Eastside

Since I am behind in my blogs, I am going to cram the Eastern Europe part together. The first Eastern destination was in Prague. It was a very nice city, we climbed 287 steps to the top of a Church tower, which gave us a nice view of everything. We also climbed Peltin hill aswell (we've done alot of climbing) and had another beautiful view of the City. Everything was really cheap in Prague, especially beer. 500 ml Beers in the store were under a dollar, and even in the bar we were paying just over a dollar. So we figured it would be a good place to do our own little pub crawl, we went place to place and even found a New Orleans still bar with a huge black guys singing some blues without a microphone, and his friend playing piano. They were very good, we even went back there for dinner the next night. Also from Prague we left on a day trip to Plzen to take a tour of the Pilsner Urquelle brewery. Birthplace of Pilsner beers. The gave us some unfiltered right from the barrel Pislner Urquelle beer. I liked it alot more than the bottled stuff. Overall Prague was a nice place to stay.

We headed more east to Polland next, and stayed in Krakow. This was one of our worst train ride I would say, we did not have a seat for the first 3 hours of our ride. the train was so crowded we had to stand in the aisle and attempted to read. It was worth it though because Krakow has been one of my favourites so far. It is one of the only cities in Polland that was not destroyed by Nazis. Apparently they liked the look of the town so much that they didnt want to destroy so they just took it over. So all of the old buildings were undammaged. Everything was pretty cheap there too, the eastern part of our trip has been nice on the budget. We also went to Auschwitz, which was definitely the saddest part of our trip. Its where the first concentration camp was, and also the biggest one. It was very strange to be standing where hundreds of thousands of innocent people died and suffered. We walked through the living facilities and they had little room, most of them starved to death. It was pretty sad. It was definitely a necessary stop, i think we all learned a lot and made me appreciate more than the numbers we hear, that they were all individuals. I think thats enough depressing stuff for now.

We went back to Krakow and checked out the old communist section of town, old square concrete buildings, with parapets for snipers to hide behing on the roofs. It was kinda cool to see, although very ugly. I've been finding more and more beggars in the eastern countries, they come very close and don't mind making you feel bad. Our tour guide told us that even though they look really sad and pathetic, she sees them at bars and in restaurants later in the night. So I did my best to ignore them.

Over a Beer or so our trio decide that Budapest would be our lazy city. Most of our trip so far has had very little down time, just one thing to the next. Our hostel was very small and had kind of a family feel to it. So we made a few friends right away, also for the third time I think three of Jack's friends from school happened to be in the same place as us, so we had a few more friends there too. Those are some of the reasons we decided to make it our relax city. Its cheap here too, I think it will be our last City where we will be well under budget. We stayed an extra day for that reason. We did fair amount of walking the first day, and checked out the buda side of town. Surprise, surprise we climbed up a hill to get a nice view, which we did get, right along the river. Budapest is known for their Spas so we went to one, they call them baths, but they are more like swimming pools with hot tub temperatures. It was very relaxing, and they had fountains with warm water you could stand under. It was just like a massage. It was just what we needed, and it was pretty much half way through our trip. We made another change in plans, now we are no longer going to Vienna, we were told by Jacks friends that there wasn't very much to do there, so we are going to Salsburg intstead and meeting up with them there also.
I'll try not to leave it so long till my next post, its easier for me to do a little at a time aswell.
cheers everyone