Hopping Through Europe

I spent twelve days in Europe, hopping around from town to town and thought I would catalogue some of my impressions and experiences. It was a pretty quick trip and I didn’t really get to know many peeps or even learn the names of 95% of the places and things I saw but it was also a really fun exercise in survival and a great way to spend an inter-co-op vacation.

Day 1 - Sofia, Bulgaria

• visited my awesome friends, Rada and Sneje. Only had a few short hours to catch up. They gave me salad and tea. Hooray!
• their apartment was really neat, with 180 degree views of the Vitosha mountain in Sofia and right by the budding tech district.
• grabbed some banitza and airyan with Rada on the way over to the airport bright and early in the morning.
• forgot my razor at Rada’s apartment. You will see my beard growing as the trip progresses; also, got fined 35 EUR for not checking into my flight three hours beforehand with WizzAir. Will note this for future low-cost flights.
• made friends with the girl sitting next to me on the plane. She was an American girl from Virginia who had grown up in Sofia and now went to school in Budapest. Was really entertained by the fact that she loved Bulgaria so much.

Day 2 and 3 - Budapest, Hungary

• wow! This city is better than I would have given it credit for before coming. Really walkable, beautiful, clean, the weather was great, and things were really cheap.
• met up with Kaylien at the airport. She was at Terminal 2A but insisted she was at 2B and didn’t have Wi-Fi so it took a little longer than anticipated. Then we took the bus into town!
• the Airbnb we stayed in was so cool. From one of the main streets in Budapest, you take a turn and wind up in a courtyard that feels like a whole different world. The chirping of the birds was somehow amplified by the courtyard. The apartment itself was a modern loft that was modeled to look and feel like a tree house (green accents, fake grass). Really cozy!
• of course, the first thing we did after settling in was to go out to walk around and get a feel for the city. And the first stop was a fast food joint where we grabbed some schnitzels.
• afterwards, we crossed the river back and forth a few times and eventually wound up on top of a big hill that overlooked the city. It was nighttime by then. Turns out it was past actually around 23:00, so most food places were closed, and we had to make do with fast food once again.
• stumbled upon a cool book exchange café. They were closing but the owner was really nice. He was clearly passionate about the craft of coffee-making recommended I try St. Frank Coffee in San Francisco.
• once we got back to the Pest side of town, we walked around the center and got some Hungarian draft beer to sip on. Eventually, we got home and went to sleep.

At the top of one of the hills in Budapest

• in the morning, we had a really nice European breakfast in the center, cappuccino, chocolate croissants and all. Apparently, Hungarian food is kind of an amalgam of stuff chopped up on the same plate, e.g. sausage, tomato, cheese, etc.
• after breakfast, we went to the Gellert Bath House on the Buda side of the river. I thought the spas and saunas were not sufficiently hot compared to what I am used to.
• once we were done soaking, we walked along the river and stopped by at a café, where I read a bit of The Dream Machine by the Danube. An inspiring book, it reminded me of Stripe inasmuch as it talked about smart people coming together to work on solving problems with computing. The CEO of Stripe (where I interned), Patrick, had this book printed for everyone in the company because he found it important and interesting.

Budapest from atop a (different) hill

• wandered up to and around the Hungarian National Gallery. Learned that like my home country of Bulgaria, Hungary was part of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottomans never conquered Vienna, which is a few hundred kilometers upriver, so this was one of the westernmost outposts. Also, I looked at paintings of old people and scenery. I was honestly more impressed by the buildings than by the art.
• saw (rather, heard) a bunch of groups Bulgarians around Parliament. Went into a Hungarian restaurant. Some Bulgarians happened to be sitting at the next table over. Ate some traditional Hungarian food. Fell asleep at the dinner table. Woke up to some Bulgarians cackling and taking pictures of us. Rude. They didn’t think I understand them, but I am generally disappointed. Of course, it would be Bulgarians to pull this kind of thing.
• caught an evening cruise down the Danube and had a few glasses of champagne. Was really tired but it was a must.

Parliament from the Danube cruise

• woke up bright and early and spent our remaining 2700 HUF ($10) on more sandwiches than was reasonable to eat. I think I ate three! That held us over until dinner in Italy.

Day 4 and 5 - Rome, Italy

• not exactly what I expected, but a marvel nonetheless! Saw something about Rome being called the Eternal City because of its prominence throughout the ages. One thing that stood out is that while Rome is amazing, I feel like all the cultural heritage also prevents it from evolving with time and reinventing itself.
• Kaylien and I walked from the central train station to our apartment because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets to the tram
• settled into our Airbnb. This one was a really cute studio in the Jewish Quarter, in the perfect location for walking around the city. So close to everything, we didn’t need to worry about trams. This meant that when we were leaving, we still had no idea where to buy tickets; thankfully, no one asked.
• walked to the Colosseum in the nighttime. It’s really really impressive that humans of a thousand plus years ago managed to build all this without the any of the tools we have today. I had this recurring thought that the modern day equivalent of this amazing architecture (as in, the marvel of human accomplishment) is something like a microprocessor or a data center. Yes, I have become a hopeless tech bro.

Chillin’ at the Colosseum at night

• ate a great spaghetti dinner and washed it down with Peroni. Great restaurant. Again, super affordable given the location and ambiance (10 EUR plates). Everyone around was so European.
• saw some more impressive old buildings, ate gelato, and slept.
• woke up bright and early and started knocking out the sights of Rome one by one. Saw a bunch of piazzas (…so that’s how the course management website got its name), ate pizza and gelato on the go, went to the park, sat at another café, saw the Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, and a bunch of other historically significant things. One thing to note is that at almost every monument, there was at least one guy with a large gun. It was a little uncomfortable.

Kaylien at café drinking her iced tea

• stopped by at a Head promotional event and got to play tennis and watch a tournament in the middle of Piazza di Venecia. I totally crushed Kaylien at tennis.
• made our way to Vatican City. Climbed up the stairs to the top of St. Peter’s Basilica. Finally got a good sense of what Rome looks like from above and a good work out, too. The area around the canal had some pretty trees. Also, that river is so green.
• Evan and two of Kaylien’s friends from school came over in the evening and we went to another dinner. This time, we got red wine, pasta, and lamb. Afterwards, we stopped by what was said to be the best gelato place in Rome. It was good but I was also gelato’d out so couldn’t fully appreciate it.
• Yay Evan! As you can see, we were really excited to see each other.

Tired but working on that aperol spritz with Evan

• Kaylien’s friends went home and the three of us hopped over to Scholar’s Pub to meet up with a bunch of Northeastern kids that were in town for a Dialogue. That outing didn’t last long, because I got tired pretty quickly and wanted to go to sleep, but seeing Katherine again was neat!
• Woke up bright and early at 5:45 to catch our 8:55 flight to Sweden. Grabbed a tiny coffee at the airport.
• The average age of the people on this airplane was almost certainly the highest of any airplane I have been on.

Day 6 and 7 - Stockholm, Sweden

• I loved Stockholm. It seemed to embody some solid values, like self-reliance + sustainability, utilitarianism + minimalism, design, etc. In terms of the lifestyle that I could imagine someone (read: me) having, this was the best stop of the trip, but the weather might be a deal breaker for me.
• got into Stockholm pretty early (around noon) and took the train straight to our Airbnb. My first impression was that the public transit system is actually kind of unintuitive. We had a hard time finding the 13 line within the Central Station. When we finally got off, it was in a residential district, right across from a school. All the blonde cherub kids were playing and looked happy and wholesome.
• figuring that eating out for every meal would be really expensive, I picked up some groceries. The cashier told me to unpack my own shopping cart and later to pack my own groceries in a bag; this was my first taste of Swedes’ emphasis on self-reliance. Groceries turned out to be a great decision because the apartment had an amazing kitchen that was so much fun to cook in. Let me tell you, induction stoves are dope and Swedes know what utensils to buy to make cooking easy.

Stockholm Airbnb’s spacious kitchen

• after lunch, we decided to watch a movie. First, I started a documentary called Minimalism but it was so bad, so I decided to watch something from the IMDb 250 list instead; turns out, there are only a handful of titles available on Netflix. We (more like I, because Kaylien immediately fell asleep) watched The Iron Giant. Not a bad movie. I found it heartwarming. Also, did laundry during the movie. The washer and dryer in this house were so small. Probably about ¼ the volume of your typical American set and probably also more appropriate for the amount of clothes I have. I liked that.
• Found out I was actually really tired when I fell asleep right after at 17:00 and woke up at 3:30 the next morning. It was starting to get light outside at 3:30. Latitude - amazing!
• Kaylien slept until 8:30 so I had to entertain myself by making some breakfast, drinking coffee, reading some a few papers, and starting this post. This is where I am stopping now that we are finally going out.
• around twenty hours after first making it to Stockholm, we decided to embark on our journey through the city. First, we walked through the local school, then by a pond, across some bridges, and into the downtown area. The water everywhere was so breathtakingly blue. And, while the downtown area looked pretty small at first, it seemed to stretch on forever when we finally started walking through it.
• somehow, I decided that eating McDonald’s would be a good idea for lunch. Dollar menu stuff, of course! We picked up some waffles from a street vendor for dessert. To be fair, restaurants weren’t that obscenely expensive – you could pick up an entreé for twenty bucks, but I wasn’t really feeling the vibes, and was hungry enough that anything would be satisfying.

Eating a waffle with ice cream in Stockholm with Kaylien

• we didn’t do anything in Stockholm per se other than soak in the sights; I got a feel for the culture. For example, there was a lively and genuinely fun-seeming strike of the garbage collectors who were parading down one of the main avenues. The nature was really beautiful. And, it seems like the Swedes really love their interior design because the high streets were dotted with furniture stores. Figures, since they have to spend a lot of time indoors.
• notably, I would have loved to see the National Design Museum, but it turned out to close at 18:00 and we did not get there until a bit after. After wandering through a few buildings, I continue to uphold that Swedish buildings are not exactly intuitively laid out.

Beer by the water in Stockholm

• after an exhausting day, we picked up beers by the water; then, we took the subway back home, stopped by the grocery store for some more bread, and went home to cook salmon. It was an amazing cut for 50 SEK (~$5). Nothing really beat the grocery store seafood in Sweden. I was also a fan of both the crab and shrimp salads. Texted my dad about the salmon and he told me to look into Norwegian salmon being toxic. Heh.

Some homemade salmon dinner

• in the morning, Kaylien went off to the airport. She caught a noon flight to Boston, whereas my flight to Berlin wasn’t until 19:30. Thank you for being a great travel buddy and enjoy the rest of your summer!
• I just went back to downtown and hung out in a bookstore; the exercise for the day was working through a tutorial on building a simple interpreter, since everything learned in PL went straight over my head the first time around.
• I derped and bought a ticket to the wrong train (the low speed one); it would have been a stretch to make it to my flight on that one so I had to write it off as a loss. Wasting money is so grrr.

Days 8, 9 and 10 - Berlin and Dresden, Germany

• landing in Berlin was so incredibly beautiful. How is everything so green and the sky so pink and blue?
• ended up immediately making my way to the hostel via the S9 train. I stayed in a ten Euro per night room in a place called Plus Berlin. The receptionist was super cool and nice. We chatted a bit about our upcoming birthdays and his passion for filmmaking which brought him out here from France. I asked him what to do for the rest of the nights and he expressed some disdain for the local “commercial” establishments. As I would later find out, such disdain is pretty definitive of Berlin’s culture.
• ended up grabbing a döner from a street vendor. While I was eating, this really creepy dude came over to me and started making some really strange movements. I felt kind of uncomfortable so I left and and picked up a beer in an outdoor food + beer place that had lots of people. Everyone was speaking in German, except this group of older British people. I watched something kind of funny: one of the British girls handed a homeless guy around the place two Colas and a receipt for a burger that she had bought him; she explained in English that he can pick up his burger at the window. He was really grateful but also completely missed the point that she had bought him a burger and when she went back to her friends, he ambled back into his homeless person area, while she didn’t notice. Later, I saw him drinking his Cokes with a friend while walking back, oblivious to the missed opportunity for a snack. Thought it would be in vain to try and explain to either party what was going on, so I kept on my way.
• got back to the hostel and managed to catch up with my roomies – two girls traveling from Melbourne, Australia and a guy from San Antonio, Texas. The guy was also going to Dresden the following day and suggested a cheap bus for me to take instead of the train. We chit-chatted a bit. They asked me how I can afford to live in San Francisco; at this point, I mentioned that I worked at some tech companies and my travel mates said something about feeling bad for themselves and then we all went to sleep. Probably should not have said that. In the morning, we shuffled through our stuff and all departed around the same time. They were nice!
• The hostel was right next to the East Berlin Gallery, so I walked through that in the morning. It didn’t help that all the labels were covered in graffiti. Near the end of the Gallery, I stumbled into an area by the river that had a bunch of homeless people or “squatters” as they call themselves. One of them told me this was a dead end (thanks!) and explained where I should go to see stuff (back 200 meters and down the road). Afterwards, he asked for a few coins, suggesting 0,20 Euro. I only had a 5,00 Euro bill, so I gave him that, because I thought he was pretty nice. He was really taken aback and went on to tell me a bit about himself and life by the river. There were a bunch of squatters around. He said they light fires in the night to keep warm but cannot light them very big because the people living in the luxurious condos nearby call the police. It was a little hard to understand his English but he mentioned that he is 39-years old and without a job for over ten years “so it is over for me.” In all fairness, the squatter life didn’t seem so bad with as much company as he seemed to have.
• I walked over to Aleksanderplatz where I would be taking the Flixbus to Dresden around noon. Nothing much happened for the rest of the day, but I ate a bagel and had some cappuccino in a small café by the side of the road.
• I realized that without Kaylien and her camera, I had stopped taking pictures. Also, my iPhone keeps telling me that its memory is almost full, so yeah. On the other hand, traveling alone made me meet many more new people (mostly in random nooks and crannies, to be fair). Two and a half hours later, I was in Dresden and my wonderful cousin Guergana was there to meet me at the bus station.
• the first stop was the top of the rebuilt Frauenkirche in the old town center. We went to the top of the cupola and she told me all about the history of the various buildings. After that, we walked around the market and had some beer. Then around one of the palaces, and to a mural of the Kings of Dresden, and finally stopped for a German dinner. The dinner consisted of lots of meat and potatoes – sausages, ribs, mashed potatoes, and potato wedges.
• after dinner, we made our way to the new town to meet up with Chris, Guergana’s boyfriend. We had a few drinks and chit-chatted for the night. Then, when we were sufficiently “tired”, we went back home to call it a night.
• in the morning, Guergana gave me some marble cake and a coffee and headed off to class while I packed my bags and took a shower. I was alone for about fifteen minutes before meeting up with an old friend from Kardzhali, Nadejda, who happened to be studying dentistry in Dresden.
• she showed me around the medical campus of the University, and took me to a pretty garden. Afterwards, we caught up over a beer in the new town. Notably, Dresden was the booziest part of my trip. I told her about the culture in Silicon Valley and my life. It was a great chat and a serendipitous run in indeed. Apparently, we had not seen each other for at least eight years, but our dads had been childhood friends.
• when I was getting back into Berlin, I booked the best rated hostel in Germany (woot, Hostel World!) even though it was a bit more expensive than the others. I didn’t find it quite as nice as the one where I had stayed the prior night though – it was less spacious, less clean, and the staff and guests weren’t as friendly.
• I went to an amazing dinner at Crackers – which must be the best restaurant in all of Berlin with Kenny.

Okay, I got too lazy to talk about the part where we went to Bulgaria afterwards, but that was significant in a lot of ways.