21-22 May 2009, Bratislava, Slovakia

[a bit backdated]

The train ride from Budapest to Bratislava was nice, following the Danube the whole way. As the Danube was always of major strategic importance the whole way was dotted with various small towns and hilltop castles.

However, once I arrived in Bratislava, I had my first incident with the police anywhere since I left the States. When I got off the train I went over to a little side area and decided to smoke a cigarette. I didn’t see any "No Smoking" signs and there were at least a couple of other cigarette butts there so I figured I was okay. Not so it would seem. A couple Slovakian police came, declared this was a non-smoking area, checked my passport and then fined me €30.00 on the spot. Needless to say, this did not give me a good initial impression of the place.

After that, I had to take a taxi to the hostel (another €14.00) and the hostel itself was already costing €18.00. So by comparison to anywhere else, the prices suddenly skyrocketed. And it wasn’t just a matter of interpretation. Slovakia has just recently dropped its own currency and now uses the Euro specifically, so the prices are really what they say, and those prices aren’t low by eastern standards.

Anyway, I got to my hostel, checked in and set off immediately to go get a haircut, which all went easy enough. After this I went exploring around Bratislava. My train to Brno was to leave early in the morning, so I really only had this one day to check out Bratislava.

After the haircut, I walked through the city center, then up the hill to the castle. The city center at least is all very clean and seems very new to me, very little speaks to its age. Compared to Budapest, Bratislava is certainly a very small and provincial town. For me the center was too clean and too quaint and very obviously grossly over priced. A tourist trap if ever there was one. And, as one would expect in a tourist trap, it was full of tourists, mostly British it would seem.

I took a lot of photos, but otherwise my tour was uneventful. I stopped for a delicious – but overpriced – dinner and then went back to the hostel and went to bed.

I woke up at 6:15 in the morning and was off to get my train to Brno. However, what they neglected to mention was that the train had a three hour layover in Kúty, which was a pain in the ass. This place was really in the middle of nowhere.

Overall, my impression of Slovakia was a bad one. Everywhere else – Romania, Moldova, Hungary, &c. – people at least try to be helpful, but not in Slovakia. In Bratislava the only Slovakian people I actually met were either authorities (police, train people, ticket salespeople, &c.) or service staff catering to tourists. However in Kúty everyone were just normal Slovaks and they aren’t at all friendly. In fact, it seems that they pretty much resent foreigners, so I guess it is no surprise that they just sent a fascist to the European parliament. And it isn’t just a poverty issue. Romania and Moldova are much poorer than Slovakia, but they don’t have the same attitude as most of these people seem to have.

My train on to Brno was delayed (on top of the three hour layover), but it did eventually arrive and I was happy to leave Slovakia, the Czech Republic (next blog) was much nicer.

People I talked to in Brno said that Czechs were cold and indifferent and that Slovaks were friendlier, but that wasn’t my experience at all. In fact my experience was the exact opposite. I got on decently with Czechs, but didn’t care for Slovaks at all, and the feeling was apparently mutual. Slovakia is not much cheaper than other central European destinations and way more expensive than Budapest. Further there isn’t really all that much to see and what there is has been all cleaned up and made “tourist friendly.” I think in the future I’ll just avoid Slovakia all together and if you’re looking for a place to visit in Central Europe, I’d suggest you avoid Slovakia.

19-21 May 2009, Budapest, Hungary

[a bit back dated]

Virtually everyone I knew in Bucharest had been to Budapest, so now it was my turn and after Sighişoara I was really looking forward to going to a big vibrant city. Small town living is not for me.

The 19^th was really nothing more than the very long and boring train ride from Sighişoara to Budapest. After arriving in Budapest I found my hostel right away (it was very close to the train station, thankfully) and moved in. I did some laundry and played around online to see what I would do on the 20th. Since I only had one full day in Budapest, I decided I wanted to make the most of it.

For a city the size of Budapest it is flatly impossible to get a decent sense of the place on a one day visit, but I'll share my impressions anyway. Budapest is exactly what you would expect from a former capital of a huge empire (the Hapsburgs) and my initial impression is that it is completely comparable to London, just much cheaper.

It is far more international and cosmopolitan than Bucharest. There are far more foreigners of all stripes and I saw the first Spar & Tesco that I've seen since leaving Ireland. At least on this day there seemed to be a lot of Australians and Americans visiting. The language, however, is radically different and frankly it is difficult to make out any words at all; in that respect Romania is better. There are also a lot more definably “trendy” people here – yuppies, punk rockers, hip-hop kids, skaters, and so on – as you would see in the West. Perhaps I have just been in Bucharest for too long, but Budapest seems very Western to me. Budapest reminds me a lot of London, but is also very European, for example there are coats of arms on virtually everything which seems odd in a formerly Stalinist country, where they often went to great pains to “erase” the feudal past.

I set out very early and walked all day. I put on some serious kilometers but got all over the centers of both Buda and Pest (the two cities that make up Budapest), including the castle, which I walked up to. I crossed the Danube about six times on different bridges running all over the place snapping photos (see the MySpace album, there are a lot of photos). Otherwise though, it was all fairly uneventful. I didn't spend much time in any one place.

By the early evening I was both completely exhausted and suffering from a bad sunburn. I found a nice little street cafe in the middle of Buda and decided to stay there for a while and drink beer. I met a few Hungarians, who spoke good English, which was nice. Hungary is one of those places where there is nothing odd about strangers joining you at your table, which is a little odd, but is also great for a foreigner to meet people. I stayed for a few more drinks and then went back to the hostel. As shown in the photos, I got all over the place, but only as a fly by tourist.

The next morning I was off to Bratislava. Everything went well enough until I got to the train station and got the stupid idea to stop and eat a kebab. This took too much time and I found myself in a mad dash to get my big backpack out of left luggage and to get on my train. If I had walked around on the walk ways I would have missed my train, so instead I jumped off the platform – with all my crap – ran in front of one train and managed to jump on my train literally two minutes before it pulled out. I just jumped on whatever car I came to and it turned out to be first class. However there didn’t seem to be many people around so I just took a cabin and settled down. Despite my ticket clearly saying second class, either the ticket people didn’t notice or didn’t care, so I managed to score a free first class ride from Budapest to Bratislava on the 21^st.

17-18 May 2009: Sighişoara, Transylvania, Romania

[A bit backdated...]

I took a minibus out of Braşov (previous blog) in the early afternoon and arrived in Sighişoara a few hours later. Back in Bucharest I had heard many good things about Sighişoara and wanted to see it for myself.

Sighişoara is very old, originally founded as a Roman town named Castrum Sex (yeah, it doesn't 'sound' like a good name) and by the 12^th century it was a thriving German trading town by the name of Schässburg. This is where, in 1431, Vlad Ţepeş (“Dracula”) was born and there is another statue of him. Sighişoara is much smaller than Braşov, 30,000 as compared to 300,000 people and the town center – the medieval part - is extremely small. However, it is one of the last medieval hill towns in Europe that still serves as a functional town center and is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

It is absurdly picturesque and very cool, really like stepping back in time as the city center, perched atop its hill, is still surrounded by its medieval walls, most of its towers and fortifications still stand and inside everything is cobblestone, narrow and winding. Of course there are lots of museums (the most original being the torture museum in the town's old torture chamber), little cafes, and stalls selling tourist crap. Unlike Braşov, that does have some industry, Sighişoara has absolutely nothing but tourism. I met a lot of people from Sighişoara and the surrounding area in Bucharest, people who had moved there because there is no work – and no hope for work – in Sighişoara. There was a definite feel of prosperity in Braşov, but this isn't the case in Sighişoara, at least off-season.

When I first got to town it occurred to me that I had completely neglected to get the directions to my hostel online, which was a pretty big problem. The bus dropped me off at the stop and I had absolutely no idea where to go. I knew my hostel was in the medieval town and that was obvious enough to see on top of the hill, so I went that way. However, it was a hot and sunny and toting almost 50 kilos of shit on my back and going uphill made it quite a task. I stopped at a nice little cafe (Cafe Bar, He. Olbercht #32, at the bottom of the path up to through the medieval walls, with the big Bergenbier umbrellas out front) where everyone was friendly enough for a few beers and to wait for the sun to go down a bit. I asked directions, and though no one knew English, we managed to work it out. The walk up the hill was a real pain with all my stuff, almost as bad as that enormous hill in Terracina back in Italy.

I did finally get to my hostel, settled in, showered, and was pretty happy with the place. They had good stable WiFi that I could access from my room and since I arrived on Monday the place was almost empty. Although I was just paying for a dorm room, for the first night it was all mine, which was nice. I went out and walked around a bit and went back to the cafe for another beer. At the cafe I ran into an older lady – an Australian doctor – that I had seen at the Scottish pub in Braşov, and we chatted a bit, which was also nice. English is not a popular alternative language in Sighişoara. After Romanian, then comes German, then Hungarian; so English-speakers were few and far between. Anyway, the sun was going down and I was pretty tired, so I went back to the hostel, played around online, and went to sleep early.

The next morning – May 18^th – I woke up early and on a mission to explore Sighişoara. The timing was perfect as in Romania virtually all museums and the like are closed on Monday (the day I arrived), so everything was open once I was ready to start exploring. It was a beautiful day out as you can probably tell from some of the photos. Not surprisingly, medieval hill towns are very hilly, so after about six hours of going non-stop, I was about exhausted. This is when most of the photos were taken.

I went back to the cafe for a few beers – which are, like everything else – extremely cheap in Sighişoara if you avoid the few places specifically catering to Western tourists. I was literally paying two lei for a beer (2 RON = 0.5 EUR or about 0.75 USD) which is incredible compared to Bucharest. The problem with the cafe is that they don't serve food (except ice cream, which doesn't go with beer very well); so I went to a pizza place at the bottom of the hill. Again everything was incredibly cheap. I ended up getting quite drunk and stumbling around Sighişoara for a little while longer (without incident), went back to the hostel and passed out.

Sighişoara really is small enough that you can do the basic tourist thing in a day and there isn't much else to do, at least that I am aware of. I saw later in Lonely Planet that there are a couple little clubs catering to tourists, but I totally missed them. It is a very small place and everything dies off pretty early. A nice place to visit, but I would hate living there. Further, since my train to Budapest (next blog) was fairly early, passing out early and getting a good nights sleep was the right thing to do.

Next, Budapest...