I am now getting ready for my second venture over to Europe. This Saturday (June 20th) I begin my travel with 3 flights ending in Sofia June 21st. I'm sure I'll be in a great mood by the time I arrive...

This trip will see me visit Sofia, Budapest, and some other yet to be determined locations. I am meeting my brother in Sofia, and will be spending most, if not all of my time with him.

That's all for now, this is just a warm-up post, setting the scene for the adventures yet to come.

I leave Ottawa Saturday evening and pass through Toronto and Frankfurt on my way to Sofia (Bulgaria). If I catch my two connections and things are relatively on time I will arrive in Sofia around 5:30pm local time Sunday and meet my brother at the airport.

After 3 nights in Sofia we catch a flight to Budapest (Hungary) for around 4 or 5 nights (we'll see how it goes) and then move by train up to Prague (Chzech Republic). We spend about 2 nights there and proceed by train to Berlin for another 4 to 5 night stay. Finally we hop a train to Amsterdam for about 2 nights which will wrap up my portion of the trip.

I did not count up the number of nights everywhere to see if that makes sense, we'll figure it out as we go. Maybe we'll stop in a smaller town along the way, who knows. What I do know is that I fly out of Amsterdam early on the morning of July 6th, so I need to be in Amsterdam then.

If I make all of my connections coming home, I arrive back in Ottawa sometime in the afternoon or early evening July 6th (got to love time zones). Coming home I transfer in Frankfurt and Montreal. I think I'll miss my connection in Montreal but I really don't care about that).

Fun times a head! Stay tuned for more updates.

And we are off! So I am currently in Toronto in the business class lounge. Thanks to some traveling last year for work I have some guest passes which I am making use of. I managed to get on an earlier flight out of Ottawa as I was worried about the weather in Toronto. The loune is very nice and a good way to start the trip.

I have not even figured out how long I am traveling for, with the time changes it is not a simple task. It is a 6 hour time change to Germany, then another hour to Bulgaria. I'll get there eventually.

Ok, one more run to sample the food and drink, then off to the big flight (to Frankfurk). My next update should be from Bulgaria.

I have not clue how long I was traveling for, and with the time zone changes it is a bit difficult to figure out quickly so I'm not going to try. I also have not had very much sleep over the last day or two which does not help.

Bottom line, I'm in Sofia and have met up with Robert.

I must I am VERY glad I packed a couple of days worth of clothes in my carry on as my checked backpack did not come off the conveyor belt. I'm hopefull that it will arrive in the next 2 days before I leave Sofia. I am also happy I bought extra luggage insurance and now need to call someone to double check what exactly I can get before I buy anything.

The hostel here is nice. They serve pasta with tomato sauce for dinner with a beer every night. We have a room with 3 beds to ourselves, with a common area and shared kitchen and bathroom with I think 6 other people. More then managable.

As it is pushing 9pm here we will not be doing much tonight, we will probably just go out to get a drink and maybe a snack and save our energy for the walking tour tomorrow.

Today was the walking tour of of Sofia. The main part of the city is small enough that you don't need to take transit if you have the time, you can slowly make your way around which is nice.

My day slowly started at 5:30am when I woke up for the first time. It was overcast but nice out. After tossing for a bit I managed to go back to sleep until a more normal 8:00am. Besides that, thankfully I have not really had an issue with time change which is nice considering it is a 7 hour difference.

After a surprisingly good breakfast at the hostel (including cheese and salami) we headed out in the rain to start the tour. Thankfully it stopped raining within the first hour and it then warmed up and becase nice out.

A couple of the highlights of the walk included a couple of very nice cathedrals, a statue of St. Sofia, and the Central Synagogue in Sofia. This synagogue is the largest Sefarad synagogue in the Balkans and is 100 years old. It is currently under renovation but is still very nice and I enjoyed stopping by.

We walked through the open air market and grabbed some fruit to snack on before heading back towards the center of town. Communist party headquarters is a very large and imposing building, but I bet it was a bit scarier in the past. We saw the Soviet Army Monument, there is what I'm sure used to be a very well kept square in the park, however it is now a bit overgrown. It is still an intersting historical site as I'm sure there used to be pretty large gatherings there where people cheered on their communist leaders.

We really enjoyed walking around and getting a bit of a feel for the city.

This evening we went out to a Burgarian resturant the hostel recommended and had a bit of a pile of barbecued meat which was good (the resturant was Pri Yafafa if anyone was curious). Later, depening on the weather (it just started raining again) we may head out to a local jazz bar or somewhere else as we see fit.

Tomorrow the plan is to head to the Rila Monastery, the hostel organizes daily tours. Apparently today's was cancelled as there were not enough people, so hopefully there will be more tomorrow as it is our only chance to go. First thing Wednesday morning we are off to Budapest.

Last but more certainly not least, after dinner we stopped by the hostel to pick up my bag which had arrived:) Hopefully it follows me a bit more closely on the flight to Budapest.

Today the better part of the day was taken up with a trip out of Sofia to the Rila Monastery. The Monastery was started in about the 10th centruy and is dedicated after a monk who decided to go live in the forest/mountains and lead a solitary lift.

The drive to the Monastery from Sofia takes about 2 hours. The hostel organizes regular trips to the Monastery so they have a van which they used to drive 5 people up, including myself and Robert. The drive was a bit of an experience, as being driving normally is in another country. The scenery was great as were were driving through the mountains. The only had to stop once to let a herd of cows be pushed off to the side of the road.

The Monastery is really nice. Most of is is much more recent then the 10th century, the oldest structure on the site is from the 13th century. Unfortunately we were not able to go into it as it was closed. The church, as is most often the case, was really something. The whole back wall was very intricate and the whole church was painted with great detail.

After wandering around a bit, we had some donut type things which is apperently the thing to do there, and had lunch.

We then went on about a 45 minute hike in the wooks, and saw some of the places where the monk that the Monastary is dedicated to is supposed to have lived. It was really nice walking through the woods, and it kept you focused as it was not always a straight forward path.

Tomorrow morning at a stupid early hour we are off the airport to head to Budapest. I don't think I will be posting updates quite as frequently going forward as we will not have a computer with internet in our room as we do in Sofia.

We have been in Budapest for the past day and a half. One of the first things I found out from looking at the map once we got here is that there are two more world heritage sites in the city, so far we have been to one of them.

We took a flight from Sofia to Budapest which went through Rome. I know Rome is not on the way, but it was the cheapest flight and still saved us a pile of time as the train would have taken about 24 hours. We arrived at the hotel in the early afternoon, and walked around downtown for the rest of the day to get a feel for the city.

Yesterday started off a bit late, it seemed I was still a bit jet lagged, and a bit tired from our early mornings in Sofia. I fell asleep for the frist time at 8pm, and for good around 9pm. When I woke up the next morning I figured it was 7 or 8 am. Nope, it was 10! We got moving as quickly as we could after that.

We started of the day by going up to the castle district, one of the world heritage sites. This area, as most castles are, is up a hill which we hiked up. We started off by going to the military museum where we learnt a bit about the city, and saw some old weapons. We then walked around the rest of the area. There were some very nice views of the city, and it was mostly sunny out which was nice. We then tried to find another museum, but the map was not detailed enough so we missed it. We finished off on our way home by going to a soup place Robert´s book recommended, which turned out to be very good and cheap (we just got back from giong there again). We wanted to go check out a park which is supposed to be very nice at night, but it started to rain so we stayed in.

Today we went over to the Cetadelle which has a bit of an interesting history. It was attacked many times, and was heavily used during the wars. We ended up taking shelter there for a while as there was some very serious rain in the area. After making it down the hill, we went across the river to a market and had some amazing strudel, it was really really good.

That´s about it for now. We bought out train tickets for the rest of the trip and head to Prague Sunday morning. The next update will probably be from Prague about Monday.

Hello from Prague. Budapest finished up quite nicely. We went up to hero‘s square which is really nice and saw a couple more sights. I don‘t remember all the details at the moment as it is a couple of dayz ago and we have been on the go a lot since then.

Yesterday we took the train from Budapest to Prague. The ride was nice and took about 7 hours. We had some fun when we arrived as all we had was the name of our hotel, not its address. Some helpful people in the tourist office of the main train station who were not busy at all were very helpful and helped us track down exactly where we were supposed to be. Wow this hotel is nice! Expedia helped us get quite a find for a very good price.

Today we slowly walked through the main part of down and headed up towards Prague Castle. I went around a bit, but left Robert to do the full tour as I have already been there. I am currently about to head off to another part of town I did not see on my first visit.

We have 2 more nights in Prague and then move along to Berlin.