My return from Turkey brought with it quite a jolt back to reality and a fair bit of culture shock - indicated by the fact that my first thought as I was flying into Bratislava was “where are all the mosques?”. But, it also implied lots of exciting arrivals and reunifications and the end of travelling alone! After a long and exhausting journey from Istanbul, which involved: a bus trip where the driver nearly made us late to the Istanbul airport because he stopped to buy a packet of cigarettes and then drove round the city in circles for ages; a flight in the early hours of the morning, meaning that no sleep was had that night; somehow managing to get from the Bratislava airport to the bus station without any Slovakian money, thanks to the ... read more

After all of my recent international adventures, I thought it was about time I updated you all on how things are going in Prague. A lot has happened in the past couple of months, but I’ll start with the most important thing: my birthday! I had a wonderful, although not particularly Czech, birthday. The night before my birthday I went out for tea with a bunch of friends (all Australians, so I certainly wasn’t missing having an Australian birthday!). We went to a vegetarian restaurant in the city, which has become my favourite restaurant in Prague so far. The food there is awesome and it was especially great to be able to have a meal that actually had a variety of plants in it, not just potato! After many restaurant meals of cheese and potato, I ... read more

Guten Tag meine Damen und Herren, So, the first of my many planned trips around Europe this year was to Berlin on the Easter long weekend. I headed over there with an Austrian friend, although she was in Hamburg for half the time we were there. Despite my previous disinterest in anything German, I really enjoyed being there, much more than I had expected I would. My first impression of Germany, as we were travelling from Prague to Berlin on the train, was that it looks just like a more upmarket version of the Czech Republic! The buildings and cities looked pretty much the same, but they’re just looked after much better. Although we were travelling through East Germany, apparently it’s different in West Germany. I pretty much spent my weekend being the stereotypical tourist in ... read more

Well, I’ve been in Prague just over a week now and what a week it has been! It’s been an incredibly difficult and frustrating week but also very rewarding and I’ve already done lots of interesting things here. Everything here got off to a bit of a bad start basically from the minute I arrived at the airport. Getting from the airport to my dormitory was a minor disaster, mainly because of lack of communication. I took public transport to get there - ended up waiting an hour for a bus that was never going to come because it doesn’t run on weekends, which the lady at the information desk conveniently failed to tell me. I also ended up getting lost on the way and with no way of contacting anyone and no-one around who spoke ... read more