Category Archives: Travel

NOTE: This is a sponsored post by Airlink Alaska. If you’re interested in advertising on my site, click here.

Alaska is arguably the U.S. state that is the most shrouded in mystery. Isolated from the continental U.S. by Canada, it’s difficult to reach, expensive to live in, and has few people living there. Unlike Hawaii, which is similarly separated from the rest of the U.S., Alaska doesn’t have year-round sun and tropical beaches to lure in tourists. However, Alaska boasts some of the most unique and gorgeous mountain scenery in the world, making it a truly unforgettable vacation spot.

If you’ve ever thought about what it might be like to go to the Arctic Circle, the northernmost place in the world, now is the best time to do it. Airlink Alaska is your portal to some of the 49^th state’s best-kept secrets, offering guided tours of the Dalton Highway and more. For a trip that you’ll remember for the rest of your life, take a sojourn to northern Alaska and discover why thousands of tourists have begun flocking to this great state.

Why Go to the Arctic Circle?

The Arctic Circle is the northernmost part of the planet, a sparsely-inhabited land of extreme temperatures and natural beauty. Sprawling across Alaska, Russia, Canada, Greenland, and the fringes of Scandinavia, the Arctic Circle is distinguished by extremely cold winters, cool summers, and massive shifts in day length: during the summer, the sun never sets, and during the winter, it never rises.

Its extreme location means that the Arctic Circle is host to countless flora, fauna, and landscapes that cannot be seen anywhere else. The Alaskan interior is known for its tall, rugged mountains, such as Denali (Mount McKinley), as well as rivers, lakes, and glaciers. Because much of the region lacks human inhabitants, the Arctic Circle boasts some of the largest tracts of unspoiled terrain in the world.

In addition to this, tourists flock to Alaska and other Arctic locales for the aurora borealis, also commonly known as the Northern Lights. The aurora borealis is a natural light phenomenon created by solar wind, the natural particles emitted by the sun. Auroras occur due to disturbances in the magnetosphere, which is generated by the Earth’s magnetic poles and protects the planet from harmful radiation. They appear as a dazzling array of colors in the night sky.

While auroras can theoretically occur anywhere on the globe (and have occasionally been spotted in places such as New Orleans), the only place to consistently see them is the Arctic or Antarctic Circles. This is because this is where the Earth’s magnetic poles are located. Additionally, due to its sparse population, the Arctic Circle lacks the light pollution that spoils night views in cities and other heavily-populated places, making viewing the Northern Lights much easier.

The Northern Lights is most easily observed from mid-August to mid-April due to shorter days and clear skies at night. During the summer, there is too much daylight to see auroras much of the time, with many regions of Alaska experiencing perpetual twilight and day lengths of 20 hours or more. You need darkness in order to maximize your chances of witnessing the aurora borealis.

Airlink Alaska Tours

All that said, journeying to Alaska yourself—particularly to its most remote regions—is not a light undertaking. Due to Alaska’s isolation, traveling is costly, and the state’s extreme climate and lack of development can make solo adventuring dangerous for the unprepared traveler. This is particularly true on the Dalton Highway, much of which is unpaved, sparsely inhabited, and takes you through regions of Alaska where the weather can turn on a dime.

If you want to visit the Arctic Circle, you’ll want a tour guide who can keep you safe and also fill you in on the history and science of the region. Airlink Alaska offers guided tours of the Dalton Highway and Arctic Circle based out of Fairbanks, the central city of the Alaskan interior. Their tours are guaranteed to make your Alaskan experience a comfortable and safe one.

Airlink Alaska offers a number of tours of the Arctic Circle, each catered to your specific needs. Its Northern Lights tours will take you out to Murphy Dome and other secluded, high-altitude locations so you can view the aurora borealis surrounded by nature. Note that while there is no guarantee that the Northern Lights will appear on any given day, the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that anyone who stays in Fairbanks for three days or more has a 90 percent chance of witnessing an aurora.

In addition to this, Airlink Alaska offers a guided summer tour of the Dalton Highway, the primary artery connecting Fairbanks to the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay, the northernmost inhabited location in the U.S. Airlink Alaska’s day tour stops at a number of Alaskan landmarks, including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Finger Mountain, and the Yukon River Bridge. Visitors will have the opportunity to have their picture taken at the Arctic Circle Monument, commemorating their journey to one of the most remote regions of the world.

See the Northern Lights

Alaska is a truly unique place that attracts a truly unique type of visitor. It doesn’t have warm beaches and tropical weather like many common vacation destinations. Even in the summer, it can experience snowstorms and other extreme weather events. Much of it is dangerous to travel alone due to wildlife, climate, and lack of human habitation. However, its remoteness gives it some of the most memorable sights of any place in the world.

The Northern Lights, the Dalton Highway, and many more natural and manmade wonders make Alaska one of the most interesting places to visit in the U.S. With an experienced tour guide at your side, you’ll get even more fun out of your Alaskan getaway. If you’ve ever been curious about what America’s northernmost state has to offer, check out Airlink Alaska’s website and see how they can help you. Whether you want to see the Northern Lights or other Alaskan landmarks, they can help make your vacation one of the best you’ll ever have.

Click here to visit Airlink Alaska.

Read Next: How Alaska Chaga Tea Can Help You Get Off Coffee and Sugar

This is a guest post by James Maverick.

There is a war going on in the developing world. It’s not your typical war with tanks, guns, and ammo. It’s a war for the people’s hearts and minds. While there are lots of things attempting to do just that, feminism, as usual, is trying to colonize the local cultures.

Take Brazil, for instance. The country recently had a presidential election. It was won by Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing candidate, a sort of Brazilian Trump if you will.

As expected, he was heavily opposed by lots of different factions, ranging from environmentalists to liberals to—you guessed it—feminists.

Leading up to the election, there was a popular video that was circulating on the Brazilian interwebs. The video has over 1.5 million views and in it, a female journalist is screaming “O que é isso” (What is this?) repeatedly, while the future president is seen in the background trying his best to ignore her and continue his press conference.

This video was the rallying cry by the liberals in order to discredit Mr. Bolsonaro, but it seemed to have achieved the complete opposite: it galvanized the conservatives and even the young people (who are traditionally liberal), making his presidential victory all but assured.

In many ways, Brazil is an interesting country to experience a sort of a feminist backlash. It’s not a Western country like the U.S., Australia, or Denmark, so feminism isn’t exactly something that’s automatically accepted. Instead, it’s a Latin country with traditional values where liberal ideas such as feminism have always been met with deep suspicion.

One reason that feminism has become at the forefront of the battle of old traditional values and new liberal values is due to the expansive reach of Western media.

Influential Western publicans such as the New York Times never seem to miss the opportunity to pour gasoline on the fire by talking about women’s oppression and how they’re second-class citizens in their own country.

In Brazil, it doesn’t take much effort to affect Brazilian women emotionally and make them feel like they’re oppressed by the “evil” men.

After all, Brazil is one of the most sexualized countries on the planet. The women are extremely friendly and open, although I wouldn’t say particularly easy. Still, merely the fact that they’re perceived all over the world as easy is enough to create a backlash.

Ideologies like feminism nicely connect with these feelings of being unworthy and provide a rallying cry for this backlash. The formula is simple: some, but not all, women are unhappy because they’re treated as sexualized objects, so feminism must be the answer.

To be fair, not all women feel this way. Just like anywhere else, including the U.S., the birthplace of feminism, there are women who don’t need feminism to feel complete.

When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, I met plenty of women who indeed enjoyed feeling like women. Yes, even with guys constantly approaching them and asking them out and all that other sexual stuff.

Most of them didn’t think much of it; they were women after all. And part of being a woman is receiving attention from men. If the attention is unsolicited, a woman can simply ignore it. If it’s welcomed, a woman can reciprocate.

From Ukraine with Love

Another country that’s in the middle of similar cultural turmoil is Ukraine, my homeland and where I’m living now.

Ukraine has always been a country without a cohesive identity. In order to understand why, it really helps to view it as two countries: one with more traditional, Eastern European values and closely aligned with Russia, with the other against all that.

Ukraine is also linguistically divided; the Western part speaks mostly Ukrainian while the Eastern part speaks predominantly Russian.

Thus it’s no surprise that this lack of cohesive identity gives makes the country ripe for various types of propaganda and brainwashing, with feminism being at the forefront.

We’ve all seen this movie before. The Western institutions such as liberal media and various observers swoop in. They can’t help but notice “inequality.” The can’t help but see the women “oppressed” by men. They can’t help but see great injustice being perpetrated everywhere they look.

They have to see injustice. It’s their job. And so everywhere they look, injustice is exactly what they see.

So how do you find this injustice? How do you make the world “fair” again for the weaker sex?

The answer, as you’re probably already suspecting, is feminism. Never mind that women’s rights are enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution just like any other European country, and there’s not a single woman in this country that can’t do something that a man can do. On a legal level, true equality has been achieved.

But even with all these first-world advancements, some women still believe or feel that their rights are being infringed upon.

Of course, as is the case in Brazil, not all women feel this way. I have met countless women in Ukraine who shake their heads at feminism, believing that it’s aimed at “weaker” women who haven’t found success in life and need an ideology to make them feel whole.

There’s definitely some truth to that. A woman who’s strong, capable, successful and knows how to attract a great man doesn’t need to search for an ideology that reinforces her anger at the world.

But even a woman who’s not particularly strong or successful, but one that doesn’t take everything personally and one that believes the solutions to her problems lie within her, will not seek salvation in some external ideology.

It seems that Ukraine isn’t an easy target for Western ideologies as feminists had initially thought. They underestimated the country that fought countless wars, lived under various oppressive regimes, and waged several revolutions in its long and painful history.

What’s in Store for the Future?

Brazil and Ukraine aren’t the only countries at the forefront of this ideological battleground, but they’re definitely the most notable ones.

The theory goes that if Brazil falls, the rest of Latin America will soon follow; if Ukraine falls, Russia isn’t too far behind (although many have greatly underestimated Russia’s strong patriotic and nationalistic mood, which form a strong barrier to Western influence).

Although many traditionalists are pessimistic about what’s happening in their own countries and abroad, I remain optimistic. I don’t expect countries like Brazil, Ukraine, Colombia, or Romania to become the next Australia or the U.K.

For that to happen, there needs to be a rapid rise in the standard of living. After all, regardless of how you look at it, feminism is a luxury. All these ideologies can’t take root in societies that barely generate enough wealth to feed and shelter its people. That’s why you’ll never see feminism take root in most African countries, except for maybe the richest one: South Africa.

That is also why, for the most part, feminism and similar ideologies will be more receptive where they originally originated: the rich Western world, particularly the Anglo-Saxon world. And even there, it risks biting off more than it can chew, as witnessed by the current #MeToo movement.

James blogs at Maverick Traveler.

Read Next: The Backlash Against Feminism Has Arrived

Last summer, I took a short trip to Belgrade, Serbia in order to get out of Hungary for a bit. Belgrade is the country’s capital, situated further south along the Danube River and an eight-hour train ride from Budapest. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, so here are my observations on the trip…

1. Serbia is falling apart in every conceivable way.

While Serbia is not as poor as Ukraine, it has a similarly run-down atmosphere, as well as infrastructure that is arguably worse. For example, the reason it takes eight hours to go from Budapest to Belgrade when it’s only three hours by car is because Serbia’s railways are in terrible shape.

When we crossed the border from Hungary, for example, immigration officers boarded our train, took our passports, and told us to get off. After we milled around the crumbling Subotica station for fifteen minutes, a chain-smoking middle-aged lady came out and told us that due to “problems,” they were sticking us on a bus to the next station, Stari Žednik, which was twelve miles (twenty kilometers) away, where we’d board a new train to Belgrade. She then left us to bake in the 104 degree (40 degrees Celsius) heat for another half-hour, when the immigration officers finally reemerged, handing our passports out at random.

We then boarded the bus that would take us to Stari Žednik—a crappy 1970’s-era Soviet monstrosity with no air conditioning—but there were too many people to fit on it comfortably, so about a dozen people had to straphang in the aisle. It took a half-hour to get to the Stari Žednik station, and we were nearly two hours late in getting to Belgrade. At least the train they stuck us on had AC.

I figured this was just a temporary issue, but nope: when I went back to Budapest a few days later, we had to disembark at Stari Žednik and take a bus to Subotica to change trains. Fortunately, the Serbs ordered multiple buses that time around, so we weren’t crammed ass-to-elbows and sweating on each other. At least the trains in Ukraine, as run-down as they are, arrive and leave on time.

These problems don’t end when you get to Belgrade, either. The city itself is architecturally schizophrenic, with old pre-20th century buildings mottled together with communist-era monstrosities and modern developments. You’ll also run across ruins from the wars in the nineties, monuments to NATO’s bombing that the Serbs haven’t bothered to clean up. While the central areas of Belgrade are fairly nice, once you leave them, the city gets ugly and depressing quickly. The sweltering hot summer weather—a full ten degrees Celsius hotter than Budapest on average—doesn’t help.

2. Serbs are disturbingly apathetic about everything.

The Serbs are a charming but depressing people. The state of Serbia’s infrastructure and architecture reflects the listlessness of its citizenry. Serbs believe that no matter what they do and how hard they work, they will just get screwed over, a somewhat justifiable view given recent history. For example, during the war in Kosovo, the Serbian military beat the Kosovo Liberation Army—a bunch of Albanian cowards who were only good at burning down villages and raping women—in every battle, only to have Bill Clinton bomb Serbia to smithereens after the Albanians went crying to the U.N.

The problem is that this mentality creates a nihilistic culture where nobody cares about anything. Belgrade’s atmosphere, even in the summer, is dreary and limp. Public transportation, restaurant service, and everything else is inferior to not just the U.S., but other countries in eastern Europe. Furthermore, due to Serbia’s proximity to the Mediterranean, it has a more clannish, physically-oriented culture akin to Italy or Spain. If you play sports or are into dancing, you’ll like Serbia; for everyone else, you’ll be left wondering what the fuss is about.

On the upside, the Serbs I met are pretty friendly towards Americans, or at least not overtly hostile, a genuine surprise seeing as we were complicit in Serbia losing its historic heartland, Kosovo, to a bunch of Albanian mobsters. Indeed, while walking around, I saw vendors hocking Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin T-shirts (Serbia is the only eastern European country I’ve visited that is pro-Russia), while outside the Serbian parliament building, there’s a massive English-language installation protesting Bill and Hillary Clinton for protecting “Albanian war criminals.”

3. Belgrade is ultimately a poor man’s Budapest, including the girls.

At the end of the day, Belgrade is too similar to Budapest for me to really be wowed by it. The two cities have similar climates, cultures, and party scenes. The women are similar-looking—though Serbian women tend to be skinnier and more Italian- or Turkish-looking than Hungarian women—and are equally difficult to approach unless you’re part of the same social circle. What Belgrade does differently from Budapest, it typically does worse, such as architecture and infrastructure.

You can’t even escape from foreigners in Belgrade, because the city has a ton of British and American expats and backpackers. For example, the train I came in on had a ton of grimy British hippies going to a music festival in Novi Sad, while in one restaurant, I had to listen to some fat American chick loudly complaining about President Trump to her Serbian fuckbuddy.

One standout in Serbia is the food, which is some of the best I’ve had in Europe. Serbian cuisine is spicier than other eastern European cuisines, with such items as cevapi (sausages made from pork and beef) and the “gourmet Serbian burger” being must-try items. There’s also a lot of local culture to take in, from the Nikola Tesla Museum—where I participated in a Tesla coil demonstration—to the Gavrilo Princep statue to the Belgrade Fortress, which overlooks the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers and is beautiful at night.

Overall, while I enjoyed my visit to Belgrade, it’s not a city that motivates me to come back. Perhaps it’s just due to the fact that I live in Budapest, but Belgrade came off as a poor imitation of it; if you haven’t been to Hungary, you might find Serbia more impressive. If you enjoy sports, dancing, and fast-paced nightlife, Belgrade is worth a visit for a week or two, but there are better cities in Europe to make your home in.

Read Next: Thoughts on Visiting Lviv, Ukraine

Train travel in Europe is usually pretty easy, and there’s no place where it’s easier than in Budapest, which is one of the hubs of Europe’s railway networks. That is, unless you’re going to Ukraine.

For some reason, train tickets between Hungary and Ukraine cannot be purchased online, either from MÁV or Ukrainian Railways. It gets even more confusing if you’re going anywhere other than Kiev. For example, there’s purportedly a direct train between Budapest and Lviv, but what neither MÁV or Ukrainian Railways will tell you is that it’s a sleeper train to Kiev that drops you off in Lviv in the middle of the night, and is overpriced to boot at around $65-70 one-way. There are no direct flights between the cities, so that’s not an option either.

There’s actually a train itinerary you can take from Budapest to Lviv (and vice versa) that costs half as much and gets you to your destination much faster. You also don’t have to sleep on the train. Locals in eastern Hungary and western Ukraine use this trick all the time. Here’s what you do.

Budapest to Lviv by Train

1. Purchase an online ticket from MÁV from Budapest-Keleti to Nyíregyháza, leaving at 9:30 and arriving at 12:29. Total cost for a second-class ticket (including the mandatory seat reservation): 5,020 Ft (about $18). First-class tickets are available from 6,010 Ft (about $22), and you can receive a three percent discount if you use e-ticketing instead of a printed ticket. Travel time is about three hours.
2. Purchase an online ticket from MÁV from Nyíregyháza to Záhony, leaving at 12:48 and arriving at 13:57. Total cost: 1,300 Ft (about $5). No mandatory seat reservations are required and there’s only one carriage class. Like with the Budapest to Nyíregyháza ticket, you’ll get a three percent discount if you use e-ticketing. Travel time is just over an hour.
3. Purchase a ticket from Záhony to Chop, leaving at 14:22 and arriving at 15:40. This must be done in person at the Záhony train station. Total cost: 715 Ft (about $3). MÁV accepts credit and debit cards, but bring some cash just in case (I don’t recall seeing an ATM at the Záhony station). Travel time is seventeen minutes (Ukraine is an hour ahead of Hungary).
4. Purchase an online ticket from Ukrainian Railways from Chop to Lviv, leaving at 17:00 and arriving at 22:24. Total cost for a second-class ticket (excluding bed linen and tea): 145.32 UAH (about $6). First-class tickets are also available from 350.45 UAH (about $13). Travel time is five-and-a-half hours.

As you can see, you can spend as little as $36 getting from Budapest to Lviv, and if you prefer to ride first-class, you’ll still only pay $43, which is far less than the $65-70 that the “direct” train costs. You’ll also spend less time getting to Lviv (about nine-and-a-half hours), and you’ll get there with enough time to eat dinner, shower, and sleep in a nice, warm bed instead of some crappy Soviet-era sleeping car.

Lviv to Budapest by Train

1. Purchase an online ticket from Ukrainian Railways from Lviv to Chop, leaving at 10:10 and arriving at 15:23. Total cost for a second-class ticket (excluding bed linen and tea): 112 UAH (about $4). First-class tickets are also available from 262.41 UAH (about $10). Travel time is just over five hours.
2. Purchase a ticket from Chop to Záhony, leaving at 16:15 and arriving at 15:33. This must be done in person at the Chop train station. Total cost: 82.50 UAH (about $3). I have no idea if Ukrainian Railways accepts credit or debit cards and I didn’t see an ATM at the train station (there’s very little to see or do in Chop), so bring cash. Travel time is seventeen minutes.
3. Purchase an online ticket from MÁV from Záhony to Nyíregyháza, leaving at 16:03 and arriving at 17:12. Total cost: 1,300 Ft (about $5). No mandatory seat reservations are required and there’s only one carriage class. Per usual, you’ll get a three percent discount if you use e-ticketing. Travel time is just over an hour.
4. Purchase an online ticket from MÁV from Nyíregyháza to Budapest-Keleti, leaving at 17:26 and arriving at 20:30. Total cost for a second-class ticket (including the mandatory seat reservation): 5,020 Ft (about $18). First-class tickets are available from 6,010 Ft (about $22), and again, you can receive a three percent discount if you use e-ticketing. Travel time is about three hours.

Interestingly, going from Lviv to Budapest is slightly cheaper: you only need to pay a maximum of $34 for second-class carriage the whole way, or $40 for first-class carriage on the Lviv to Chop and Nyíregyháza to Budapest legs.

Other bits of advice if you’re planning to go between Budapest and Lviv:

• Bring something to eat. There’s no refreshments on any of the trains and the only stops where you could possibly have enough time to get something are Chop and Záhony, neither of which have anything aside from vending machines (the cafe at the Záhony station has been closed every time I’ve been through there).
• The Ukrainian Railways workers know zero English, so learn some Ukrainian or Russian before you go and/or have Google Translate on your phone ready.
• The Záhony train station is the only one where bathrooms are free. Everywhere else, you have to pay.

Have a fun trip!

Read Next: Thoughts on Visiting Lviv, Ukraine

I recently had the opportunity to visit Győr, a small city in northwestern Hungary about midway between Budapest and Vienna. Győr is best known for the Battle of Raab (its former German name) in 1809, where Napoleon’s armies defeated a combined Austrian and Hungarian force during the War of the Fifth Coalition. The French victory at Győr was significant enough that it is commemorated at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Here are my observations on what I saw…

1. The rural/urban divide isn’t as pronounced in eastern Europe as it is in the West.

Degeneracy is relative. By American standards, Budapest is as non-pozzed as a city can get. As I remarked when I came here months ago, the amount of blue-haired freaks and other human detritus is very low (it’s a bit higher now due to tourist season). Homosexuals are almost invisible: the only time I’ve run into one was a Belgian pot dealer who was trying to buddy up with me and a Swedish friend of mine at a bar.

From a Hungarian perspective, Budapest is Gomorrah, because like all large cities, it’s more sexually loose and morally lax than the smaller cities and the countryside. As Melissa Mészáros (who showed me around Győr) put it, people in Győr and other minor cities dislike Budapest for the same reasons upstate New Yorkers despise New York City, or why people in downstate Illinois hate Chicago.

Thing is, there’s a massive gulf between how people in upstate New York live versus how people in NYC live.

That gulf doesn’t exist in Hungary. Győr is visibly more conservative than Budapest: there are far fewer bars and clubs, and people tend to be more laid back. The center part of the city is off-limits to cars and the only public transportation option is buses (the city is too small for a metro, or even tram lines). However, the sense of mutual loathing that exists between American cities and the country isn’t present here. While Hungarians in Győr might view Budapest as a Babylonian fleshpot, they aren’t wishing it would get quaked off the face of the Earth, like many rural Americans wish would happen to L.A. or San Francisco.

This is because Hungarians, whatever their flaws, still view themselves as part of a united people. Even left-leaning Hungarians feel a deep connection to the nation, which is why it’s such a serious insult to call a Hungarian a “hazaáruló” (traitor to the nation/homeland). Even excluding the turd sandwich of diversity that Americans have been force-fed for decades, left- and right-wing white Americans don’t view themselves as part of the same tribe anymore.

2. Christianity is alive and well in rural Hungary.

It’s common for nationalists from the West to claim that Christianity is cucked and needs to be “pushed” because it is “falling,” but a visit to any medium-sized or small town in eastern Europe puts the lie to that. On Sunday morning, Melissa and I attended a festival being put on by the local Catholic diocese, featuring numerous homemade food vendors and a children’s choir. We also had the opportunity to meet Böjte Csaba, a famous Hungarian monk from Transylvania widely beloved for his orphanage and his charitable works.

I can’t even name a Christian celebrity in the U.S., or at least one who isn’t known for being a worthless shitbag. For that matter, I can’t think of a Catholic festival (or a festival from any Christian denomination) in the U.S. that would attract anyone other than old farts. In Győr, I saw young families with children at the festival.

Melissa and I also visited a nearby museum set up by Győr’s Catholic diocese commemorating Bishop Vilmos Apor, who was killed by the Soviets near the end of World War II because he was protecting Hungarian women from being raped by the advancing Red Army. Apor was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1997, after achieving near-legendary status among Hungarians for his actions (the communist puppet government that ruled Hungary during the Cold War officially suppressed knowledge of Apor’s actions as well as those of the Soviet “liberators”).

Again, I can’t think of a religious figure in the U.S. who has this level of respect or reverence.

The reason why Christianity is dying in the West is because Westerners are spiritually dying, if they’re not already dead. In any country that still loves life—Hungary, Poland, or anywhere else in eastern Europe are prime examples—the Church is as strong as it’s always been.

3. If you want to really experience a country, you need to get away from the big cities.

I’m not going to bother with some trite explanation of how the “real” Hungary is found not in Budapest. The real reason you need to get away from big cities when traveling abroad is simple: tourists.

Most people who go abroad are morons whose top preoccupations are getting drunk and failing to get laid. In Budapest right now, the tourist season is in full swing, with hordes of British stag parties wandering the streets embarrassing themselves and packing bars to fire code violation levels. Beyond being intolerable, they make it difficult to interact with locals.

Fortunately, these idiots rarely venture out of big cities because they’re cowards who won’t even shit in a public toilet unless it’s been mentioned by Lonely Planet or reviewed on TripAdvisor. While Győr has a number of tourists due to its strategic location between Vienna and Budapest and its significance in the Napoleonic Wars, they’re small in number, meaning I can walk the streets and have a peaceful lunch without hearing two fat American girls loudly whining about how Hungarian guys won’t give them the time of day. The only problem residents there are Gypsies, but they’re a problem in Hungary in general.

Győr isn’t as nice as Lviv, where I was maybe one of a handful of English-speaking visitors during my initial visit, but it’s still pretty nice.

Overall, I would recommend Győr for a weekend visit at least. It’s quiet, clean, beautiful, and isn’t full of retarded Brits whooping about in furry costumes.

Read Next: Brief Thoughts on Living in Budapest, Hungary

NOTE: This is a sponsored guest post by Speaking Abroad. If you’re interested in advertising on my site, click here.

If you’re traveling abroad, you need to read this.

1. Knowing ten words puts you in the top ten percent.

Too many people (I’m looking at you, British stag parties) simply go into another country and go around yelling English at people.

If you’re doing a trip that is pure “tourism” (i.e. not immersing yourself into the culture), that’s one thing. But if you are actually going to go and live in a country for a few weeks to a month, learning just a handful of words and phrases will put you so far ahead of the rest of the crowd.

It will help you meet local girls for dating, it will open doors to to make male friends at the gym (gyms, nightclubs, etc.), and everyone working in restaurants, stores and the like will appreciate the effort.

It shows a genuine interest and appreciation for the local language and culture. This is something that is sorely lacking in the majority of Western people who travel, hence the reason why so many of them have such a poor reputation overseas.

2. Ask about English the proper way.

Note: Every country is going to be drastically different in this approach.

Contrary to the last point, people do not expect you to speak their language fluently. They are not going to hold it against you. However, there is a proper way to ask if they speak English.

Whether you should ask at all also varies country to country.

For example, when Matt was in Sweden for his speech, he probably realized that just about everybody there speaks English. Some people would likely be offended if he asked if they spoke English.

But in comparison, when he was recently in Ukraine (and as you go further east to countries like Moldova), far fewer people speak English. So there, it’s appropriate to ask.

There is a right and wrong way to do so.

For example, if you’re in a McDonald’s ordering (don’t eat McDonald’s while abroad, but you get my point), it’s bad to just walk up and start ordering in English. You are putting that person on the spot, forcing them to perform in a language they are probably not comfortable in. And you’re doing it in a way that is in the public spotlight; nobody likes that sprung on them.

It is far more appropriate to say in a very moderate tone, “Do you speak English?” More than likely, they will respond back by saying, “a little,” or “so-so.”

This is your cue to just order. Most people can at least understand enough English that it won’t be a problem to take your order. Just don’t ask them to communicate too much back, and you’ll be just fine.

3. Understand dialects.

Many people in foreign countries are extremely proud of their country and language. “Language pride” just isn’t something that exists in the United States or the U.K. For us, it’s just English.

That’s not the case abroad.

For example, to use the Ukraine example again, many people in the western part of the country hate Russia and the Russian language itself. While I’d never advise a Westerner to learn Ukrainian over Russian, Ukrainians in that region won’t give a damn.

In that case, it’s best to at least be aware of that problem and act accordingly. If you start speaking Russian and someone wrinkles their nose in disgust, switch to English.

Another example of this is Spain. In some regions of the country, a different dialect of Spanish is actually spoken. While the Spanish probably won’t be as offended as Ukrainians in this case, it’s still good to at least be aware and recognize the separate dialects.

4. Download offline translators.

I don’t really see a need for any apps other than Google Translate. It works just fine for the majority of languages, and has some nifty features.

Make sure you always download the offline translation pack (they’re usually a couple hundred megabytes) in the app itself. This allows you to use it even if you don’t have an Internet connection, though foreign SIM cards are so cheap, it’s usually worth it.

Either way, you’ll be covered.

As a bonus tip, you can do the same thing with Google Maps areas. This will allow you to navigate the city (and some parts of public transit) without having either cell service or a reliable WiFi connection.

5. Hit up language exchanges.

If you’re planning on spending significant time in a place, make sure to hit up the language exchange programs. These usually occur on a weekly basis, and are truly just groups of people who get together to practice various languages.

If you are a native English speaker, you’ll be in hot demand.

In most cases, if you are a native speaker and choose to go and practice English, the host is going to buy you a couple beers. All the people who want to practice English will flock to you, making it very easy to get phone numbers from girls. It’s easy to make friends who will want to hang out and can give you a hand with the local language if you’re in a pinch.

I’ve met many great people this way, and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Closing Thoughts

Too many people get stuck on the notion that traveling is scary. That if they don’t speak the language, it’s going to be a struggle. The truth is that in many places of the world, English is widely spoken.

And even if it’s not, you can survive with the tips I’ve mentioned above.

Don’t let language barriers stop you from seeing the world.

Read Next: Three Easy Ways to Learn Another Language

Last week, I was required to leave Hungary temporarily and had to pick a city to visit while I was away. I settled on Lviv, Ukraine, a small tourist city located a stone’s throw from the border with Poland. While I’d originally intended only to visit for a couple days, I enjoyed Lviv so much that I extended my stay through the end of the week, enabling me to see much of the city.

Here are my observations on what I saw…

1. Ukraine is a third-world country.

I’ve written about the deteriorating political and economic situation in Ukraine already, but it’s entirely another thing to have it thrust in your face. Ukraine’s poverty is evident the second you cross the border. I traveled to Lviv via train from Budapest (there are no direct flights between the cities), and rural Hungary doesn’t look that much different from the rural northern U.S.: lots of farms, rustic villages and mountains in the distance. The only things that puncture the illusion are the occasional nuclear power plant, cow grazing on railroad property, or horrifying grey communist-era apartment block.

Rural Ukraine is run-down and decaying. The Tisza River (delineating the border between Hungary and Ukraine) is a filthy creek. Chop, the border town where I cleared customs, is a dirty, crumbling dump. Roads have moped-sized potholes, houses are in shambles, and people are burning trash everywhere or setting forest fires for the hell of it. I’m not kidding: Ukrainians love setting things on fire. On the train from Chop to Lviv, I saw so many fires that they lit up the night sky. There’s also a stark class divide; you’ll often see nice, new houses with steel gates and stone fences right next to run-down farmhouses with broken windows and rusted-out cars on the front lawn.

Lviv is in better shape than the other parts of Ukraine I saw, but even there, things are coming apart at the seams. Once you leave the Old Town area of the city, the roads start getting shabbier and the buildings more poorly maintained. Even the sidewalks themselves, which are all cobblestone, are in a state of disrepair. All of the girls I saw wore boots when they were out and about because it was the only way to protect their feet.

2. Lviv is the the cheapest city I’ve ever been to.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Ukraine is the white Philippines. Thanks to the poor economy, you can live large on the smallest of budgets.

For example, a first-class train ride from Chop to Lviv is about $7. A fully furnished apartment in the center of Lviv is $10 a night… the absolute lowest that Airbnb allows landlords to charge. Eating out at nice restaurants is about $5; in fact, they’re so cheap that I started ordering multiple courses, which I never do anywhere else. Taxi rides will run you less than $4, not that you need them since everything important in the city is within walking distance, and there’s also a robust tram system that costs about $.15 per ride. Ukraine has become so poor that a waiter actually got mad at me for paying for a 130 hryvnia (UAH) dinner with a 500 UAH note because it was the only one I had.

For reference, 500 UAH is about $18.

If it weren’t for Ukraine’s political instability, Lviv would be an ideal place for budget-conscious travelers to settle down. While the city lacks the nightlife and amusement options that bigger cities have, its low cost of living, quiet atmosphere, cute girls and proximity to major European cities such as Krakow, Budapest and Kiev make it extremely appealing.

3. Ukrainians are outgoing and curious about foreigners.

Unlike Russians, who can barely be bothered to do their jobs when you ask them to, Ukrainians will go out of their way to help foreigners, particularly Americans. Due to the State Department scaring everyone away from Ukraine due to the war in Donbass—which is happening clear on the other side of the country, in a place no one would ever want to go—visitors from English-speaking countries are a novelty. Even in Lviv, the only tourists I encountered were from Poland, the Czech Republic or other eastern European countries.

For example, I attracted attention at the Chop border crossing because I was the only non-Hungarian or non-Ukrainian on the train. While I was staring at the timetable trying to give myself a crash course in Cyrillic, one of the border cops on duty came up and asked me if I needed help (despite barely knowing English). In Lviv, I would regularly get stares from girls walking down the street, though the fact that I wore a suit whenever I went out was probably part of the reason why.

The only area where I was even remotely hassled was at customs itself.

When the Ukrainians were searching my bag, they held me up for ten minutes after finding a packet of phenibut. The officer doing the search asked me if it was hashish; I told him no and explained what phenibut was, and he and his colleague spent ten minutes Googling it on their phones before figuring out that it was legal and sending me on my way. I was likely saved in part by the fact that I was wearing a suit and my passport lists my birthplace (New York), so the guards assumed I had money and were more likely to shake me down for a bribe than arrest me.

4. Lviv is the least Americanized city I’ve been to in Europe.

In a week’s visit, I saw exactly one outpost of American consumer culture: a lone McDonald’s near the Opera House. Everything else is either local, Ukrainian or a Russian chain. Even American brands of junk food are hard to come by; supermarkets are dominated by regional equivalents. The atmosphere is also extremely conservative, with none of the meat market anarchy of Budapest’s party district. Girls here tend to be conscientious and don’t sleep with men until the second or third date at least.

The downside to all this is that English fluency is rather low. In Chop, the only people who spoke any English were the customs officials. In Lviv, young people speak decent English, but their overall proficiency is lower than Hungarians in Budapest. Settling down in Lviv for the long-term would require me to learn some Ukrainian (or possibly Russian; however, Lviv is the most nationalist part of Ukraine and Russians are widely disliked there).

5. Ukrainian girls are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and the easiest to approach.

While American trends such as obesity and social justice have made a tiny amount of headway in Hungary, they’re completely stopped dead in Ukraine. Just about every girl between the age of 18 and 30 in Lviv is head-turningly gorgeous and dressed to the nines in skirts and boots. Beyond their physical attractiveness, the average Ukrainian girl oozes femininity and carries herself with an energy that radiates beyond her looks.

Ukrainian girls are also stupidly easy to approach, far easier than Hungarian girls. On my first day in Lviv, I fired up Tinder while eating lunch and started swiping right. In less than five minutes, I immediately had three matches, a far better response rate than I’d seen anywhere else, and I ended up going on a date with one of them. Later that day, while touring the city, I just started going up to girls and talking to them. As an American wearing a suit, girls were curious as to why I was in their city, and they didn’t attempt to play stupid games or act cliquish. (I’ll write more about the girls later.)

Overall, I really enjoyed my stay in Lviv. If it weren’t for my work in Budapest, I’d seriously consider relocating there for a spell. As it stands, I plan to come back in the near future.

P.S. If you’re ready to start meeting Ukrainian girls now, click here.

Read Next: Thoughts on Visiting Stockholm, Sweden

Last Thursday, after navigating the twin threats of American land-based public transportation and surly Russian airport employees, I arrived in Budapest, Hungary. It might just be the fact that I was elated to get out of the deteriorating cesspits known as Chicago and New York, but it’s wonderful here and I don’t want to leave.

Here are some of my observations on what I’ve seen so far.

1. Budapest works the way large cities in the U.S. are supposed to work.

I was admittedly somewhat nervous about the move, considering that I wasn’t as familiar with Hungarian culture as I was with Philippine culture when I moved there. The fact that I’d lost my ATM card at a duty-free shop in Moscow—a fact I didn’t discover until I went to get money at the Budapest airport—didn’t help my mood. These fears literally evaporated when I got on the bus to downtown.

As it turns out, Budapest is so pleasant that not even losing access to my bank account could ruin my mood.

Unlike Americans, Hungarians can keep the basic infrastructure a city needs to operate running. The Metro here runs on time, without the horrendous delays that the New York City Subway, Washington Metro and Chicago L have. The elevators and stairways are clean and don’t smell like piss, and railways don’t smell like diarrhea (as Penn Station did when I arrived there last Tuesday). Buses and trams are clean, pleasant and safe. Despite supposedly being a “second-world” country, Budapest’s infrastructure is just as well-developed and maintained as any Western city.

Moreover, the city’s lack of ethnic diversity makes it more welcoming and safe than American cities. Riding the public transportation system down to where I was staying, I counted exactly two non-whites: a pair of fat black girls outside a hostel. There are no black guys trying to hustle you for bus fare, no gangs of Mexicans leering at you and your girlfriend on the sidewalk, and no bums passed out in front of train stations with needles still jammed in their arms. While District VIII (where I was staying) supposedly has a bad rep due to its Gypsy population, I felt perfectly safe walking around there at night.

Unlike in the U.S., racial minorities don’t get to cry “racism” or “bigotry” when they get caught committing crimes, so they behave themselves.

The cost of living is also far more reasonable than anywhere in the West. A “comfort class” (midway between economy and business) Aeroflot ticket to Hungary cost me only $750. In Budapest, a one-bedroom apartment will run you about $300 a month. Eating out at a decent restaurant is $5-6. A beer is $1. A one-way Metro ticket is $1.20. Absent the raft of leftist regulations that are choking business in the U.S., Budapest’s standard of living is where it should be, where everyone can afford a decent lifestyle. While I’ve yet to explore some parts of the city, I have yet to see the stark poverty that defined the Philippines, or the deepening gulf between rich and poor that defines America’s major cities.

2. The people are welcoming and pleasant.

Perhaps it’s just my eastern European genes coming to the forefront, but I feel more welcome in Hungary then I did in the Philippines. For that matter, I feel more welcome here then I did in California. While Hungarians have a rep for being distrustful of foreigners, I’ve been treated with politeness and respect by everyone here, aside from one supermarket security guard who accused me and my friend of stealing because we had a bag full of groceries from another store.

The obsequiousness that defines Filipinos’ (and southeast Asians in general) attitude towards foreigners doesn’t exist here.

The locals also don’t have a predatory attitude towards foreigners, so I don’t have to spend my mental energy fending off hookers and grifters. For example, before I left, my friend, Arktos CEO Daniel Friberg, warned me not to ride with any taxi drivers in the Budapest airport lobby, because they were likely to cheat me. I fully expected that as soon as I stepped in the door, I’d be assailed by eight million hustlers trying to get my money. Instead, I was all-but ignored in the lobby, aside from one driver who asked me if I needed a ride. On the way to where I was staying, I didn’t have to deal with a single beggar, shoe-shine boy or ugly fat girl offering me “boom-boom” for 5,000 forint.

The pleasantness of Hungarians extends to how they interact with each other. In Budapest, people still have normal social lives. While smartphones are ubiquitous here, Hungarians don’t hover over them constantly like Americans do. In public, you’ll see men holding hands with their girlfriends and daughters holding hands with their mothers. The social dysfunction of major American cities is nowhere to be found.

3. The women are gorgeous.

In four days here, I’ve yet to see a girl between the ages of 18 and 35 that I would not sleep with. Feminism and social justice are all-but nonexistent in Hungary. I’ve seen exactly two girls with cotton candy-colored hair: a pair of lesbians I saw at the mall. I’ve seen one guy with ear gauges. While there are a fair number of tattoo parlors, almost no one openly displays tattoos or piercings aside from earrings. While some girls are chubby, almost no one is obese.

Trigglypuff-style freaks simply can’t be found here, and there are no flaming homos either.

Additionally, Hungarian women tend to be more conservative than Western women. Girls who openly sleep around are punished for it.

4. For all of Eastern Europe’s supposed “fascism,” I feel freer here than in the U.S.

When I boarded my flight in NYC to Moscow, I had to take off my shoes and belt and disassemble my laptop bag in order to go through the TSA checkpoint. After I got zapped with their cancer-inducing radiation scanner, I got a patdown from a black agent because there was a nonexistent “anomaly” on my lower back.

When I reboarded my flight to Budapest in Moscow, I merely had to put my wallet and phone into a bin, stick my bag in the scanner, and walk through a simple metal detector. The lady running the scanner asked to look at my microphone, but when she was done confirming that it wasn’t a bomb or a gun, she actually helped put my bag back together.

This was in Russia, a country that leftists claim is literally Hitler.

When I actually arrived in Hungary, I didn’t have to fill out any immigration forms or answer any questions: the customs officer just looked at my passport, stamped it, and handed it back. Again, this is a country that responded to the migrant crisis by building a border wall and telling the E.U. to get fucked, and they didn’t feel the need to put me through the rigamarole that the “liberal democracies” of Canada and the U.S. do.

I’m planning to spend most of the next year living in Europe, possibly returning to the U.S. around November. If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to stop by and say hi.

Read Next: Brief Thoughts on Living in the Philippines

NOTE: I’ve reached deep into the In Mala Fide archives to bring you this post all the way from August 31, 2010, about my tour of a Canadian military nuclear fallout bunker near Ottawa. I had thought this post lost because I had thought I’d accidentally deleted the pictures that accompanied it, but I was cleaning out an old hard drive of mine the other day and found them. Enjoy.

I imagine most of you are spinning in your swivel chairs laughing your asses off at the above picture. “Whut did Kana-duh have to do whit the Cold War? Dey just a bunch of elk pelt-sniffin’ wannabe ‘Mericans!”” Quite a bit, surprisingly. As a founding member of NATO, Canada was at risk of Russian nuclear attack, which prompted the government to construct a series of bunkers across the country to safeguard government officials in the event of World War III. The largest and most important of these Diefenbunkers (named after John Diefenbaker, Prime Minister of Canada from 1957 – 1963 and under whose government the project was initiated) was located in Carp, Ontario, about twenty minutes west of Ottawa, designed to shelter the Prime Minister, Governor General and other members of the federal government.

Of course, fallout bunkers for government officials aren’t unique to the Great White North; the U.S. had a similar program. What makes this Diefenbunker special is that after the bunkers were decommissioned in the mid-90′s following the Soviet Union’s collapse, a bunch of volunteers from the nearby township got together and transformed the derelict shelter into a fully-furnished museum. To this day, it’s the only Diefenbunker open to the public.

When I first heard about this, I decided I had to check the place out, and man is it cool. The above picture is the shed where the blast tunnel leading to the bunker entrance is: inside a hill in the decommissioned CFB Carp.

One of the first floor main hallways, off to the left of the front desk. The Diefenbunker is freaking huge: four floors of concrete and linoleum designed to withstand the end of the world. The first floor is divided between re-creations of rooms and specially designed exhibits about Cold War and Canadian history.

The infirmary. When a nuclear bomb wipes out your capital, you better have everything you need to stay alive in your fallout shelter.

Cold War government propaganda is so quaint.

A map of Ottawa delineating the damage an ICBM would cause. The percentages indicate the estimates of how many of the people in each circle would be killed on impact.

A scale model of the bunker, similar to the one used in its construction.

Nuke or no nuke, I’ll be damned if I have to wait in line to use the can.

Radio equipment. When the Canadian Forces decommissioned CFB Carp in 1994, they took all of the bunker’s furnishings with them, forcing the restoration volunteers to restore them.

Entrance to the ladies’ quarters. Being a military installation, when the Diefenbunker first became operational, the only women allowed in were nurses and secretaries. I wonder if we were better off that way. I’d rather help repopulate the True North with a sexy secretary then some bull-dyke private with a torture fetish.

The cafeteria. Looks near-identical to the one at my old elementary school. Fun fact: hidden back in the kitchen, there’s a Coca-Cola refrigerator stocked with enough wine to make an entire sorority blackout drunk. Goddamnit, I wish I could do that at my job. I hate you, Canada.

The pantry, stocked with only the finest in survival cuisine. MREs: mmm mmm, tasty!

Shitty quality I know, but I couldn’t not get a picture of that box. To think they were only a half-century off the mark…

The vault, the lowest (and coldest) part of the complex. This is where the Bank of Canada would have stashed all that Canuck Gold™. The far wall is taken up by a poster listing off major events of the Cold War.

Now that’s old school.

The war cabinet room. Mein Fuhrer, I can sit!

The Emergency Government Situation Centre, the nerve center of the entire complex. They may not be able to keep your city from being turned into radioactive ash, but gosh darnit, they’ll know where the missiles land!

It may be the end of the human race, but we can still have a few laughs.

OSAX, where the supercomputers are kept. Skynet not included.

Why take a picture of a toilet? It’s only the most important toilet in the entire bunker! It’s the Prime Minister’s toilet, the holy bowl where he would squeeze out his two daily allotted MREs in poop pellet form. This is an important toilet, people! Show some fucking respect!

And here’s the Prime Minister’s desk, where the task of administering a post-apocalyptic nation is carried out.

An apparent reproduction of an actual letter sent to Prime Minister Diefenbaker. It’s nice little details like this that set the Diefenbunker apart. We can’t have anything nice like this in the States, because the lumpenproles would ruin it.

Those are actual military rations you can purchase at the gift shop, if you really enjoy Meals Refused by Ethiopians. Other odd things you can pick up there include Joseph Stalin-themed breath mints and DVDs of Nuclear Roof, Canada’s answer to Duck and Cover.

Overall, the Diefenbunker is one hell of an interesting place to visit. It’s certainly unique, and the pictures here don’t even cover a fifth of it. If you’re interested in Cold War history and technology, or if you just want to wander around a real military fallout shelter, it’s more than worth your time.

Read Next: North to Canada