After what felt like far too short a visit to Prague, we traveled to Berlin for a 4 day and 5 night stay. Once again, the bus was the way to go, being cheap and fast, with wifi and coffee included in the price. We chose to stay at the Leonardo Hotel in Mitte, which is close to the former Jewish quarter, U-Bahn train system, and plenty of good restaurants. Berlin has a totally different feel than the previous ten-or-so…
For us to get around Europe, we found buses to be dirt cheap and pretty nice. We used Flixbus a few times, as well as Polski Bus and RegioJet. They all have nice seats, wifi, and RegioJet even has TV screens in each seat and you can watch movies! Trains were so expensive that buses made sense for our budget. We took a RegioJet to Prague from Wroclaw. We had sort of misplanned our timing and scheduled ourselves to be…
After Krakow, we continued our European city tour with a visit to Wroclaw for 3 nights, and by the 3rd night I can say we actually learned how to pronounce the city’s name. We stopped there partly to break up our journey to Prague, and partly to see the city (Poland’s 4th largest) and nearby Karkonoski National Park. We were also excited to see the Jewish quarter with its synagogue, restaurants, and memorials, and (unrelated) the random dwarf statues scattered…
To get to Krakow, we took the night train from Budapest. We got a sleeper car and thought it would be great because we got accommodation and transportation in one. Turns out you don’t sleep much on a sleeper train, especially one that makes frequent stops. I slept better on the turbulent ferry from Italy to Croatia! Needless to say, we were exhausted when we got to Krakow. We made our way to Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter of Krakow where we…
After a weekend in lovely Bratislava, we bused to Budapest for 4 nights in the Hungarian capitol city. This felt like somewhat of a homecoming for me since my mom’s family immigrated from Hungary to the U.S. when things started getting bad for the Jews during WWII. And while my grandmother really comes from farther east, in a town that’s now part of Ukraine, seeing the synogogues, memorials, Hebrew signage, Jewish food, etc. really made both of us feel at…
It turns out flying to Europe from Australia takes a long time. In our case, 2 red-eye flights with a layover in Abu Dhabi, and 24 hours later we were in Rome. The good thing about travelling west, though, is that you become an early riser instantly due to the jetlag. Landing early in the morning, and seeing as we were in the neighborhood, we swung by good old Trevi Fountain on the way to our guesthouse. Normally the attraction is swarmed…
Before we even flew to New Zealand, we were required to have an outbound flight due to visa rules. We ended up having to do this at 4:30am before our flight to Auckland, so made a quick decision that we’d come back to Australia after our time in NZ and explore Sydney since Shawn’s never been. We arrived midday and checked into our Airbnb with our lovely hosts, Jessica & Ben and their amazing dog, Zoey, in the super hip neighborhood…