Hungary

We had minivans! The first time this tour that we’ve had private transport. Tony told us we could have six people in one van and the rest in the other, so seven of us got in the first van. It was an interesting trip. Very mature. Someone kept farting and nobody would admit to it. We all have our own theories on who it was. I think at the moment the group verdict is split between Steve and the driver. Amanda was vigorously defending Steve. Not surprisingly, we had to have an unscheduled stop so Marsha could pee against a wall in a random small town. We couldn’t see her from the vans but we’re fairly certain everyone else in the town could. Marsha pees more than anyone else I know, including Kerryn. We are becoming well versed on the Toilets of Eastern Europe.

About fifteen minutes later we stopped for a toilet break.

Ok I’m done ragging on Marsha now. We only had half a day in Budapest. It’s very pretty, again, and we were staying just off the high-end shopping street, which is always a fatal mistake. Not for me, I’m far too tight to spend a lot of money on one item of clothing, but it’s always dangerous for somebody.

The tour I’m doing is actually made up of heaps of smaller tours, so we drop people off and pick people up at various points along the way. I think there are six others who are going as far as me, but everyone else is doing shorter tours. So Pancakes and Julie only did Russia to Poland, Kat comes with me from Russia to Croatia, Marsha and Cameron joined in Poland and finish in Istanbul, and when we got to Budapest we lost Amanda and Steve and Adrian, as well as Pat and Sue and Hugh, so I've gone from being one of four Kiwis to being the one and only. It was really sad when we left everybody.  (For those that are interested, I'll put links to some of the shorter tours that mine encompasses at the bottom of this post.  Otherwise you can go to the Tucan Travel page and look for yourself!)  Those of us who are going to the Baltics also changed tour leader in Budapest, and those going straight to Istanbul went on with Tony.  It works out so that Sarah (my new tour leader) and Tony always hit Budapest at the same time, so in a few weeks I'll be back on Tony's tour, until I finish in Istanbul.

Confusing stuff.

The Famous Five!  Our last night together.

All photos on this post are courtesy of Steve and Amanda Tilley.  I love facebook.

Anyway, when we got to Budapest we headed out for the usual city walk.  We got as far as the first church, and Amanda, Steve, Cameron, Marsha, Adrian and I all packed it in and went to the bar.  Not that we weren't interested, but Amanda, Steve and Adrian had the following day in Budapest as well, and Cam, Marsha and I all have more time there in a month, when we switch tour leaders again.  Kat stuck with the group for the rest of the walk, then met us at the pub.  A couple of hours spent people watching (or rusky spotting) is never wasted.  I can't find any photos of Hungary, I think I decided that I'd do it when I came back...  oops!

Those of us going to the Baltics had a meeting with our new tour leader, Sara, and our new group at five or six o'clock.  It was quite funny because there were something like 11 of us going on together and 6 joining, so it was more like a case of the new people meeting us. 

I have to be honest.  I was pretty disappointed when we had our first meeting with our new group. This is nothing against the people on my tour, they are all really nice and I get on well with pretty much everybody, and everybody has tried really hard to get along as a group and to be really inclusive. However, I had envisaged that the group would be far closer to my age. When we discussed this with Tony, he said this tour is completely out of the ordinary, and that normally the group would be mostly under 35 year olds, with maybe one or two older. Our group now has four people under 35, and 14 over, and I think the oldest are in their 70s. When I went to the Middle East with Tucan, two years ago, our group was almost exclusively under 35, and we would more often than not all have dinner together, and usually we’d all spent the day together anyway. Group dinners on this tour are pretty well unheard of. We don’t spend much time as a group other than when we’re on the bus or the train together. A big part of what I was looking for in a tour was new friends of my own age, and I’m really worried that when Kat and Kylie leave the tour in Dubrovnic, I’m going to be very much on my own. However, I have to admit I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the advertised age range on the tour – 18 to 60, with a recommended maximum of 70. The only condition is that you have to be able to carry your own bag, which everybody here certainly can do.

Tony had booked a restaurant for everybody who was on both tours, for that night. Our tour group, those who had been together since Warsaw, all showed up, but only two of the others, which was a real shame. However, we had a nice meal. The usual crowd had decided to go for drinks afterwards, so we went with Tony and a couple who’d been on Sara’s tour through the Balcans and were rejoining Tony’s tour. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember their names.

Adrian, me, Stevie, Kat, Tony, Random Guy from other tour, Amanda, Cameron, and Marsha.

Our last night together in Hungary.  Again, Steve has placed himself between me and the camera.

I was expecting a late night, but Marsha, who was even more disappointed than I was, went home at something like 1030pm, and everyone else followed within an hour. I went with Kat to the supermarket, and as we were getting back, Adrian was on his way out to a rooftop bar that we’d all been keen to try. So I went with him.

What we’d sort of not bargained on was that it was Sunday night. We got a tram to the right place, which was a big square with lots of young people standing around it. We asked around until we found some locals who knew the bar and pointed us in the right direction. We walked off down the street that we both thought these girls had indicated, and tried to follow their directions, but found ourselves around the back of the same block, in a very quiet side street. So we asked someone else, who pointed us back to the same place. Right before we walked off down the same street again, we spotted an alleyway halfway back up the block, and figured we might as well give it a thrash. We’d been told that it was just a doorway, and right when we came around the corner we found a doorway that had a group of people standing outside, more people coming out, and lots of graffiti. After climbing something like 7 flights of stairs, walked into the covered area of the bar, and it was completely empty, except for one bored staff member. So we went outside and up to the terrace, which was really nice and roomy and had maybe three groups of people. We got a drink (thanks Adrian!!), and as soon as we sat down they came around to tell us that they were closing in fifteen minutes. Love it.

When the bar closed, we decided to go for a walk and see if we could find anywhere else. We did find one place, but even Adrian wasn’t so keen on going in there. It was full of very boisterous men. So we figured it was home time.

As cities go, Wellington is a pretty small fish, so I couldn’t believe the number of people who were out in the streets at 130am on a Sunday. At home, there’d be absolutely nobody.  Sometimes I feel like I come from the back end of nowhere, and like I know nothing about the world.  But then, that's why I travel.

The next morning, everybody got up to see us off at 830am, which was nice of them considering they didn't have anywhere to be that day.  It was really sad!!  We'd travelled together for three weeks, in travel time that's a looooooooooong time without killing each other.  I miss the other three a lot, and I know Kat does too.  It's very quiet without Amanda here!  She's very vivacious and brings a lot of energy to a group.  And I adore Steve, in the same way I adore Denyse (of Jason and Denyse, who I travel with right from Russia to Istanbul).  He's very lovely, doesn't ever seem fazed by anything, and he's always smiling.  And to answer the question on everyone's minds....... yes, I did fancy Adrian a bit.  (For those who are now wondering, nothing happened.) 

There was much hugging, and of course there were some tears from various quarters, and then we saddled up and headed off.  It was a pretty quiet trip to Novy Sad.

Eating ice cream in Krakow when we should've been looking at (another) church.

Good times...  oh how I shall miss those laughs.

Tucan Travel Tour Links

My tour - Eastern Europe Discovery - Moscow to Istanbul - eeed

Pancakes and Julie's tour - Moscow to Warsaw - eemw

Complete Eastern Europe - Warsaw to Istanbul - eece

Balkans to Istanbul - eebi

Balkans Discovered - Budapest to Dubrovnic - eebd

Warsaw to Dubrovnic - eewd

Balkans Encompassed - Budapest to Budapest - eebe

And many, many more.....

Poland - Krakow

I bought a new camera. Dad told me to. The lens on my old one is having a ‘mare, the autofocus doesn’t work and it does this funny clunking thing when you turn the focus ring manually.  I went in to look at lenses for my camera, but a lens alone was going to cost me about NZ$600, and I came across a beautiful new Nikon D3100 in the same shop which was NZ$830. I told Dad my lens had sort of carked it but does actually still work, and that I was trying to talk myself out of buying this camera. He said buy the Nikon. My camera was originally his, and he’d already had it repaired once, and he said it’s not worth fixing again. So while we were waiting for our train out of Krakow I went to the electronics shop, which had the same Nikon but with a much better range lens, and it was only about $100 more. So I bought it. I got the camera, the lens, a camera bag, and a memory card, all for about $1000, and I can claim about $160 tax back when I leave the EU. That is SO MUCH less than I’d expect to pay in NZ. I’m so excited!! I’ve always wanted a Nikon.

Other than that, Krakow was like this mad dash the entire time we were there. We arrived by train at lunchtime, that afternoon most of us went on an optional excursion (a trip that Tucan will organise for you but which is not included in the cost of the tour) to the Krakow Salt Mine, then we took a city tour by golf cart the next morning, saw Schinder’s factory at lunchtime, went to Auschwitz that afternoon (which is included in our tour), and took the overnight train to the Czech Republic that night. I would’ve really liked at least one more day in Krakow, I feel like we missed a lot.

The Salt Mine was interesting.  Not overwhelmingly so though.  We walked down 380 stairs underground, and spent about 2hrs walking through passages and room after room that'd been carved out of the salt....  as you might expect in a mine I suppose.  A lot of the rooms had statues in them that had been carved out of the salt.  You have to excuse my photos, I hate flashes so everything's at least like 2.5sec exposures.

I am Oz!  Being photographed by a million or so other people while my shutter was open!

There were a couple of pretty impressive rooms.  The cathedral was the best.  It's absolutely ginormous.  (That's totally a word and totally how you spell it.)

It has some pretty impressive statues, and carvings on the walls.

This was my favourite thing in the whole mine.  The perspective is perfect.  It's flat, but when you stand in front of it, it looks like it's been carved right into the wall.

The lights are behind her, not inside.  The statue I mean.

Another interesting example of the fact that you can see through pure salt.

I'm not as verbose as usual unfortunately...  Bit tired at the moment.  Luckily a picture paints a thousand words so I'm already at five thousand and something.

The golf cart city tour was good because it covered everything in the near vicinity.  Our hotel was in the coolest street, it was full of little cafes and restaurants and bars, and it was in the old Jewish Quarter.  Krakow was pretty beaten-up looking, but I really liked it.

I found out that the reason there are buildings falling down around the place, or at least it's the reason in Krakow, is that there are so many people who they couldn't account for after the war who owned property, and because they didn't know if or when these people or their decendants would show up again they didn't sell the buildings on.  I like that the government did that.

Fortifications in the city wall.

This was at... maybe a church I think...

Amanda being very cheeky with someone else's hat.  "Quick, take my photo!"

We finished the city tour at Schindler's factory (as in Schindler's List).  They made it into a museum, which has only been open for a year.  It's an excellent museum.  We had to be back at the hotel fed and watered at 130pm, so we only had an hour to get through, and it took that long just to walk from one end to the other.  It's more about the war and the persecution of Jewish people than it is particularly about Oscar Schindler, but it was very well done.

Left:  Floor tiles

Right:  Pots and pans which form the outer walls of a room.  Inside it's perfectly round and has the names of the people on Schindler's List all over the walls.

 Fantastic museum.  Really sorry we didn't have another few hours to spend there.

Lunch.  Open baguettes from the best shop in town. 

It was in a pagoda in the middle of the market square, along with four other baguette shops.

I'm going to have to write a separate post for Auschwitz.  I didn't take any photos though, I kinda didn't feel like it was appropriate.

Poland - Warsaw

The ten hour train trip into Poland wasn’t actually too bad, just really damn boring. Amanda asked if she could read my blog, which I’d just finished writing, and then it somehow turned into her reading it out loud to the other six of us. What I write is more personal than what I would normally say out loud. I’m totally fine with knowing that everybody’s going to read it, but having it read aloud in front of me was quite a strange feeling. I was trying to hide behind Steve.

We got to our hotel at something like 930pm, and the seven of us had decided while we were still on the train to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a proper dinner. While we were en route to the restaurant it started absolutely pouring. I could hardly see out of the car. And there was sheet lightening all around the sky, all evening, but no thunder. It was Ian and Julie’s last night with us, so I’m really glad we went out and did something, but as soon as we finished eating all we wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. Adrian just about had one foot in a taxi by the time we finished paying the bill.

We had a 9am or 930am orientation walk the next day, so Pancakes and Julie came downstairs and checked out at the same time, so we could all say goodbye. It was sad!! Kat cried. Then Julie cried. It’s amazing how quickly you form relationships with people when you travel together, we’d all only known each other for 2 weeks.

Warsaw was so hot!! We walked from the hotel into the old town, and on the way we saw a bear.

Adrian does an excellent impression.  Rawr...

 

He did have a friend in there with him, but the friend was far brighter than Fluffy here, and was off under the trees having a snooze.  They’re part of the zoo, but their enclosure is outside the entrance, alongside the public footpath.  We found out that Adrian does a very funny impression of a bear when he asked a Polish taxi driver if he could feed the bear a rabbit.  He was getting a bit obsessive about feeding the bear a rabbit.

Orientation walks are good because we stop at the major churches, castles, and town squares, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t go back to them.  Churches do tend to all look the same to me after a while.   The old town  in Warsaw was very pretty though.

The first photo shows what was left of the square (shown in the second and fourth photos) after WWII.

It was basically rubble, and they've rebuilt it to look the same as it did before the war. 

The third photo is of the old town wall.

After the orientation walk, I went to the Gestapo museum with Amanda, Steve, Adrian, and Kat, which was along the same lines as the KGB building in Vilnius but not quite as graphic. When you walk in the front door, there’s a film playing. We all know how I felt about the last one, so I was a bit nervous. The only visual was portraits of people who’d been victimised in that building, with a voiceover about what had happened. The thing I remember most clearly is that when the war was over and the building was vacated, there was 5,500 kilos of human ash in there. After the film finished, we walked along the corridor and had a look in the cells. A couple of them had been preserved exactly the way they’d been at the end of the war, with bullet holes in the wall opposite the door.

We ended up spending the afternoon shopping. All the women in Warsaw were really beautifully dressed, so I was feeling pretty mangey in my travel clothes and I was dying for something pretty to wear. I got a new dress, and I was really hoping for high heels but couldn’t find any that I liked enough to buy. I’ve failed as a woman.

Kat had booked a single room for that night (before she met me, obviously), so I had a great big twin room to myself. Excellent. Although we were only home for a couple of hours before we met up again to go out for the evening.

It was kind of a strange night all round. I’m not quite sure how else to sum it up. Amanda and Steve had done some homework for us and found out where we should go, so we got a taxi to the Hard Rock Café and walked from there. The idea was that there was plenty in the area, but in the end we walked for something like half an hour before we found a bar. It was called “Players”, as in football, and there was no music and almost nobody there. We decided that since there was nothing else in sight that looked like a bar, we might as well have a drink and see if we could figure out where we should go from there, so we sat outside and watched which direction the girls in short skirts and high heels were walking. Then we got up and walked in the opposite direction. That wasn’t really intentional. Amanda wanted to go to a place called Organza, which was meant to be the best place in town, so we were trying to head for that.

We ended up standing on a street corner, and we could see one place which was called “Bollywood”. So we figured we’d give it a thrash, since we couldn’t seem to pin down anything else. It was certainly very interesting. There were a lot of tables of Indian men. There were five guys at the next table, and they took it in shifts staring at us for most of the time we were there. There were a few other women there, but not a huge number, and quite a high proportion of them appeared to be hookers. There was a DJ too, who was playing Indian music, which was a lot of fun. He wasn’t so good at merging from one song to another though, every now and then there’d be two different rhythms going on at the same time. All part of the fun. We had a couple of drinks and the others shared a shisha, and we played with Adrian’s new camera, and Kat and Amanda even braved up and had a dance. The guys at the next table were absolutely agape.

Mum:  He's got a girlfriend.

I had to have this photo in here because it's just so cute.

The girls

When we left, we walked outside and hailed a taxi, and asked to go to Organza. The driver thought we were taking the piss because it was literally right around the corner. We must’ve walked right past it. He took us to a club that he recommended, the Opera Club. They let us straight in, even though they’d turned away the group that were right in front of us, and as soon as we got in the door we knew we were in the right place. It was underground, through these red brick tunnels with arched ceilings and wooden floors, and then you walk into a bigger room with a bar, a DJ, and a dance floor. It was, without any exaggeration, the best club I’ve been to. Everyone was there to dance, not to get wasted, the DJ was amazing, and there was a great atmosphere. Even the bar staff were having a great time. We got there a little after midnight and left at 3am, and Kat and I danced for most of the night. We got Adrian out on the dance floor when Kat went to the bar, and he was a bit of a hit – I got totally elbowed out, every tall girl in the room gravitated toward him (and there were plenty of tall girls there), and I found myself right at the edge of the dance floor. However, it didn’t last long. We need to work on his dance moves.

Every time we go to have a group photo, Steve stands right in front of me.

The hallway into the club, featuring Kat.

The next day, to be honest, Kat and I didn’t really get moving until midday. We wandered into town, past the rather naked lady who was sunbathing in the park, Kat went to the post office, we had some lunch, Kat went to sleep at the table, we wandered over to the university library and had a look at the rooftop garden and our second view of naked sunbathing girls for the day, and then we went home again. Hard day. We’d planned to go out for a meal, but the other three had done a tour during the day and been shown a whole lot of great bars, a block away from our hotel, so it was decided we needed to go out again. We had some new people joining our tour that day, so we invited two of them to come with us. Meet Cameron (28) and Marsha (22), mates who are travelling together, who are both Aussies. Dammit! We now have 6 Aussies and me.

We went to three bars along this one street, and by ourselves we would never have found any of them. The last one was around the back of a big industrial looking building, where we sat outside in the courtyard between the buildings and watched Kat and Steve compete at badminton, until someone lost the shuttlecock.  There was also some hula hoop action from Kat and Adrian, and a group of boys who were break dancing.  Not what we expected to find in the middle of Warsaw. Still, it was a much quieter night than the one before. For most of us anyway, I believe Adrian ended up at the strip club and only got back this morning in time to pick up his backpack before we had to meet at 810am to get on the train to Krakow!