Funfare for the Common Man

Talk about a rough start, and a rude welcome to eastern Hungary. I was almost ready to throw in the towel within hours of my arrival. I try to plan as little as possible when I’m on the road, though in the height of summer with limited accommodation on offer that can be a perilous endeavour. So from time to time I swallow my principles and book rooms in advance. Unfortunately, I was unable to for Eger, my next stop, and it was perhaps an ominous sign that I couldn’t get through by phone or email. I was particularly concerned because it seemed like a place with limited accommodation, and I was proved right. I could really draw the story of my arrival out. It was one of those evenings that I have tried to purge from my memory, but then the negative experiences are also part and parcel of travel, right? “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” (Clinton Fadiman) Long story short: ...

'Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.' Walt Whitman This was a trip that really made me feel my age, to borrow from Jarvis Cocker *. I’ve done plenty of budget travelling and backpacking in my time, and for the most part I still enjoy it – when you’re on the road for a month, you have to do so on a budget, let’s face it – but in my cantankerous old ways, I have a hard time putting up with the crap that comes with staying in youth hostels. Whenever possible, I opt for a single room, but in many cases, you’re still faced with lots of noise and other general tomfoolery (like loud, idiotic backpackers talking utter nonsense till the wee hours of the morning). I think I’ve reached my limit when it comes to sharing rooms in hostels, not that I was ever much of a fan of it to begin with. In Lviv I stayed at the Kosmonaut Hostel where I was kept awake every night by French and...

  I’ve got a lot of stories to tell from a month of summer travels, but let’s begin by going back into the past, to just over a year before my 2011 travels commenced. We’ll call this the PROLOGUE : Lviv: 16-21 June 2010 Regular and semi-regular readers will have different recollections of my tales from the summer of 2010: Romania-Moldova-Transdniestria-Ukraine-Poland. Much of that has been covered in varying degrees of depth on the Layman’s Guide (I especially love my rambling, blabbering Tiraspol post ). Interspersed amongst my ditties were missives about the World Cup, which I fear alienated a few too many readers. After my wretchedly poor World Cup preview, which provoked torrents of abuse and vitriol, I felt that I had to keep up some momentum and thus produced a few perfunctory pieces of inchoate bile where I ruminated on various matches and theorized in way too great depth. Blah blah blah indeed. I have also, from time to time, referred to the splendid ‘new’ collection o...