The Prague blog... written on a train to Munich. We just got to our hostel and are about to grab some beer soon.
Ok, so I know I didn't update this at all while we were in Prague, but we kept pretty busy while we were there and I didn't like sitting around on the netbook while there was beer to be drank. Prague was another stop where we pretty much held to a strict liquid diet, as people say, Czech beer is good... I'll give them that, but it's not really anything to write home about. Personally, Anthony and Cliff both make better beers... but telling the Czech's their beer isn't totally awesome would probably open up another war or something crazy like that, so I'll just say, the beer was good enough. For the most part we drank Budweiser and Pilsner Urquell... Not the Bud we get back home, but the actual original Budweiser that was started here in the Czech Republic, they taste nothing alike. Beers are served with a huge head on them, but the glass usually has beer up to the .5 liter mark so it's ok... Apparently some of the American folks don't like that much head... once I figured it was supposed to be that way, it was cool with me.
So, our first night in Prague, we get in late because trains don't know how to be on time, ever. So our train left Budapest an hour and 30 minutes late, which got us into Prague around 11pm. We decided to see if we could find something to eat but again, only one meal that day since everything close to the place was closed or no longer serving food. Unlike the states, when it's late, bars stay open and serve alcohol, not food... they know their role it seems. We went to this place called music and blues bar... A joint owned by some old dude who was hanging out with his wife at a table, with another couple Englishmen sitting at another table. We had just went to an ATM to get some Czech currency and picked up 3000 Czech Koruna, the exchange rate is around 20-1... so 3000 Koruna was around $150, we both picked up this much and now have some left over, for 3 days in Prague, I figure that's pretty good.
The bar we went to, that was practically empty, and had no actual music anywhere in the vicinity... was actually a pretty neat place. The walls had framed pictures of the Beatles, BB King, and many other big artists that have come along.... along with a few instruments hung up on the brick. So, we stopped in there looking to find the Candle-light type of place in Eastern Europe, we've still yet to find it. Since we'd just left the ATM, and each had 3 1000 Koruna bills, we ordered our beers, the choices were Light or Dark...lol. When we went to pay with a 1000 Koruna bill the bartender/owner of the bar said he couldn't make change. So now you've got us staring at two full beers after an entire day on a train thinking, shit, we can't even drink... :-( But the guy was cool and said to have the beers, so we did. We sat there for awhile and when we left we told him we'd be back and we tried every day for the next three days to see if the place was open at all, and it never was again. We can't say we didn't try to hook the guy up, we really just wanted to pay what we owed and buy the man a beer for showing us the hospitality. I think our good karma is still intact enough though, even though we never did pay the guy back, since we tried so many times to do so.
After that we went back to the hostel, a huge one... pretty much a big ass party every night. Prague is a young person's party city, in every way. Kids can drink beer at 16 and hard alcohol at 18, so as one can imagine, the bars will have a much younger clientele in some cases. Our room was filled with 3 English guys, a guy from Amsterdam, and as funny as it sounds... A guy from Tennessee, Franklin, TN to be exact. Random, I know. We got in fairly late but sat on the porch of the hostel drinking budweisers for 30 Koruna, about $1.50 for a half liter, 22 ounce beer. Pretty good deal if you ask me... The hostel sold them out of a fridge that you just pull it out, pop the top off of it, and throw the guy working there a few coins... it was a sweet setup. That night we pretty much sat around in the outdoor party area drinking with people from pretty much EVERYWHERE. One guy we hung out with was an Englishman, who lives in Australia, who is in the end of a trip from China, to Russia, through Poland, and through other parts of Europe, before going to Greece and catching a plane to the UK to see his family he hasn't seen in ages. I thought our train trips were long, but he was catching trains that his ticket would say shit like 29 hours of travel time on one train...crazy.
We are now on the train from Prague to Munich, Germany... a 6 hour trip which is why I'm blogging the hell out of some stuff right now...lol. The Czech countryside is a beatiful scene from the train, Anthony's passed out again, imagine that.
Our first full day in Prague was spent doing all the touristy shit that the city has to offer, which is cool except for the fact that the only people we ran into, were tourists... which I don't care much for. Everyone pretty much spoke english there too, so no language barrier again. The hostel had a bbq for free, so as you can imagine, all the kids who are traveling with a small amount of money were there for some free sausage and rye bread. There were a ton of English guys, bunch of Americans, two Swedes, a few women from Canada, some Germans, and a few other people littered in here and there from all over... After the BBQ we went to have some real food, 2nd meal of the day if you add a sausage on a piece of bread together with a kabob we had earlier in the afternoon...lol. The only day in recent memory where we've eaten more than one meal. :-) Then we went to this bar that a bunch of people from the hostel were gonna meet up at... It's a karaoke joint, owned by a guy from Indiana, and the bar is ran by a big, crazy bastard from Amsterdam. I think it'd be a cool place if you want to feel like you're back in the states... because everyone there was a regular and were from the US. When the hostel crowd left the hostel and made their way up to the Blind Eye tavern, we were pretty beat so we ended up leaving... it seemed like too young and loud of a party than we wanted to deal with after the looooong day of sun and walking we'd endured up to that point. It was beautiful weather, but when running around in the hilly, cobble-stone streets of the city, can make it unbearably hot. We did get to a huge stairway that goes up to a castle... when we started up the stairs from Hell, I looked to my left and saw a quaint little pub/restaurant with two rocking chairs and a table in the shade. We decided to have a beer... or two. It ended up being a great spot. We saw all the tourists come around a corner and almost every time say, "shit", "oh God", "noooo" and pretty much all those other words that describe something you really don't want to do.
We stared at this lady with a paper hat on her head for a while and thought it would actually be cool to have one...lol. We decided we had no need to look that cool though...haha.
Our last night in Prague, we hung out with the dude from Tennessee and went to a local beer garden that was absolutely packed. We ended up at this smaller beer-garden, part of a restaurant that was connected to the big garden. After finding 3 chairs and a place to put them, we started to drink beer, and lots of it, while watching the Spain - Portugal match on a big screen. Myself and the other Tennessee feller made friends with a couple German ladies while sitting there, both very nice and quite attractive. We sat with them for a bit before going out separate ways and making our way back to the hostel. Where we sat around drinking with a new bunch of budget travelers than the previous night. I made very good friends with a beautiful French girl named Lorene, she'll probably be that one chick I'll remember from this trip that I would love to be able to meet again but most likely never will... oh well. We drank til 4am and woke up at 8am this morning to catch the early train to Munich... saying I feel like complete crap is probably a big understatement...haha.
The English guys we met ove the course of being in Prague, all said that the Czech people were always rude to them and didn't like to speak much english at all... after being around them for a few nights, I found them pretty loud and obnoxious (like I hear Americans are some times???) but for the most part, really cool and nice to all of us at the hostel... other than the loud part...haha. They always went on pub crawls and came back around 5am or close to it... sleeping with the window open, they usually woke me up before they even made it off the street to the hostel. Most clubs there don't even open until 1am... all the way through the week. I figure the person who wants to party and go out to clubs every night would be in heaven if they went to Prague.
Our last day, we took a trip on the train to the town of Kutna Hore' where we checked out a big cathedral and "The Bone Church" it was cool and nice to get away from the city a bit.
AND THEN IT HAPPENED.
We're waiting for the train back to Prague, when Anthony and this other guy look at eachother and are like, "holy shit, Anthony?" "Chris?" Yeah... no shit. We'd talked about this the previous day actually... The fact that we haven't ran into anyone we knew yet... since it's been my experience in life to run into random people I know in the strangest of places. So there we are, on a train platform, in a city the size of Forest Grove, OR or Jamestown, TN... and Anthony actually meets someone he knows there. The world is indeed, a really small f'n place. We sat with Chris and his wife on the train back to prague in awe that we would run into someone from the US that we actually knew. They were on their way to Vienna and Budapest and I told them how awesome of a time I was sure they'd have, since Budapest was the coolest place on earth as far as I'm concerned...haha.
While also on that train platform, I was sitting on a bench and a bird was situated above me and decided to piss right on my arm. After being all pissy for a while and using a bottle of water to wash my arm off, we moved to a different bench with no pigeons over head... We did however keep an eye on that little bastard in case he decided to screw with me again. Fast forward about 20 minutes, we're waiting on the train, and these two couple come and sit on the bench next to us... the one with the pigeon above....yes. So, we decided that we are bastards and didn't warn the people that they could possibly be in a pigeon-shit zone if they're not careful. So, we didn't warn them... and I said, watch, the hot one is totally gonna be the one that gets shit on... and then yes, a few minutes later Anthony looks up and says, oh shit, it's turning around... so we start giggling a bit and then see it happen again. Right on her hat, like napalm bird shit covering everything in site...haha. We tried not to laugh but we played it off like we were looking for another one above us.
My final thoughts on Prague:
I thought it was waaaaay too touristy for me, they are fixing a lot of issues with big buildings and bridges, which caused me to get fairly crappy pictures quite a bit... I didn't like that much at all. It is a beautiful city though, I think I'd go again, but I'd still be sure to hit up Budapest first if given the choice. The hostel we were in was probably my favorite part of being there, the common areas always had people around to chit chat with, and everyone was friendly... along with being able to grab a beer and sit around for really cheap. I don't have anything bad to say about Prague, but I thought I'd like it more than I did.
We just crossed into Germany, a place I once called home as a toddler, it's cool to be back. It'll be nice to be able to understand some of the people here, unlike everywhere we've been thus far.
We're now off to Munich, where we have two nights booked at a hostel, then a night in Heidelburg, then two days in Belgium, including the Rock-fest I'm sure I've told most people about... then off to Amsterdam for my 30th birthday. This is the first time we've actually been all booked up for more than a day or two since we started the journey, it's kinda nice, but now it seems like we're a bit limited if we find a place we'd like to be in longer. I'm sure we'll deal with it fine.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Pics from Budapest
lol, view from whee we stood at a random and free Rod Stewart concert.
Heroes Square.
Random wedding photos being taken, the bride and groom looked incredible.
A labyrinth we checked out under Buda Castle.
Nikki, one of our roommates... the wtf look is due to the weird lady with the wig who can barely be seen on the right side of the pic.
Death, chillin on a park bench.
A pic of the Danube River, separating Buda from Pest.
The typical breakfast for us.
Heroes Square.
Random wedding photos being taken, the bride and groom looked incredible.
A labyrinth we checked out under Buda Castle.
Nikki, one of our roommates... the wtf look is due to the weird lady with the wig who can barely be seen on the right side of the pic.
Death, chillin on a park bench.
A pic of the Danube River, separating Buda from Pest.
The typical breakfast for us.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
big blog from budapest, written on the train...
We just got to Prague, so here's some easy reading for the folks back in the states... It seems to be one big wall of text so sorry about that... i'll fix it later but for now i'll leave it be. I wrote it in word so it screwed me over...lol
Budapest, one side of the city is the Buda side, and we stayed in the Pest side, they are separated by the Danube River with a few bridges in view every way you look, much like Portland. It was an amazing city and I’d highly suggest anyone able to, to make sure and check it out if they ever make it across the Atlantic. The language barrier is almost non-existant, since 90% of the people there speak great English. We never made it out of the city but I figure that’s something I can do if I ever make it back here, I could easily spend an entire week or two there. We stayed for 3 nights after only planning to be there for two.
Since I’m on another 7 hr train ride to Prague right now, I have awhile to catch up with the blog, since we stayed out til late last night and I pretty much passed out the minute I walked into the dorm. I’ll get to the rest of that night later, it was a pretty awesome day... We just passed a castle on top of a hill looking over some little Hungarian town just across the Danube River. That was pretty cool.
I don’t remember all that I spoke of in my last entry since I wrote it straight into the blog site I use, so I’ll just go ahead and recap the trip to Budapest. Our hostel was pretty awesome, we stayed in an 8 person dorm with 4 sets of bunkbeds. We stayed 3 nights and had a few different sets of folks come in and out in our time there. Three people were our roommates the whole time, Nikki and Colene, from California, and some suuuuper quiet girl who I’m pretty sure works somewhere around there since she was pretty much up at the same time every morning and hanging out at the hostel every night. We exchanged hello and bye a few times but for the most part, she didn’t seem to talk to anyone. The two from California were our homies for the remainder of our time in Budapest. We got along fine with them, due to being roomies, but both of us agreed that Nikki is probably a complete bitch. Both were pretty hot and had no problems flaunting it...lol.
The first night we hung out with them we went to a park where people just brought drinks and drank til they puked... well, at least the kids were... The grown ups pretty much people watched and drank a bunch themselves. We helped Colene get back to the hostel due to being shit faced. When we got their we all were pretty beat from our long day and everyone pretty much crashed the minute we got there.
The next day Anthony and I went to do all the touristy stuff that people do when in Budapest, we snapped some pics, had some Hungarian food (Pork with onions, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and little balls of bread) I’m sure I forgot someof the stuff in it but oh well. It was an amazing dish, and ended up being my one and only meal of the day... which, has seemed to be the norm on this trip so far. We’ve been gone for a week and a few days and we’ve only had more than one meal a day maybe 3 times. It’s our ongoing joke that we’ll probably end up just finding some pizza somewhere later on.
I snapped a few pics of some great architecture, saw a couple doing their wedding photos, and the bride may have easily been the best looking bride I’ve ever seen. I did snap a few pics of them so I’ll share them when I get online in a seperate entry with the rest of the pics from here. We found out that Rod Stewart was holding a free show near Heroes Square. We decided to meet up with the roomies and head to that around 7pm.
I can’t imagine myself saying this... but I’m gonna. Rod Stewart was an awesome show. It started off with a bunch of Hungarian singers doing some of their own songs, with some English songs sprinkled in. One girl looked like Pink and I said, I bet she does a Pink song at some point... sure enough I called that one...haha. There was a bit of Michael Jackson and a few other rock songs that I don’t remember right off. I’VE NEVER BEEN IN A PLACE WITH THAT MANY PEOPLE, SERIOUSLY. At leat a half-million people, but most likely more than that. There were screens up allover the place that people were watching and taking video of, because they were so far back they couldn’t actually see the show... if that puts it into perspective. I only know this because we decided to walk through the crowd and find a drink, but the place we were standing was in the area where you couldn’t drink. The funny thing about that though, the area was kind of gated off, but you just had to go through a little checkpoint when you go in there so they can check you for booze. They must’ve sucked at it though, since I saw a fair amount of people still drinking where we were.
So after going through the little checkpoint, we went towards the stage... we pretty much just kep walking until we were about 30 feet from the stage... at the end of the show, we were about 12 feet from Rod Stewart. Anthony and I are used to rock shows where we try to find a mosh pit, this was definitely not that type of show...haha It seemed like noboody knew they could get into the close in area so it was the only empty-ish area in about 6 football fields worth of place to watch from.
*
Pardon the blog interruption, we just pretty much bribed a ticketing agent to get a ticket through Slovakia, since it’s not covered under the Eurorail ticket that we have... even though we asked a ton of times about a ticket to Prague and they said every time that we didn’t need to buy a ticket, bastards. So we didn’t... now we’re approached by the ticket lady on the train as we head through Slovakia, and she says that we need to buy a ticket. Anthony talked to her and she said we can get a receipt from her for 44 Euro showing that we paid our way through the country... or just give her 20 Euro to not give us a reciept and go on through, while risking not having a ticket and having to actually purchase one from someone else... though she said she would be the only one checking tickets, so I hope that’s the case. We’ve agreed that neither one of us wants to end up in a prison in Slovakia...haha. We gave her $25 because we haven’t even seen a Euro in our travels yet. Hopefully she doesn’t hop off and let another ticket agent hop on while seeing us get screwed over... that would be fucked up.
Anyways...
So after the concert, we ditched the chicks and ended up hanging out at the hungarian pub underground of the hostel we stayed in. It was a good choice, we partied it up with the locals. There was a guy singing, playing the guitar, the piano a couple times, and yes... even a Kazoo. The one man show was pretty awesome even though it was in Hungarian and neither of us could understand a word he was singing. He did, however, do a song in English and gave us a thumbs up...lol When we got there, we got a few hard looks from some of the people there, but after chatting with the guy for a few minutes and actually clapping and yelling for him when songs were finished, everyone seemed to be cool with us. Apparently we even sat at a table with a few of them, but I don’t even remember that... Anthony mentioned it a bit ago. (We HAD to try some of the local shots damnit!) LOL. People even took pictures of us, most likely to include in whatever fac ebook or myspace type of site they’re on. Oh, and speaking of Facebook, it seems like everyone at every hostel checks in and then jumps on facebook about 5 minutes later... kind of funny to see... Though I can’t hate on that, I do that with my netbook for the most part.
So yeah, we both pretty much agreed that the random Rod Stewart concert and the really cool /locals only type of pub, made yesterday the best day of the trip so far.
Random thoughts...
*Trains are never on time here in Europe... so that sucks.
*We’ve ran into more and more Americans... we’re sitting next to an elderly couple on the train right now actually... All signs point to them being nice people.
*We’ve found a pool hall in Bucharest and Budapest, it wouldn’t be us if we still didn’t try to shoot pool at least once in every country. Especially when you only pay about $4 an hour on a beautiful table... as we’ve done in both places.
*We stopped at a little pint-sized mini mart and got a drink and a muffin... the best muffin I’ve ever had, literally. No real details for ya, it was just that friggin good. So much so, that we stopped and got one just like it the next day... the same amazing. I would have got a few for this long ass train ride but all the people selling them decided to close on a Sunday, as we’ve found that most places do. Strange as it may seem, most stores close on Saturday also. So if you’re really needing that new pair of Nike’s, you better grab them on Friday or you won’t have them by Monday when you go back to school.
*The pickles here are neither Dill or sweet pickles... This is something I’ve never thought of... what’s a pickle taste like when it’s not in a jar off the shelf??? Well, I know what it tastes like, and honestly I didn’t really like it.
*The other day my checking account had $4740 in it, and using the currency calculator, it came out to around 1,079,500 Hungarian Forint. So yeah, I’m a damn millionaire... that’s what’s up.
I still have a 500 Forint bill that i’ll stick with my left over money from Romania... I figure I’ll have a nice collection of change and bills to show off when I get back home, and added all up together, it may be about $5 in all...lol. I had two 500 Forint bills, but I bought a 500ml Nestea for 370 Forint.
*We’ve watched a lot of World Cup matches, so I’ve been pretty happy with that thus far.
*I can last on one meal a day for the most part, but I can’t imagine it’s been the healthy way to go about it...lol. A diet of beer has worked so far though.
That’s about all I can think up so far, this took about 2 hours off the7 hr trip, so that’s nice.
Budapest, one side of the city is the Buda side, and we stayed in the Pest side, they are separated by the Danube River with a few bridges in view every way you look, much like Portland. It was an amazing city and I’d highly suggest anyone able to, to make sure and check it out if they ever make it across the Atlantic. The language barrier is almost non-existant, since 90% of the people there speak great English. We never made it out of the city but I figure that’s something I can do if I ever make it back here, I could easily spend an entire week or two there. We stayed for 3 nights after only planning to be there for two.
Since I’m on another 7 hr train ride to Prague right now, I have awhile to catch up with the blog, since we stayed out til late last night and I pretty much passed out the minute I walked into the dorm. I’ll get to the rest of that night later, it was a pretty awesome day... We just passed a castle on top of a hill looking over some little Hungarian town just across the Danube River. That was pretty cool.
I don’t remember all that I spoke of in my last entry since I wrote it straight into the blog site I use, so I’ll just go ahead and recap the trip to Budapest. Our hostel was pretty awesome, we stayed in an 8 person dorm with 4 sets of bunkbeds. We stayed 3 nights and had a few different sets of folks come in and out in our time there. Three people were our roommates the whole time, Nikki and Colene, from California, and some suuuuper quiet girl who I’m pretty sure works somewhere around there since she was pretty much up at the same time every morning and hanging out at the hostel every night. We exchanged hello and bye a few times but for the most part, she didn’t seem to talk to anyone. The two from California were our homies for the remainder of our time in Budapest. We got along fine with them, due to being roomies, but both of us agreed that Nikki is probably a complete bitch. Both were pretty hot and had no problems flaunting it...lol.
The first night we hung out with them we went to a park where people just brought drinks and drank til they puked... well, at least the kids were... The grown ups pretty much people watched and drank a bunch themselves. We helped Colene get back to the hostel due to being shit faced. When we got their we all were pretty beat from our long day and everyone pretty much crashed the minute we got there.
The next day Anthony and I went to do all the touristy stuff that people do when in Budapest, we snapped some pics, had some Hungarian food (Pork with onions, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and little balls of bread) I’m sure I forgot someof the stuff in it but oh well. It was an amazing dish, and ended up being my one and only meal of the day... which, has seemed to be the norm on this trip so far. We’ve been gone for a week and a few days and we’ve only had more than one meal a day maybe 3 times. It’s our ongoing joke that we’ll probably end up just finding some pizza somewhere later on.
I snapped a few pics of some great architecture, saw a couple doing their wedding photos, and the bride may have easily been the best looking bride I’ve ever seen. I did snap a few pics of them so I’ll share them when I get online in a seperate entry with the rest of the pics from here. We found out that Rod Stewart was holding a free show near Heroes Square. We decided to meet up with the roomies and head to that around 7pm.
I can’t imagine myself saying this... but I’m gonna. Rod Stewart was an awesome show. It started off with a bunch of Hungarian singers doing some of their own songs, with some English songs sprinkled in. One girl looked like Pink and I said, I bet she does a Pink song at some point... sure enough I called that one...haha. There was a bit of Michael Jackson and a few other rock songs that I don’t remember right off. I’VE NEVER BEEN IN A PLACE WITH THAT MANY PEOPLE, SERIOUSLY. At leat a half-million people, but most likely more than that. There were screens up allover the place that people were watching and taking video of, because they were so far back they couldn’t actually see the show... if that puts it into perspective. I only know this because we decided to walk through the crowd and find a drink, but the place we were standing was in the area where you couldn’t drink. The funny thing about that though, the area was kind of gated off, but you just had to go through a little checkpoint when you go in there so they can check you for booze. They must’ve sucked at it though, since I saw a fair amount of people still drinking where we were.
So after going through the little checkpoint, we went towards the stage... we pretty much just kep walking until we were about 30 feet from the stage... at the end of the show, we were about 12 feet from Rod Stewart. Anthony and I are used to rock shows where we try to find a mosh pit, this was definitely not that type of show...haha It seemed like noboody knew they could get into the close in area so it was the only empty-ish area in about 6 football fields worth of place to watch from.
*
Pardon the blog interruption, we just pretty much bribed a ticketing agent to get a ticket through Slovakia, since it’s not covered under the Eurorail ticket that we have... even though we asked a ton of times about a ticket to Prague and they said every time that we didn’t need to buy a ticket, bastards. So we didn’t... now we’re approached by the ticket lady on the train as we head through Slovakia, and she says that we need to buy a ticket. Anthony talked to her and she said we can get a receipt from her for 44 Euro showing that we paid our way through the country... or just give her 20 Euro to not give us a reciept and go on through, while risking not having a ticket and having to actually purchase one from someone else... though she said she would be the only one checking tickets, so I hope that’s the case. We’ve agreed that neither one of us wants to end up in a prison in Slovakia...haha. We gave her $25 because we haven’t even seen a Euro in our travels yet. Hopefully she doesn’t hop off and let another ticket agent hop on while seeing us get screwed over... that would be fucked up.
Anyways...
So after the concert, we ditched the chicks and ended up hanging out at the hungarian pub underground of the hostel we stayed in. It was a good choice, we partied it up with the locals. There was a guy singing, playing the guitar, the piano a couple times, and yes... even a Kazoo. The one man show was pretty awesome even though it was in Hungarian and neither of us could understand a word he was singing. He did, however, do a song in English and gave us a thumbs up...lol When we got there, we got a few hard looks from some of the people there, but after chatting with the guy for a few minutes and actually clapping and yelling for him when songs were finished, everyone seemed to be cool with us. Apparently we even sat at a table with a few of them, but I don’t even remember that... Anthony mentioned it a bit ago. (We HAD to try some of the local shots damnit!) LOL. People even took pictures of us, most likely to include in whatever fac ebook or myspace type of site they’re on. Oh, and speaking of Facebook, it seems like everyone at every hostel checks in and then jumps on facebook about 5 minutes later... kind of funny to see... Though I can’t hate on that, I do that with my netbook for the most part.
So yeah, we both pretty much agreed that the random Rod Stewart concert and the really cool /locals only type of pub, made yesterday the best day of the trip so far.
Random thoughts...
*Trains are never on time here in Europe... so that sucks.
*We’ve ran into more and more Americans... we’re sitting next to an elderly couple on the train right now actually... All signs point to them being nice people.
*We’ve found a pool hall in Bucharest and Budapest, it wouldn’t be us if we still didn’t try to shoot pool at least once in every country. Especially when you only pay about $4 an hour on a beautiful table... as we’ve done in both places.
*We stopped at a little pint-sized mini mart and got a drink and a muffin... the best muffin I’ve ever had, literally. No real details for ya, it was just that friggin good. So much so, that we stopped and got one just like it the next day... the same amazing. I would have got a few for this long ass train ride but all the people selling them decided to close on a Sunday, as we’ve found that most places do. Strange as it may seem, most stores close on Saturday also. So if you’re really needing that new pair of Nike’s, you better grab them on Friday or you won’t have them by Monday when you go back to school.
*The pickles here are neither Dill or sweet pickles... This is something I’ve never thought of... what’s a pickle taste like when it’s not in a jar off the shelf??? Well, I know what it tastes like, and honestly I didn’t really like it.
*The other day my checking account had $4740 in it, and using the currency calculator, it came out to around 1,079,500 Hungarian Forint. So yeah, I’m a damn millionaire... that’s what’s up.
I still have a 500 Forint bill that i’ll stick with my left over money from Romania... I figure I’ll have a nice collection of change and bills to show off when I get back home, and added all up together, it may be about $5 in all...lol. I had two 500 Forint bills, but I bought a 500ml Nestea for 370 Forint.
*We’ve watched a lot of World Cup matches, so I’ve been pretty happy with that thus far.
*I can last on one meal a day for the most part, but I can’t imagine it’s been the healthy way to go about it...lol. A diet of beer has worked so far though.
That’s about all I can think up so far, this took about 2 hours off the7 hr trip, so that’s nice.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Traveling with technology
Sitting here in a hostel bunkbed in Budapest, I realize how cool it is to have a netbook and free wifi in most hostels. I had a video chat with a friend a bit ago on skype and I've been able to sit around and blog or check the latest scores of the world cup the entire time we've traveled. It's been awesome to look up stuff we want to see and find stuff about it prior to checking it out. Every time we've arrived at a new hostel, we check on the next one we'll be staying at and make our reservations at that point. It's worked out great thus far.
We were going to take a late train out of here tonight and we had made reservations in Prague already for tomorrow and the next couple days, but we've decided to stay one more day in Budapest and we'll just take an earlier train tomorrow. All stuff that we're able to do with the awesomeness of technology at our fingertips. I've been able to upload photos at the end of the day, but all have been uploaded straight out of the camera. I'm not looking forward to having to edit a bunch of them when I get back to the US, but I'm sure I'll have some good ones later.
We are going to check out a free Rod Stewart concert tonight in a park... weird I know, but it seems like the cool thing to do. We've had some pretty cool roomies here in Budapest that we hung out with last night. They wanted to go check out a park but not go alone, we figured out why when we got there... but it was pretty cool.
We filled up a couple bags with booze and strolled down to this park where it seems a few hundred thousand people go just to sit around, drink, and people watch. Lots of teens there, along with some older folks but it was mostly for the kiddies it seems. It was like a license to drink for the kids, and as long as they stayed in the park and did their business they wouldn't get hassled. So you can imagine there's a ton of kids chugging beers I could never pronounce if I tried, and drinking mixed drinks they have no idea how to make.
The two ladies we went with are both around 25 and incredibly good looking and have b/f's back in California where they are from. Nothing crazy or looking for hookups (no need to be jealous Bobbi, no funny business here) but they were cool company to hang out with for the night. We just found out that the hostel we're in will do your laundry for free if you stay 3 nights so that's absolutely awesome... they even dry it, which we've not run into since we've been in Europe. Dryers tend to not exist in the places we've been, meaning everything is line dried, which suuuuuux when you're not in a place long, our first laundry was in transylvania a few days ago, when it was raining. I've been wearing semi-damp clothes since with not a febreeze bottle in sight...lol.
We're about to go check out some big bath deal that's all the rage here, it's pretty much a hotspring in the city that everyone who comes here says you have to go, so we're gonna do that today before seeing Rod Stewart (That sounds funny to even say it...lol.)
We were going to take a late train out of here tonight and we had made reservations in Prague already for tomorrow and the next couple days, but we've decided to stay one more day in Budapest and we'll just take an earlier train tomorrow. All stuff that we're able to do with the awesomeness of technology at our fingertips. I've been able to upload photos at the end of the day, but all have been uploaded straight out of the camera. I'm not looking forward to having to edit a bunch of them when I get back to the US, but I'm sure I'll have some good ones later.
We are going to check out a free Rod Stewart concert tonight in a park... weird I know, but it seems like the cool thing to do. We've had some pretty cool roomies here in Budapest that we hung out with last night. They wanted to go check out a park but not go alone, we figured out why when we got there... but it was pretty cool.
We filled up a couple bags with booze and strolled down to this park where it seems a few hundred thousand people go just to sit around, drink, and people watch. Lots of teens there, along with some older folks but it was mostly for the kiddies it seems. It was like a license to drink for the kids, and as long as they stayed in the park and did their business they wouldn't get hassled. So you can imagine there's a ton of kids chugging beers I could never pronounce if I tried, and drinking mixed drinks they have no idea how to make.
The two ladies we went with are both around 25 and incredibly good looking and have b/f's back in California where they are from. Nothing crazy or looking for hookups (no need to be jealous Bobbi, no funny business here) but they were cool company to hang out with for the night. We just found out that the hostel we're in will do your laundry for free if you stay 3 nights so that's absolutely awesome... they even dry it, which we've not run into since we've been in Europe. Dryers tend to not exist in the places we've been, meaning everything is line dried, which suuuuuux when you're not in a place long, our first laundry was in transylvania a few days ago, when it was raining. I've been wearing semi-damp clothes since with not a febreeze bottle in sight...lol.
We're about to go check out some big bath deal that's all the rage here, it's pretty much a hotspring in the city that everyone who comes here says you have to go, so we're gonna do that today before seeing Rod Stewart (That sounds funny to even say it...lol.)
Friday, June 25, 2010
Budapest is amazing
Ok, so compared to Bucharest and pretty much the whole of Romania, this place is like Scottsdale is to AZ or the Pearl district is to Portland. It's a pretty touristy place where we are situated, and the biggest difference I've seen thus far is the fact that we feel pretty damn safe around here. A few scammer types around the big tourist traps but other than that most of the folks we've met have spoke great english and been very friendly. Hungarian is a language all it's own, so we don't understand a damn thing anyone says... but again, almost everyone speaks english. We're in the super nice part of town but everything is still pretty cheap. A bit ago we had a full meal, 4 beers, a shot of ouzo and an espresso and our bill was still only around $28... our most expensive meal in a while, if not the whole trip.
People here dress like they're all going to a posh club every minute of the day, much like some French and Italian folks I've seen in the past. The guys dress sharp, wearing suits or some well known name brand clothes while the women all wear heals and dress to impress. This makes the women look amazing but in all fairness, Romania still has the natural beauty over this place when it comes to the ladies. :-)
Today we walked around Buda castle, which is situated on top of a big hill on the Buda site of the city. The other side of the city is the Pest side... hence the name Budapest. There is an amazing amount of great architecture in every direction you look. Even the hostel we're staying in is in a building with gargoyles on the side. The streets were a bit tough to figure out when we were looking for the hostel the other night, but once we figured it out and walked a few miles we finally found where we needed to go.
Last night we stayed in a mixed dorm with 8 beds... which we're staying in again tonight of course. Our neighbors were a couple 20ish chicks from California that we chit chatted with this AM before heading out, 3 asian guys who spoke practically no english and a chick who just checked in at 8am (and woke me up) whom I'll have to ask where she's from in a bit. So far the girls are still there along with the one that woke me, but we've added a few German guys in place of the Asians. They seem alright, I talked to them a bit ago and their English was as good as mine. Apparently, this is one of the coolest hostels in this city, because almost everyone here is from America...haha. Ok, only an entire other room of 8 that let us in the gate yesterday.
It's been awesome with the world cup going on, because every day after we've walked around all day and need to sit around and eat or drink beer... we just stop by a bar that has TV's outside with the world cup matches going on and vuvuzelas blaring in the background in case you didn't know where the game is on. We've caught about a match or 2 a day other than the days we've traveled and weren't able to, so that's been awesome. About 5 minutes away they have a huge projection screen in a park where everyone gathers to watch the games... how cool is that?
This has been most of our times when we're not walking around being touristy.
We're going to go out in a bit and figure out something else to do tonight since we have one more night in this awesome town. Hopefully I'll be able to hop on here in the morning but if not I'll probably write a bit more when I'm on the train to Prague about this place. We were told that if we like Budapest, that Prague is a 10x cooler place... so really looking forward to that... so much so that we booked 3 nights there rather than our typical 2 in most places we've been so far.
I reckon that's about it for now. :-)
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Budapest, Hungary
Is so far an absolutely amazing place. Our hostel is in a part of town surrounded by practically everything we'd like to see today. So, we're about to head out and check out the town if it's not raining too much.
writing on the train yesterday...
So this is a bunch of drivel i wrote yesterday on our 11 or so hour trip on the train yesterday...
We're now on the train to Budapest and I just realized it's going to be a monster sized leg of our trip... probably ~ 11-12 hours on the train... I figure it's a good time to write up the next blog as as any, if not a good time to just write random crap because I have around 10 hours of train time and 6 or so hours of battery life on the netbook.
I checked the exchange rate of the Hungarian Florint and it's $1 - 226 florint. $5000 in my account would show 1.3Mil. Florint, so that would be quite funny to see (if only I had $5000). I hope the atm machine gives my balance on the reciept so I can feel rich for once...lol. Speaking of money, we've done incredibly well thus far with spending very little. Our travel had been paid for months ahead of time so other than the occasional reservation fee on the train, we've paid nothing for travel. The buses in Constanta were free and other than the trains that's the only other way we've run around other than walking and having Liviu and Bogden taxi us around for a couple days in Bucharest. We filled up his Ford Fiesta for around $40, but that was well worth not having the hassle of figuring out Bucharest on our own. Gas was around $8 a gallon when we figured it out... no more bitching about gas prices for me, if I can stay under $4 I'm pretty sure I'll be happy for ae while, gas is expensive EVERYWHERE on this continent from what I've been told.
Our train was around an hour late into the station so that made our already insanely long train ride a bit longer to deal with...bleh. We should make it to Budapest around 7pm but judging by the delays we've encountered to this point, I imagine it'll be closer to 9pm when we get there. Let's hope we don't have to get through too much of the town to get to our hostel... The brochure for the place in Budapest mentioned that it shouldn't cost more than 10 Euro from the train station to the hostel. This is a good thing to know since it's a good idea to haggle with taxi drivers prior to getting in the car because if you don't, the common scam is to charge you an insane amount more than it's supposed to be. As more than one guide book I've read said, it's usually the first scam that most people visiting Europe run into.
We've already ran into a few of them in our time on the road and I'm actually thinking about getting a wallet just to see if any of these bastards are quick enough to pick my pocket... seriously, I'd actually like to see just how sneaky they are. Other than that, we've felt relatively safe, Hell, Anthony went to get some beer the other night in the projects around midnight...haha. He got back and said that it was probably not a good idea to do that again. I guess it helps that he's about twice the size of most Romanians...lol.
The country side of Romania is a lot like Oregon at times, and in some cases like Florida. Right now I have a view of some big hills about 20 miles away with fields full of grass/hay just off the tracks. The countryside is spotted with small farms, many of them couldn't possibly have electricity. Every structure looks old and somewhat run down, people are always outside, and it seems every house has at least a cow and a horse tied up outside. Some of the folks are even lucky enough to have a goat or two. We passed a little old guy the other day who had a donkey on a rope behind him, and the tail of the donkey had a couple goats tied to it.
While I have the time... let's talk about drinks. The Romanian people have it right, beer costs less than coke or orange juice in almost every place you go. I've been drinking big bottles of water or orange Fanta on occasion when I wasn't drinking beer... the Fanta is about 4 Lei and a bottle or can of beer starts at around 3 Lei in stores. A 330ml can of pepsi at a restaurant this morning cost me 4 lei, that's for a 12 ounce can... just like ours back in the US. Beer at the same restaurant cost 4.5 lei for a 500ml glass on draft. It's not the best beer in the world, but it's the equivalent of a coors light as far as I'm concerned. I'm still fine drinking it when it's what I have to work with. The water comes carbonate more times than not... so it's been a learning experience when it comes to buying water... the word (Plata) means flat. It's usually in parenthesis just like that on a bottle if it is indeed a bottle of flat water. After the first day and buying the mineral water more than once or twice, I kind of didn't mind it and would maybe venture to say that I liked it a bit... it just didn't seem to quench the thirst so much.
We passed a horse buggy being pulled with only 3 wheels...lol. That poor horse. Just after that we just passed a couple "water towers" that look like a silo at Chernobyl...lol. Hopefully I'm not glowing green later on.
Something else that I've seen that I thought was cool... You know how in the US when you pass a school, there's a basketball court around it... in front, behind, on the side... somewhere around it. Well here it's like that with football courts (street soccer) as the typical American would see it. The goals are a bit smaller, and I've yet to see one with nets, but they're just in front of every school I've seen. I will admit though, I have seen at least two basketball goals up so far.
Every little town we pass through is noticeable from a good ways off due to all of them having one big church in the middle of them. They all have one big pointy spire on them and have mostly been white. They stand out quite a bit since most other buildings are a shade of tan or brown.
Romania is stuck in the 90's when it comes to music, some 80's and a little new stuff, but it seems everyone is all about the 90's music. At first we thought it was just kinda funny how the music was a throwback in a place or two, but then we started noticing it everywhere we went. With the occasional Romanian song thrown in, we had a soundtrack straight out of my school age years.
So, that's been Romania for the most part... now we're off to Bucharest and I figure that's about all I can write about our first country. We met a few cool people, had a few good, and not so good beers and food... more pizza than we really should have, but mostly because we didn't really know what a lot of food was and the two of us being somewhat picky eaters kind of kicks the "try everything" approach that some people could do while abroad. I feel like a kid when I order food because I'd LOVE a picture menu, the problem with that though... the food we've seen in pictures looked like something we wouldn't even want so that's not exactly helped too much. One place had a menu that looked ok while reading it, but then looking at the pics of everything made me not even think I'd want that... and that sux.
Would I come back? If I were really looking for a woman to marry and had money enough to come out here for a long time, heck yes. With that aside, it was a cool experience and I wouldn't mind passing through on another trip some time but as we leave Romania, I'm glad that we're going somewhere else... so I guess that's a yes and a maybe/maybe not rolled into one answer.
We're now on the train to Budapest and I just realized it's going to be a monster sized leg of our trip... probably ~ 11-12 hours on the train... I figure it's a good time to write up the next blog as as any, if not a good time to just write random crap because I have around 10 hours of train time and 6 or so hours of battery life on the netbook.
I checked the exchange rate of the Hungarian Florint and it's $1 - 226 florint. $5000 in my account would show 1.3Mil. Florint, so that would be quite funny to see (if only I had $5000). I hope the atm machine gives my balance on the reciept so I can feel rich for once...lol. Speaking of money, we've done incredibly well thus far with spending very little. Our travel had been paid for months ahead of time so other than the occasional reservation fee on the train, we've paid nothing for travel. The buses in Constanta were free and other than the trains that's the only other way we've run around other than walking and having Liviu and Bogden taxi us around for a couple days in Bucharest. We filled up his Ford Fiesta for around $40, but that was well worth not having the hassle of figuring out Bucharest on our own. Gas was around $8 a gallon when we figured it out... no more bitching about gas prices for me, if I can stay under $4 I'm pretty sure I'll be happy for ae while, gas is expensive EVERYWHERE on this continent from what I've been told.
Our train was around an hour late into the station so that made our already insanely long train ride a bit longer to deal with...bleh. We should make it to Budapest around 7pm but judging by the delays we've encountered to this point, I imagine it'll be closer to 9pm when we get there. Let's hope we don't have to get through too much of the town to get to our hostel... The brochure for the place in Budapest mentioned that it shouldn't cost more than 10 Euro from the train station to the hostel. This is a good thing to know since it's a good idea to haggle with taxi drivers prior to getting in the car because if you don't, the common scam is to charge you an insane amount more than it's supposed to be. As more than one guide book I've read said, it's usually the first scam that most people visiting Europe run into.
We've already ran into a few of them in our time on the road and I'm actually thinking about getting a wallet just to see if any of these bastards are quick enough to pick my pocket... seriously, I'd actually like to see just how sneaky they are. Other than that, we've felt relatively safe, Hell, Anthony went to get some beer the other night in the projects around midnight...haha. He got back and said that it was probably not a good idea to do that again. I guess it helps that he's about twice the size of most Romanians...lol.
The country side of Romania is a lot like Oregon at times, and in some cases like Florida. Right now I have a view of some big hills about 20 miles away with fields full of grass/hay just off the tracks. The countryside is spotted with small farms, many of them couldn't possibly have electricity. Every structure looks old and somewhat run down, people are always outside, and it seems every house has at least a cow and a horse tied up outside. Some of the folks are even lucky enough to have a goat or two. We passed a little old guy the other day who had a donkey on a rope behind him, and the tail of the donkey had a couple goats tied to it.
While I have the time... let's talk about drinks. The Romanian people have it right, beer costs less than coke or orange juice in almost every place you go. I've been drinking big bottles of water or orange Fanta on occasion when I wasn't drinking beer... the Fanta is about 4 Lei and a bottle or can of beer starts at around 3 Lei in stores. A 330ml can of pepsi at a restaurant this morning cost me 4 lei, that's for a 12 ounce can... just like ours back in the US. Beer at the same restaurant cost 4.5 lei for a 500ml glass on draft. It's not the best beer in the world, but it's the equivalent of a coors light as far as I'm concerned. I'm still fine drinking it when it's what I have to work with. The water comes carbonate more times than not... so it's been a learning experience when it comes to buying water... the word (Plata) means flat. It's usually in parenthesis just like that on a bottle if it is indeed a bottle of flat water. After the first day and buying the mineral water more than once or twice, I kind of didn't mind it and would maybe venture to say that I liked it a bit... it just didn't seem to quench the thirst so much.
We passed a horse buggy being pulled with only 3 wheels...lol. That poor horse. Just after that we just passed a couple "water towers" that look like a silo at Chernobyl...lol. Hopefully I'm not glowing green later on.
Something else that I've seen that I thought was cool... You know how in the US when you pass a school, there's a basketball court around it... in front, behind, on the side... somewhere around it. Well here it's like that with football courts (street soccer) as the typical American would see it. The goals are a bit smaller, and I've yet to see one with nets, but they're just in front of every school I've seen. I will admit though, I have seen at least two basketball goals up so far.
Every little town we pass through is noticeable from a good ways off due to all of them having one big church in the middle of them. They all have one big pointy spire on them and have mostly been white. They stand out quite a bit since most other buildings are a shade of tan or brown.
Romania is stuck in the 90's when it comes to music, some 80's and a little new stuff, but it seems everyone is all about the 90's music. At first we thought it was just kinda funny how the music was a throwback in a place or two, but then we started noticing it everywhere we went. With the occasional Romanian song thrown in, we had a soundtrack straight out of my school age years.
So, that's been Romania for the most part... now we're off to Bucharest and I figure that's about all I can write about our first country. We met a few cool people, had a few good, and not so good beers and food... more pizza than we really should have, but mostly because we didn't really know what a lot of food was and the two of us being somewhat picky eaters kind of kicks the "try everything" approach that some people could do while abroad. I feel like a kid when I order food because I'd LOVE a picture menu, the problem with that though... the food we've seen in pictures looked like something we wouldn't even want so that's not exactly helped too much. One place had a menu that looked ok while reading it, but then looking at the pics of everything made me not even think I'd want that... and that sux.
Would I come back? If I were really looking for a woman to marry and had money enough to come out here for a long time, heck yes. With that aside, it was a cool experience and I wouldn't mind passing through on another trip some time but as we leave Romania, I'm glad that we're going somewhere else... so I guess that's a yes and a maybe/maybe not rolled into one answer.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sighisoara, Birthplace of Vlad Tepes (Dracula) in the heart of Transylvania
So after a long train ride, in the realm of 10-11 hours, from Constanta to Sighioara we arrived at our hostel around noon, yesterday. On the train, we were joined by a new acquaintance from Canada, who's also in Europe traveling all over the place for about a month. This is another somewhat touristy town but quite different from either of the places we've been so far as far as population goes. I've found that during this trip we haven't been eating much but we've walked a ton... so perhaps I've found a new diet to market... the travelers diet. Now if only I could kick beer our of the diet I'd come back 50 lbs smaller...haha.
There are still a ton of gypsies around here, and I don't think they live here but travel in to mess with tourists. I imagine early morning there's a couple tiny cars filled with dirty little bastards, all around 4-11, brought up to make the parents money. In the train station yesterday a kid, around 8 came up and just kept mumbling "dollar, dollar, dollar" and I've found out, and been told not to ever give them anything. It's the whole, give them a hand and they'll take your arm, kind of deal. We watched a kid get a couple pieces of pizza from some old guys yesterday, only to see him walk up < 30 minutes later to ask for more, only that time he brought a couple other little kids with him. I saw another kid yesterday with a big smile looking through a wallet, I'm sure someone was rather pissed off since I'd put a paycheck on it that the wallet most likely didn't belong to the kid. I didn't even bring a wallet this trip for that reason, I actually notice a lot of people walking behind me to look and I usually just kinda laugh it off. Other than the uneasy feeling from the gypsy folks, Romania's been an absolutely awesome place.
So, we're in the land of Dracula... and it's marketed pretty heavily as you could imagine. It's pretty awesome seeing the architecture here, as it's been restored a bit but certain buildings seem to be exactly like they were in the 1200's.
A statue of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula)
The hostel we're staying in is pretty nice, the chick that works here speaks great english and has been very nice. We did our first laundry yesterday... It's still outside hanging on the lines drying. We didn't eat much yesterday and by the time we actually got some food in us, both of us ended up getting a bit smashed and just sitting around with the folks at the hostel watching a couple world cup games. We also ran into a few other Americans who are staying here for about 3 months with Unicef or one of those kind of organizations.
It's raining today so now we're gonna try to figure out something to do...
There are still a ton of gypsies around here, and I don't think they live here but travel in to mess with tourists. I imagine early morning there's a couple tiny cars filled with dirty little bastards, all around 4-11, brought up to make the parents money. In the train station yesterday a kid, around 8 came up and just kept mumbling "dollar, dollar, dollar" and I've found out, and been told not to ever give them anything. It's the whole, give them a hand and they'll take your arm, kind of deal. We watched a kid get a couple pieces of pizza from some old guys yesterday, only to see him walk up < 30 minutes later to ask for more, only that time he brought a couple other little kids with him. I saw another kid yesterday with a big smile looking through a wallet, I'm sure someone was rather pissed off since I'd put a paycheck on it that the wallet most likely didn't belong to the kid. I didn't even bring a wallet this trip for that reason, I actually notice a lot of people walking behind me to look and I usually just kinda laugh it off. Other than the uneasy feeling from the gypsy folks, Romania's been an absolutely awesome place.
So, we're in the land of Dracula... and it's marketed pretty heavily as you could imagine. It's pretty awesome seeing the architecture here, as it's been restored a bit but certain buildings seem to be exactly like they were in the 1200's.
A statue of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula)
The hostel we're staying in is pretty nice, the chick that works here speaks great english and has been very nice. We did our first laundry yesterday... It's still outside hanging on the lines drying. We didn't eat much yesterday and by the time we actually got some food in us, both of us ended up getting a bit smashed and just sitting around with the folks at the hostel watching a couple world cup games. We also ran into a few other Americans who are staying here for about 3 months with Unicef or one of those kind of organizations.
It's raining today so now we're gonna try to figure out something to do...
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Constanta, day two.
We hung out at the beach for about 6 hours today... literally, 6 hours. We started wondering if the people serving us beer thought that were could drink all day...lol. We got close enough. In the time at the beach we got to know our Romanian servers quite well, even if there was the language barrier that we didn't cross in any way. Other than the Bere, and multumesc (thank you) we didn't have to say much, though we did end up getting some chicken chest (breast for those in the states, it's funny to see chicken chest written out on a menu)... it was still a cool time to hang out and probably one of my favorite days on this trip. Many women were running around topless, so I imagine this may come in to my evaluation of this place thus far.
We watched our (15 yr old) server give a kid a beer and Anthony decided he needed pics so here's a series of shots from that...haha.
As we walked back we saw a guy working on a power line, he had a cable line in his mouth... so it was worth getting a shot of him.
Randome topless chick I stared at for most of the day... there were many, this was just the one that kept me interested...haha. You may have to look kinda close.
We did end up sitting at the beach drinking the equivalent of $.80 beers... so you can imagine that turned out alright.
The bathrooms at the beach, attended by a gypsy woman who demands 1 Lei per visit if you need toilet paper. Kinda like paying a quarter to go to the bathroom...lol. Though, it's not exactly a nice stall or anything... the gypsy takes the paper our of the stalls and sells it... that's why you need to pay...lol. Anyways, Anthony thought it would be a grand idea to take a pic of the stall... where you're supposed to hover, of course... he just happened to take a pic while urinating...lol...wtf.
We are now hanging at the hotel we stayed at last night even though we're not staying here... they said it's cool if we hang out in the courtyard and use their wifi while we wait for a train to come at 1am... which we are taking to sighasara (sp?) which is one of the most medieval cities in Europe. Vlad the Impaler was born there... who is also the person that the legend of "dracula" was made from. So we're gonna travel about 9 hours tonight/tomorrow morning to get there and we'll be staying in that town for a couple nights. So that should be awesome. After that, we're headed to Budapest for a few days... in Hungary. That's about it... I just hope I still have this netbook tomorrow since I plan on sleeping on the train tonight and I hope nobody decides to steal it while I sleep. :-)
We watched our (15 yr old) server give a kid a beer and Anthony decided he needed pics so here's a series of shots from that...haha.
As we walked back we saw a guy working on a power line, he had a cable line in his mouth... so it was worth getting a shot of him.
Randome topless chick I stared at for most of the day... there were many, this was just the one that kept me interested...haha. You may have to look kinda close.
We did end up sitting at the beach drinking the equivalent of $.80 beers... so you can imagine that turned out alright.
The bathrooms at the beach, attended by a gypsy woman who demands 1 Lei per visit if you need toilet paper. Kinda like paying a quarter to go to the bathroom...lol. Though, it's not exactly a nice stall or anything... the gypsy takes the paper our of the stalls and sells it... that's why you need to pay...lol. Anyways, Anthony thought it would be a grand idea to take a pic of the stall... where you're supposed to hover, of course... he just happened to take a pic while urinating...lol...wtf.
We are now hanging at the hotel we stayed at last night even though we're not staying here... they said it's cool if we hang out in the courtyard and use their wifi while we wait for a train to come at 1am... which we are taking to sighasara (sp?) which is one of the most medieval cities in Europe. Vlad the Impaler was born there... who is also the person that the legend of "dracula" was made from. So we're gonna travel about 9 hours tonight/tomorrow morning to get there and we'll be staying in that town for a couple nights. So that should be awesome. After that, we're headed to Budapest for a few days... in Hungary. That's about it... I just hope I still have this netbook tomorrow since I plan on sleeping on the train tonight and I hope nobody decides to steal it while I sleep. :-)
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Constanta, on the beaches of the Black Sea
A pic of the Black Sea that Anthony snapped earlier today. Not much more to say about it, but it's a pic of a body of water that I'd never seen before.
This was Bob, a random turtle swimming under a bridge when I snapped a pic of him. I'm not exactly sure if he's actually named Bob, but he wouldn't say shit when I took his pic so I gave him a name. :-p
The local currency, Lei or Ron at some points... 3 Lei ~ $1. So we go to places and it says 15 Lei for pizza and we'll also get two beers for 6 Lei also... we end up paying < $10 for our meal. Tipping is not something that happens much it seems, and when it is done, 10% is expected... any more is crazy to them...lol. I'm ok with that. Oh, and apparently, when you order a "margherita" pizza, which we know in the states as having some tomato slices and basil along with some different cheese, is rather different here. Two nights in a row we've ordered the same thing and ended up getting a cheese pizza...lol. That will be the last we order of that type of pizza in Romania. Yes, we have found ourselves in Italian restaurants the past couple nights, but only because they had awesome outdoor seating, which I've found to be one of the more awesome parts about the eateries and cafe's around here. They have just as much outdoor seating as they do indoor. With the weather the way it's been, it's actually nicer to sit outside anyway.
Seriously, this is as normal of a parking job in Romania as parking in a spot in the parking garage at Macy's is to us.
Another random pic of me that Anthony took where I'm not wearing a hat... amazing huh? Note the typical parking job in the back...lol.
Our past couple nights have started out at this place in Bucharest. Caru Cu Bere, as I mentioned previously is roughly translated to Carriage of Beer. They have been around since 1879 and brew their own beer, which we later found is pretty much an unfiltered wheat that's similar to our Widmer Hef. beer... and actually, Anthony and I both agreed that Widmer makes a better Hef. Being old skool does not a good beer make. In all actuality, it seems like Heineken has the market cornered in Romania. It seems like everywhere we go we try and ask for a different beer, only to be told that they're "out" and that they have Heineken and that's it. So, Romania get's a "D" for it's beer grade. While we've had a few decent beers over the last few days, nothing stacks up in any way to what we're used to back in Portland, our land of great beer.
One of the coolest bartenders we've met on this trip. Oksana.
We stumbled on a bar that was open at 10am on a Sunday since we needed to wait on our train to Constanta and needed something to take up some time. She gave me free wifi in her bar and gave us peanuts when she couldn't make any food yet...lol. Very cool girl and she's pretty much the typical cute Romanian type of chick that this place is made up of. The pic of me sucks since my eyes are closed but it's the only one we got so it'll have to do.
So once we got to Constanta, we got stuff in the hotel and decided to walk down to the beach. Apparently we are some pretty damn easy targets to wannabe scammers so we had to fight off a lot of BS scam artists doing shit all night. This kind of became a pain in the ass, it seems that we were in a good part of Bucharest since we didn't see much of this gypsy way of life, until we got here and it became a bit of a pain in the ass. It seemed like every person we'd run across was looking to screw us over in some way or another... they put kids into their scams and just randomly say hi and want to talk you up and then 10 seconds later you get some guys with fake politia badges wanting to see our papers... When this happened I just said, C'mon Anthony, just walk... and they seemed to just go away. It really made me think this area is kinda bleh because it's so prevalent here.
We're going to hang out here tomorrow and take a 1am train to another place in Transylvania to see a few castles. I'm looking forward to that since I'll probably feel more ok pulling out my big DSLR instead of leaving it in my bag thinking that someone's looking to jack it right out of my hands at some point. That's about all for tonight, we're staying in a hotel with an awesome AC so I'm looking to catch up on some much needed sleep that I've yet to have since we left on Thursday morning.
noapte buna. (Good night)
This was Bob, a random turtle swimming under a bridge when I snapped a pic of him. I'm not exactly sure if he's actually named Bob, but he wouldn't say shit when I took his pic so I gave him a name. :-p
The local currency, Lei or Ron at some points... 3 Lei ~ $1. So we go to places and it says 15 Lei for pizza and we'll also get two beers for 6 Lei also... we end up paying < $10 for our meal. Tipping is not something that happens much it seems, and when it is done, 10% is expected... any more is crazy to them...lol. I'm ok with that. Oh, and apparently, when you order a "margherita" pizza, which we know in the states as having some tomato slices and basil along with some different cheese, is rather different here. Two nights in a row we've ordered the same thing and ended up getting a cheese pizza...lol. That will be the last we order of that type of pizza in Romania. Yes, we have found ourselves in Italian restaurants the past couple nights, but only because they had awesome outdoor seating, which I've found to be one of the more awesome parts about the eateries and cafe's around here. They have just as much outdoor seating as they do indoor. With the weather the way it's been, it's actually nicer to sit outside anyway.
Seriously, this is as normal of a parking job in Romania as parking in a spot in the parking garage at Macy's is to us.
Another random pic of me that Anthony took where I'm not wearing a hat... amazing huh? Note the typical parking job in the back...lol.
Our past couple nights have started out at this place in Bucharest. Caru Cu Bere, as I mentioned previously is roughly translated to Carriage of Beer. They have been around since 1879 and brew their own beer, which we later found is pretty much an unfiltered wheat that's similar to our Widmer Hef. beer... and actually, Anthony and I both agreed that Widmer makes a better Hef. Being old skool does not a good beer make. In all actuality, it seems like Heineken has the market cornered in Romania. It seems like everywhere we go we try and ask for a different beer, only to be told that they're "out" and that they have Heineken and that's it. So, Romania get's a "D" for it's beer grade. While we've had a few decent beers over the last few days, nothing stacks up in any way to what we're used to back in Portland, our land of great beer.
One of the coolest bartenders we've met on this trip. Oksana.
We stumbled on a bar that was open at 10am on a Sunday since we needed to wait on our train to Constanta and needed something to take up some time. She gave me free wifi in her bar and gave us peanuts when she couldn't make any food yet...lol. Very cool girl and she's pretty much the typical cute Romanian type of chick that this place is made up of. The pic of me sucks since my eyes are closed but it's the only one we got so it'll have to do.
So once we got to Constanta, we got stuff in the hotel and decided to walk down to the beach. Apparently we are some pretty damn easy targets to wannabe scammers so we had to fight off a lot of BS scam artists doing shit all night. This kind of became a pain in the ass, it seems that we were in a good part of Bucharest since we didn't see much of this gypsy way of life, until we got here and it became a bit of a pain in the ass. It seemed like every person we'd run across was looking to screw us over in some way or another... they put kids into their scams and just randomly say hi and want to talk you up and then 10 seconds later you get some guys with fake politia badges wanting to see our papers... When this happened I just said, C'mon Anthony, just walk... and they seemed to just go away. It really made me think this area is kinda bleh because it's so prevalent here.
We're going to hang out here tomorrow and take a 1am train to another place in Transylvania to see a few castles. I'm looking forward to that since I'll probably feel more ok pulling out my big DSLR instead of leaving it in my bag thinking that someone's looking to jack it right out of my hands at some point. That's about all for tonight, we're staying in a hotel with an awesome AC so I'm looking to catch up on some much needed sleep that I've yet to have since we left on Thursday morning.
noapte buna. (Good night)
more pics while we sit and wait for a train to constanta
Walking around a botanical garden...wtf. hahaha We were told they were water towers... then I mentioned that usually those are not in that shape. :-)
A cool fountain we saw in a park yesterday.
A picture of myself with Bogden and Liviu, our tour guides in Bucharest. We work with George, who is Liviu's wife's cousin. So he set us up to have someone hang out with us... without them we'd have managed, but we made some good friends and had some good times we may not have found on our own. This picture was taken in front of the people's house which is the 2nd largest building in the world next to the Pentagon. Nobody knows how many rooms for sure but it's 1100+. Mostly politicians and officials have offices here.
A cool fountain we saw in a park yesterday.
A picture of myself with Bogden and Liviu, our tour guides in Bucharest. We work with George, who is Liviu's wife's cousin. So he set us up to have someone hang out with us... without them we'd have managed, but we made some good friends and had some good times we may not have found on our own. This picture was taken in front of the people's house which is the 2nd largest building in the world next to the Pentagon. Nobody knows how many rooms for sure but it's 1100+. Mostly politicians and officials have offices here.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
More from Day 2
I found out why Romanians all seem so fit yesterday. We walked about 8 or so miles over the course of the day. Visiting parks, botanical gardens, places in town where other's are all walking, the train station...etc. The people here love being outdoors and it seemed like ALL of Romania was outside yesterday. Which was cool, but made it a bit crowded in some places.
A random pic showing the awesome way that Romanian people park, this is a very minuscule look at it... when there are a lot of cars it's rather amazing. When people need to find a place there usually are gypsy kids around to make sure and find a spot for you, they'll point it out and guide you in, then ask for a few Lei to watch it and keep it safe for you. Again, another small thing that reminded me a bit of Mexico when I was there a few years ago.
Lovely way to run power lines... all the power, cable, and telephone lines run above ground in this city. This is a common site, and actually not as bad as some that we've seen...lol. I know the safety minded folks at Intel may even cringe a bit when seeing this.
Anthony trying to use a pay phone that he was ultimately not smart enough to figure out. We ended up stopping a random dude and asking if we could call the number of our Romanian homies to meet up with them. Luckily he spoke English so that worked out. Then we got together and had more beer... of course.
A random pic showing the awesome way that Romanian people park, this is a very minuscule look at it... when there are a lot of cars it's rather amazing. When people need to find a place there usually are gypsy kids around to make sure and find a spot for you, they'll point it out and guide you in, then ask for a few Lei to watch it and keep it safe for you. Again, another small thing that reminded me a bit of Mexico when I was there a few years ago.
Lovely way to run power lines... all the power, cable, and telephone lines run above ground in this city. This is a common site, and actually not as bad as some that we've seen...lol. I know the safety minded folks at Intel may even cringe a bit when seeing this.
Anthony trying to use a pay phone that he was ultimately not smart enough to figure out. We ended up stopping a random dude and asking if we could call the number of our Romanian homies to meet up with them. Luckily he spoke English so that worked out. Then we got together and had more beer... of course.
Day 2 in Romania
In the US, we'd close this road down until it's all finished, but they just put a sign on it in the middle of the road saying watch where you're going...lol. This is pretty much in line with everything else I find crazy about how the folks here drive.
Gypsies fishing in the channel... apparently the fish are pretty small, but there's a lot of people who's main source of food are the fish they catch. They don't use a rod and real, but rather a really long pole, like we'd use for deep sea fishing, and just tie a line and a bobber to it... kinda like a cane pole back in the day.
Looking down a street new the People's House. There were fountains all the way down the street, I'd already walked too much and didn't feel like getting any closer to get any better shots...lol.
The Arch of Triumph, a similar arch to the bigger one in Paris.
There are a few more pics but it's late and we are waking up early to head to the beach of the Black Sea, in Costanta. Cheers.
Gypsies fishing in the channel... apparently the fish are pretty small, but there's a lot of people who's main source of food are the fish they catch. They don't use a rod and real, but rather a really long pole, like we'd use for deep sea fishing, and just tie a line and a bobber to it... kinda like a cane pole back in the day.
Looking down a street new the People's House. There were fountains all the way down the street, I'd already walked too much and didn't feel like getting any closer to get any better shots...lol.
The Arch of Triumph, a similar arch to the bigger one in Paris.
There are a few more pics but it's late and we are waking up early to head to the beach of the Black Sea, in Costanta. Cheers.
The start of our trip... Bucharest, Romania
So, after a LOOOONG trip to Eastern Europe, we've now made it to the capital of Romania, Bucharest. The first flight was a of a 10 hour trip from Portland to Amsterdam, which took off an hour late. (Thanks Delta-KLM) During this flight I watched a few movies, including Avatar, Legion, some other movie I can't remember, and half of The Blind Side... All were decent movies, but I imagine Avatar was never really meant to be seen on a 5 inch screen, it was a good movie to start with since it was about 3 hours long. The seats we had were awesome, they were the first seats directly behind 1st class so we had huge leg room where I was able to stretch out a lot over the course of the longest flight I'd ever taken.
Anthony has the keen ability to fall asleep at any time so he pretty much boarded the plane, started a movie, then passed out... this pretty much happened the whole trip, making me extremely jealous because I've never been able to do that. For the 2 and a half hour trip to Romania, he was pretty much asleep from takeoff til we got there.
We sat in the Amsterdam airport for around 3 hours waiting for a 2.5 hour flight to Bucharest. While there, we noticed that practically all of the flight attendants are all pretty much extremely good looking. The flight from Amsterdam to Bucharest was pretty much uneventful other than the guy next to me buying a bunch of jewelry from the duty free catalog totaling around 500 Euro's. Which is in the realm of $600.
So, that was the trip here in a nutshell. When we finally arrived to Romania, we were met outside of the airport by our newest friends, Liviu and his English speaking buddy who's name I don't even want to try to spell. The were just outside the gate with a sign saying "Anthony and Nick" just like in the movies. :-) After a few hello's and handshakes we were off to find the Happy Hostel, our residence for the night. Where we were greeted by a man, literally, holding a knife and asking us why we were there. After showing a reservation to the place the fella was all smiles and saying he was just cutting some plants in the garden... yeah right.
We dropped our stuff off, then headed out to a brew pub and eatery that's been around since 1879, Caru Cu Bere, roughly translated it was carriage of beer. Liviu's friend had to call up a buddy who speaks better english to get that confirmed for us...lol. It was one of a bunch of bars lining a network of cobblestone streets where practically everyone was sitting outside enjoying a nice 70 degree day with a half liter. There were 4 of us and our bill came out to ~125 Lei. A full meal for close to $11 a piece. For the amount of food and the few beers we had this was pretty cheap to myself and Anthony, but was deemed a rather expensive place for beer by our new Romanian buddies.
We walked around a bit before heading to a billiard club where we spent a rather large portion of the night showing off some American 8-ball skills and watching the England vs Algeria match of the World Cup. We drank half liter-bottles of Heineken and some other Romanian beer and then took off to check out a few other places. Which we walked through, left, drove around for 30 minutes or so, and came back to where we ended the night. It was a cool "ultra lounge" type of setting... a bunch of incredibly hot women and metro'd up men, complete with scantily clad women dancing on top of glass boxes overlooking a pool. It was a really laid back atmosphere considering the club music blasting but nobody really dancing other than the previously mentioned hotties in bathing suits.
So that was our first night here. A few things about Romania, the traffic is crazy, cars wizzing around almost hitting eachother every few seconds, seriously. Parking is probably the coolest thing I've seen in any place I've ever visited. They park on wherever they feel like, any and everywhere... It's a controlled chaos though. While they all honk at eachother and some yell and throw hands up, everyone gets it, it's an "act fast or move" type of place... not for the faint of heart as far as driving is concerned, I wouldn't want to drive here at all. In all fairness, Liviu is an incredible driver as far as I'm concerned. Though, as I mentioned to him, his ways would piss a lot of people off in the US...haha. It reminds me of a huge version of Nogalez, Mexico when I visited it a long while back. The one glaring difference from the US... Pedestrians definitely don't have the right of way here.
The women here are all pretty attractive and people in general just seem more fit than in the US, but that's somewhat expected since we are the capital of fast food it seems. The "Happy Hostel" is a tiny little place with no AC and questionable wifi but it seems to do that trick as far as having a place to stay... and I imagine it's probably nicer than some places around here. It's almost 9am here, 11pm in Portland, and I've probably got around 5 hours of sleep since 8am Thursday morning... I'd like to blame a bit of it on the fact that it's about 80 degrees in the room and the dogs out back that seem to hate eachother and feel the need to bark it out every few minutes. As soon as I get out and start taking pics I'm sure I'll be posting a bunch of those here for those who are interested. That's about all for now I guess. Stay tuned.
Anthony has the keen ability to fall asleep at any time so he pretty much boarded the plane, started a movie, then passed out... this pretty much happened the whole trip, making me extremely jealous because I've never been able to do that. For the 2 and a half hour trip to Romania, he was pretty much asleep from takeoff til we got there.
We sat in the Amsterdam airport for around 3 hours waiting for a 2.5 hour flight to Bucharest. While there, we noticed that practically all of the flight attendants are all pretty much extremely good looking. The flight from Amsterdam to Bucharest was pretty much uneventful other than the guy next to me buying a bunch of jewelry from the duty free catalog totaling around 500 Euro's. Which is in the realm of $600.
So, that was the trip here in a nutshell. When we finally arrived to Romania, we were met outside of the airport by our newest friends, Liviu and his English speaking buddy who's name I don't even want to try to spell. The were just outside the gate with a sign saying "Anthony and Nick" just like in the movies. :-) After a few hello's and handshakes we were off to find the Happy Hostel, our residence for the night. Where we were greeted by a man, literally, holding a knife and asking us why we were there. After showing a reservation to the place the fella was all smiles and saying he was just cutting some plants in the garden... yeah right.
We dropped our stuff off, then headed out to a brew pub and eatery that's been around since 1879, Caru Cu Bere, roughly translated it was carriage of beer. Liviu's friend had to call up a buddy who speaks better english to get that confirmed for us...lol. It was one of a bunch of bars lining a network of cobblestone streets where practically everyone was sitting outside enjoying a nice 70 degree day with a half liter. There were 4 of us and our bill came out to ~125 Lei. A full meal for close to $11 a piece. For the amount of food and the few beers we had this was pretty cheap to myself and Anthony, but was deemed a rather expensive place for beer by our new Romanian buddies.
We walked around a bit before heading to a billiard club where we spent a rather large portion of the night showing off some American 8-ball skills and watching the England vs Algeria match of the World Cup. We drank half liter-bottles of Heineken and some other Romanian beer and then took off to check out a few other places. Which we walked through, left, drove around for 30 minutes or so, and came back to where we ended the night. It was a cool "ultra lounge" type of setting... a bunch of incredibly hot women and metro'd up men, complete with scantily clad women dancing on top of glass boxes overlooking a pool. It was a really laid back atmosphere considering the club music blasting but nobody really dancing other than the previously mentioned hotties in bathing suits.
So that was our first night here. A few things about Romania, the traffic is crazy, cars wizzing around almost hitting eachother every few seconds, seriously. Parking is probably the coolest thing I've seen in any place I've ever visited. They park on wherever they feel like, any and everywhere... It's a controlled chaos though. While they all honk at eachother and some yell and throw hands up, everyone gets it, it's an "act fast or move" type of place... not for the faint of heart as far as driving is concerned, I wouldn't want to drive here at all. In all fairness, Liviu is an incredible driver as far as I'm concerned. Though, as I mentioned to him, his ways would piss a lot of people off in the US...haha. It reminds me of a huge version of Nogalez, Mexico when I visited it a long while back. The one glaring difference from the US... Pedestrians definitely don't have the right of way here.
The women here are all pretty attractive and people in general just seem more fit than in the US, but that's somewhat expected since we are the capital of fast food it seems. The "Happy Hostel" is a tiny little place with no AC and questionable wifi but it seems to do that trick as far as having a place to stay... and I imagine it's probably nicer than some places around here. It's almost 9am here, 11pm in Portland, and I've probably got around 5 hours of sleep since 8am Thursday morning... I'd like to blame a bit of it on the fact that it's about 80 degrees in the room and the dogs out back that seem to hate eachother and feel the need to bark it out every few minutes. As soon as I get out and start taking pics I'm sure I'll be posting a bunch of those here for those who are interested. That's about all for now I guess. Stay tuned.
Friday, June 18, 2010
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