Vienna
Elaborate white facades frost the decadent viennese palaces and their trellis encircled gardens, tempting visitors and locals alike to indulge in spiced mulled wine, sweet tulip beds and endless, palate-cleansing fields of grass meant for picnicking, sun-basking, and silly games of duck-duck-goose.
Easter Market Count: 2
Mulled Wine Mugs Consumed: 3
Budapest
From her seat on the hill, Buda holds Pest’s youthful glow in her panorama view; street lights, club strobes and late night eats’ neon signs entice travelers over bridges, into Pest’s falafel filled dives and WWII ruin bars. As siblings do, Pest gazes enviously at her castle-crowned sister, coveting Buda’s pious church towers, fortress walls, and whispering, winding streets. Meanwhile, the sloping chains of Széchenyi bridge lock Budapest together, unifying their millennia of stories and linking their future history as a vibrant hub of Central Europe.
Easter Market Count: 6
Mulled Wine Mugs Consumed: 9
Prague
Old town Prague is the teapot of a china set, the centerpiece of the grand multi-district city. Exquisite cobblestone patterns coat Prague’s gently sloping streets, drawing visitors to meander the castle’s vibrant green grounds, ponder miscellaneous statues and marvel sky reaching gothic structures. If Prague were a sentence, she would run-on, dripping with archiac adjectives and chthonic
clauses, each delightful detail jumping from the readers tongue like skipping feet on twisted pathways, towards the towering castle conclusion that life truly can be a fairytale, if we imagine it to be.
Easter Market Count: 4
Mulled Wine Mugs Consumed: 6
Ljubljana
Bring Downtown Disney into your mind’s eye, resize the buildings back to regular dimensions, replace Mickey Mouse with a bright green dragon, and draw a river down through the street’s center: you have a basic image of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. Take a walk down that river, past the modern stores tucked inconspicously into old, pastel-painted buildings, and grab some strawberries at the daily farmers’ market down the river from town hall. Strawberry seeds stuck in your teeth, hop on bikes and ride your own amusement to central park, then go play in the old Yugoslav barracks-turned-art commune, filled with intense graffiti, monster sculptures and mis-matched steel structures meant for climbing. And so you’ll have spent a marvelous day in sLOVEnia.
Easter Market Count: 1
Mulled Wine Mugs Consumed: 0 (unfortunately)
love from my bedroom floor, in the middle of a mess of clothes packing for tomorrow's flight to athens,
shonabell
