Eastern Europe Tour

The last couple of weeks have been exhausting to say the least. I got a nice rest from snowboarding when I was in Vienna, and while there ran into a couple people I had met earlier. I went to the Opera and walked around the city a lot. There is a lot to see in Vienna but unfortunately it was really windy the whole time I was there. I think thats normal for Vienna though. Staying in my room was a guy from Australia named Sean and we seemed to get along quite well. Eventually we made plans to go to Budapest together.

Budapest-
What an amazing city. There is so much to do and see here, its overwhelming. Budapest is one of the places that I would tell everyone I wanted to go, and almost everyone would say how much they loved it or how many good things they have heard about the city. So my expectations were high to begin with. Budapest is full of amazing statues, lots of history, massive monuments, and of course the weird public baths. I spent a good 6 hours in the baths in total, which are these large thermal pools, each pool containing different minerals and different temperature water. The majority of the people in the baths are old men with giant pop bellys but there are a good amount of younger people as well. Everyone is so relaxed in the pools and the saunas it was definately a cultural experience. Budapest has some of the nicest, most beautiful people I have seen as well. Everyone is willing to help. There are also some really cool bars and places to hang out, that have a great vibe to them. Its not a city full of pretentious snoody people that go to their expensive hang out places to feel better than others. Its a great town. Eventually after talking with Sean we decided that we had a good time together and should travel all through Eastern Europe until I had to be in Rome and he had to go back to Prague, where he was working.

Next stop was Romania, not much to say specifically except that there were stray dogs everywhere. The people are typical Eastern European. We stayed the night there and decided to pack up to Serbia the next day.

Serbia was an experience. The bus ride took so long to get to Belgrade, and once again we had no idea what to expect. We kind of just assumed we would figure out what we wanted to do and see in Belgrade once we got there. We ended up staying 2 nights in total, and were pleasantly suprised with the city. Luckily my friend Mina who is from Serbia told one of her friends that we were coming to the city and she was nice enough to show us around. There is nothing like a local tour guide, and Slavika did a great job showing us around. The coolest parts of the city are the giant white church that you can see from almost every part of the city. St. Slavas is the worlds largest orthodox church and our hostel was about 25 meteres from it. The other part of the city is the fortress, which is nice to visit. I did notice that the Serbians dont talk that much about the war compared to the Bosnians and Croatians. The weirdest/coolest part of Serbia though was that when me Sean and Slavika walked into the ? Cafe which is the oldest in the city, I heard my name full name called out for the first time in a while. "Kyle Healy?" I turned around and Colin O'Leary my cousin. I was in shock, first of all I am lucky if I get to see him once every couple of years because he lives in New York and goes to school at Yale, and secondly I had no idea he was going to be in the Balkans. Unfortunately he was getting ready to leave Serbia and we had just got there. It was still a pretty cool experience though. Next stop was going to be Bosnia.

Sarajevo was not what we were expecting, but we didnt really know what to expect. First we had no idea that it was in the mountains, oops. We also didnt know that it was so dangerous. I had never had so many people ask me "Why are you here". Like we were crazy for being in Bosnia. The first thing you notice is all the grave sites packed full of grave stones. Over 11000 people died in Sarajevo while the city was surrounded by the Serbian army. We learned alot about the war and how no one could go out during the day because of snipers. There is a part of the city called sniper alley where there are still bullet holes from them. The apartment buildings look like they were just under attack, holes in them and massive caliber bullet holes in them. It was a freaky site. There are still so many buildings that are in ruins and have not been repaired yet. The city seems to be doing well despite the war but the people are still a little cold. The food was good as well. There were a couple of scary experiences including every time we crossed the border in and out of bosnia, a total of about 9 times, for various reasons. The worst one was when we got our passports checked the guy got a real strange look on his face. He made the bus stop for about an hour and called in reinforcements. We got our backpacks disassembled and the contents layed out in front of them, and they went through everything we owned. They then had the dogs come and smell everything. While this was going on the soldiers still had our passports and seemed like he wasnt going to give them back. Eventually he did though and we were on our way. It was freaky because they carry some pretty big guns with them and I had a really bad vibe that he was going to plant some sort of drugs on us or something. It was creepy. Another situation was when we were just exploring the ruins of one of the buildings, and looking at shrapnel on the ground, just wandering around, we stumbled into a mine field that still had not been cleared of mines. The only thing telling us this was a thin line of yellow tape that looks like it had been there for ages. Some local man started yelling and waving his arms at us to get out, but of course we had no idea what he was saying so we walked closer to him, he freaked out more, and somehow we got the message that we should go out the way we came in. Pretty strange experience. Anyway we decided to go to Dubrovnik as soon as possible.. knowing that would be a nice oasis away from the crazyness.