Arrival Notes Anya and I flew back to Kiev and then took a bus back to Odessa after weeks of traveling Europe. I would return, briefly, to Austin, Texas on a lonely flight. Travel fatigue and stupid mistakes: Getting back to the States was a comedy of errors. I flew to Warsaw, missed a flight, flew to London the next day, missed another flight, flew to Moscow and then from Russia flew to JFK. From JFK I flew to Austin the next day. After about a month I flew to Copenhagen,

We arrived in Athens early in the morning, as the city was beginning to open up. By then we were running low on money, but Athens is one of those places where simply walking around feels like getting access to a treasure chest. The central market was waking up, cafés were filling, and the Acropolis was already there above the city, impossible to ignore. Athens is not just an old city with ruins placed around it. It is one of the places where the intellectual and political voc

We left Kyiv for Lviv in Western Ukraine near the border with Poland. We took an old Soviet-era train, which is a great experience. The train just clanks metal on rails, chugging through bleak wintry mountains and steppes, no one saying a word, no one doing anything. You feel like you could be taking a train to the end of the world. The trip is twelve hours, too, so you feel like a lot of things by the time you arrive. (Note how I'm writing in the second person, a seldom-used

We eventually left Istanbul and flew back to Odesa. By then it was late November 2017, and Anya and I had been traveling for months. We lived in Odesa and that had been home base, but never for long. The next month, in December, we headed north to Kyiv for Christmas. We pick up the story of Erik Travels The World there. We arrived in Kyiv before Christmas with snow on the streets, Christmas lights everywhere, and the city carrying that strange mixture of ordinary life and ver

Back in Odesa in glorious summer. The women is holding child waving to her husband, a sailor, who is leaving port. The statue commemorates soldiers and sailors who braved the sometimes nasty Black Sea, and who often went into battle or danger. It's the Farewell Harbor statue. The mom looks fine. A bit stiff. That's just like, your opinion, man.

Picture an old map and a prop-engine plane tracing out a red line marking our route, as with the classic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Anya and I flew to Antalya in southwestern Turkey, through Istanbul, departing from Sarajevo. When we touched down in Istanbul, there was some big problem with passport control that sticks in my mind. The passport agent was super rude and kind of staring at my passport and needling me with Turkish-English about “where are we going? Why are yo

Ah, yes, Sarajevo. The stuff of motion pictures (in 2006 Welcome to Sarajevo, in 2014 the titular depiction of the events of 1914). The...

Well, you can end up in Skoder, Albania. That's traveling. There's nothing really wrong with Skoder, but it's poor. It lacks jobs for...

I decided to break up these posts, as looking through the photos it's clear these are big experiences. The taxi driver deposited us at...

Albania. Skoder, Albania. Yeah. I mean, don't go. Don't. But I did, and I'll tell you all about in pictures. I--we--also went...

After about a week it became clear to me that Tivat was too much of a resort to really do any serious work on the book. And I needed to...

In Odessa. She was old school. Sit there, shut up, and learn. I liked her. She's a good teacher. Super Russian.

Montenegro is this little country tucked away in (what seems to be) a crappy area of the world: The Balkans. Serbia, Albania,...

I'll post a montage of photos of me in Austin after returning from Europe, then in Boston, skip London for now, and a photo of me in...

Now things got really strange. I won't give the "why," only the "what" and the "how." Anya had to return to Odessa, so I stayed another...

We decided to ride the bus out to Krakow in Poland, which was about a twelve hour ride. Translation: long. Silver lining: Krakow is...

After a couple of weeks in Prague, we took a bus up to Berlin. We stayed only one night in Berlin, but I took a few photos. I feel...

We finally made it to Prague! Turns out, we visited Prague in the Czech Republic twice, once in July 2017 and again in 2018. In July...

This happened in Chicago in a hotel party during the World Series in 2016. I hadn't left for Odessa yet, so it has nothing to do with my...

Behold! More spotty and missing photographs. More forgivable perhaps in Vilnius, as we had only an overnight before returning to Odessa...