Posts

Greg

My Last-Minute Travel Buddy

/in /by

Meet Greg. Greg showed up at our gym a few months back with absolutely no grappling experience whatsoever. Greg kind of wandered in and out of the gym on an irregular basis for a few weeks before he decided he would accompany me to a Clark Gracie seminar down in South Carolina. On the way down to the seminar, Greg asked me what he thought Clark Gracie would tell him he should do to get better at Jiu-Jitsu. Lol. Of course I told him that Clark would probably tell him that he needed to train way more often, keep coming back and all the standard Gracie propaganda everyone has heard ad nauseum already.

I’m not sure if Greg ever got the chance to ask Clark his question, but all I know is that Greg started showing up and training. Despite only having a few months’ experience under his belt, he’s by far one of our more seasoned white belts, and has entered at least 3 different tournaments already.

When I first bought my tickets I announced my trip to my team. Greg said that he really wanted to go and he would start looking at tickets as well. I didn’t hear anything from him for a while, but just the other day he up and actually bought round-trip tickets to Bucharest. So now I’m stuck with this crazy guy, haha. All the slots for the camp in Bulgaria were taken already, but Tudor from Absoluto found a spot for Greg after all. Nice!

Coincidentally, Greg is scheduled to leave for Madagascar in September with the Peace Corps. I think it will be really cool for him to see the evolution of the BJJ program I helped set up over 10 years ago, and hopefully he can do something similar in Madagascar. Regardless, I’m looking forward to having a travel buddy, last minute or not!

So full!

The Trip

/in /by

All right… since this is a travel blog after all, I should probably talk a little bit about my itinerary and my expectations. Let’s do that now…

I’ll be flying out of the Greenville, SC airport in the morning of August 8th. I’ll have a ~10-hour layover in Washington, DC, and I plan on spending time with an old friend (who, coincidentally, served with me in Peace Corps). It would be really nice to drop in to a gym out in DC, but in the end, friends and family will inevitably always take precedence over pajama wrasslin’. It will be nice to see him again before gearing up for my trans-continental flight to Germany.

My next stop will be a 2-hour layover in Munich. I will, predictably, be completely wiped out by the time I get to the Munich airport since I really can’t sleep on airplanes or any form of transportation. I’ve always envied people who can just turn themselves off like a light switch and go to sleep almost anywhere, but this is unfortunately not in my nature. The upside to this is I’m really great to have around for late night road trips.

Here's me not sleeping on a Soviet-era train.

Finally, I’m planning on getting into the Bucharest airport in the afternoon of the 9th. The BJJ camp in Bulgaria will have already begun by this point in time, and at the time of writing I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to get from Bucharest to Sozopol. I will most likely continue to have no concrete plan for travel from here on out: in my experience, travel planning for Eastern Europe is notoriously difficult to do. Nobody else really plans for anything, so I guess when in Rome… right?

These buses are what the majority of folks use to get around the capital city of Moldova.

The Bulgaria BJJ camp ends on the 12th, and from there I’m guessing that Sandu and I will be making a b-line for Moldova, but I’m totally at the mercy of Eastern Europeans so really anything could happen. Sandu says he wants to put on a couple seminars while I’m there, but other than that, I’ll just be trying to absorb some of the culture, seeing old friends and old places and otherwise doing the tourist thing in Moldova for maybe a week or so. After that, it’s back to Bucharest, where I’ll presumably have a couple days to see what’s new in the city and to see friends.

The city of Chisinau, Molodva is filled with Soviet bloc buildings, which are surprisingly nice on the inside.

Since I’m a US citizen, I won’t need a visa for any of the 3 countries I’ll be visiting. This isn’t to say that I’m expecting everything to be smooth sailing. While my passport is still valid, it is almost 10 years old and therefore about to expire. I was a good deal heavier than I am now when I took my passport picture, and I’m one of those people who looks like a completely different person depending on how much I weigh. On top of all this, I have a million stamps from Romania and Moldova (I had to get new pages added to my passport at one point) and just to make my success rate at crossing borders that much more interesting, I’d spent 2 years as an illegal immigrant in Romania already so I’m crossing my fingers that doesn’t raise any red flags.

In the end, I’ll have no less than 10 border agents to convince that I am who I say I am, that I’m there legally, and for them to let me into their country (including my own).

I’ll be posting more on my trip as we get further along in this blog. I’m going to post a packing list which may be helpful for future travelers to this part of the world. I’ll most likely have to make some posters for my seminars in Moldova so I’ll be sure to post those as well. I’ll definitely have some more information as it gets closer and closer to being time for me to leave, but for now though, you will need some more background stories.

(c)ChristianGraugart Visit 2011 (2)

Not Your Traditional BJJ Travel Blog

/in /by

OK, I have to start out by saying that this is not your “traditional BJJ travel blog” (if there is such a thing) but a BJJ travel blog it is, nonetheless! If I were to create my own category, this would be, “A BJJ Travel Blog With a Lot of Background Stories.” So, keeping that in mind, this blog will read more like 33% memoir, 33% present day (as it relates to the story) and 33% or less of me actually traveling.

If you just stick with me, I promise this will make sense as you read. At the same time, I’m under no illusion that there will be hundreds or even dozens of people reading this so I’m really mostly doing this for myself (haha). Oh yeah, I should probably mention that this is a blog with a fixed lifetime, set to end after my trip.

A couple weeks ago, I purchased round-trip tickets to Bucharest, Romania. My wife and I lived in this city for almost four years, but I’m actually not going to be spending very much time there if I can help it. I’ll be meeting up with my former student, Alexandru “Sandu” Birlea, and attending a BJJ summer camp in Sozopol, Bulgaria. This camp is put on by Tudor Mihaita and Absoluto BJJ, who are based in Bucharest, but this is also not the main highlight of the trip for me. What I’m really looking forward to is getting back on the mats with the Moldovans again.

I last left Moldova in October 2014, after helping some friends to set up an “Eco-Village” in a small town about a half hour from the capital. I last saw Sandu a few days before I left as he set out into town for a night out. Back then I thought that I would be able to return a little sooner than I’m currently anticipating, but that’s just not how life went. All of this is in the past of course, so I’m super excited to be returning!

So, as a rough plan, I’ll be getting into Bucharest sometime hopefully in the afternoon of the 9th. I have no idea how I’m going to make it from Otopeni airport, down to Sozopol as of yet, but this is not something that you really have to plan for this far in advance when you are traveling in Eastern Europe. This has been my experience thus far, anyway, and I’m banking on there not being any major changes over the past 4 years.

I’ll be in Bulgaria for the duration of the camp (4 days) and then we’ll be in Moldova for a good five days at least. This is by far not long enough to do much of anything in Moldova. I won’t even be scratching the surface of getting the full Moldova experience, but this is how it has to be, at least this time around.

Lastly, I may have a couple more days in Bucharest, prior to my flight, so I’m hoping to maybe see a couple people before I have to get back on the plane and go home. Bucharest is a great city to hang out and party in, so long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. My tolerance for hard partying and choking down second-hand smoke has deteriorated over the years, but I’m still curious to see what’s changed since I left.

That’s my trip in a nutshell!

So why Moldova? (BTW, where’s Moldova?) Who’s this guy Sandu and what’s so great about him? Stay tuned for some more background stories, coming soon!

*Note: the featured image is (C) Christian Graugart from his trip to Moldova in 2011.*