Situated on the eastern coast of Spain, Valencia is the country's 3rd largest city, behind Madrid and Barcelona. There are roughly 800,000 people who live in Valencia proper and about 1.6 million that live in Valencia's metro area. It is also worth noting that Valencia's harbor is the busiest container port in the Mediterranean and the 5th busiest in Europe. That means that this is a city of economic importance. Stuff happens here.
Today, I’ll be telling you some of what happened to ME (and one very unlucky friend) while I was here.
Boston has a lot of cool history. Even if you don't feel like you know very much about Boston, you still probably already knew that. This was the city where the Revolutionary War started! The Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, the Salem Witch Trials—the early history of the Boston area is rich with some of the most riveting stories that American history has to offer. And moving into the modern era, Boston still managed to be the site of some of America's most interesting historical sagas, from the Boston Strangler, to the Great Molasses Flood. However, to me, one story stands out above the rest, and it didn't happen all that long ago.
The story I'm talking about is the heist of the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum, which happened in 1990.
Tunisia was going to be my second country in Africa, so I was excited to at least get a taste for it. We didn't have much time here, but we would still be able to see a decent chunk of Tunis. The flight here from Algiers was short but green and scenic as we made our way horizontally across the top of Africa. And as our plane made its final decent over northern Tunisia, I was excited. Here are a few pictures I snapped out the window. Drink 'em in, because everything went to shit from here.
We sat on the deck of the boat eating our dinner together. Nobody was speaking. We were not in good spirits. Lightning flashed silently off in the distance in all directions with increasing frequency. The coast of Sumbawa sat calmly a few hundred meters away. I watched the lights twinkle from shore, wishing I was there instead of on this boat. With the wind picking up, we could all feel the storm coming.
The rest of us, strangers to one another at this point, looked at each other, and then with an uneasy shrug climbed down onto the deck of this tiny boat. It bobbled precariously with every passing wave. One thing was certain: this was going to be interesting. So let’s fast-forward a little bit, shall we?
There was a huge, black SUV stopped in the middle of the street. There was a mysterious white powder all over the shattered windshield. The rest of the vehicle was already very badly dented, as if a crowd of people had attacked it. There was an angry mob gathered around around the drivers seat door. Something was happening there.
