Fivemack flees the country

[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.

Comments

[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.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun ! That ease of booking lured rwrylsin and I into booking a weekend in Prague in a couple of weeks - whee !

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

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Damn, I need a holiday. First I need a passport, a job and some money.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[(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