#FBF Adventure Re-cap: Ukraine Part II

Hey, hey and happy Friday! Summer seems to be in full swing for us right now, meaning our adventure list is also long, keeping our schedule pretty busy these days. The poor hubs basically gets dragged along on all of my must see destinations (which grows daily). I'm so thankful he's such a trooper. This weekend we'll hopefully be exploring some lava caves! We've never been caving before, so we'll have to see if it all pans out, but I'm pretty excited regardless! I'll be sure to come back with a full re-cap next week with whatever adventure ensues.

Now let's get back to #FBF.

My first international trip was taken in college when I still had the coveted summer break. You better believe I took full advantage of that and visited Ukraine for a month (you can read about that here). After a couple of weeks in Ukraine, my friend and I decided to take a mini adventure. After visiting with a travel agent, we agreed to Eastern Europe.

Next stop: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and a stint through Poland. Admittedly my memory of this trip gets a little dicey. It was a jam packed tour with lots of sights seen, buses missed, and a language I couldn't understand.

Since we booked our trip through a Ukrainian travel company, naturally our guides and other travelers all spoke Russian. For a girl who can only speak English and enough Spanish to be dangerous, this posed a problem. Though my friend tried her best, it proved challenging for her to translate everything any of the guides said or explained to us about each site, so I didn't really pick up a lot of details. Understandable. But I can tell you the sites are beautiful and all well worth a visit!

My favorite memories from this trip would include:

• Missing the bus with the tour group we were supposed to travel the next week with. Fail. As a planner, and someone who always has to be on-time for everything, this was an experience I wasn't used to. Though the circumstances were out of our control, in retrospect, I'm actually glad it happened. If there's one thing I've come to learn to love about traveling, especially abroad, is to embrace the unexpected. Something will always go "wrong," but that wrong turn will likely bring you somewhere great with memories you treasure. In this case, we got to meet a new group of wonderful people to travel to Hungary with and then we got a non-guided, five hour walking tour of the city. One of my favorite travel memories to date.

Some of the detail on one of the buildings in Hungary.
I wish I snapped a pic, but Hungary is also home to the most beautiful fields of sunflowers
I have ever seen.

• Seeing the Danube River and the parliament building. At the time, it was one of the coolest buildings I had seen.

Parliament and the Danube.

• Slovakia was a bit of a blur to me. It was in the middle so probably had the most traveling to see. From castles with beautiful gardens to Holocaust memorials and churches where the bells played an Elvis tune, it was all a rush.

We never did come to know the significance of this, but found it pretty hilarious.

One of the side streets in Slovakia...come to think of it, this may be Prague.
I told you it was all a blur!

 

One of the castles we toured.


The English garden to the castle above

Owl caves in Slovakia

If memory serves, this is Bratislava

The chimes that played the Elvis tune.

• Prague (or Praha-pronounced Praga) was probably my favorite city visited. The St. Charles bridge was pretty spectacular and the Gothic style cathedrals they had in the city were beautiful. We were also pretty much out of money at this point, so we were having to get creative, which I think only added to the experience. We walked (a lot). We got lost. While trying to find ourselves, we found a building that had a cool architectural design which we had actually seen on a billboard the day before (score!). We kept running into one particular group of English tourists. Entertaining, is the only word that comes to mind. We ate. Since we basically only had change at this point, hot dogs were the only thing we could afford. To this day, it was the best hot dog I've ever had. We met Italians- standing in line to use the restroom (ladies- no matter where you go, our line is always longer), we befriended a group of Italians. We couldn't speak a lick of their language, nor them ours, but we had the best of times with them. They are still some of the friendliest people I have ever met.

The large Gothic cathedral near the main square in Prague

The other cathedral in the main square of Prague.

The building we found while lost.

One of our Italian friends.


The one picture I have in Poland (Hi Lena!).

Eastern Europe- you were good to us.

After a week of traveling by bus, a 12 hour train ride followed by an almost immediate two-hour train ride, then an eight and three-hour flight back home, we were exhausted! I swore at the time I was done traveling for a while. Yea well, I'm sure you can guess how long that lasted.