Others in our group relay stories of staying in hotels during Communism and being forced to leave their key with a guard on the floor, who monitored comings and goings of the guests. The phone is rotary. Our ceiling leaked profusely any time we turned on the air conditioning, despite repairs by hotel maintenance staff. The bread served at breakfast and by room service was an the verge of being stale. It was quite hard.
Smoking is very, very popular in Eastern Europe so smoke-free restaurants are impossible to find.
Tuesday, July 21 Tour of Krakow. In the morning, we visited World Heritage site we visited in one day. We took a long bus ride from Krakow to Budapest, Hungary . We drove through Slovakia , the eastern country of what was once Czechoslovakia, and passed through two border-control points. I got out of the bus at the Poland-Slovakia border to take photos, which did not meet with the approval of the border guards.