A Degree for the Dump? Only in Kibera, Kenya!

Lukáš Konečný
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A Degree for the Dump? Only in Kibera, Kenya!
TL;DRIn Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum in Kenya, around a million people live packed into just 2.5 square kilometres. There, a group of young volunteers led by Ahmed Ibrahim Utu set up a Montessori school funded by collecting and recycling waste from local rubbish dumps. It now runs a nursery, kindergarten and the first three years of primary school, and got off the ground partly thanks to the Czech organisation Centrum Dialog. The same group also started a football academy, which offers journalism courses alongside training sessions. Since 2002, Centrum Dialog has run a long-distance child sponsorship programme that’s given more than 4,000 children in Kenya and Guinea a shot at an education — dozens of them from Kibera have finished primary and secondary school and gone on to university.

Can you imagine university graduates heading straight to a rubbish dump after earning their degree? Perhaps as a joke or a tongue-in-cheek protest — but certainly not as a serious career move. Yet in Kibera, Kenya, a group of young volunteers did exactly that. They studied hard so that after finishing school, they could head into the most polluted corners of the city and help their entire community by collecting waste.

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Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

In a Land Where People Still Love to Live

Lucie Konečná
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0
In a Land Where People Still Love to Live
TL;DRSt. John’s, the capital of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, is described as a place where people are remarkably friendly, cheerful and honest — nobody bothers locking their doors or cars, and locals have been known to welcome guests with a letter containing a spare key. Highlights include the colourful houses on Water Street, The Rooms museum, and the Signal Hill monument with its Cabot Tower from 1897 (where Guglielmo Marconi picked up the first transatlantic wireless signal on 12 December 1901). There’s also the abandoned village of Quidi Vidi, about a 20-minute walk away. July and August are the best months to come, with puffins and icebergs on show and temperatures around 22 degrees, while September tends to bring rain, strong winds and the odd hurricane warning. It’s just 5 hours by air from London to St. John’s, and the piece wraps up with nine practical tips for the trip.
I can’t stop smiling. We caught this disease the moment we landed. The corners of our mouths shot up and settled there as if it were their natural position. Everyone smiles here. I found myself in a land of the friendliest people on the planet — a place where happy living isn’t just a phrase, it’s a way of life. The question of “to be or not to be” doesn’t even exist here. Welcome to St. John’s, Canada, in the province of Newfoundland.
Continue

Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

Romania #3: As Long as They Don’t Have Guns, We’re Fine

Lucie Konečná
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0
Romania #3: As Long as They Don’t Have Guns, We’re Fine
TL;DRThis route runs from Targu Jiu through the Banat region to the Czech villages of Svatá Helena and Greoni, ending up in Oravița. The one stretch to watch out for is the 20-kilometre road between Greoni and Oravița — a pitted, unpaved track that took a nerve-shredding hour to drive, made worse by a tense encounter with local Roma. The piece draws a sharp contrast between the tidy Czech villages, with their tinkling sheep bells and wind turbines, and the neglected Romanian settlements nearby, full of derelict tower blocks and rubbish. Targu Jiu’s one real sight gets a mention too: the endless column, Coloana Fără Sfârșit, taken in at around 35 degrees. The main takeaway: whatever you do, don’t drive that stretch of Banat between the Czech villages and Oravița after dark.
A pepper seller waves at me. “What are you doing?” “The gentleman wants a photo with the peppers.” The forty-something seller of red peppers strikes a pose, proudly showing off his impeccably grown vegetables and beaming at us. This Romania travel story begins as we wander through a fruit and vegetable market in a grimy town called Targu Jiu — a place that either had its glory days long ago or never had them at all.
Continue

Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

Romania #2: The National Hobby – Sitting and Staring

Lucie Konečná
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0
Romania #2: The National Hobby – Sitting and Staring
TL;DRSitting and staring is a proper national pastime in rural Romania: whole families, from kids to grandparents, line up on benches outside their houses along the main road, watching cars go by, since these villages often have no side streets or squares to speak of. The authors saw it themselves driving from Pitesti to Targu Jiu, and again in Transylvania, where people turned their heads in unison as the car passed. In towns the habit’s dying out, replaced by gyms and coffee culture, though fairy-tale Sighisoara was the exception — come five in the afternoon, one family had set up folding fishing chairs right by the road. The other classic village ritual is the loving care lavished on ornate gates and doorways, even when they hide an overgrown garden or an unfinished house behind them — left unfinished on purpose, so nobody has to pay property tax.
On the road from Pitesti to Targu Jiu in Romania, I noticed it for the first time. We were driving through villages that were essentially rows of houses lined up along the main road – no centre, no village square, nothing that visually defines a village. We wondered why there were no side streets; everyone lived right on the main road. But we soon understood why.
Continue

Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

Romania #1: Dogs Here Are Like Oversized Pigeons

Lucie Konečná
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0
Romania #1: Dogs Here Are Like Oversized Pigeons
TL;DRStray dogs are a common sight all over Romania, wandering streets, roadsides, restaurants and even tourist spots — at one cable car viewpoint, travellers whiled away the queue stroking the puppies. The road out of Bucharest runs through towns like Pitești and Târgu Jiu to the village of Golești, home to the Muzeul Viticulturii with its 17th-century castle, currently under renovation, and next to it a rebuilt early-20th-century village funded by the EU, complete with church, school, town hall, pub and cemetery. Along the way you’ll spot Roma travellers with horse-drawn carts and dusty, down-at-heel towns where visitors are clearly seen as odd intruders. The whole region feels like a clash between neglected Romanian countryside and little pockets of Western-style development built on European funding.
We left Bucharest airport, heading for Targu Jiu. We crawled through traffic on the motorway, surrounded by nothing. Nothing in the form of peeling walls, faded advertising signs on neglected houses, and yellow fields of dried-out grass. Nothing. No mountains in the background. No anything. That divine, romantic Romanian landscape certainly neither began nor ended in these parts. Just grime carried by the dry southern heat. Where on earth had we gone? I was starting to worry that there really was nothing here. This was our first taste of Romania — and it was nothing like the postcards.
Continue

Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

Russians Are Killing Our Boys

Lucie Konečná
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0
TL;DRThe war in Ukraine turned out to be the topic that resonated most at the Summer School of Journalism in Havlíčkův Brod, regularly attended by friends from Uzhhorod in Ukraine. Ukrainian students, including Kristýna, spoke frankly about having no illusions over Ukraine joining the European Union, and about media fatigue — after so long, the war no longer counts as the day’s top story. Austrian journalist Barbara Tóth and Olga, a Czech studies student from Berlin, raised the issue of Russian propaganda and mistrust towards European media. Yakim, a Ukrainian law student, explained how Russia suppressed the Ukrainian language under communism in an attempt to destroy the nation from within, stressing that the conflict is fundamentally about politics, not ordinary people.

Tears were welling up. I felt ashamed of the Czech Republic, of the EU. In that moment, I wanted to play the hero and go liberate Ukraine with my own tiny strength. I was walking alongside Kristýna, a young, beautiful Ukrainian woman who had come to the Summer Journalism School from Uzhhorod. This is a personal story about the Ukraine war — about people caught between politics, propaganda, and the desperate need not to be forgotten.

Continue

Tips and Tricks for Your Vacation

Don’t Overpay for Flights

Search for flights on Kayak. It’s our favorite search engine because it scans the websites of all airlines and always finds the cheapest connection.

Book Your Accommodation Smartly

The best experiences we’ve had when looking for accommodation (from Alaska to Morocco) are with Booking.com, where hotels, apartments, and entire houses are usually the cheapest and most widely available.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance

Good travel insurance will protect you against illness, accidents, theft, or flight cancellations. We’ve had a few hospital visits abroad, so we know how important it is to have proper insurance arranged.

Where we insure ourselves: SafetyWing (best for everyone) and TrueTraveller (for extra-long trips).

Why don’t we recommend any Czech insurance company? Because they have too many restrictions. They set limits on the number of days abroad, travel insurance via a credit card often requires you to pay medical expenses only with that card, and they frequently limit the number of returns to the Czech Republic.

Find the Best Experiences

Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can book guided walks, trips, skip-the-line tickets, tours, and much more. We always find some extra fun there!

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