in transit: To the Czech Republic, via Austria

After having a great evening yesterday walking around Budapest and even stumbling upon some sort of cultural festival where I got to see real Hungarian folk dancing for free, and then dodging the loutish England fans who were happy about winning despite the other team actually scoring the goal, I finally decided to check out what trains I actually had to catch to get to Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Since this is a rather illogical route I am taking, the trains I have to catch are a bit of a mess, so I am sitting in the Linz train station in Austria (which is very nice) being extraordinarily overcharged for the internet. I am coming back to see Austria later, with my friend Dave, my routing makes no sense, but oh well. The countryside on the train was very beautiful though.

One major problem when you are travelling on your own with a backpack thats almost as big as ones self is what to do when you need the loo. Even though my pack contains mostly shabby clothes, in this age of terror it is not an option to just dump it outside the toilet door or the bomb squad may be called. So I have to either leave it at a luggage desk if they have one, and it doesnt fit inside the lockers that they have here. There was no left luggage desk at this station, so through a series of interesting miming and spoken queries, I finally got a security guard to watch it for 5 minutes so I could go to the loo. Ah, the joys of solo travel!

Hopefully I will get to Cesky Krumlov sometime this evening. Im keen to see the place as I have heard so many good things, and my desire to go there started when I read an article on UTS Reportage about it, so I hope it is as good as the hype. It is in South Bohemia though, so it can't be too bad.