Greg and Mandy's Travels

Serbian railways aren’t extensive. From my map it looks like they have exactly two lines. Count em and weep. One line goes down the spine of the country coming out of Zagreb (Croatia), down through the middle, all the way to Skopje in Macedonia. The other line comes from the Sofia (Bulgaria) in the east, and meets the other line somewhere towards the middle of the country. A giant T intersection if you will. The eastern line is only one track and wends it’s way through the mountains and tunnels, seeking to escape to the plain.

Trouble is, that it isn’t a very robust track, and it’s just as well that there’s only one train a day.…

Well, I think we’ve seen Sofia at it’s finest. Yesterday’s walking tour was early on a Sunday morning, on a beautiful summer’s day, in the middle of the holiday season. So in the main there were only tourists about, the streets were not clogged with cars, and the smog was low. Gorgeous.

The city is encircled by mountain ranges, like a huge caldera, and there are hot springs underneath which charmed the Romans, but add a few million cars and the smog sits like a blanket over the city. Not so charming in the modern era, and then you add snow.…

During the 9th century, two Byzantine theologians and brothers, Cyril and Methodious worked out a set of symbols to be able to denote all of the sounds in the Slavic languages, in order to put the Bible into Slavic form. Good intention, bad execution. I’ve ranted on about this before, so I won’t dwell on it, but the real problem was that they didn’t use the Latin characters where one existed, and then just add unique characters for the other sounds. No, that would have made life too simple, so they just rearranged everything.

Consequently:

The sound s is written as c

The sound v is written as b

The sound n is written as h

The sound r is written as p

And so on.…

Dracula (or Vlad as he was known to his mum) wasn’t really a bad kid. Just misunderstood. I mean, he always brushed his teeth, and never turned his homework in late. Really, it wasn’t his fault that his father was Prince of Transylvania and known around the traps as Vlad Dracul (Vlad the dragon), and there was nothing he could do about being called Vlad Dracula (Vlad son of the dragon). They were given that moniker as they were members of the Order of the Dragon, a militant fraternity founded by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, dedicated to halting the Ottoman advance into Europe.…

Did an Urban Adventures tour of Bucharest today, led by an architecture student by the name of Alex. If you wanted to know about neo-romanian architecture, and how the art nouveau style influenced the french classical architects of the time to incorporate Chicago influences whilst retaining classical details over the gothic features, then Alex was your man. Unfortunately, he wasn’t my man. Didn’t matter much, as the other three on the tour were architecture students, presumably which was why we got this guide, and they all had a bang up time discussing the modernity of soviet architecture, so we nodded wisely for a while before my eyes glazed over.…

Well that was the end of the interruptions on the train during the night, so we enjoyed our bunks and slept through till about 5am when the train stopped at a major station and all the kids woke up. The restaurant car on the train is more like a mobile bar, so for breakfast we bought a coffee and ate our cereal dry.

Arrived in Bucharest a few minutes late, and headed down the road towards our apartment. Really lucked out this time. Gorgeous, modern, ground floor apartment on the fringe of the historic section of the town. Microwave so Mandy is happy, and fast internet and A/C so I’m happy.…

Perpetual losers is how I’d classify Hungarians. Every guide has the same running gag in their tour spiel. “We picked a fight with the Ottomans and lost so they occupied us for about 300 years. Then we picked a fight with the Hapsburgs and lost so they occupied us for about 200 years. As part of the Austro-Hungarian empire we were on the losing side of WWI and lost half our land. We sided with Germany in WWII, and when the going got bad we tried to change sides, so Germany occupied us in 1944 and we got involved in the Holocaust.…

If it’s Monday, it must be Hungary. But before we left Bratislava, we took one last, leisurely stroll down to the river and across the UFO bridge hoping to grab a pastry from our favourite cafe for the journey, but alas we were too early.

Walked all the way back to the train station from the Old Town. Funny how we didn’t realise how down hill it was all the way when we arrived, until we had to walk all the way back up. The train was on time – actually it was the same train we arrived on from Prague, and we even had the same seats.…

Insider Tip #1
For all of those people who have always wanted to visit Prague. Don’t! Visit Bratislava instead.

Let me give you the reasons. Bratislava and Prague are the capitals of the two halves of old Czechoslovakia, and only 2 hours apart. They share the same WWII/Communist/Jewish/Velvet Revolution narrative, so you aren’t dipping out there. In Bratislava’s favour, the Danube is better than the Vltava. They use the Euro which is far more convenient. They were the capital of the Hungarian Empire for 247 years, and nineteen kings and queens have been crowned here, so they have the culture. Prague has Dvorak, but Bratislava has Liszt and Haydn.…