Day Three There’s an eerie quality to Easter Sunday spent in a country that doesn’t celebrate Easter that weekend. It’s a Sunday, alright, and the city is motionless and sluggish to wake, but I feel slightly out of synch, like a visitor who programmed the wrong century on the time machine. I google Orthodox churches,…
Tag: traveltips
To the Shire and Back with the Blue Wave Express- A Visit to Szigliget
The guesthouse owner looked incredulously at us as we dismounted from the minivan and it became clear that it wasn’t ours. We’d gotten the same slightly suspicious glances a few years back when we’d arrived in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, in the same carless state. Crazy, crazy folk. We’d approached Szigliget by train, on the slow,…
Mystery Train to the City of Five Cathedrals and a Crescent- A Weekend in Pécs
I don’t always travel first class, but when I do, I don’t. The glorious rail transportation company of Hungary (or as we frequent travelers fondly call it, k@&va MÁV) is offering discounts for online purchases, because you obviously need more incentives not to go to their ticket office and wait for an eternity and a…
Cellini’s Saliera and the Mo Salah of Beer- A Weekend in Vienna
On an unseasonably warm February morning we strolled through the Belvedere park, among joggers running out of steam on its gentle incline and Asian ladies snapping selfies with bare legs (it was not THAT warm, but the Asian resilience to cold in touristy situations never ceases to amaze me). A few hours later, we were…
Refuge by the River- Visit(s) to Szentendre
It recently dawned on me that, shockingly, I haven’t written anything about Szentendre here, though I’ve probably been there more than to any other place in Hungary besides Budapest, which figures, since it’s a leisurely 40 minutes away by HÉV line number 5, which gently rocks upstream along the course of the Danube. (An extension…
The Land of Pigeons and Wild Boars: The Hapless Guide to Kușadası
The first rule of Kușadası is that no one talks about the ineptitude of Google maps when it comes to Kușadası. For if they did, no one would ever go there. Jokes put aside, if your accommodation is in the old town, loosely referred to as Kaleiçi, basically the area surrounding the bazaar and the…
Rocks, Saints, Rivers- A Visit to Ephesus
Present day Ephesus lies stranded inland, about 5 kilometres away from the coast. As with many ancient sites, one could hardly notice its presence if it wasn’t for the road signs. The closest settlement is Selçuk, a sleepy provincial town on the road from Izmir to the seaside resort of Kușadası. Most visitors also come…
High Life over Vienna: The Donauturm (and other Observations)
Having found ourselves in Vienna on a particularly lovely summer’s day, we decided to do some things we’ve done before: briefly visit the Hundertwasserhaus (glad to report people are still posing with empty looks on their faces in front of the fountain), have cakes in Demel (glad to report the waitresses are still the same…
To Tourist or Not to Tourist: Day Trip to the Floating Village of Bokod
Experts in day tripping as we are, we set off on a sunny bank holiday morning with that generally ill-advised Top Gear/Grand Tour confidence of what could possibly go wrong only to be immediately confronted with the first thing that most definitely went wrong. As Hungarians are almost irrationally staunch about sticking to bank holiday…
A River Runs Through It- Day Trip to Mostar
Mount Velež oversees Mostar from a height of 1969 metres, bearing the name of Veles, the Slavic god of many things: earth, waters, underworld, and deceit. Veles is the trickster god. For those more familiar with Norse mythology, or its Marvel corruption, Veles is Loki. Yet the one thing Veles could not achieve is protect…
Pocket Diary Budapest 