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Turn Left At The Iron Curtain: The 4 Worst Hostels I’ve Stayed In
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Leo Tolstoy The opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is one of the most famous in literature. The Russian’s point was that there are myriad qualities that must exist for a family to be happy. And every unhappy family falls short in a different way, each as unique and lachrymose as the next. Two families may be equally despairing, but that despair will be rooted in a different tragedy each and every time. At the risk of contriving this insight to the point of contortion, I believe this wisdom to be equally applicable to the…
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Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ details the barbaric brutality imposed on Eastern Europe from the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Encompassing the entirely avoidable and heart-achingly tragic famine in the Ukraine and the nadir of Western Civilisation that was the Holocaust, it is a painful but necessary read for anyone intent on travelling between the Baltics and the Balkans. Poland is afforded more attention than anywhere else and having read it one would be forgiven for assuming it to be a country shrouded in its history’s shadow for eternity. Mercifully, this is not the case. My sojourn through Poland would last a week and…
