July 2010
1 post
Barcelona
Our first night in Barcelona was spent at a hostel located “five minutes from the metro”. After walking in the complete opposite direction for a few minutes, we quickly turned around and found our hostel probably about fifteen minutes away. We’ve since learned not to trust hostels on how close they claim to be to things. Nevertheless, fifteen minutes wasn’t a big deal.
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June 2010
7 posts
Bordeaux
(I know this seems silly since we’re already back, but we want to finish the blog up so here we go.)
Bordeaux started out extremely stressful. Our train from Marseille encountered some sort of incident and we were delayed a couple hours. Our hotel did not have 24 hour reception, and we had told them we would arrive at 9pm so when we arrived close to midnight, I was a little panicked. We...
Marseille
Our hostel (Vertigo Vieux Port) was advertised as being 5 minutes away from the Vieux Port metro station, but left out any direction after that except for the street name. We eventually found it after asking a few locals (one guy gave us completely wrong directions, thankfully we asked someone else). Geordie´s french skills saved us. The hostel was really cool, and we stayed in a four person dorm...
Nice
We arrived in Nice with pretty specific directions of where to go. We set out to find our hostel and ended up getting to it within no time. The woman who ran it - Brigitte - was super nice and kinda quirky. It was quite a large room, so it was a shame we were only in Nice for one night.
We headed out and decided to get to a spot that had a panorama of Nice - it was closed by the time we got...
La Spezia / Cinque Terre
We found our place in La Spezia relatively easy - in fact the whole day went a little too well for finding things and catching trains. We stayed in a really cute place called A Posada or something.. it had advertised itself as a B&B but it definitely was more of an apartment with breakfast vouchers. The rooms were very cute and spacious though. The first day we arrived we took the train to...
Florence
We arrived in Florence shortly after realizing that we had no directions to our hostel. After wandering around for a good forty five minutes, we found an internet cafe where we google mapped our hostel. We walked a good twenty minutes to where we figured the hostel should have been. After asking more directions and finding another internet cafe, we realized we had gone in the complete wrong...
Rome
We got to Rome without much trouble. I was very nervous about it because four years ago I was with a friend when she had her bag/passport/etc stolen, but we managed to avoid thieves. We stayed in a campground called Tiber Hostel & Camping. It was about 30 mins away from the centre of Rome, but it was cheap. It had a nice big bus that transported us from the campground to the nearest train so...
Venice
Quick note: because of a combination of falling behind in updates and this infuriatingly French keyboard, these next few updates will be shorter.
We got off our train at a stop called Mestre - a ghetto-like area just outside of Venice and took a bus to our hotel - the Ariston. We found it without too much trouble and checked in. Our immediately packed up our laundry and hiked to the laundromat....
Split
We decided that our next stop would be Venice. Our mode of transportation basically fell between a train that would take up an entire day, or a short bus to Split and an overnight ferry to Ancona. We opted for the latter and bought our bus and ferry tickets. We figured that the bus ride would only be about three hours - so we stocked up on cookies and juice for the ride there. It ended up taking...
May 2010
10 posts
Dubrovnik
These next few posts will be pretty condensed, as we have been without consistent (or free) internet for awhile… but here goes!
We stayed in Dubrovnik for four nights, which was really nice - the longest we have stayed in one place. We stayed at this place called Jele Rooms, which was owned by an old Croatian woman named Jele. The first two nights we had our own kitchen and the rooms were...
Mostar
We arrived in Mostar fairly late, but had a pretty decent set of directions to our hostel. We were instructed to head straight towards the “big cross on the hill” and sure enough as we set foot outside, in the distance we could see a giant glowing crucifix on a mountain. To make a long story short, we ended up coming to exactly where we thought the hostel should be - and yet there was...
Sarajevo
We arrived in Sarajevo after a very, very, very long train ride. It was about an eleven hour day train, and we were asked for our tickets and passports (separately) at least five times. We got some stamps to our passports, but we cannot tell where they are from. We had the compartment all to ourselves up until the last couple hours where a group of very chatty foreign girls invaded us.
When we...
Budapest
Our first night in Budapest was, in essence, just a mad search for food. After wandering up and down the street in non-decisiveness, we decided to go to a neat-looking place on the corner. It was pretty cool (both figuratively and literally since we sat outside and I’m quite sure Billy was freezing but never admitted it). I had chicken Kiev, and Billy had traditional chicken paprika with...
Krakow and Budapest
Alrighty then. Our first day in Krakow we decided it would be a good idea to sleep in. We were both pretty tired from constantly being on the move, and so a good lazy morning sounded like a good time. I (Geordie) got up earlyish, however, to investigate the supposed free breakfast (which encompassed a decent, yet mildly stale, sandwich). When we finally got moving, it had turned into a beautiful...
Vienna (and Krakow)
We arrived in Vienna on the 8th, after a little bit of worry figuring out the trains. The schedule we received with our Eurail passes is from 2009, and while it has worked for us so far we found out that there was a bit of a change for Vienna. Luckily the timing was almost the same, and even though it went to a different station in Vienna, we were reassured by a couple from Philadelphia that we...
Prague
We arrived in Prague very late at night on the 5th, but managed to find our first hostel okay. It was a very cute place (Prague Lion Hostel) that had it’s own little kitchen and balcony… and ants, which we found as we were leaving. It was a very long walk from there to our second hostel, Clown & Bard, and quite a bit was uphill. We were champs though and made it without taking a...
Munich and Prague
After waking up and cramming as much of the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet into our tiny Canadian stomachs, we headed into Old Munich. We passed through the commercial district (which was not open yet - I guess our eagerness kinda backfired…) and took some pictures of the massive glockenspiel in the rathaus. We wandered some more and ended up finding the hofbrauhaus, which was the beer...
Amsterdam & Munich
We arrived in Amsterdam a couple days ago after a super turbulent flight and a near missed connection in Minneapolis (the horror!). It was pouring rain and windy, but we managed to walk around and see the city a bit. Checked out the KattenKabinet, which I was really excited for. It’s a fancy building turned museum dedicated to cats. Wasn’t really very big, but was definitely cool....
