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Showing posts with the label Danube

Hungary

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"Merry Christmas!" My girlfriend Felicia and I exchanged gifts, and the gifts would be that we would go to Hungary to meet the spring 4 months later. The time finally arrived and so did we to the capital Budapest which I quickly renamed to Budabest since I liked it so much. Pest in Swedish means plague so it sounded better to say best. Budapest is everything I expected Berlin to be, it's creative and charming since it has embraced the worn down buildings. They even got bars called ruinpubs situated in buildings that were doomed for destruction which are now instead equipped with rejected furnitures and beer taps. We arrived at night and took a quick walk around the block before we went to bed. The next day we immediately left the city center to go take a morning bath at the famous and yellow Szechenyi thermal bath. It's the largest medicinal bath in Europe and was opened in the early 1900's. It smelled like fart in the inner sections so we...

Slovakia

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The capitals of Austria and Slovakia are so close to each other that it took just an hour to get from Vienna to Bratislava by bus when my friend Erik and I had been visiting Austria for a couple of days. Now it was time to enjoy the poor side of the border and it's weird how two cities that are so close to each other can be like night and day. I just hoped our visit wouldn't turn out as bad as in the horror movie Hostel which is said to take place in Slovakia. We arrived in the autumn and it was raining down on the gray foundation that is the worn down suburbs of Bratislava. My first impression was horrible and I wished we had stayed in the grand and beautiful Vienna instead. Then I quickly understood that it was a big difference between the suburbs of Bratislava where the bus station was located and the city center. When we arrived at the boat hotel on the river Danube that floats through the city, it felt like coming home for me. I had seen the river floating through many...

Serbia

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I don't know why but I couldn't sleep the night before I went to the airport together with Nils to go to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It was early December and we were met by a gray, dull and gloomy city that still had its marks from the Yugoslav wars during the 90's. We asked for direction to our hotel called Hotel Union and the girl I asked laughed before she pointed out the direction, that's never a good sign. We arrived at Hotel Union and we could almost not see where we were going in the corridors because they wouldn't use any lighting, probably to save money or something. It was supposed to be a 3 star hotel but I would learn from this trip that you should go for the guest reviews instead of the stars. We had separate rooms next to each other and I thought my room smelled a lot of smoke, but as we were just there for 3 days we quickly went out of the hotel and into the streets. Nils had asked the receptionist for a recommendation of what to do and she s...