Dita Kiki

The decision for this road trip to Budapest was not a hard one. I happened to own a valid Schengen visa, a leftover of my previous trip to Strasbourg, and I asked a friend of ours and his girlfriend if they would go. So a week of planning, we booked two rooms at the Apartment4you Budapest through my favorite booking site, and it cost only €29 per apartment for two for one night stay. I prepared some itinerary based on a lot of Googling as it was my first time to be in Budapest. It was not a first visit to Budapest for Kiki, but the previous three were business trips, which means that he hasn't seen a lot of the city. It was the end of October 2012 and the day was super rainy when ... read more

If you're following this travelblog, we apologize in advance for our super long off-the-blog period. It's not that we had stopped traveling, we have just been super busy to find a free hour to sit down and post. In fact, we have a pile of pictures and travel journals and notes to be processed to texts once we have some free time. Today, I finally have the time, while Kiki is still on a business trip to Montenegro. Let me get to this one story first. It's about Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. We hopped to Bratislava on our easter trip to Vienna. About the trip to Vienna itself, we'll get to that later. So, we were driving to Bratislava from Vienna. Few meters from the border, we tanked the car in a gas station where ... read more

Sunday, April 24th 2011, was one special day for us. Not only that Kiki turned 28 on that day, but also it was Easter, that of course was followed by the Easter Monday, a national holiday, left us with a long weekend. We had decided to visit Dubrovnik for that, which was a decision we had made quite a while ago, when we accidentally found a very good offer for flight from Zagreb to Dubrovnik for less than 40 Euro one way for each. Kiki has a colleague in Dubrovnik who kindly offered us her flat for us to stay in, so we didn’t even think twice to go. We flew from Zagreb on Friday evening after work, and our flight was delayed for half an hour, making us reaching Dubrovnik quite late because of the ... read more

What would first come to your mind when you heard about Croatian tourism? The sea. What would a tourist visit the first second he/she landed in Croatia? The sea. The Adriatic sea. Let me tell you: Croatia is beyond the sea. Forget the sea for a while, take your backpack and head up north. As all the visitors are concentrated in Istria and Dalmacija region, the Central Croatia is almost forgotten. In fact, Central Croatia, especially Zagorje and Varazdin area, host the most important and beautiful baroque centers, castles, and fortress one can find. There is no sea, but there is green hilly area hiding tons of cultural heritage Croatia has. Trakoscan Castle is located in Varazdin County, around 100 km from Zagreb. Kiki and I visited the castle in late November. As Croatia has a ... read more

One Friday in late November 2010, Kiki had this invitation of attending some presentation of the project he supervised few months before. He had to assess the progress of some project on new technology to enhance olive oil production or something like that. The presentation took place in Vodnjan, one city in Istria. So it just crossed my mind suddenly: another Istria trip! And Kiki had the same thought, so we just hit the road, without any planning of how long we'd stay, where we'd sleep, or anything like that. We arrived in Vodnjan around 4 pm. Vodnjan is just about 10 km on north of Pula. So we took the same route as we did before, when we did the Pula-Rovinj-Opatija trip. Vodnjan was typical Istria. It was a very small town with just one ... read more