Sitting on the sofa of the small common room area of the hostel in Lviv with my laptop, a two year old Mac Powerbook whose battery has pretty much died so it now needs to be constantly connected to a power supply. In the area just outside, covered by a leaking plastic roof, where building …
Things are difficult in Ukraine. Even though I didn’t understand the language in Slovakia, Poland or Lithuania, at least I could read the letters, and then it’s often possible to get an idea of what’s going on. The culture here is also quite different. East Europe by comparison is very European. I’m in Lviv now, …
I got on the train for Lviv at Kosice, Slovakia, at 7:24 but I didn’t have a ticket. I’d gone to what I think was the Kasa, ticket booth, in kosice station but the woman behind the curtains didn’t speak any English. I showed her my print out with the train I wanted to get …
I walked out of the pension and turned right. I walked up the hill, past two small churches and several hotels and pensions, to the cable car station, where there are a load of snack bars, a tourist information office, and bureau de change, and the ticket booth for cable cars that go up the …
The food in Poland was generally not that good, slabs of dry boneless meat with potatoes, though I’d taken to having salad, but it was always in a salad bar and seemed to have been sitting there for days. But on the last night in Krakow I ordered ribs, potatos, cabbage and pickled cucumbers, and …
The main pedestrianized street of Zakopane, whose name I forget because I don’t know how to pronounce it, is full of people walking up and down not seeming to be going anywhere, many of them going there with ice creams, binoculars, cameras and pushchairs. Most of the shops are restaurants, either fast food burger kebab …
A week in Krakow is more than enough, particularly if you’re staying in a hostel that seems to have been set up to cater for the stag party crowd: groups of between 5 and 20 British and Irish men. The hostel laid on a booze cruise 3 nights a week (90 zlotys to eat and …
Polish bread can be quite solid, unless you go for sliced bread, which I will now after slicing my finger this morning and ending up in a Polish hospital. The taxi driver took me to one place, which was a bit like a hospital, but not really. It was a back entrance. A guy with …
I took the bus from Palanga to Vilnius. It cost 51Lt. Now I’m on the train to Warsaw. 67Lt. I have 10Lt in my pocket. The rest of my money I changed into Polish Zlotys. The woman in the bank seemed to find the way I said Polish amusing. It took a while buying the …
It’s a warm sunny day. I’m sitting at a table outside a restaurant, on a terrace with a fountain. A man takes a photo of his son wearing a red baseball cap side on, like a ten-year-old rapper. There are roses in the fountain. Birds search for food beneath the tables. I’m in Nida, on …