Around Eastern Europe in 18 Days
Right, back in one place for a while now :) So it's time for photos as promised. Hadn't had a chance to resize and upload them 'til now, as i've worked 45 hours (mostly teaching) in 9 days, on top of lectures and a couple of exams. I'm fully aware that the concept of *me* attempting to teach English is fully likely to be abhored by a certain chap currently residing in Dublin, but hey, they must be desperate :P English really is a rather *silly* language, there are far too many exceptions that I can't explain.
I've spent one afternoon reading out pages and pages of english (and german) articles and phrases into a tape recorder [yes, i'm being paid, it's not just for fun :P ]! Why the *hell* anyone wants to know the phrases for "Please send us your brochure about bicycle saddles' and "Kindly fax us price-lists for grinding wheels [Schleifscheiben]", I'll never know...
I should look on the positive side, and remind myself that now I have learnt such wonderfully useful phrases in German as:
"Your hose-reels have been recommended to us by Messrs Rowland & Sons - Ihre Schlauchwagen sind uns von der Firma ...emphohlen worden"
"We are interested in including electric waffle-irons in our range" [ Wir haben Interesse, Waffelautomaten in unser Sortiment aufzunehmen]
"On examining the tools, we noticed that eight pairs of pliers were rusty" [Als wir die Werkzeuge überprüften, bemerkten wir, dass acht Zangen rostig waren]
Now to figure out how to incorporate those phrases in my German oral exam.....
Right, enough nonsense. So, here we go: Click on the blue text below to get the photos! I dont know why it says blach, I wanted it to say 'to the photos', but it doesn't seem to undertand....
Well, I only spent 18 hours whizzing through Serbia on the night train from Vienna to Sofia, but spent the time glued to the window, as there was a hell of a lot of contrasts in landscape, urban/rural etc. I'm not only posting pretty tourist pictures, but photos that are representative of what i saw...I hope this gives an insight to where I've been...
Outskirts of Belgrade at Dawn -Left-Right: Shanty town, sunrise over the Danube, Communist-era accommodation:
South-Eastern Serbia, very mountainous, lots of stunning gorges and valleys, so i was very happy with all the rocks :) Was intrigued by how everybody walks to work inside the railway tracks - sacrilige in the UK! Also saw lots of houses made of sticks and mud, and in the countryside the main form of transport seemed to be waggon carts, usually falling apart with planks missing, and overladen with either hay or people. Lots of delightfully stereotypical old peasant women in shawls were to be found traipsing along the railway tracks, usually carrying an improbably heavy pick-axe or toiling hard in the fields.
After *finally* leaving across the Serbian-Bulgarian border, reached Sofia, where I stayed for only about 12 hours and left early the next morning. Did not look nearly as communist/depressing as i thought, in fact, it really did not feel as differnt from Western cities as I expected. Though maybe 7am on a Sunday is not the best time to get a feel for a place, I can report that there were many people coming out of clubs, that Sofia has a snowy pet mountain next to it, and that it has a very large bulbous church, which was surprisingly dark and depressing inside:
I utterly failed to work out Sofia's train station, despite having managed to buy a ticket, due to a *very* confusing numbering system for platforms, and noone speaking English, French or German, and not comprehending that I could not understand their well-meaning explainations and directions. So I gave up and got a bus. :) Next stop was Plovdiv, the second city of Bulgaria, formerly the capital of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, and older than Constantinople, Athens and Carthage. In Thracian times it was known as Philippopolis, and it's old town is full of Bulgarian Revival-style buildings and cobbled streets, very very pretty, I had a very relaxed day wandering round, and the city felt buzzing and happy and bustling. They also have much nice ice-cream :)
I also found a rather lovely amphitheatre, above which I had dinner while watching the sunset over the mountains :) Bulgaria being two thirds mountians, it's not difficult to find some...
Next morning another earlier early start, where I had more difficulty trying to get the hang of the platform system, but thanks to a very kind-hearted conductor who took pity on me (and luckily spoke a smattering of french and german -ici doit reserve - zwei Stunden etc) and lead me across several tracks (they dont have underpasses between platforms, you just jump down onto the tracks and climb up the steel footholds on the other side) and took my hand and pulled me up to the platform and deposited me on the train :) Damn I felt useless! While waiting in another station the day before, in Stara Zagora, a kindly old lady who sat next to me started asking me questions. Again, she simply did not comprehend that I did not speak Bulgarian. She seemed to be asking me where I was going -I pointed to the red trajectory line on my map, which began in Serbia and ended at the Romania border - so she presumed I was Serbian. My attempts to explain where I actualyl came from, including attempting to draw a map of Europe with a large Arrow pointing to England, failed. But she was very friendly, and did keep rambling on in in a helpful tone. So i asked her in verbless Bulgarian 'Where-platform-Plovdiv?'and was taken by the hand over to the counter where she bustled to the front of the queue, and interrogated the woman behind. To my increasing worry, this conversation was about 5 minutes long, and involved me having to produce my ticket which was duly passed up and down the ticket queue with people looking at it like it was written in heiroglyphics, when in fact it had been bought jsut that morning in a very normal way. Everybody felt the need to add their tuppence-worth helpfully, as though it was astoundingly unusual for someone to travel from teh capital city to the second city (about 2 hours) by train :S. When the ticket reaached the end of the line, a young man pointed at it and, eager to help, said in English: 'ticket'. It was than passed again to the front, and I eventually was advised that i wanted platform 5. Got there eventually then :)
So, next and last stop in Bulgaria was the very very pretty town of Veliko Tarnovo, which according to the following signpost is 2790km from London; 1290km from Vienna, and 3125 from Helsinki. It also has Billa! (a chain of corner shops found on every street in Austria):
This amount of rocks makes Gemma very happy :) And add a pretty fortress to clamber over, and I'm ecstatic!
Ok, so that was Bulgaria. The last night was spent in a rather nice restaurant, and then in a local bar being introduced to the local cuisine and aniseed liquor, which costs all of 1 lev, ie €0.50. Next morning spent much time on various trains, and in the border town of Ruse, and crossing the danube which, especially due to all the flooding, was like a small sea! Got into Bucharest in the evening, negotiated the trolley-bus system, found a passable restaurant with an unplesantly loud roma band, and left early the next morning for a day trip to Constanta on the Black Sea Coast three hours away, before returning to Bucharest for the evening. Costanta was where Ovid lived in exile, and has many many roman remains, mosaics, columns with greek writing, old minarets and mosques, and a restaurant that serves rather lovely mussels for people missing living near the coast! Jason and the Argonauts also apparently visited. The town, that is, not the restaurant. The town was called Tomis in ancient times (from the Greek for 'to cut'), after Medea cut her brother into pieces there...
It also has the biggest shipbuilding yard I've every seen. And I've seen several shipyards!
The large hole in the ground that I nearly fell into is one of many examples of things Romania might want to sort out unless it wants Brussels to have a fit when it joins the EU...
Then it was back to Bucharest for some speed sigh-seeing, specifically, the two hours before it got dark. So I planned a route following communist and revolution themes. A couple of examples are:
On the left is the building shell of the hated Securitate, the Communist secret police, who were the ones who took you away if you spoke to a westerner for example. Tis crazy to think that was only 15 years ago. The interior of the building was torn apart by revolutionaries, but the shell was left as a reminder. Recently, the National Architecture or something has built its glass offices *inside* the building shell, which I thought was rather neat. On the right is a church in the piaza where revolutaries were shot at by the secret police, after the crowds had heckled a speech by Ceausescu, and violence had broken out, leading the dictator to be lifted away to safety by a helicopter, but later killed. You can still see the bullet marks on the wall of this church:
Ceausescu also demolished between 1/6th and 1/8th (depending on the guidebook!) of the city to make his huge palace, now the parliament, and a very long road boardered by communist-style accomodation and office blocks - the boulevard was intententionally built to be 6m longer than the Champs-Elysees, and the palace is now the second biggest building in the world, after the Pentagon. Or the third, depending whether you take surface area or volume...
Finding my way back to my accommodation was challenging, as they appear to have changed rather a few street names since my map was made - oh well, just made it more interesting :)
The next morning took me northwards to Sinaia, in the Carpathians, just teetering on the Transyllvanian border, though not actually inside it (Transyllvania being the plains *inside* the horseshoe-shaped Carpathians). It was founded by a monk who started a monastery there, supposedly bringing with him a rock from Mt Sinai. And then King Carol (who was actually Prussian/German, but someone asked him to be king of Romania, so he travelled in disguise by overnight train in order that no-one recognised his treachery) thought it would be a rather nice place to build a rather nice palace, and I concur with him entirely :)
Next day brought me to Sighisoara, in Transylvania proper, where I thougth I'd got off at the wrong station, due to it having no signs saying where I was, no indications tourists had ever been there, and indeed, no station building except portakabins. But all was ok, they were simply refurbishing the station. Further off-season problems meant that noone answered the door of where I had booked to stay, until I tried again 5 hours later, to be told that today was the first day of the season, and they were now open as of half an hour ago - so I had the place to myself! :) The town itself has a rather delightful mediaeval citadel, which is still inhabited, It's also quite a small place, which meant that I had time to spare - and wandered round with a Swiss chap who was on his way from Zurich to Norway. By bike. The upshot of having free time is that I therefore felt it necessary to start playing with the settings on my shiny camera and taking sepia shots at strange angles :)
If you can read the name plates, I was 1872km from London, 656 from Vienna, 221 from Bucharest and 456 from Sofia and Budapest:
Also had a rather nice lunch in the house where Vlad Dracul was born (Dracula to you - or Drac - or 'D' depending on how well you know him [apologies to Eddie Izzard :) ]. Yes, he was a real person, no he wasn't a vampire. He was the king of Wallachia in the times of the Ottoman 'invasion', and was renowned for killing his enemies with a stake through the spinal cord, so that they died very very slowly. He was therefore called 'Vlad the Impaler', and Dracula 'cause his dad was called Dracul, and -a is the son ending. So, there you have it, you didn't think I'd be giving history lessons in this, did you? :P Couldn't resist taking a photo of inside of the restaurant:
After Sighisoara, I spent two nights in Cluj-Napoca, the largest town in Transyllvania, where I was hoping to catch an expedition to a set of large ice-caves and salt-caves nearby, but unfortunately there were not enough people to run the trip. Was very disappointed, I've never seen an ice cave, and I'd been looking forward to it for weeks! Bah... So yeah, then I got the train back through Hungary to Vienna, stayed one night, and then left the next morning for five days in Ukraine - this trip was a ten-person study trip with the Academy, so involved much less logistical work! It also involved four more overnight trains, about which i'm now getting rather blasé. A month ago, I had an ingrained objection to entering a country sideways, let along horizontally, and so was up and dressed when the border guards wanted to see my passport - but now, I'm happy just to roll over bleary-eyed and hand the passport over from my bunk. Border guards like shiny things, by the way; specifically the new uber-holographic UK passports.
So, Ukraine: spent one day Lviv, two days Kiev, another day Lviv, and then back through Hungary. Again. Lviv is a very western-feeling bustling student city, not surprising that it feels so cosmolitan - in the last few hundred years its been part of Austia-Hungary, Poland, Romania, USSR and Czechoslovakia. Spent most of the day inside the (very ornate) university having lectures, and also in underground coffee-shops drinking liquid choclate...mmmm... oh, and I found a pharmacy that doubled as a musuem, with old medicine chests everywhere, including this one, which, if you use you imagination on the blurry photograph, has an absinthe draw :)
Kiev was shiny and golden and sunny. Had a morning of very interesting talks in the Austrian Embassy before a bit of sightseeing, and then we got taken out to dinner by the manager of Raifaissen Bank Ukraine, at a *rather* nice traditional restaurant floating on the Dnietr river, in return for listening to some scintillating talks on the economic relations between Austria and the Ukraine ;)
The following orthodox church is an exact replica, in the exact same place, of one that Stalin had demolished in order to build a nice big concrete square.
The next day (after sleeping in a real *bed*, that didn't move or have to be lifted up in the air for an hour to change tracks, or being checked for passports at 3am), we spent the morning in the Ukrainian Ministry for Foreign Affairs (below, pretty building - Stalin did have some taste after all it seems - I am very jealous of my friend who works in it!), and the Foreign Minister gave us a couple of briefings on foreign policy including the Transdniestria problem, the Russian problem, and the elections in Ukraine which had happened the week before, and coalitions etc were as-yet undecided. Oh, and the big stone thing says that I was 2238km from London this time.
Afternoon consisted of more sightseeing, more pretty domes, a long wander round the old quarter, and a visit to the Chernobyl museum. Given that I was 100miles from Chernobyl in the week of the 20th anniversary, this was very interesting. In the entrance hall they have the signs of all the evacuated villages, hanging from the roof - it's rather eerie to walk under them, especially given their sheer number. I also saw some monks doing their gardening.
Then it was back to Lviv overnight, after meeting with 'local representatives of politics and intelligentsia' at a restaurant. And we had coffee in the Grand Hotel, which is next door to where the chap who Masochism was named after was born. Went to a rather pretty cemetary there, where I found it very strange that so many graves has huge heads carved into them, I mean like a couple of feet wide - but only those graves from Communist times, which I guess makes sense.
So, we left that evening for Vienna. As we had to change trains in Budapest about 9am, I thought it seemed a shame not to spend the day in Budapest by myself and catch a later connection, so that's what I did. I'd already 'done' most of the tourist sights on the last visit in October (the photo journal was in my previous LJ account, so I can't refer you to it...), but there remained three things I wanted to see: the main thing I unfortunately didn't get done - the terror house, which is a museum to the two terror periods Hungary experienced in the C20th, namely Nazi occupation and Communist era. So one more trip needed then to complete the list.
However, I did make it to the Park of Communist Statues, which was much further out of Budapest than i'd anticipated and so the taxi fare was indeed a pretty penny...and so I stayed longer than intended there to make use of cheaper shuttle bus. Ok, so I guess some of the statues were rather large, but I was nowhere near as impressed as I'd anticipated - I'd heard that they were *heuuge* and awe-inspiring, but I didn't feel particularly awed! Two intrigued me though - the rusty hands holding the marble ball, and the admittedly rather large leaping comrade, under whose shadow the children were playing - under the shadow of communism so to speak:
Last time I was in the city it was horrendously cloudy and so my photos didnt do the Parliament justice. I must say the part they've grit-blasted looks even more impressive than before :) Spent quite some time sitting on the banks of the Danube watching the *entire* trees floating past, due to the recent floods, and pondering on the wider aspects of what else flows down (and up) the Danube, in terms of culture, political ideologies, architecture etc etc, as that looks like being a part of my dissertation...
And then on to the last stop of the trip - I finally found a set of caves to explore :) In hindsigth I really should have got a bus, given that it was a 2hour walk uphill in crazy heat and burning sun. Was definately worth it though, and it made descending into the 10 degree caves even more pleasant! There was a satifying number of insanely narrow passages, and ladders and diagonal rung-walkways, yay! And I emerged an hour later suitably dusty and muddy to look weird on the train :) The small tour that I joined was rather surreal as it was conducted entirely in Hungarian (thoguh I had been given a comprehensive english translation of the geology to read beforehand, so was not a problem) there were only 4 others on the tour, three mentally-handicapped old men (and their carer) who made an array of rather unnerving sounds and growls and got rather freaked out when the lights went off...still, I had a great time - I really must look up caving clubs over here in Austria at some point!
Right, well that's taken me about three evenings to sort out the photos and text, so I hope at least some parts of it were interesting - and congratulations for making it to the end :)
I've spent one afternoon reading out pages and pages of english (and german) articles and phrases into a tape recorder [yes, i'm being paid, it's not just for fun :P ]! Why the *hell* anyone wants to know the phrases for "Please send us your brochure about bicycle saddles' and "Kindly fax us price-lists for grinding wheels [Schleifscheiben]", I'll never know...
I should look on the positive side, and remind myself that now I have learnt such wonderfully useful phrases in German as:
"Your hose-reels have been recommended to us by Messrs Rowland & Sons - Ihre Schlauchwagen sind uns von der Firma ...emphohlen worden"
"We are interested in including electric waffle-irons in our range" [ Wir haben Interesse, Waffelautomaten in unser Sortiment aufzunehmen]
"On examining the tools, we noticed that eight pairs of pliers were rusty" [Als wir die Werkzeuge überprüften, bemerkten wir, dass acht Zangen rostig waren]
Now to figure out how to incorporate those phrases in my German oral exam.....
Right, enough nonsense. So, here we go: Click on the blue text below to get the photos! I dont know why it says blach, I wanted it to say 'to the photos', but it doesn't seem to undertand....
Well, I only spent 18 hours whizzing through Serbia on the night train from Vienna to Sofia, but spent the time glued to the window, as there was a hell of a lot of contrasts in landscape, urban/rural etc. I'm not only posting pretty tourist pictures, but photos that are representative of what i saw...I hope this gives an insight to where I've been...
Outskirts of Belgrade at Dawn -Left-Right: Shanty town, sunrise over the Danube, Communist-era accommodation:
South-Eastern Serbia, very mountainous, lots of stunning gorges and valleys, so i was very happy with all the rocks :) Was intrigued by how everybody walks to work inside the railway tracks - sacrilige in the UK! Also saw lots of houses made of sticks and mud, and in the countryside the main form of transport seemed to be waggon carts, usually falling apart with planks missing, and overladen with either hay or people. Lots of delightfully stereotypical old peasant women in shawls were to be found traipsing along the railway tracks, usually carrying an improbably heavy pick-axe or toiling hard in the fields.
After *finally* leaving across the Serbian-Bulgarian border, reached Sofia, where I stayed for only about 12 hours and left early the next morning. Did not look nearly as communist/depressing as i thought, in fact, it really did not feel as differnt from Western cities as I expected. Though maybe 7am on a Sunday is not the best time to get a feel for a place, I can report that there were many people coming out of clubs, that Sofia has a snowy pet mountain next to it, and that it has a very large bulbous church, which was surprisingly dark and depressing inside:
I utterly failed to work out Sofia's train station, despite having managed to buy a ticket, due to a *very* confusing numbering system for platforms, and noone speaking English, French or German, and not comprehending that I could not understand their well-meaning explainations and directions. So I gave up and got a bus. :) Next stop was Plovdiv, the second city of Bulgaria, formerly the capital of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, and older than Constantinople, Athens and Carthage. In Thracian times it was known as Philippopolis, and it's old town is full of Bulgarian Revival-style buildings and cobbled streets, very very pretty, I had a very relaxed day wandering round, and the city felt buzzing and happy and bustling. They also have much nice ice-cream :)
I also found a rather lovely amphitheatre, above which I had dinner while watching the sunset over the mountains :) Bulgaria being two thirds mountians, it's not difficult to find some...
Next morning another earlier early start, where I had more difficulty trying to get the hang of the platform system, but thanks to a very kind-hearted conductor who took pity on me (and luckily spoke a smattering of french and german -ici doit reserve - zwei Stunden etc) and lead me across several tracks (they dont have underpasses between platforms, you just jump down onto the tracks and climb up the steel footholds on the other side) and took my hand and pulled me up to the platform and deposited me on the train :) Damn I felt useless! While waiting in another station the day before, in Stara Zagora, a kindly old lady who sat next to me started asking me questions. Again, she simply did not comprehend that I did not speak Bulgarian. She seemed to be asking me where I was going -I pointed to the red trajectory line on my map, which began in Serbia and ended at the Romania border - so she presumed I was Serbian. My attempts to explain where I actualyl came from, including attempting to draw a map of Europe with a large Arrow pointing to England, failed. But she was very friendly, and did keep rambling on in in a helpful tone. So i asked her in verbless Bulgarian 'Where-platform-Plovdiv?'and was taken by the hand over to the counter where she bustled to the front of the queue, and interrogated the woman behind. To my increasing worry, this conversation was about 5 minutes long, and involved me having to produce my ticket which was duly passed up and down the ticket queue with people looking at it like it was written in heiroglyphics, when in fact it had been bought jsut that morning in a very normal way. Everybody felt the need to add their tuppence-worth helpfully, as though it was astoundingly unusual for someone to travel from teh capital city to the second city (about 2 hours) by train :S. When the ticket reaached the end of the line, a young man pointed at it and, eager to help, said in English: 'ticket'. It was than passed again to the front, and I eventually was advised that i wanted platform 5. Got there eventually then :)
So, next and last stop in Bulgaria was the very very pretty town of Veliko Tarnovo, which according to the following signpost is 2790km from London; 1290km from Vienna, and 3125 from Helsinki. It also has Billa! (a chain of corner shops found on every street in Austria):
This amount of rocks makes Gemma very happy :) And add a pretty fortress to clamber over, and I'm ecstatic!
Ok, so that was Bulgaria. The last night was spent in a rather nice restaurant, and then in a local bar being introduced to the local cuisine and aniseed liquor, which costs all of 1 lev, ie €0.50. Next morning spent much time on various trains, and in the border town of Ruse, and crossing the danube which, especially due to all the flooding, was like a small sea! Got into Bucharest in the evening, negotiated the trolley-bus system, found a passable restaurant with an unplesantly loud roma band, and left early the next morning for a day trip to Constanta on the Black Sea Coast three hours away, before returning to Bucharest for the evening. Costanta was where Ovid lived in exile, and has many many roman remains, mosaics, columns with greek writing, old minarets and mosques, and a restaurant that serves rather lovely mussels for people missing living near the coast! Jason and the Argonauts also apparently visited. The town, that is, not the restaurant. The town was called Tomis in ancient times (from the Greek for 'to cut'), after Medea cut her brother into pieces there...
It also has the biggest shipbuilding yard I've every seen. And I've seen several shipyards!
The large hole in the ground that I nearly fell into is one of many examples of things Romania might want to sort out unless it wants Brussels to have a fit when it joins the EU...
Then it was back to Bucharest for some speed sigh-seeing, specifically, the two hours before it got dark. So I planned a route following communist and revolution themes. A couple of examples are:
On the left is the building shell of the hated Securitate, the Communist secret police, who were the ones who took you away if you spoke to a westerner for example. Tis crazy to think that was only 15 years ago. The interior of the building was torn apart by revolutionaries, but the shell was left as a reminder. Recently, the National Architecture or something has built its glass offices *inside* the building shell, which I thought was rather neat. On the right is a church in the piaza where revolutaries were shot at by the secret police, after the crowds had heckled a speech by Ceausescu, and violence had broken out, leading the dictator to be lifted away to safety by a helicopter, but later killed. You can still see the bullet marks on the wall of this church:
Ceausescu also demolished between 1/6th and 1/8th (depending on the guidebook!) of the city to make his huge palace, now the parliament, and a very long road boardered by communist-style accomodation and office blocks - the boulevard was intententionally built to be 6m longer than the Champs-Elysees, and the palace is now the second biggest building in the world, after the Pentagon. Or the third, depending whether you take surface area or volume...
Finding my way back to my accommodation was challenging, as they appear to have changed rather a few street names since my map was made - oh well, just made it more interesting :)
The next morning took me northwards to Sinaia, in the Carpathians, just teetering on the Transyllvanian border, though not actually inside it (Transyllvania being the plains *inside* the horseshoe-shaped Carpathians). It was founded by a monk who started a monastery there, supposedly bringing with him a rock from Mt Sinai. And then King Carol (who was actually Prussian/German, but someone asked him to be king of Romania, so he travelled in disguise by overnight train in order that no-one recognised his treachery) thought it would be a rather nice place to build a rather nice palace, and I concur with him entirely :)
Next day brought me to Sighisoara, in Transylvania proper, where I thougth I'd got off at the wrong station, due to it having no signs saying where I was, no indications tourists had ever been there, and indeed, no station building except portakabins. But all was ok, they were simply refurbishing the station. Further off-season problems meant that noone answered the door of where I had booked to stay, until I tried again 5 hours later, to be told that today was the first day of the season, and they were now open as of half an hour ago - so I had the place to myself! :) The town itself has a rather delightful mediaeval citadel, which is still inhabited, It's also quite a small place, which meant that I had time to spare - and wandered round with a Swiss chap who was on his way from Zurich to Norway. By bike. The upshot of having free time is that I therefore felt it necessary to start playing with the settings on my shiny camera and taking sepia shots at strange angles :)
If you can read the name plates, I was 1872km from London, 656 from Vienna, 221 from Bucharest and 456 from Sofia and Budapest:
Also had a rather nice lunch in the house where Vlad Dracul was born (Dracula to you - or Drac - or 'D' depending on how well you know him [apologies to Eddie Izzard :) ]. Yes, he was a real person, no he wasn't a vampire. He was the king of Wallachia in the times of the Ottoman 'invasion', and was renowned for killing his enemies with a stake through the spinal cord, so that they died very very slowly. He was therefore called 'Vlad the Impaler', and Dracula 'cause his dad was called Dracul, and -a is the son ending. So, there you have it, you didn't think I'd be giving history lessons in this, did you? :P Couldn't resist taking a photo of inside of the restaurant:
After Sighisoara, I spent two nights in Cluj-Napoca, the largest town in Transyllvania, where I was hoping to catch an expedition to a set of large ice-caves and salt-caves nearby, but unfortunately there were not enough people to run the trip. Was very disappointed, I've never seen an ice cave, and I'd been looking forward to it for weeks! Bah... So yeah, then I got the train back through Hungary to Vienna, stayed one night, and then left the next morning for five days in Ukraine - this trip was a ten-person study trip with the Academy, so involved much less logistical work! It also involved four more overnight trains, about which i'm now getting rather blasé. A month ago, I had an ingrained objection to entering a country sideways, let along horizontally, and so was up and dressed when the border guards wanted to see my passport - but now, I'm happy just to roll over bleary-eyed and hand the passport over from my bunk. Border guards like shiny things, by the way; specifically the new uber-holographic UK passports.
So, Ukraine: spent one day Lviv, two days Kiev, another day Lviv, and then back through Hungary. Again. Lviv is a very western-feeling bustling student city, not surprising that it feels so cosmolitan - in the last few hundred years its been part of Austia-Hungary, Poland, Romania, USSR and Czechoslovakia. Spent most of the day inside the (very ornate) university having lectures, and also in underground coffee-shops drinking liquid choclate...mmmm... oh, and I found a pharmacy that doubled as a musuem, with old medicine chests everywhere, including this one, which, if you use you imagination on the blurry photograph, has an absinthe draw :)
Kiev was shiny and golden and sunny. Had a morning of very interesting talks in the Austrian Embassy before a bit of sightseeing, and then we got taken out to dinner by the manager of Raifaissen Bank Ukraine, at a *rather* nice traditional restaurant floating on the Dnietr river, in return for listening to some scintillating talks on the economic relations between Austria and the Ukraine ;)
The following orthodox church is an exact replica, in the exact same place, of one that Stalin had demolished in order to build a nice big concrete square.
The next day (after sleeping in a real *bed*, that didn't move or have to be lifted up in the air for an hour to change tracks, or being checked for passports at 3am), we spent the morning in the Ukrainian Ministry for Foreign Affairs (below, pretty building - Stalin did have some taste after all it seems - I am very jealous of my friend who works in it!), and the Foreign Minister gave us a couple of briefings on foreign policy including the Transdniestria problem, the Russian problem, and the elections in Ukraine which had happened the week before, and coalitions etc were as-yet undecided. Oh, and the big stone thing says that I was 2238km from London this time.
Afternoon consisted of more sightseeing, more pretty domes, a long wander round the old quarter, and a visit to the Chernobyl museum. Given that I was 100miles from Chernobyl in the week of the 20th anniversary, this was very interesting. In the entrance hall they have the signs of all the evacuated villages, hanging from the roof - it's rather eerie to walk under them, especially given their sheer number. I also saw some monks doing their gardening.
Then it was back to Lviv overnight, after meeting with 'local representatives of politics and intelligentsia' at a restaurant. And we had coffee in the Grand Hotel, which is next door to where the chap who Masochism was named after was born. Went to a rather pretty cemetary there, where I found it very strange that so many graves has huge heads carved into them, I mean like a couple of feet wide - but only those graves from Communist times, which I guess makes sense.
So, we left that evening for Vienna. As we had to change trains in Budapest about 9am, I thought it seemed a shame not to spend the day in Budapest by myself and catch a later connection, so that's what I did. I'd already 'done' most of the tourist sights on the last visit in October (the photo journal was in my previous LJ account, so I can't refer you to it...), but there remained three things I wanted to see: the main thing I unfortunately didn't get done - the terror house, which is a museum to the two terror periods Hungary experienced in the C20th, namely Nazi occupation and Communist era. So one more trip needed then to complete the list.
However, I did make it to the Park of Communist Statues, which was much further out of Budapest than i'd anticipated and so the taxi fare was indeed a pretty penny...and so I stayed longer than intended there to make use of cheaper shuttle bus. Ok, so I guess some of the statues were rather large, but I was nowhere near as impressed as I'd anticipated - I'd heard that they were *heuuge* and awe-inspiring, but I didn't feel particularly awed! Two intrigued me though - the rusty hands holding the marble ball, and the admittedly rather large leaping comrade, under whose shadow the children were playing - under the shadow of communism so to speak:
Last time I was in the city it was horrendously cloudy and so my photos didnt do the Parliament justice. I must say the part they've grit-blasted looks even more impressive than before :) Spent quite some time sitting on the banks of the Danube watching the *entire* trees floating past, due to the recent floods, and pondering on the wider aspects of what else flows down (and up) the Danube, in terms of culture, political ideologies, architecture etc etc, as that looks like being a part of my dissertation...
And then on to the last stop of the trip - I finally found a set of caves to explore :) In hindsigth I really should have got a bus, given that it was a 2hour walk uphill in crazy heat and burning sun. Was definately worth it though, and it made descending into the 10 degree caves even more pleasant! There was a satifying number of insanely narrow passages, and ladders and diagonal rung-walkways, yay! And I emerged an hour later suitably dusty and muddy to look weird on the train :) The small tour that I joined was rather surreal as it was conducted entirely in Hungarian (thoguh I had been given a comprehensive english translation of the geology to read beforehand, so was not a problem) there were only 4 others on the tour, three mentally-handicapped old men (and their carer) who made an array of rather unnerving sounds and growls and got rather freaked out when the lights went off...still, I had a great time - I really must look up caving clubs over here in Austria at some point!
Right, well that's taken me about three evenings to sort out the photos and text, so I hope at least some parts of it were interesting - and congratulations for making it to the end :)