Starting from scratch

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Hi there,

It seems as though travel blog has had a meltdown and lost all of my entries. I hope you had a chance to read them before they were lost.

Lara and I are currently in Budapest, Hungary. I will give a bit of a run down on Poland, Slovakia and Hungary where we have been the last week or so.

Poland. From Vilnius in Lithuania we jumped an overnight bus down to Warsaw. After walking around the old town and taking a few happy snaps we jumped onto a train and headed for Krakow that same afternoon.

Krakow was great. Its old town has a real buzz about it and somehow it escaped damage in WW2. From here we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The thing that blew me away when I heard it was that these camps were actually insured and still have the original fire resevoirs!

In Krakow we also went to the Salt mines, castle and indulged in some of Polands finest beverages including Bison grass vodka. From Krakow we took a bus further south to Zakopane which is a ski resort town at the base of the High Tatra mountains. This place was packed with tourists and fairly pricey, but very pretty.

Wanting to spend more time in the mountains we took a bus with those riduculous adds all over the windows so you can't see out, through the mountains to the Slovakian side.

As it turned out the Slovakian side was nothing like the polish side (except for the mountains). The resorts were very small with not so many people, and it was about 1/3 of the price of Poland. A$1 beers! Although I managed to pick myself up a case of the snivels in Poland so had to just look on as others made the most of the cheap beer, very unfortunate.

The downside of Slovakia is that everything is difficult. We waited a combined total of 1 hour 20 minutes for 2 late trains just to get to the capital Bratislava. To add to the pain, after the woman selling the tickets for the 5 hour train ride assured us there were no reserved seats we spent the whole ride getting kicked out of seats that were reserved.

Fortunately we learned from that experience in Bratislava and made sure we had seats for Budapest where we kicked others out of our seats.

Bratislava was a small town with a nice old town which had bands going on in the streets for their summer festival. It also apparently has the cage of shame where people used to be put on display, however I failed to find it let alone get locked in it.

So we are now in Hungary. Due to a bit of luck combined with a bit of reckless spending we managed to take in a small piece of Hungarian culture, The Hungarian Formula 1 Grand Prix! A great day and awesome to see. No shortage of security though. They had security guards lining the fence every 10 metres for the entire track. Someone still managed to get a flare onto pit straight god bless them.

While this place is as expensive as anywhere in western europe, there are still a huge number of very poor people. An American guy we were staying with was telling us he bought a house here which the Gypsies have robbed 5 times, the last time taking the front door as well. Apparently they stole amoungst other things 500kg of scaffolding, a 150kg gas heater and his coffee which he was most upset about.

We are about to head back to the train station to pick up our bags from left luggage if they are still there and jump on a train to Transylvania.

Hopefully some of my other entries reappear in the next few days, if not then enjoy this one.

Cheers
Christian

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Comments

[Harry]

Did Mark Webber finish?
Hi Christian! Thanks for your amusing insights!My big question is - Was that Formula 1 the Grand Prix that Mark Webber actually finished(10th I think?)Lara would have needed her ear plugs!! Hope you got your left luggage OK with everything else disappearing! That Cage of Shame in Bratislava sounds interesting I think Pope John Paul came from Krakow. What a contrast from Swedan - $1beers and you missed out because of your flu....sob, sob......