Me and a friend are in the very early stages of planning a trip around Eastern Europe in the summer. Has anyone done this before? It would be really helpful to hear your experiences, travel tips, places you think we should visit, and any books or websites you found useful. Is interrail the best way to get around? A friend told me that it didn't cover bits further East, but I haven't checked the details.

We've got a few ideas of places we want to go to, but don't want to try and pack so much into one trip that we don't have time to think about where we are or learn about a place. Cities we like the sound of are: Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, Sarajevo, Krakow, and we'd like to see other bits of the former Yugoslavia, and the very Eastern bits with Communist architecture. I'd reeeaally like to go to Chernobyl and also any other interesting abandoned buildings I can find.

I'm a literature/philosophy student and my friend is an architect and we are interested in...things to do with those things. One of my friends travels a lot and writes about it for Vice, so ideally I'd like to out-indie him with some of the places I visit (some local knowledge would be great!). I'm hopefully about to start a PhD and my friend is hoping to go back to uni in October to do her diploma, so both of us are pretty keen to save money. We were thinking of going for about a month, but nothing's set in stone...I'd like to persuade my friend to go for longer.

also, i'm vegetarian - am I going to starve?

I want to see buildings like the ones Frederic Chaubin photographs:

I've only been to Prague (twice) of those places and I don't feel I managed much beyond the touristic stuff on either occasion and definitely didn't manage anything remotely indie-cool (did end up in some basement dive that reeked of weed and played only Iron Maiden. the beer was cheap.) so I don't feel too qualified to help. And the only restaurant recommendation I have is a particularly meat-centric one so that's no good.

But what I can say is that you'll not starve. The first time I went I was vegetarian and my bf at the time insisted that all they have is meat and dumplings and there would be absolutely nothing for me to eat (tbh I think he would have said anything to get me to eat some meat). But I did not have a problem there.

Granted, you're not going to get to sample much local cuisine and you'll probably live off Italian food the whole time. But you'll eat.

Also I am so horribly jealous of anyone who does interrail. I have been wanting to do it for years and always swore I'd do it before I graduate but life has totally gotten in the way of that.

whinewhinewhine.

Although just out of interest, if anyone can weigh in how much they have spent on such a trip for, say, a month I would be interested to know. I might try to do it while everything is still on my doorstep.

I imagine in prague there is lots of Kafka stuff, I'm pretty sure you can go to his house.