Monday 29 July 2013

Hitch-hiking

Here begins our FIRST experience with hitchhiking. The moment when we arrived at the gas station Kuba came to the first man we saw and asked if he's going to Seged. He was not going - he was going to Romania, but he said he could take us and leave us at the first gas station near Seged. We were impressed that so quickly we were able to find something and that our driver spoke very good English (Gabor wrote us necessary phrases in Hungarian and we had phrasebook).


Budapest

25.07

Yesterday, we were doing sightseeing in Budapest the whole day. We loved it. At the beginning Kuba considered that the buildings are quite old and he didn't like that but I did. This had its own atmosphere. In my opinion the prettiest places were - Vajdahunyad Castle and Fisherman's Bastion. There we saw a guy who was doing le parkour, he was jumping from the wall to the stairs (it was high). 

Day one

24.07
Day one

Actually we can say that it's second day. Yesterday we left Częstochowa in the morning with Polish Bus to Bratislava. Through traffic jams in the Czech Republic we were late which caused my anxiety, because in Bratislava we had to change the bus for the bus to Budapest. Luckily the bus to Budapest was also late. The bus had small screens on the seats in front of us - for watching movies. We watched Terminal and they even offered us tea (all in price). The journey passed pleasantly, in the meantime, I called our hostel in Budapest - I wanted to inform them that we will be after midnight, my call answered old lady and she was speaking to me in a strange language that I would hear in next days. Hungarian. Of course I did not understand anything I said what I had to say in English and hung up. We arrived at the capital of Hungary, and it was very dark, bus stop was outside the city, so Kuba was looking for the way. We went wich Czechs, who had a map. It's good that we had to stop at an ATM and a it's good that they went further because it turned out that we were going the wrong way. The right way helped us find the Hungarians on bicycles. We finally got to the hostel, it was a pretty nice dormitory and for 60 zł for two people-comfortable bed, kitchenette and bathroom for two rooms. After 8 am we were already at our host-kind Gabor, a Hungarian lawyer. He gave us the keys to the apartment and we meet in the evening. Now we eat breakfast in the park. We are going to do sightseeing.

Journey

We are going through Slovakia and Hungary to Serbia, later to Montenegro and Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina - to return through Croatia and make a stop at Balaton Lake in Hungary!

Unfortunately, because of disease we had to resign from Romania and Bulgaria.
We leave on July 23 and return at the end of August.

See you !

Balkans

Why Balkans? One year ago we were going to Croatia and we were making stops in few countries along the way. We thought- if Slovenia was once part of Jugoslavia then it's part of Balkans. Slovenians were surprised - they don't consider themselves as Balkans. Croatians felt offended. Balkaniec means someone crazy.

We decided to go on a journey to find the Balkans. Where are they located? Which country feels a part of them? What exactly are the Balkans? State of mind or a part of history?