Budapest

It took 45 minutes by bus & tram to reach the Warsaw airport from my hotel.  The airport terminal is fairly new & I was through security in just a few minutes.  My flight from Warsaw to Budapest is on Wizzair.  I paid $58 for my ticket which included $25 for my checked bag.  The 1 hour flight was pretty smooth & it appeared that every seat on the flight was filled.

I arrived in Budapest & bought a city transit pass for 15 days for only $22.50.  I also stopped at Subway for lunch on my way to the hotel.  They had a few rap songs (in English) with some really sexually explicit lyrics on the overhead speakers followed by a Taylor Swift song, no one seemed understand the lyrics of the songs (or didn't care if they did understand).

I checked into the Park Inn hotel for a free 7 night stay & was upgraded to a superior room which is the size of a small suite.  The hotel is only a few years old & in a quiet neighborhood, but the downside is that it is 15-20 minutes by subway from downtown.  

After staying in 8 cities over the last month, it will be nice to take it easy for the next 12 days here without many activities planned.  Budapest is a great place (especially in the evening) to just to walk along the river or through some of main tourist streets downtown & people watch.  Here are a few photos from my first night in town. 

Torun

Torun, Poland is well known for a few things.  The astronomer Copernicus lived there and it has a nice historic district that was largely untouched by World War 2.  I arrived in Torun after a 2 hour bus ride from Gdansk & found a luggage locker for my bag & headed into town for a short visit.

The town has many churches & almost all were red brick & primarily gothic style buildings.  I noticed a lot of older people dressed up walking down the main pedestrian street which seemed strange at 10:00 am on a weekday.  When I got to the main square in town, there was some type of march going on & then some type of religious ceremony.  I never did find out exactly what it was.

I stopped at a place on the main square for lunch, visited the Copernicus museum, & took a few more photos before heading back to catch the bus to Warsaw.

Copernicus statue

The main walking street in Torun

The bus ride back to Warsaw was 3.5 hours & it was about another 45 minutes on public transit to my hotel.  I stayed in an IBIS hotel for one night before my morning flight to Budapest.  Just as I was l leaving to get a sandwich from a place down the street, an alarm goes off in the building.  I saw the receptionist on the phone outside saying it was a false alarm.  Then a few minutes later, 3 fire trucks pull up at the hotel with some loud recorded message throughout the building in several languages saying stay where you are & don't panic. I am glad it was just a false alarm, but it went on for about 15 minutes since no one seemed to know how to turn it off.

Well after the excitement of the false alarm, it was time to get some rest since I had a 10:30 am flight in the morning.  I will be in Budapest for 12 nights, so it will be a nice break to be in one place for awhile after staying in 8 cities over the last month.

Gdansk

I took the 7:00 am train from Warsaw to Gdansk, it was an older & slower train (1 hr 15 minutes slower) compared to most of the others on the same route. Unfortunately the train was very crowded & I was wishing that I spent extra $20 to get there more comfortably.  The apartment I rented in Gdansk was a 20 minute walk from the train station. The outside of the building looked a little rough, but the apartment had just been renovated, so everything was fine once I got inside. The location is great, less than 5 minutes from the main tourist area.

My apartment is on the left.

Gdansk is a town on the Baltic Sea with a population of approximately 500,000.  It has been an important trading city for centuries & was part of the German Hanseatic trade league.  It was also the site of the first battle of World War 2 & as the home of the Solidarity trade union which helped bring down the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.  It is also very popular with tourists due to it's scenic waterfront area.

As was the case with Warsaw, almost all of the downtown area of Gdansk was destroyed during the war.  So the town has been reconstructed to resemble what it looked like prior to the war.  The weather was great during my visit to Gdansk. On my first 2 days there, I walked the city several times including doing a group walking tour, ate some good polish food, & was able to get some nice photos of the city.  

One of the highlights of my visit was the Solidarity museum.  The museum is a brand new 2 story complex with a lot of great exhibits & historical items.  The total cost was just over $4 including the audio guide. The Solidarity trade union was able to push the communist regime for better wages, improved working conditions, & other reforms which ultimately help bring down the communist governments in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

Solidarity monument 

The front of museum.

Lech Walensea speaks to Congress

On my last day in Gdansk, I visited Sopot which is a 20 minute train ride from Gdansk.  The town was really nice with a sandy beach & the longest wooden pier in Europe.  It was quite windy on the pier, but luckily I remembered to bring a jacket with me.  I had a really good lunch of fish & fries at a small family restaurant near the beach.  You had to order inside & they called your order number when it was ready.  It was funny because the lady called the number for my order in English instead of Polish when my fish was ready.

Sopot main pedestrian area

Sopot pier

Sopot train station

"Krazy House" because of the shape of the building

Every day on my trip, there are always large groups of schoolchildren at every tourist site.  I thought I would get a break from this when visiting Sopot, but there were lots of schoolchildren there.  What is educational about visiting a beach town?  I wonder how they can speak 2-3 languages if they are always on these trips?

Field trip to the beach

I also found out there was a famous historical site right near the apartment I rented.  It was a post office & communications center that was attacked by the the Nazis on the first day of WW 2.  The postal workers held off the Nazis for almost a day & there is a monument with a museum inside the building.  

Monument to the postal workers.

The survivors of the attack were executed by the Nazis after a trial.

Overall Gdansk was a great place to visit, but it is popular with tourists so it gets crowded at times.  There were also some of the "umbrella women" that I saw last year in Kraków trying to get foreign guys to visit the local gentleman's club.  My next destination on my trip is 5 hour stop in Torun & then on to Warsaw for the night.  I have a flight from Warsaw to Budapest the next day.

Here are a few more photos from my visit to Gdansk.

Lody is Polish for ice cream.  This is a famous ice cream shop with great homemade ice cream for $.75 a scoop.

One of the umbrella women looking for the next foreigner to harass.

Fahrenheit, the guy who invented the thermometer is from Gdansk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit

Warsaw at Night

There is a big ugly skyscraper from the 1950s which was built by Stalin as a "gift" to Poland located right near the hotel I stayed at. It is the same style building as the ones that I had seen in Moscow & Riga.  It isn't too popular with the local people & was originally white, but after years of pollution is darker & dirtier.  Here are some photos of it during the day & at night.

I also photographed some of the nearby skyscrapers which are light up in different colors.

My last night in Warsaw, I went down to the river & got some nice photos of the bridges. Unfortunately  I didn't realize that there was a nice wide pedestrian lane on the 2nd level of the bridge & I ended up taking a narrow lane on the top of the bridge with a knee high guardrail with traffic whizzing by at 60 mph.  It was a much more pleasant walk on the 2nd level on the way back.

Going over the bridge on the top level was a bad idea.

This return trip was much better.

I was able to get some really good photos & there were quite a few people along this section of the river.