Europe tour Interail 2006 : Bosnia and Herzegovina, amazing hospitality

En français
We left Hungary direction Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The train was pretty scary and noisy and we were asking ourself if it was not going to fall apart but we still arrived safe and sound in Sarajevo.
The city was amazing. It contains Synagogue, Church and Mosque in the same area, some people should really take a chance to learn about diversity taking this country as an example of what can be achieved. There are still traces of the war as they are part of history but that is not the most important.
We stayed there a while, walking around and also watching a match of giant chess.
The only think that annoyed me was to be attacked by flying ants in the main place but I think that's part of the fun. I had never seen that many of them and I'm not a big fan of insects especially when they fly.
We then took the train again to go to Visoko. Visoko is a small village between Sarajevo and Zenica, we wanted to go there to see the pyramids. The fact that they are pyramids is a bit controversial, you can discover more about them here.  In the train people were indicating us where we should go and we met someone from the place who proposed to actually show us a bit around. We ended up spending the evening with him and his family. Bosnia offered us one of the best greeting we had so far during our travel.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction 
Travel table of content 

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Budapest

En français
We arrived in Budapest (Hungary) at 8am, we started with taking a shower and breakfast before noticing that the next train to leave to our next destination was from the other train station. We crossed the city with our bags, I mean the big big ones, I was really dying, so heavy. But we finally made it to the train station where we left our bags for the rest of the day before going to visit the city.

Budapest  is divided in two parts, Buda and Pest. We start to go to the Buda Castle (Budai Vár in Hungarian) then we went down to visit the Pest part of the city with Heroes' square (Hősök tere) taking the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (Széchenyi-Lánchíd).
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content  

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Romania or train, train, train

En français
After our visit of Košice, we took our next train to Bucharest in Romania. Due to lack of planning, not noticing the jet lag and not really planning our visit of the city we arrived in Bucharest's train station a bit lost. We walked around a bit but the only thing that we ended up being told (my Romanian is really poor) is that we should walk to Constanta which is another city really far away. So we decided to eat a pizza in the train station and to take the next train to Sighişoara. Sighişoara is the city of Dracula. We walked there at night seeing the places where he was bitting his victims. You all know how I like vampires' stories, I was really happy to be there. We then waited for the train that was supposed to get us more west.
I really hope to be able to go back to Romania some days to see the country more in details.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content 

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Košice

En français
We spend another night in the train, during this travel this is going to become an habit. We went through Eastern Slovakia to reach our new destination of the second day, Košice. Our little routine started : find how to go to our next destination, get a shower, some breakfast, a map of the city, a place to leave our bags (well not this time) and go to walk around for our visit.
Košice is the 2^nd largest city of Slovakia after Bratislava the main city, even though it didn't look that big. It was a Sunday so the city was really calm, a lot of people were at the church. One interesting thing in this city was the fountain that follow the music.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content

神風怪盗ジャンヌ (Kamikaze kaitou jeanne)

En français
神風怪盗ジャンヌ (Kamikaze kaitou jeanne) is a anime from the fantasy shōjo manga series by Arina Tanemura that was released in 1999. It is two parts the first part counts 27 episodes when the second one counts 17.

The story is about a high school girl, Kasukabe Mason who discover that she is the reincarnation of Jeanne d'arc. Jeanne d'arc is a figure of French history, in the 15th century, France had been invaded by the English and a peasant girl, Jeanne, decided to rise against the invader and to throw them of the country believing that she is carrying the will of god. She will lead the French into victory during the Hundred Years' War and succeed to help Charles VII to the throne of France. However, she will be captured and sold to the English and be judged and burn alive at the stake.
So Maron has an angel to help her steal beautiful object that have been possessed by the demon, she call the power of Jeanne d'arc and transform to be able to steal them without giving away her Maron identity. Her best friend, Todaiji Miyako is the daughter of the policeman in charge of arresting Jeanne and would do anything to help her father. The next neighbor Nagoya Chiaki is also a thief, friend or enemy, that is the main question.



In this anime, things turns a lot around the relationship between the characters and how their respective past is acting on them to lead to their present behavior. It's also funny. I like it.
Cinema, Manga, Animation Content

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Sunshine in Praha

En français
We initially wanted to start our travel either in the south (Italy) or in the north (Belgium) but the train prices inside your own country are variating a lot and we soon found out that the easiest/cheapest thing to do was to start in Praha. We had already visited Praha the year before during the first Europe tour, the posts can be found here and here. This time we had the chance to see the city under the sun. We also took the opportunity to visit Zlatá ulička (the Golden lane) where we didn't previously go. This street used to host goldsmiths or alchemists in the 15th century and that's where it has got it name from. It's now hosting museum of armory and textiles from middle age.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content

The number 22 in the Golden line is the house of Franz Kafka.

I won AugNoWriMo : Demon and fairy part 8

I won AugNoWriMo, well I passed the 40000 word line I still need to be officially verified.
That time it was really hard, not that much about the story more about a strange brain pattern. Let me explain because if that happens to me I know that it's happening to others as well and knowing about it will help fight it.

I was late on my word count,with the move to America I couldn't write for few days. Looking at the late words now, that wasn't too much. But the thing was I possible couldn't catch up all at once for sure. So what did I do? I felt bad and I didn't write, so the late words started to add up even more because I couldn't make it all at once was feeling like if I couldn't make it at all. And that was the main problem. Just I didn't need to make it all at once I needed to split it, into pieces, like I did at the beginning of the challenge, 40000/31 = 1291 (above integer).

So I split it and I get back at writing every day. Most of the time I didn't even reached the new word count but I was writing every day I was getting closer and that's the main point, because you can't do it all right now doesn't mean that you can't take a little step in the right direction and that little step was just what I needed to get back to my writing motion.
Of course when the week-end arrived I had just four days left to get my last 15200 and I had the feeling that I wasn't going to make it. But I split it, 5000 Saturday, 5000 Sunday so that I just had about 2500 for the two last days. I wrote 5200 on Saturday, 4500 on Sunday but on Monday I wrote 4100 words so that on the last day I just had to write 1200 words and they came to me really easily. On the two last days I was also splitting the writing time, writing each time I had a moment.
I think that one of the most important thing is the desire to get what I said I would and I made it.

The novel is not yet finished with 2 contests won and a total of 94138 words so you can expect to have more to read in the close future. It is going to be my longest novel so far.
All Novels Draft 

Enlarge this document in a new window

Back to part 7 
To final part