Lots of Cities, Too Few Days

Here I sit, back at my kitchen table/make-do office. I’m trying to focus on whether the last three weeks were just a dream or a true reality.

The trip was amazing. Europe always is for me even with only 3 visits under my belt. As I sit here less than enthusiastic about returning to my real world, I’m thinking about how blessed I was to have such an adventure.

Last week wasn’t quite as leisurely as my time in Ireland. In fact, it was pretty crazy and after arriving back in Brazil at 2am Sunday morning it is taking some time to recover.

I do think we confirmed our speculation that city hopping isn’t for us. It seems like that is always the thing to do in Europe. Everything is so close together that you should really see as much as you possibly can in your time there, right?

I think we have found that we are the type to spend more time in each place and really soak it up. This is what we have done in the past, but this time we really wanted to fit in some new places in addition to returning to Vienna.

We visited 4 cities in a week and by the time we got to Budapest on Thursday, we were so exhausted we lost interest in even seeing the sites.

Tiredness aside, each city was beautiful and incredibly unique. We loved it all, but the vote is in and Vienna is still our absolute favorite.

I’ll go into more detail about each city this week and post a few pictures. If I could sum up each place in a few words this would be it.

(Oh, the 4th city we visited was Plzen, Czech Republic for a brewery tour. I’ll write more about that later, but since we went for that specific purpose I can’t really sum up the city itself.)

Prague – Fairytale. It had a quality that made it almost seem unreal.
Vienna – Perfect. The design of the city, the sites, it is by far my favorite.
Budapest – Different. I am not sure what my expectations were. It was similar, yet unique compared to the other cities we visited.

I’ll start off with a few pictures of Prague and continue tomorrow. I have to hang around the apartment while I wait for our luggage which got stranded in Amsterdam so I’ll have plenty of time for updates.

View towards the Prague Castle from the Charles Bridge
Old Town Square
View from the Letna beer garden in Letensky Sady (park) overlooking the city