Monthly Archives: April 2016

Hello!

We were in Munich, Germany for 4 days over the Easter weekend.  We hadn’t planned on going to Munich but as mentioned in the last blog, it was the best flying option for us from Sarajevo.  We enjoyed Munich with it’s lovely Marienplatz main square with the New Town Hall, which houses a great glockenspiel that does a little performance 3 times daily.  It also had some great architecture, and amazing, huge beer halls full of people.

We then decided to take the train from Munich to Innsbruck, on advice of our good friend, Christine.  And we weren’t one bit disappointed.  Innsbruck was breath-taking beautiful.  The mountains were exquisite and surrounded the entire town.  One day we took the cable car up to the mountains – stunning!  See if you can spot Gary’s costume malfunction in the mountain photo.  The poor woman who took the photo!

We found a lovely restaurant that served up locally sourced food and on the second night there (yes, we really liked this place!) I chose one of the specials, fully aware of what it was, but it wasn’t as appetizing when the server brought it and said “here is your baby horse”.  She really meant here is your small portion of horse, yes, horse.  It was very good.

We then made our way to Italy where we will be returning home from.  I will have a blog post shortly on the 2 cities we visited.

Ciao for now.

The countries that we briefly touched on in this region were:  Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia.  I say briefly because we only visited 3 cities within this region.

Serbia

BELGRADE – We flew into Serbia’s capital (Yugoslavia’s capital from 1918 to 2006) from Istanbul on March 15, spending two nights.  Belgrade was not a beautiful city but an interesting one.  It felt like it was still trying to live in the old communist regime.  They love Putin here.  The people, it appeared to us, seemed like they were struggling to make a living.  The young taxi driver who drove us from the airport to our hotel felt no hope in the country and couldn’t wait to leave.  The buildings looked tired and like very little had been done to them.  They still had trams, possibly from the 50’s or earlier, that looked like they had seen better days.  There was however a younger, creative crowd that was doing some very innovative start-up businesses.  It certainly felt promising.

Croatia

ZAGREB – We took the 7-hour train into Zagreb.  Stepping out of the train station we could tell it was a lovely city:  beautiful architecture and a sculpture facing the station, giving it an instant impression.  We spent 4 days here and really enjoyed our time.  A lovely walking city and beautiful architecture on just about every street.

Bosnia

SARAJEVO – We arrived in Sarajevo after a 10-hour milk-run train ride.  We were very tired by the time we got to our hotel and wondered whatever happened to the romance of train travel.  This was one of the things we were looking forward to once we got to Europe.  Once we checked into our hotel we walked down the street to a lovely traditional Bosnian restaurant.  The food was so yummy.

We had every intention of hanging around Sarajevo for a bit and then heading down to the coast and traveling up it by train, but the reality is that this area does not have the same infrastructure as other parts of Europe when it comes to trains.  Also the weather was crappy and when we looked at the 2-week forecast it was going to continue to be crappy.  So, we looked to flights instead and based on price, time, possible destinations, and less crappy weather, we decided to head to Munich, Germany.  The morning we woke up to head to the airport made us even more glad that we had made our decision – slushy snow everywhere!