Monthly Archives: February 2013

First Stop on First Solo Backpacking Trip: Prague, Czech Republic

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So here we are, the morning after Groezrock Festival ends.  I wake up in Geel, Belgium at 5:00 am to the sound of church bells outside my window. I am ready to go and get started on my trip.

Today is by far the worst travel day of my trip, but it needs to happen to get me situated where I want to be.  I am going from Geel to Brussels Midi.  From Brussels to Frankfurt.  From Frankfurt to Nurnberg.  From Nurnberg to Prague. It’s fifteen hours of traveling.  In addition to that, it includes a bus ride. For some reason, the bus ride intimidates me. I don’t know why. I’m like that even back home in New York.

I wake up and walk to the Geel train station to start my long day.  At Brussels Midi, I grab some breakfast and figure out where I am going.  It is at this point while standing on the train platform, that I realize my ticket actually has information on it that I didn’t know it had.  You know, because the ticket is in German and I do not speak German.  It turns out that on the ticket is the car number and seat number.  I knew I had made a seat reservation but I did not know how to read the ticket.  I asked a conductor for help and he pointed this out to me on my ticket.  He also showed me how to tell where each car is going to be when the train pulls in.  From this day forward, I now know that I can use Google translator to figure out my pre-purchased train tickets and find this information.  Easy, peasy!

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Brussels: Belgium and Geel

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After working a full day, I went straight from my job to JFK Airport and boarded a flight to Brussels.   I had a layover in Dublin.   I arrived in Brussels at 9:25 am on April 27, 2012.  I don’t sleep on planes, I have never been able to.  When I landed, I had been up a number of hours I was way too exhausted to do the math for.  Also bonus: when I landed, the clock on my phone was an hour behind.  I have no idea why.  Someone suggested it was because of daylight savings time.  Well don’t phones get the time from a satellite or something?  It was so frustrating because I was so exhausted.  I could not figure out how to manually do the time.  I didn’t want to change the time to another time zone to get it to appear right because what if it auto corrected?  Then I wouldn’t know and was looking at some other country’s time zone.  I have so many trains to catch this trip.  I need to know what time it is!  I am so tired please god please AH YES I FIGURED OUT HOW TO MANUALLY DO THE TIME YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHH.

So despite having my first meltdown before even leaving the airport, I wanted to see some of Brussels.  I collected my luggage, got my passport stamped, took a train to Brussels Centrale and ditched my luggage in a locker.  I was really happy I had Euro coins with me leftover from my last trip so I didn’t have to scrounge for change to do this.

Did I mention I was exhausted?  All I wanted was a large iced coffee.  Everywhere I went, that’s all I could focus on, never got it.

I walked around Brussels a bit and took pictures.  Most of them ended up not coming out. I can see the thumbnails but I get an error when I open them.  We like to call this “act like it’s not happening”.

Brussels has a casino that I could not find for the life of me (this is probably best).   I was able to find Mannekin Pis though, so that was good.

mannekin pis

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Budapest, Hungary

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chain bridge budapest

The train to Budapest was actually quite enjoyable.   The seats were very comfortable and they were out in the open and not inside a cabin. I do not like cabin seating.   I don’t want to spend hours face to face with someone.

I arrived in Budapest at midnight.  I walked outside. It is POURING.  I thought I found the metro but I wasn’t sure since there is absolutely no signage outside.  I wait and finally break my hatred of asking people for help.  They tell me yes, this is the metro station.  Thank you.

I go downstairs, burning hot.  The escalators are very fast, this scares me to death.  I don’t know what it is but recently I’ve started to get scared of getting on escalators going down. It’s the stupidest fear and it developed right in time for me to go to Europe with these super speedy down escalators.

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Vienna, Austria

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riesenrad, prater park, vienna, austria

I am really glad I kept a diary.  If I had to write this from memory, today would start out as “took the train from Bratislava to Vienna, dropped my stuff off in my hotel and hurried to see Prater Park because I could not wait to ride the Riesenrad!!”   But reading my diary, that not what happened at all.

I took the train from Bratislava to Vienna.  In my diary, as I’ve mentioned, I write down all the intermediate stops and times we are supposed to stop at them.  Despite this, I ended up questioning myself as to where to get off and ended up staying on one stop longer. Then I had to figure out how to get back to where I was supposed to be.   It turned out I had to take a commuter train back to that stop and then continue following my directions for the subway.  I did all of this with my stubborn insistence of never asking anyone for help.  It’s funny how I don’t remember the annoying mistakes I had to deal with.

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Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic

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Another huge highlight of Prague was my side trip to Kutna Hora to see the Sedlec Ossuary, the church made out of human bones.   I had seen so many pictures of this and could not wait to see it in person.  The train was easy peasy.  The walk to from the train station was also easy as google had led me to a blog where someone clearly laid out walking directions, which were way easier than following a map.

train station1

In case you are wondering – you get off the train. Follow the crowds though an underpass under the tracks to exit the train station.

Try and stop to look at the map and find yourself unable to because there’s too many people in your way.

kutna hora map, train station

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One Night in Bratislava, Slovakia

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Bratislava is a destination I had never even heard of until I went nutso on eBay and bought around 25 European guide books just because they were a dollar each.  I cannot express just how uneducated I was on Europe before I started making plans to see it.

Many books will tell you that Bratislava is not worth an overnight stay.  Now that I’ve been there, I can also say the same thing.  But you know what? I like being able to say “It’s not really worth an overnight stay” and have me saying that be based on me doing it.  I love all the knowledge I gained on my trip, even if it’s only stupid little things like that.

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