The Carnevale

2/17 - 2/23

From Amsterdam to Milan by plane. So excited by the funghi porcini pizza, but we got sick of eating pizza all the time soon enough! The duomo is the biggest gothic cathedral in the world, 600 years in the building, and the surroundings also featured guards dressed like M. Bison (aka Vega), which was a definite plus.

Overhaul

The problem with keeping a blog going for almost 8 years is that there's a lot of old html code and clunky formatting left lying around. Today I did my best to update things and make navigating around the archives easier and I think things are better now.

One weird bug that's come up a lot is the text of old posts getting whited out. The text becomes visible if you highlight it and I've corrected a dozen or so instances where I noticed it happening, but please let me know if you come across any blocks of text still obscured.

Yes, I know there are lots of other reasons to visit The Netherlands...

2/12 - 2/17

...but one of the main reasons we're travelling the world is expose ourselves to different cultures and broaden our horizons. When it comes to drug culture most Japanese are so blinkered that really, it would have been wrong not to experience as much as possible in our short time there, right? Responsibly, of course.

Anyway, our bus from Prague was first heavily delayed, then broke down halfway so after a long wait we had to transfer to another bus at stupid o'clock in the morning. We finally arrived around 5pm the next day and were too tired to do much other than find the riverboat hostel we'd booked, get connected in the wonderful central library and sleep.

No puns in the Czech Republic please

2/8 - 2/12

Prague was a little warmer than Budapest, albeit still covered in snow. We initially checked into the popular Chili Hostel, which turned out to be a horrible dump. We weren't expecting great things from a 20-bed dorm room, but one combined shower/toilet room between 30+ people? Please. We moved to a hotel masquerading as a hostel shortly after.

Buda and Pest

2/3 - 2/8

We arrived in Budapest without a plan, but since we'd heard we could book hostel rooms at the tourist information office we weren't too worried. We found the tourist information office just before they closed, only to be told they 'don't do hotel bookings', contrary to the business card I had in hand. After a quick bit of internet searching they did give us a list of potential hostels to try out, but after an hour or so traipsing around in the snow and dark we realised that the first two places they'd recommended didn't even exist!

A big helping of Croatia

1/24 -2/3

Leaving Montenegro we soon arrived in Dubrovnik. The same guy that greeted us in Kotor was waiting (for us?) in the bus station and not having any better options we accepted the lift to his home near the city wall. Dubrovnik is all about the wall and what a wall it is. In all our travels through Europe we saw a lot of impressive walls, but we've yet to see one that tops Dubrovnik's. It's not just the wall itself, it's the seaside cliffs, the moat/canyon that's now a road, the red roofs and the chunky architecture that all combine to make the wall special.