Sean and Megan

Saturday 10th - Thursday 15th January 2009 Although I was excited about the Australian Summer waiting for us, our last week in Vienna was a little sad. We said goodbye to Jamie (for the last time) on no less than four occasions and met Malachy for lunch and Emmanuelle and Hans Peter for dinner. Gathering our belongings and cleaning up the apartment I’d fallen in love with and teaching my last lessons were harder than expected. Fortunately, Jane and Phil arrived on Saturday and kept us entertained and busy for the final few days. We showed them around our favourite sites in Vienna and did a couple of final things that we’d been holding off on until they arrived. For the weather conscious, the most important thing to note of this period is that it was ... read more

Friday 5th - Tuesday 8th December 2008 Our motto for this trip has been ‘When in Rome’, so our journey really wouldn’t feel complete without a visit to this ancient, historical city. With our travels rapidly coming to an end, we squeezed in a quick long weekend between visits to Northern Ireland and England. The scene was set with an overnight train journey from Vienna to Rome. We had the top bunks in a little cabin that we shared with three other people and it felt like we were on a school camp (the other cabins were filled with children on a school camp, so this was probably why). The journey was fine, although the beds were deceptively hard and only about three quarters of Sean fit into his. I woke every time the train stopped, ... read more

Saturday 1st - Tuesday 4th November 2008 Sean’s Ma (who’d been in the UK since August) organised a trip to visit Jamie and Sean in Vienna, but flew in and out of Prague. Of course we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check out the famous city so went up to meet her for a four day mini-break. We are a little behind with the blog, so here is a wee account (I’m just back from Ireland). Getting There - Prague is just four hours north of Vienna, so we caught a train there early on the Saturday morning and late back Tuesday night. With lots of farms, cottages nestled between rivers and woods and the occasional small town with huge, concrete, communist-style apartment buildings, it was one of the more scenic journeys we’ve taken. We ... read more

Friday 17th - Monday 20th October 2008 PestBuda - Being the amalgamation of the city of Pest and Budain in the 19th Century it could have easily been named that, but I agree it sounds better the other way round too. So Hungary has a very impressive history, and it’s easy to see the proud history with the large bronze statue at the corner of every street. In fact, they had so many statues they have taken some away and made a tourist park out of them. Memento Park is a collection of Soviet statues installed during their period of occupation and it was worth a brief visit. After 1990, these statues were to be torn down, but the park was created to perserve this history. Getting out of town is always a good thing to ... read more

Saturday 23 - Wednesday 27 August 2008 We both had a tops night sleep in the ‘Romantika’ (something about ships perhaps....) and, because we had forgotten to set our watches to the new time zone, only woke up when an announcement was made saying we were an hour from Tallinn. The port we arrived at was very well set up and clearly catered for large numbers of tourists arriving by passenger ferry. There were already three large ships berthed in the port and later we discovered a second port just around the bay. A city sightseeing bus was waiting out the front, so we decided to do one full loop of the tour and then get off at the stop closest to our hostel. We couldn’t realise it at the time, but because of all the ... read more