The Stingy Tourist

Deals in Budapest

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:54:02 +0000

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New Hostel Opens

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:52:28 +0000

London

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:48:56 +0000

Prague part 2

admin — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:34:39 +0000

We decided to go back to the Jewish Quarter in the morning. The Jewish Museum runs all of the synagogues and exhibits in the area, so for one price you can get a ticket that lets you see everything. Our first stop was the Pinkas synagogue. The synagogue no longer holds services. Instead it is a memorial to the Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust. The walls are completely filled with the names of every known victim, as well as their birth and death dates. Even still today, people come to the synagogue to try to find out about their relatives or learn about their ancestry. We learned that Madeline Albright, who was born in the Czech Republic but fled with her family as a little girl, recently visited the synagogue and found out that she had Jewish family she didn’t know about.

Connected to the synagogue is the Old Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery is really small and has thousands of tombstones crammed on top of each other. Prague’s Jewish Quarter was a ghetto for hundreds of years where the Jews had to live under harsh regulations. The Jews were only allowed this tiny plot of land to bury their dead, so they estimate that they are about 40,000 people buried in 12 different layers in the cemetery.

Our friends Ilana, Sally and Sami were arriving in Prague soon so we went back to the hostel to meet them. After they settled in, the five of us went to a Czech restaurant for dinner. We had goulash, as usual, fried cheese, lamb and a Czech beer called Pilsner Urqell. The food was great and the restaurant had a really fun and lively atmosphere.

When we finished eating we took a local recommendation and went to a bar called simply, the Pub. This place was hands down the coolest bar I’ve ever been to. Each table can fit about eight people in a round booth, and in the center are four beer taps. There is also a touch screen that tracks how much you drink, and lets you choose songs to add to the jukebox queue. The back wall of the bar has a floor-to-ceiling projector screen that tallies the number of beers for each table and ranks the top 10. When I go home I plan on opening one of these in Gainesville. Seriously.

Everyone who’s ever been to Prague raves about its five-story mega clubs, so we had to check one out. We went to Karlovy lázně, a club on the riverbank where each of its floors plays music from a different decade. The coolest part of the club is on one of the middle floors where bright blue boxes are scattered throughout the dance floor and lasers shoot around the room. Everything stays open late in Prague and before we knew it it was 4 A.M. and the city was still going. We headed back to the hostel and passed out.

Czeching out Prague

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:20:50 +0000

We woke up at 6:30 A.M. to the alarm, and by 6:31 we were back asleep. To catch our 8 A.M. bus to Prague we figured that we had to be out of the hostel by 7:15, but it wasn’t until 7:20 that we actually woke up. We shoved our stuff in our bags and sprinted to the metro station. Huffing and puffing, we reached the bus station just as the bus driver was about to close the door and managed to stall him long enough for us to buy tickets and throw our bags under the bus.

The bus pulled in to Prague around noon, and we took the metro to Prague Square Hostel, where we were staying for the next three days. As soon as we settled in we walked to the Old Town Square, where we caught up with a New Europe free walking tour of the city. The tour guide was a Czech student, and he did a great job explaining Prague’s history in ancient times as well as its 20th century turbulence. He said that his grandfather, who was born in 1919, has never moved out of Prague yet he’s lived in seven different countries due to the different political parties that came into power.

The tour took us past the famous astrological clock, which was recently rated the most overrated tourist attraction in the world. Every hour on the hour hundreds of people gather in front of the clock tower to see it spring into action only to be greeted with a couple of slow moving statue heads and a trumpet player. We also walked through the Jewish Quarter, saw the Charles Bridge and walked along the Voltava River bank.

That night we decided to try out the Clock Tower pub crawl. The pub crawl joined us with about 50 other travelers and took us to three different bars. The bars in Prague are deceiving from the outside. When we walked up to each bar it looked just like a tiny, run down place, but each time we would enter and find a modern, multi-story establishment. Some of the other cities we have been to were kind of dead on the weekdays, but on a Wednesday night Prague was raging.

Vienna in a day

IlanaSlott — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:48:38 +0000

I met Lisa and David in Vienna on day 14 of my 60 day European backpacking trip. Sami, Sally, and I arrived from Munich just in time to meet them for dinner and a weird night out on the town. A tip for anyone planning to visit Vienna: going to a bar named “Chelsea” on a Monday night might not be the best idea.

In the morning we went to the Schonbrunn Palace, the ornate former summer home of the Hapsburg dynasty. We did the shorter version of the two audio tours offered (35 minutes), which allowed us to check out about 20 rooms of the enormous palace. The Schonbrunn is worth a visit, especially if you’re like me and need your history fix in every city.

After we left the palace we went to the Naschmarkt, which was my favorite part of Vienna. The bustling outdoor market has countless vendors who sell everything: fruit, vegetables, cheese, cakes, meat, fish, and pre-made delicacies. The five of us split three types of hummus, falafel, olives, and a variety of cheese stuffed vegetables for lunch… everything was delicious. The food gets progressively cheaper as you make your way through the market, so when Sally and I went back the following day we started from the opposite end (right by the Karlsplatz subway station).

Fully satisfied from our lunch at the Naschmarkt, we headed to the Freud museum, which is set up in Freud’s old apartment. It’s only 4.50 euro to get into the museum if you have your student ID, but it was sort of a let down. You walk through all of the rooms in the apartment, including a room with some of Freud’s things, a room where home videos play, and the original waiting room for patients. You also get a packet with a ton of information that you’re supposed to read as you walk around, but it didn’t really hold my attention. That being said, if you can’t make it to the Freud museum, don’t be too disappointed.

Getting around Vienna is really easy, and we used the subway system to get from place to place all morning. In the afternoon we decided to take the tram to Grinzig (a town on the outskirts of Vienna) to try some of the locally made wines. We went to two different restaurants and split three bottles of wine between the five of us: two whites and a red. I’m not much of a wine expert, but all of them were really good. We ordered our third bottle of wine with dinner, and we spent a while sitting outdoors and talking before going to our hostels for the night.

Hungry in Hungary

admin — Sun, 22 May 2011 08:16:19 +0000

Living in Budapest’s Jewish quarter for a couple of days had us dying for some deli food so we woke up and went to Spinoza’s to get breakfast. Spinoza’s is a small, but fairly well known restaurant in the Jewish Quarter, where we had a feast. Hungary, like Croatia before it, is not on the Euro. One dollar is worth about 185 Hungarian Forint, which means when you’re sitting at a restaurant and can’t decide between two meals, you just get both. We had coffee, a bagel platter, eggs, fresh fruit, granola and yogurt. The bill was about six bucks each.

After breakfast we went on a walking tour of the Jewish Quarter. It was both sad and interesting to learn about the history of the Jews in Hungary, which is where a lot of my family comes from. The tour brought us to the Great Synagogue, which is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest, behind New York’s Temple Emanu-El, in the world. The Synagogue is spectacular, but oddly looks more like a Catholic church than a place for Jewish prayer.

We also stopped at Szimpla, a ruin pub nearby. The Jewish Quarter is filled with what are known as ruin pubs, which is a deserted factory or warehouse that some one decides to take over and turn into a bar. After the fall of communism in Hungary there were a lot of deserted buildings, but more importantly, a lot of people who wanted to drink and party. Now the ruin pubs have become legitimate establishments and are considered to be the best bars and nightclubs in the city.

Starving again by the time the tour ended, we walked up town to Andrássy Ave., which is considered the Champs-Élysées of Budapest, and had dinner at a local restaurant called Menza. The highlight of the meal was my sour cherry soup. It was a sweet and creamy pink liquid that had a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating around. It would have been dessert anywhere else in the world, but in Hungary it was a common start to a meal. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past few days, it’s that you’ll never go hungry in Hungary.

Waking up in Budapest

admin — Sat, 21 May 2011 20:02:35 +0000

For the last few days we’ve been having an amazing time traveling throughout the Croatian coast and then flew to Budapest. I got a little behind on the blog posts, so here’s the most recent post from today. I will be going back and filling them in as soon as possible.

We woke up in Budapest excited to tackle the city and all that it had to offer. From our hostel it was only a few minutes walk to Deak Ferenc square, which is the main square of the city and where we were meeting up with a walking tour. Our tour guide was a Budapest native who spoke broken English, but she had great stories about each part of the city. The Danube River cuts through Budapest dividing it into two sides. To the west you have the Buda side, which is more residential, but still has some historical sites, and to the east is the Pest side, which is what you would refer to as the downtown area. We were staying on the Pest side, and that was where the tour began.

We wandered all over the city with the tour for the better part of three hours until it ended at Fisherman’s Bastion on the Buda side. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon and we were starving. In Croatia we asked everyone we met for advice about Budapest, but the thing that stuck most was the Great Market. We heard it was the place to go for lunch to sample all of the Hungarian delicacies, so despite the walk to the complete opposite end of town, we hauled over there.

The market was not really how we imagined. Most of the stands were selling uncooked meats or vegetables, but on the top floor we found a small section that was serving already made hot dishes. We tried the Goulash, which was excellent, and a koogle-like dish that was terrible. We topped it off with a huge fried pancake covered in Nutella, bananas, sour cherries and powdered sugar.

After stuffing our faces we headed to the famous Szechenyi thermal baths for some natural cleansing. We walked in and found a long hallway filled with several different shaped pools heated to various temperatures. Different types of Saunas and steam rooms were scattered throughout. There’s also an outdoor area that is like a beach, with hundreds of people lying around the edges of three huge pools and a whirlpool. For anyone who’s ever been to Blizzard Beach, or comes from Florida for that matter, the bathhouse won’t blow you away. The saggy, old men in Speedos didn’t help the cause either, however it was definitely still worth doing.

Refreshed and rejuvenated we returned to the hostel and got ready to go out. We headed back to Deak Ferenc square and caught the end of a free fashion show. At night this area gets filled with locals hanging out and drinking, and there is a free underground club that has live music. We hung around the area for a while and then checked out the Hungarian rock band that was playing. After stopping at a bakery for a late night snack we made our way home.

Plitvice National Park

Lisakass — Sun, 15 May 2011 17:08:21 +0000

After a fun night out, we slept for only a few hours before packing up our backpacks and saying goodbye to Zagreb. We boarded a 7 A.M. bus to Plitvice Lakes National Parks. Plitvice is a beautiful park with 16 interconnected lakes that are surrounded by trees and waterfalls. It was truly a beautiful site to see.Upon entering the park, we took a ferry to get to the main lakes area. From there we followed a three-hour trail around the lakes, stopping frequently for pictures. It is a photographers dream location and I would recommend going there to anyone who has the opportunity. The lakes range in color from clear green to blue and the water is as beautiful as I’ve ever seen. We were expecting a lot out of the park from everything we had read in the guidebooks, and it lived up to it.

We ate a quick lunch at the hotel next to the park, before running to catch the bus to our next location, Split. Split is the second largest city in Croatia and we were excited to finally arrive on the coast. The bus ride there was four hours, just enough time for me to have to pee three times. Luckily the bus drivers smoke their cigarettes as much as I drink water because we stopped every hour. I managed to only hold up the bus one of these times, as I frantically searched for the restroom at our last stop. It wasn’t awkward when I got back on or anything…

After what seemed like forever we arrived in Split. In Croatia it is more popular to rent a private room from someone than stay in hostels. So that was exactly what we did. We had a large room with a TV, table, and closet, for only $12 each. We hit the backpackers’ jackpot. After settling in we went to dinner on the water, then headed back to the room to relax and sleep after a long day of travel. It was a great day.

Day 2 in Zagreb

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 14:49:55 +0000

We had only booked the Funk Hostel for a night, so even though we decided to stay another night in Zagreb we had to check out in the morning. With Hostelworld.com we were able to book another hostel for the night, and it ended up being just as cheap and right in the city center. We dropped our bags off at the new hostel and headed out to explore Zagreb.

Zagreb is centered around Ban Jelacic square. From there you can walk down one street to get to all the shopping, another takes you to the bars and restaurants and another brings you to the market. Hungry for lunch, we decided to head to Dolac Market. The European market scene is really cool. Everything is fresh and costs next to nothing. We walked from stand to stand and bought bread, meat, cheese and some of the reddest strawberries I’ve ever seen. Then we took our food a couple blocks away and found a great bench in the shade in front of the cathedral to eat.

We walked around the rest of the downtown area for a little and then decided it might be smart to take some time to plan out our next couple of days in Croatia. We didn’t really have any set plans but knew of a few places we wanted to go and that we wanted to be in Budapest by Friday. We used the Wi-Fi in the hostel to check out every combination of bus, train and ferry schedules and eventually found a way that worked perfectly.

Relieved to have a plan in place, we went back out and got dinner at a small pizza place. With Croatia being right on the Adriatic and so close to Italy, there is a ton of Italian food here. After eating we went back to the hostel room and met our roommate, Laurence. He was from London and had just arrived on a train from Bosnia, where he was doing fieldwork for his graduate degree. We invited Laurence to join us and the three of us went out to check out the bar scene. We found a cool bar near the city center where we sat outside and had a drink. Laurence had a train to catch at 4:30 in the morning so he left us after an hour or so, and Lisa and I went to another bar called Tomato.

The bar was pretty empty but we made conversation with the bartender and another kid that sit with us. Both were from Croatia and were in Zagreb studying at the University. We talked with them for a while and were amazed at how similar they were to us. Even half way across the world, people have the same kind of stresses in their lives, do the same stuff with their free time and have the same kinds of hopes and dreams for the future.