I feel basically the same way about Tallinn, Estonia that I felt about Split, Croatia. It’s a cool place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Which makes sense. Both cities are cruise ship ports, and as such host mobs of tourists every summer. Now throngs of tourists aren’t necessarily a show-stopper; Prague,
Run-down. I keep coming back to this phrase when trying to describe Kaunas, Lithuania. The city isn’t uniformly so, of course. Other Kaunas buildings aren’t run-down; they’re just plain ugly. But the most memborable facet of this city to me, as I walked all over it from stem to stern, was the shabby condition of
I spent eight weeks — the majority of my time in Europe on this trip — wandering through cities that had been part of the Austrian Empire for two or three centuries. It’s pretty astounding, the length and breadth of the territory that was once ruled from Vienna: Most of the Balkan Peninsula, from Slovenia