Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland

These are the pictures from the European part of my big 2007 trip. I think I was becoming a little jaded from the traveling so I did not shoot very much. I also completely stopped taking "we've been here" pictures and pictures of nice old cobble-stoned streets - I already have quite a collection of them and I am afraid that one nice old street is very much like another. So what's left is a somewhat disjointed collection of spots that just happened to catch my interest.

As for impressions from the trip, Hungary was very much Budapest vs everything else. Budapest is a beautiful city with majestic architecture and is a must-visit place in Europe. Everything else (at least the north-east of the country) turned out to be flat and boring. This came as a surprise - usually things get more interesting once you leave the large cities.

In Poland we stayed in the south-east corner of the country - high Tatras mountains and Krakow. Krakow is a very nice medieval city that survived WWII well. The Tatras felt too touristy to me - too well set up for tourism and too many people milling around. I guess I am spoilt by the much less tramped mountains of Americas.

The highlight of the trip was Slovakia. It is a quiet and unassumingly pretty country. It happens to be relatively far from the major European tourist centres, so it is not overrun by western tourists. If you after a relaxed and pretty place, hospitable people, and good (and cheap) food, you can do worse than to go to Slovakia.