It’s been less than two weeks since we left Europe for Asia, and yet it feels like a lifetime ago. That could possibly be because we’re in Varanasi, India which is a whole world different than Europe. Having had enough of the sensory overload from the city, we’re hiding in a café drinking coffee (made with filtered water) and reflecting on our 100 days in Europe. Continue reading
A stopover in Dubai en-route to India was an obvious choice for us as almost all flights from Europe to Asia go through Dubai. Most flights arrive late in the evening/early morning and the connecting flights leave hours later. We thought it would be much better to spend a couple days gawking at the engineering marvels in Dubai. Since the early 2000’s Dubai has been dumping money into infrastructure and luxury accommodation to attract tourists and has become a city of the world’s biggest/best everything. As an example of how far the country will go to attract tourists you just have to look at the Palm Islands: because the beautiful pristine coastline wasn’t long enough for the amount of tourists, Dubai built the Palm Islands with the first (Palm Jumeirah) adding 78 kilometers of beach to the city and another two islands are in the works. Continue reading
Budapest has it all. Seriously, within a few hours of being there I had settled on the fact that it was my favourite city so far in Europe. And that’s not an easy feat, we’ve covered most of the ‘must-see’ European cities: Reykjavik, London, Brussels, Paris, Zurich, Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Athens, Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, and Bratislava. Yes, I admit we’ve missed a few, but you get the point. I thought Budapest would be cool, but I didn’t expect that much – and it blew my expectations away. The city just has so much to offer from modern vegan and raw food eateries to wine bars and hip cafes to a huge influx of craft beer and brewed-in-house bars to organic food markets and Christmas markets all mixed with traditional markets and delis selling Hungarian sausage and around the corner from a crumbling church hundreds of years old is a crumbling building turned into a Ruin Bar. I mean, every European city is a complex mix of hundreds (usually thousands) of years of history and modernization (which in many ways is synonymous to Westernization) but Budapest seemed to pull off the mix of new and old best. It has managed to keep it’s complex and lengthy history alive while showcasing how far the economy and people have come in the past decade. Continue reading
We arrived in Bratislava in the afternoon and our airbnb host met us at the train station. He had already bought three tickets for the bus and he offered to carry my luggage. He rode the bus with us to our apartment and showed us around. The apartment was one of the best we have stayed in – everything was there. The bathroom was stocked with toiletries and the kitchen was stocked with everything you could possibly need for cooking as well as enough food in the pantry for a dinner or two, all for our use. We were very pleased and happy with the fantastic start to this new country. Continue reading
After an activity-packed 11 days in Poland, we were exhausted when we arrived in Prague. We booked an Airbnb room in someone’s apartment but lucked out and had the place to ourselves for the first two days and we took the opportunity to sleep-in and relax. Our first day and a half in Prague we really didn’t do anything, and it felt great. The apartment was spacious with a beautiful view and a Starbucks across the street; it was pretty easy to do nothing. Continue reading
(*This post is just on our first day in Athens; for our full account of Athens please see post: “Athens“)
We planned on spending three nights in Athens and ended up adding a fourth after our failed week on the Greek Islands (see post: Travelling with High Expectations = Disappointment.) Our previous post ended with a positive note on our excitement for Athens. Unfortunately, our bad luck continued. We arrived just after midnight to our Airbnb which was more like an apartment building turned into a makeshift hostel. We’ve encountered similar situations before: someone rents our multiple rooms in their house and basically makes it into a hostel, and sometimes it works our fine when it’s run properly. This was something different, our Airbnb host rented every floor in the five-story apartment building (the bottom floor was a make-shift receptionist area). Continue reading
Every time we set expectations for a place we seem to regret it. With the route we were following over land through Europe, we wouldn’t have made it to the Greek Islands until sometime in late October or November. So, we flew out of our way to make it for the tail-end of high season before it got too cold to enjoy the beaches and because most of the restaurants and hotels shut down for winter. We wanted to experience the famous party scene on Mykonos and watch the sunsets in Santorini. Greece was the only spot we booked our plane tickets and accommodation in advance. We booked a room right on Paradise Beach on Mykonos to be at the party area and a more remote (cheaper) room on Santorini planning to rent a scooter for four days and explore the island. We were going to eat cheap and delicious Greek food daily, buy fresh olives, watch countless sunsets, lay out on the beach, get tanned, etc. etc. Continue reading
Dalmatian dogs originated on the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, hence the name, and we saw plenty of them strutting around. I saw a postcard which would make the perfect cover photo for this post: a Dalmatian sitting tall and proud on an ancient stone wall overlooking the Adriatic Sea. I would have loved to Google that photo and stick it in here but that would be strictly against our rule of only posting our own photos so you’ll just have to live with imagining it (or Google it yourself). Continue reading