Apparently this is Barcelona. Wow.
I had great plans for coming back to the States after five months abroad. I wanted to respond to emails and other contacts that had stacked up from my month traipsing through Europe, my house was a blank canvas waiting to be repainted, and I could finally stop thinking about museums, new friends, and nightlife [...]
The country is called Hungary, but the primary ethnic group in Hungary is the Magyar. They seem to be a warm, fun loving people who just happen to have an incomprehensible language. Hungarian (Magyar) is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which means that the only language Magyar resembles is Finnish. If you know [...]
So today I took my first steps train in a long while. There is a lot more western movement in my immediate future. And I am very happy. I´m at a hostel in Munich tonight after having spent four nights in Budapest. And Budapest may be my new favorite continental European city. It was just [...]
Before coming to Budapest, I had never been farther east in the world than the Czech Republic. But when I was in Prague, they told me all the action was in Hungary. So I came, knowing far less than I am comfortable knowing about my host culture. The old and the new are colliding here [...]
Vienna was the first city I had ever seen in Europe way back in 1996 and it left a big enough impression on me to come back. Unfortunately, after spending so much time around European buildings, Vienna loses some of its grandeur and one starts to yearn for something with a bit more grit. The [...]
Rome, the Eternal City. The guidebooks say that nothing will prepare you for the chaos that is Roma. That is completely ridiculous. It also happens to be completely true. See, what they don’t tell you is that the crowds are tolerable if you are prepared and rested and that the city is safe to walk [...]
Judging by the long, steep grades in their massive gardens, the Medicis were bad ass walkers in addition to being badass about pretty much everything else.
My favorite city so far is Berlin. I think I visited it at the absolute perfection of Spring: warm days, chilly nights, children playing giddily in the streets of what was not so long ago an emotionally destitute part of the fall of Communism. People relaxed on the balconies of their newly renovated apartments. And [...]
(I’m going to come back to my stops before this, Berlin and Switzerland, because they were both incredible: Berlin was everything a healing city should be and Switzerland will heretofore be called Paradise. But due to the aforementioned French keyboard problems, I’m going with this one from my (written) travel journal.) My next destination, perhaps [...]
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