fivemack: (Default)
[personal profile] fivemack
After procrastinating about this since roughly the fall of the Ceaucescus, I've finally decided to go to Romania, 29th June -> 7 July.

Booking holidays nowadays is almost absurdly easy; ten minutes on the Web and £200 on credit cards, and I have a flight from Bristol to Bucharest and back, travel insurance, and a bed in a dormitory at the Elvis Villa Hostel, the best-reputed youth hostel in all Bucharest.

Not sure exactly what I'll do in Romania - I'm tempted, if only to re-enact a scene cliched in spy thrillers, to take the sleeper across the mountains to Sofia and spend a few days there. The impression I get is that there are lots of quite attractive places in Romania, but none of them are Bucharest; it may be this will be a holiday substantially spent on East European trains.

Date: 2005-04-17 12:35 pm (UTC)
aldabra: (Default)
From: [personal profile] aldabra
Sofia's not worth several days, or at least it seemed not to be; we allocated an afternoon and felt we'd done it by the end of that.

Beware the ceilings of loo compartments in East European trains; one of them spontaneously detached itself and tried to decapitate me at 2am one morning.

Date: 2005-04-17 12:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] davidcook.livejournal.com
Sounds like fun ! That ease of booking lured [livejournal.com profile] rwrylsin and I into booking a weekend in Prague in a couple of weeks - whee !

(this "living in Europe" thing has its advantages)

Date: 2005-04-17 04:01 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sphyg.livejournal.com
Damn, I need a holiday. First I need a passport, a job and some money.

Date: 2005-04-17 07:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rwl.livejournal.com
I've been to Romania twice, though never outside Bucharest. Ceaucescu pretty much razed whatever old town parts of the city that had existed to rebuild the city into his idea of a neo-Roman civilization with broad plazas and boulevards, and palatial buildings. The end result is a bit sterile.

My favorite cities in Central Europe are Bratislava and Budapest, with Prague a close third. I'm also fond of many cities in Poland, though they will probably be too far north for you to get to.

Date: 2005-04-17 08:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fivemack.livejournal.com
I've visited and loved Budapest and Prague; not made it to Bratislava, yet, nor anywhere in Poland. That region is certainly somewhere I'm planning in the future (some sort of train-based circle, Berlin -> mid-Poland -> Krakow -> Bratislava -> Prague -> Berlin seems as good a way as any of spending two weeks of vacation), but one of the things I realised when planning this trip is that Bucharest isn't in any meaningful sense near places like Budapest. Do you have any suggestions of nice bits of Poland other than Krakow?

I think of Central Europe as ending roughly where the Ottomans reached (which is probably the same as claiming it ends at the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire); Bulgaria and Romania aren't quite in the same box for me as Slovakia or Hungary, and Serbia's in a different box again. I seem to recall that Romanians don't like being accused of being Balkanites, which removes one obvious name for the area.

Date: 2005-04-17 11:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rwl.livejournal.com
I like Gdánsk as much as Kraków. The old town is very nice and even though it doesn't have a famous castle, there is a splendid waterfront. Problem is, Gdánsk is about a four hour train ride north from Warsaw. I also like Katowice, but that's because I have friends there, not because the city is a tourist attraction. Warsaw has become a mostly western city in the past several years -- prices there are significantly higher than, for example, in Kraków. But it's still worth visiting, as is mot of Poland.

Date: 2005-04-27 09:21 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Your plans sound alarmingly energetic as usual.
I was in both Bratislava and Budapest recently, can only say I was a lot more impressed with the latter. The area around Bratislava is grubby industrial, and even the old centre seemed really quite run-down. (It does have an amusing series of statues (http://www.bratislavaguide.com/bratislava-old-town-statues) though.) I'm probably biased because it was bitterly cold when I was there.
Louisa

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