The last blogpost

With this post I'm ending this holiday blog. I just boarded the ICE from Frankfurt to Brussels, thus my journey has almost come to an end. Today nothing special happened, I arrived almost on time in Zürich, changed to the ICE to Frankfurt, had lunch in Frankfurt and boarded the Brussels-bound ICE.

I thank you all for reading this blog and I hope you'll follow my next trips too!

The final day in Graz

The day that had to come, has come: the final day of our trip. Today my travelling partner exchanged me for someone else, so I could go home and prepare to start working for Eurostar again.

This morning we got out real early, already around 7h, to pick up my replacement travel partner at the station. We had a lot of fun together in Graz. After we picked her up, we took the tram to IKEA for our breakfast, which consisted of pie and coffee. We walked around a bit in the shop and noticed that the assortment was 100% the same as in Belgium, with just some minor price differences.

We went back to the city and did some sightseeing in Graz. We saw the artificial island, took the cable car up to the Schlossburg and visited the main squares and shopping areas. We finished of by a walk in the Stadtpark, after which we had a very good meal. My meal -surprise surprise- was a Wienerschnitzel. We finished of by eating one ice cream bowl with the three of us.

In mean time the moment was coming for me to return to the station and take the night train to Zürich. The train had an old Belgian wagon-lit car in it, so I decided to travel on board of it, despite the reservation price of 69 euro. Tomorrow I will travel or through France or through Germany to go home from Switzerland.

Changing trains in Belgrade

Yesterday morning we arrived about 2 hours late in Belgrade and so we missed our connection to Budapest with 15 minutes. The next train was going to leave 15 hours later. Thus we were forced to spend the day in Belgrade.

Since we were there quite early everything was still closed, except for some breakfast bars. We had breakfast and walked a bit around the city. First of all we visited the mausoleum of Tito, which I didn't see the first time I was in Belgrade. In fact the mausoleum is the museum of Yugoslav history and is quite interesting (apart from the temporary exhibition which is a bit too abstract). Besides the grave of Tito and his wife (who only died recently), there is a vast collection of personal objects he received during his many travels as well as a huge collection of traditional clothes from all over the world.

When our visit was finished we went on by regional train ("Beovoz") to the city centre to visit the Nikola Tesla museum. For those readers who don't know who Nikola Tesla is: he is the major inventor of modern electric equipment. He also was a philanthropist, since he didn't want to make any profit out of his inventions. He even invented a way to spread electricity globally through the air, without the need for any cables, making batteries and power plugs obsolete. Originally JP Morgan funded the project, but as soon as he realised that there would be no way they could measure how much electricity one users uses (which makes the electricity would be free for all), he withdrew his money from the project and thus ending it. This story is a typical example of how fucked up capitalism is and made me quite angry. At the museum we also saw some of his inventions, which were demonstrated too.

After our introduction to the life and accomplishments of Tesla, we went for a swim in the public swimming pool. As soon as we got out, we got hungry and looked for cevapcici, which we found at a Bosnian restaurant. In front of the restaurant there was a very funny pimped out Zastava parked. Then we returned to the station, picked up our luggage and took the night train to Budapest.

Our night train was planned to arrive at 6h (in the middle of the night), but luckily it was one hour late, so we could sleep a bit longer. Upon arrival in Budapest we were still exhausted though, so we went to the Gellèrt parc and slept for an hour or so on a bench. We had breakfast near the Kiraly baths and spent almost the rest of the day at those thermal baths. At 16h10, finally, we took the direct train to Graz, which runs over the Gysev network. Gysev is the second national railway company of Hungary, which is partially owned by the Hungarian and partially by the Austrian government.

When we got to Graz, we checked in at our hostel (saw we shared our room with very cute guys) and went out for a drink (without the cute guys).