• Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de
    34·
    7 days ago

    Here’s what I would avoid when traveling to Poland:

    • Zakopane, it’s overpriced and very crowded. If you want to visit the area the town is in your better off staying in smaller villages, unless you have to use public transit.
    • Szczecin --not an ‘avoid at all cost’ but more of a ‘there are better cities to visit’-- this-or-that part of the city is always being remodeled/reconstructed and there’s no ‘old city’ with day and night life focused between two shoping centers and some roundabouts in the city center. If you want to go sight-seeing Kraków, Wrocław or Gdańsk are much better choices.
    • Mazury lake district, beautiful lakes and decent nightlife, shit infrastructure - roads are narrow (two bigger cars can’t pass eachother without going offroad) and often lacking sings and other markings
    • Podlaskie Voivodship, even worse infrastructure than Mazury, it’s rural, mainly towns and villages with nothing a tourist might want to see. You might think it’s a good place to go star-gazing but Bieszczady are a lot better for that (Tho you should probably go to a Dark Sky Site for that, there’s one close to Bieszczady, in Slovakia)
    • THE SEASIDE, it’s crowded, expensive, the sea is cold and it’s fumcking wimdy, go to like Italy, Croatia, Portugal or Spain instead

    Also in general avoid capital cities, they are often the worst of major cites in a given country.

    • Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      6 days ago

      I forgot two places - both as bad as Zakopane - One is the Hel(l) Peninsula, it’s as overcrowded as Zakopane; but it has a single road (one lane each way) that gets jammed very fast, you can be stuck there like 5 hours, even though it’s only 30 Km long. The second one is Krynica Morska, a town located on the Vistula Spit(separating Vistula Lagoon from Gdańsk Bay, in the Baltic Sea) and it has the same problem as Hel - it’s a popular destination with only one road in and out.

    • merari42@lemmy.world
      4·
      6 days ago

      My wife an I were on a Roadtrip from Germany to Poland for a holiday and did go to a lot of beautiful places. But Zakopane is stuck in my mind as the most touristy place I did ever go to. The High Tatra mountains are still beautiful but we had to wait in line to even enter the hiking trails. And on the trails it was just hundreds of people trying to make photos without other people in the background.

  • EllE@lemmy.world
    351·
    7 days ago

    Common tourist places during tourist season are usually the worst. I took a 10 day trip to Paris one summer and it was a mix of the most popular tourist places (Louvre, Eiffel tower, etc) and some underground shit my sister found.

    Every tourist place was jam packed with annoying tourists, costly and had tons of scammers surrounding it. Every less known place was really awesome, aside from one sketchy neighborhood we had to walk through where we were followed for a while.

    I’d also say that Northern Europe has generally been much more pleasant to travel through, for me.

  • Cadenza@lemmy.world
    256·
    7 days ago

    France is becoming a far right country on two weeks. Do yourself a favor and stay as far as you can.

  • Tryptaminev@lemm.ee
    2113·
    6 days ago

    Depends. Are you white? Would you be recognizable as a “foreigner”? In the latter case avoid all of Germanys provinces, especially in the former East. Do not travel alone and be wary of the cops. They are usually the same groups as the local Neonazis.

        • niktemadur@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          Back when Australia was still remote and exotic, before Crocodile Dundee even, a lot of people back in the day thought he sang:
          “He just smiled and gave me a bit of my sandwich”,
          which would have also made for a fantastic lyric in a very silly way.

    • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I wanna move to Belgium. Not once have I considered Brussels as my new demeure. It’s got some cool stuff, but it has little to no revisit value.

      Quite a lot of the cities in the Flemish region look absolutely beautiful (Bruges especially), yet everyone I know of just sees Brussels and thinks of it as all of Belgium, then comes to the conclusion that the entire country is basically rubbish.

      But I personally think that Charleroi is way worse.

    • resin85@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Just got back from a 3 day trip to Brussels, we loved it. Plus, Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) everywhere. We did take a day trip to Bruges though, that was even better than Brussels IMHO. Especially since I could walk around saying to my wife “If I grew up on a farm, and was removed, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”.

  • eightpix@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 days ago

    Had a couch surfer stay with us a while in Kuwait. He’d been everywhere. He said that, of all places, Moldova had no redeeming qualities. Granted, things might have changed in 10 years. Does anyone care to weigh in?