QUOTE (metamorphosis @ Feb 14 2009, 07:18 PM)

Good that i got you to promise to tell! Peace!
I have promised, I do provide. Here is an account of my journeys in the summer.
For one week I visited my relatives in Southern Hungary. Aside of things only meaningful to our personal rasa with them, it can be notable for you too that some of them live in Paks, where our country's first (and so far the only) nuclear power plant operates. One of them even worked there, so he could actually bring me in to show some of the facilities that can't be seen by ordinary visitors. Although I am not a tech savvy, it was definitely interesting to take a look. By the way, the power plant is surrounded with a beautiful forest and lakes area, with all kinds of frogs and birds. The place has almost none other industries, so the air is very pure there too.
Some other days I spent with a family of my friends, in Serbia. They are Iskconites, but of the good kind, and we remained friends even after my rebellion against the „sampradaya”. We got to know each other when the Americans bombed Serbia, and they sought refuge in Hungary. They lived in an Iskcon centre for some months before going back to Serbia.
I went back to Hungary, to the Northern great city of Miskolc, to pick up my travelling companions to be for the next one and a half months. The younger members of two long-term friendly bhakta families from the peripheries of Iskcon, aged 16 to 22, they wanted to travel, and they convinced me to go with them. I was there the only one to know languages other than Hungarian. So the families trusted me with their youngs, and we left the country to make fun of the geographical fact that you go two hundred kms in a given country and you are off Hungary (it being a teeny little country), and going another two hundred kms will gets you in yet another different country – this is something you Americans can't do

–, and that one can still can tresspass freely between them, as long as they belong to the European Union. I converted all my collected money into Euros -and as I was always lazy to reconvert them back to HUFs, I gained much recently as the world crash made HUF plummet like a hawk with cardiac arrest, in relation to the euro.
So we decided to go North, and spent two days in the Slovakian city of Kosice, and that's why I can't serve you with any pictures – in both Northern Hungray and South Slovakia, crime, and especially theft, is rampant. We made the mistake of letting some of our bags unattended, and our digital camera – the only valuable thing we brough besides money which we kept on ourselves – was stolen out one of them.
Keeping North, we went to the Polish city of Krakow for like five or six days. We found it to be spectacularly nice for such a large city. It was of particulary interest for one of us who studies architecture. After that, as temperature rose steadily, we decided to go straight to the sea, and we ended up in the little northern seaside city of Wladyslawowo – we picked this city because of its little size and because we found this abundance of „w”-s in the name extremely funny; even more so as the second „l” was apparently just another „w” just in different written form, judged by the way it was pronounced. But we found the water to be creepily cold there, so after three days, we moved further; seeing a weather forecast that promised warmer waters there, we went for Kolobrzeg. We also planned to meet the traveling party of the Iskcon guru, Indradyumna Swami, as two of us were his disciples or aspiring disciples – we decided then to go to „nearby” Kostrzyn nad Odra (which is much easier to pronounce than to write correctly), where they will be there in the annual Woodstock festival. So we spent the days remaining in Kolobrzeg, on the seashore, and then went to K.N.O, two days before the program begun, so the disciples could briefly meet their guru, and when the Woodstock started, we could attend the programs – at night there were huge kirtans there. When there was no other program, we made fun of swimming through the not too wide rivers Warta and Odra, which also forms the border with Germany, „without being fired at from either side”.
After these incursions, we did continue into Germany – Berlin was actually so close to K.N.O. that there was a direct train to there. There we spent some days to, comparing the two half of the city that once formed two separate countries. Apparently, any country in which Communists ever set feet decays – not that East B. in itself looks that bad; it's like a better fared Hungarian or Polish city. But if compared to West Berlin...
Budget constrains prevented us to continue in this direction – Germany is a costly place to stay for long. So we turned around and went to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic (do you really don't have a proper name for that? like Czechland? or Czechistan, or something like that), then bussed through Austria, and we ended the travel with twelve days in Piran, Slovenia, at the coast of the Adriatic Sea. And finally, back to Hungary, we spnt some days at the Southern part of Lake Balaton.