Fivemack flees the country
Apr. 17th, 2005 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 12:35 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 12:53 pm (UTC)(this "living in Europe" thing has its advantages)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 07:12 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 08:00 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-17 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-27 09:21 am (UTC)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