E Europe Travel

Posted by Amanda Kendle

Italian architect David Fisher is a pretty creative guy, and he's managed to design a functional skyscraper that changes its shape at the push of a button. Well, a little more slowly than that (you can't spin a building too quickly or its occupants would feel ill), but the separate floors of his skyscraper can all rotate independently, and this means the shape of the skyscraper when viewed from outside will be constantly changeable.

The first of these skyscrapers is due to be built in Dubai soon, but Moscow seems to be the next destination. The Mirax Group is apparently behind the construction, which will be 60 stories high, but an exact site for the building hasn't yet been decided upon - that should happen during October.

While I'm not sure if this isn't just a kitschy building (but then again, what is St Basil's Cathedral - and I love that!) - the nice aspect is it's designed to be green, and use natural energy sources to help with the mechanics of it all. When (or if) the final decision to build is made, it should take about 20 months longer until the skyscraper is completed.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

During my time in Bratislava, I became addicted to the SkyEurope website in my search for cheap flights from Bratislava to anywhere - the only criteria was it should be somewhere I hadn't been. Back then - I first flew SkyEurope in 2003 - the flight network was pretty limited, and I managed to take long weekend holidays in Paris, Venice and London using cheap flights from SkyEurope.

I wish I was still living in Bratislava, because now the network is really huge (and flights haven't got more expensive). While I was checking some facts for this week's article on Flying SkyEurope in Eastern Europe I got to see exactly how big the route map is now. I'd have a few dream holidays to take out of Bratislava now: a sunny stint to Varna or Bourgas in Bulgaria would be high on the list, as would a quick trip up to Copenhagen. I'm also impressed to see there are now a few direct flights out of the eastern Slovak city of Kosice. Things are continuing to look up for Eastern European travelers, and I think that's great!

Posted by Amanda Kendle

Already this year, one of my favorite travel guide book publishers, Bradt, has released a new guide to Croatia. In its third edition, and now almost un-Bradt-like, since Croatia has become such a popular destination, the book covers areas like national parks and islands in especially good detail. Also this year, the second edition of the Dubrovnik city guide came out.

More recently, in July, Bradt issued its fifth edition of the Estonia guide book. With the growing number of visitors to Narva en route to or from Russia, Bradt expanded its coverage of this interesting border town.

Coming later this year is another useful Bradt guide - and this will be the first Bradt guide to Bulgaria. It's due to be published in December 2007 and will include information about the Black Sea coastline, the mountains and ski resorts and Bulgaria's nine World Heritage listed sites.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

If you're planning a trip to Budapest or other parts of Hungary or just have an interest in Hungarian culture, I highly recommend tuning in to Budacast.hu to listen to their weekly podcast in English. Every week, they produce a twenty-minute podcast that includes a weekly news summary, interviews with locals (often artists or journalists) and some tips on what to see if you're traveling there.

A recent podcast included some language tips (desperately needed if you want to pick up a bit of Hungarian), a first person story of a day trip to Villány and a feature story about the Kerepesi cemetery. All fascinating and all likely to give you the Hungarian travel bug.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

I'm just doing a bit of holiday daydreaming and a week in a Hungarian wine-growing region sounds just right at the moment. Work commitments and finances might keep me away, but perhaps I can vicariously travel there through a reader who loves this tip.

In the north east of Hungary, towards Ukraine, you can find the Tokaj-Hegyalja wine district, which is well known as the source of some great Hungarian wines. Head to a small town called Tarcal here and you can stay at the brand new Andrássy Kúria Hotel Wine & Spa resort, which has been built right in the middle of a winery. As well as nice accommodation, you can get a bit involved with the whole wine thing - there's tasting, of course, along with sessions where the owners show you something about the process of wine making there. And then ... well, some more tasting would be important, I think! The spa complex also sounds really relaxing and it's also wine (or grape) influenced - they have "vinotherapy" treatments which use cosmetics and other products made from grape and wine extracts, apparently.

Please try it out for me! You can check the English version of their website for more details. Let us know if you enjoy your stay.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

A few years ago, I landed at Vladivostok Airport and was met by a charming young Russian guy whose face I can still picture clearly. Perhaps that's because I link it with the terror I felt as he drove me from the airport into the Vladivostok city center.

During our car ride, I remember this man explaining about the Russian cars that were built during the communist era, and proudly boasting that they were far superior to East Germany's Trabants, built "from rubbish", he said. This comment came flooding back to me as I read the latest novel from Marina Lewycka called Two Caravans. One of the characters, a Ukranian man named Vitaly, describes how his father had a sky-blue Zaprozhets 965, one of the first mass-produced "workers' cars" in Ukraine. And he was proud because it had a "real metal body - not fibreboard rubbish like the Trabant". While these old cars are increasingly rare across Eastern Europe, you should definitely try to see one when you travel - it's really amazing that some of them ever functioned.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

Last month in Christchurch, New Zealand, the World Heritage Committee met to consider which sites to add to their World Heritage list. After much consideration (and long discussion, it seems), they added just 22 sites, bringing the total of properties on the World Heritage list to 851.

The ones that made the headlines when they were added were places like the Sydney Opera House and the Old Town of Corfu in Greece, but there was also one addition from the Eastern European zone. The he Primeval Beech Forest of the Carpathian (Ukraine and Slovakia) was inscribed on the list as a natural property.

The reasons for adding this forest given by the World Heritage Committee were:

The Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathian constitute a transnational serial property of ten separate components along a 185 km axis from the Rakhiv Mountains and the Chornohirskyi Range in the Ukraine, west along the Polonynian Ridge, to the Bukovské Vrchy and Vihorlat Mountains in Slovakia. The ten sites represent an outstanding example of undisturbed, complex temperate forests and exhibit the most complete and comprehensive ecological patterns and processes of pure stands of European beech across a variety of environmental conditions. They contain an invaluable genetic reservoir of beech.

This area is relatively rarely visited by tourists, but after being added to the World Heritage list, that will probably change, although it will hopefully be in a controlled and careful way.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

I'm a bit of a lover of odd news, and since my friends all know I'm also a fan of Eastern Europe and Russia, they tend to forward me a big range of interesting news stories. In the last week two really strange stories out of Russia have captured my imagination.

First up, there was the story of the stolen meteorite. In Krasnoyarsk, northern Siberia, they've been keeping a hundred-year-old, three-ton meteorite there for a couple of years. The story of the landing of the meteorite itself is fascinating - back in 1904, it flattened a 2000 square kilometer area of the Siberian forest. But the problem this week was that this massive rock has gone missing: police are looking out for it, but how can you lose a whole meteorite and where could anyone hide it?

Further west of Siberia towards Moscow, the town of Sarov (Nizhny Novgorod province) was the other part of Russia to make unusual headlines recently. It was here that a crocodile fell out of a twelfth-floor flat and fall to the pavement. Perhaps they'd like to make a Russian version of our "raining cats and dogs" phrase, and describe the weather as "raining crocodiles"? It turns out that this particular crocodile had been living in the flat (with its owner) for 15 years, and it was eventually returned there, with just one tooth damaged as a result of its adventure.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

A recent survey by the TRI Hospitality Consulting group has revealed that hotels in Moscow are making a considerably higher profit than hotels in any other part of Europe, including western Europe. They say that in the first half of this year, the "pure profit" made on the average hotel room in Moscow was 5,225 roubles (over US$200); the second highest figure came from London with about $150 per room.

They say the reasons for the massive profit-making in Moscow hotels are a high demand, a shortage of quality hotels and the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor in Russia; after all, Moscow is becoming known as the city of billionaires - you just have to look at the new Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel to see that. And wages for many jobs are still low; Moscow hotels pay out about 20% of their revenue on salaries, whereas it's nearly 40% in Paris.

What does all the mean for you, the traveler? Well, save up extra roubles if you plan to stay long in Moscow, or find a good homestay. Budget hotels are still few and far between. One last suggestion is to make friends with one of Moscow's 35 billionaires (or perhaps even one of the numerous millionaires) - there are so many now, it can't be hard to find one.

Posted by Amanda Kendle

Flying in and out of, and around, Eastern Europe is getting much easier and cheaper the more the budget airlines expand. This week, British low cost carrier EasyJet announced that it will start flights from London Gatwick into Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, as of November 6 this year. The Gatwick-Sofia route will operate three times per week.

If you're using EasyJet, you should be aware that they've also just announced there will be charges for all checked in baggage from October 1. That means that unless you can carry everything with you as cabin baggage, you'll have to pay 5 pounds per bag (or 2 pounds if you register the luggage at the time you book). The total weight for checked in baggage is still limited to 20kg, and you have to pay 6 pounds per kilogram for anything over that - and the word is they enforce this rule pretty strictly. Your carry on luggage can have any weight though, as long as it fits the 55cm x 40cm x 20cm dimensions.

But in any case, the addition of Sofia is good news, and EasyJet is still offering a number of other Eastern European destinations, including Tallinn, Riga, Warsaw, Krakow, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava and Ljubljana.