Some Initial Notes...

Hey there! Thanks for joining me on this fun trip to Eastern Europe. For those of you who know me (and us), you may already know that I have a deep love for the history, culture and people of this particular area of the world, and jumped at the chance to go back when our friend Ron VanderGriend asked me to join him to work with some of our Hungarian brothers and sisters who are planting churches in Budapest. Because I have the coolest wife in the world, as well as the coolest boss and friends, I was also able to book some time plus and minus the training to schedule in some other stuff that I really wanted to see and do while I am in the area. Below is a brief synopsis of those sorts of things.

Really, I have 3 “macro” objectives for this trip:

1) Encourage Hungarian church planters. I’m SO excited that I will have an opportunity to spend some time with friends who are engaging many of the same struggles that we are at GCC, but just in a context that happens to be 6,000 miles away. While I can by no means do all the stuff our whole team does during our Innovate conference, I will seek in some small way to bring some of the same notions, ideas and values with me to encourage the men and women who will be at the training.

2) Visit Auschwitz. More on this later as well, but I’ve wanted to visit Auschwitz since 1992 when I took a college course at the University of Arkansas on literature by/for/about the Holocaust against the Jewish people that occurred in WWII.

3) Hunt Vampires. Well, not really, but i'm going to enjoy being in the nexus of the lore. More on this later, but there are several sites of both historical, mythological and literary interest that I would like to visit, and so am planning time and travel in to be able to do so.

Having said that, “The Plan” is as follows for how I actually plan on accomplishing the above:

• Arrive in Krakow on 10/5 and hang out there for the day. The city has a lot of history, and I would like to see and Ron VanderGriend said that much of it is still relatively “untouched” in the last 50 years, and you can get a really good sense of what it felt like even today. After exploring the city a bit, I’ll probably stay at a Hostel for the night and then head out early on Saturday morning (10/6).
• On morning of 10/6, take a train to Auschwitz. It’s a World History site, so the museums at the camp are free, and I plan on spending most of the day there if I can. There are two camps at Auschwitz, actually, one on each side of the road, and I will try to see them both if I can. By the way, my reason for visiting this site is neither distinctly “historical” (I’m not a WWII “buff” or anything), nor morbid, but rather because I took a semester long course in college on literature about the Holocaust, and it absolutely changed my life and the way that I look at things (to this day, whenever I see fireplaces, chimneys and smoke, the first image that associates in my head is one related to the death camps and both the horror and the triumph of the human soul that so many of the prisoners found, shared and exhibited there. I think I just wanted to be able to put a “physical reality” with all the mental stimuli, but plan to spend most of the day simply in silence as I walk through there. I think Elie Wiesel said that there is some validity to the notion that the only really acceptable response to such immense evil and tragedy is that of silence. I’ll plan on observing such.
• I’ll probably take an overnight train (or series of trains) from Auschwitz (which is in Poland) to the Slovakian border, and then from there to a small city called Visnove for the day (10/7). If everything goes as planned, I should get to Visnove sometime in the morning (like around 9 am), and should have the whole day there. Visnove is less than half a mile from Csjethe Castle (Erzebet Bathory’s place – pronounced “Chayth”), and while the castle is now mostly in ruins, it’s still largely a “must see” for any fan of all things vampire. More on why this castle is significant later, but I’ll try to take a late train from Visnove (wouldn’t want to miss sunset at the castle if I can help it!), and while originally, I was just going to head down to Budpaest from there, think that in stead I may jaunt over to Vienna for day (it’s not that far) and see what’s up there. It’s been 16 years since I’ve been to Vienna, and I was pretty much in travel shock for most of that day anyway, so will hopefully be able to enjoy it more now.
• So that’s 10/8 in Vienna, and other than seeing if they really do have Vienna Sausages, I’m not sure what else I’ll try to see. Will probably take an overnight train from Vienna to Budapest, and hope to land in Budapest sometime before noon as that’s when Ron V. gets in and we can start training. Side Note: If Vienna doesn’t work out, I may try Prague instead. I’ve seen lots of movies where it is featured prominently, and wouldn’t mind seeing it if I can.
• 10/9 – 11 – Training with our friends from TBL (The Bible League) and the people who are planting churches in the post-modern, high-tech city of Budapest. Many of the issues they are wrestling with are the same issues that GCC has either faced or is facing, and I’m bringing along lots of great material to share with them in the hopes that we will be able to encourage and help where we can. I’m also going to cover some Purpose Driven materials, and Ron will sync that with the TBL curriculum so that the planters will understand the parallels to the training that they’ve already had.
• After training ends on 10/11, I’ll try to catch an overnight train to Brasov, which is in Romania. Brasov is the closest and most direct “waypoint” to getting to Bran Castle (the legendary “Castle Dracula” where the real Vlad Tepes lived and operated during the time he served as Voivode – “warlord” – and from which he dispersed his notoriously horrific and tyrannical rule as “Vlad the Impaler”). Bran sits about 15 miles from Brasov, but shuttles run there daily, and I plan to be on one of them. Incidentally, if you track Jonathan Harker’s journey in Stoker’s book, you end up right where Bran is located, but unlike Stoker’s book, Bran is a beautiful, well-manicured, immaculately maintained historical site that resembles in no way the ruin to which Stoker alludes. More on this later, but it’s why I like to think that the “meta-mythos” that Stoker tapped to make his monster was actually a combination of Erzebet Bathory, Vlad Tepes, good old superstitions and other macro-lore that just circulate in that area of the world anyway. My own personal opinion is that Bran is the “site” of the “Castle Dracula”, but Csjethe is the actual castle. That’s been posited by some other scholars, but is usually dismissed as grounded almost completely on conjecture. So… feel free to draw your own conclusion.
• I have to be back in Budapest on 10/14 for my flight home, so will take an overnight train again from Brasov to be present early am to make my flight home.

So… long first post, but hopefully it will serve as a skeleton for the trip and some general ideas that go along with it. I’m guessing if you’ve made it this far, you are probably either REALLY close friends or family, so please know that I love you all, and can’t wait to share the experiences with you through this blog and after I return.