Statistics

Usually I use the left side of my little desk to work on. Hence the right side has come to act as a put-down-surface, where everything that doesn’t have a specific place gets put down. In an effort this morning to clean up all that has accumulated on the right side of my desk over the last half year, I discovered a folded A5 page torn out of a former travel-diary of mine that I had quite forgotten about. It was titled ‘Statistics’ and lists a number of things that I did during my journey from Germany to Syria at the end of 2006.

It turns out that during the one-month trip I took 4 trains (of which 2 were overnight), 3 ferries, 16 buses (2 overnight) and 18 trams. I hitched a ride with 16 cars and 2 lorries and took 6 taxis.
I visited 12 museums, 10 mosques, 15 churches and 1 synagogue (incidentally the first one I ever visited in my life – in Dubrovnik).
For accommodation, I stayed in 8 different Ho(s)tels a total of 11 nights, spent 9 nights at 4 different private houses (through hospitalityclub.org) and camped out 8 nights in 4 different locations (on an island off the coast of Croatia, on a forlorn hill at the edge of Dubrovnik, in a park in the Bosnian pilgrim town of Medugorje and in an open cave in central Anatolia). Regarding food, the chart says I ate in only 21 restaurants (I preferred to sit somewhere outside with a view, I think).
Finally, I crossed 8 international borders plus two borders in and out of the UN-protected zone of Kosovo.