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Eating all the bread

Our trip to Europe landed us in Belgrade, which caused most people to ask, why would you go to Belgrade? Our answer was $149 round trip tickets to Europe. But since Belgrade wasn’t our dream destination, we made plans to take the train to Budapest and Vienna. For the last two days, we’ve been in Budapest. And we have eaten so much. But we have also walked 5-7 miles a day, so I am pretty sure it evens out.


And Budapest? We love it. The place we are staying is in the Buda side of the Danube, right off the famous Andrassy street. It wasn’t too hard to walk to the Schezeny baths and St Stephen’s Basilica, or most big tourist sites. We stayed at an Air BnB on the first floor (American 3rd floor, because the the second floor is the 0.5 floor). The elevator only fit two people and our suitcases, but most of the time we took the stairs. All of the buildings in the inner city look like Parisian style buildings built in the 18th century. Food was cheaper in Budapest than LA, but not as cheap as Belgrade. In Belgrade, We only spent $40 each the 48 hours we were there. That includes our taxi rides from the airport and to the train station and all of our food. 

We ate all the pastries in Budapest. Croissants with schokolade and pastries with blueberry. I even bought a donut. But they were different from what we expected. The donut, was not a cake donut and was not fried. It looked like a donut but was less sweet and more bready. Croissants were made with pastry dough, so they were flakier. 

Next stop Vienna.

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No Sleep…Since Brooklyn

Jet lag is hitting me hard onthis trip. I am siting in the bathroom right now at four am, so I don’t wake up my friend with the light from my screen. I’ve been awake since midnight. Since we have arrived in Europe, I have basically slept 4 hours at a time at the most. In the last 60 hours I have had 14 hours of broken sleep. Three hours when we arrived, 4 more that night, 3 the next day…you get it. It’s rough. I am worried it’s going to get me sick.

Other than the sleep, we’ve been exploring the Serbian (former Yugoslavia) capital city of Belgrade. Our neighborhood is very communist block in style, in zone 3. But we did venture out to see the more Bohemian and hipster part in zone 1. One surprise we have found is that more people speak English than we had thought. When we researched our trip, a lot people said English wasn’t spoken by many people. But so far, it hasn’t been a huge problem.


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The Longest 3 Weeks

I need a vacation.

Didn’t that just seem like the longest 3 weeks of any presidency? 

So my best friend and I are headed to Europe. So far, our 8 day adventure is costing us less than $700 each. The ways we saved money on our trip include and error fare from NYC to Europe for $149, points for cheap or no cost hotels, and Airbnb stays. 

We have a night in NYC before heading of to a part of Europe I have never been. When looking up travel guides that include Serbia, there seems to be some debate whether it should be called Eastern Europe or Central Europe. Lonely planet says its eastern.

We are going to experience a few different things on our adventures.

  • Plane and train travel 
  • 3 different currencies
  • Traveling to a place where less English is spoken
  • Food, food, food
  • Thermal baths
  • Cold, February temperatures

See you when I get back! Until then, enjoy the view from my parking spot!