We left Prague and took a five hour train ride to Berlin. The train was nice but had this weird system where some people had seat reservations and some (like us) didn’t, so there weren't two seats together anywhere in our car that were unreserved for the entire trip to Berlin. This meant that we, and lots of other people, had to juggle ourselves around in different seats for different segments of the trip. Kind of annoying. Anyway, we made it to Berlin and found our way to St Christophers Hostel. The hostel was pretty big and corporate, but the positive side of that was that it was really really clean and it had a fun bar/restaurant downstairs with a good wireless internet connection. On our first afternoon in Berlin we walked to an area ... read more

We took an airport shuttle from Linz, Austria to Cesky Krumlov across the border in the Czech Republic. Our shuttle driver may have been a nice man, but he drove like a maniac. He went about 70 mph down small windy back country roads barely wide enough for two cars, and then slammed on the brakes and veered to the right every time another car appeared. To his credit, he did sometimes slow down a little on the turns. We arrived in Cesky Krumlov safe and sound and we caught the tail-end of an annual renaissance style festival with marching bands and costumes, food and street performers, and a music stage in the main square. After making our way around a guy on stilts and a bunch of tourists, we found our hotel, Castle View ... read more

Lindsay and I took our time making our way back to Austria from Northern Italy. We stopped off at a scenic lake for a sausage lunch (of course!) and got off the highway a few times to take the smaller roads. We arrived in Salzburg after about 4 hours of driving and checked into our hostel, the Institute St. Sebastian, which is a women’s religious student dorm during the school year, but rents out some of the rooms during the summer. They had lost our reservation because another person with the exact same name had checked into the hotel the night before using our reservation information. So, now we’re here for two nights instead of three (they didn’t have a room for the third night), but luckily we were able to add another night to ... read more

Okay, maybe that title was just a cheap excuse to use the word "Wiener." We arrived in Vienna on Friday after a short one hour train ride from Bratislava and found our way to Hostel Ruthensteiner. The hostel was great - really clean and bright and well-run, and best of all, they had washers and dryers. We spent our first morning/early afternoon in Vienna just doing laundry (first time we've had a dryer since we went home for Christmas!) and catching up on email. Later in the afternoon we ventured into the city and headed to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, which holds the Hapsburgs' collection of European art, as well as an Egyptian art section that we didn't have time to see. The museum was great, if a bit expensive. That night we walked around for ... read more

We left Istanbul at 6am on Monday morning with a whopping two hours of sleep under our belts (and a few beers the night before), flew all the way back to Milan, and then caught our flight to Budapest. Despite being pretty exhausted by the time we arrived, we both really liked Budapest from the beginning. Driving in from the airport was kind of strange as it looked like we could have been anywhere in the Midwest - it's really flat with huge corn fields and hot, muggy weather. This geographic confusion continued as we arrived in the city, because everyone there looked and dressed like Americans. We weren’t necessarily expecting Budapest to feel so familiar or “normal,” but I suppose after Portugal and then Istanbul, a lot of places in Europe would. We got ... read more