Getting from Dubai to Vienna was drama free - got picked up from the hotel in a brand new Cadillac and this driver was actually careful about the car, no near misses on this trip. Dubai airport is something different, the place is seriously lacking in places to eat and seating. You walk straight in amongst the shops and it seems like catching your flight is of secondary concern. Once you go upstairs to where the departure gates are there is people laying around everywhere because of the lack of accessible seats - most of the level is partitioned off for [View Full Entry]

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In the morning their offsider arrived and she spoke good English, sorted out money and things. I was going to go for a walk around but didn’t get to it, just checked my email. Couldn’t see the big dog that they had, well I assume he was big going by the barking he had been doing last night when I turned up. Before I had left Australia Monica has said to make sure I had some warm clothes and good shoes as it was minus 15 the night before and they had a foot of snow. Well not today… yes it [View Full Entry]

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Got up a bit before 6am to get to the station for the 6:40am train. Said good bye to Julia and timed a bus to the station pretty well. The board wasn’t yet saying what platform my train was going to be on, just that it was late. But of course the dickhead taxi drivers were everywhere and hassling the shit out of me. After walking up and down a few times I went and grabbed some Maccas for brekkie. By the time I finished the train was up on the board and I checked out the platform. There was a [View Full Entry]

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Had a bit of sleep-in in the morning and when I got up I was hearing from the Istanbul kids all about the night out they had. Damn I was regretting not being able to. They had seen some extremely hot girls getting up on the bar and stripping off, dancing. “Ireland” (we all ended up using the country of someone’s origin instead of their name) said she was in no way bisexual but she would’ve jumped at the chance to try it with these girls. And I spent the night watching some paedophile perving on young girls. Damn damn damn. [View Full Entry]

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I was up a bit before 7 in the morning to go driving out to the ruins of the real life Dracula’s castle. Now I had made a big mistake in hiring this car that I hadn’t worked out yet. 1. they drive on the other side of the road, which means the rest of the car is to your right not to your left 2. the car was a manual and I drive an auto, so I was changing gears with the wrong hand 3. the map that the hostel had provided me was not so good for driving - [View Full Entry]

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Felt a little seedy the next morning and didn’t get going until about 11am. Retraced my way back to the train station and got myself a ticket to Bucuresti (Bucharest is the English version), which is a two hour train ride south on the Wallachian plain. 42 lei for a first class seat, or 38 for second class... seemed like a no brainer and I thought better to pay a little bit more and be looked after a bit better away from the gypsies, but turns out when I got on the train it was one big carriage. First class was [View Full Entry]

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In the morning went and had a look at the Black Church. There was a lot of police and military police cars outside, some VIP was getting a guided tour through the church at the time. I went in for a look and sat in a pew to soak in the atmosphere. There was some security wandering around and giving me death stares, walking past me trying to see inside my jacket. Big, mean looking buggers they were, looking like angry Mirat Safins too. When the VIP went past there was about 6 around him and they all glared their way [View Full Entry]

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Woke up around 7am and we were somewhere in Romania. The old lady in my compartment was on her way to Bucharest to visit her mother. She was German and spoke a little English, plus lots of Romanian and Italian. We managed to communicate though and she told me a few stories about Romania, and taught me a few Romanian words (boo-nah-dee-ma-naat-za = “good morning”, boo-nah-zee-wah = “good afternoon”, boo-nah-zeh-rah = “good evening”). All of a sudden the door to the compartment ripped open and instead of seeing a cop or soldier or someone wanting to mug us, [View Full Entry]

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Got up at 7:00 next morning to go sightseeing. I wanted to get in for a tour of parliament house but couldn’t because of the stupid riots in the previous weeks. I decided I didn’t need to jump on the tour bus because I had seen half of the sights from the outside anyway, and a big remaining drawcard was the tour of parliament which wasn’t happening anyway. I checked out Heroes Square, which has statues of famous Hungarians who played a major role in the country’s history. Nearby there’s the remains of a castle which was cool, has a real [View Full Entry]

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Train arrived from Vienna about 13:00, sorry the correct train arrived about 12:40, but I wasn’t paying attention as I was starting to pack things in the train and just looked up and saw a “K” at the start of the name of the station so jumped out. It was then that I realised no one else had gotten off the train. The place looked like some kind of wasteland like you see in movies set in a desolate near future. It was like Mad Max but not in the desert. I felt like I had landed in the set of [View Full Entry]

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