Trakai

After visiting Vilnius, I went straight to Trakai, a little town 45 minutes away by bus. The main attraction there is a castle on an island in a lake. It sounds cool and it definitely is!

When I arrived at Trakai, I found out the castle was around 2 km away from the bus station, so I had to work quite a lot. The weather was ok and it was nice to walk by the lake. There were some boats by the shore. They were so colourful!




After a while walking, I started seeing the island castle far away behind another island's trees.



And finally, I arrived there!



The castle was beautiful and quite well preserved. At that moment, I noticed it was the cover of my guidebook! So it was a good decision to come here. Hehe... These are some of the pictures I took there.




And this is a nice panorama from the opposite coast.



After that, I came back to Vilnius, had a quick dinner and flew to Riga, in Latvia, where I slept.

Vilnius

Last Saturday, I visited Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. The weather was really bad when I arrived, with a big downpour... The Old Town, as usual was medieval and there were many churches. Lithuania was part of Poland for a long time and still has some remnants from that period: the main religion is Catholicism. Some parts of the city could be in Spain, Portugal or Italy: narrow streets with churches everywhere.



This is the main street in the Old Town, Pilies Gatve.



And this is the Cathedral.



This is Bernardinu Gatve, a pintoresque street going from near the cathedral to the beautiful church of St Anne.



This is probably the most important landmark in the city: St Anne's Church. Napoleon said he wished he could put it on his hand and carry it to Paris. He really liked it... me too :)



This is the Church of St Nicholas, very colourful...



And this is the main square. The city hall is on one side of it, just at my back. The colourful houses are the most striking features of this place.



And finally, St Theresa's Church and the Gate of Dawn, the only remaining original gate in the city.



I continued my way to the bus station and got onto a bus going to Trakai, a near-by town. That will come tomorrow!

Back from another backpacker's adventure

Hi! I am back! Finally i made it!

Since Saturday, I have been traveling in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I arrived this morning back to the Netherlands. The conditions of the trip quite in the limit: just a backpack with 5 kg in total, alone, lots of walking and a really restricted budget. And the result: one of my nicest times in Europe lately!

On Saturday morning, I flew with FlyLAL to Vilnius in Lithuania. The flight was to Riga in Latvia, but the stopover time was 9.5 h!! So, I decided to visit Vilnius and Trakai. In the beginning, I thought it was far too much to be visited in one day. But in the end, I could make it! Then at 23h, I flew to Riga (Latvia).

On Sunday, I visited Riga, a superb city. In the evening, I traveled to Tallinn (Estonia) by bus.

On Monday, I visited Tallinn, a lovely and attractive city. There I walked around the Old Town and also went to the beach, in Pirita.

On Tuesday, I took a bus back to Riga at 6.30am and back in Latvia, I went to Sigulda, the entry point to the River Gauja Valley National Park. At night, back to Riga, short nap in the airport and back to Amsterdam.

In the coming days, when I get some of my energy back, I will tell you more about each place (I promise I will try not to make it boring!) and post some photos!

Now, some statistics! :)

With this trip, I have overcome a psychological turning point... I have traveled in or to more than 30 countries! In total, I have been to 31 countries now. As I told you some time ago, most of these trips have been within Europe. Besides, I have achieved my objective of knowing Europe before leaving the continent for PhD studies.

This is my current map of visited countries:



And this is a zoom over Europe:



In the coming months, until September, I won't travel to new countries in Europe. I will travel to Morocco and around Asia: Japan again, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia. And after that, it will be time for hard work. Not more traveling for a while. But I will have traveled to 35 countries and have many plans for the future!!

Plovdiv (Пловдив)

During our last day in Bulgaria, we visited Plovdiv. Plovdiv is a very old city (older than Athens or Rome) and has a nice Roman theatre and a nice medieval old town. The city is the second biggest in Bulgaria, but the historical center is quite small and can be visited in half a day.

This is what the Roman Theatre looks like!



And these are some photos taken in the medieval town.






Enjoy the weekend!!

This weekend, I will travel to the Baltic countries: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I will be back on Wednesday or Thursday.

Trip to Bulgaria in the map

Click on the image below to see where we went in the map.

Rila Monastery (Рилски манастир)

During our second day in Bulgaria, Felipe and I went to Rila Monastery, a nice monastery in the middle of the mountains which was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in the early eighties.

It took around 2 hours by car from Sofia to get to the monastery. The trip started using wide road and little by little we got into the mountains. The entrance already showed there was something beautiful hidden inside the walls.



And this is what was hidden, a superb church and a tower. The view when you get there is impressive. With the mountains as the perfect background, the colourful and densely decorated church is really beautiful.



And the tower looks quite nice too!




Everything was full of religious pictures like this one:



This is the chimney in the monastery kitchen. It looked quite curious. The walls were so dark!



On the other side of the monastery, there was another gate and behind it there was another small building with some restaurants.



In the end, this day trip to the mountains and to this superb monastery was completely worth it!!

Sofia (София)

As I told you in some of the previous posts about football, last weekend I went to Bulgaria with Felipe. I did not really know what I should expect of that country and what we could find there. When I thought about Bulgaria, I just thought about Hristo Stoichkov ;-)

Sofia turned up to be an interesting city. The historical center is really small and you can see everything in about one day. The interesting thing is that Sofia, or Bulgaria in general, is a place where many cultures got mixed: Turkish, Russian, Greek, Western European. Therefore, you are walking in some streets and you can see a bizantine church, a mosque and a synagogue in the same square... Interesting.

Bulgaria is still not used to tourism, at least the Eastern and Central parts of the country, and just a few people can actually speak some English. Besides, everything is written in cyrillic (e.g. Russian letters) so it can be a bit confusing for some people. However, the weather was great and prices were ridiculously low for westeners! You could drink half a liter of beer for less than one euro!! And for 5 euros you could have a proper meal!! Tomorrow, I will tell you about our trip to Rila Monastery, but I wanted to tell you that a shared taxi among 4 people hired for a 5 hours drive and a 2 hours wait cost exactly 15 euros per person!! Try that in the Netherlands...

So, let's proceed with some photos, as usual!

The first thing you notice is that you will have problems reading the names of the streets if you cannot read any cyrillic:



This nice building is the National Theatre. Soviet associated countries have always been famous for their support of culture.



This is Alexander Nevski Memorial Church, a very beautiful church in Russian style, which has become one of the symbols of the city.



And this is the view from the entrance:



This is the Russian church, which looked similar to the ones I visited in the Kremlin, when I visited Moscow in 2006.



This nice bizantine church is called Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church and it was a bit off the center.



This church is called St. Nedelya and was just in the real real center of Sofia, just next to the Prime Minister's residence and the former Party House.



And this mosque is not far away! Behind it, the Baths of Sofia... However, my camera got broken and was the only camera we had at that moment... so I have not got any pictures of that beautiful building.



Finally, the women's market, a traditional street market when local people bought vegetables and other stuff. Quite authentic!



Off the city center, the city looked really poor and untamed, which made it also attractive! Just different from all Western Europe: so homogeneus!!

29th June 2008. A date to remember!

Yes, we finally made it!!! Yesterday, Spain won its second EuroCup!! The previous one was won in 1964, by people like Gento, Zoco, Amancio... let's say... by legends... I think this new generation, Casillas, Xavi, Cesc, Villa, Torres, will be as famous as those! The good point is they are still really young and a good long-lasting group can be created.

Well, I watched the match in Sofia, Bulgaria. I went this weekend to visit Bulgaria (Sofia, Plovdiv and Rila Monastery) and I was still there for the match. Some locals told us where we could go for big street screens and we went there. I was wearing my Spanish jersey and some Spanish people saw it and came to talk to us at some point. I watched the match with Felipe, a French guy from the hostel (he came travelling from Egypt through the Middle East) and a guy from Barcelona who had just started his motorbike trip from Barcelona to Iran! And surrounded by Bulgarian people everywhere. At the beginning, I didn't know if they would support Spain or Germany, but soon I saw they were quite neutral or supportive for Spain, which was nice!

In the morning, when I arrived in the airport, many Dutch told me things like "Viva España!". They were really happy because we defeated Russia and especially, Germany. Later, in the train, I could browse the local press and this is the result:






Appart from the mis-spelling of some words, you can see they really supported Spain yesterday!

This morning in ESTEC, it was kind of the same, many people told me supportive things (because of my football T-shirt...). Besides, somebody in my corridor had put a little Spanish flag with a little bull in the middle in every Spaniard's office door!! hahaha... I was really surprised this morning when I saw that flag on my door! And another guy hung a Spanish scarf in his door knob! Not bad for the European Space Agency! :-)



And yesterday, many people were celebrating our victory in our usual football pub in Leiden, Bad Habits. They were kicked out of the pub after 2am! This is what it looked like during the match:





(These last two photos are courtesy of Paula Saameño. Gracias Paula!)

Can you recognise yourselves amongst the people there? Live some comments telling us your experience! ;-)



So, finally, we could and still can celebrate something important. PUDIMOS! :)

Spain 3 - Russia 0

I can only described the Euro2008 semifinal played yesterday with one word: IMPRESSIVE!

Spain clearly defeated Russia and played a really good match. Even goals were beautiful! All players were superb and Russia did not seem to be dangerous at any point of the game... at least, that is my opinion once the match is over... hehe...

Newspapers in Spain say the same: yesterday's was "THE PERFECT MATCH".

Photos from www.as.com

Anyway, we are in the final after 24 years and we will play Germany there. Next Sunday at 20.45. I hope we can make it!! That would be so nice!! I am going to Sofia (Bulgaria) this weekend and my Spanish jersey is in my backpack!

Mogari no Mori (殯の森)

I have just seen a great movie. A Japanese movie by Naomi Kawase (河瀨直美) which won the best film award in Cannes Festival last year. The name of the movie is "The Mourning Forest", Mogari no Mori in Japanese.

The movie is great and very in the director's line. Naomi Kawase san graduated from Photography School and started making documentaries. Afterwards, she used all she had learnt from those areas and applied it to movies. Her movies are really slow, with only a few dialogues and photography and feelings are the most important things. Her movies are more like a piece of art than like a movie. For some people, they can be boring... for me, they are just perfect!



Some months ago, I also watched another of her movies: Sharasoju (沙羅双樹). My impression was the same. That movie was also amazing. This kind of movies really touch you. You can't stay the same after them...

If you have the opportunity, check out any of these two movies. Two true master pieces!