A few holiday plans have gone into action over the last few days. In fact, flights and hotels have been booked, all that needs doing now is sorting the train tickets nearer the time and saving the money to pay for it all. If anyone wants to Jack-cat sit for two weeks towards the end of the year, let me know. If not, I am sure the house and cat will be well looked after during that time.
The plan is to go to Rhodes to get the plane because, let’s face it, you can’t get it from Symi. Knowing the weather at that time of year we’ll leave three weeks in advance to make sure we don’t miss the flight and connection. The flights to Vienna are quite civilised actually. It takes from 10.30 in the morning until six at night to get there via Athens, but that’s because of a wait in Athens of a few hours. And at least it’s not like the Romania flight where we had to stay overnight in the Athens airport hotel, nice though it was, and pay €60 for two sandwiches and three glasses of wine. We can ‘Plaza-it’ the night before, have a curry, and wander to the airport by bus in the morning.
After the Vienna weekend comes a train to Prague for a couple of nights, and then a train to Budapest for a few nights, and then a train to Belgrade for a few nights and a flight home. I looked into coming back all the way by train, well, as far as Athens as you can’t actually get a train to Symi anymore, but the journeys were overnight. I like being on a train so I can see scenery pass by, like having a kind of ever-moving stage set to watch. There’s little point in getting and over-night and sharing a sleeping-berth-thing with four snoring Serbians for ten hours only to arrive at Thessaloniki, where you need to change and then spend a few more hours heading to Athens, where you then need to get across town and find the boat, making sure you’re on time and hoping that the weather is going to be calm so it can leave. And then paying out €160 minimum for two people to share an inside four person cabin for 17 hours. An outside two person one being around the same cost as a flight for two from Belgrade to Rhodes, which you can do in only a few hours.
So, four cities in two weeks and three decent train journeys looks fine to me. Not the best time of year to be traveling I know, but what can you do when you work seven days a week from April to October? I thought I’d check out the opera and state theatres and see what was on in these cities when we are there. Sadly there’s nothing very inspiring in Prague on the spare night we have, even with stalls at the opera only costing €30.00 or so. And ditto Bucharest where there’s the Nutcracker to watch (same kind of good price) but, well, I’ve already cracked that one a few times and ballet’s not really me thing, you know? And trying to find the advanced programme for the Serbian State Theatre (online) is a bit like trying to locate the other half of the Rosetta stone; they only seem to have the month of June available at the moment. (As it’s August, perhaps they will have this December’s programme available in February next year.)
But still. There’s some advanced warning for you that there will be no blog for a couple of weeks later in the year, but maybe a lot of blog when I get back. Before then of course there’s a lot of work to do and money to save. Have a good weekend!
