I’ve moved in to an apartment in Rome, where I’ll stay until early 2012 before moving back to the States. Things are great here: I’ve been street performing (sometimes for a charity or a celebrity), teaching English, eating truly fresh mozzarella, jogging alongside aqueducts, writing and spending a lot of time with Valentina. In other words, enjoying la dolce vita.

As you saw just now if you clicked on any of those links, I’ve also been blogging shorter updates over at Google Plus. My updates are public, and you don’t need a Google Plus account to see them — just check out my profile here from time to time if you want to see what I’ve been up to, or click the big G+ icon on the upper-righthand side of this page.

I won’t be updating this blog very often now that I’m focusing on other things, so if you’d like to keep up with my current (admittedly domestic) adventures, check me out on Google Plus. I’m also looking for a good way to feed my updates from there directly to this page.

I did have one more travel adventure between Turkey and Italy… in the Balkans. I spent about a month exploring former Yugoslavia and Albania, but I’ll have to tell you all about that some other time.

Thanks, everyone, for following along over the past 15(!) months. Taking this trip has been the most rewarding decision I’ve ever made, and I really owe you guys for being so fantastically supportive at every step. Your interest, comments and emails have accentuated my good experiences by allowing me to share them, kept me company in times of loneliness, and helped me feel connected to home as I was exploring worlds far outside of my comfort zone.

If anyone out there has any questions about Europe, CouchSurfing, or travel in general — even if it’s five years from now and you’re someone I’ve never met — please feel free to email me or use the contact form at the righthand side of this page and I’ll be happy to help. Same for anyone who just happens to miss me . Just be sure to check your spam filter afterward, because my reply emails are often flagged as spam (maybe I should stop using the word “enlargement” so often).

That’s it, for now. Until next time!

Kyle

Oh, Turkey, you know I wanted all of that. But Cappadocia was like flypaper. I was helpless, don’t you see?

All those spires of rock and compressed ash, the hollowed-out caves from four millenia ago, and the pre-Christian churches with their manmade pigeon nests for harvesting excrement for fertilizer. I know it sounded trite, but I meant it when I said Cappadocia was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.

It’s not that the other parts of you didn’t matter – you witnessed my burning tears in Istanbul as the Imam sang from the Koran in Arabic, and you must have seen the way I marveled at the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque. I’d never seen a city which straddled two continents before. Come to think of it, Turkey, you were the first and only time I’ve ever been to Asia. And I wanted to see so much more of it. So much more of you.

It’s just that, in Cappadocia, I was Indiana Jones.

Climbing craggy walls of rock to get into those prehistoric attics, scrambling through tunnels with only a cigarette lighter for illumination, blindly sinking my feet into pools of water and piercing my fingers through countless spiderwebs. Sliding down hills of pumice, running my hands over the stone table of that ancient monastery, peering up at the arches of those carved-out churches. I tried every day to make sense of those Martian cities of human termite mounds, Turkey. Did Dr. Seuss design your Cappadocian landscape? You can tell me. Is that what you whispered in my ear that night as the cone formations stretched and yawned into your blushing sunset?

It doesn’t matter, I guess. You’re right, I focused too much on Cappadocia and not enough on your harder-to-reach parts. Even my words now sound like a love letter to the places that I miss instead of an apology to the features that I missed. But I want this letter to convey both feelings: gratitude and regret, those two sides of the very same lira.

And it’s also a promise. I swear I will return for more, if you’ll have me. I will see Olympos, to which I came so close the first time. I will respectfully pay the entry fee and visit your ancient city of Ephesus (which I am deeply sorry for dismissing before as “Pompeii’s retarded cousin”).

And most of all, I will know your eastern extremities like the boundaries of my own body. I promise I will, Turkey. You have my word.

When? Uh, I don’t know. Stop nagging me.

Love,

Kyle

—– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

Other Turkish delights:

- Learning after two weeks that the hand motion I often make subconsciously while walking (swinging my arms and clapping the side of my fist into my other hand) has a meaning in Turkey. Specifically, it means “suck it.”

- Turkey as dog heaven. From what I saw in most cities, stray dogs are not euthanized by default. Instead they are given shots and ear tags and set loose, resulting in a free-dogs-for-rent wonderland. (Bored or lonely? Bring a frisbee to the park and spend an hour with the friendly, playful dogs you find there.)

- The manager of a small pension in Cannakale sitting across from me at breakfast, using the only English he seemed to know: “Friends,” he said with a wide missing-tooth smile, pointing to himself and then to me.

- Dinner with my host family in Denizli: dolmas, soup and yogurt for me; Popeye’s chicken for them. After eating, as the prayer-calls of mosques echoed from the hillside of the farthest place I’d ever been from home, their 15-year-old son Ozan and I discussed the respective merits of Kanye West and 50 Cent.

- Metin in Denizli telling me about visiting the Catholic churches in Mexico, comparing them to Turkey’s mosques: “people do the same things there as here – they just use different words.”

- Playing ukulele in the Antalya bus station, attracting a crowd of employees from a nearby internet cafe and tea stand who brought me free tea and many, many questions.

That’s the same number of days I spent in Sezze, Italy with my girlfriend, Valentina, where I lived up to my Oregonian roots and brought bad weather with me. As apparent penance one day, after a rainy hour in line at the Vatican, a guard stymied us for making a wrong turn and we had to go through the entire queue a second time. But our reward came after the 537 steps up the cupola of Saint Peter’s Basilica: a seagull’s-eye view of Rome. And another treat awaited me back in Sezze, where Valentina’s mom taught me how to make pizza from scratch (as I repeatedly slipped and fell while trying to climb the language barrier).

The Czech Republic came at a slower pace, with over a week for the moonlit admiration of Prague’s Gothic castle, a karaoke duet of “I Got You Babe” with my bearded host Clabbe, and an interesting stowaway as I hitchhiked out of the city with a van full of Swiss students – a drunk homeless man climbed in after me, parroting my words as “great, tanks” with blind confidence.

But Germany received the bulk of my time, with 3 full weeks for its exploration. Using hitchhiking as my sole means of intercity transport meant plenty of over-120mph autobahn moments, two instances of drivers who spoke only German, and one example of me trying to be cool but accidentally scattering cigarette ash like confetti all over the inside of a car. (Note to self: don’t succumb to peer pressure.)

Germany is more like the United States than any other country I’ve visited. Lots of new buildings, car-filled highways, and big discount grocery stores. And what people say about Berlin – that it’s surprisingly cheap, covered in graffiti, and full of colorful counterculture – is all true. I stayed in the west side of the city with an Indian CouchSurfing host named Shivam, and with other guests from every corner of the world I enjoyed sunny rooftop picnics, a professional living-room violin concert, and late nights in Berlin’s open-starting-at-2am dance clubs.

My one night in Denmark was not nearly long enough. But I did have time to walk along Copenhagen’s waterways, thinking about my Danish mormor and morfar as I passed by all those pristine sailboats, and to see the infamous hippie-haven anarchist island, Christiania, with its proud signs enforcing the absence of photography and EU laws within its limits.

Hitchhiking up the western coast of Sweden was a difficult task; as it turns out, Swedes are just as fearful as Americans when it comes to hitchhikers. Even hitchhikers who play ukulele. But eventually I scored a ride to Gothenburg with a local man who, at 60 years old, told me he wanted to stop working soon so he could travel like I am.

Finally, my only stop in Norway was Oslo, the most expensive city in the world. That fact translates into $16 falafel pitas and $4 grocery-store Cokes, but also prime opportunity for street performance. If you ever want to feel really poor, try “busking” in Oslo for an hour. There, college students and old ladies can afford to give the equivalent of $10 for hearing 45 seconds of an unfamiliar song during their afternoon parkside strolls.

You’re in the back seat of a van, driven by a Romanian plastic-wreath runner. Two women are on the middle bench seat in front of you: the driver’s family maybe, or friends. The relationship isn’t clear, and their English is as good as your Romanian. But you paid them $10 for the ride, and that bridged the gap.

The four of you have been in line for an hour, sitting in the van, creeping forward one carlength at a time. The speed seems to be picking up now, and the three of you in the back all get excited. It will slow down again soon, but you don’t know that yet.

And you don’t know that once you get through to the town of Suceava, you’ll check in to Irene’s Hostel and get to know the Romanian family that owns it. Irene and her husband, whose name sounds like “Chup,” have a baby on the way, and Irene’s younger brother Alex has been helping them run things. Suceava is famous for its painted monasteries, but you will spend your time writing at a table near the window as the snow blasts outside, a peculiarly quiet violence driving it sidelong.

At some point Chup will offer to help you get over to Hungary cheaply by taking one of his friend’s touring buses. You’ll thank him for the option, but suspect a ripoff and ask around. You’ll be right to do so, and a couple of local guys from CouchSurfing will explain a cheaper, faster way to you over Romanian beers. And so after cutting through the country on a train to the western border, your last night in Romania will be in Cluj. You’ll stay there with an energetic firedancer named Ana, eating her homemade pickles and poached eggs with pepper spread before taking an early morning bus to Budapest.

Hungary’s capital will remind you of Paris, with its short but magnificent buildings, wide lanes and prominent river. You’ll spend two nights in Budapest walking along the Danube, admiring the crumbling architecture, and taking Europe’s oldest dedicated subway system with your hosts Marco and Janko before they drive you northward to a remote eco-community farm in central Slovakia.

A night of locally grown soup, drumming and overtone singing at the farm will prepare you for the next morning’s train ride to Bratislava, Slovakia. That ghost-town capital of 430,000 invisible people will be among the worst cities you’ve ever seen, with its hangdog emptiness as bold as Budapest’s vibrant Austro-Hungarian aesthetic.

But you don’t know any of that yet. All of it is still ahead of you. First, you have two more hours in the snowy Romanian immigration line. Two more hours eating sweet pastries with three people whose language you do not know, whose relation you do not understand, but whose destiny, at least for now, you share.

Within an hour of my arrival, Ira was pouring shots of Ukrainian vodka and homemade rose liqueur for everyone, which we followed with pickled cabbage with mushrooms her grandmother had picked in the neighboring forest. Before preparing borscht, potato pancakes, and pierogi for me over the next few days, Ira’s grandmother asked if everyone in the States was vegetarian.

Neither of her grandparents spoke English, but Ira was happy to translate and laugh along as her grandmother and I exchanged sleepwalking stories, and blushed as she interpreted her grandfather’s recommendation that I should start going to church. Behind their small house was a massive brick building, unfinished but close to completion. To avoid taking up debt while increasing their lot, Ira’s grandparents (with help from the rest of the family) built the huge new house themselves over the last summer.

But the bars of Lviv were the main attractions I saw there, as Ira and various friends we picked up along the way made our rounds through the kitschy post-Soviet nightlife. Old yellow and blue van-buses too short to stand in shuttled us between the house and city, past gray buildings and brightly flowered graveyards.

There was homemade horseradish vodka at Masoch’s in Lviv, a little dungeon cafe decorated with leather, chains and sculptures of genitals. Named after Lviv-born Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man who ‘invented’ masochism, the cafe’s whip-yielding waitresses served breaded portobello mushrooms while a video of three mating frogs played on a big screen on the wall.

To enter signless Kryivka, a man in a Ukrainian soldier uniform required the password “Slava Ukrajini” (something like “power to Ukraine”), and a shot of strong apple vodka once inside to strengthen Ukrainian comrades and poison any Russian infiltrators. Downstairs through the gate, a Ukrainian cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” pumped through the stereo to diners, drinkers, and shooters practicing their aim at the tucked-away pellet-gun range.

To access the Freemasons restaurant, we rang the doorbell to a nondescript upstairs room in an apartment building. A thin, bearded man in a bathrobe answered, revealing his small linoleum-floored kitchen complete with dirty dishes, old refrigerator and tiny television. He offered us a chair in front of the TV and our choice of leftover food, joking with Ira in Ukrainian before ushering us through a second door, into a glowing violet high-end restaurant with a view of the downtown center. For about $5 I enjoyed some of the best mushroom soup, salad and cake I’ve ever had, then said goodbye to Ira and her grandparents, and soon after to Ukraine.

An occasional ten minutes of town would be followed by more stillness, more fields that faded into a dream of fog, with silhouettes of trees like hands reaching up from the blurred horizon. Finally a grove of trees appeared as thick as grass, a needle of sunlight piercing through them. Krakow was near, and near it was Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz camp consists of two sites: Auschwitz I and Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Together they were the biggest Nazi concentration camp, and the world’s largest cemetery. Built in a ransacked small town west of Krakow — chosen for its location in the center of Jewish Europe — this was where poison gas chambers were first developed and used as an efficient method for mass murder.

Entering the Auschwitz I camp, I saw fellow tourists posing under its black gate, strangely smiling for photos under the infamous message “work sets you free.” As I slowly walked under the gate, a guard brushed past me and began checking for bombs under the ledge of a nearby brick building.

Dozens of the buildings within Auschwitz I are open as exhibits detailing different aspects of the concentration camp, the Holocaust, and World War II. I walked through the barnlike living quarters of the prison, stood in the torture stalls, went inside the gas chambers and the crematoria.

The rooms of one building are lined with glass cases which are filled with the sorted possessions of murdered prisoners: thousands of shoes, glasses, combs, crutches and prosthetic legs. One case houses a massive pile of suitcases with their owners’ names clearly marked, a tactic to prevent panic by convincing prisoners that they would eventually be reunited with their belongings. In many cases, these empty leather shells are the only record of what happened to their owners. The smallest display case in one room contains a porcelain doll with a shattered face, laid across a little girl’s toddler shoes and clothing.

The more I saw, the more I understood why some people believe that the Holocaust is a hoax. To believe the truth about what happened is to think the unthinkable, to take something dark and horrible and let it inside you.

Auschwitz I had a cremation capacity of 700 bodies at once. Birkenau is much larger, and was built when this number was no longer enough. At Birkenau they could cremate 16,000 people per day. Though parts of it were destroyed by the Nazis in a last-ditch effort to remove evidence, the death camp’s design is obvious, precise and terrifying.

Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau is not filled with formal exhibitions to explore, and so arriving there without a guide is a disorienting experience. Dark wooden prison buildings reach out on all sides in staggering scale, with a forest of chimneys crowding the sky. Surrounded by farmland once fertilized with human ashes, Birkenau took the magnitude of Nazi brutality out of my thoughts and pulled it into feeling, like an earthquake tearing stone walls to the ground

I felt history crashing into me as I stumbled over the camp’s train tracks and walked dumbly through its snowy grid of ruined structures. I was looking for an answer. I didn’t find one.

Things in Poland that were not horrifying:

- Helping a Mongolian waiter write a song in English for his wife.

- Trading English vulgarities for Polish ones with a couple in canal-perforated Wroclaw; trying four different types of Polish vodka with them; playing with their baby.

- Spending over a week in beautiful Krakow with my American host; playing poker; finding hidden cemeteries; drinking yerba maté.

Step 2: Fly back to Oregon to spend holidays with the fam. Surprise sister. Notice the big cars and people, huge supermarkets, and cheaper everything – even most products imported from Europe.

Step 3: Fly back to Dublin and then London for a week each. Acquire Italian girlfriend. Leave for colder Europe.

Done, done, and done. My next dispatch – about Poland – will be longer.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

Sincerest regards,

Kyle Jacob Byers

Everywhere you go in Italy, you understand enough of the language to feel comfortable but never enough to get bored. Emphatic gestures help at times, but despite the stereotypes, most don’t speak that way — at least no more than anyone does when talking to someone in a language they don’t understand. At times in Italy you forget to even try to understand, getting too caught up in the melody of the language to bother considering the meaning behind its individual notes.

You use the slowest trains available as you travel through the country, taking in its varied identities with a speed fitting of its unifying culture: from the modernity of Milan to the antique magnificence of Florence, to the trash-heaped disarray of Naples. The wrongly idealized Venice to the truly idyllic Cinque Terra and Sermoneta. The pizza with sauteed mushrooms and eggplant; the pizza with fresh buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes and basil; the pizza with thin crisp slices of potato. The pizza that doesn’t melt in your mouth, but commands your mouth to melt around it. The pizza that seduces you in the darkness, a hot stone of emptiness that settles on your abdomen and quakes there until you get out of bed to fill it.

The laughter over traditional spritz in carless Venice, and awful Tuscan wine on the steps of domed churches in Florence. Sweet homemade lemoncello from an old woman and her eight-person family in the town of Latina, made with lemons from their backyard trees and given as thanks for a dining-room ukulele serenade. The tour of Rome through a local’s wide eyes and softly singing mouth. The student protest march there, Italian style: a moving dance party with smiles all around as police flex riot-geared muscles and circle a helicopter above. The fossilized sites of Pompeii and Norba, cities as solidly preserved as your memories of this, your favorite country so far.

Every part of my trip has been colored by these brief interactions, but France took them even farther, starting with my first hitchhiking experience and adding to it: A five-minute “flash mob” group freeze with numerous passing tourists stopping to take pictures. Offering free hugs with a group under the Eiffel tower, with responses from passers-by ranging from fear to shyness to laughter to jumping-up-and-down exuberance. Nonverbal jokes with the faces of passing motorists while hitchhiking a second time.

More stuff, too. Let’s skip to the highlights.

Highlights reel:

Paris

- Exploring Paris with my first host there, Ophélie, and her friend, Valérie; going to the ultracreepy underground catacombs, decorated with the bones of over a million people (thanks for the recommendation, Jeff G). Eating strong Camembert with apples.

- Seeing more of Paris including an absinthe tasting at a goth bar with Edouard, my second host. He and I taking part in the Paris flash mob, part of an event in which groups of people in European capital cities throughout the continent froze for five minutes at exactly the same time: full video or fast-track to me and Edouard proposing to a girl together (I didn’t make the video); free hugs; tour of the historic sewers of Paris.

Colmar:

- Staying with Daniel, who barely spoke English but was still hilarious; seeing Grunewald’s brutal Crucifixion.

- Trying hitchhiking to Chamonix, getting two rides to get 1/3 of the way there: one from Henri, a German man in his 70s who was drafted in the war but deserted at age 18 and called me an ubermensch, and one from Michael, a middle-aged Swiss man who kept the baby shoes of his 20-year-old son hanging from the rearview mirror. Getting into Switzerland but no farther, meeting a kid named Colin who showed me the way to the train station, bought me some Swiss chocolate and let me use his phone to message my hosts in Chamonix. Taking the train the rest of the way. Accidentally going to three countries in one day (France, Germany, and Switzerland).

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc:

- Staying at the foot of the Alps with Ewelina and Alan, from Poland. Feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach every time I went out the door and saw the mountains. Being physically winded from simply seeing their beauty and size, then being more winded after hiking up them for six hours with Ewelina and Alan and laughing nonstop.

- Eating some of the best pizza of all time — cheeseless and vegan, Alan’s recipe. Trying to go vegan for a day; going seven hours before accidentally eating non-vegan muesli.

- Hitchhiking into Italy.