Balabanova All Over

Archives

[Vatican City, Italy] No visit to Rome is complete without a visit to the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. If you have only one day in Rome and have to pick between this and the Coliseum/Forum, I’d pick this (although with some planning, they are both doable in one long, exhausting day). To get to the Vatican, I took Bus 64 across the Tiber river. It was about… Read More

[Rome, Italy] Arriving in Rome was a breeze. I set off from LA on an early-morning flight to Washington, DC, where I connected directly to Rome. I slept for the majority of the second flight and when I landed at 8:30 in the morning local time, I was ready to go! My Bulgarian passport gave me access to the EU customs line. It was not actually a customs line but a series… Read More

[Chicago, IL] A couple of major Chicago attractions book-ending a divine lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant? Not a bad way to spend another day in Chicago, I think! We started off our day at Willis Tower. Built as and still commonly referred to as Sears Tower, it was the tallest building in the world from the time it was completed in 1973 until 1998 when the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia were… Read More

[Chicago, IL] Kristina did not know this yet, but sightseeing with me is no joke. There are places to be seen and meals to be eaten and pictures to be taken. I have a checklist with must-dos and nice-to-dos, and I have google-mapped the place to death because my worst nightmare is wasting precious time trying to figure out where to go next, or, even worse, having to come back to an… Read More

[London, United Kingdom] I woke up on Sunday fully expecting the cooler, cloudy, misty weather that had been forecast for that day. Instead, I saw rays of sunshine peeking through the blinds. I was very excited – that meant warmer temps, and awesome photos of London from the London Eye, which I planned on riding that day. Before that though, I had a few other London must-sees on my list. I started… Read More