OnTheRoad

Hola mi amigos! From the frozen wastes of the east I have come to the beautiful city of Barcelona. Staying in the same hostel in the Placa Real as I did when I was here three years ago, strangely enough. I think I have a t-shirt back home from the place...

So, to run down on the last couple of weeks (I've been lazy on the updates)... I have done a lot of work, and not so much travelling. From Budapest I went down to Belgrade (aka Beograd) in Serbia (now a separate country), where the street signs are all in cyrillic letters. And my frigging map is in latin letters. bastards. Still, the place was nice, great group of people in the hostel. Not so much to do, but fun anyway.

Caught a night train back again and met a genuine football hooligan who had come into town that day to fight. Nice guy, gave me a team hat for the Partizan team. Advised me not to wear it in Belgrade, I'd be beaten pretty quickly ;)

Hung out in Budapest for a few more days, hoping for more riots. No luck there. Still lots of cops around though.

Then had some extreme travel to Barcelona. Extreme in a it-really-shouldn't-be-that-hard way. Took 28 hours of travel or something to get here. Caught a night train to Kestley, by lake Balaton, southern Hungary. Small problem though, it has a four hour stopover in a town called Siofok. Four hours, and no buildings in which to stay to keep warm. Four hours of walking around Siofok trying to keep warm... luckily the temperature wasn't too bad. Well, above zero anyway. I took to huddling inside a phone booth to stay out of the wind and read a book :D

So, caught a Ryanair flight to Frankfurt. Then waited, in an extremely sleep deprived state, for nine hours until my connecting flight. After my troubles with the last flight I tried to get to Bacelona I made sure I had some space in between for rescheduling... Anyhow, Frankfurt Hahn airport has been cunningly designed so that there is nowhere to sleep. Eventually I just slept on the floor in front of an empty checkin counter for a half our nap. Other than that, I subsisted on coffee. Mmmmm.

Uneventful after that, made it to Gerona, caught bus for an hour (bus costs as much as the flight from Frankfurt to Gerona). Met up with Val and Pete and assorted others, going to cruise down south to Taragona tomorrow, possibly head up to Madrid, then back out to Gerona for a flight to London on the 15th.