By Irena: After making our way through parts of Ukraine and Poland, Darvin and I officially feel like we have had a good sampling of Eastern Europe. The family visits were really good. Surprising at times, very educational, emotional, and heartwarming too. It was a LONG journey from Croatia to Ukraine, opting for the long train ride over a flight to save some cash. Rather than trying to do the 32 hour train journey in one shot, we opted to spend one night in Budapest, which was a great decision. It was a really beautiful city with far too much to [View Full Entry]

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Darvin Wrote: Considering we had not expected to even visit two of the three former Yugoslavian states that we did, this most recent part of our journey has been both enjoyable and also very sobering. When we were looking to try and find our way from Greece to Croatia the only cheap way to go was to fly into Belgrade, the capitol of Serbia (and at one time the capitol of the former Yugoslavian Federation), and then make our way by bus through Sarajevo, the capitol of Bosnia-Herzegovina, finally arriving to the town of Split in Croatia. The scars of the [View Full Entry]

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Irena Wrote: Ahhh Greece... We just left yesterday after spending 2 full weeks there. Parts of it felt much different than my first experience there 5 years ago. I don't know if I hadn't noticed it before, but some places felt so touristy, it almost reminded me of a European Mexico. The restaurant owners, tour operators and sales people were so aggressive at times! Particularly in Athens. We could not walk down a street without the restaurant owners coming up to us, handing us their menus and telling us that the food was "very good, very cheap, you must sit". The [View Full Entry]

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By Darvin: We arrived in Lisbon late Sunday night and caught a cab directly to our residencio (budget hotel) located near the downtown center of Lisbon. Right away I noticed that compared to Barcelona and Madrid the buildings in Lisbon were much more run down, the streets had more garbage on them, were smellier and there was more graffiti. The history of Portugal is again one of very rough times until only recently but the old historic area of Lisbon did not wear it very well. The metro was very easy to use however, and once we got out and did [View Full Entry]

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I knew that going from Ibiza to BOOM was going to be intense, but as it turns out the only real hardship was simply getting from the airport to the festival. Before we left Ibiza, and once we arrived in Madrid and found out that no-one was at the airport to shuttle us the 5 hour drive to the festival site in Portugal, I tried numerous times to sort out our transportation (thank you Nilza for all your effort!!), but in the end we were on our own. At first I thought that getting to BOOM from Madrid on our own [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Barcelona was not easy but once our close friends Rusty and Ada arrived, the idea of traveling with them to join a whole crew of our other friends on the world infamous ultimate Spanish island of night clubbing, Ibiza, made heading off to our next stop much more exciting. Of course once we arrived, Ada's suitcase was missing (Easyjet said they had no idea of knowing where it was or when it would arrive, wtf?!??!?), but after a 40 min wait it arrived on the next flight which was a huge relief. The other odd thing about our flight was [View Full Entry]

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Although this is our first city in Europe to have visited on our trip we could not have asked for a more perfect beginning to our time away from home. Four nights in the Hotel Dante, hours and hours each day of sightseeing world heritage sites, endless supply of gelato, a dip in the Mediterranean, consistent hot sunny weather and way too many cool shops and cafes to check out all made for a whirlwind but thoroughly enjoyable stay. It has been an intensely grounding experience to walk through ancient old narrow streets and place our hands on stones that have [View Full Entry]

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