Travels in Eastern Europe

It's taken a while to sort out all the images Maggie and I took on our supposedly relaxing - turned out to be quite hectic -      rail journey round part of the old Soviet controlled countries. It’s a strange feeling that all the cities we visited had western culture but with an underlying totalitarian feeling. I’ve tried to give an impression of the feel of the cities rather than the postcard sights you all probably know.

 Begging Car	Checkpoint Charlie
  Prague Wedding	An Invitation
Kolon Station and Vienna Opera House	Vienna Protest

Everywhere we went in Prague there was the smells of cooking and all of it looked delicious. The ones we sampled certainly were.
Sadly the gents at the station were only too common a sight in all the cities. Hope the hams have got Merv's  mouth watering. More to come in November.

Checkpoint!	Troubadour		Zelena - Prague
Can Only Be Budapest!		Prague Station
Kebab Stall		Prague Ham

There are a lot of homeless people in these cities, fancy spending the night here?
The wall is big business in Berlin, these twin lines of bricks trace the whole length of the wall.  The beers were OK but for a Midlander the lagers had little taste compared to a good bitter but then I found 'dark' beer, not bad at all.

The children's railway is a throw back to communism and one of the few things the people of Buda-Pest voted to keep.

Buda-Pest has the second largest synagogue in the world which houses a very moving museum covers the history of the Jews in the city including the dark days of the ghetto.
They do say 'know your customers' I think this shop owner does!

Finally a couple of street vendors being moved on the local cops.

I will now save the rest for November, all in all it was a very interesting couple of weeks but do it again?  No way too many early mornings and changing hotels every 4 days was a chore. The trains were very good and first class was really comfy on all of them, makes you realise just how poor our railways are.

Ghetto Clothes - Budapest	Shop Window - Budapest		Children's Railway- Budapest
 A Bed for the Night		Berlin Wall
Strong Arm of the Law - Berlin		Black and Almost White

As with all images on the blog, please click on them to see them in a larger size.

Tony Middleton