From the Bosphorus to the Baltic

Final fragments

2009-05-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

We've now been back in England nearly two weeks - and it's taken this long to get over the feeling of disorientation and to start sorting out the jumble of impressions and memories of the last three months. It really was the most incredible experience, and I can assure everyone who is asking that we did have a brilliant time. I don't want to call it the trip of a lifetime, because hopefully it is the first of many, although possibly this, my first proper travelling experience of any length of time, will always be a bit unique. It's a part of the world I definitely want to go back to. Turkey fascinated me, and I really want to go back to explore parts of it outside Istanbul, such as Ephesus, Ankara and Cappadocia. I'd love to go back on a retreat to the Rila monastery in Bulgaria - just stay there for a couple of nights completely removed from the rest of the world up in the mountains. Romania also is an intruiging country: it would be great to go hiking in Trannsylvania in the summer, but also to explore more of the northern part of the country - Marmures - which is still very untouched, as well as to visit the city of revolutions: Timisoara. Budapest, of course, I would go back to in a flash for more opera, baths, cake and Danube romance. Little Olomouc in the Czech Republic definitely warrants another visit in the perfect Poet's Hostel (best one we visited I think). And I just fell in love with Poland as a whole - such incredible spirit and rejuvenation. The trip also made us both want to visit slightly more far-flung places such as the Ukraine and Molodova. Belarus looks interesting too, but perhaps when it ceases to be run by a communist dicatator whose KGB is still bugging most of the country.

And we didn't quite make it to the country which has had the greatest influence on this region in the last hundred years - Russia. All through the trip, it has felt as if it is looming in the background like a rather sinister but fascinating shadow. We stopped just on the border with Estonia, tantalisingly close to St Petersburg, which many other travellers in Tallinn were going on to. Apparently the Estonian border isn't the best place to cross because of the strained relations between Russia and Estonia, and we heard a couple of horror stories from other travellers about being stopped at the border and questioned for hours by border guards before paying them substantial bribes. In the hostel in Tallinn, I found a book on the last of the Romanovs and got hooked - it seemed a very appropriate final book to read on the trip, in a city where the Tsars came on holiday in the summer. The armadillo and the tortoise will one day team up again to explore Russia - it's a promise!

Twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, what can I say about our impressions of post-communist Eastern Europe? Firstly, it's really no longer possible to group together this part of the world under one name. There is such an amazing variety between the countries, as well as huge diversity within the countries themselves. A tiny Bulgarian village in the middle of nowhere has nothing in common with the bustling beauty of Prague. The difference in language alone is extraordinary - to go from Turkish, to Cyrillic Bulgarian, to Frenchified Romanian to bizarre Magyarian Hungarian is quite an experience.

But as a summing up makes generalisation inevitable, I would say that the overwhelming common feeling is that of rejuvenation - an incredible bounce-back spirit of survival in so many beautiful countries which have spent much of their history under Imperial occupation of one sort or another, then underwent Nazi occupation with all the horrors of World War Two and the concentration camps, then Soviet occupation which lasted for nearly fifty years. Cities such as Warsaw and Dresden which were almost totally destroyed have been lovingly rebuilt, and in most places there is a feeling of buzzing new life and new opportunities. Of course it wasn't all rosy. The real poverty we experienced in Bulgaria and Romania was pretty shocking - especially when you consider that these countries are now in the EU. Hopefully the financial help resulting from membership will be a big help. The huge prejudice towards the Roma in these countries, along with Slovakia, was also unpleasant to encounter, as was of course the massive social problems within the Roma communities themselves. And perhaps nastiest of all for a region with such a troubled Jewish history were the remaining traces of anti-Semitism which we found. Don't get me wrong - it's only traces, and we were also struck by the thousands of people under the Nazis who did take in and protect their Jewish neighbours. But nevertheless the occasional bits of anti-Jewish graffiti with swastikas, the dubious monument at the Hill of Crosses and the stations of the cross in a cathedral in Olomouc and again in Tallinn with anti-Semitic caricatures, struck an undeniably uncomfortable note. Some old wounds haven't quite healed up - especially in the former Sudetenland, as we found when we were in Liberec where the story of the evicted German community still isn't acknowledged. As we went on, it struck us more and more just how recent this is. For our generation, who learnt what little we know about this area in history lessons, after the Tudors, it was a striking realisation. In the Baltics of course, 1989 wasn't the end of occupation - there were still Russian tanks killing Latvian citizens in Riga in 1991, which was when they finally regained their independence.

So much still to see and still to learn. We have come home with lists of books, films and artists we need to investigate. I'm going to start by reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to get an idea of the gulags to which so many people in Eastern Europe were sent. Wish me luck....

This will be my last post so goodbye and thank you for reading this blog. I hope it's been interesting to read and I'm sorry there were sometimes long gaps between postings - getting reliable internet access was sometimes rather difficult! We're both really glad we wrote it, as otherwise I think we'd have forgotten a lot of our adventures. To finish, I can only say again that this is not going to be the last of our adventures. Where to next? Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the former Yugoslavia, the Dalmatian coast, or maybe further afield to South America or India? But that, in the words of Kipling, will have to be another story.

News Flash

2009-05-21T01:26:00.000-07:00

Our special correspondent in London is please to report that Sarah and Lucy arrived safely back on British soil last night and were taken away by their respective families to be fed fish and chips, washed and put into bed. They are said to be glad to be back home, although some what confused: it is alleged that Lucy thanked the ticket collector on the Stansted Express in Estonian, although this story has not been confirmed. It is hoped that reflections on the end of the trip will be posted in the next day or so, and that being the case, regular readers of this blog are encouraged to stay around for a little while longer, if they feel so inclined.

Another day, another country

2009-05-20T04:29:00.000-07:00

You would think that the last day of an incredibly busy three months would be spent relaxing in the sunshine, possibly with a beer and reminiscing about days gone by. However, we decided to take in one more country by travelling to Finland and back. Varro kindly gave us a lift to the ferry terminal in the morning and helped us with the tickets and check in and we were soon on the rather impressive katamaran which was taking us to country number thirteen. I was very excited about the sea crossing, Sarah rather less so, but we both agreed it was great fun to arrive in the heart of a capital city by boat. We got out right on to the main Esplanada, a lovely boulevard of Art Nouveau buildings and incredibly posh shops and cafes. Our day in Helsinki was absolutely lovely. We explored the Orthodox and Lutheran cathedrals (the latter is much more impressive on the outside than the inside), wandered round the docks admiring the beautiful yachts and wandered in bookshops which had whole sections devoted to the Moomins.

Perhaps the highlight was visiting the Atheneum Art Gallery, which had a special exhibition on the Kalevala: the Finnish legendary cycle about the folk hero Vaininaimen (sp?). The original poems are ancient, but the cycle itself is a 19th century construction built up when Finnish nationalism and independence from Russian rule became hot topics. It was a wonderful exhibition, and really exciting to encounter a mythology with which we were completely unfamiliar. Lots of strange monsters, creation and rebirth legends, quests, nymphs, water giants, healing bees, the river of the dead....so many overlaps and also differences with other mythologies. I think it was actually a good way to encounter the legends, as the rooms took you through it motif by motif rather than as a continual story: probably a more authentic first experience of how the stories were told and understood. It left us both wanting to read the Kalevala....though possibly not in Finnish, as it's one of the most unusual languages in the world and apparently fiendishly difficult to learn.

We arrived back from Helsinki around nine at night absolutely exhausted and stuffed ourselves with a final meal of....you guessed it...pasta and pesto before tumbling into bed. A really memorable last day, which has left us with all sorts of new interests and questions. The best way to finish a trip which has been one new experience after another.

Eurovision, Baltic style

2009-05-20T00:40:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Tallin in the afternoon and were rather impressed at our ability to navigate the tram system to the Old Town. Tragically, this sense of direction didn't last, and we spent an awfully long time searching up and down the medieval streets trying to find the hostel which had moved location since our guidebooks were published. Eventually, we found where we were supposed to be and dumped our bags for the final time on this trip.

Tallin is an interesting last place to stop as for many people, it is where they begin their trip and so the hostel was full of people beginning their journeys, and Lucy and I were quite sad to realise it was all over for us. A guy called Jonathan was staying in our dorm and was doing a very similar trip to us except in reverse and taking in Belarus and Ukraine, so we spent a lot of time sharing tips of Romania and Bulgaria with him. He also let us know that all museums in Tallin were open and free until midnight tonight, so after dinner we headed to the City Musuem. It was quite a bizarre museum, with a huge section on men's clothing, which we didn't really understand, but was nevertheless quite entertaining.

After a coffee in the Main Square, we headed back to the hostel to watch the end of Eurovision, a first for me. It was amazing to see how seriously it is taken here, proper cause for national pride! After complaining bitterly about the unfair voting, we headed to bed.

The following morning, we headed to the Cathedral for mass, a small and beautifully simple building just down the road from us. After joining in with the hymns in our best Estonian, we headed up to the Lutheran Cathedral, a very German building with lots of coats of arms and white-washed walls. We had lunch in a little artisan's cafe before heading to Kadriog, a district of Tallin with beautiful parks and a couple of art museums in the old summer palaces of the Tsars. By far the most interesting museum for me was the modern art gellery which took you through Estonian art chronologically and was a great way of seeing how historical events had been interpreted artistically. The park is very beautiful, and a wonderful place to just wander round and soak up the atmosphere. This district also houses the Song Bowl, where the Estonian song festivals are held. It is the biggest ampitheatre-type place I have ever seen. Song in Estonia, as elsewhere in the Baltics, played a huge role in the emerging national consciousness and later in the fight against Soviet oppression. A lovely evening spent at the Hostel, chatting with everyone about their travels, including one guy's experience of con men on the Russian border, which made me very glad that we chose not to go to Russia.

On Monday morning we said goodbye to Jonathan, who was heading to Tartu, and spent the morning exploring Tallin's Old Town and updating the blog. In the afternoon, we met up with Varro and his lovely family who are friends of Lucy's aunt and uncle. They gave us a really interesting tour of Tallin, including the school that Varro's mum founded in the 1980s as a counter to Soviet education which has lots of attached artisan's workshops. Varro also took us to see the Stalinist area, which was used to house the huge number of Russians who were moved here under the communist regime. That evening, we had a lovely dinner with them and their friends and had a great time playing Narnia with their children. A really lovely family.

Reliving our student days

2009-05-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

Between the capitals of Latvia and Estonia, we stopped off for two nights at Tartu - a university town in Estonia about three hours on the road from Tallinn. It's a loveable little town which has an atmosphere very like Durham or Cambridge as there are lots of students around, sitting around in cafes having deep conversations. There must have been something in the air, as Sarah and I started having terribly meaningful conversations, not mentioning train times or bowel movements once. I think we covered the nature of language, contemporary art, the origins of the novel and feminist theology. Not bad for one afternoon.

There isn't a huge amount to do in Tartu if you aren't a student, so we just spent the day exploring the old town, wandering in the botanical gardens and parks, and drinking coffee. The town has some great quirks though: the main statue of the town square isn't the ubiquitous Man on Horse but two lovers kissing under an umbrella while water spouts over the top of them. And there is all sorts of evidence of student pranks over the town, such as the granite bridge topped with an arc: apparently a necessary step before graduation is to walk over the arc, hopefully not falling into the river below.

In the evening we plummeted from our intellectual heights when we watched an extraordinarily silly film called Superbad with the guys at the hostel on a projector screen. The title says it all really. The following morning we feasted royally on pancakes for breakfast before catching a bus on to Tallinn.

The traditional seaside trip...

2009-05-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

Freezing water? Check
Strong winds? Check
Slightly dodgy weather? Check

It is a relief to discover that at the same lines of latitude some things remain the same and our day trip to 'The Baltic Riviera' had just enough of the English seaside resort to make us nostalgic. Nevertheless, you don't get stiletto heels and designer sunglasses to quite the same extent in Bognor Regis. The resort of Jurmala is full of stunning summer homes and nice restaurants and we had a lovely lunch overlooking the beach, before doing our best windswept impression on a long walk up the beach. Heading back to the hostel, we had a very decadent evening of Poirot, which got me too scared to walk down the corridor alone...

The following day, we wanted to head to the National Park area of Sigulda, but missed the train by one minute, so had to wait for 2 hours for the next one. This gave us a great opportunity to explore Riga's covered market - the largest in Europe which is absolutely full of meat and fish and in which, it is incredibly easy to get lost. We finally made it to Sigulda and walked to the castle, where we had a picnic of sardines, bread and apples. After a further wander, we took a cable car across the gorge to a little village called Kirmulda. We went for a scramble through the woods there, humming 'We're going on a bear hunt' as we went. Returning to Riga, we headed back to the hostel for tea of bacon, eggs and cabbage (a surprisingly yummy combination) and watched more Poirot, with the light off, which was a mistake...

Our final day in Riga was spent doing important things like laundry and buying a fish. Seeing how big a part of our stay the fish tank had been, we decided to buy Karlis a fish on the proviso it was called Bob. Thus Bob the fish was bought and entered the House Hostel fish tank. At the time of writing, he was still alive.

After a late lunch of Russian dumplings, we headed to the station to catch the bus to Tartu and enter country number 12.

On Fish

2009-05-18T03:40:00.000-07:00

Feeling much better, we headed to Riga the following morning and arrived at the House Hostel for lunch. Unfortunately there had been a death in the house; the beauty of the fish tank, an enormous angel fish had slipped off this mortal coil and it was a time for grief for Karlis, the guy who owned the hostel. After a suitable period of mourning (approx 5 mins), the discussion took a more philosophical bent and it was decided that in the long run, the death was fish karma for it being so mean to the rest of the inhabitants of the tank...

This set the tone for our stay in House, a whole lot of random conversations and a chance to really chill in a place which felt more like a friend's flat than a hostel. After settling in and having lunch, we wandered round the Old Town in an attempt to find a church for evening mass. We managed to spot a priest and after a restoring cappucinio headed in to a beautiful little church, with lots of Art Nouveau decoration. After mass we wandered back to the hostel through the park and got to see the Freedom Monument, which marked the fight for Latvian independance in 1919. During the Soviet occupation, putting flowers at the base of this monument carried the penalty of being exiled to Siberia. We returned to a super of Spaghetti Bolognase and a Beatles CD, which made us feel very hip.

On Monday morning, Karlis made us a breakfast sandwich which made a lovely change to our usual fare of nutella, bread and bananas. After a leisurely breakfast, we headed to the Art Nouveau district, a stunning area of Riga, with beautiful buildings from the turn of the century which was when Riga was primarily extended. It is full of 'beautiful people', classy restaurants and cafes and it was lovely to just sit outside and soak it all in. Afterwards we headed through the parks to the Musuem of the Occupation of Latvia, which takes you through life for ordinary Latvians during both the Nazi and the Soviet occupation. It was an excellent museum, with particularly good sections on the lives of deportees and intellectuals in exile. Again, we were struck by just how difficult it was to be in this region in the twentieth century.

That evening, Karlis (who used to be a chef) cooked us a delicious stirfry and we sat and drank wine and discussed more 'fish' issues. Afterwards, we introduced him to the hilarity of Michael McIntyre, which I think he greatly appreciated.

The Hill of Crosses

2009-05-13T01:18:00.001-07:00

Our last stopping point in Lithuania was Siauliai, a sleepy little place near the Latvian border which is, somewhat surprisingly, the country's fourth biggest city. The reason we had come was to see the Hill of Crosses, which is about 12km outside the town in the countryside. This is a couple of mounds which, since the middle ages, have been the place where local people put crosses: as signs of devotion, to commemorate loved ones who have died, or to mark a prayer answered. In the Soviet era it became a great symbol of spiritual and national identity. The hill was bulldozed many times by the communist regime but overnight the crosses would all reappear again as local people risked their freedom, and even their lives, to creep to the out of the way spot surrounded by barbed wire to plant their crosses. Many of the crosses commemorate people who were deported to Siberia.

It's an eerie, slightly surreal place to visit. Situated right out in the middle of nowhere, there is no sound but the tinkling of the thousands of rosaries moving in the wind and the slight creaking of some of the bigger crosses. The crosses have overflowed from the mounds and now spread out over the surrounding area. Some of them are very new, planted for people who have died recently, and lots have been put there by pilgrims as a mark of respect and support for the Lithuanian spirit which refused to be destroyed by so many years of hostile occupation. It can't but be an impressive place when you understand its history - it makes you want to plant a cross there, just because you now can. But it is, and perhaps this makes me a very shallow person, a spooky place to be. It's as if the ghosts of a thousand past struggles are still there, haunting the empty field while the rest of the world has moved on. Also, there was one thing which struck a jarring note: a large sign in German, which I think was commemorating all the people killed in the Holocaust, but at the same time calling for all the Jewish people to recognise the true Messiah and convert to Christianity immediately. It was in the shape of a Star of David topped and dominated by a large cross: not the most comfortable of things to see there. Of course my German is a little rusty: let's hope it was just commemorating the dead rather than paving the way for future conflict.

While visiting the Hill, we had what we have decided was a post-communist experience (this sounds better than being conned by a taxi man again). There are no buses out to the Hill on weekends and so we had to take a taxi. The taxi driver charged us the cost of our accommodation that night to take us there and back: a distance of 24km, and wait for us for 20 minutes. There was nothing we could do about it but pay up. We thought that this was quite a good symbol of post communism. You can visit a previously banned site of national and spiritual pride; you can pray there; you can plant a cross there; and you can then be hugely conned by a mafia-esque taxi driver covered in gold jewellry blaring western pop music into your ears all the way there and back!

There isn't much reason to visit Siauliai other than the Hill of Crosses as we found there was absolutely nothing to do there once we'd seen the ornamental sun dial and had a refreshing peek at "Small Statue on High Street" (as the tourist brochure described it). On a Saturday afternoon at 4pm all the shops were closed on the high street, the tourist information office was closed, the one internet cafe in the town was closed and there was just one place to eat and drink open in the whole place. So much for the 4th largest city in Lithuania. We ended up however staying here 24 hours longer than we had intended as we both got a touch of food poisoning - nothing serious but enough to warrant a day in bed. I won't go into details but shall leave it up to your lurid imaginations. And we were so smug that we'd been travelling for three months and hadn't eaten anything dodgy......pride goes before a fall. By Sunday morning however, we were well enough to hit the road again and catch the 9:30 bus to Riga.

Herrings and Heaven TV

2009-05-12T03:30:00.001-07:00

Two other things of significance happened to us in Nida: I was introduced to pickled herring, which was surprisingly tasty, and we discovered a slightly scary evangelical Christian American TV channel (there's only so much BBC World News you can take) called Heaven TV. We got strangely addicted to this, as a series of elderly male preachers exhorted us to invite Jesus into our lives now, or, as they assured us with twinkly smiles, we would burn in hell. The whole thing was a bizarre and slightly addictive cocktail of hellfire sermons, descriptions of poverty stricken people in South America who were helped only when they converted to this particular brand of so-called Christianity, shiny television reconstructions of near death experiences in which people met God, and a nauseating children's programme in which unnaturally clean looking children sang songs about forgiveness. Perhaps the best moment was when they urged their viewers to donate money so that they could preach the message of Christ to Europe. Thanks, but we have had Christianity here for quite a while-just the last 2000 years or so. I'd love to see them trying to preach to the Poles......

All of which added up to one of the more surreal moments of the trip: sitting in an incredibly obscure Lithuanian village, eating pickled herring out of the jar and being thanked for our role in helping Heaven TV preach Christ and populate heaven. Perhaps it's time we started to think about coming home?

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

2009-05-12T03:02:00.001-07:00

On Monday night, as we packed up to leave Vilnius the next morning, we gradually realised that we had got a day out in our schedule and were in fact supposed to be in Kaunas. Earlier in the trip this of course wouldn't have mattered, as we constantly made changes to the plan and revelled in being semi-spontaneous. Now however, we have so little time left that we have to be ruthless. Kaunas had to go. We'll have to save the only Devil Museum in Europe for another time. So we went straight on to Nida where we had three nights booked in a terribly respectable sounding guesthouse. Nida is a little fishing village on the Curonian Spit, a load of sand dunes and pine forests which protrudes from Kaliningrad (a random little bit of Russia in between Poland and Lithuania), but most of it actually runs parallel to Lithuania, just a few hundred metres away across the Curonian lagoon. So Russia and Lithuania have split it and Nida is right at the end of the Lithuanian bit - the closest to Russia we technically get on the trip!

We bussed to Klaipeda, a gritty and unattractive industrial port, and took a ferry across the lagoon to the Spit. I was expecting a hearty sea voyage of, say, about an hour or so, but in reality we were on the boat about five minutes before we had reached the other side. You could practically swim it - in fact, I bet people do in warmer weather. From the landing place at a village called Smiltyne we took a rattling little bus along the Spit to Nida, about an hour away.

The Spit is very beautiful: lots of colourful wooden houses set among pine forests leading right down to the sea, which is smooth and languid on the lagoon side and crashing and wild on the Baltic side. You can cross from one side of the Spit to the other very quickly: it's only around 4km and in some places you can almost see the sea on both sides of you through the woods. What Nida is particularly famous for is its sand dunes, which are indeed stunning: they make you feel as if you are in the Sahara...only slightly colder and wetter.

Having had beautiful sunny weather for well over a month, I had predicted that it would rain when we finally got to a beach. And such proved to be the case. Our first day in Nida it poured down from beginning to end with a nice cold wind into the bargain. In true British spirit, we refused to be deterred from our seaside holiday and wrapped up in cagoules and boots to go for a walk on the beach. The Lithuanian cleaner in the guesthouse wished us good luck in sepulchral tones, doubtless wondering what kind of lunatics she had staying in her house. We however thoroughly enjoyed our....bracing...walk along the sea front and even made it up to the top of the dunes for a quick look over to Russia before deciding that Honour, that demanding female, was satisfied and we could now retreat to the one cafe open in Nida for hot chocolate (Nida is pretty dead at this time of year - apparently it livens up in July and August). We later wondered whether we had accidentally stumbled into Russia, as it's not very clear which country the sand dunes actually belong to, but were assured that we couldn't have done, as we'd have been beset by large angry Russian men with large angry dogs not to speak of lots of barbed wire. Shame, it would have made a good story, but at least it's an excuse for another trip.....

Our second day in Nida was much improved: plenty of sunshine and a clear sky, so we rented bikes and cycled along the Spit through the well marked cycle path which goes alternately right along the sea front and through forests. On the way back, we turned off the main path to explore the less trodden paths of the woods and made our way through gorgeous swathes of dappled sunshine to the other side of the Spit where we fulfilled a longheld ambition of the trip by paddling in the Baltic. It was too cold to swim, even for Brits, but we loved the beach: great expanses of golden sand almost totally empty, and somewhere over the water in the distance, England.

Messing about in boats...

2009-05-12T02:37:00.000-07:00

After a leisurely breakfast out in the sunshine, Lucy went to mass and Rob and I had a wander round the city, before we all met up again for lunch. Our afternoon was spent on what the Lonely Planet called 'the perfect day trip', heading out to a park called Trakai, a collection of lakes complete with a fairytale castle on an island and lots of lovely little cafes and ice cream. We hired out a pedalo to do a bit of further exploration, and it was here that I discovered Lucy's sailing skills which are normally very well hidden. It is fair to say that I am not a natural, even in a pedalo, and Lucy and Rob had a great time mocking my attempts at both steering and pedaling. After a super afternoon messing about in boats, we headed back toVilnius for a yummy meal.

The following day we walked up to the Three Crosses on a hill overlooking the city, which marks where several monks (numbers range from 3 to 14) were crucified. It was really interesting to get a birds-eye view of the city; the Baroque architecture isn't overpowering at ground level, but from above you can see more clearly why it has the reputation of being a Baroque capital. After a final ice cream, it was time for Rob to head back to the airport and for Lucy and I to get ready to head to Kaunas the following day. Or so we thought...

Vilnius vibes

2009-05-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

We spent a lovely long weekend in Vilnius. After such a stressful journey, the thing Lucy and I most wanted in the world was a G & T and Rob thankfully obliged. Dumping our bags at the hostel, we headed out to explore Vilnius and find somewhere to eat, before heading back for a well deserved night's sleep.

The first thing to say about Vilnius is that it doesn't feel like a capital city at all. We were staying on a quiet road next to a stream which was only a 10 minute walk from the centre and yet it felt like we were out in the country. It's Baroque churches are what makes Vilnius famous, but what makes it so cool for me is the atmosphere; where else would you get a district declaring itself a republic and forming its own constitution with such gems as "Everyone has the right to die, but this is not a requirement"? Our first full day was spent exploring this district, called Uzupiz, before heading up to explore some of the Baroque centre. The plan to do much exploring was thwarted by the fact that it was Labour Day and so there were a huge procession going on. (At this point we were terribly English, and despite not having a clue what was going on, clapped very politely and tried to join in with the singing, somewhat unsuccessfully.) There was also a massive Taize convention, so we had to keep an eye out whenever we went into any of the churches to check we weren't about to end up in the middle of a service.

After the beauty of the centre of town, it was rather a sudden shift to go to the KGB museum, but it came highly recommended as something one must see and I suppose there is never a good time to see something which is so upsetting. It is a museum based in the old KGB headquarters, where people were sent for anything remotely constituting 'anti-Soviet' behaviour and has a large section on the fate of those transported to Siberia and other areas of Russia. What you realise is that whole families were sent, often without any charges being confirmed and that until these settlements had established themselves, the chances of the children surviving the vastly different temperatures was minimal. Another very moving collection was the embroidery with various messages about their homeland and the fight for independence and a rosary made out of bread. The bottom floor of the museum has been maintained as the prison it was when still the KGB headquarters. The isolation cells and execution cell are obviously pretty horrendous, but it was the padded cell which really threw all of us, which is where they put prisoners after torture. It was certainly well worth seeing, although I do worry that on this trip Lucy and I are perhaps becoming a bit numb to such horrors; so much inhumanity happened here in the 20th century, that I'm almost expecting to discover it in every new place that we see.

St Weronika, Patron of Hapless Travellers

2009-05-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

Leaving Poland proved to be a more difficult task than we had thought. After saying goodbye to Helena on Thursday morning, we were next due to meet Rob in Vilnius on Friday afternoon, so had over 24 hours to get from Poland to Lithuania. An easy task, you might think. Our initial plan was to take the overnight bus from Gdansk to Vilnius - a ten hour stint, but attractively cheap and with no changes - but we found out that this only ran alternate nights, and of course, not the night that we needed to travel. So we decided to travel 5 hours back to Warsaw and take the overnight bus from Warsaw to Vilnius. Here too we were thwarted. That bus also only runs alternate nights - and not the night we needed. You would think that it would be organised so that there was always a bus running overnight from Poland, either from Warsaw or Gdansk....but that would just make too much sense. With the aid of the Thomas Cook railway book (the Bible of the road), we worked out that we could get to Vilnius by Friday evening if we caught the 7.25 from Warsaw and changed at Sestokai, just over the Lithuanian border. However, this left us stranded in Warsaw for the night.

And so it was that Weronika received yet another phone call from Damsels in Distress and came one step nearer to canonization by having soup and pasta waiting for us when we arrived at 10pm. It was a short but, we hope, sweet visit, as we were off again at 6.30 the next morning to get to Warsaw Centralna. We were a little early (alright, half an hour) but we were absolutely determined not to miss that train, as there probably wouldn't have been another one for several months. Once we were on the train, we thought that the drama had ended. No such luck. We then had to decipher Polish announcements about which part of the train to sit on depending on where you wanted to go. Cue much heaving of bags up and down the train and general confusion. The train then proceeded to run half an hour late, meaning that we would miss the one connection that day from Sestokai to Vilnius. Stress levels had reached fever pitch when we arrived at Sestokai and raced over to the other platform where the train was about to leave.

I have never been so relieved to arrive at a place in my life. Vilnius certainly likes to be elusive. Odd for the biggest capital of the Baltics but I suppose it keeps out all but the most determined travellers. Here endeth the Saga of the Two Maidens and the Polish Public Transport System.

The Polish tour continues

2009-05-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

We decided to break the journey from Warsaw to Gdansk at Torun, a medieval university town famous for gingerbread and Copernicus. In fact you can buy a gingerbread Copernicus there, which admittedly was chiefly what we went to Torun to do. It's a beautiful town with the characteristic main square with a magnificent town hall in the middle and lots of places to sit out in the sunshine and drink beer. We chose a cafe next to a statue of a violinist surrounded by frogs (the Polish version of the Pied Piper story) and whiled away a couple of hours until our connection to Gdansk very happily.

The train (approved by Helena for its Poirot-esque compartment carriages) got us into Gdansk at 9pm and we took a rackety taxi to the hostel which looked like a ruin from the outside but inside was very cosy and clean, and a great base to explore the city centre, as it was just a ten minute walk away. I think we were all pleasantly surprised by Gdansk the next morning. I for one had been thinking of heavy industry, shipyards, revolutions....all of which are certainly important in Gdansk, but it is also remodelling itself into a very attractive tourist town to rival Krakow with a completely restored main street and square and a lovely river front lined with restaurants and amber shops. But it manages to keep its own unique character and is fiercely proud of its recent history. However, it has to be said that it was something of a disappointment to Sarah as it is not in fact on the sea, despite the deceptive appearance on maps. Helena had been gently hinting as much for the last three days but to no avail. So the dreams of fish and chips on the beach will have to wait for the time being.

We spent the morning mainly wandering through the Old Town and buying amber, at which Helena proved herself to be remarkably decisive, and I to be quite the opposite. After a beer and a highly dodgy hot dog, we headed for the Roads to Freedom Exhibition which is about Solidarity and the end of the communist regime in Poland. It's an excellent exhibition, very inspiring, and it made our subsequent visit to the shipyards much more meaningful. Seeing the soaring monument to the fallen shipyard workers was very moving when you realise just how much it meant to have successfully erected it. The famous gates of the shipyard, where many of the demonstrations were staged, are still covered in Solidarity posters, crosses and pictures of John Paul II (as well as one of the current pope). But it is also very much still a functioning place; as we arrived the workers were leaving for the day and casting curious looks at the girls taking pictures through the gates. What struck us all was how incredibly recent all of this is - we seem to be catching up with ourselves time-wise as this trip goes on.

The day finished with a fish supper sitting on the waterfront and surveying the mix of tourist and industrial boats that line the river: quite indicative I suppose of the point that Gdansk is at. It was sad to realise that this was our last night in Poland. Or so we thought......

Chopin's fingers

2009-05-07T06:50:00.000-07:00

The following day we decided to head over the river to Praga, the only district of Warsaw not completely destroyed post the Uprising. It was apparently the area used in the filming of The Pianist and it certainly seems much more crumbly than the Old Town; you can still see bullet holes in buildings and everything looks much more run down. It is cool primarily because there are absolutely no tourists there (the nudist we passed we assume was a local) and so you get to see a bit of Warsaw life by just wandering round without bumping into someone else taking a picture.

After a coffee in a local cafe, we headed back to the Old Town to find somewhere nice to eat and found a lovely restaurant overlooking the Main Square. Lucy and I have found that it is a distinct advantage having people come out to see us, because we can justify having a beer or eating out far more than we would otherwise! After a very lazy lunch, we walked along the Royal Way and found an English bookshop to restore Lucy's ever-depleting supply of reading material. A quick pop into two churches, one of which is the resting place for Chopin's heart*, before heading to meet Damian.

Damian is Lucy's Aunt's friend (I think I got the connection right), who agreed to show us round the Lazienkowski Park, and absolutely stunning park with a beautiful Palace on the lake, lots of peacocks and a beautiful open air Chopin theatre. We spent a lovely few hours chatting about everything from politics to Warsaw before heading back to Weronika's for pasta and pesto. It was more successful than the veggie stirfry, but this might have more to do with the delicious Moravian red rather than any improved cooking ability. Another enjoyable evening spent chatting to Weronika, before we packed up and got ready for yet another early start.

A massive thanks at this point to Weronika and her grandmother who made us feel so incredibly welcome. It was lovely to actually stay in a home rather than in yet another hostel and to be able to get some real local insight, so hope Weronika sees this and that the red wine is helping with the exams xxx

*Given the ongoing fight between France and Poland about who can claim Chopin, we've come to the decision that the deciding factor should be who owns his fingers...does anyone know which country does?

Well I would walk 500 miles....

2009-05-07T01:36:00.000-07:00

To our amazement, Lucy did make the 8 am mass and looked ridiculously cheerful for that time in the morning. Helena too was an early riser, so I was left holding the flag for the people that can't think straight until at least 9 am. We had a leisurely breakfast with Weronika before heading out on the metro to the Old Town. Our first port of call was the Warsaw Uprising Monument, a collection of sculptures of people emerging from the rubble. It was right outside what we assumed were the courts, a strikingly modern complex of buildings, which framed the sculptures beautifully and was, I think, a fitting tribute.

After that, our wander took us through lots of little winding streets to the Old Town Square, complete with a fountain with a mermaid on it which is the symbol of Warsaw for some reason. The buildings were of course largely destroyed after the Uprising but have been beautifully restored, so that they look very like the old pictures you see of this area on postcards. The old centre was absolutely heaving with people, especially families who were indulging in the most amazingly tall ice cream cones you have ever seen and given that an important aspect of this trip is immersing oneself in the local culture, we decided to follow suit.
Following our 'immersion in culture', we headed into the Royal Palace to explore. Again it was completely devastated during the war and wasn't rebuilt for decades afterwards. It houses a beautiful mirrored room where concerts are held, as well as a series of rooms that depicted different eras of the royalty of Poland. It was interesting to see just how many of the portraits were either the same as or relations of the portraits we had seen in Vienna. You get a sense of just how inter-related the royal families of Europe were.

We lunched in one of the many beautiful parks in Warsaw, the Saxon Gardens, watching all the people out for a Sunday stroll. Warsaw feels very family centred, as well as incredibly safe and was definitely a city which was stealing our hearts. We could have stayed sat in the sunshine for the rest of the afternoon, but instead had madly decided to walk to the Uprising Museum, out in the business district.

It has been a failing of ours on this trip, that we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the fact that distances on the map, even when you know the scale, can look much smaller than they are. This was our mistake trying to get to the museum; it took hours and as 4 o'clock came around and it just came into view, we had the awful premonition that we were about to discover that Poland operates early closing times on Sunday. Thankfully it didn't and we got a couple of hours to explore what turned out to be an amazing museum.

The museum itself works chronologically through the beginning of war to the aftermath of the Uprising. It is brilliantly done with lots of visual and auditory aids. Particularly moving for me was the section about the Home Army, the men and women who fought against the Nazis and were prominent in the Uprising itself. After the war, the Soviets (who incidentally had refused to come to the civilians of Warsaw's aid, despite being just the other side of the Vistula) tried to undermine the significance of the Uprising and the importance of the role of the Home Army in a spectacular retelling of history in which it had been a pointless sacrifice of civilian life by the thoughtless ruling class. It was only after the fall of communism that the musuem was able to come into existence. Also deeply moving was the role children, particularly Scouts made to the Uprising, carrying messages and equipment to the Army. Most of those who survived were sent to camps afterwards, when Hitler ordered that the city be destroyed.

Knowing what a long walk back it was to the centre of Warsaw, we attempted to catch a tram, but not realising how to get tickets, we had to jump off and walk the several miles back. We felt that after this we probably deserved a beer and sat in the early evening sunshine, looking out towards the Palace of Culture and Science. Feeling refreshed, we headed back to Weronika's who was most amused at our catastrophic attempt at veggie stirfry, which managed to fill her entire house with the smell of burnt broccoli, not our finest culinary moment...

Getting to Warsaw

2009-05-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

Well we did make the train and even managed to pick up lunch supplies with our incredibly limited Polish - we keep getting pitying looks from the old ladies whenever we try and pronounce 'apple' and 'two'. The five and a half hour journey was spent with me trying to read Kafka (I think that life may be too short...) and Lucy re-reading The Pianist as she has now read through absolutely everything we brought with us and requires a re-stock in Warsaw.

We arrived at about 4, outside the enormous Palace of Culture and Science (a gift from the Soviet Union), and headed to a cafe to wait for Lucy's friend Helena to arrive. A restoring sandwich and coffee later, we heard from Helena and gave her directions to reach us. It was only after half an hour had passed and she had still failed to arrive that we thought there might be a problem and discovered that there are multiple black fountains and little parks around the Palace, and poor Helena was stuck looking for us on the other side.

Once we were all assembled, we headed up to the Old Town, beautifully restored since its total destruction after the Warsaw Rising for an initial wander and were struck by quite how stunning it was. We found a lovely little restaurant for Pierogi and a catch up, before heading to the supermarket to stock up. After standing in a queue for hours we were finally stocked up and ready to find Weronika's house, where we were staying.

Having said that we would be there by 9 and with no way of contacting her to let her know that we were going to be late, we were slightly panicked at the discovery it was going to be nearer 10.30pm by the time we got there. However, we finally made it and were made to feel very welcome and comfortable by the lovely Weronika, who even managed to persuade Lucy to attend the 8am mass the following morning (Helena and I shared somewhat astonished expressions...)

An American in Wroclaw

2009-05-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

Leaving Dresden horribly early in the morning, we caught the train to Wroclaw, our overnight stop en route to Warsaw. We've now got these early mornings sussed; neither of us speaks to the other until we have a coffee/food and are capable of being civil as neither of us are what could be termed as 'morning people'.

We arrived in Wroclaw, in Southern Poland just before lunch and had time to settle in to the Cinnamon Hostel (think joss sticks and a slightly bohemian atmosphere) before we were meeting up with Beth, one of the girls we met in Olomouc. She is an American teaching here and offered to show us round.

Like many cities on this trip, Wroclaw has belonged to many different people at different times and was part of Germany during the war. Although over 70% of the city was destroyed in WWII, it has been beautifully restored and was a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. Beth showed us round the old town; the Rynek (market square) with a big flower market, lots of cool jewellry designed by local art students and the University with its beautiful Baroque church, before taking us to the undercover market with a milk bar where we got to soak up the local atmosphere. Everyone eats with everyone and it was here that I got to try Pierogi, the famous Polish dumplings with a yoghurt drink you are supposed to have with it.

After a wander round the market where we tried the local gingerbread, Beth took us over to the islands on the river Odra, which is where the Archbishop lives along with many religious orders. From the top of the cathedral we got a fantastic view across the whole of Wroclaw. After a walk along the river, we headed back to the square for some yummy ice cream and coffee, before going back to the hostel to get ready to go out that evening.

Beth and Maria (the other girl we met in Olomouc) took us out to a lovely Italian restaurant by the river front where we chatted about politics over a bottle of wine, before heading to a jazz bar. Finally we realised that it was pretty late and that we had an early train to catch so we headed home so that there was at least a chance that we might make our train.

Musings on Dresden

2009-04-23T14:34:00.001-07:00

In his travel documentary on Eastern Europe, Michael Palin said that it was uncomfortable being an Englishman in Dresden. Having spent two days looking around the city, I think I would agree with him. The evidence that it was bombed to bits in February 1945 doesn't stare you in the face. In fact, if you knew nothing about the history, you might just think it was a very clean and tidy baroque town with lots of development going on. But delve a little deeper and the truth is that this is a city which is still in the process of being rebuilt, and almost all the buildings you can see in the Old Town are reconstructions of ones which were completely destroyed by the bombs of the Allies. As a result, the Neustadt (which is where we're staying) is in fact the oldest part of the city, something which is very bizarre to realise. The reconstruction has been incredibly good. The Opera House in particular, the Frauenkirche and the Zwinger Palace have been beautifully done, and the only give away that they aren't the original buildings is that the statues are bright and clean rather than stained with soot. Some of the statues look no more than a year or two old, and others are still in the process of being made. We only realised the full scale of the destruction when we saw some photographs taken the day after the bombs fell - it looks like a ghost city with just skeletons of buildings standing in the dust and the huge historic buildings completely flattened.

At least 35,000 people were killed in the night of 13th February, probably many more as the city was full of refugees fleeing the Red Army. This of course makes it a tragedy by any reckoning, as we knew before we came here. What I hadn't appreciated before was what a symbolic blow it was against Germany's very heart. Dresden was renown for being the most beautiful city in the country, the seat of the Bohemian and Saxon nobility, the centre of the arts for hundreds of miles around. To strike it was therefore not only to take German lives, but also to humiliate the nation as a whole. While we were in the Old Masters Gallery earlier today, we kept coming across the same apology on all the information sheets: there was only a copy or an early sketch surviving of this or that famous painting, as the original had been destroyed on 13th February. Immense ceiling paintings, which must have taken years to do, now only exist in tiny sketches done by 19th century tourists.

I appreciate of course the desire for revenge in nations which had been so horrifically bombed themselves, though I can't help feeling that to use the motivation of revenge to plan military strategy is highly morally and practically dubious. I'm no historian, and I don't pretend to know whether the British policy of carpet-bombing hastened the ending the war, or not. But I do know that the bombing of Dresden was an act designed to cause the utmost hurt and destruction not to the military bases or the industrial centres, but to the German civilians themselves, their homes and their entire cultural heritage. And we have a statue of Bomber Harris in London. Enough said.

We discussed whether or not we felt guilty as English women in the city, and decided that we didn't really, although there was a degree of discomfort which must have its roots in a guilt of sorts. How far should later generations feel complicit in evils done by their countrymen? I think we have a duty to remember Dresden, not to get too complacent about being on the right side in WW2, and certainly to remember that terrible things can be done in the name of right. But I don't think it's right for generations afterwards to feel that they are to blame for what was done before they were born. I've seen how crippling and unfair this can be with some of my German friends who feel that they are equated with the Nazis even when their families resisted and were persecuted by the regime, or simply when they were born far too late to have any choice in the matter.

In any case, Dresden as it is now is not a city to encourage guilt-ridden gloom. One of the things the inhabitants make most of, generously in my opinion, is that a lot of money was given by the UK and US to assist in its rebuilding, and the Frauenkirche is known as the Place of Reconciliation (can't remember the German, sorry, but it's probably a hugely long compound word of some sort). It's a city with a lot going for it and very friendly people. I have to say it's nice to get smiley and welcoming service in cafes and bars rather than the "service with a snarl" which is pretty much standard in Eastern Europe. And we're loving the fabled German efficiency. When we crossed the border from the Czech Republic we changed to a beautiful little commuter train with comfy seats, automatic doors (I think, the first on the trip) and announcements telling you what side of the train the platform would be on at the next stop. I know it's trivial, but Sarah and I have spent a lot of time on trains recently and so have become something of connoisseurs, aka geeks.

We spent yesterday exploring the Old Town, with all its obvious historic and cultural sights, and then today we were in the New Town, a very attractive area with a beautifully designed modern market place to replace the one which was destroyed, lots of quirky little bars and an artists' corner called the Kunsthof which is packed full of galleries, completely pointless but gorgeous arts and craft shops, hippy clothes stores and Aladdin's Cave-esque antique shops. We had a very happy couple of hours browsing and planning what we would spend our money on, if we hadn't needed to eat for the next month.

Tomorrow we go back to Poland again on a horribly early train to spend the day and night in Wroclaw before going to Warsaw on Saturday. It's been nice to be somewhere where we have at least some grasp of the language (though I can't say my A'level presentation on the importance of environmental issues came in very useful). Now it's back to the land where zs, ks and ws rule supreme....

The Bohemian Connection

2009-04-22T11:45:00.001-07:00

We arrived in Liberec late on Sunday night and after the Prague experience, were grateful for a private room with an ensuite. Being hungry we tried to find somewhere to eat, but even though it is a fairly large city, the only place open was MacDonalds and after an E number filled dinner, we headed back for our first decent night's sleep.

Liberec was originally a German-speaking town, originally known as Reichenberg and signs of its German past are everywhere, from the style of buildings, to the prominence of German signs for shops and attractions here. As part of the Sudetenland, it had tried to gain independance after WW1, but became integrated into Czecholslovakia. As a result, it became a hot bed for Pan-German movements and was the birthplace of Konrad Henlein, the Nazi sympathiser and leader of the Sudeten German Party. Signs of this history can still be seen today; the modern library where Lucy and I used the internet is on the site of the old synagogue which was destroyed on Kristallnacht. After the war, due to the Potsdam treaty, the German population of this entire area were forcibly expelled unless they were essential to industry or could prove they were anti-fascist. They were also put on the same rations as Jews during the war and there are dreadful stories of starvation and suffering on the essentially forced marches into Germany. It is still a highly contentious issue and although both the German and Czech Prime Ministers apologised for their treatment in 2005, it is not something which is really referred to.

It is into this complicated history that my family fit into, as they were Sudeten Germans, and our first port of call the following morning was to the village that my grandmother was from. It is now a ski resort high in the Jizera mountains called Bedrichov, but when my gradmother knew it it was called Freidrichswald. It is a short bus ride from Liberec and while we waited for the bus, we had a bit more of an explore around Liberec itself and found a beautiful lake, which at one point must have been for industrial purposes, but it now surrounded by school parties and people sunbathing which was very different to the massively industrial Bohemia that I had imagined.

The bus ride took us to the top of the mountains and dropped us by another little lake. The village was originally a centre for glass blowing, which is what my great grandfather Gustav did. Now there are only the ruins of the old factory and the village is mainly full of pensions used by skiers, even now there was still a bit of snow on the ground. It is very beautiful and peaceful. We popped in to the tiny Tourist Information Centre, to be greeted by a group of policemen, who seemed to be there for a bit of a chat. Armed with a map, we headed up to the church at the top of a hill. The building itself was locked, but we were able to get into the graveyard. We found quite a few graves with the name Hujer on them, but none that were names I was aware were directly related to me. However, we couldn't make all of the names out as they have been badly maintained, so they may well have been there. That, I suppose, is one of the unexpected side effects of a forced expulsion, there is no one to tend the graves.

We sat and had lunch by the church, overlooking the village, before heading back to catch the bus, via Jablonec back to Liberec. I was really glad that we had been, but I didn't really know what to feel. My family were not expelled with the rest of their village because my great grandmother was vital to the industry. However, extended family were and on the rare occaisions that my grandma spoke about her life before coming to England she mentioned the dreadful things which the Russian soldiers did there. In some ways, I think my main feeling is one of sadness; that at the end of what was a horrendous war where the full extent of racial hatred had been seen that it seemed legitmate to force people from their homes purely because they were ethnically German. That by putting Sudeten Germans on the same rations as Jews during the war, or by allowing it to happen, something of the moral cause was lost. Yet I suppose that knowing the history of what came next; communism, the gulags and Sibera it probably isn't much worse than other people suffered. I think that seeing the place were my grandma grew up has helped me to understand her better.

The following morning, we headed to Jablonec to the glass and jewellery museum to give a bit of context to the area. This area was and still is a major centre for glass jewellery, particularly beads and glass in general and the clearly loved museum was a great way of seeing this. Afterwards, we went looking for some beads as souvenirs before having a very stodgy lunch of dumplings and bacon. We then headed back to Liberec to get our bags before heading to Dresden.

The train journey to Dresden must be one of the prettiest journies we've done. The local train took us to Decin, where we changed onto a tiny one carriage train to Bad Shandau, through an area known as Bohemian/Saxon Switzerland which is just stunning. After that it was a super efficient German local train to Dresden itself, where we are staying in a really arty, studenty area in a really well set up and loved hostel.

Learning to love Prague

2009-04-22T10:47:00.001-07:00

What with the crowds of tourists, mass of souvernir tat, pouring rain, extortionate charges to get into churches and fairly obnoxious German boys sharing our dorm, I didn't exactly love Prague at first sight. In fact it took a lovely sunny weekend exploring the castle side of the river to change my mind. I can now admit that it is one of the most beautiful cities we've been to, although I still think it is a place deeply scarred by too much tourism. We have heard far more English voices than Czech, and the extent to which Czech culture is trivialised in order to sell it to tourists is quite disgusting. I think Kafka is spinning in his grave at the sight of a grinning cartoon of him on t-shirts.....

On Saturday we crossed Charles Bridge, walked around the castle courtyards and went on to have a lovely walk around the monastery on the top of the hill and in the surrounding parks, wandering through orchards of apple blossom and taking in the breath-taking views. In the evening, we managed to get deliciously cheap tickets to see a Smetana opera at the National Theatre (only 3 pounds for a fabulous view high up in the gods). It was an opera we had never heard of before called "The Secret" which had some beautiful music, especially the overture and a stunning duet between the two young lovers which just kept soaring upwards. The plot however was distinctly dodgy and Sarah and I got very confused as to why strange dancers wearing green sequinned outfits were gyrating in the background throughout. After the opera we popped next door to an Art Deco cafe to have a quick Martini (oh dear, we are getting increasingly pretentious as this trip goes on...) and then walked back along the river all lit up at night back to the main square. We meant to go straight to bed, but we admitted to each other that we were starving, and so bought hunks of pork from a great haunch being roasted on a spit and ate them with our fingers. Glorious but greasy.

On Sunday morning we went to the 11am Mass at St Vitus Cathedral which is inside the castle complex. This is a stunning Gothic building which took nearly 600 years to complete and is fascinating because of all the different styles which the series of architects used over the centuries. The tower, for example, has a Gothic tower, with a Renaissance parapet topped with Baroque carving. Inside are a series of amazing stained glass windows, one of which is designed by Mucha, the Czech Art Nouveau pioneer - an exhibition of whose work we saw in Budapest. He contributed the window as a mark of his fervent Czech patriotism, for which he was to suffer later under the Nazi regime. It's also got a shrine to St Wenceslas in one of the side chapels, which is richly decorated with precious stones. The music at Mass was underwhelming to say the least in a city so associated with classical music as Prague, but perhaps it was because it was the Sunday after Easter. Afterwards we walked through the castle gardens to a beer garden for a cooling pint of Pilsner, which we hadn't tried yet, and then it was time to head back to the hostel to finish off all the food we had left in the fridge in a rather eclectic lunch of beans on toast, cheese, iceburg lettuce and pears.

And now we're about to catch a train to Liberec in the north of the Czech Republic. I'm glad we were able to see a more attractive side of Prague before we left, but visiting here has given us both a bit of a jolt as we realise that the very tourist industry that has enabled us to do this trip can have such a destructive effect on one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I really hope that Budapest doesn't go the same way as Prague, as it felt like a much more genuine city and not full of quite so many drunken stag parties. It'll be good to get off the tourist trail and plunge into the villages and provincial towns, as we go on to find out more about Sarah's family, this time the Czech side rather than the Slovak.

Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m'invitasti, e son venuto....

2009-04-20T00:41:00.000-07:00

I was sad to leave both Poets and Olomouc. After checking at the local internet cafe that we had actually got tickets to Don Giovanni, we headed up to the Archbishop's Palace for a brief look around the museum. It has obviously been very lovingly put together and it was a shame we only managed a couple of floors. After checking out with the lovely Poets staff, we headed for the train to Prague.

We travelled through beautiful Czech countryside and arrived in Prague in the late afternoon, with glorious sunshine to greet us. The hostel was right off the Main Square, a short walk from the station, although it took us ages to find and we were both glad of a shower before our evening at the Opera. The man who ran the hostel was a little bit grumpy, particularly as we told him that we wanted to be in a dorm rather than the 3-times-the-price single room (we think this might be why we got shoved with the German boys, but more on that later...)

Dressed in what passes for our finery on this trip, we headed to the Estates Theatre, which is where Don Giovanni was first performed. It is a beautiful little theatre, mainly gold and blue and as we had a box, we were able to see the orchestra really well. It was an entertaining and funny production, with lots of servants mucking around in the background; including at one point break dancing. The scene of Giovanni's descent into hell was was really moving though. Afterwards, we headed back to the hostel kitchen to rustle up some pasta and pesto, where we met some cool singing Italians, who we met from then on every time we went to the kitchen.

Breakfast the following day was a twisty pastry from the Easter Market which we have seen all over the place and had yet to try - yummy although very hard to describe. After breakfast, we headed out for a free tour of the city, a really good way of getting a general idea of Prague, but you do feel as though everyman and his wife is there with you. We saw all the obvious things; the astronomical clock, the Tyn church, the University, Wenceslas Square, the New Town, the Charles Bridge and the Jewish Quarter. Some interesting quirky things were also pointed out, like the little pictures which adorn some of the buildings, such as golden rings or elephants which were used before widespread literacy as a way of giving directions.

After the tour, we headed to a cafe for lunch in a shady courtyard before being good and heading out to find a laundry. What the people of Prague must have thought of us with our tatty Tescos bags of dirty washing is anyone's guess, but we felt quite proud. While that was being washed we did boring but important things like buying food and we went to the top of Wenceslas Square to see the monument to the students who set themselves on fire in protest of the communist regime. It is very moving, particularly when you realise that had they not set themselves on fire, they would have seen communism come to an end within their lifetime.

Having done all our washing and food shopping, we rewarded ourselves with a beer in the Main Square and put the worlds to right. That night we discovered that our four bed room was being shared with not two but three smelly German boys, who arrived after a night out at about 3 and proceeded to have a long, loud conversation before falling asleep, one of them on the floor, although they seemed to swap, loudly, in the middle of the night. Lucy and I were not impressed!

The following day, it poured down and so we thought we would go into the Synagogues of the Jewish Quarter. However, having queued for ages, we discovered that they wouldn't take card and deciding not to queue up in the rain again, we spent the rest of the morning in the wonderfully cheesy 'Kafka Cafe', drinking coffee and, in Lucy's case, reading The Trail. After lunch of a sausage under an umbrella and with it still pouring down, we decided to spend the afternoon updating the blog. Feeling very virtuous, we headed out for a reward in the form of coffee and cake in the Cubist cafe, a wonderful little place which is beautifully designed and does delicious cake.

Our evening was spent cooking veggie curry to have with our Australian friends, Kylie and Jason. We first met in Plovdiv in Bulgaria and this was the last time our paths were going to cross; they head west, while we go east. It was a lovely evening spent chatting, although both Lucy and I were sad when they left. It has been an unexpected blessing of this trip to get to know people who are doing a similar thing to you and they are so lovely, we keep trying to get them to come to England. The German boys will certainly not be receiving an invite after another disturbed night of loutish behaviour!

Bicycles, Nudists and Fountains

2009-04-19T06:27:00.001-07:00

We did not catch the 6.55am train as dutifully planned for the night before. At approximately 5am, my alarm went off and I heard a groan above my head from Lucy. We came to the mutual decision that life was too short for such stupid times and promptly went back to bed. As a result we just missed the 9.47 train so had to get the 11.47. This gave us a lot of time to kill in a very silent Krakow. Thankfully, the Easter Monday tradition of boys throwing water at girls did not seem to be happening (I'd have thumped them if they had come anywhere near me with my giant rucksack on!) and we arrived at the station dry and in one piece. With so much time to kill,we persuaded ourselves that the only thing to do was to have a leisurely coffee in the station cafe.

Our train journey involved two changes,one in Katowice and one in Ostrava. It is a sign of how far we have come in terms of travelling that this prospect didn't particularly bother us. Both were fine, although we did make the error of having a station cheeseburger for lunch. That neither of us got food poisoning is a minor miracle! We arrived in Olomouc around 5 ish and jumped on the tram to the Poet's Corner Hostel. Although it is up 4 flights of stairs, it is an absolutely fantastic place to stay; small, brightly coloured, lovely rooms and bathroom and the nicest staff we've met on the whole trip, who really knew and loved the city. Greg, the guy who manages the hostel also gave me lots of book suggestions regarding my family history, which was really helpful and has helped me put their experiences into more of a historical context.

After a cup of tea with a guy called Sam from Montreal, we headed out to the supermarket for veggies and to have a quick wander around the town. It's very beautiful - quite like Krakow but without the crowds and tonnes of fountains in all the little squares, including one which the guidebook says is a woman and is certainly not female. We headed back for food and showers and had intended to go out for a drink at the micro brewery. However, we ended up talking to some girls from Wroclaw (a point later on in the trip), Beth and Maria who offered to show us round when we got there. Several hours later, we called it a day and headed to bed.

We woke up reasonably early the following day and after an interesting breakfast of toast with garlic cream cheese, we spent the morning exploring more of Olomouc. One of the most impressive sights is the Holy Trinity Column in the central square (we think erected after a plague, but we aren't entirely sure), a huge mass of dark stone and gold. Inside there was a very cool nun who pointed all the reliefs to us, including a presentation of the Crucifixion where instead of Jerusalem, the background is Olomouc, we also popped into the church for a little bit of a wander which was beautiful.

Leaving the main square (and its slightly underwhelming astronomical clock) behind, we headed up to the University area. Again we popped into a pretty baroque church, although I found it unsettling due to the seemingly anti-Semitic paintings of the Stations of the Cross which were displayed in the cloisters,particularly given that they were only painted in 1937. Perhaps we were both over-sensitive to it given our recent visit to Auschwitz.

The University itself was beautiful; we pottered around the quad where everyone was getting ready for the film festival which was starting that night and had an awesome astronomical sculpture to Copernicus and then dropped down to the gardens which surround the city. It was very reminiscent of Durham which perhaps explains why we loved it so much. Greg had advised that we try some of the chocolate cake, particular to Olomouc, so we headed for coffee and cake, before going back to the hostel to grab bikes and go for a ride.

The lovely thing about Olomouc is that it is surrounded by very beautiful countryside and there is a very easy 5km cycle to a lake which can be done from the hostel. Having spent most of our time in cities, getting out into the countryside really appealled. However, neither of us had been on a bike in years,and this proved interesting... Lucy's bike was very low, whereas my seat was very high and, being us, we couldn't work out how to adjust the seats. This had added hilarity given that because of a slightly dodgy hip, I could only get on the bike from one side. We must have looked a little bit peculiar, heightened by the fact that neither of us could quite summon up the courage to cycle anywhere near other people and so wheeled the bikes for an exceptionally long time...

However, it's true what they say, you don't forget how to ride a bike and once we finally got on, it was brilliant - sunny, with the wind in our hair and beautiful surroundings. We ended up spending ages just cycling round the lake and accidentally ended up cycling through the nudist beach. It was quite a surprise and I'm quite proud that neither of us fell off the bikes. A bird also pooed on my head, but Lucy tried to assure me that it was tree sap which magically appeared miles away from any trees. It was a lovely gesture, but I wasn't convinced!

The evening was spent with tea and books and good company, in the form of Francie, who worked at the hostel and a mother and daughter team from Australia who were travelling round Europe. After a really lovely evening we headed to bed, ready for Prague the following day.

Triduum in Krakow - part 3

2009-04-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

There was a very cheerful holiday feeling in Krakow on Holy Saturday as everyone was hurrying to church in their best clothes with Easter baskets of food to be blessed. While Sarah went to do a bit of necessary shopping, I did a tour of the churches in Krakow in an attempt to find confession in English. This was ultimately unsuccessful thanks in part to the huge queues at confessionals which meant you couldn't really pop in quickly to see if the priest spoke English. However, it meant I could join hundreds of Polish people in paying a number of visits to the beautifully decorated Easter gardens set up in churches with the Host on display inside the tomb surrounded by spring flowers. In one tiny church: St Giles, near the castle, the Host was being watched over by boy scouts who were evidently very proud of their responsibility and were determinedly standing to attention with eyes front.

Meeting up back at the hostel, Sarah and I bought a bunch of daffodils to bring some spring cheer to our dorm, and had a big lunch of pizza and tea in the kitchen before spending the afternoon doing washing, blogging and generally sorting things out. Later, we rewarded ourselves by a coffee on the main square, watching the horses and carts drive tourists around at extortionate prices. Learning from our mistake on Maundy Thursday, as we thought, we arrived at the Dominican church an hour early for the Easter Vigil, which was scheduled to begin at 9pm. There was still standing room only. In fact, we were lucky to get a place inside the church at all. As the darkened church got fuller and fuller, with every aisle packed full, including the central one, we didn't know how on earth the procession was going to get down. But somehow they managed it with the flames of the Easter fire flickering in the background, and the Paschal candle making its way down the church with people pressed to either side around it clutching little candles which were gradually all lit too until the whole place was illuminated.

It was an even longer Mass than before, lasting nearly five hours, and again, obviously, entirely in Polish. We managed to follow the first couple of readings thanks to the give-away repetitions of Old Testament names like Abraham and Moses, but after that we were pretty lost. Again, the atmosphere was just incredible with the whole congregation seemingly intent and enthusiastic, even those having to stand for the whole thing. We managed to nab a kneeler which helped, serving as a useful seat during the long Polish sermon. At the end of Mass there was a procession in which the Host was brought from the tomb back to the tabernacle with lots of singing and ringing of bells. As it passed by, somehow everyone managed to kneel down, despite the fact that even standing up you had your nose pressed into the small of someone else's back. The whole thing ended with lots of cheerful hymns. We decided it was time to lose all reserve and threw ourselves into singing along with the Polish, much to the amusement of the guy standing next to us, who helped us out from time to time with pronunciation. I defy anyone to sing "Zmartwychwstania pryzklad" with success. Luckily, pretty much every line ended with "alleluia" which we sang with gusto, feeling a bit like Mr Bean on his one foray into church....

We finally got back to the hostel at around 2am and found the gates locked and no one answering the doorbell. Time for Sarah's rock climbing skills to prove their worth. Her elegant scaling of the gate was most impressive and we managed to get inside with no bones broken and dignity pretty much intact. As we were by now very hungry, we celebrated Easter in the hostel kitchen with hot chocolate and bananas before creeping into the dorm full of sleeping bodies to our beds. An amazing way to see in Easter 2009.

Easter Sunday itself was a day of sheer pleasure. On getting up we exchanged Easter presents, had boiled eggs for breakfast courtesy of the hostel, and wandered round the main square in the sunshine singing English Easter hymns to ourselves and getting some rather odd looks. We then had a coffee sitting on the main square, followed by a gin and tonic, which was in turn followed by a lunch of hot sausages and ketchup from a market stall. By now we had eaten and drunk the day away sufficiently that it was time to meet Dr Kloczowski again, who had offered to give us a walking tour of the city. He showed us the old university buildings, a couple of churches built in a range of architectural styles from baroque to Art Nouveau, Kafka's house and the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz where we visited a tiny synagogue and an ancient Jewish cemetry lined with wall plaques from survivors of the Holocaust remembering family members who had died. We finished off with another cup of tea and a long talk about European history during which Sarah and I both felt rather as if we were in a tutorial for which we hadn't prepared - absolutely fascinating but a tad scary! We then said goodbye to our friend, who had given up so much of his Easter weekend to us, and walked back along the Vistula in the evening light to meet up with two other friends: Jason and Kylie, the Australian couple who we first met in Bulgaria, who were following a similar route to us and had just arrived in Krakow. We all went out together for an Easter meal in which I had lamb pierogi which were gorgeous, and Sarah had a simply enormous knuckle of pork which was the size of her head. We finished off the evening eating chocolate and playing Scrabble with a mixed Polish/French set, which made scoring rather interesting. Around midnight we said goodnight and turned in, as we were planning an early start for the Czech Republic the next morning.

Triduum in Krakow - part 2

2009-04-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

We were up early on Good Friday in order to catch a local bus to Auschwitz. We had some difficulty deciding whether or not to visit, especially as Sarah had been before with a school group, but in the end we did. It's very hard to know how to write about it, as anything you say is inadequate. A few of my personal impressions are as follows: the feeling of how strange it was that the sun was shining, the blossom was growing in the trees and the birds were singing; the ironic words written in friendly curvy writing over the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei; the wall after wall of photographs taken of the prisoners on arrival, some with tears in their eyes, and some trying to smile; the heaps of hair, shoes, toothbrushes, suitcases and spectacles; a single broken doll among a pile of children's clothes; the unmitigated horror of Cell Block 11 - the punishment block where Maximilian Kolbe starved to death; the signs at the edge of the barbed wire saying "Halt!"; the first gas chamber to be built; the place where Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, was finally hanged at the end of the war.

Shuffling round with the crowd of other tourists, I felt desperately unsure as to whether or not I should be there: are we all indulging in a macabre voyeurism, or is it really important that we should have to face what other people had to live? How can you respond to the fast food vans parked around the entrance, or the souvenir shops? What about the hordes of school children who are clearly not old enough to deal maturely with what they're seeing? But what else can you do with the place? How else can the memory of the survivors be honoured? The Nazis tried to destroy Auschwitz at the end of the war, to cover up their crimes. But they didn't succeed, just as they didn't succeed in eradicating the memory of their victims. And we can't let them succeed fifty years later: these people must and will be remembered as the individuals they were, and we can't forget their sufferings just to make life easier for ourselves.

As we left the camp and caught the bus back to town, it was impossible not to feel some kind of bizarre survivor guilt, that we could just walk out and return to normal life when so many thousands couldn't. I think we both still feel deeply ambivalent about going there. I think it will take a long time for our impressions of it to fully sink in.

On arriving back in Krakow, we hurried straight to the Good Friday service which was even more poignant than usual in its starkness and bareness after being at Auschwitz. Kissing the feet of the crucifix meant more than ever, as I realised that it was not just a quaint slightly sentimental medieval tradition, but a mark of reverent compassion for all those who suffer in the world.

As you can imagine, the rest of the evening was very quiet, and we were glad to go to bed after the intensity of the day.

Triduum in Krakow - part 1

2009-04-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

Any city founded on the slaying of a dragon was bound to be a hit with me, and our first impressions of the city on a relaxed Maundy Thursday were certainly favourable. We spent the morning pottering around Krakow in the sunshine, exploring the main square and the markets, and making our way up to the Wawel Castle and Cathedral. We didn't go in to either, as the entrance prices for the castle were pretty high and the cathedral was closed, but we had a good look round the various courtyards and admired the view of the Vistula curving through the city. A quick visit to the place where Smok the Dragon was allegedly killed was irresistible, although we managed to resist buying a nauseating fluffy version of him. Making our way back to the centre through the winding streets, we noticed how many priests there were hurrying to the castle, and realised that they were on their way to the Chrism Mass at the cathedral, which would also explain why we hadn't been able to go in. Lunch was fresh tomatoes and apples purchased from a local Polish market just outside the city centre, and we ate them sitting in the shade in the Planti (the park that surrounds the old city centre and protects it from the noise of the traffic) - a wonderfully cheap way to get a vitamin kick!

In the afternoon we were taken out for coffee on the main square by a family friend of ours, Dr Kloczowski, who teaches Philosophy at Krakow University. He proved to be great company and wonderfully welcoming. On hearing that we were arts students, he recommended us the best Polish authors to read and took us to some English language bookshops where we could buy Polish poetry in translation. He kindly offered to write the authors' names down for us, as we were having some difficulty in remembering how to say them, let alone spell them. We both found Polish probably the most difficult language we have yet encountered (possibly apart from Bulgarian, but then that is in a different alphabet)! Remembering how to pronounce a few crucial words was hard enough, but understanding anything anyone said was practically impossible as it all sounds like a big slur of zs. Apart from of course the chorus of "tac tac tac tac" (the Polish word for yes) which can be heard everywhere! Poles don't seem to be able to say yes just once.

When we had finished browsing the bookshops, we just had time for a quick freshen up before going to the Dominican church which Dr Kloczowski had recommended as having the best liturgy. The Maundy Thursday Mass was to begin at 7pm and he advised us to be early so as to get a seat. Not having yet encountered Polish Catholicism head on, we naively thought 6:30 would be early enough. Not a hope. When we arrived, more than half an hour early, there was already standing room only, and even the standing room was about two thirds full. We found a spot by a pillar which proved useful to lean on as the nearly 3 hour Mass progressed. We could barely see anything, and could understand even less, but there was such an amazing atmosphere that it didn't matter. The church was just crammed full of people with lots of groups of young nuns and a strong presence of students and young professionals. The music, though nothing like so grand and impressive as that in Vienna, was very moving because everyone clearly knew all the hymns and joined in with gusto. At the end of Mass, we paid a visit to the beautiful Altar of Repose in a side chapel which again was crammed with people on their knees and filled with meditative Taize music

Returning to the hostel, we were glad to sit down with a late supper of chicken stew (now a firm favourite on the Sarah-Lucy menu) before crawling into bed.

Plans 'til Warsaw

2009-04-14T02:31:00.000-07:00

We thought we should update everyone on the changes to our itinerary from here until Warsaw. We left Krakow yesterday and are now in Olomouc in Moravia (Czech Republic). We're spending two nights here before heading on to Prague on Wednesday which we'll leave on 19th April to go to Liberec. After two nights in Liberec, we're going on to Dresden for three nights and will leave on 24th. We'll spend the night of 24th in Wroclaw and arrive in Warsaw on 25th as planned.

More blogging soon!

HAPPY EASTER

2009-04-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

And now we are experiencing a proper Polish Easter in Krakow which we will write up properly for you all later. Much love and a very happy Easter to everyone, we are thinking of you all. xxx

Do they have sheep in Australia?

2009-04-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

After the hectic sightseeing in Vienna, we all enjoyed having a lazy day back in Bratislava on Monday. We went out for an early lunch at a local restaurant which specialised in all sorts of different pancakes. Everyone then split up to do shopping and have a wander. Rob and I planned to go out to dinner before we would all meet Jason and Kylie, the friends we made in Bulgaria who also happened to be in Bratislava for cocktails. But first we all watched some episodes of Jonathan Creek and managed to get Lucy hooked!

We joined up with the others at a Jazz Cafe and had a hilarious evening. Poor Jason and Kylie were subjected to a grilling from Keira about the state of the nation of Australia, with such classics as 'Do they have sheep in Australia?' However, they and we seemed to enjoy it and most of the rest of the evening was spent giggling with cocktails.

The following day, we decided to go to Schonbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, designed by Fischer von Erlach to matchVersailles. Poor Lucy had a cold and so couldn't join us. The Place itself is just awesome, absolutely beautiful and opulent. We looked round 44 of the rooms and learnt a little of the history of the Hapsburgs, absolutely gorgeous. We then headed back to the centre of Vienna and the beer garden we had been to at the weekend. A lovely afternoon was had, sitting out in the sunshine, drinking home brewed beer and eating hearty Austrian fare, including the goulash my grandma used to make.

We headed back to Brastislava reasonably early to have a quick bite to eat before the opera Eugene Onegin. Thankfully Lucy was feeling up to going. It was a very bizarre production with apparently lots of symbolism, although I didn't get why they were all wearing socks . Much hilarity ensued during the supposedly tragic death scene as Onegin wasn't quite up to the job in terms of acting ability, it looked like he was having a fit. There were also some very interesting things going on in the strings section...We all had a great time seeing it, although I was glad that Lucy's first professional opera was the Donizetti. We all headed home for a Slovakian sweet wine tasting before heading to bed for the early start to see Nikita off.

Again, I'm not sure what Milan thought when he arrived at 7 the following morning to be greated by one clothed Nikita and the rest of us still in our pyjamas looking half asleep. Very sad to say goodbye to Nikita, but the others weren't leaving til 12 so we had an opportunity to head out for breakfast and some souvenir shopping. Lucy and I weren't leaving until 3, so after another very sad goodbye to everyone, we had a last check of the flat and had a cup of tea before walking the 1km to the station in absolutely blistering heat.

The train journey to Krakow was a bit of an epic... I'd gone to get the tickets that morning and been informed that we only needed to do one change at Breclav in the Czech Republic. Hoping off the train, we headed to the right platform, only to discover that it looked like we would have to do another change at Katowice. In the end, it all became slightly clearer; the last carriage on the train split with the rest and did head to Krakow, so all we could do was hope that we were on the right half. Thankfully at quarter to 10 we arrived in Krakow and headed to the hostel, which is in a lovely location right on the main square. There were still some food stalls at the Easter market open, so we had some lovely polish sausage for tea and finally crashed ready to explore Krakow more tomorrow.

Viennese whirlings

2009-04-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

We had selected Bratislava as a base, partly so that we could get easily to Vienna while paying Slovakian, rather than Austrian prices. So on Saturday we headed off to Vienna, catching the bus just down the road from the apartment, which took about an hour, and then the metro into the centre of the city. Vienna really does live up to all the cliches - coffee, cakes, opera, the Hapsburgs, horse-drawn carts: you're bombarded with the lot as soon as you arrive. We emerged from the underground into Stephansplatz - the heart of the city, and marvelled at the huge Gothic cathedral which dominates the square. A quick trip to the tourist office, and we were sipping (very expensive) coffee in the shade while browsing the information leaflets and deciding what to do. The unmissable place seemed to be the Hofburg, the imperial palaces which are now a complex of museums and galleries, so we wandered in that direction, pottering through its stately gardens full of people lying in the hot sunshine, children playing games, and a myriad of ice cream stalls. The best bet seemed to be a combi-ticket for a couple of galleries, so we all bought one and headed to the Treasury of the Hapsburgs. This is best described as a banquet of jewels, from which you emerge completely drunk on colour and blinking in the sunshine. Nikita had her eye on a rather nice sword (presumably to slay any dragons which might be lurking in the shadows), while Rob revealed a latent ambition to be a royal herald, complete with a bejewlled tabard.

A quick sandwich and a much needed cold drink, and then the party split for the afternoon to explore different parts of Vienna. Nikita, Keira, Becky and I went on a bit of a park crawl - wandering through four of the city's parks, and ending up in the Stadtpark which is beautiful, full of flowers and families enjoying the sunny Saturday afternoon. We basked for a while in the sunshine, before returning to the centre of town to meet Rob and Sarah at the Hotel Sacher for authentic Sachertorte and tea with real milk: Sarah's and my first proper cup of tea since leaving England. We were rather afraid we wouldn't like it, as we've got so used to drinking black tea, but you'll be relieved to hear this was not the case! Over our terribly civilised afternoon tea, we discussed our impressions of the city, and agreed with Rob's comment (which I think he may have plagiarised from Salim) that it feels like the capital of an empire, not the capital of Austria. In the context of the country, it feels ludicrously overblown - you really have to get into the 16th century groove....

Full of cake, we tottered back to the bus stop and got back to the flat in Bratislava in time to cook another veggie curry with all the left over vegetables and more wine. The next morning was a very early start, as we wanted to make Palm Sunday High Mass in St Stephen's Cathedral. Thanks to everyone's Herculean efforts in getting out of bed, we arrived with enough time to arm ourselves with pussy willow branches, which are used here instead of palms. The Mass was amazing, with a packed cathedral, an impressive procession of clergy, and a wonderful choir who sang some lovely motets as well as the Bruckner Mass setting. The singing of the passion was especially good - the big German bass singing "Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?" sent shivers down the spine.

After Mass it was time for a much needed coffee and panini in a nearby cafe, and we then walked back to the Hofburg to the National Art Gallery (via an irresistible ice-cream shop which served up the most delicious "Mozart" ice-cream. Yes, I know it's horrible touristy, but the combination of marzipan and chocolate ice-cream was just too good to miss.....) The Art Gallery was overwhelmingly packed with a great selection of international art, including some wonderful Breughels and a few Carravaggios. A few hours later, we left feeling very square eyed and in need of a sit down. Which was just as well, as we then had to sit for an hour and a half in a queue for standing seats (surely a contradiction in terms?) at the Opera House. Lured by the promise of tickets for only 4 euros, we were stuck in a darkened stuffy corridor for what seemed like an age, while a rather alarming man in a gilt edged uniform patrolled up and down and told us that if we moved at all, we would lose our places in the queue. Once the queue finally got moving, we were shepherded through several different spot checks, stood in a couple more random queues, apparently for no reason at all, and physically moved around by the now female but equally alarming woman manning the queue, to ensure that we were standing two by two shoulder to shoulder to enter the Opera House. When we finally got in with very frayed tempers on all sides, we were informed that we could mark our places by tying on to the railings, either a scarf or a ribbon. No other item of fabric was apparently appropriate. It being a boiling hot day, we didn't really have many scarves between us, and none of us are in the habit of carrying around lengths of ribbon. So we had to stay in our places for the remaining half hour before the opera began to make sure that the hard earned spots weren't lost. To add insult to injury, the third alarming person in charge of queueing chose this moment to inform us that we weren't allowed bags inside the Opera House, meaning that we would have to go back to the beginning of the queue and do the whole bally thing again. The only possible response to tyranny being subterfuge, we all united by sitting on our bags to hide them, denied all knowledge of suspicious bulges and felt very like oppressed peasants.

It has to be said however, that we had a fabulous view and very much enjoyed the opera. It was L'Elisir D'Amore by Donizetti which is a very enjoyable farce, involving a foolish peasant who is conned into buying wine which he thinks is a love potion which will make the beautiful local land lady fall in love with him...you get the general idea. The singers were great, although the music wasn't much to write home about until the second half, which included the beautiful aria Una Furtiva Lacrima. The brilliant tenor performing it was just unbelievably good. Keira and I were both in tears, and the audience clapped and shouted so much that he had to perform it again (to the surprise of the soprano lead who came on to continue the opera and had to make a precipitate exit). After the second time, he had a standing ovation from the entire house. Unforgettable. I have definitely been converted to tenors. Go and look up the aria now - you won't be disappointed.

It was a very late ending to the day, as we had to wait nearly two hours for a bus back to Bratislava in the bus station God forgot in the less than lovely suburbs of Vienna. Finally arriving at the flat around 2, we crashed out in bed. A weekend of non-stop culture and luxury can be terribly exhausting, darling.

A late Chad's invasion....

2009-04-11T05:29:00.000-07:00

Milan, the guy who dropped the others off at the flat looked a bit frightened at the manic hugging which occured as soon as the front door opened, and left us to get on with it. Nikita arrived an hour after the others and after the obligatory cup of tea and chat, we headed out to explore the city.

Although technically a city, indeed a capital city, Brastislava (particularly the Old Town) feels very town like. There isn't a huge amount to do, except sit in the sunshine in one of the many cafes which line the streets. Nevertheless, we had a wander to the main square, with a little minature Easter market and around all the ajoining squares, past all the embassies and the opera house before having a genuine (i.e melted chocolate) hot chocolate in a cafe. The result was six people all on a slight sugar high...

We headed back to the flat so that people could get settled in and tried the Tokaji wine Lucy and I had lugged from Hungary. To say it was the SPAR shop own brand, it wasn't half bad, although incredibly sweet. Afterwards, we headed out to a locals restaurant. It turned out to be an ideal place to try new things; Nikita tried snails and vension and I tried smoked trout. We also tried a Slovakian wine (apparently the best) which was, as Rob put it 'hideous' (althoughit tasted better if you added water as Lucy and I did - heathens). After lots more chatting we headed in for the night.

Poor Becky who is an early riser, was up and ready to go at a reasonable time. The same cannot be said for the rest of us. After a very delayed breakfast, we headed out to visit some of the museums of the old town. The main site of Bratislava is its castle, which of course being this trip was 'under renovation'. Instead, we went to a quirky art museum, with a mirrored bookcase walk way and lots of very cool modern art as well as lots of older paintings by Slovak painters. It was really interesting to see how European art movements; impressionism and cubism especially, had affected these artists whose work is not really displayed outside Slovakia.

We then wandered to St Martin's Cathedral , a beautiful if dark building which backs on to the motorway, so its quietness surprises you. It is where several of the Austro-Hungarian monarchs were crowned (including Marie Theresa) due to the Turkish invasion. Afterwards there was a photo opportunity where Rob taught Keira how to use his very high tech camera. Photos continued while we sat in the square and drank beer. Discovering that you had to have a big meal rather than a snack to eat there, we headed to a bagel bar for a yummy smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel.

The group then split, some on the look out for ice cream; a mammoth task as I understand it as Slovakians seem to think it is bad for you. Rob and I wandered to the UFO bridge for a look at the Danube, stopping on the way there at a wine shop to see if we could get some better Slovakian wine to have with dinner. We came back to discover that the makings of a fantastic curry had already begun. A very civilised evening of listening to music and chatting, bar Keira and my mad rush to Tesco for yoghurt to cool the curry down a bit. The curry was fantastic, the wine better than the night before!

Friday was another beautiful day of sunshine. Making a slightly earlier start, we headed out to the UFO bridge, the main bridge which crosses the Danube in Bratislava. It is known as the UFO bridge due to the structure at the top which houses a viewing platform at a restaurant. You get incredible views at the top; it gives you a visual history of the city - a beautiful Old Town with a castle, combined with the huge Soviet tower blocks of the communist regime. Far in the distance you can see Austria, which brings home the extent to which Brastilava really was at the very edge of the communist block.

After a lovely coffee looking out over the view, we wandered through the park, back to the Old Town and had paninis by the (under renovation) fountain. We then headed to the Archbishop's Palace, a candy pink building with wonderfully preserved festures and a huge number of mirrors and British tapestries. While there we met a hilarious guy on the information desk who struck up quite a rapport with Keira. He advocated Christian Socialism as an economic system and complained about the damage western capitalism had done...the evils of the British Empire etc.

We then went on a hunt for ice cream. The guy serving was a bit of a show of; pretending to drop them or throw them at you - very entertaing to watch. Absolutely delicious! Then it was time to put the gladrags on; Rob and I headed out for a quick bite to eat. While we were having a lovely dinner, the others were having a slightly stressful time as they had realised that the ballet was at the new theatre, a drive away. Cue the arrival of more conmen taxi drivers, but we all arrived with five minutes to spare. Sleeping Beauty was lovely, and we had really good seats which was wonderful, although the acting is absolutely terrible! After leaving the ballet, a search for food was required for the others as Tesco which is allegedly 24 hrs isn't. Nikita and Becky gave up, poor Lucy and Keira were stuck with the delights of a fish burger in MacDonalds. However the E number overdose did prove hilarious for the rest of us. A lovely evening!

Not our finest hour

2009-04-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Part of our last day in Kosice, which was a Sunday, was spent sitting in the Catholic cathedral wondering where everyone else was. The congregation turned up about half an hour later, and we tut tutted about how disorganised it was, and how the notice on the front door giving Mass times hadn't been kept up to date. It was several hours later before we realised that the hour had in fact gone forward. So we had caught the 10;30 Mass rather than the 9am. You'll be glad to hear that we felt suitably foolish. We had read that the Slovaks are a deeply religious people, and it definitely felt like that at Mass. The church was packed, with people kneeling in the aisles (and this was the third Mass of the day). The congregation was a real mix: young families with lots of children, teenagers, students, elderly people, and the atmosphere was very devout. After Mass, pretty much the entire congregation transferred next door to an ice-cream parlour. Being good tourists, we felt that we ought to blend in with the locals, so we followed them in to have coffee and cake.

As the day wore on, we really had run out of things to do in Kosice, so the evening was spent in the youth hostel singing as many things in harmony as we could remember: three years in a college choir were not spent in vain! The next morning, we packed up and hopped on a train to Bratislava, which took 5 and a half hours as it went all round the country in two sides of a triangle rather than directly across. We did manage to glimpse the snow covered Tatras on the horizon, which was about as exciting as the journey got.

On arriving in Bratislava, we walked a long way through the industrial and commercial outskirts of the city to get to the apartment we had booked. After about two miles, the poor armadillo and tortoise were feeling their shells rather, and as we were completely lost, we decided to give up and take a taxi. The taxi driver, carefully selected for being a cuddly looking grandpa figure with a white moustache, welcomed us cheerily, smiled from ear to ear, and drove us 30 seconds round the corner to the address we had given him! He then proceeded to charge us 5 euros for the privilege, assuring us that this was the minimum charge. We attempted to argue the case, but his English mysteriously dried up, and our Slovakian wasn't really up to the job. Another triumph for the ILTDC (International League of Taxi Driving Conmen).

The flat, though looking rather shabby and decrepid on the outside, turned out to be spacious, clean and modern, and about five minutes walk from the old town and a local supermarket - perfect for our purposes! Sarah and I had the rest of the day, and the whole of the day after in the flat by ourselves before everyone else arrived on Wednesday so took the opportunity to sleep a lot, wash clothes, eat baked potatoes and watch a lot of very odd Slovakian tv (there was some international tennis on too which made me very happy, and which Sarah tolerated with much patience). Then on Wednesday, it was time for Bratislava to become Durham for a week, as the Chadsians arrived......(imagine the Dance of the Capulets in the background).

Medzev

2009-03-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure how I was supposed to feel visiting the place where my grandad was born. In a sense it is a place I have no connection with, my grandad left shortly after the Second World War and only went back in the 1980s (I'm not even sure if he went back to Medzev itself). I've never met any of that side of the family and the impression we all had was that it was an unlucky place to be during the previous centuries' conflicts and so didn't want to push my grandparents into discussing it. What we do know is that one of my grandad's brothers, Michael, was marched off by the Russians, along with many others from the town, when they 'liberated' the area and that for part of the war my grandad was in Munich working in the BMW factory. Quite why remains a bit of a mystery, he was only 13 at the outbreak of war.

An online site had been able to provide detatls of my great grandfather Johann (1880-1952), Charlotte, my great aunt (1911-1990), Natalia (1922-1986), another great aunt and Jan, a great uncle (1921-1989). I was hoping to find their graves and if possible see if I could speak to someone in the records office who might know more about the transports to labour camps in Russia, but I knew that this was probably a bit of a shot in the dark.

When we arrived I was struck by how beautiful it was, surrounded by mountains and remebered my grandad telling me how horrified he was when he arrived at Hull harbour and saw the industrial north of England for the first time. Seeing this place I could well imagine having the same reaction. In some ways Slovakia feels very rural still, even though years of communsim sought to industrialise everything. There is a little square in the centre of the town, with the Mary Queen of Angels Catholic Church; a beautiful and traditional church and a monument to some sort of resistance in 1945. There is not much sign here of pre war buildings, except for the church and I would love to know why. The same is true of graves; I couldn't find any pre 1880.

We headed up to the graveyard hidden up at the back of the town, built into a steep hill which is presumably overflow from the more central one. Graveyards are telling about the makeup of the town, and the first thing we noticed was the number of graves which shared the same name, the second is that they were almost entirely German names: Gedeon, Gaspar, Antl, Schmiedt, Tischler, Eiben, Muller, Schuster, Tomasch, Pimzner, Friedl (Friedel), with only a few clearly Slovakian or perhaps Hungarian names. Until 1919, this was part of the Austro-Hunagarian empire. After a lot of searching, and in fact nearly missing it, I found the grave of my great grandparents, Johann and Sarlote (1988-1968). Her maiden name was Gedeon, but interestingly her first name is not spelt in the German way. Next to it was the grave of my great aunt Natalia and her husband Karol. Unfortunately my great grandparents grave was not in a particularly good state, but we couldn't find a flower shop. But I was really moved to be able to find them and see them for myself.

We tried to get into the local records office, but it was closed, although I'm hoping they'll help if I write them a very nice letter. The main graveyard at first looked too huge to be able to find anything, but Lucy found Jan's grave and that of Charlotte and their spouses and also one for a Katarina Ruzbarska (1912-1966) whose maiden name was Nohavickova (unmaried women take that ending so technically I suppose I should too.) This I think is another great aunt as there were definitely two daughters born before Johann went away to fight in WWI. The most interesting find in the graveyard however was a monument to a group of soldiers who all died 21.6.1919 in which there was a Jan Nohavica. The monument commemorates something to do with Slovakian nationalism and the Czech Legion, we checked the guidebook when we got back and it said that in 1919 the Hungarian Red Army tried to reoccupy this area and were forced out by this Czech Legion, so we think it might be related.

There were no other Nohavickas that we could find in Medzev, which leads me to suspect that it was only my family which lived here. The man who let us into the appartment in Bratislava said that Nohavicka is a Slovakian word meaning small/ children's trousers, but that it is quite an unusual surname in Slovakia. This also suggests that my grandad's side of the family weren't part of the German settlers who moved here, but were in fact Slovakian which makes sense because although my features are very German - blonde hair, blue eyes etc, my grandad and his siblings had dark hair and eyes. Much of this needs to be confirmed, but it is a very encouraging start to finding out more about this side of my family.

Interestingly, there is no mention anywhere that I could see of the citizens taken to Russian Labour Camps, although that it happened is well documented. I'd really like to find out what happened to Michael as it is something which grandad was always anxious to know about and hoped he survived. Everything else that I discovered while we were there he probably already knew about, but it would be nice to answer this question one way or the other.

We finished a lovely visit in the main square eating lunch of sardines, apples and bread before heading back to Kosice and a typical Slovakian dinner of dumplings, goulash and cabbage rolls. A very moving day for me.

(For anyone interested, I've attached a couple of websites about Medzev or Metzenseifen as it is in German.)

http://www.oldmetzenseifen.de/

http://thoey.tripod.com/hoey/stories/laborlist.html

Introducing East Slovakia...

2009-03-31T08:39:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Kosice at 10 pm on Thursday night, a 3 1/2 hr trip from Budapest. Deciding it was too late to go wandering through an unfamiliar city, we grabbed a taxi to hostel K2, our home for the next few days. The hostel's location wasn't what you would call obvious as it was through an unmarked door in a quiet courtyard, but at last we were able to dump the bags and hit the sack.

The following morning gave us the opportunity to explore Kosice after a bizarre breakfast of strudel and cappucino. It is the so-called second city of Slovakia, right at the eastern end of the country, 21 km from the Hungarian border. The outskirts are very Soviet - lots of high rise flats and signs of poverty, but the main square is beautiful. It's very like Sibiu; pedestrianised with beautiful pastel coloured buildings and of course the obligatory Tescos. It is dominated by the Cathedral of St Elizabeth, a beautiful gothic church started in 1378 with a gorgeous tiled roof and cupola, which make it the most striking landmark in the city. Inside is an eclectic mix of old and new which both of us really liked. There is a really modern, smooth stone lecturn and altar with a traditional gold panel behind, a gothic twisty staircase up to a huge statue of Mary and a crucifix, really old frescoes of the Last Judgement the Mount of Olives and modern stained glass. It reminded both Lucy and I of Durham in its feel.

The cathedral is surrounded by a little beautifully kept garden where there is a little chapel in a similar style. All across this pedestrianised area are the excavations of tunnels from the Middle Ages, which are quite cool and there is a town tower with an apparently interesting waxworks museum, although we didn't feel the need to explore... There are more gardens, complete with an apparently singing fountain (this was 'under renovation' so sadly tuneless, although this might have been a blessing in diguise) before one comes to the small and elegant Opera House. It is all very lovely, although you can't help but feel that it is a lot more provincial than its second city status would lead you to suggest.

We headed into the tourist office to find out about how to get to Medzev the following day. This is the main reason for visiting this side of Slovakia, as it is the village where my grandfather came from and I wanted to see what I could discover there. It is very close to Kosice and so far I had been unable to stop myself imagining my relatives in what then must have been there county town. In any case, having sorted out transport, Lucy and I went for a posh cup of tea at the Art Nouveau Slavia which the guidebook describes as 'too snooty to be relaxing'. It is, but we had a good time mocking its pretentions.

Our afternoon was spent in the East Slovak Museum, which we thought would be a good grounding for understanding Medzev. It was a hilarious failure. First we tried to pay and the woman had no change, so we bought a packet of crisps with a 50 euro note (I don't think the lady at the til was overly impressed...) Finally managing to buy our ticket, we were lead into a room with a solar system model in it. Sharing slightly bemused looks, Lucy and I dutifully admired the model and appreciated the information displayed about the universe, all the while wondering how especially this related to East Slovakia. The second room shed no further light - it was full of rocks from around the world, which, whilst fascinating wasn't quite what we were expecting. By the third room, all became clear; the two previous rooms were setting the scene for the natural history of East Slovakia and the following rooms were full of stuffed animals native to this part of the world.

Well, we enjoyed wandering, but it can't be said that either of us are particularly interested in natural history. At the end of the section, we tried to go to a different area of the museum, only to be told in Slovakian that our ticket didn't cover this. By this stage it was 4.30 and we decided that we would leave the rest for another day. Dinner was in a lovely pizza restaurant, popular with locals called Kleopatra and we headed in for an early night.

Goodbye Budapest!

2009-03-26T03:34:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning saw us heading off to Keleti railway station to buy tickets to Kosice in Slovakia for the following day, as we thought that we needed to book international tickets 24 hours in advance. This turned out not to be the case, but we were still glad we had got it sorted in advance, as the process was unbelievably tortuous. The rather grumpy lady behind the counter wrote everything out by hand in triplicate with not a computer in sight. We then wasted a lot of time talking at cross purposes before realising that the reason she had sold us return tickets rather than singles was because returns are cheaper. Not sure what the logic in that is, but there you go.

From here we went back to revisit the area of Pest we had explored on our first day, and spent a lovely afternoon pottering up and down the beautiful streets visiting a number of lovely bookshops, reading Hungarian poetry, and drinking coffee surrounded by dishevelled students and intellectual looking old men reading. We also popped into the Liszt Academy of Music to see if there were any concerts on that day (there weren't) and again mingled with lots of arty looking music students. We really got the sense of Budapest as a university town for the first time.

Rather than going out for supper as we had initially planned (Budapest has been quite expensive enough already!), we decided to cook our own version of Hungarian paprika chicken, supervised by the lovely girl working in the hostel. We bunged in chicken thighs, root vegetables, herbs and tonnes of paprika....and it was gorgeous. Later in the evening we went out for mojitos at an arty little place called Cafe Kafka just down from the basilica, which was a fantastic way to end our week in Budapest. We walked back along the Danube, looking at the stunning view of the river and bridges all lit up at night, finally getting back to the hostel around midnight.

Today it's on to Slovakia. We're finding it hard to tear ourselves away from Budapest: it's such a beautiful city with so many different layers of history and culture to explore. But it'll be good to be back on the road, and with something of a research project to work on (watch this space....). And of course it's less than a week now until we see a crowd of Chadsians in Bratislava....can't wait!

The Holocaust Memorial Centre

2009-03-26T02:39:00.000-07:00

Having seen much of the beauty in this fabulous city, we decided that we ought to learn more about the Holocaust here. With this in mind, on Tuesday we headed not to the Jewish Quarter, but to the very ordinary district of Ferencvaros where a centre was opened in 2004 to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust in Hungary. It was positioned here rather than in the Jewish Quarter to emphasise the fact that it was not just Jewish Hungarians who were victims, but gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents and those with disabilities.

The building itself is modern, although in a really fitting way: it doesn't look out of place surrounded by these much older buildings. Most of the museum takes place underground and takes you chronologically from the initial stages of rights deprivation right through to the death camps. It is an excellent museum, very thought provoking as it follows the fates of various families throughout the various stages. Harrowing to go and see, but was much more meaningful to me than my visit to Auschwitz had been, I guess because it was able to be personal whereas at Auschwitz, there just isn't the time or space to do so. What is amazing is the so-called Auschwitz album. Although there were never any pictures taken past the selection process, SS photographers did take photos of everything up until this point, that it survived is equally incredible.

The museum was also fascinating because it gave an interesting impression of Hugary as a country which still has difficulties with its Roma population. There is still I think quite a lot of tension between this community and the rest of the country which was reflected by the exhibition, as although it tried to be unbiased it wasn't quite as detailed as perhaps it might have been. This could be down to the fact that there aren't as many detailed records, but it still left both of us with the view that this is a group which is always at risk of being persecuted.

The exhibition finishes in a stunning 1924 Leopold Baumhorn synagogue, which is my favourite. It is gloriously painted in white, turquoise and gold and is a perfect location for the experience to draw to a close. The most moving thing was a set of perspex seats which formed half the seating in the synagogue on which there were photographs of various victims of the Holocaust.

After a reflective cup of tea, we headed back to the hostel for a quiet night in. Both of us were very glad we went.

An evening with Bluebeard and three tramps

2009-03-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Monday morning saw the fulfilment of a month-long ambition: a proper fry-up English breakfast. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and once we felt able to move again, we decided to go on a day trip to Szentendre: a little town to the north of Budapest. We took the rackety commuter train from the other side of the river and 45 minutes later were exploring the old streets. It has always been a favourite haunt of artists and craftsmen, and there are a number of galleries and workshops selling lace, wood carvings, paintings and beautiful children's clothes. I toyed with the idea of buying a miniature Hungarian national costume for my niece, but decided it might be slightly too random for a little half English, half Maltese girl.....

We explored the cutsie cobbled streets and squares and looked at a beautiful Serbian Orthodox cathedral (the town has been regarded as the heart of the Hungarian Serb community since the 1500s). The town is situated on a lovely peaceful part of the Danube bend and we ate apples siting by the river in the sun, resisting the temptation to take pot shots at neighbouring ducks with the cores. Our exploration ended with the inevitable cup of tea in a local cafe and then it was back on the train. We just had time for a quick rest and freshen up at the hostel before it was time to head out again to the Opera House for an evening of Bartok with the Philharmonic Orchestra.

We didn't have any idea what to expect, as neither of us know very much about Bartok, and the programme was entirely in Hungarian. So we just sat back in our incredibly high seats and immersed ourselves in the music. The first half was a very disturbing and sinister piece of music with lots of percussion which built up amazing tension towards the end. Sarah's internet research later proved that this was a one-act ballet called The Miraculous Mandarin, which apparently involves three tramps, a prostitute and a hapless Chinese chap who is beaten up by the tramps and hung on a tree, and finally dies of his wounds. All good clean fun. The second half took us rather by surprise as a large man in a very regrettable shiny shirt started chanting poetry in an amazingly deep voice. He was later joined by a wonderful soprano and a slightly reduced orchestra. It was all very exciting and emotional, although we didn't have a clue what was going on. There was one great moment when a group of brass players appeared in the top gallery and blew a great blast at the same time as all the lights suddenly went on in the theatre, including the magnificent chandelier. We later found out that it was a one-act opera about Bluebeard: perhaps the big scary moment was when she opened the door and found the murdered wives.... Any Bartok experts out there feel free to elucidate. Anyway, the orchestra and singers were just superb and we had a wonderful evening. Back at the hostel, we had late night pasta and pesto and tumbled into bed.

Ladies who coffee, Hungarian style

2009-03-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning was a slightly less obscene start to the day than Saturday had been, but it still felt far too early to be wandering down to the Basilica for mass. However, the service was beautiful, complete with the first proper choral music of the trip: Mozart's Missa Brevis and motets. Suddenly it all looked much more beautiful than it had during the cursory glance we gave it on Thursday and it was lovely to be able to appreciate it as a member of the congregation, rather than as a tourist.

After mass, we had decided to climb Gellért Hill and have a picnic. However, we decided that we would try and find a place for coffee first. All the guidebooks recommend at least having a look at Gresham Palace, a fantastic Art Nouveau Palace built in 1907. It was taken over by the Four Seasons and surprisingly lovingly renovated so that it looks like it did originally. It is supposed to be a fantastic place for a coffee, however, Lucy and I were thwarted in our attempts, we couldn't even find the door to get in. This actually turned out to be a good thing as we ended up in the market square we had found a few days earlier outside the posh coffee house Gerbeaud. As part of the Spring Fesival, there were lots of folk artists playing, so we sat in the sun and rang our mothers for Mothering Sunday whilst sipping tea in the sunshine.

We climbed Gellért Hill in the afternoon. At only 235m high, it isn't enormous, but everything else is so flat that it does look quite striking. At the top is the Independance Monument, a giant woman holding a palm leaf, which almost acts as the city's mascot. There is also a modern looking citadell, but we didn't have an explore. Instead we had a lovely picnic of sausage sandwiches, Pom Bears, salad and fruit overlooking the city - beautiful.

Once back at the bottom of the hill, we walked along the river on the Buda side, seeing lots of quite grand houses before walking back over the suspension bridge to Pest. We tried to find the Orthodox Cathedral, but all the directions seemed to point in opposite directions and in the end, we arrived at the Inner City Parish Church, which from the outside looks like it is falling apart, but inside is beautiful and it is very obvious that it is well loved by its congregation.

We decided that we would treat ourselves to coffee and cake at Gerbeaud, the most famous cafe in Budapest. From its beginning in 1858, it has been the place where the rich and fabulous come to people watch and drink coffee. It is very beautiful inside, lots of thick drapes and patterned wallpaper, but is very touristy now and the staff are quite grumpy. Nevertheless, they certainly know how to make a fantastic cappucino and yummy cakes. We shared the Gerbeaud cake (chocolate and alcohol) and the Esterhazy cake (nuttly and creamy) which were delicious. Well worth a visit.

As we left, the outdoor concert had taken a turn towards 'world music', which seemed to consist of a woman screaming down the microphone. Lucy and I shared puzzled expressions and decided we wouldn't stay to hear the rest. However, in the market we did find absolutely fantastic 1930s hats and we had decided to turn up in Bratislava looking effortlessly fashionable in them. Unfortunately, this looking stylish will have to wait as the 55 euro price tag was just a little over our budget...

Instead we headed to the local cinema to see if there were any films in English. We ended up seeing Doubt, which was brillant and thought provoking. It stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann who are fantastic. It gave us a lot of food for thought, and we spent most of the night, whilst cooking veggie stirfry discussing it.

Sulphur, sulphur, glorious sulphur...

2009-03-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

In the heat of conversation on Friday night we (oh, alright then, I) had rashly agreed to go to the thermal baths at 6am with Susan, who was leaving Budapest mid-morning so needed to have an early start. Sarah wasn't hugely impressed by this, but nonetheless Saturday morning saw us up bright and early (well, early at least) to go to the Szenchenyi Baths in the north of the city, a short metro ride away. We bought tickets for about 8 pounds and were told if we left before 3 hours were up, we would get a partial refund. Scoffing at the idea of spending more than 2 hours in a swimming pool, let alone 3, we went in to change. Three and a half hours later we emerged very happy and relaxed, and smelling strongly of rotten eggs.

The baths are housed in fabulous 19th century baroque building, constructed for the purpose, and consist of a series of pools of thermal sulphurous baths at different temperatures, a number of dry and steam saunas, loads of showers and, best of all, three heated outdoor pools. These cannot be compared to outdoor pools in England - they are actually warm for a start: it is like swimming and sitting in a very large bath that is full of fountains, whirlpools and bubbles and statuary: paddling around hundred year old classical statues is so much fun! It was a glorious day - a clear blue sky and sunshine but very cold at that early hour. It is bizarre to be able to see your breath while you sit in steaming waters with the sun warming your back. The great thing about going so early was that no other tourists were up and the baths were full of lots of local elderly people chatting, relaxing and generally having a good time. Lots of people sit around in the outdoor baths smoking, reading and even playing chess on the floating chessboards. If you have to get up at 6am, this is the way to do it.

After the baths we said goodbye to Susan, had an ice cream (first of the year - yay!) and strolled through the park in which the baths are, ending up at the impressive Heroes Square, which stands at the head of the main street in Pest, Andrassay Utcar. The square was full of demonstrators waving the Hungarian flag and lots of police. When we returned to the hostel later, we found out that it was a protest against the resignation of the Hungarian PM - it was a hot topic of conversation among staff at the hostel who had much to say, mostly critical, of him and his actions especially relating to the EU. From Heroes Square, we went to the Fine Arts Gallery as we'd spotted there was a special exhibition there on Mucha, the Czech pioneer of Art Nouveau who, amongst other things, designed theatre posters for Sarah Bernhardt. It was an absolutely beautiful exhibition and we crippled our bank account at the gift shop buying gorgeous postcards and momentoes.

Then it was back to the hostel via the Opera House to buy tickets for a Bartok concert later in the week by the Hungarian National Philharmonic for the princely sum of 1 pound 50. The cheapness of the theatre here is wonderful: we are seriously considering relocation...... The rest of the day was spent in boring but necessary domesticity: washing clothes, food shopping and trying to get rid of the smell of sulphur from our hair. The evening ended with eating slightly odd Hungarian crisps with two other hostellers: a lovely quirky illustrator from the Netherlands called Petra, and Brendan from Kentucky. We had lots of interesting chat on the subject of jobs, the future, life, the universe and everything.

Buda and Ballet - Oh What A Night

2009-03-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

We had an early start on Friday, as we wanted to make the most of the day and headed out to the metro to get travel passes and jump on the tram. Given that this was our first real experience of using foreign public transport on the trip, we were feeling suitably smug when we got off the tram at the right stop only to realise that we had no idea how to get on to the hill itself. Cue the entrance of an imaculately turned out old lady who pointed us in the right direction. (The older generation have so far been unfailingly generous, helpful and perhaps most contrastingly to England, visible, even really late at night.)

Castle Hill itself is very beautiful and feels like a little village, although it feels very touristy, with lots of coach trips, much more so than Pest. However, there were brilliant views over the Danube, aided by the fact that it was an absolutely gorgeous spring day. Lucy and I both laughed (much to Susan's bewilderment) when we reached the Mátyás Church, one of the iconic landmarks of the city, which was covered in scafolding - under renovation could be the subtitle of this trip. Nevertheless it is beautiful if overwhelming inside: neo-gothic, late 19th centry although destroyed in WWII, with every square inch painted and minutely detailed stained glass windows. The decoration has elements both of Art Nouveau and geometric (turkish) designs, which is very fitting given Hungary's history. However, it was quite difficult to feel that it was a living, breathing place of worship, with so many tours going on. What saved it for me was a display at the back of the church about the modern church community and the Stations of the cross which were very evocative prints of original acrylics. Apparently it is hugely important to Hungarian history, but I will need to do a bit more reading...

After the church, we headed out to the Fisherman's Bastion, a fairy tale series of turrets and cloisters, apparently designed by Schuhet as a foil to the church. It doesn't serve any other purpose and it provides absolutely stunning views and was a lovely spot for some biscuits. A short wander and we were at the Royal Palace, which is actually quite ugly (I think again it was destroyed during the war) but houses the lovely National Gallery. The gallery covered a huge period, but had some particularly lovely 19th stuff, particularly Hungarian home scenes. I can't say that the really modern stuff caught my imagination, but we could well have been a bit pictured out.

Having had a restoring coffee, we headed back over the Danube to the Central Market. It is housed in a building which looks like a train station with two levels. Fresh produce is on the ground floor, canteens and tourist stalls on the first. There were lots of locals around which was lovely as it made it feel far more genuine. This also gave us the opportunity to try our first Hungarian goulash, although trying to find something veggie for Lucy was a bit of a challenge.

We returned to the hostel to put on what constitutes our glad rags ready for the ballet at the State Opera House. The ballet was called Balanchine: 'the soul of the woman in dance', which sounded rather bizarre but it was absolutely awesome. The State Opera House is just glorious inside, lots of murals and gold leaf everywhere, although if you have cheap tickets, you don't go up the sweeping staircase, you go through a little side door. Being right up in the gods gives you a stunning view of the whole thing which is just great, although the staff are quite rude to you. The ballet was actually three one act ballets: Serenade by Tchaikovsky, Concerto Barocco by Bach and Who Cares by Gerschwin. They were obviously very different but beautiful, especially the Gerschwin, which saw Lucy and I humming along and wishing we'd shown some talent in ballet lessons. Absolutely fabulous.

History lessons in Pest

2009-03-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Art Hostel, which is where we're staying, is located on the Pest side of the river, like most of the accommodation in Budapest, so we decided to base our initial exploration on Thursday in the vicinity. First stop was the Hungarian Parliament ten minutes down the road which is a spectacular great Gothic building modelled on the Palace of Westminster but with more spires. It's set in a large square which was the site of various demonstrations during the Soviet era. There's a really striking memorial to Hungarian independence now on the site where hundreds of people were mowed down by machine gun fire. It has a symbolic grave and a Hungarian flag with a hole torn in the middle: a reminder of how Hungarians tore the Soviet emblem out of their flag during demonstrations.

From here we walked along the banks of the Danube looking over at the stunning view of Buda and at the chain bridge plunged into the main part of Pest. The streets are very handsome, clean and packed with prosperous looking shops, churches and theatres. It's very hard to believe that these streets have been almost totally rebuilt since being flattened in World War Two. The city bears very few scars of its at times horrific past. The communist era seems to have pretty much passed Budapest by in terms of architecture, in the centre at any rate. It's definitely the most beautiful city we've been to so far: like what Bucharest must have been once, and not even comparable to poor old Sofia.

We wandered around Pest for some time, finding amongst other things a very pretentious square of modern art (we thought the main exhibit was a paddling pool but it turned out to be "a meditation on the art of co-operative creativity") and a little gem of a church down a side street where all-day adoration was going on. We ended up at the synagogue, the biggest in Europe and the 2nd biggest in the world after the one in New York. It was built in the 1850s when the Jewish population in Budapest was at its peak and was finally being accepted in Hungarian society: this was when laws were passed giving Jews the same rights as Christians in terms of jobs and taxes. As a mark of co-operation, the Jewish authorities commissioned a Catholic architect to design the synagogue, with the result that it looks surprisingly like a basilica. For the first time on this trip, we opted for the guided tour, and were really glad we did, as it enabled us to see the stunning interior close up and also hear some really amazing facts about the history of the Jews in Hungary. Hungary was a relatively safe place for Jews for most of WWII, as while the Nazis puppet government in Budapest had persecuted the Jewish community heavily by aking away their jobs and property, they had at least stopped short of actually sending them to death camps. However in 1944, the government tried to negotiate a secret peace treaty with the Allies, and as a result, the Nazi army moved in. Then, with horrible efficiency, they proceeded to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population within months, first putting them into a ghetto and then sending them to Auschwitz to die in the gas chambers, or of typhoid in the camp. From April 1944 to the end of the war, 600,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed. To give some idea of scale, that means every third person who died in Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew, and every tenth victim of the Holocaust overall was a Hungarian Jew. Before the war, there were 800,000 Jews in Hungary, now the population is just under 100,000.

The tour took us through the graveyard, which contains a mass grave of 3000 Jews, all of whom were killed in a massacre in the ghetto in 1945, just before the end of the war. Only 24 were able to be identified later, so there are just 24 headstones, all with the same date. Around the back of the synagogue is the memorial garden with a beautiful sculpture of a weeping willow in beaten steel, paid for by donations from surviving family members. There is also a memorial to all those non-Jewish Hungarians, all of whom risked, and many of whom gave their lives to save their Jewish neighbours. The chief among these is actually a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg who was working in Budapest at the time and saved thousands of lives by issuing fake passports and hiding Jews in properties owned by the Swedish embassy. He was later taken by the Russians after World War Two for unspecified reasons and was never seen again.

After leaving the synagogue, we walked through the former Jewish ghetto, which is now full of Jewish cultural centres and memorials, as well as ordinary houses and shops. It's a very surreal feeling to be walking through scenes of so much former suffering which within our grandparents time was surrounded with barbed wire and had signs up saying, "No Christians may enter." Somehow the suffering beneath the surface of this city is all the more poignant because the surface is so much more beautiful than somewhere like Bucharest, where the scars are far more obvious.

This post seems to be turning into a history lesson, and a rather depressing one at that, but it is such a huge part of the trip - we're immersed in a whole new story every time we step off the train. Sarah and I are both feeling increasingly embarassed by how little we know about countries which are really so close to us and are trying to soak up as much information as possible. I could go on and on about the uprising in 1956, the subsequent Terror in reprisals, the heroic Imre Nagy, the rat Janos Kadar who changed sides to join the Soviets when he saw the coup was going to fail and was later hailed as the human face of communism......don't worry I'll restrain myself. We certainly haven't finished learning since leaving Durham.

After leaving the Jewish quarter, it was on to a totally different part of history as we passed the birth place of Liszt, which is now a music academy with a very large and stern statue of him outside. Then we walked down Andrassy Utcar, the main (and very splendid) street in Pest which contains, amongst other things, lots of diamond shops, the former headquarters of the Nazi, and then Soviet, secret service, and the Opera House which is a magnificent building. We popped into here and managed to get wonderfully cheap tickets for the ballet on Friday night - they cost the equivalent of 3 pounds! More on this later.

From here it was on to St Stephen's Basilica, the biggest church in Budapest. It's a stunning building, and the inside is still very reverent, as most of it is roped off from tourists. We didn't manage to see the right arm of St Stephen, Hungary's most prized relic, as the chapel was, wait for it, undergoing renovation (a continuing theme for the trip). Perhaps another time.... The basilica overlooks a square filled with bars and coffee shops, which looked beautiful in the twilight and we walked back to the hostel through the streets which were just beginning to fill up with people going out for the evening.

Back in the hostel we cooked a slightly unsuccessful chilli with our new German friend and planned what we were going to do the next day. Susan was only able to stay two nights so wanted to be sure she saw as much as possible - this is proving very good for us as otherwise we have a slight tendency not to wake up until shamefully late. Having done quite a lot in Pest today, we decided tomorrow would be Buda.

Of trains, trams and frozen peas

2009-03-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

Our journey from Sighisoara to Budapest on Wednesday lasted an epic 9 and a half hours, at first through Romanian countryside where you could easily be watching the farmers of 100 years ago, and then through the incredibly flat Hungarian Great Plain ( I suppose the name is a bit of a give away). Despite lots of chocolate and much dozing, we were pretty sick of 20 Questions by the time we eventually arrived in Buapest. We got to the Art Hostel around 9pm after a crazy tram ride during which I think we defrauded the Hungarian public transport system (the slightly drunk driver said we could have it as a souvenir....). After a nutritious and satisfying meal of cuppasoups and biscuits, and much chatting with other travellers, we turned in for the night.

As we're staying here a week, we took the opportunity the next morning to do a lot of washing and stock up on food to cook for ourselves in the well equipped little kitchen. We really noticed the difference in stock at the local supermarket compared to the ones we've been using in Romania - there is so much more choice here, especially of fruit and veg. In Romania, broccoli was classed as an exotic product. We managed to buy frozen peas for the first time, which made Sarah very happy. All practical considerations having been dealt with, we teamed up with a lovely German medic called Susan, who was also staying at the hostel, to explore Budapest.

Well we've not met Dracula, but we have met underpants guy...

2009-03-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

After a delightful morning at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and lunch at the hostel, we headed out to Gara de Nord to catch the train to Brasov, a Saxon town 3 hours away. All seemed to be going well, tickets complete with seat reservations were purchased and we were feeling quite proud of ourselves. This wasn't to last. Having located the platform and the correct train, we dutifully tried to find the correct carriage and, being unable to see an obvious no.1 (our reservation), we just jumped on and hoped for the best. We got ourselves into what we thought was our carriage and dutifully loaded the bags on to the rack and sat down, ready for a chilled journey north. We were sat down about 5 minutes when the lady next to me told me that she couldn't help noticing that we were in the wrong carriage and that we needed to go to the other end of the train. Back on went the bags, and with only a few minutes to spare, we tried to walk through the train to get to our seats. We soon realised that there was absolutely no hope of this as the train was getting progressively fuller and it looked like we were going to pummel some old dears with our rucksacks. Off we jumped and ran towards the front of the train, where a conductor pointed to the carriage marked 2. You could forgive us for being a little confused, given that our tickets clearly said 1. Anyway, at last we found our seats and were ready to go on our way.

It was a very interesting journey. People actually walk along the lines to get home in what look like little shanty towns. Rubbish seems to be everywhere here, although it maintains a kind of beauty and I'm not really sure why. Very soon we were out in the countryside and witnessing a different kind of poverty to that which we witnessed in the city itself - no tower blocks, but houses that look like they are falling apart. We had a lovely little girl accompanying us on the journey, who loved hearing us talk in English. This is the lovely side to the Romania we have seen, everyone is very child friendly and it is quite usual for children to just start chatting to any adult they come across in the carriage.

We arrived in Brasov about 8.30 and were quite tired. Unlike Gara de Nord, here we were troubled by men offerring us taxis and lifts to the hostel and we suddenly felt very conspicious with our huge bags. Luckily, the hostel had given us directions about buses, plus a warning about the dodgy men at the station, so we jumped on the bus and with the help of Lonely Planet, managed to direct ourselves to The Rolling Stone. Upon arrival, we were greeted by whole load of Spanish boys who were staying in the dorm rooms, and the lady who ran the hostel suggested that we might want to take the private room instead, which we gratefully did. This room even had jacuzzi bath, although you had to pay 10 euros for the plug, which we decided was bit of a rip off.

We spent the next day exploring Brasov in the snow which had fallen the night before. It is a beautiful town, with muticoloured buildings and beautiful churches and a giant BRASOV Hollywood sign on the top of the local mountain Mt Tampa. The most famous building is the Black Church, a Lutheran church with a 4000 pipe organ. Bizarrely it is full of Turkish carpets which were gifts from merchants and has really beautiful paintings on all the pews, which seemed a bit ornate for the Lutherans... The church did have a really interesting display on the Reformation in this area, strange to think of it reaching this area, which is predominantly Orthodox and has a notable Hungarian Catholic minority, but they were nothing if not persistent. Lucy spent the rest of the day having a bit more of an explore, but I wasn't feeling great so headed back to the hostel. However, she took some lovely pictures of the woods surrounding the town and the two watch towers. Brasov also has a really interesting cemetry with the graves of all those who died fighting the Communists, including a six year old girl which was well worth a look.

We decided to go out for our first Romanian meal at the locally recommended Casca Romanesca which was absoltuely lovely. Full of locals holding a celebration meal for a christening and with live music, we had a lovely evening, eating locally made sausages and in Lucy's case, even trying the tripe soup! I don't know whether it is an experience she is willing to repeat...

Sunday morning saw us up early for the first time all trip for mass. The service was in either Romanian or Hungarian, it was hard to tell, but that gave an opportunity to fully appreciate the surroundings. It was a large Cathedral which was quite full, with people popping in all through the service and was really rather pretty. We spent the afternoon going up the cable car to the top of Mt Tampa which was just astonishingly beautiful. Fresh snow and pine forests made it look like Narnia and we could see the town below, which was all very charming. We tried the restaurant for something to eat and met the owner, a lovely German man who brought us the coffees we asked for and then realising that we were hungry, brought us sausages and bread free of charge.

Headed off to Sibiu late afternoon and shared pretzels and dried apricots with the woman we were sat with. We arrived about 9 and headed up to the Old Town where the hostel was, which is absolutely beautiful, very clean and again has these lovely candybox coloured buildings. The hostel itself looked out onto the square which was beautiful, but the whole town was very quiet, which is such a change to everywhere else we've been. There were only us and two other guys staying, so we got the beds next to the heater (an old fashioned, ceiling high gas stove) which was great as it was absolutely freezing. We spent the following day just wandering round Sibiu and found another Lutheran church claiming to have the largest pipe organ in Romania, but looked to be heavily under construction so we gave it a miss. The real find of the day was the Orthodox Cathedral which had the most glorious murals we've seen on the entire trip, deep colours and fantastic detail, particularly regarding expressions, which are not often shown in Orthodox art.

Returning to the hostel to cook a stirfry, we discovered that the two guys who were also at the hostel were even odder than previously thought. The older of the two spent the whole time rubbing two candlesticks and the younger seemed to think it entirely appropriate to wander round in his all too revealing underpants all evening. We were not impressed, but did have an almighty fit of the giggles which we tried very hard to link to something other than what he was wearing, without success.

Today we left Sibiu for Sighisoara, another Saxon town, from which we will catch the trin to Budapest tomorrow. We ended up using the slow train to get there which have a universal bad press in Romania for being the worst way to travel, but actually we found it fine. It's basically like the local bus route and the tiny stations you stop at every five minutes look exactly like bus stops, with people just hopping off and walking to their villages from there. It gave us really good oportunity to see what village life is like here. We arrived in Sighisoara with enough time to wander round the medieval fortifications and although all the buildings were closed, we still managed to get a good feel for the place. We also bought some Romanian wine to have with the chicken stew we cooked, and have spent the evening chatting to the other guy who is staying here, who is from Florida, about the civil rights marches he was on and our experiences of traveling so far. A lovely end to our time in Romania.

Parisian Bucharest.....no, really!

2009-03-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

We crossed the Bulgarian-Romanian border on Tuesday afternoon at the decidedly un-blue Danube and arrived at the Gara de Nord station in Bucharest in the pouring rain. After walking for about a mile, we arrived at the mysteriously named Butterfly Villa completely drenched and ready for some supper. The hostel was a good one, with a lovely big kitchen and some interesting people staying, including Slightly Odd French Guy, Man Who Snored and Arty British Students Making a Film (learning ten new names a day is getting too difficult).

We had been prepared for the worst with Bucharest - the guide books admit that many tourists get straight back on the train, and the best thing they can say of it is "lively and developing" - always a bad sign. People in Bulgaria too had looked on us with horror as we said we were going to Bucharest and told all sorts of horror stories about scams. But we were very pleasantly surprised. I'm not sure whether it was because we came from Sofia (which is a very sad city), or simply because we explored it on a beautiful sunny day, but we found it a fascinating, and in places, quite beautiful city.

Our exploration started at Piata Revolutiei, the heart of the city where the old palace stands and where the former Communist HQ (now the Senate) is. We stood and looked at the low balcony where Ceausescu made his infamous last speech to the booing crowds, and found it very hard to imagine what it must have looked like amid the roaring, crazy traffic and the hordes of young glamorous Roumanians hurrying to work. Then we strolled up the Calea Victoria (the main shopping and restaurant street) to the Old Quarter: lots of cobbled streets and old baroque style buildings, elegant, although crumbling. In this area of town you really get a sense of how beautiful it must have been in its golden age. Apparently Bucharest used to be known as the Paris of the East, and you can actually feel the French influence in the buildings, as well as in the language which has loads of links: for example, "thank you" is "mersi". We're still a bit mystified as to why there is such a French influence - any comments explaining this would be most welcome! We took the opportunity to have a drink at one of the many French style cafes, purely for cultural reasons of course, - hot chocolate with chilli is highly recommended.

The south of the city is very different in feel, as this is the area that Ceausescu completely remodelled as a monument to communism. The most obvious result of this is the monstrous Parliamentary Palace (originally called the Palace of the People) which is on the top of a slight rise of land and so totally dominates the southern area. The only thing you can say about it is that it's very very big (2nd biggest building in the world in terms of ground covered). It really is a complete monstrosity, although the design is in itself not terrible - it's attempting to create a baroque impression. It's just ludicrously big; it makes you feel as if you'd lost your sense of perspective as you approach it. It overlooks the Boulevard Uniri (formerly the Boulevard of the Triumph of Socialism) which is just a little bit wider and longer than the Champs d'Elysess, deliberately. It has a kind of arrogant splendour about it, so long as you don't think about the hundreds of beautiful old houses, churches and monuments that were bulldozed to create it. Behind the Parliamentary Palace is the Centru Civic - Ceausescu's pet architectural project. It's basically a network of very straight wide roads carving through a sea of concrete tower blocks interspersed with areas of scrubby wasteland where just one or two old houses stand forlornly looking like guilty survivors. The thought of everything that was razed to the ground is just heartbreaking. It's incredible to think what one man can do to a city.

On a happier note, back in the centre and north of the city, there are some lovely parks which provide some much needed green space and peace. We wandered through the biggest, Parcu Cismigu, which was full of young and old couples and lots of cooing pigeons. Our exploration of the city ended at Piata Universitiei, which was the site of various protests by the students of Bucharest University, including the City of Peace which was destroyed by the military, and of course where the infamous footage of tanks rolling over students was shot by foreign journalists in the towering Intercontinental Hotel which overlooks the square. Again, it was hard to imagine the scene, as the square was full of students happily browsing book stalls, which can only be a good thing!

Overall our impression was of a genuinely vibrant city which, unlike Sofia, has had a golden age and is determined to have another one. The locals seem defiantly proud of their city and there is plenty of building and redevelopment going on. The cultural scene looks great - there are several large theatres and concert halls which all look prosperous and busy. There is a sense of triumphant survival in the city: they were never quite conquered by the Ottoman empire, resisted Austrian Hapsburg domination, gained independence of the Soviet empire through great suffering and on top of all that, lived through a series of earthquakes! This city has really dealt with everything that can be thrown at it, and has more than survived.

On Friday morning we rounded off our stay in Bucharest with a visit to the irresistibly named Museum of the Romanian Peasant. This turned out to be a fantastic and completely batty place with loads of great and slightly random displays (including a room dedicated to grandmothers!) and wonderfully dodgy English translations of the information sheets. These included great lines such as "Anything which is touched secretly, dies." And to explain a room which was just full of wooden chairs: "When you put many chairs together, things start to happen..." We never worked that one out.

Now we have just arrived in Brasov in the Carpathian mountains, which is where we begin our tour of Trannsylvania. It's snowing heavily outside and we're going to snuggle down with cups of tea. Bliss.

Expotition to Veliko Tarnovo

2009-03-09T13:22:00.000-07:00

After a chilled out morning in Sofia, celebrating Rob´s birthday, we decided to don our rucksacks and head out on an expotition (as Pooh would have it) to Veliko. The hotel staff looked rather bewildered at our ´turtle chic´, as this look has come to be known, but nevertheless organised us a taxi to the Bus Station for the next leg of the trip.

We decided to break the trip to Bucharest in Veliko, a fortress town en route which was once the medieval capital of Bulgaria. The first thing we discovered is that no one pronouces it as one might think. The second is that in some cases all you can do is hope you got on the right bus and jump off it again at approximately the time the guidebook suggests. This was the method we employed, based on the fact that we had no idea what was going on. After 3 hours of travelling through beautiful Bulgarian countryside (and less beautiful suburbs), everyone got off the bus so we did too and thankfully realised we´d made it to Veliko. Again, like Plovdiv, Veliko does not immediately appeal, particularly when a strange man comes up to you and says that he has a hostel and transport if you need it... Thankfully, the woman from Hostel Mostel came to pick us up and we have spent the last couple of nights in a lovely hostel right near the fortress.

Hostel Mostel works on the basis that you pay 20 leva per person (about 10 pounds) and get dinner and a beer thrown in to the price of your bed. Lovely warm showers, laundry etc have all made this a great stopping off point. This is not to mention the actual town itself. Like Plovdiv, the Old Town is beautiful, all cobbled streets and ladies with goats. We spent this morning in the sunshine climbing around the fortress which has a patriarch´s complex at the top. The inside of the complex has the most amazing modern murals which use the same content as other Orthodox churches, but the images are slightly cubist in style and painted in grey rather than the bright colours we´ve been used to which was very cool. We both thought execution rock (where criminals were thrown down the gorge) was a little bit anti climactic as there are more impressive places in this area to fling people who upset you to their deaths.

We spent the afternoon wandering through the back streets to the ticket office to buy the tickets to Bucharest (7 hours tomorrow morning) and sitting in the garden reading and playing draughts before tucking into homemade pizza. We are becoming more and more concerned about how we will find Bucharest tomorrow as none of the guidebooks have been enormously positive. But as luck would have it, two people we met in Plovdiv, Jason and Kylie turned up tonight, so we´ve had a lovely time catching up.

I will lift mine eyes unto the hills

2009-03-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Ever since coming to Bulgaria, we´ve been looking forward to a trip to Rila monastery, a UNESCO world heritage site, which is supposed to be one of the highlights of the country. So Saturday was the day to catch a slightly obscure bus and head out into the Rila mountains outside Sofia. The bus journey was a 3 hour trek through very poverty stricken rural countryside: hundreds of crumbling and unoccupied buildings, rubbish everywhere, donkeys pulling carts along the motorway, women washing clothes at a single outdoor tap. Poverty is obviously not confined to the city slums but is the way of life for the majority of the country. Apparently the average Bulgarian survives on 100 pounds per week total living expenses.

The last leg of the journey, from Rila village to the monastery in the mountains was just spectacular: stunning views of snow capped craggy mountains and rushing streams, with some ominous rock falls at the side of the road. The monastery really is incredibly remote, which I suppose makes sense as it was founded by a hermit who wanted complete solitude. It certainly makes you realise why the Ottomans didn´t bother trying to conquer it. The monastery is built like a fortress with high walls, cloisters round the inside and the church in the middle. There´s been a monastery on the site since 900, though the present building dates from the 19th century as there was a fire which destroyed all the original wooden structures. In a wonderful burst of confidence however, they just rebuilt it exactly the same. And actually the relative newness of it means that you can see all the colourful murals in the church; in all of the other older Orthodox churches we´ve been in, the ceiling and walls are too blackened with soot from the beeswax candles and incense to be able to see the murals properly. It made me realise what a strong emphasis there is on story in the Orthodox tradition: every inch of the church is covered with depictions of moments in the Old and New Testaments and if you tried to identify every one, you´d be there all day. Favourite saints seem to include Sts Cyril and Methodius, obviously, as they´re the creators of standard Cyrillic, St Demetrius (?) and St George who appears everywhere enthusiastically killing his dragon.

There was quite a lot of snow on the ground while we were there, and this enhanced the secluded, peaceful atmosphere, which survives the smattering of tourists and the inevitable tacky souvenir stalls. This is really the spiritual heart of Bulgaria, and a great symbol of national and religious pride, as it was a working monastery all the way through the occupation by the Ottomans, and indeed still is. We saw quite a few monks around in their black robes, hats and long beards, and there are large parts of the monastery which are closed to visitors. Unfortunately, we were rather pushed for time, as there is only one bus back to Sofia in the afternoon, but we had a quick look around the museum and saw correspondence and gifts from all round Eastern Europe to the monastery, which was obviously a real hub of intellectual and cultural life all through the late middle ages and the Renaissance. Although they didn´t get printing until incredibly late: the first Bulgarian printing press was in Rila monastery in the 1890s! One exhibit in the museum was particularly interesting: a beautiful wooden cross carved with over 600 tiny exquisite figures portraying biblical stories, which took one monk 12 years to complete. He then lost his eyesight, presumably because of so long staring down a magnifying glass, so never got to appreciate the final product, which is a very sad story.

I think we were all sorry to leave the monastery so soon, as it is a deeply moving and very beautiful place. Bulgarians don´t have very much to boast about, and don´t boast at all about what they do have, but Rila seems to be the place that embodies something of their national pride, religious devotion and spirit of quiet fortitude.

Psycho and Sofia, a match made in heaven...

2009-03-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, we left Plovdiv feeling much more attached to it than when we arrived on Monday morning. We decided to take the bus to Sofia, the capital where we had a guesthouse booked for when Rob came out. Sofia is a hard capital to fall in love with at first sight. The outskirts certainly are an example of what years of foreign rule and communist regime can do to a capital. It's all tower blocks and deprivation and I think it looks worse partly because Sofia is on a huge plain, so there is nothing to break up the view. I was shocked to see children, who can't have been older than seven, smoking on the street. Up until this point we hadn't really seen children begging far away from their parents, so it was an early indication that it is a much bigger problem here.

We were led to believe that the guesthouse was a purple and gold building which we discovered was a bit of an overstatement. The rooms themselves looked like they were out Psycho and we realised that we were the only people staying. None of this made us feel enormously comfortable, and looking at the prices (this guesthouse is the most expensive place we are staying on the whole trip) we decided we weren't going to stay there for the whole time. Instead, we went looking for the hostel some people we'd met in Plovdiv where we had heard that they did private rooms. Unfortunately no private rooms, so instead we ended up staying in a very nice hotel. I think they were a bit bemused by the two of us wandering in like little turtles all dishevelled and travellery while the rest of their glamorous clientele wandered round the lobby. But we are nothing if not unique. It was lovely to have a little bit of luxury for a few days, particularly in a city where there is such a mix of riches and poverty. It is not a city to be poor in.

My birthday was lovely, Lucy and I spend the morning getting our bearings a bit more and discovered that Sofia does have some beautiful buildings in its centre. We then ensconced ourselves in a coffee shop for until we met Rob at 3. Having settled into the hotel, we went for a proper look around, catching the changing of the guard and the arrival of the President of Macedonia at the Parliament buildings, before realising that all Orthadox churches have a service at 5 every day. We heard some beautiful chanting in the St Nikolai Russian Church, before heading over to see the main church of Aleksander Nevski, which was built to commemorate those who liberated Bulagria from the Ottomans. I found it startling to see how large a part faith plays in peoples´ lives here, partiularly since the years of communist rule. It is quite moving to see little old ladies in headscarves wander in to churches alongside well dressed businessmen to light a candle and kiss an icon. The only disappointing thing is that very often you can´t see the murals inside the churches because years of incense has blackened them, although it is encouraging to realise that this is because they are living, breathing places of worship as opposed to the museums as we experienced in Istanbul. We ended my birthday with a lovely meal (although Lucy ate rabbit which was most upsetting) and were staring to feel a bit more positive about Sofia...

Saturday morning saw the three of us head off towards Sofia´s synagogue, which is apparently the largest Sephardic synagogue in Europe. Despite the fairly serious renovations which were going on, you could tell that it is a really beautiful building and it is a shame that the Jewish population has been so reduced here that they now only use a little side room for their services. Bulgaria has a lot to be proud of concerning its Jewish population, Tsar Boris refused to send the country´s Jews to the death camps and as a result saved thousands of lives. This is the only coutry we are visiting that can say that.

After the synagogue, we went for a proper look round the Churches we saw yesterday as well as the Byzantine one of Saint Sofia, after which the city was named. The crypt of Aleksander Nevski church houses their national collection of icons, which are beautiful, although it is a shame they are not in the monestries where they were originally designed to be. We then decided to travel up to Mount Vitosha, Sofia´s mountain, to get a view of the city from the top. This was not an overwhelmingly successful trip. The taxi driver drove us all the way to the chairlift, allowing absolutely everything to go ahead of us, before announcing as we arrived that it was closed. So we saw the foot of the mountain, but not much more. Putting this down to experience, we headed back for a G & T and a lovely Greek meal, ready for Rila the following day.

Pottering in Plovdiv

2009-03-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

After our day of rest and washing yesterday, this morning we were sufficiently re-energised to get out and explore the town. Despite our less than positive first impressions (we were after all extremely spaced out and sleep deprived) we have both rather fallen for Plovdiv. It's a very quaint, shabby, laid back town where life seems to move at a leisurely pace - as unlike Istanbul as you can imagine. The Old Quarter is perfect for pottering: a picturesque maze of little cobbled streets, ornately decorated Orthodox churches, colourful wooden mansions and Roman ruins. We had a peek at the amphitheatre - Plovdiv's main tourist attraction - which you can see perfectly well from behind the gates without paying to get in. The town has some lovable quirks such as random comic statues and lots of elongated wall murals, and is full of cats. While we were out we noticed that absolutely everyone was wearing little red and white wristbands and asked the uber-friendly guy in the hostel what they were for. Apparently they symbolise happiness and health and you're supposed to wear them until you see the first blossom of spring, or a stork....at which point you then tie the band on to a blossoming tree for fertility. We saw them tied on to lots of trees, shops and even church doors. When in Bulgaria, do as the Bulgarians...we have duly bought one each and are now watching out for storks.

It was a good day to be in Bulgaria, as today is their National Day of Independence (the day they split from the Ottoman Empire in 1878) and there was a holiday atmosphere in town with a brass band playing folk tunes, interspersed with Abba hits for some reason, Bulgarian flags everywhere (red, white and green in horizontal stripes, since you ask) and lots of families treating themselves to coffee and sticky cakes in the town's big central cafe. Sarah and I enjoyed incredibly rich hot chocolate there and soaked up the atmosphere. In the afternoon we decided to climb one of the hills of Plovdiv to get a view of the whole town - Plovdiv was built on seven hills but now there are only six thanks to the communist regime tearing one down (how do you even do that?) to get rubble for building. We ended up climbing the hill of the "Liberators" (apostrophes intended) which has a massive statue of a Soviet soldier on top looking noble on a plinth carved with happy looking communists. The so-called liberation was highly dubious on two fronts, firstly because Bulgaria had freely chosen to side with the Germans and hadn't been occupied by them to any significant extent, and secondly because it began a period of oppression and stagnation for 40 years, which began with thousands of dissidents being sent to death camps. Bulgarian history is actually really interesting and very very complicated - first the Greeks, then the Romans, then their own empire (biggest in Europe at one point!) followed by constant tribal wars interspersed with repeated attempts to become independent of whichever large empire was on the up at the time. This trip is making us both realise how little history we actually know and we have all sorts of plans for self improvement when we get back. Next to the Soviet statue was a much humbler war memorial to all Bulgarians killed in conflict which was heaped with fresh flowers. We noticed flower sellers at the top of the hill and a lot of elderly people dressed in their Sunday best climbing the hill (much faster than we were to our shame) to lay flowers at the memorial - this is evidently something you do on the national day. It was all rather touching.

Everything in Plovdiv seems to shut down at about 7pm, even on their national day, so we spent this evening eating pasta cooked by a very nice Australian couple staying in the hostel, playing cards and watching bizarre Bulgarian television (national armwrestling anyone?). On to Sofia tomorrow with clean clothes and good impressions of Bulgaria so far.

How to queue barge, Bulgarian style...

2009-03-02T00:25:00.000-08:00

At 3.30 this morning, Lucy and I could have been on a film set. A burly guard came to our three-person cabin and told us we had to get out for a passport check. We dutifully followed the other weary-looking travellers and went out on to the platform. Then we had to cross several tracks and climb back on to another platform into a little soviet-style booth and queue to get our passport checked. Or at least we thought you had to queue. However, this didn't seem to be everyone's principle as several little old ladies just wandered up the queue, found a space they liked (generally near the front), and stood there, not even looking slightly embarrassed. Needless to say Lucy and I did not adopt this tactic and duly waited our turn.

After being checked, we trundled back to our cabin, and apart from another check on the Bulgarian side, there were no other stops. We arrived in Plovdiv at 8.30 this morning and walked the mile or so up to the hostel. The Hiker's Hostel is lovely and we are the only people staying in the dorm so it is nice to be able to completely relax. We are going to chill out today, do some washing, have a much needed shower and drink lots of mint tea. This is the life...

Last day in Istanbul

2009-03-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

We woke up this morning for the last time to the sound of the call to prayer which ushered in a beautiful day with blazing sunshine and a clear sky. After a quick breakfast, we walked over Galatay Bridge past myriads of fishermen to Beyoglu to find a Catholic church for Mass. Having got rather lost in side streets and feeling tempted to give up, Sarah spotted a nun, the first and last one we have seen here, who we accosted and managed to communicate with in very broken German. She directed us to the church of St Anthony of Padua on Iskleskal Caddesi which had an Italian Mass at 11:30. We think the sermon might have been something about John the Baptist but I wouldn't swear on it. The church was about half full - not bad considering there were three other Masses as well over the weekend. It's a lovely church run by Italian priests - Pope John XXIII preached here for ten years while he was the Vatican's ambassador to Turkey and there is a nice soppy statue of him outside the church with a dove. Catholic geeks among the readers, click here for more details.

Afterwards, we treated ourselves to Turkish coffee and an incredibly rich cake consisting of honey, cream and cheese, in a nearby cafe while we wrote postcards and then headed back to the hostel via a stall selling freshly pressed fruit juice - they literally squash an orange in front of you into a plastic cup and you do the rest.

And now we're totally up to date with the blog and feel very proud of our Herculean efforts! Shortly, we'll be off to have a meal before taking ourselves to the station for the late night train to Plovdiv. We're both really sorry to leave Istanbul - it's such a fascinating city and there is still so much more to explore. But we're very glad we gave ourselves a whole week; it's been a fantastic start to the trip. Wish us luck on the train - next stop Bulgaria!

So, there were these two English girls...

2009-03-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

We decided that Saturday was going to be a real chill-out day and so we decided to treat ourselves to a Trukish Bath at Cagaloglu Hamami which is 300 years old. All seemed to be going well until we were conned into paying 10YTL for a hand mit, but as we'd been pretty savvy up until this point, we just put it down to experience. However, I do clearly remember asking if we needed to wear costumes and being told that no we didn't and that robes were provided, which we could see from the picture, all the women wearing. So there we were in our cubicle, modestly wrapping what felt like far too small a sheet round ourselves, then having to put wooden shoes on and waddling like ungainly geishas to the baths themselves. So far so good. Once in the baths however, we saw lots of naked women and this Turkish woman, with only a sheet covering her lower half told us to take our towels off. I don't think Lucy or I have ever shared such identical looks of horror. As we couldn't get out of it, we just had to go with the flow and tried to hide inconspicuously in a corner. No chance. The same woman thrust metal bowls at us and started using them to tip water over us and gestured that we should do the same. Thankfully, then we were left to get on with it for a while and regain some composure. The room itself it circular, with a big marble slab in the middle and lots of little marble sinks with warm and cold water running into them all around the outside. Being very British, we tried to pretend that we weren't completely starkers, but it didn't last long. Back comes the first woman, putting a bathing suit on and hauling Lucy onto the middle marble slab, where she proceeded to scrub Lucy with the over-priced mit. I thought I should just wait my turn, but suddenly this rather large Turkish woman came over to me wearing only knickers and told me to lie down next to Lucy. On went her swimming costume and I was duly scrubbed. At that moment, I really did understand the sentiment behind 'lie back and think of England', this woman could have easily had me for breakfast. After washing again, we were both massaged, which was actually incredibly relaxing and had our hair washed. By this point we were both quite used to being naked and toddled off as instructed to the hot room. More chilling out on the marble slab ensued before we finally emerged attempting to look elegant in our little robes (which suddenly felt much bigger). I don't think we succeeded, but we've certainly bonded...

After that little experience we were both completely comatosed, and just chilled for the rest of the day. You'll be pleased to note that there are no accompanying pictures.

Further afield on Friday

2009-03-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

Having spent almost the whole time so far in Sultanhmet, we decided to extend our wanderings on Friday to take in the Asian district on the other side of the Bosphorus, and Beyoglu - the area on the other side of the Golden Horn. So we hopped on a ferry over to Uskudar and stepped off the boat on to Asia - the first time for both of us! It's similar in feel to Sultanahmet, perhaps slightly more conservatively Muslim. There were noticeably more women in headscarves, fewer tourists and a mosque on every corner. This area was conquered by the Ottomans 100 years before the rest of Istanbul and is very proud of the fact - there are a number of monuments up to the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Attaturk who unsurprisingly you find everywhere here. We walked up the coast road to see the views of Sultanahamet which were great despite the rain and fog (we've had to stop ourselves saying, "this must look amazing in the summer" as it started to become something of a catch phrase for the trip....). After visiting several local mosques, one of which had slightly offensive posters up urging a boycott on any shop with American and Jewish connections from National Geographic to Wonderbra, we stopped in a bakery for the inevitable tea and baclava. I'm trying not to think about the amount of sugar we've consumed this week..... On the positive side, however, we can now say at least one phrase in Turkish: ici cay lutfen (two teas please)! We're both developing something of a taste for black tea and it's wonderfully cheap here.

Mid-afternoon we took the ferry over to Besiktas which is on the European side, and walked along the coast past a totally over the top Baroque palace, built while the Ottoman Empire was crumbling around it. This was where Attaturk died and the whole area is plastered with posters depicting his life. Then it was on to Taksim Square - glamorous, urban, surrounded by expensive hotels and the kind of high street chains you'd find in London. This part of Istanbul could be any European city in the world, and as such, is not particularly interesting, but it is another side to the city so we're glad we visited. The whole area is packed full of sophisticated young Turks who looked with evident scorn on two bedraggled Britishers counting their lira to see if they could afford a coffee! We found a cafe full of students for a cheap but filling supper and then went to the cinema as we noticed that "Revolutionary Road" was being shown. It had Turkish subtitles and was shown on a screen that flickered in and out of focus. For reasons best known to the management, Sarah and I were put in the "courting seats" at the back, so we snuggled down together to enjoy the film! It was perhaps not the best choice for us as it's about two people who turn to travelling to sort their lives out, but it all goes horribly wrong and one ends up dead - just to spoil the ending for you. Ah well, at least we don't have two moronic children who wander in and out saying "but Mummy, I don't want to go to Paris". Feeling slightly depressed, we headed back to the hostel around 11pm and had a rather interesting time trying to find a bus - the public transport in the city remains a mystery to us and most of it seems to stop after 9pm. Safely back in the hostel eventually, we crashed out on our bunks.

I am single tonight for you...

2009-03-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Only in the Grand Bazaar could two bedraggeld girls warrant so much male attention. We wandered into it via the book section which has the most beautiful pictures of various scenes from Ottoman life, they seem to use calligraphy here to actually form shapes and they are covered in gold leaf. Unfortunately they are also about a hundred pounds, so not something for this trip! This gave us quite gentle introduction to what is the hardest selling I have ever witnessed. 'Are you looking for me?', 'Stop following me', 'Ladies, you are going the wrong way' along with 'I am single tonight for you' were just some of the lines shot in our direction from stalls selling absolutely everything; carpets, water pipes, iznik tiles, turkish lights, leather, pashminas, denim, backgammon sets, chess sets, belly dancing costumes, socks, jewellery, perfume, watches and antiques, you name it, you can find it in the Grand Bazaar. However, they were no match for the Lucy-Sarah team.

I has thought that I wanted to get Rob a chess set for his birthday and so we tried to see if we could find a vaguely decent one. This provd to be a bit of a challenge, although it wasn't long before we got offered a 'beautiful marble' one, after having rejected a tea set thinking that neither of our parents would appreciate it making its way back to either of our houses... Anway, negotiations started at 150 YTL (about 75 pounds), at which point Lucy looked at this man as though he had two heads and told him she would pay 20YTL as we were students and had no money. At this point we got the sob story about his 12 children and we had both worked out that this particular chess set was certainly not marble - given that he had about twenty just stacked up and easily pinchable, they probably weren't even worth the twenty we were offering. Lucy was fabulous as this man's price kept coming slowly down to our 20YTL offer. By this time, I thought Rob probably wouldn't thank me for this and so, as self-styled guardian of the purse strings, I said I didn't like it and we walked away. As we did so, he offered it to us for 10YTL - so think how little it must actually be worth...

After more of Lucy's expert haggling and my silent bad-cop routine, we left the Grand Bazaar on route to the Spice Bazaar. Again, outside it was absolutely freezing, but as luck would have it, a street seeler was coming up a little side street crying 'Sahlep' with what looked like a little gold teapot on a trolley. Lots of men from all the surrounding shops rushed out to buy what looked like hot milk, and I suddenly remembered that this was one of the things which Lonely Planet recommended we should try, so we bought one to share. It's actually sweetened milk with cinnamon sprinkled on top and has the consistency of custard. You have no idea how good it is to sip on a wet, cold day.

We found the Spice Bazaar by luck rather than good judgement and were both a bit unimpressed. There are quite a lot of spice stores and varieties of turkish delight as well as 'natural viagra', which looks suspiciously like a walnut, bu the chat up lines weren't nearly as good - 'Only 4 lira for blondes, free for a real one, I pity you' - cheek!!! The other problem I guess is that there isn't enough to make it different from the Grand Bizarre as for every spice stall there is a shop selling tourist tat, so it just doesn't feel unique. We did succumb to buying some Turkish delight to have later on at the hostel.

We headed back, desperate for a warm shower (a bit hit and miss at the hostel) and to dry off a bit. There was warm water than goodness and I think we both warmed up for the first time that day. We were thinking that we would have a quiet night in and maybe go out for a water pipe with Felicity and Stephie later on. However, when they came back, they'd managed to get talking to a local who had recommended a local restaurant, and realising how hungry we were, we decided to tag along and also got to meet an Australian guy called Matt who they'd met during the day. So down various back streets we went, asking random people if they knew where this place was until we came to a canteen which looked quite shabby. No one spoke any English and we just pointed at what we fancied. We were a bit concerned, but actually the chicken stew was fantastic and there was loads of lovely bread to mop it up with. Afterwards, the guy who the two other girls had met invited us all the the local bar where we sat drinking apple tea and playing backgammon. What a memory!

The rain it raineth every day

2009-03-01T05:24:00.000-08:00

Thursday morning was bucketing it down with rain. So naturally we decided to walk all the way to the western disrict of Istanbul where no trams or buses go. We calculated that we must have walked about ten miles, squelching all the way. But it was all worth it, because we ended up at the Chora Church - a real little gem, just outside the old city walls which is full of the most beautiful mosaics dating from the 12th century. It became a mosque after the fall of Constantinople and is now a museum. In the picture at the side, you can just see Theodosius (chap who built the church) and his wife offering it to Our Lady and Christ. Presumably this was in one of the areas which surrendered to Mehmet the Conquerer as he promised to spare any churches which accepted his authority. The original decorations of the church are remarkably well preserved and there is little sign that it ever became a mosque. We stayed in here as long as we could to get out of the rain, before venturing out to explore the area more generally. After much wandering we found a local bakery where we had incredibly cheap cay (tea) and rice pudding (a Turkish speciality) and watched lots of local children running errands to buy bread and baclava. Then it was off again into the rain to walk along the Golden Horn all the way back to Sultanahmet, psyching ourselves up for an encounter with the Grand Bazaar......

Tickets to Plovdiv and Topkapi Palace

2009-03-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Having got our bearings slightly more, we decided to try and buy our tickets to Plovdiv on Wednesday morning. The station is, as everywhere, almost exclusively male, so again we looked just a bit conspicuous. We think we have the right tickets, even though Lonely Planet seems to think the train doesn't run on Sundays...

We decided to spend the day in Topkapi Palace, the palace of the Sultans built by Mehmet the Conqueror after the fall of Constantinople. It takes over a hill on the coner of Sultanahmet, with amazing views (when not drizzing) over the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. We spent the whole day wandering through the various different courtyards. The first as you enter is called the Court of the Janissaries (Janissaries were the personal soldiers of the Sultan) and in Ottoman times this area was the least restricted of the palace. There's a rather beautiful little fountain in the corner with a rather grim story; it's where the imperial executioner used to wash his tools. The heads of the people who had upset the Sultan were put up on a spike above the entrance to the Second Courtyard. Only the Sultan and the valide sultan (his mother) were allowed through the gate on horseback, everyone else had to dismount. This sets the tone for the sort of pomp and circumstance of the rest of the Palace.

Ironically enough, through the drizzle, up in the fir trees we saw some green parrots, much like you would and do see pigeons around the rest of the city. The most impressive feature of the this second courtyard is the Imperial Council Chamber, where matters of state were discussed with the Sultan 'eavesdropping' behind a gold grate. It's nothing if not noticeable, so I highly doubt that any of the various deposings of sultans was planned here. In the area which used to be the stables, there is a display about Selim III 1789-1807, a sultan who tried to introduce many political and social reforms. He was eventually deposed, partly due to not being able to choose a side and stick to it in the Napoleonic wars.

The Gate of Felicity leads you to the Third Courtyard, the domain of the Sultan, where very few people were allowed, apparently to keep a mystique surrounding the ruler. There's an Audience Chamber where the Sultan would sit whilst white eunuchs would ensure the visitor showed the correct amount of respect, bowing/grovelling etc. Apparently even if the Sultan and the visitor could speak in the same language, all conversation would nevertheless go through the Grand Vizier. Around the rest of the courtyard are collections of grand robes and the imperial treasury. The treasury includes countless emeralds and rubies and the Spoonmaker's Diamond; an 86 carat diamond, the fifth largest in the world, which was originally bought for just three spoons. By far the most important for Muslims are the Sacred Safekeeping rooms with various relics from the Prophet's life, including his beard.

The Fourth Court is the one that looks directly over the Bosphorus and is full of beautifully tiled buildings, generally used for medical purposes. The view in good weather must be lovely, although it was absolutely freezing when we were there. Although allegedly the Harem is supposed to be the most splendid rooms in the Palace, Lucy and I felt a bit conned, as the rooms are all empty and the lighting is so poor that you can't really see. The rest of the Palalce is well worth seeing though. We sat and had one of our 'moments' eating our picnic lunch in the Second Courtyard.

We spent the late afternoon in two local art courtyards, where you can watch local artists at work and where you aren't hassled and you get free tea. I'd love to come back to do a course here. Dinner was a delicious Turkish Pancake called gozelme, filled with spinach and potato cooked right in front of us. We spent the rest of the evening drinking Turkish wine with two of our roomates and eating dark chocolate, a very decadent end to a lovely day.

Still here......

2009-02-28T12:03:00.000-08:00

Just to apologise for the long silence since Tuesday - we're still in Istanbul and are very well and happy! There is so much to do here that there hasn't been much time for blogging and in any case, the internet connection is highly dodgy. If I manage to publish this post without the whole thing blacking out and having to re-write it, it will be a minor miracle. We've just got back from a Turkish bath and are currently far too relaxed to write anything of interest. We're planning on a major blog session before we leave for Bulgaria tomorrow evening. Now we have to eat an entire box of Turkish delight which we were talked into buying at the Spice Bazaar so we're off to get sweet and sticky. More tomorrow!

Aya Sofya

2009-02-24T09:02:00.000-08:00

Thıs has to be the saddest place ın Istanbul. As ıt's one of the places you have to see, fırst thıng on Tuesday mornıng we duly queued up, paıd an extortıonate fee (our food budget for several days!) and shuffled ın wıth the rest of the crowds. Enterıng through the door whıch ın former ages only the emperor could use gave us quıte an ego boost but as soon as we got ınsıde we were struck wıth the empty derelıctıon of the place whıch was once a great church, then a great mosque and ıs now a great nothıng, purportıng to be a museum. It ıs a dead place covered ın scaffoldıng whıch ıs presumably part of a desperate effort to keep the peelıng ceılıng from fallıng rıght off. True, the dome ıs amazıngly huge when you thınk how early ıt was buılt and how comparatıvely lıttle technology they had, and some of the mosaıcs are beautıful - the bıts that have survıved the desecratıon - and the great plaques of scrıpt from the Qu'ran are ımpressıve. But overall the whole ımpressıon ıs one of decay and faılure. If thıs ıs a symbol of East meetıng West and Chrıstıanıty meetıng Islam, ıt says nothıng good about socıety then or now. It's very hard to get any kınd of spırıtual feelıng ınsıde - ındeed you're not allowed to, as prayıng ıs forbıdden. We both left feelıng rather depressed and headed off to some mosques to fınd some places whıch are doıng what they were desıgned to do and where relıgıous practıce ıs stıll alıve ınstead of beıng prohıbıted (the New Mosque - actually 400 years old - ıs partıcularly beautıful).

Later that day, we popped into the museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, which has some beautiful things in it, especially some gorgeous displays of calligraphy and stunning illuminations in books of poetry. We finished off the day with kebabs outside the Blue Mosque in the rain - who needs good food when you have such an amazing view?!

The Blue Mosque

2009-02-24T08:46:00.000-08:00

We wandered into the Blue Mosque in the afternoon, fetchingly clad in headscarves (if there is a knack to putting one on that doesn't fall off, it has escaped me) and I have to say that it took my breath away. It's a huge building split into three, with the cetral dome reaching further than the other two. Every available space, apart from some clear glass at the bottom is covered with tiles which I initially thought would be really over-powering, but the overall effect is muted (your not even sure which is the principle colour) and actually incredibly peaceful. They've hung candles from the ceiling so that they are only just above your head, which creates a sense of it being intimate, even though you're tiny in comparison to the building. It's quiet, but not because anyone is telling you to be, people are oviously very used to being watched at prayer and get on with it. The Mosque feels spiritual, and it was lovely to be able to spend some time just sitting and thinking, before exploring some more.

The guide book told us that to get the intended view, we ought to look at the Mosque from the Hippodrome side, which is actually supposed to be the front and it is stunning. This is partly because the Mosque is partially hidden close up, so it surprises you. It's weird though as I thought Aya Sofia and The Blue Mosque were facing each other in a sort of standoff. It also means that they are facing different ways - so Mecca and Jerusalem can't be in the same direction here, which is odd as I thought they were.

We then mouched behind the Blue Mosque and saw some very weird wooden buildings that were the same size as a wendy house, before ending up in one of the mainly residential districts where there is clearly an election going on as the whole place is decked out with flags.

After a little bit of a rest back at the hostel, we headed out for dinner with our roomates. You get invited into every restaurant going here, but we finally found a reasonable one for a Durum- a meat kebab wrapped in a tortilla. It was great to feel like part of the hostelling community, and to discover that the 'what am I going to do with my life' is actually something of a universal problem.

The Sunken Cıstern

2009-02-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

We ended up ın here mostly to escape the attentıons of a very persıstent man ın front of Aya Sofya who engaged us ın conversatıon, told us we were beautıful, expounded hıs vıews on phılosophy ('the Greeks only wrıte ıt, here we lıve ıt!') and then proceeded to attempt to sell us a carpet. Despıte hıs temptıng offer to shıp ıt to Hıgh Wycombe, we declıned and sought refuge ın the Sunken Cıstern. Thıs ıs an ıncredıble Byzantıne construct whıch stored 80,000 cubıc metres of water for the cıty to use ın tıme of sıege. It's supported by hundreds of columns taken from Roman buıldıngs-very strange to thınk that the Byzantınes were usıng ancıent ruıns to buıld theır up to the mınute modern technology, whıch ıs now an ancıent ruın. On the ınsıde ıt has an eerıe feel, despıte the hoards of tourısts and generıc whale-song musıc pıped out of every corner. Water drıps from the ceılıng and enormous carp swım ın the cloudy water. Two of the bıggest pıllars are supported by massıve heads of Medusa, who seems to be somethıng of a heroıne of Istanbul, as we keep encounterıng her. We emerged to the surface agaın somewhat damp and blınkıng ın the sudden lıght and after much wanderıng around back streets ended up ın a laıd back cafe hung wıth local arts and crafts and enjoyed Turkısh tea and baclava.

Impressions of Istanbul

2009-02-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

Well, our attempt to put Istanbul into neat categorıes of Byzantıne and Ottoman faıled straıght away! We left the hostel and ımmedıately lost ourselves ın the glorıous jumble of the cıty that ıs at the same tıme Byzantıum, Constantınople and Istanbul. Most of the last two days has been spent just wanderıng around the streets of thıs ıncredıble cıty through a constantly constrastıng serıes of beautıful mosques, gardens, fountaıns, back streets, tucked away museums, glıtzy clothes shops, endless carpet shops and too many food stalls to count. We have adopted the mantra that you never really get to know a cıty untıl you get lost ın ıt, mostly by necessıty, as our map readıng has proved to be terrıble! We wıll try to descrıbe a few of the amazıng thıngs we have seen ın the last two days as we sıp apple tea ın a roof top cafe overlookıng the Bosphorus, where twılıght ıs turnıng rapıdly to nıght and the lıghts from Beyoglu twınkle on the horızon.....

Arrival!!!

2009-02-23T00:12:00.000-08:00

Well apart from a slightly dodgy oil leak before take-off yesterday, our journey to Istanbul has been brilliant. We flew over the entire city in the dark, the boats on the Bosophorus looking like little tea lights and landed in a flurry of snow, which was slightly unexpected. It is still snowing/raining slightly this morning, and we are about to go and see the sights of Byzantine Istanbul (we are splitting it up into eras so we don't get confused).

The hostel itself is lovely, although we've dicovered it doesn't have a kitchen. We are sharing a room with one American guy and two German girls who are all about our age, which is a relief as we thought it would be too quiet here. I'm writing this on the top floor of the hostel which is where most of the socialising happens. Three sides of it are open so you get a panoramic view of the city. I'm looking out over the Sea of Marmaris and feeling quite glad we didn't decide to go on a boat trip today, as it's not what you might call calm...

Introducing us

2009-02-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Sarah and Lucy's Alternative Grand Tour! Over the next three months, we will be undertaking a journey around Eastern and Central Europe, from Istanbul, the gateway to the East, to Tallinn, perched on the doorstep of Russia and Scandinavia. In the coming weeks we will pass through twelve countries, eleven capital cities, three major rivers and four mountain ranges, will change money into ten different currencies and will attempt to say "hello" in eleven languages. You can see our route here, in all its zig-zagged glory.

Quite a few people have asked us, why Eastern Europe? Granted, it's not the usual gap year destination, not being Australia or Thailand. But this relatively small corner of Europe is wonderfully diverse, culturally rich and just bursting with a historical legacy that is incredibly relevant to who and where we are today. It's amazing to think that when our parents' generation were our age, they couldn't have visited most of the countries on our route. And yes, some of the places we're visiting are obscure to us - Plovdiv, Sibui, Poprad, Wroclaw, Siauliai, Tartu - a few months ago we couldn't have located these places on a map let alone pronounced them (we still can't pronounce most of them)! But the obscurity is very appealing in a continent as touristy as Europe, and we're hoping to find some corners that are still relatively undiscovered. Oh, and did I mention the cheap air-fares....they're quite attractive too!

Thanks for looking up our blog - we will aim to update it regularly with our experiences and impressions, and will upload photos as often as our somewhat limited technical skills permit! Do keep in touch with us, and if you happen to be in our vicinity at any point during the trip, let us know and we'll badger you for a free meal, sorry, welcome your company. This is probably the biggest adventure of both of our lives to date and we can't wait to get on that plane on Sunday......