Hi All!
Heyy I'm in Prague... and what a nightmare getting here!
The trip from Split to Budapest took 20 hours! On the same train! I met kewl people though, so that made it OK :-) It was good to speak to some more Hungarians - May meet Agnes for wine tasting next week, and met some more friendly Portugese people. But... arghh!
Then I jumped on a train 5 minutes after my 20 hr one for another 2 hours to get to Gyor... I was feeling quite ill so walked across the road to the nearest hotel (was quite cheap... but smelled bad!) and crashed for 14 hours.
The next morning I was able to get the hotel maid to clean my clothes! let me tell you that they *really* needed cleaning! I ended up paying her more than she asked for (was still cheap)... everything was folded and she even rolled my socks together... *I* didn't even do that!!!
Yesterday I jumped on a train at 2pm from Gyor to Breclav. It was 1/2 hour late, so I missed a connection to Prague. I was hanging out with Andrea and Simona from Italy, and Sebastian from Germany, but they were speaking Spanish!
I met Austrian Sarah who wanted to travel to Rijeka, Croatia but was heading to a similarly named village in Hungary! (oops!) Considering they speak pretty good German in Hungary, and not English as much, that made me feel quite confident about the whole navigate-when-you-can't-communicate thing! Or perhaps I'm just lucky??
I arrived at Prague at around 9pm and was drinking with the hostel people by 10. We hit the town and saw some sights, danced a bit and drank... am coming to realise how competetive (some) Americans are. I'm not sure if they realise that I just don't give a damn!
Everything works here and most people speak English. It's not much like elsewhere in Eastern Europe... tis really nice, but it's not the kind of challenging holiday stuff I go searching for!
In 10 minutes I'm starting a 4 hour walking tour of Prague... should be interesting!
'til later! :-)