Saturday 16 July 2011

Eating Eastern Europe

"A traveller doesn't know where he is going, a tourist doesn't know where he has been"

Though my brothers wedding puts half of my summer holiday on hold, the other half remains relatively free for feasting.  It cost a short sum of £229 (saving over £100 purely for being 25 or under!?!) for what is called a global, 10 days within 22 days, pass.  What does that mean?  I had no idea but thanks to the friendly people over at Lonely Planet it is making a little more sense.  It is like having 10 seperate day passes valid for all the trains (almost) in Europe but with a time limit of 22 days to use them.

As a group we took some time to finalise our route but it seems that it is now in place:

Amsterdam (Netherlands) - Berlin (Germany) - Krakow (Poland) - Budapest (Hungary) - Venice (Italy) - Ljubljana (Slovenia) - Split (Croatia).

or more importantly:

Special cakes - Sauerbraten and Currywurst - Bigos - Gulyas - Polenta and Bar food - Insert Slovenian food here - Insert Croatian food here.


All in two weeks?  We are yet to look at train time tables but this is the hope.  I am sure it will all fit in to place.  There are only 3 of us (down from 7!) that are seeing through the whole trip but others are flying in to meet us in various places.  This does mean that we are not overly flexible with our travelling times and a pretty tight schedule is required.  For the majority of my trips i would like to think i sit quite comfortably on the line between tourist and traveller and hopefully sometimes sway just slightly to the latter.  This trip i am officially a tourist.  I know exactly where i am going, when i am going to be there and pretty much what i will be doing in each place.

One of the things i will be doing excites/scares me the most.  My friends all leave Split before me as i have chosen to stay on for a few more days to learn my PADI.  I will be diving in Split!! (Don't type that into google images by the way...).  Ever since snorkelling Padang Bai in Bali i have been intrigued by taking that step further.  Going into the deep unknown and taking over an enivironment that the human body is completely not designed for.  Now i know the Mediterranean Sea is not populous with the exotic fish and bright colours of the tropics but there are some great WW2 wrecks to explore and i think it would be an ideal place to start out.  :o)