?>

Posts Tagged ‘churches’

5th September
2011
written by Justin

The culture in Istanbul is a very interesting mix resulting from a blend of two cultures: Ottoman and Roman. It was the capital of each empire for a time, and absorbed a lot from both cultures. While we were visiting, we got to experience a side of Istanbul that is unusual for us as we came from predominantly Christian areas of the US: Ramadan.

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque

(more…)

4th September
2011
written by Hazel

After our extreme adventure getting to Sofia we were happy to find our hostel and get settled in. We arrived late at night and then took it easy most of the next day. One of those laundry, blogging and recovering kinds of days. We went out for lunch at a kind of Italian-ish restaurant and were completely amused by the constant flow of weddings going on. I’m not sure what it was, but we must have been sitting outside a registry office or something because every ten minutes or so another wedding party would pull up with decorated cars and a big bridal party. They would go inside this shabby building for a few minutes, come back out and leave. This went on the whole time we were eating lunch (and in fact, we saw weddings going on all over the city the whole time we were there).

One of the many weddings we witnessed

One of the many weddings we witnessed

It was quite an experience being in Sofia – they use a Cyrillic alphabet, but our map had the street names written in the Roman alphabet, so we couldn’t find ANYTHING.

Pretty useless map if you ask me!

Pretty useless map if you ask me!

(more…)

7th August
2011
written by Hazel

We opted for another free walking tour in order to get our bearings in Budapest, and I have to say, I thought it was one of the best.  Our guide was really good and we saw a lot of the sights.  The city is beautiful and we decided to give ourselves a little of a photo challenge – trading cameras for the day!  My camera has really awesome zoom capabilities, but Justin’s takes much better wide shots and has virtually no zoom.  We bought them because we knew they would complement each other, but it was a quite different experience to trade off!

Here are some of my favorites that Justin took:

Decoration on a building

Decoration on a building

Fountain

Fountain

(more…)

2nd August
2011
written by Justin

Many of you are probably thinking: Why haven’t they gone up to see the castle yet!  It’s so spectacular!  I don’t know, but we never did end up going to see the castle.  We heard rumors of another sight not far from Prague that sounded so much more unique and exciting to me that we went there instead!  It was the Sedlec Ossuary, a church whose cellar is completely full of (and decorated with) human bones!  This is not the type of thing that even exists in the US so we jumped at the chance to go.  It took a two hour train ride to get to the town, a suburb of the city of Kutna Hora.

Sedlec Ossuary

Sedlec Ossuary

(more…)

30th July
2011
written by Hazel

We left Berlin heading for Prague, but since it was a pretty long train journey we decided to make a stop in Dresden, in the south of Germany, to break things up a little. We were supposed to have a few hours to walk around, but because we misread the train schedule we ended up only having about an hour and a half.

Dresden has a fairly compact center, so we were able to walk from the train station and just spend some time wandering around. There are many really beautiful buildings to look at. We first walked through a kind of shopping mall area, and then arrived at the older part of town.

Since we didn’t have time to investigate much I’ll just post some of the pictures we took and leave you with the same kind of general impression that we got. Click any of the photos below to see our whole gallery.  It looks like it would be a good place for a holiday…

Shopping mall area

Shopping mall area

(more…)

27th July
2011
written by Justin

We landed in Berlin’s TXL Airport without a hitch after passing through Latvia’s hugely expensive Riga airport. The first sign that we had that life is different in Berlin is the convenient Contact Lens Dispenser, right on the way out of the airport! Neither Hazel nor I had ever seen such a thing so of course we were required to buy some contacts for me right there on the spot. Hopefully they will be usable during snorkel and scuba dives later in the trip!

Contacts!

Contacts!

After some currywurst in the airport, we were refreshed enough to try to find our new hostel: Main Station Hostel. You would think that this hostel would be right next to the main station in Berlin (known as Hauptbanhof) but in fact it is a small distance away from a rather secondary train stop on one of the city lines. Oh well. We found it after about 30 minutes and were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the hostel. The bunk beds were solid – no shaking – and the lockers were more like little closets. But the best part was that our 8-bunk dorm room was divided into 3 sections: a bit by the door with 6 beds, a bathroom, and an intermediate room with a table, some lockers, and only 2 beds! So we were able to have a a semi-private room there. We were both still exhausted; running around Helsinki with friends is a great way to visit, but it does take up a lot of your energy to do so much cool stuff, and we still hadn’t had a chance to do absolutely nothing for a while after Herrang. So we more or less went to bed straight away.
(more…)

18th July
2011
written by Justin

This was a really exciting time for us, as we were about to embark on a type of journey that neither of us had experienced before: a sleeper train. With our Eurail ticket, the train fare was included but unfortunately not the bed reservation, which can be very expensive! Our ticket, being first class, allowed us to get 1st class beds – one bunk each in a 2 bunk room – but there were two reasons we decided not to get that. First, those beds cost over 100 euros EACH! Of course we were not going to purchase those tickets at that price. Second, we could not have reserved beds in the same room! They were single-sex only. These two things completely convinced us to downgrade to a 2nd class sleeper car which cost 26 euros each and was 2 bunks in the same room with 6 bunks total. That’s right, we were able to book bunks together in 2nd class. How strange!

Sleeper Car

Sleeper Car

(more…)

12th July
2011
written by Hazel

We left Luxembourg in the morning and had a rather slow train ride to Strasbourg, in France.  I’m not sure if there was something wrong with the train, but about every 20 minutes we would stop for five or ten minutes before continuing on.  And not at a station either, just in the middle of nowhere.  Still, it was pretty countryside and we were not in too much of a hurry.

Once we got to Strasbourg it about noon and we headed straight to the information desk in the train station.  They were very helpful and explained how to get the tram to the hotel we had booked, and what the best transportation options are.  Strasbourg has a really good tram system that runs at most hours of the day and it is possible to get a ticket (for about 5 Euros) that lets up to three people travel on the trams as much as they want for 24 hours.  This was so, so good.  We were able to see so much of the city and had no problems at all getting around.

Our hotel was called Cerise Hotel and was a big success.  Inexpensive, really clean, internet in the rooms (important because we still had a lot of planning we needed to do) and even had a fridge and microwave in the room so that you could eat in a bit.  We took pretty full advantage of that!

Our plan was to do a few hours of planning and work on updating the (very out of date) blog and then to get out and see something of the city in the evening.  Despite having a small setback with our internet not working, the hotel sent someone up immediately to fix it, and we were able to get a few days of plans finalized.  This calmed us down substantially and as we set out to see the city we were feeling so happy and positive!

We took the tram to the central area and then walked around taking it in.

Canal and "Petite France"

Canal and "Petite France"

(more…)

1st July
2011
written by Justin

Because of the stress we encountered upon entering Europe, we decided to remedy our poor planning as soon as possible and reserve 1 week or more of our upcoming accomodation and transportation.  Of course, nothing is that simple – our hotel, being the cheapest in Luxembourg, did not have internet available (but, interestingly, it did have an ashtray in the shared bathroom), so we went on a quest to find some cheap or free wifi in town.  This also afforded us a chance to sightsee along the way into town!

Valley and Bridge

Valley and Bridge

(more…)

28th June
2011
written by Hazel

The next stop on our family tour of the UK was Durham, where my brother is working on his PhD. He recently bought a house, so we were excited to see him and to check out his new place. He gave us a wonderful tour of castle and abbey ruins and I had a blast taking tons of photos.

We started out with a bit of a walking tour of the town, cathedral, and the castle which is part of the university.

It was a beautiful walk along the river. The cathedral is in the background.

Walking along the river into town

Walking along the river into town

(more…)

Previous