I tried to think of some puns featuring Warsaw, Vilnius or Riga, but the few I could come up with were too dreadful to inflict on you

Location: Riga
Visited since last post: the Russkie market in Warsaw (OK, so strictly I mentioned Warsaw in the previous posts, but the market is a different world), Vilnius
Mood: slow. I've been catching up on sleep but can't help suspecting I still need more
Company : an Aussie, a Kiwi, two Americans and a Korean [in Vilnius]. Sounds like the start of a bad joke, doesn't it?
Reading : a friend's draft article. I've been carrying it around for a month and finally started reading it....
Weather : crystalline blue skies, but the evening cold is starting to bite.

My final verdict on Warsaw is actually that it's rather a shame I couldn't spend longer there, though the proviso that being in a hurry there is highly stressful still applies. Hassle notwithstanding, I did manage to get a new camera, and from what I've seen so far it's actually much better than my old one. I've also got a mini tripod and clamp (the mount for my other tripod was on the old camera when I lost it, rendering the tripod useless), which is handy because it's way smaller than what I used to have, but does occasionally lead to me looking very stupid as I try to see the screen on the back of a camera that's only 6 inches above the ground and pointing up. Perhaps I should invest in a small mirror, which would be even stranger but far less conspicuous....

The Russian market is an utterly bizarre sight. Take a stadium (about the size of the Milton Keynes National Bowl, and even more of a shithole than it), surround it with market stalls, the traders in which are not exclusively Russian, but do seem to exclude Poles, add lovely views of Warsaw as a backdrop, and you get close some idea of what I saw. What really makes it though is the selection of items on sale. The whole thing is arranged in 3 circles, as if symbolising Dante's hell, with the first circle consisting of relatively conventional market goods - worryingly cheap alcohol, clothes with brand names like Alf Lauren and Lewi's, and a fur coat stall that looked completely incongruous because it seemed to sell products that actually were of high quality. The only remarkable things about the outer circle was the complete lack of interest that the traders seemed to have in, well, trading. It's a cliche of the recently-communist countries that people supposedly don't 'get' capitalism, and actually in the majority of places it's quite an unfair perception (I'm fairly convinced that Germany is where shop staff were least interested in selling things to me, to the point that I did walk out of a couple of shops because I got so bored waiting for the attendant to finish his/her personal phone call). However, here at the market (where normally I'd expect capitalism to reach a far more frenzied pace than in standard shops) I'd have to stare at a stall for some time before the owners could be bothered to look up from their games of cards or backgammon. In the second circle things get a bit more interesting, with every sort of software and a vast selection of music and DVDs in obviously pirated editions, and an array of mobile phones which if they weren't all stolen would be worth an awful lot of money.

It was only in the inner circle that I quite understood why I had been told I had to see this place though. There was enough gear there to mount a revolution. Starting relatively innocently, with very large binoculars, and the sort of long heavy maglites that security guards in the UK need licences to carry because they are such useful weapons (and bear in mind that while some of the Polish police carry guns, others are armed only with sticks). As I walked around I started to see foot-long survival knives (because when you're stranded in the jungle, you really want to carry something that heavy, right?), and one of the traders obligingly demonstrated the sharpness of his wares to me by shaving his arm with one, and eventually guns. This might not carry quite as strong a resonance in the States, but bear in mind that I grew up in a country where if you see a policeman with a gun it's still a little surprising, and if anyone else has one you run like hell. It was pretty unnerving stumbling across a market stall covered in revolvers....

Nothing else in Warsaw was quite that remarkable, and I can see why it tends not be highlighted on tourist itineraries, because there aren't that many 'sights' to gather round in a hard and take photos of, but it really is a very nice place. I think it's the first place I've been to since Berlin that I could actually imagine wanting to live in. The youth hostel was terrible though. I started to get a bit worried about the fact that I didn't like anyone I spoke to there, thinking that perhaps it was me having suddenly become jaded now that I'm travelling alone (it wasn't - more on that below), and then to make things worse there was a school group of 10-year-olds staying on my last night, so I got very little sleep.

From Warsaw, I took an overnight train to Vilnius, which was a bit disappointing. It's not that I have any real criticisms of the city (except that there's no information visible at all on leaving the station), but it just seems to be an unremarkable and restrictively small place. Having found solitude entirely pleasant in Warsaw (and profitable - I don't know if it's because they took pity on me dining alone, or just because I expressed an interest in strange local drinks, but the restaurant where I had my last meal before leaving town gave me a succession of delicious sweet vodka-based spirits on the house), I think I would have been deathly bored, and consequently depressed if I hadn't met anyone interesting in Vilnius. The one thing that was good about the place though was the youth hostel. It's not an especially nice building or anything, but it had a good common room, where a large selection of interesting lone travellers hung out, and whenever anyone went into town if they didn't want to wander around alone it was easy enough to muster a small crowd. I hope things continue to work out that way, but I think that a lot of my Russian accommodation is in private rooms. Still, I'll be meeting one of the Vilnius people in Moscow and potentially again in UB, and most hostels are unconcerned enough about people loitering that I can always hang around in their common rooms anyway.

In fact there was one incident of note in Vilnius. We (6 people from the hostel) went out for dinner, and this very deranged and drunk (looking at his eyes he was either seriously unhinged or on a combination of heavy duty stimulants and booze) Aussie expat heard antipodean accents and came over, addressing what was essentially a monologue (with pauses in which people tried to respond sensibly, but he always ignored the responses) about Australia to the Kiwi of the group (who didn't seem too pleased about being mistaken for an Aussie by one). Eventually he left us alone, and went to sit with his two friends, who we think were Lithuanians, and in any case were very large and looked like hardened seaman types. Later on he decided to come back and ask me whether I was from Sydney or Melbourne. When I replied London he seemed to take offence and started making vaguely threatening noises about how he can understand everything you say, you know and there's always someone to ruin everything, and then as he was walking away he turned back and muttered something in either Lithuanian or Tongues. His large mate kept staring at me from then on, so needless to say we decided to make like a tree. What I found very funny was that occasionally I worry about being a conspicuous outsider and getting trouble from the locals, and so far the only trouble I've had anywhere has been from a bloody anglo. Still, he was very obviously of the sort who leave their homeland because they can't deal with normality....

I'm in Riga now, and this place has to stand out as the biggest pleasant surprise of the trip so far. For some reason I had it in my head that Latvia was simply like Lithuania, but less interesting, but I'm glad I wasn't forthright with that opinion, because it's completely unfounded. Riga is a bustling (at around 8 on a Friday that word can be replaced with heaving) city packed with beautiful and distinctive buildings in a cacophony of styles, with a particular concentration of highly decorated Art Nouveau. So far all I've done is walk around town, and there's plenty more walking (and photography) to be done, but I want to be a bit more organised tomorrow and either go on a day trip to Sigulda (which is supposed to be much more of a quaint small town) or actually go into some museums. I've generally seen remarkably few museums so far on this trip, which isn't such a bad thing seeing as they can get a bit monotonous over the course of months, but I know so little about Latvia that I ought to try and learn more while I'm here.

I'm staying in a hotel at the moment, which means that instead of meeting people without trying it's actually really hard to find anyone to talk to (especially when I speak none of the local lingo), but it's worth it because I was wearing myself out. Between two international sleeper trains (which means being woken up in the middle of the night for passport control that so far has always been hassle-free, but still keeps me awake for long enough that it takes a while to fall asleep again), and the general difficulty of having a lie-in in hostel dorms, I've not been sleeping anywhere near enough for the past week. I wasn't exactly ill, but I wasn't feeling well at all in Vilnius, so between the obvious need for more sleep and a warning from other travellers that Riga's hostels are annoyingly far out into the suburbs this seemed like a good idea. I think the extra sleep I've had so far (having gone to bed as soon as I checked in and not gone out again till lunchtime) and will get tonight should restore me to feeling 100% tomorrow, in which case it will have been worth the sacrifice of sociability....

On Sunday night I'll set off for Russia, where everything will get that little bit more exciting but also more scary. I hope I do find a way to meet people I can speak to, because wandering around alone for a few days is fun, but being alone for several weeks is one thing that would be sure to stop me enjoying myself.

posted @ 4:16 PM -

I've done it again - written several posts which will now appear backwards. If you've already read yesterday's, then skip to the first entry from today and read them in chronological order. If you haven't read yesterday's yet, then here is where to start.

posted @ 4:40 PM -

Scratch the surface

Don't let me put you off Warsaw. It's very much like how a fellow traveller in Dubrovnik describe the Slavic people - there's a nasty and hard exterior, but if you take the trouble to get past that it's always worth it. I had a refreshingly mundane day today, of doing laundry and buying myself a new camera, and though getting around is still quite a trial, getting lost in Warsaw is a very pleasant experience. Behind the over-busy main streets, there are lots of small parks and courtyards, and although there is little of old Warsaw preserved, the post-war building has mostly been well executed. All in all it's a nice leafy place to walk around in, just as long as you aren't in a hurry to get anywhere.

Tomorrow I'll go back to doing tourist things again, and tomorrow night I'll head for Vilnius. I would actually like to spend longer here, but I have to enter Russia on Sunday night from Riga, and the trains to Vilnius are only every other night, so if I dally here I'll have to cut out either Vilnius or Riga, which I already did last year, and I don't want them to be places I perpetually fail to see.

Must go now so I can get in to the hostel and sleep somewhere warm. This has been my life - how are you?

posted @ 4:38 PM -

You achieve a zen-like state, as if someone else is driving

As soon as I left Britain I became very calm, probably because my last few weeks before leaving had been so hectic. Far from dissipating, that calm has become more and more set in, and it's been very helpful considering that some people in Eastern Europe still have a lot to learn about customer service, but yesterday was the closest I came to losing it.

My journey to Warsaw actually managed to go wrong before I had even reached Krak�w station. Buying public transport tickets is even more difficult in Krak�w than Bratislava, to the point that Peter & I simply gave up trying after a while. Most of the time we just walked everywhere, because it's not a very big place and it's very pleasant to walk around in, but once I had re-attached my backpack I couldn't face the mile or so from where I was staying, so I decided to just risk it and ride free. A couple of inspectors did show up, looking like right shady characters (they don't have a uniform, just ID badges, and they wear battered leather jackets that make them look like dodgy antiques dealers). Unsurprisingly they wouldn't accept my sincere protestation that I had actually tried in vain to buy a ticket, but they were surprisingly nice about it. I'm sure in Britain conductors try to inconvenience fare dodgers as much as possible, by doing things like marching them off the bus/train at the next stop wherever it is, but here they asked where I was going, and waited till we reached the station so they could get off the tram with me without causing me too much trouble. The one taking the money then kept repeating the fine, sounding like he expected me to be horrified by it, when in fact it's not that bad (110 z�oty), and it didn't occur to me until later that he might have been hoping for a bribe. In the end he wrote out the ticket very resentfully (which is why I think he didn't expect the transaction to be conducted in the official way), and I was far more concerned about how close I was to missing my train than the fine itself, because they really did take their time.

The actual train ride was fine, but then arrival was a complete nightmare. Warsaw In Your Pocket describes Warszawa Centralna station as a disgrace, and they ain't lying. For a start there are no signs with the station name at all, and Warsaw has several stations, so I just had to assume I was in the right place based on the fact that I had been warned about its awfulness. Then the platform is really dingy (as were many parts of the station, and bear in mind that I arrived in the early afternoon on a sunny day), and there are no signs to anything at all. It was obvious that I had to take an escalator up, so I just picked one, and ended up in some sort of concourse, but not the main one. In the end the only way I could find the main ticket hall was to leave the station altogether, and follow street-level signs for the station, to get back to the main entrance.

The main hall is on 3 levels, so I went to a ticket clerk on the lowest level first. She didn't speak any English, and my knowledge of Polish can be tactfully described as minimal (though it's a nice language, and I am starting to make sense of signs etc.), so I got out a pen and paper and managed to convey that I wanted a sleeper reservation for a train to Vilnius. She pointed me upstairs, and I think she was explaining that she couldn't do international bookings. Upstairs there were enormous queues (another thing I had been warned about in Eastern Europe, but which has mostly been an unfair stereotype), and I didn't see the word for international on any of the kiosks, but they all had exactly the same text, so I just picked a queue. After a while I reached the window, only to be pointed upstairs again. I wandered off, and then realised I could see an upstairs gallery, but no way to get there. A friendly copper (Warsaw seems to be crawling with police, but all they do is stand around looking bored and occasionally harrass tramps) pointed me through an unmarked door to a dingy staircase, which led up to another set of ticket booths, still not signed as international, but with a large map on the wall as a sort of subtle clue. The person here evidently could help, but once again spoke no English. As has happened a few times in Poland, an extremely helpful attitude together with some creative use of drawings made the transaction possible in spite of this. My particular worry here was to ensure that the train won't travel through Belarus, because I don't have a visa for there, and the most direct route would go through a corner of it. I'm reasonably sure it doesn't. There's still an outside chance I'll find myself rudely awakened by a Belarussian border guard throwing me off the train in the middle of the night though....

All I had left to do after this was buy a 3 day pass for the public transport (once again no sign of where to do so, but the guidebook pointed me to the right newsagent - ironically I've used buses and trams lots today and not been checked at all), and get the tourist information to book a hostel. Should be simple enough, but all that tourist information could offer was a place called the School Youth Hostel with an absolutely rigid 11pm curfew. When I said I wasn't happy with that curfew (actually I think curfews in general are a terrible idea, but my main objection was that it was so early) the assistant gave me a lecture about how you have to be considerate to the other guests. I felt like pointing out that my hope was to meet other guests and go out for the evening with them, but I just walked away because it clearly wasn't worth the effort. I also felt like asking her who she thought she was lecturing me like that when she was obviously fresh out of school and I had been living with people in a perfectly civilised manner for a few years now, but again it clearly wasn't worth doing.

I decided instead to go off in search of some of the less restrictive hostels listed in my guide. I started at what the guide calls the king of Warsaw hostels, which of course was booked out. The receptionist told me this with an expression that spoke volumes: what were you thinking turning up here without a reservation. Anyone would think it's the off-season or something.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I did an awful lot of traipsing round Warsaw, which is a bloody nightmare to get around if you don't know the area. There are whole sections of road where it's impossible to cross, and I've now got into the habit of using buses to get across main roads because it really is that bad, and the public transport by contrast is a model of efficiency. There are also a lot of small roads not marked on any of the 3 maps I now possess, public transport maps seem simply not to exist, and none of my maps indicate numbers on streets, in spite of the fact that many streets are 2 or 3 miles long. Then there's the metro. There's only one line, but the stations are just as confusing as the main train one. They seem to be of the two unconnected platforms model, except that the only way to choose a platform is by choosing the right entrance at street level, and the entrances are signposted by the names of the end-of-line stations. All very well, except that there's no map until you reach the platform, and the line is still being built, so the end of one of the lines is a station that doesn't even exist yet. Kafka would be proud.

Total time from getting off the inter-city train to finally getting on to a metro train away from the main station area: 1½ hours. And that was before I went to the first hostel. And where do you think I ended up staying? The School Youth Hostel of course. It's clean, comfortable, cheap, in a nice area, and truly awful. The staff talk to everyone like schoolchildren, as far as I can tell they are totally rigid about the curfew (and there's a tower from which you can see the Warsaw skyline, which doesn't open till 11pm, so I have a choice for tonight between missing that or risking spending the whole night locked out), and during the day it's locked from 10am to 4pm, so I had to carry my bloody laundry around all day and look like a tramp.

posted @ 4:17 PM -

Ghosts

The other part of Krak�w's sad undertone is more subtle. The last thing I did before heading for Warsaw was to wander around Kasimierz, which used to be the Jewish Quarter. If you were to walk around Golders Green there would be a sort of vibrancy to it which is pleasing, even though it's not my favourite of places by any means. There's also obvious infrastructure - Kosher butchers, bagel bakeries, and some of the best take-aways for Middle-Eastern food in London. Kazimierz has two Jewish restaurants, and one working synagogue, and that's it. Plus I'm not convinced that both of the restaurants are actually run by Jews (one of them seemed to use a menorah as its symbol, only it had too many branches), and one of them had a klezmer band, only they had had to import the musicians from Galicia (no, not the most obvious of places, but that's what their sign proclaimed). 70 years ago the streets would have been full of life on a Sunday morning, and the Jewish community would have been impossible not to see everywhere around. Now there are just these things, a few other synagogues that have been preserved as museums (a general observation about Poland is that at least some of the people here seem very eager to make sure that such things are preserved and remembered), and the ghosts of Hebrew inscriptions or stars of David on one or two doorways here and there.

If I could have told myself that the people just moved away, or assimilated into the Polish community, then it would have been OK. What was so upsetting was the knowledge that the people who had made this area home had been systematically wiped out.

Perhaps it's because Auschwitz is so intensely horrible that it's numbing, but somehow I found this more touching.

posted @ 3:30 PM -

Never forget

For all its loveliness, Krak�w also has a deeply sad undertone to it. It was the site of a flourishing Jewish community once, and then the Nazis invaded, and set up one of the largest concentration camps nearby.

We went to Auschwitz. I won't write much about it, because I can't avoid lapsing into cliches, and many more articulate people have expressed the same thoughts as I have in a better way. I do feel the need to say some things though. The first is that everyone should see a concentration camp. It's actually part of the curriculum in Germany that every schoolkid has to visit one at some point in their education, and I think that should be extended beyond Germany. Until after the event no-one believed that such utter debasement of humanity was possible, and now that we know it can happen it is really important that we never forget.

As we were leaving Peter turned to me, tears in his eyes, and something to the effect of I don't know how you haven't broken down. I'm not even a Jew and I'm cracking. The truth is I don't know how I didn't break down either, but I was certainly close, and there were parts that I skipped because after a while I was just desperate to get out of that place. I think in the end I felt more angry than upset, and in a way anger is easier to contain. I disagree very strongly with those who would still bear a grudge against modern Germans for what their grandparents did (and such people do exist - I remember someone asking me why I was learning that Nazi language when I chose German instead of Spanish at school), but walking through that place I could at least understand where they are coming from.

The thing that struck me most was the scale. Auschwitz is already large, but then there are aerial photographs of the area, on which Birkenau (the Vernichtungslage - we didn't visit there because I was too strongly gripped by the urge to run away by then) is evidently at least 10 times the size. Then one of the sections (the only one that was specifically about the Nazis' campaign against the Jews as opposed to the general suffering in the camp) finishes with a bare room, with a poignant small memorial in the middle, a lot of Jahrzeit candles, and a recording of the mourners' Kaddish. Normally there is a place in that prayer where the name of the deceased is inserted. This time there was a list of the camps' names instead. The list went on, and on, and on.

In the end Auschwitz just left me feeling horribly numb. There is still a part of me that doesn't want to believe that such a thing really happened. On the way back we met Jo & Jez, who seemed to be in a similar state. It was quite telling how at first Auschwitz was all we could talk about (and we were all really hungry, but none of us could face the prospect of eating for a while), but gradually conversation moved away. For the rest of the night (and even the following night when we met up again) it would still pop up every now and again, and 5 days later I'm still finding myself haunted by what I saw.

posted @ 3:06 PM -

Lies, damned lies, and other peoples' impressions about Poland

Of everywhere in the European part of my trip, Poland was probably the place I was looking forward to least. I had been told that the food was awful, there was nothing to see except Auschwitz, the cities were all ugly post-war constructions, and just generally given the impression that I'd want to leave pretty sharpish. Just goes to show that we should always make our own minds up about such things - all of those things were completely wrong.

But first things first. On the way from Bratislava to Krak�w I managed to lose my camera. As someone at the youth hostel put it, we go travelling, take security precautions and make it as hard as possible for us to be robbed of anything valuable, and then we mug ourselves. In my case I simply left the damn thing on a train in Katowice where we had to change. I'm not too bothered about the camera itself - it wasn't a great one and I should get most of the value back from my travel insurance - but it had a memory card with all my pictures to date. Anyone who's been travelling with me while I've had a camera will know that I am slightly pretentious about my photography and spend a long time playing around with it, so that's deeply frustrating to me.

In a strange way, this setback provided for a really pleasant introduction to Poland, because it let me quickly discover that the one positive thing I had been told about the place - that the people are generally really friendly and helpful - is in fact true. I didn't realise the camera was missing until we were on the next train, so at Krak�w station I went to the information desk to see if it could be tracked down. No-one spoke any English at all, but I ended up on the phone to an official's daughter, who interpreted for me. Then a message was relayed to the conductor of the train (I had a reservation card with the train number and all on it, so he was easy to track down), who by that time had already done his search through the train at the end of its journey, and hadn't found anything of note. No practical help in the end, but even so it made my first impression of Poland really lovely - could you imagine anyone at Brighton station doing that for a gormless tourist?

Krak�w continued to feel that way. It's a very pretty town (even in the unremittingly grey weather that persisted until the day after Peter left), and has a general nice buzz about it (probably due in considerable measure to the fact that it has a big student population, who were all arriving for the new term while we were there), but the thing that really made me enjoy my stay there was how wonderfully nice almost every person we encountered was. Both the Poles (especially the waitress who served us dinner on our first evening there, who was quite chatty and one of the most beautiful women I have ever set eyes upon) and the fellow travellers (big shout out to Jo & Jez - I hope you read this sooner or later).

posted @ 2:18 PM -

I've written a lot today, and I've been writing things in chronological order, while they display newest-first. It will probably make more sense if you jump down to the first of today's entries and then read them in order.

posted @ 3:42 PM -

I am not a number

It may be the first place I had negative things to say about, but on balance I did like Budapest. It's Bratislava that has the dubious honour of being the first place that I actually disliked. From the ugliness of the station, to the fact that it was the first place I felt I really had to be on my guard (nothing actually happened, but I did feel like there was some danger of mugging, which I haven't felt anywhere else we've been), to the unspeakably vile smell in the corner of the station where the cashpoint was, to the cold grey drizzle, the visit started pretty badly. Then there was the fact that it was completely impossible to buy tickets for public transport (there are machines everywhere, but they only take coins, and the smallest Koruna note is such a low denomination that very few purchases actually get coins in change, and people refuse to give you more, presumably because coins are in short supply and they need bus tickets too) while the consequences of not having a ticket are very starkly advertised (actually it's not that bad - a fine that translates to a mercifully small number of pounds), and the lack of any public transport maps, whether at the station (which isn't central), available from out hotel (which also wasn't central), in the guidebook (actually this is a general failing of the ubiquitous Lonely Planet Eastern Europe - the maps therein are frequently pants) or posted at bus stops. And I thought London buses were hard to work out!

Our hotel (strangely the only cheap place we found to book in advance was a relatively smart hotel, in which a triple room cost next to nothing, while the nearby hostels were charging London prices) obviously realised this difficulty, because there was a sign up in the station telling us how to get there, only the instructions involved counting 8 stops on the tram, which is surprisingly hard to do when being constantly jostled by other passengers and thrown around by the least smooth tram ride I've ever experienced. We eventually found the place - a concrete shoebox among other concrete shoeboxes - and at least the room itself was decent.

The reason we had booked a place in advance was so that we could meet Brian (with whom I shared a cubicle at work over the summer) there, and it was his arrival that saved out stay in Bratislava from being really awful. The best thing about the place is that really tasty food and decent beer are so cheap that we actually had difficulty getting rid of the small amount of cash we'd taken out when we arrived, and we ate very well and drank an lot of beer. I probably won't see Brian for ages now, because he's from LA and is heading back there soon, so it was particularly good seeing him for one last time.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bratislava itself is also the most awful - the new suburb across the river from the old town. The old town itself is quite pretty, but it's tiny, and then it's a short walk up a small hill to the castle, which offers outstanding views of an endless grey skyline. I have seen miserable Stalinist apartment blocks before, but never anything as inhuman as this skyline. Every single building was exactly identical, on a perfectly regular grid, with almost no space between them, stretching from one side of the horizon to the other (it's mainly the green spaces between buildings that makes Zagreb nice, and it was the limited scale of the concrete block estates that stopped them from being really horrible in Budapest). I know it's presumptious to judge a place where I stayed for a very short time from its architecture, but the whole district just seemed to sum up so much of the negative Western propaganda stereotype of Communism. It dwarfs people, and just seems to suck the colour out of everything. It felt like the kind of place where a person would not be Ivan Denisovic, but Worker 12 of Unit 4, Block 22. Until now I had always said to myself that these Communist-built districts were unpleasant, but not that bad, but this place really was dispiriting.

It gets better from here on - I'm falling in love with Poland - but that part will have to wait till tomorrow for me to write it, because although this internet cafe is open late, and I would happily stay here for another few hours, my hostel has signs absolutely everywhere about how the doors are locked 11pm and will not under any circumstances be opened until 6am, so I will have to leave here by about 10:30, and I have emails to write.

posted @ 3:29 PM -

McBudapest

Before setting off on this trip I had heard two opposing viewpoints on Budapest: one was that I would love it because it's a really beautiful city, and the other was that I would hate it because they have embraced Americana and capitalism with such vigour that it's killed off any native culture. Both had a point.

I have a strong suspicion that Budapest, or at least the central (read wealthy - the one journey we made out of town on a bus revealed quite how sharp the line is between the rich & elegant centre and the poor and grey outskirts) part of the city, has a higher number of McDonald's per inhabitant than London, and an impressive array of boringly familiar brand names. It's also reminiscent of certain parts of London in that there seemed to be several times as many foreign tourists in the more popular streets than Hungarians (I do appreciate the hypocrisy of complaining about tourists when I am one, but I hope to high heaven that I'm less annoying than some of these ones). There are other not-very-nice things about the place too, such as the fact that bars close earlier than in Britain (and as far as I can tell there's no law forcing them to), and that it's the first place where we saw the stereotypical depressing Stalinist apartment blocks (Tito may have been guilty of many things, but he spared Yugoslavia from the worst aspects of Stalinism, and Zagreb is a very human city as a result, while the other places we stayed were too small to have such things). There are good things to be said about the place too though - bear this in mind while I finish moaning.

The absolute worst thing about our stay in Budapest would have to be the first arrival at Keleti station. It probably didn't help that our previous 3 stops had all been small places, and it certainly didn't help that we'd been travelling for almost 24 hours, but even so the crowd at the station was quite bewildering. In fact it's probably the only place where we saw a really large number of Hungarians, all rushing (the whole Budapest transport system seems to be geared to rush rush rush, and while its efficiency is great it is a bit off-putting), in a station that actually has quite narrow platforms. Then someone homed in on us to try and sell us accommodation, only it wasn't one of the sweet sobe ladies like in Croatia (who also get a bit much at times, but are basically likeable), but an agent of a youth hostel. The most expensive youth hostel in town. As expensive as a cheap hotel, and he tried to sell it like it was the only option, and like it was cheap, but luckily we had done our homework and we knew better. What freaked us out though was that as we wandered towards the exit he appeared, and repeatedly did this while directing us back within the station. He was ostensibly being helpful (showing us where the cashpoint was and the like), but there was something really disturbing about his manner (I suppose the best way to describe it was that as soon as he clapped eyes on us backpackers we could see the cartoon dollar signs in his pupils), so we decided we just had to get out of the station, sit down in a cafe and work out where to stay. Getting out of the station took a while just because of the pressure of the crowd streaming in, and then the area around was depressing. It took us a while to find a place that we felt comfortable walking into as obvious tourists, and at that point we really had quite a negative feeling about the city.

Of course, we were in the equivalent of King's Cross, and actually if you compare like with like it felt a whole lot safer, but more importantly as soon as we left there things started to improve. We were almost the cause of a pile-up in the Metro station, because the escalators run unreasonably fast, so one basically has to leave the escalator at a fast job rather than the walk that works in London, and when we failed to do so the escalators simply remorselessly spat more people out in our direction. Still, the Metro itself was a model of efficiency, in spite of looking ancient, finding the youth hostel we had picked was easy, and it was a really nice place (it has the unpromising name of Best Youth Hostel, but it was good), and in fact by far the most sociable place we've stayed in. Now that I'm travelling alone I hope I can find more places like that.

From this point on we started to enjoy ourselves again, and Budapest is certainly a beautiful city. More to see than we had time for (we only had 2 days there, because we had to keep going north so Peter could get back to Berlin for his flight this morning, and I could be close enough to Riga to get there by the end of this coming week), and a relatively good place to do on the cheap because so much of what is worth seeing are the buildings themselves. We did splash out a little though, on some delicious food and a performance of Mozart's Requiem in the old church in the castle, which was fantastic.

If I had to pick a highlight of the trip so far it wouldn't be Budapest, but it was certainly an entertaining place to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and one more thing - we met our first (and so far only) dumb Americans there. You don't tend to meet many travelling in Eastern Europe, and by contrast it is relatively easy to meet interesting Americans, but these two did confirm that the stereotype is not baseless. There's a labyrinth under Buda castle, which consists of nothing authentic at all, but is done with an engagingly whimsy sense of humour, and they just didn't get it. There are authentic copies of cave paintings, painted onto plaster which has been slapped over the stone of the castle walls, with the stone wall visible all around. These two actually had to ask me if they were real! Oh well. Sometimes I feel like certain people only exist to make me feel better about myself.

posted @ 2:28 PM -

do re mi so far so good

Location: Warsaw
Visited since last post : Bratislava, Krakow
Mood : OK, but somewhat exasperated by the incomprehensibility of Warsaw (which I shall come back to later) and the autocratic regime in place at the only hostel that seemed to have beds.
Company : Peter until yesterday, assorted nice people we bumped into along the way in Budapest and Krakow, and Brian T in Bratislava. Now down to me, myself and I
Reading : The Economist. News from the rest of the world, and... nothing's happened!
Weather : well, let's just say that 10 days after sweating in shorts and sandals in Dubrovnik I have bought a nice heavy coat. Of course the day I got around to doing this the sun came out and it's nice and warm again now.

I have lots to write, and I probably won't finish today, but I'll be back tomorrow, and gradually catch up with emails to individuals as well. For now, the very short version is: Bratislava's not very nice, but meeting up with Brian and finding by far the cheapest bars we've yet seen meant that fun was had. Krakow is really really lovely, but walking around Auschwitz has to be the most intensely horrible experience I have ever voluntarily put myself through, and the ghosts of the Jewish quarter are also upsetting. I am finding Warsaw very difficult to deal with, not because it's unpleasant (once I finally found a hostel, had a shower and left my bag behind I started to quite like the place), but because navigation is damn near impossible as a pedestrian, even with the 3 different maps that I now possess, and public transport is even more opaque.

Peter went home yesterday, so I'm on my own now. I'm enjoying it so far, but it has only been 24 hours.... One damper - I lost my camera the other day, complete with all the photos (170-odd) I have taken on this trip so far. Bloody stupid thing to do.

posted @ 1:25 PM -