Observations
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1) Don’t take traveler cheques to Eastern or Western Europe. They are hard to cash and you get screwed on commissions. Bank machines are everywhere and most accept bank cards that work on the Plus system. By withdrawing money from a bank machine you get the bank rate of exchange and it with cost you at the most $2:50 for a transaction fee.
2) Most Americans traveling are claiming they are Canadian and even have Canadian flags attacked to their backpacks.
Finally Made It To Bratislava
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A funny thing happened on the way to Bratislava… we ended up on the wrong damn train (it seems to be our fate to take the wrong transportation in Eastern Europe). It’s not really that we’re incredibly dense – the train we got on did say “Bratislava” on it, but unlike every other country in the world, Slovakia puts the origin instead of the destination on the train. So – we ended up seeing almost all of Slovakia in one day – any further east and we would have been denied entry into the Ukraine. Interesting fact – it only takes 7 hours to travel from one end of Slovakia to the other (I can only make it half way to my parent’s house in that time!). That’s the last time we will take a second class train in Eastern Europe (A six person cabin with 10 people & a dog in it.). The last journey we had like that was in China with a chicken on my lap – but you do get close to the locals!
Olomouc, Czech Republic
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We are on our second day in Olomouc, a very quiet and quaint town in Eastern Czech Republic. The difference between here and Prague is quite dramatic; there are no other English speaking tourists, prices are very cheap here, and you don’t have to pay to enter any of the churches. A few interesting things about this town: it has its own pro soccer team, you can eat pizza for supper in the basement of the town hall, it has quite an assortment of mythology themed fountains, it has the second oldest university in the Czech Republic (it has teaching, phys. ed., science & theology faculties), it has its own castle and cathedral (where an 11 year old Mozart wrote his Symphony in F Major), and the hero of the Czech Republic – King Wencelas – is buried here. It’s the ancient capital of Moravia, and a fantastic place to soak in a lot of culture with very little effort.
