Training to Brasov

We spent most of the day on trains today. In true Eastern European train fashion, our train was absurdly late. We were supposed to get in at 6:30 and we got in at almost 10. That means that the 7 am train to Brasov I planned to take and the 8:30 backup train were both shot.  Driving into Bucharest was kind of scary. I hope that a walking tour shows me a bit more of the city's charm, but the train ride into the station felt like that scene from Eurotrip when they first go to Bratislava.

We didn't spend much time in Bucharest because we found a train leaaving to Brasov around 10:50 and almost immediately boarded the train. It was a pretty train ride. It took about three and a half hours to get there and we got to see a lot of the Translyvanian mountains. They kind of reminded me of fhte drive through Oregon. A lot of trees. Pretty trees, but trees.

We got into Brasov around 2:30, got some Romanian lei, bought lunch, and then made our way to the hostel. We hung out at the hostel for a couple of hours before making our way into town. We got some food to make sandwiches with for our Translyvanian castle tour tomorrow. We also got Romanian Chinese food, which was surprisingly good.

That's about all we did today. We were pretty tired from having survived our third and final overnight train and tomorrow we're doing several tours (castle tour and a walking tour of Brasov after we get back). Mia and I uncovered the hostel's stash of Apatow movies so we've been having a bit of a marathon.

What we've seen of Brasov is kind of cute, though. The bits of it we've seen so far remind me of a mountainy Sabaudia.

Sofia Day 2 + Rila Monastery

So now we're safe in Transylvania. We're not armed with wooden stakes. Maybe we should. Maybe.

Anyway, our second day in Bulgaria was spent doing one of the hostel's side trips to the Rila Monastery. The Rila Monastery is a UNESCO World Heritage site is and is this excluded monastery up in the Rila Mountain. The tour basically got us someone to drive us directly to the monastery, which having been there, would have been hellish to do via public transportation. There were three of us signed up for the tour: Mia, me and some guy named James who sounded like Daniel Radcliffe. The drive out to the Rila Monastery took about two hours, but there was a stop over at a gas station.

Before we got to the Rila Monastery, our tour guide stopped us somewhere else in the mountains to go see a cave that St. Ivan used to live in. It was a funny moment because Mia slept for pretty much the entire ride to the monastery and she woke up for a very sweaty uphill hike. She was clearly thrilled. The hike was a lot longer than I initially thought when he said he was taking us to a cave. We pretty much got out of the car and he pointed to this giant hill and said we're climbing up that. It wasn't too bad. The cave was pretty cool too, but there was this tiny hole at some point that we were expected to squeeze through. I declined  as the only image in my head was of Winnie the Pooh.

After climbing back down the hill, he drove us to the Rila Monastery and left us there for a few hours. The monastery is very pretty. It used to house like 300 monks, but according to some tour guide we were listening to there are only like six monks living there. Apparently, those few monks aren't too lonely because they rent out some of the rooms as a hotel.

In any case, there was also a giant church in the middle of the monastery. From the outside, it looks like the rest of the monastery, but it was incredibly ornate on the inside. I'd post pictures, but we weren't allowed to take them inside. Judging from all of the paintings all over the interior, I can understand why.

Even though the monastery was very pretty, we were left there for two and a half hours and there's really only so much of the monastery that you can see in that time. We were all kind of hungry, though, so we got some food. Tried some monastery-style bean soup (good) and some Bulgarian beer (not so good). For dessert, we got Bulgarian donuts that the woman at the hostel had been raving about. That was entertaining because there was a large selection of different syrup flavors to try out.

After eating, we wandereed around the monastery for a little wihle longer, before finding our tour guide and heading back to Sofia. The driver stopped at some point to buy some fruit and gave us some. Other than that, it was a pretty awkward and quiet ride back.

We got back to the hostel around 4:30 and hung out at the hostel for a little while because it was deadly hot. We went out for dinner around 6 before coming back, grabbing our bags and heading to the train station. That was fun. We had like 5 dollars worth of Bulgarian money to spend and nothing to spend it on because we had already gone to the market. I think we got Snickers bars or something.

The overnight train that we took to Bucharest had a final destination in Moscow. That was kind of fun. We had a sleeping compartment and were the only people in the compartment. It wasn't as big or comfortable as the one that we took to Belgrade, but the door also didn't make noises the whole night and I actually managed to sleep. They took our passports for a while, but we eventually got them back.

Sofia

We rolled into Sofia, Bulgaria tired, smelly, and hungry. The train station wasn't welcoming either. We almost got run over by some street cleaner. Our first priority was to make sure that we were indeed in a sleeper for our overnight train tomorrow. We got tossed around from ticketing office to ticketing office until we got to the right one and confirmed that we were in a sleeper. Ideally, we'll luck out and there will only be the two of us again, but who knows. Unlike the Budapest train, this is the only train that goes from Sofia to Bucharest. At least we get beds.

Also, trains in Eastern Europe make Italian trains seem prompt. This one arrived three hours late. While we're training into Bucharest tomorrow, we're ultimately trying to get to Brasov that day. At Budapest, they told us that we didn't have to make reservation for the Brasov train. I was going to do it anyway, but it migth be better that I don't. Who knows when we're going to arrive in Bucharest on Wednesday morning.

Anyway, we got out of the train station and everything smelled like pee. We had to make our way through a million taxi drivers and peole advertising hostels before we made it to the tram. The area of Sofia that we saw on our tram ride reminded us of some of the less touristy areas of Mexico. There were definitely some dirt roads and the streets were not completely done or in disrepair. That might have been fine, but add the rows of communist-era architecture and you'll get our first impression of Sofia.

We finally made it to the hostel. It's a pretty cute hostel, but because we got a private two bed room, we're in an apartment a couple streets away. Thus, we did not get to partake in the free pool table because we did not want to have to wake in the dark Sofia streets more than we had to :(. Anyway, we checked in, but they told us that it'd take a couple of hours for the room to be ready. We had the option of doing an 11 am free walking tour, but we were too tired hungry and gross feeling to do that. Instead, we sat around and hung out in the hostel. We also dug into the bag of mini croissants that we bought in Belgrade. They weren't that good, but we made them better with the packet of knock off Nutella that we also got.

Our room was supposed to be ready at 2, but it ended up being ready at 12. This was great. We showered. They do a laundry service here for 8 lav (equivalent of 4 Euro), so we decided that our train clothes from the past few days either needed to be burned or washed, so we went back to drop that off, pay for our room, and book ourselves in the tour of the Rila Monastery that they put on. Once that was done, we ran back to the room for the much needed sleep.

We were up and out by 5 and decided to do the 6 pm run of the free walking tour that we missed earlier in the day. This was a very tough decision for us. Included in the hostel price, they'll make you pasta for dinner. But that only happens from 7-8. On the other hand, this tour lasted from 6-8:30. We almost tried to do both and were going to leave the tour an hour into it, but we actually ultimately really liked the walking tour. The Sofia we saw on the tour was a lot nicer than what we had seen in the morning. There are a lot of underground Roman ruins in the city, so when our tour guide would take us to the subway area, you'd just see old walls all around. There are a lot of really pretty churches scattered around the city, some of them going back to the 11th century. The biggest church and the one pictured below is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It was huge. We saw a palace, the president's building (but just missed the changing of the guard). The tour guide was pretty funny too. 

Oh, another cool thing about Sofia is that they have a lot of mineral springs all over the city. It's completely safe to drink, so we got to fill up with some natural mineral water.

The tour ended around 8:30, right after the dinner. :( All in all, though, we were glad that we did the tour because we saw a lot more of Sofia and did a lot more than we would have otherwise.

Tomorrow we check out and we take an overnight train to Bucharest. Instead of having an awkward day, though, we're doing the hostel's tour of the Rila Monastery which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We could have taken public transportation to the monastery and it would have been a lot cheaper, but seeing as they only have three trains to and from Rila each day and the trains we've encountered so far have not been particularly reliable, I think the private transport is the safest bet. It's also a pretty long drive to and from the monastery, so we've got a full day ahead of us.

Belgrade Day 2 and Overnight Train from Hell

We are now safely in Sofia, Bulgaria after the overnight train from hell. But, we're safe now...and only have one more of these overnight trains to go. Yay. And we have a sleeper. Anyway, back to Belgrade.

The problem with overnight trains is that for that day that you're in the city, you're stuck in a strange limbo where you can't quite do too much because you're not staying another night in the city. It's harder when you're not in a country that uses the Euro and have to try to use up as much of the remaining currency but not overspend so we have something to eat. Also, while the Eastern European cities that we've been to have been pretty cool, they're not as jam packed with things to do as other European cities are. I guess that's not so much of a problem in Budapest, but that's definitely what happened yesterday in Belgrade.

So, we woke up in the morning, only an hour or so after a crew of BeerFest attendees had stumbled into our hostel. We checked out and had our free breakfast and then made our trek our to the Nikola Tesla Museum. They do free tours of the museum on the hour and we got there around 10:30, so we sat around waiting for the tour. It's really not that big of a museum, but the tour was worth it. They have a lot of models of Tesla's inventions and they do demonstrations. They told stories of Tesla's life. We got electrocuted (kind of). At the end, we got to see Tesla's urn. It was a good museum and one of my favorite parts of our stop in Belgrade for sure. They don't have much of a gift shop though. It was just a set of magnets and books about Tesla. :(

We weren't really sure what to do after that. We wanted to see the St. Sava Cathedral, but we also thought about seeing Zemun, which is supposed to have a cute old town. We learned from someone working at the Tesla Museum that Zemun would have been a long trip that would require multiple transfers in both directions. Instead, we had pizza in the park for lunch, where Mia in the spirit of Nikola Tesla, befriended a pigeon. Then, we decided to watch another movie. This time it was subtitled so we opted for a comedy (Horrible Bosses) and avoided the hot Serbian sun. It was a pretty funny movie. Also, apparently movies in Serbia are like the equivalent of 3 euro. Not bad at all.

The movie let us out around 3 pm, so we walked over to St. Sava Cathedral. It was one of those walks similar to our Paris walk where we saw the Cathedral immediately, but it took us a while to actually make it there. It's huge and looked really cool on the outside, but they are still working on constructing it, so the inside was kind of empty. It was still very pretty on the outside.

Our next goal was to go to some big market. This didn't end too well. The tour industry in Serbia is still growing, so they only have street signs in crylic writing and have not yet added romanic writing. This would be fine, except all tourist maps have everything in romanic writing. Not helpful at all. Anyway by the time we realized we were going to wrong direction, it was after four, which was when the market ended. We then tried to go find the Bohemian alley again. Although this is a pretty big tourist destination, it was not on the map so we ended up not being able to find that either. A lot of fail.

We didn't have much money left and had a lot of time left. Belgrade is also known for its nightlife and we had seen most of the major sights for the day. We ate dinner and then tried to watch another movie, but did not have the money for that. Instead, we went back to our hostel and they let us hang out there for a couple of hours. We watched How to Train your Dragon with some other backpackers and surfed the net until deciding to make it over to thett train station.

The train station in Belgrade isn't really much of a train station. It's pretty much a giant open court yard. Nevertheless, we felt a lot safer there than we did at the Budapest train station, so we were fine. Also, our train was there a lot earlier, so we were able to board the train.

So this train. It wasn't fun. First of all, it smelled like urine. It was gross. Also, we looked into the train compartment that we had booked our seats for and saw the shadiest group of people, as well as a woman who looked like Professor Trelawney if she didn't have teeth. We immediately pretended like we were looking for another compartment and looked with jealousy at all of the other compartments full of backpackers who ended up bonding all night. Fortunately, we were on a train that didn't require reservations, so we ducked into another compartment that had less unsavory looking individuals. They were a bunch of locals who didn't speak any English, but they were all very nice. They spent most of the night talking to each other, but I think it was because they all were arriving at their destinations anywhere from 1-3 am so they had to keep each other awake. Once they were gone, there weren't many in the seated 6 person compartment, so we were able to sprawl out a little more.

Also had fights with the train conductors several time throughout the night. If you get the Eurail Global pass, you cannot train through Serbia. However, you can get a multi-country pass that lets you do so. Our ticket clearly says that we can travel through Serbia, but each time that the conductors made their rounds they insisted that our Eurail passes were invalid even after I spelled it out for them and pointed to where it said Serbia on our ticket. They eventually both relented, except the first one had a second go and insisted that our 2 Adult Eurail Saver Pass was only for one person. Seriously. They were the worst. Mind you, one of these arguments went on at 4 am, right after I had finally foudn a comfortable sleeping position.

When I finally was able to sleep a little, a new group of people joined us. I don't think they had tickets. When the conductor made his round, one of them handed him a few bills and he just nodded and walked away. In any case, between guarding our belongings, finding a comfortable sleeping position, sleeping through loud conversations and 4 am arguments with train conductors, i only got a few hours of sleep.  Needless to say, I was pretty tired by the time that we made it to Sofia.

Belgrade

Our first day in Belgrade was pretty interesting. We spent a long portion of the morning still on the train. The train was supposed to arrive at 6:40, but didn't get in until almost 9. It worked out because it gave us some extra time to sleep. I think there must have been some problems with the train because there were several moments during the night where the train just flat out stopped. Whatever, we made it and we made it safe. I think the Canadian couple next to us were kind of panicked about the delays though. They kept on going in and out of their compartment to ask the conductor how long we'd have until we got there  and each time he told them that we'd be about 2 hours late.

We eventually made it, though and because we did not have any Serbian dinars and the guides specifically recommended against exhanging money at the train station, we just walked to the hostel. It ended up being a lot more of an uphill walk than we had anticipated and we must have looked pretty gross by the time that we found the hostel. We dropped our bags off and then ran off to get some dinars before coming back to check in. Our beds were ready (yay), so we also took the time to shower and get rid of all the train grime that we had accumulated overnight.

We finished just in time to run over to Republic Square for a free walking tour of the city. It was not with the tour company that we like to do our free tours with, but it was still a pretty well done tour and our guide was a lot less awkward than our guide in Copenhagen. The only problem is that on a hot day such as today, our guide did not have a break until almost the end of the tour. There were some points of the tour where we were just so hot that nothing she was saying was sinking in. Mia and I remedied this with ice cream though. A cure all.

The tour was fun. Belgrade's an interesting city where on one corner you will find a building that has not quite yet recovered from recent bombings, in another corner you see the lush "Bohemian Quarter" full of pubs and bars, and another street is the more ritzy pedestrian only shopping mall. The people here have also been very nice and friendly. I think the coolest part of the tour was the big fortress, which is now also a park. You see ruins of this old medieval fortress, a great view, and a lot other goodies.

Oh, also, there is a street here that the locals refer to as "Silicon Valley." Mia and I were initially excited because we thought it'd be a techie little quarter of Belgrade, but it was actually more Orange County than Silicon Valley. It's apparently a street of overpriced bars where rich locals make sure to flaunt their wealth and women with boob jobs try to find rich husbands. Also, apparently those with fancy cars will make sure to park their cars illegally in ways that everyone can see.

We were dying by the time the tour was over because it was so hot. It ended around the touristy pedestrian street, so we ducked into the closest air conditioned restaurant we could find and had lunch. Mia got gnocchi and I got a "burrito," which was more like a quesadilla. i think and Eduardos trip is due when we come home.

Anyway, we made our way back to the hostel. Mia stopped and got red glasses like the ones of her that she broke and had been trying to replace. For old times sake, we walked into a Lush. We made it back to the hostel around 3 and both of us passed out for a while.

We didn't leave again until 6:30-ish, when we decided that we should probably go out and do something else. We decided to go check out the Belgrade Beerfest, which is the big event going on in town right now. Our plan was to get a drink, get dinner and get out. The woman who we asked for directions at the front desk probably thought we were cooler than we actually were. When I asked if we could take a tram back from the event, she looked worried and told us that they'd only run until 11:15. Lol.

Anyway, BeerFest was actually surprisingly fun. We thought it'd be a lot more like Love Fest, but when we had made it there, it was actually a very family friendly event. There were even rides nearby. We tried the Serbian Jelen beer, which kind of tasted like Stella. Mia got some chicken sandwich thing and I got some hot dog like thing. We drank and ate, listened to the band perform, and then made our way out as the crowds started rushing in.

Now we're back at the hostel and I'm being eaten alive by bugs. Time to pull out the bug repellent, I guess. Tomorrow, we do the Nikola Tesla Museum and some other sight seeing. The walking tour covered many of the major sights of the city, but I think there were a couple of other things that are worth seeing. In the evening, we do overnight train #2 to Sofia, Bulgaria where they shake their heads to say yes and nod to say no.

Budapest Day 3 and Overnight Train

So, we've made it to Belgrade and have survived one day here thus far. Yesterday was a pretty long day because everyone left us with 8 hours to kill in Budapest. It was interesting.

We got up pretty late compared to the last few weeks of traveling and we sorted out the laundry that arrived (yay clean clothes). We then had our massive rush to get things together before the check out time and managed to check out our stuff right at 11. Good timing. They let us store our bags in the hotel while we ran around the city to do last-minute sightseeing too, which was convenient.

We stopped by the nearby mall to get some breakfast-ish food for everyone. More like a lunch, really. It was all food court food. Mia, James and I got kebobs and Halmony and Umma split stuff from some Asian restaurant. The mall was actually pretty nice (and air conditioned). We wandered around the H&M for a while too.

Our major sightseeing trip for the day was Memento Park. In retrospect, it might have been better to do that stop the day before, but there are no complaints because everything worked out fine. When Hungary got rid of its communist regime, they got rid of all of the propaganda statues that were scattered around Budapest. Many of them ended up in Memento Park, which is this small park on the outskirts of Budapest. The trip out there was pretty far. It took us a good hour to take various buses out to the park. It was long and there were times that we were concerned that we would not make it back to the hotel by 3 so Umma Halmony and James could get their airport taxi. The park wasn't as big as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty impressive. The statues are enormous and cover a wide range of topics. You have the statues of the major communist dictators (except for Stalin because most of those were apparently destroyed in the 1956 revolt). There are statues of other major communist heroes and then there are statues that represent communist ideals. My major regret is that when we came here on our backpacking trip several years ago, that we didn't take Gianni or Andrew to it. I think they would have enjoyed it a lot.

By the time we made our way back to the hotel area, it was almost three, so our timing was quite perfect. We helped everyone get their stuff up from the storage room and then saw Halmony, James, and Umma off as they were laughing and waving with their taxi driver.

Because our overnight train was at 11:30, we had a long time to kill and were not quite sure where we could use that time. Sure there were plenty of other sights to see, but I handed over my Rick Steves book and felt empty sightseeing Budapest without it. Also, it was incredibly hot, so we didn't really want to stumble around more in the heat. So, we did what we would have done on any obscenely hot day in the states, we went to the movies.

The movie theater near the hotel dubbed the movies, which made things quite inconvenient for us, but we ended up finding a well-timed showing of Green Lantern to go see. It was fun to watch in Hungarian, even if we didn't understand anything. Paralax's voice was also a lot creepier in Hungarian. The theater in general was pretty cool. They had WiFi in the theater, the popcorn was cheaper, and they had assigned seats.

After the movie was over, we went back to the Vaci Utca area and ended up eating at Raday Utca, which is what Rick Steves referred to Budapest's restaurant row. We even found a restaurant that he recommended and finally got our Hungarian goulash. It was so good, but the service was slow. We also tried a pretty interesting pastry dish while we were there.

By the time we were done with our dinner, it was 7:50 and our 24 hour pass ended at 7:56. This left us with not much time to get back to the hotel. Somehow, I dumbly went the wrong way and we blew our last few minutes of our 24 hr pass on a wrong turn and had to buy new single ride passes. It was depressing, but whatever. We picked up our bags and then made our way over to the train station. First, though, we stopped at the convenience store near the hotel to get some snacks for the train. We didn't end up with as much as we thought because we had to spend some of our snack money on extra Metro tickets :(

The wait for the train was a long one, but we stood close enough to the ticket-only area that there weren't too many shady people around us. Eventually, it was littered with other backpackers on their way to Belgrade anyway. The train was a little late, too, so we left around midnight rather than 11:30.

The overnight train was an interesting experience. We splurged and got the sleeping coach, which normally will sleep up to 3 people. It was only the two of us in there, so it worked out well. The train conductor took our ticket and Eurail pass at the beginning of the ride, which put me into quite a panic because that had never happened before. Had it not been for the fact that I later saw the conductor hanging out in the conductor's room, I would have spent the whole night thinking that we had fallen for some elaborate Eastern European train scam. For the record, we got our ticket back.

The train was pretty rickety and the Canadian couple next to us were loud the entire night. Also, we had to clear customs at 2 am and 3 am. That was fun. I think somehow, we managed to get some sleep in though.