazil: Is a reason really necessary? Oh, and because the latest addition to the family was just born in Porto Alegre

Argentina: Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo, beef as far as the eye can see, Colonial Spanish architecture and the most beautiful people on earth

Syria: Homa (the city of the water-wheels), the ancient cities of Aleppo and Dimashq/Damascus, Michel Aflaq and what remains of Ba'athist pan-Arabism

Algeria: Kabyle culture, the FLN's pan-semitic revolution, the Kasbah of Algiers, QusanTina and the Roman ruins

Mali: Timbuktu, African Islamic culture and learning, and, for all of West Africa, Amadou and Miriam's incredible musical talent.