The Central Europe Awards
Trip Start
Dec 26, 2009
1
84
137
Trip End
Nov 08, 2010
Athens, Attica, Greece
Friday, July 23, 2010
Awards:
Best Hostel: Backpacker's Villa Sonnenhof, Interlaken, Switzerland. A wonderful hostel full of facilities (free laundry, free hot drinks, excellent breakfast, travel desk, wi-fi in the rooms, small shelves next to the bunks, kitchen, lockers, reading lights...) in a converted villa. Great location too.
Worst Hostel: Dubrovnik Youth Hostel. Nothing especially bad to report, but no Internet and no extras except breakfast, and curtains instead of shower doors, which is always bad in a shared shower block. We had a pretty good run with hostels and hotels this leg, so although it doesn't rank down with the other hostels who have won this award it was the worst of those we've been in lately.
Best Food: That wonderful, amazing, sugar-coma-inducing nutella-filled baklava croissant from Santorini, Greece (Amanda). I'm going to long for that every time I have sugar cravings for the rest of my life. Schnitzels in Austria (Ben). Bread-crumbed butter-cooked meaty goodness.
Worst Sickness: Happily, nothing especially bad to report here, just colds! Ben's in Bar, Montenegro, which was actually quite nasty and he refused to leave the hotel for a day, and Amanda's in Paris, France, where she begged Ben to fetch dinner for her so she didn't have to leave the hotel for an afternoon either.
Best View: We both agree, the view after jumping out of the helicopter over the Swiss Alps was the best one we've ever seen! Beautiful lakes, snowcapped mountains, green valleys with cute Swiss villages nestled among forests.... Honourable mentions are going to the gorgeous clear view of Paris, France from the top of the Eiffel Tower and the sea of cloud broken by snowy mountain peaks from Jungfraujoch, the "top of Europe", in the Swiss Alps. Is it fair that the Swiss Alps got two of those three? Ah well.
Biggest Rip-off: Buying drinks in the nightclubs in Ibiza, Spain. €16 for a red bull and vodka?! Especially when it was less than €4 at our hotel's bar. And the entry fees were steep too.
Coldest Moment: Canyoning in the Swiss Alps. Even though we were wearing several layers of wetsuit, the water was freezing! Almost in a literal sense - it had been below freezing the day before we went and the trip had been cancelled.
Best Eye Candy: Zagreb, Croatia (Ben). All the girls have supermodel figures with lovely exotic Eastern European features. It's not even possible, but somehow in Zagreb, they all do. The Greek Islands (Amanda). Not so much the locals, but lots of very buff travellers stripped down to boardies. Nice.
Worst Weather: Switzerland. Zurich was cloudy and spitting, Lucerne poured and Interlaken was raining or overcast until the last day, when the sun finally gave us a break and let us have an amazing skydive. Ibiza gets an honourable mention here - although warm, it rained until the last afternoon and ruined our beach plans!
Best night out: It was a hard one, but we're going with the night at Pacha in Ibiza, Spain. Staggeringly amazing club, wild efforts at the Masquerade Motel theme and we partied to Swedish House Mafia with Robin until it closed at 7am. Awesome night. Honourable mentions are going to Ben's birthday night at Moulin Rouge in Paris, France and the night Placebo performed at Exit festival in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Scariest Moment: Opening the helicopter door before skydiving out (Ben) and jumping off the ledge into the canyon for the Canyon Jump (Amanda), both in Interlaken, Switzerland.
Most Amazing Experience: Skydiving. Easily. There's nothing like it.
Best Luck: Being in Dubrovnik at the same time as Giulia and getting to catch up with her!
Worst Transport: The night bus from Zagreb to Dubrovnik. Very cramped, especially for Ben, and we're not used to sleeping so awkwardly anymore!
Worst Experience: Walking through the super-dodgy suburb outside our hostel in Athens and seeing all the druggies and prostitutes everywhere, passed out on windowsills or picking at scabs.
Most Annoying Accommodation Convention: Pushing two single beds together does not make a double bed, Central Europe! I can still feel the gap!
Best Tour: The free walking tour in Paris, France (Amanda). Excellent, amusing, informative tour, going to lots of places but never getting boring. The caldera tour in Santorini, Greece (Ben). Volcanoes, hot springs, ships, beautiful sunsets... what more could you want?
Most Hated Person Ever: That woman in Gare de L'Est train station in Paris, who told us there were no reservations to Zurich for the next three days, gave us a massive lecture about not planning ahead and nearly made us buy a very expensive train ticket or flight when we had Eurail passes. A different, normal ticket lady found two routes within 2 hours of when we wanted to leave. What a bitch.
Nicest Locals: Serbians, by a long way. Although some of the taxi drivers still tried to rip us off, several strangers in Sebia saw us in difficulties and went out of their way to be exceptionally helpful. A customer in a cafe translated our order for the waiter and helped us figure out the exchange rate and what taxis should cost. A woman in the train station gave us a map when tourist information didn't have one and organised a cheap taxi from the carpark for us after warning us about the official taxi rank out the front. Our hotel receptionist bent over backwards to make our stay better.
Worst Beaches: Croatia. We didn't go to Split, or the islands where they are supposed to be the best, but in Dubrovnik they're all made of huge jagged rocks!
Prettiest Town: Dubrovnik, Croatia (Ben). Gorgeous medieval walled old town, all of smooth, shiny grey rock. Mykonos Town, Greece (Amanda). Classic white and blue Greek Island town,with cute little alleyways everywhere making it a maze of absolute charm.
Prettiest City: Paris, obviously. Amazing centre, so beautiful. And also, kind of surprisingly, Vienna, Austria is just as lovely.
Best Shopping: The Greek Islands, with so much beautiful handmade jewellery and Lucerne, Switzerland - a town of carriage clocks, Swiss army knives, chocolate, watches and all things Swiss.
Coolest Experience: Exit festival, Novi Sad, Serbia - a festival in a fortress. Unbeatable atmosphere and music. And clubbing in Ibiza, Spain for the opening parties - we've never experienced clubbing like it!
The Number of Awards:
The number of...
countries visited: 8 (France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Greece. No I'm not counting Liechtenstein, even though the train went through there.)
plane flights taken: 5 (although two were connections to other flights, so maybe 3)
times airlines almost lost our baggage on those flights: 2
times we had near-heart attacks over almost-baggage-loss: 4 (2 each)
nutella-filled baklava croissants devoured by Amanda: 3
Big Bang Theory episodes watched: 62 (That would be all three seasons)
Things we will miss the most:
Greek food.
Extreme adventures.
Eurozone - rarely did we have to change currency.
Interlaken.
The sun - although we hope it will stay!
Cheapness of Eastern Europe.
Things we will not miss at all:
The Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Just no.
Lots of tourists - the fannypack tour package type.
Dodgy suburbs, eg Athens, Paris.
People trying to rip us off (Serbian taxi drivers, I'm looking at you!)
Languages we have never encountered before and therefore find more difficult to learn.
I realise Austria is shockingly under-represented in these awards given how much fun we had there and Interlaken has pretty much cleaned up, but that's the way the cookie crumbles!
