Seahawk Sailor wrote:Shark, I've heard similar about Prague. It's tops of my to-visit list. Had a chance to go back in '03, but just ran out of money traveling all the other places I did. Wish we would have done it anyway now. I'm assuming it's similar to some of the other Eastern European cities like Zagreb, which of course only makes me want to visit it more because I know how awesome it's going to be.
Interesting note about Zagreb. I never got to go there because the day before we were supposed to go in, the state department said they weren't going to help extricate us if we had issues. We had visas and were given the go ahead, and then got stuck in Timisoara Romania, which is another very cool city. I really want to go back and see Zagreb. I really regret that I didn't get to, but this was May of 1995 and things were still on high alert. A bus had hit a roadside bomb the week we were to go in, so that was why we got the warning from the state department.
We ended up meeting up with another Mormon guy in Timisoara who was there enforcing an embargo (yeah right... he was totally a CIA official). Anyway, he helped get my brother and I out of the country and on to a plane to Seattle because our Uncle had just up and died the night before. Mr. CIA got us onto a plane without tickets, and got us transfers in Vienna, Atlanta and Las Vegas with about five minutes of phone calls. It was amazing. He talked to security at the Timisoara airport and they waved us through without issue. It was funny because he had only been there for about a month, and was speaking Romanian really fast. That is when I was like "wait... you don't work for the department of the treasury" he was like "Uh... yeah I do. Here's my card." With a wink.... pretty funny.
Eastern Europe is way cool. Vienna is of course "west" but totally overrated. Too pricey, too crowded, and the people are pretty snotty. Never had that in Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Timisoara, Prague, or any of the other places we went.