Anyone travel on the Venezia Express from Budapest to Venice? This train goes through Croatia and Slovenia. Two US citizens (male) taking the night train departing Budapest at 17:35 arrive Venice 9:18 the next morning. Inquiring regarding safety, accomodations, food service. I believe this is a sleeper train but I also have heard some portions are couchette only. Anybody done this?<BR><BR>Thanks in advance for any info.

Do you know if you need a visa to go through either of those countries?

Sending up. I need the same information in reverse order please. Thank you for any help. I am leaving in about five weeks for Hungary again.

Two web sites may help as to visas: <BR>Visa requirements for any nationality and any country. <BR>http://www3.travel.com.au/everest/index.cgi?E=bevisreq <BR>Do you need a visa ? Dial in nationality, destintion and transit countries. http://www.travel.co.nz/. <BR> <BR>I topok this ttrauin five years ago, and checked it recently in the Thomas Cook European Timetable, which may be in the reference library of a ccity near you. The train has sleeping cars with one, two, or three berths: each compartment has a washbasin, but the toilets or bathrooms are at the ends of the corridor. <BR> <BR>I'm afraid the train has no restaurant or buffet car. You can buy picnic food (and wine !) in Budapest before you go, or at the same cost can take a train two hours earlier to somewhere on the south shore of Lake Balaton, dine there, and carry on in your sleeper. <BR> <BR>No part is couchette only: indeed, I think the train has no couchette car. <BR> <BR>The day trains and the sleeper are fully safe: you lock your door twice before you go to sleep (though you have to wake for the border checks). <BR> <BR>If you do need visas you might look at the times and cost of an evening train with restaurant car to Vienna South followed by a sleeper from there to Venice. On that sleeper nobody wakes you at the Austro-Italian frontier. But the fare is higher. <BR> <BR>Please write on this forum during April, or to me by e-mail during May, if I can help further. <BR> <BR>Ben Haines, of London, in Chisinau <BR> <BR> <BR>

In Chisinau, now, Ben? Wow. With a frau? Eating any cow? <BR> <BR>Tell us about Moldova! <BR> <BR>Rex <BR>

Fodors <BR> <BR>I was alone, and ate widely. I was there over the Easter weekend, so the only museum open was the open-air museum of military hardware, tanks, fighter planes, rockets, helicopters, and ther relics of the Cold War. Children knew a way through the fence, and were using the hardware as an adventure playground. All in all, a sight to gladden the heart. <BR> <BR>On Easter Monday I took the bus down to Transdneistr, the area that has a Russian majority, and wishes it were independent or better still that Putin and Bush would bring back the Soviet Union (you recall that Mr Bush senior tried to hold the Soviet Union together, I think wisely). Russian army peace-keepers keep Transdneistr from fighting Moldovan Moldavia by doing just the job there that NATO does in Bosnia. Not my usualpicture of Russians, so good for my thinking. Transdneistr has a fine statue of Lenin in front of a classical House of the Soviets. Food is cheap, because money is short: as a rebel territory Transdneistr receives no foreign aid at all. They have their own coinage, with Soviet star complete. <BR> <BR>With little to do I went to a new and small studio cinema to see two American films, one with Julia Roberts running the campaign against the polluting water company, and the other that slips my memory. Both were shown from DVD to audiences of ten, with no subtitles or dubbing. Like much of eastern Europe, Moldova has young people keen to learn and enjoy anglophone culture. Even on the bus from Chisinau to Moldova I was picked up by a final-year university student who had the text of his 20-page essay on the reflection of philosophy in the plays of Shakespeare. It was good, especially in finding parallels, new to me, with lines of Bhuddist thought. He agreed to correect two points that I saw as errors. One, he took words in the plays and said they were Shakespeare's view. Maybe, maybe not. All we know is that they were views that Shakespeare rightly thought that that person would hold at that time. The other, he claimed that Shakespeare was the world' greatest teacher and greatest philosopher of all time. Since both he and I are Christians he had to concede that Jesus Christ gets top place as teacher. As to philosophy, we don't know. Neither he nor I have read the Upanishads, nor the Arab philosophers of Abbasid Baghdad or of Cordova. <BR> <BR>Slightly embarrasing was that when I corrected points of idiom in his Engkish he told me (and showed me a draft to prove it) that he had begun rightly, but that his university teacher of English in Iasi had "correrected" him amiss. Oh dear. <BR> <BR>I hope this is what you wanted to know. <BR> <BR>Ben Haines <BR> <BR> <BR>