Posts Tagged ‘Scenery’

We had a pretty easy flight from Madrid and were SO, SO, SO excited to arrive safely in Africa.  We quickly met up with my mother, Maggie, who was joining us for our whirlwind, month-long, tour of southern Africa.  She had already been in Jo’burg for a week teaching quilting, so she arranged for us to have a bit of a tour of Pretoria (a city near Jo’burg) in between the flight in from Madrid and our next flight out to Cape Town.

We had about 5 hours so it was a pretty brief trip, but we got to see some sights and we had absolutely delicious savory pancakes at Harrie’s (Highly Recommended).  Here’s a few photos.  At this point I was feeling pretty jetlagged and to be honest wasn’t that impressed with Pretoria.  But it was nice to get out of the airport and it gave us our first taste of Africa and it was really wonderful to see my mom.

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Outside the Blue Mosque

Our first stop in Istanbul after a nice breakfast was the famous Blue Mosque. It is called the Blue Mosque because of the incredible mosaics which cover the interior. This building is enormous and absolutely stunning. I had not been inside a mosque before, and was not to sure what to expect. However, they are very used to tourists and it even provided nice cloths to cover up with in order to be appropriately dressed. This was lucky for me since my outfit that day didn’t cover my shoulders! Sorry I look so tired in this picture!

In front of one of the giant pillars in the mosque

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After our extreme adventure getting to Sofia we were happy to find our hostel and get settled in. We arrived late at night and then took it easy most of the next day. One of those laundry, blogging and recovering kinds of days. We went out for lunch at a kind of Italian-ish restaurant and were completely amused by the constant flow of weddings going on. I’m not sure what it was, but we must have been sitting outside a registry office or something because every ten minutes or so another wedding party would pull up with decorated cars and a big bridal party. They would go inside this shabby building for a few minutes, come back out and leave. This went on the whole time we were eating lunch (and in fact, we saw weddings going on all over the city the whole time we were there).

One of the many weddings we witnessed

It was quite an experience being in Sofia – they use a Cyrillic alphabet, but our map had the street names written in the Roman alphabet, so we couldn’t find ANYTHING.

Pretty useless map if you ask me!

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We opted for another free walking tour in order to get our bearings in Budapest, and I have to say, I thought it was one of the best.  Our guide was really good and we saw a lot of the sights.  The city is beautiful and we decided to give ourselves a little of a photo challenge – trading cameras for the day!  My camera has really awesome zoom capabilities, but Justin’s takes much better wide shots and has virtually no zoom.  We bought them because we knew they would complement each other, but it was a quite different experience to trade off!

Here are some of my favorites that Justin took:

Decoration on a building

Fountain

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Everything we’d heard about Slovenia told us that we should not just stick to Ljubljana – we needed to get out to the countryside. So, on the recommendation of a fellow hosteler, we set our sights on the small country town of Bohinj, a 2 hour bus ride from the capital.  The direction we headed (NNW for the crossword puzzle geeks out there) took us into the Julian Alps section of Slovenia, a mountainous paradise with lakes and hiking and everything you could want!

Bled Lake and Castle

In fact, on the way to Bohinj we passed another retreat town well-known to Slovenians called Bled.  There is a rather large lake with a super castle perched on a rocky overlook on the lake.  Unfortunately we had to pick one or the other but we will leave Bled to another trip.  It appeared much more built-up and touristy than our final destination: Bohinj!

The View from our Hotel

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We arrived at Ljubljana at night and had a bit of a roundabout taxi ride to get to our hostel, Hostel Print.  However, this awesome hostel refunds the cost of the taxi ride, so it was no problem.  And it is a really good hostel.  Curtained off beds, your own power socket, your own reading lamp, awesome kitchen.  It’s a little walk into town, but as we found out the next day it is a pleasant walk and a very pleasant town.  We saw the castle, walked along the river, had an apple at the farmer’s market, and some really good pizza near the hostel.  Beautiful, relaxing first day in town!

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We didn’t know much of anything about Slovenia until we arrived there, but it is an absolutely wonderful place to visit.  Not too expensive, incredibly beautiful, lots of people speak English so it’s easy to get around.  Just wait until you see the countryside which is coming up!!!

Smurf!

We decided to break up our train journey from Prague to Slovenia with a stop in Vienna.  Now this is a city that you hear a lot about, so we thought we shouldn’t miss it.  With the way the trains were scheduled we had just about a four hour stop.  We did our usual routine of finding a map and heading for the sights.  Fortunately, our Eurail pass was valid on the city train, so we were able to easily get into town from the train station.  As usual, click any of these pictures to see the gallery.

First up, the cathedral

The weather was miserable.  Cold, windy, and little drops of rain now and then.  Even the carriage horses needed coats.

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We left Berlin heading for Prague, but since it was a pretty long train journey we decided to make a stop in Dresden, in the south of Germany, to break things up a little. We were supposed to have a few hours to walk around, but because we misread the train schedule we ended up only having about an hour and a half.

Dresden has a fairly compact center, so we were able to walk from the train station and just spend some time wandering around. There are many really beautiful buildings to look at. We first walked through a kind of shopping mall area, and then arrived at the older part of town.

Since we didn’t have time to investigate much I’ll just post some of the pictures we took and leave you with the same kind of general impression that we got. Click any of the photos below to see our whole gallery.  It looks like it would be a good place for a holiday…

Shopping mall area

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We pulled in to Helsinki in the morning and were met from the boat by my friend Tania. She even managed to spot us as we were walking down the long hallway into the terminal. Apparently she first noticed our backpacks and then was sure it was us because Justin was wearing his “pirate hat.”  (click the link and scroll down if you want to see the hat.)  And this is what she would expect from someone who married me! I was still so excited to see her and to introduce Justin and we had a wonderful three days hanging out and getting to know her awesome boyfriend Lauri.

Lauri, Tania, and Justin

We spent a lot of time walking around the city and just chatting and catching up. Tania knows a lot about Finland and knows all of the good places to go, so she was a wonderful tour guide.

Fountain in downtown Helsinki

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We were sad that the dance camp was over, but not for long because the next leg of our trip was one that we were really looking forward to!  One of my close friends from high school is living in Helsinki, Finland with her boyfriend and we got to go and see her!!!  But this post isn’t about that yet because we had several bus rides, a subway ride, and an overnight ferry to take in order to get there.  We left Herrang in the morning after the camp was over and arrived in Helsinki about 24 hours later.

Excited to go and see my friend!!!

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