Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe and Russsia – People We Met
When we travel, it’s not only the places and things that we see that make an impact on us. It’s the people and the characters that we encounter that often make our trips interesting. Here are some of the hundreds of people that we saw during our five weeks away in Eastern Europe and Russia […]
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Riga
During our first full day in the city, we walked out of our hotel and turned left into the Old Town. Rather than get out our map. we just followed our nose and ended up in the square next to St Peters Church. This was the first Lutheran Church we have come across in our […]
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Arriving in Riga
We were up early this morning to catch the 8:15 Lux Express Bus to Riga. The bus left from the Panorama Shopping centre in downtown Vilnius and seeing that it was raining, as well as the fact that we had our luggage, we caught a taxi to the bus stop. The taxi driver invited us […]
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Vilnius – Castles and Soviet Buildings
On the surface, Vilnius is a very scenic city. Scratch the surface, however, and move a little out from the main tourist areas and you can see that many of the buildings are run down with facades cracking and repairs needed. I think that is to be expected as it is only 21 years since […]
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Vilnius Old Town
We arrived in Vilnius last night to find that we were booked into a different hotel than we thought. There are two Radisson Blu hotels here and we thought that we were staying in the one right in the old town. It’s not a big issue – ours is just across the river in the […]
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Off to the Salt Mine
The Wieliczka Salt Mines are about a half hour drive from Krakow, in a little village of the same name. They are not the punitive form of mine that may first come to mind when you hear the words ’salt mine’. Instead, the mine was a large commercial operation and in the 1700’s, it along with […]
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Auschwitz – Some Facts
Thanks to the BBC for providing these facts about the horrors of Auschwitz. My visit yesterday is still filling my mind. In all, 1.1 million people died during the four and a half years of Auschwitz’s existence; one million of them were Jewish men, women and children. Other groups of people who died included Polish […]
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Krakow and Auschwitz
I read in the guide book that Polish trains are notoriously late and our train from Warsaw was no exception. It left 15 minutes late and by the time we arrived in Krakow, 250 kilometres away, it was around 45 minutes late. Krakow is almost directly south from Warsaw. It is the ancient capital of […]
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Warsaw (Without the Famous Concerto)
We are now visiting Poland with our first stop in Warsaw. There are 1.7 million people living in this city and the Polish population numbers around thirty-eight million people. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea. We had a six-hour flight from Dubai and have gone from temperatures […]
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