I knew that I would type WAY too much to summarize my experiences this summer, so I decided to mash together a bunch of out takes which none of you saw before.
I’ll admit, there’s still HOURS of unseen stuff but this was taking way too long and if I wanted to have it finished before the voting was over, I had to cut it short.
I travelled a total of:
Wow, 12,000+km! I also visited 2 continents as I went over to the Asia side of Turkey. Darn, I should have taken the boat from Sicily to Tunisia (Africa) and made it 3!
My route map:
Since you can’t really see itl, here is exactly where I went over the 7 weeks:
Thank you all so much for following my journey with the Alienware Backpacking Challenge. If you enjoy reading my blogs and would like to continue to follow my weird and crazy life, please visit Hello Liefje. It’s all about gaming, gadgets and general tomfoolery!
I’m currently working on a final video to summarize the amazing, wonderful, educational, hilarious (I could go on) summer I had. I found out that actually I forgot to write a blog about one video which I uploaded during the week 2 challenge (which was street performing).
This guy played a bunch of video game music so of course I had to interview him. Watch the video to listen to the tunes:
We have kept in touch since then and just a few days ago he sent me a link to another song he did which I thought was just incredible:
Until I showed my boyfriend the unreleased footage, he mentioned that he couldn’t understand why I was so nervous but when he saw the extremely talented people (me @ 0.55 so you actually know I was waiting to play) that I played after, he understood. These guys were just amazing and that’s only a small look at the people I had to go after! That was why I was freaking out, cos let’s face it, I sucked compared to that.
Anyway, it was a nice trip down memory lane and i hope you look forward to some more unreleased stuff seeing the light of day!
Just a small video I made about my experiences and sights seen in Turkey. I made this while waiting 6 hrs at the airport in Romania, frantically trying to make it home in time for Gamescom.
So you might have guessed from the news that we are now all in Cologne, Germany at gamescom for the final part of the challenge.
I am extremely tired though, these events can be exhausting! I just wanted to let you all know I made it out of Turkey alive, and I will do a proper update tomorrow
Yesterday was a really big day so I didn’t have time to write a blog. After finishing off my top travel tips, we headed out to see the Basilica Cistern, the largest underground cistern in Istanbul. It was featured in the James Bond film “From Russia With Love”, as the setting underneath the Russian consulate.
Unfortunately it was very dark in there and my camera isn’t so good so I the flash pictures didn’t come out well but I did what I could It was so cool to see that there were HUGE fishes swimming around!!
There was also two heads of Medusa from the Greek fables. Story (at the Cistern) has it that she was hooking up with Perseus and the Goddess Athena got jealous cos Medusa was hotter than her, plus she wanted to be with Perseus. Medusa’s best feature was her hair so Athena cursed her by turning her hair into snakes, and that anyone would turn into stone by looking at her. Perseus had to kill his beloved but used her head as a weapon to hax0r win a lot of battles. The head became a symbol of keeping away bad omens.
me with a Medusa head
After that we strolled over to Topkapi Palace where I saw some of the most amazing treasures I’ve ever seen. We were not allowed to take pictures inside but I managed to snipe a couple, plus some video which you will see when I am finished with my Istanbul summary film.
The treasury was my favourite part of the palace. I saw the biggest diamond i’ve ever seen in my life (86 carats):
As well as AWESOME medals from the army that were basically gigantic diamond brooches. If the army gave out medals like that today I’d sign up!!!! …I’m just sayin’ Everything was embellished with turquoise, rubies and emeralds. I also saw an amazing DIAMOND encrusted armour but I can’t find a picture of it.
Sorry that the images from the treasury were googled but they were really strict on taking photos and I really wanted to share just a small glimpse of what I saw with you. If this collection ever goes on tour anywhere near you, GO SEE IT!!!!!! Or any Ottoman treasures for that matter.
I also went into the “Privy Chamber, The Sacred Trusts Section”. This is where they kept a lot of holy relics. I saw many containers with clippings of Mohammed’s beard, teeth, his footprint and his weapons.
They also had the stick staff of Moses (yeah that dude who parted the Red Sea):
More pics:
Basilica Cistern
fishies!
me with a Medusa head
007
Topkapi Palace
hollow tree in the palace
Ed and I
Entrance to the sacred relics
MJs inspiration?
86 carat wonder
can you believe it’s a gift shop inside?
a roof fit for a sultan
I’ve also been updating my facebook gallery (which will probably get huge) so check it out if you want to see more!
For our final challenge we were asked to give the best tips we could for future European backpackers. Here are my top 5:
1. Be wise with your money
This point had to be made on video.
2. Be with your friends
As the only female in this contest, I did not travel alone anywhere. These days it’s not safe and I really didn’t feel like being taken advantage of. So I have not really spent a single moment alone in the past 7 weeks as I have been surrounded by my friends.
The only time I was with someone kind of random, I got touched when I fell asleep in the car That was weird.
Not only is it a lot more fun to have someone to share your experiences (and expenses) with, but i’m very humbled by how nice they all were about the weekly challenges. Every single week I have had help from my friends to complete the challenges; wheather they were filming, calling up MMA gyms, helping me with ideas and just generally being supportive.
I felt sorry for the other guys, especially during the sports challenge week as 2 of them didn’t have anyone to film them really doing the sport! So while they had to get creative to show the challenge in other ways, i’m sure their submissions would have been much cooler had they had someone to film them
The best times from my trip (and there were so many, I can’t pick one) were all shared with someone and these people were the ones to help make my trip that much more amazing, special and incredible.
3. Double check EVERYTHING
Normally i’m pretty thorough with checking all the bookings but I think this lesson has been learned by both Ben and I. Earlier in the challenge (maybe around week 2) remember Ben was homeless? I’m sure it could have been avoided by double checking the train station his train was leaving from.
For me I learned this when leaving the Netherlands for Istanbul. Remember the first blog from there? Well it all started when I said to Ed at the airport “Please don’t be mad but… we’re going to another airport than I originally thought”. In my defense I only selected the main airport when booking the tickets but somehow we ended up booked to another airport anyway.
I had no idea where this airport was so when we landed I had to ask exactly where on the map we were. Turns out we were over an hour away from the city. Fantastic. This is where we got scammed into paying for a non-existant shuttle, followed by a “private cab ride”.
4. Research places before you go there
There are so many amazing places in Europe to see and depending on what you like; beaches, archaeological sites, museums, monuments, clubbing etc
Do a little bit of research beforehand to make a rough “plan of attack” about what you want to see and do. Don’t do what I did and think “Hmm this place looks cool from google image search, and it’s sunny… let’s go here!”.
This method CAN work out for you as it’s pretty adventurous to stumble upon places that you’d never expect to, but it’s also really nice to know the history behind everything.
5. Bring an M11x!
Everyone who i’ve been around has loved this laptop, if only for the disco setting i’ve put the keyboard on. In all seriousness, it’s been my home away from home for the past 7 weeks. Right now I’m in Turkey and I’m enjoying QuakeCon as if I was at home!
There’s a lot going on here but i’m going to tell you about my two favourite places that I saw today. Each of these probably deserve their own entry
First of all I had lunch at the famous Pudding Shop in the Sultanahmet. This was once THE place to be for adventurous travellers in the 60s and 70s. it was used as a hub for the hippies and bikers to meet up, sell their hippie busses after journeying east to fresh-faced students ready to make the trip themselves. It was also used as a message centre with a cork board filled with letters, people looking for travel companions, classifieds etc.
Today it’s a pudding shop also with a lot of traditional Turkish food. But I was sad to see that with such a bustling history, the shop itself didn’t seem to have that much customers. It could be because of Ramadan or maybe tourists would rather eat burgers at the tourist ripoff places. Who knows. But the food was yummy. The pudding was out of this world.
After lunch it was time to visit one of the 7 wonders of the world: The Hagia Sofia / Aya Sofia / St Sophia. (I’m not sure if it’s a wonder anymore, they changed them in 2009 and there seems to be WAY more than 7). It was built as a orthodox church around the year 300, burned down around 534 and was re-constructed and opened to the public in 539. Then it got turned into a mosque from 1453 and finally was opened as a museum in the 1930s.
This ex-church/ex-mosque turned museum is exquisite. I have so many pictures I don’t know which ones to upload or where to begin. I will eventually put them in a facebook gallery but for now here is a little taste of it:
I’m starting to get bored with getting hustled here and by nature i’m really not much of a haggler. Today it was 43 degrees and we thought to visit the worlds largest indoor Bazzar, the Grand Bazzar. It was really intense. We started this habit of always walking around in a circle or two before deciding on a direction to follow.
Anyway, I won’t cover what happened too much as we finally got our week 7 challenge and in just the past 2 or 3 days I have picked up a few tips and stories to add to my collection.
Ramadan started today, it’s a festival where people aren’t allowed to eat or drink anything (or participate in sexual activities) from dawn until sunset for 1 month. This is something which I’d never experienced before (heck as an adult I haven’t visited a predominantly Muslim country) and I was really fascinated when all of a sudden songs started blaring through various mosque loudspeakers. Despite the buildings being built around 1609 they still utilized the modern loudspeaker. Watch the very short video to see my experiences of the praying times:
Not only did the icecream have the consistency of glue but all I could taste was the bitter ripoff of paying 10 Lira (5 euro) for 2 icecreams when a Turkish family in front of me paid 7 lira for 4. Since it was a tourist area I would have been grudgingly ok to pay that but what really made me angry was that I knew we were being ripped off. How do you even haggle for ice cream? “Oh sorry, no I don’t think i’ll be paying the amount you said, but here, take my licked spoon”.
For my first Turkish dinner I wanted kebab. I LOVE KEBAB. I figured that since i’m in Turkey they must have the best kebab ever. I just wanted a regular Doner plate but what I got was this:
The lamb was awful. I was burping lamb fat all night. I was so upset, but not deterred from finding some amazing kebab. According to google, the best kebab can be found from random “hole in the wall” style places. Because it’s Ramadan though, it’s going to be hard to find a place which the locals love since the tactic of “seeing how many people are eating there” doesn’t really work out at this time of the year.
But Turkey has some AMAZING food which I have eaten, such as this:
Nom nom nom!
I’m trying to stay positive about my experiences here so far but it’s getting hard. Because of being ripped off at every turn and to always have to stay on your toes, I don’t feel like Turkey is a very welcoming place. Of course, the people are very welcoming to your face because they want your money and to me, that doesn’t feel genuine. There are tourist scammers in every country but I’ve been to many places and this takes the cake But OF COURSE I have met some exceptions but i’m just bored of being taken advantage of almost everywhere I go. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes debating the price of my icecream. Please try to understand this.
By the way, if you liked my Diablo 2 cow run video, please vote for me for week 6! Click here to vote. Voting also puts you in the draw to win an Alienware M11x!
Today I left for Istanbul, Turkey for the (almost) final leg of the backpacking challenge.
It’s currently 3am but I really need to hash out my first experiences in Turkey. We got to Schiphol Airport (my fav airport ever) and had an uneventful flight to Istanbul.
When we got there however I realized that we were in a different airport than anticipated. Said airport was over 1hr from the hotel I had skilfully reserved online. More on that later.
Obviously we looked like total tourists and were immediately sniped by a guy (with an offensive amount of hairgel) who directed us to “hotel information” at the airport. These guys told us that we could take a shuttle bus to our hotel. 1 hour later, the shuttle bus wasn’t coming so he charged us another €15 (on top of the €30 we already paid) to get a “taxi” from his “friend” to the hotel. The taxi was a private car.
Fast-forward to the hotel arrival. The hotel was either overbooked or under construction (I wasn’t really sure) and we were transferred to the hotel “of a friend”. That hotel was in the Ottoman house (right on the palace wall) so I thought it could be awesome.
….
I was wrong. See the video as it describes a lot more than words can:
(Note: I can’t figure out how to embed stuff from Vimeo, can anyone help with this? I’m still laughing over the fact that youtube is blocked here)
Hilariously, the room was like 1m2 and Ed is like 6ft so I can’t even imagine how small it must have seemed for him. That bed certainly wasn’t going to work out. We’d have to have slept in shifts.
Tactfully we had to explain to the people at the “front desk” (the attic) that the room was simply too small and we’d have to change hotels. It was like kicking a puppy in the face. They were so nice and helpful and I felt so bad but it just couldn’t work.
We had a near-death experience in the cab on the way to the new hotel though! We almost smashed into a van pulling out which would have been an interesting turn of events.
Anyway now we’re in a totally killer hotel which I splurged out a bit on but since I am almost at the end of the road and I won the 4th challenge, I felt like it was worth it. Besides, I need a good, comfortable base to watch Quakecon from!!!!
I don’t know where to begin about the difficulty of making this video. When I first read the challenge many games came to mind and many people suggested games to me. Even my mother who remembered playing “Country Fair” on the Apple II with me as a toddler.
But one game really stood out to me as something special, as the challenge was:
The contestants need to create a video reenactment of the most memorable gaming scene in their life. They need to think about what is the most memorable gaming scene they have witnessed and reenact it on video. This challenge has two parts. Part one is the creation and publication of the reenactment and part two is a seperate blog explaining their choice and methods used.
The reason I picked Diablo 2?
There are many games I could have picked from such as Kings Quest, Heros Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Frogger, Allycat, Commander Keen, Prince of Persia… All of these games were huge for me. I learned to read and type from the “Quest” games. But Diablo 2 has that special something that makes it the most memorable.
Diablo 2 was a huge part of my life. When I was studying at University as a young 18 year old I was first introduced to the game by my ex boyfriend. Countless studying and class hours were spent levelling up and testing new characters and builds. I was hooked. The only way this addiction was broken was when the CDs were ran over by a computer chair, breaking them. This was before the NoCD crack was integrated into the patch.
I thought I was done with Diablo 2 but it turned out that my current boyfriend and his best friend were also huge fans. We would LAN for like a month straight and play Diablo 2 in hardcore mode. This meant when you died, it was over. This added a whole new dimension of fun and addictiveness to the game. I can never go back to softcore.
The sounds of Diablo is something which I’m sure I will carry for the rest of my life. Every time I hear that ring, amulet or rune drop I would immediately hold down CTRL and try to pick up the item before anyone else in the party could. Unfortunately, my boyfriend is a walking pickit.
Anyway, without many more words, this game is one of my favourites and I think I need to take a semester off once Diablo 3 comes
My methods used
While it might look like shit, this video actually too many hours of work. Firstly I came up with the cow run concept simply because I’m in Holland. There are a lot of cows here. But I didn’t find anyone who actually owned cows that I could run around with so I had to use my epic CGI skills to insert them. Than you to Soe who drew one for me in record time.
The first step was the most important: finding the sounds. Diablo 2 for me is almost all about sounds. With just one chord on the guitar, I’d recognize the Tristram song. So I searched the internet far and wide to find the sounds from Diablo 2. But alas, there was nothing what I needed uploaded. So I downloaded an MPQ editor, installed the game on my M11x and unpacked the sound files from the game.
This seemed like a good thing, but then I realized there were over 3000 sound effects which I had to go through, not including the character speeches. It took a LONG time to find and get through them but I enjoyed it. But even then I didn’t find all the sounds I needed. I found the create teleport and enter teleport sound from a youtube video. When looking on youtube for the missing sounds I realized one awful thing: WHY DO PEOPLE PUT MUSIC OVER DIABLO? I don’t want to hear Nightwish while watching you do Baal runs.
I used the tristram theme song in the intro because it was the town music in Diablo 1, plus to open the secret cow level you have to go there
When I found the sounds I wanted, it was time to film. We decided to explore the greenery very close to my new apartment and I was so pleased to find the perfect spot after a short walk. I’m happy to live next to greenery
After listening to my boyfriend and my friend laugh at me for minutes while I was pretending to be a sorc (the outfit is close, right?) I had the footage I needed to start to turn it into the most ghetto version of Diablo ever. When looking through google, I discovered that the cows from a Diablo 2 screenshot would look too bad overlayed on my video. Thats when I thought to ask 2gds talented girlfriend to draw them for me.
After that I cut out a hud from a Diablo 2 screenshot, edited some bits in photoshop to add some experience and mana effects over the video. From there it was just editing pictures in photoshop and adding them to the video. I had to do this many times, so I had actually saved like 3 different versions of the clip before the final one was ready.
I thought about a lot of things, item drops, experience, mana, cow HP… But to really make it perfect it would have taken way too long. The entire time I spent on it was around 10 – 12 hours (including research into ripping sounds) and that would be all I had since I was also visiting Amsterdam etc.
A lot of the things I added in this video I had learned from making the Quake Life movie for the week 5 challenge (Vote for it here). Maybe with enough dedication to make a fool of myself, a better version could have been done.
Now it’s time to sleep because tomorrow i’m going to Istanbul!
PS: I laughed my butt off when someone said this “fucking aweomse video next time do chaos sanctuary”. <3 Diablo fans
Everything was embellished with turquoise, rubies and emeralds. I also saw an amazing DIAMOND encrusted armour but I can’t find a picture of it.
That was weird.
