Return today

Hi All,

This post, the last of our A-V-B-P trip, comes to you from sprawling Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Happy Thanksgiving! We are so excited to share dinner in 12 hours or so with Layne, Olivia and Rennell. Together, the kids are cooking their first turkey. We can't wait!

Our final 3 days passed in a flash. When I last wrote, we were on a fabulous bus, on our way to Cesky Krumlov (CK), a small city built on a sharp bend in a river -- a natural moat. When you look down on the city, if you squint your eyes so you don't notice the antennas and satellite dishes, it's almost possible to believe that you are back in medieval times.

The steep hills around the town were covered in seriously intense autumn colours, and altogether, the effect was stunning. For the 20th time, I find myself wishing we were able to post photos to the blog so you could see too (now you can....).

Our pace was leisurely in CK....in part because it poured icy rain our first afternoon there. The travel gods relented and granted us permission to have our first, last and only afternoon nap of the trip. Ahhh!

The food on this trip has been...well, "rib-sticking" is the glass-half-full way of describing most of it, though we have had a few really good meals (all in Hungary...there's a great pun opportunity here that I'll resist). I just don't "get" dumplings: great white slices of tough, chewy, tasteless dough. And there are only so many fatty variations of roasted pork a person's digestive tract can handle, as Frank discovered in CK, causing him to suddenly bolt from the lunch table without explanation! So, the vegetarian restaurant in CK recommended to us by some lovely American art students we met was just the ticket Friday night. The owner, David, was lots of fun. He sat down at guests' tables to take orders and settle bills. He has travelled the world, and asked us if we'd been to Newfoundland (we hung our heads and shook them...no) and was very persuasive that our next trip should be to Albania.

The highlight of our sightseeing in CK was touring an original Baroque theatre that was only used for about 20 years by the local royalty, then completely shut up, freezing it in time. But really, the best part was just being there, wandering tiny, winding streets and imagining the past.

Our final day, back in Prague on Sunday, was deliciously slow and unscheduled. Since we had quite a bit of currency left in Czech Crowns, we decided to treat ourselves to lunch in the most gorgeous Art Nouveau restaurant in the city. (Guess whose idea it was...)

They advertised  a 3-course lunch menu for about $25. Although that's very expensive by Czech standards, we figured it was a great deal. Except.... I didn't do the math properly on the glass of champagne I ordered when the waiter suggested it. Turns out one small glass of pink bubbles cost more than my whole meal ($30)! It's amazing how foolish and ashamed I felt when we got the bill. I said to Frank later that I would have felt far less bad if I'd just lost the money on the street! Frank was very sweet about it, just the right combo of teasing and reassuring.

Nonetheless, the day was gloriously crisp and sunny and the hills were blazing. We decided to take the Funicular (isn't that a great word?) to the base of Prague's version of the Eiffel Tower, the Petron Tower. Except the funicular was closed for servicing....so we hiked. Up and up we went, in the late afternoon golden-y autumn sunshine, with the views of the red-roofed old city getting better and better at each turn.

 

The day ended with Frank's favourite meal (remember, it involves sausage and bread and is preferably eaten standing up) in Wenceslas Square, the exact site where the Communist era ended peacefully in the wake of massive demonstrations in late 1989.

I was planning to end with witty reflections, bordering on deep, but thankfully our plane is loading. It's been a slice, but home awaits, and that's good too.

Bye for this trip,

Wendy and Frank

Eger and Prauge

Hi Everyone,

I'm writing this on a foggy Friday morning from the bus on our way to a small town 3 hours from Prague. This bus is amazing, with comfy leather seats and flip-down trays. An attendant has come around to make sure our seatbelts are fastened and to offer us headphones for the movie (Czech only), magazines (also Czech only) and cappuccino (all languages). Oh yeah: there's also WiFi! The price? About $20 per person round trip. Come on, Grayhound, you can do better!

A lot has happened since I last wrote so I will try to limit my musings to mostly the highlights. It seems like the only sustained down time we get to write is when we're in transit...

On Saturday, after warm goodbyes with our wonderful B and B hosts, we left Budapest for the town of Eger, famous for its wine and hot springs. When the Ottomans (from Turkey) invaded and occupied Eastern Europe in the 1600s, Eger was on the northernmost boundary of the Turkish Empire. The people of Eger were driven from their homes and lived in small caves just outside the town. Once the Ottomans were driven out...a full century later...the people returned to the town, but families kept their caves as wine cellars.

Now, tourists and local people flock to that area, called The Valley of the Sirens, to sample the varieties of these proud, tiny mom-and-pop wineries in cozy cave-bars. On a wider scale, the wine industry has blossomed at an astonishing pace across Hungary since the return of capitalism.

In Eger, we stayed in an old-fashioned, lovely family-run "villa" with about 10 rooms and a swimming pool/hot tub/sauna complex, and I had a Swedish massage, unlike any other. Frank called it "beating via massage". I was quite uncomfortable DURING it, but I suspect I have a pretty high pain tolerance, so I didn't fully realize how....um...."thorough" it was until I saw Frank's reaction. I had two patches on my back, where my wings would be if people had wings, about 4" by 6" or 8". At first, they looked like a bad case of road rash, then bloomed into multicoloured bruises. The colour still isn't quite gone, but at least the tenderness (which was intense) is. So, that was an "adventure", right?

We left Eger on Monday for Prague. Our first full day there (Tuesday), we got a late start and mostly walked and walked, including transversing the 650-year-old Charles Bridge.

Wednesday was full. We started off in the Jewish Quarter, in a synagogue with the names of almost 80,000 Holocaust victims written on the walls, and artwork from children interned at Terezin concentration camp. I know we said no more Holocaust themes for the rest of the trip....but it turns out this topic is hard to avoid in this part of Europe, given that 95% of Prague's Jewish population died during WW II. It was fairly traumatizing, particularly for Frank. We cut that part of our plans short but had a lot of conversation about it for the rest of the day.

The afternoon was spent on Art Nouveau architecture (you're right, Sue Morris, it's amazing) and art. Art Nouveau is that very distinctive, curly, stylized art, like the girl and boy on old cracker tins from the 1920s. I think I like it better as architecture than art, since I took MANY photos of details on and in buildings.

In the evening, we heard the Prague Symphony Orchestra perform, along with a huge choir. I counted: at one point there were roughly 140 people on stage! We had front row seats (so close we could see the raw patches on the undersides of the violinists' jaws; so close that the conductor directly smiled at and gestured to  Frank during one l-o-n-g round of applause). Those seats cost only $20 each! Listening to the glorious, complex, soaring music, Frank and I had very different reactions. I was full of emotion, thinking about the difficult content of the morning, and how it's possible that people can be both so bad and so good, so destructive and so creative, so low and so high. The music, especially the first piece, was very sad and very sweet, and the sadness made it sweeter and the sweetness made it sadder. Frank's mind was going a 1000 miles an hour with  questions about technical things, like pitch and the positioning of the musicians. He unfocussed his eyes so he could see the perfectly-synchronized movements (fingering and bow strokes) of multiple rows of violinists. We both found it amazing.

On Thursday, we made a day trip to a small town an hour away, Kutna Hora. We saw two of the most unusual sites of our trip so far. The first was a church decorated with the skulls and bones of an estimated 40,000 people. Frank was not only creeped out about it, but had a surprisingly indignant moral reaction to people's remains being used as an "art" medium.

The second was touring a medieval silver mine. Imagine being in tiny tunnels (in some places, you couldn't stand upright; in others, you had to turn sideways to get through)100 feet underground, dug entirely by hand in the 1300s. It was amazing. Surprisingly, I was very calm, while Frank felt claustrophobic at times (though I didn't know it at the time). He says he kept telling himself "Just follow Wendy, and you will NOT have a panic attack in  a cramped silver mine 35 metres below ground."

Like Austria, the Czech Republic is holding elections this fall. We were very surprised to learn that the Communist Party is still fairly strong here and gets 15 - 20% of the popular vote. They've traded the hammer and sickle logo for two cherries, but apparently the party is pretty much unchanged in its ideology. We've seen election posters with unsmiling candidates dressed un-stylishly, just as you might imagine Soviet-style Communists might look. In some posters, the faces were vigorously scratched out.

Frank and I have a couple of running observations. One is about....dogs.  They are everywhere: the subway, restaurants, even some theatres. And, maybe this is a rose-coloured-glasses thing, but they seem better behaved than at home -- or rather, the owners seem better-behaved.

Another thing: cell phones, though not absent, are much less obtrusive here. Perhaps it's the focus on being present and engaged in conversation, rather than the hurried worries of the next thing or place or obligation.

Finally: language and communication. We are definitely in the era of the "global village", and English has been widespread on this trip. Still: the dessert we shared in a fancy cafe the other day was described on the English menu as "chocolate dough with pickled cherries" (a.k.a. Black Forrest cake). And we missed a train from Eger due to our complete lack of Hungarian. In both Hungary and the Czech Republic, most people in the big cities, and most young people in general, speak some English. Not so with middle-aged workers in train stations in small towns (though I'm sure they speak a few more words of English than we do of their languages). Even in this new millennium when we're all so plugged in, there are still interesting differences to be observed.

I suspect you too may be ready for our musings to conclude! Only three more sleeps in Europe: the next time we post will be during our layover in Amsterdam on Thanksgiving Monday. Speaking of which...we are so thankful for all of you, to have you in our lives. We wish you all well and carry you in our hearts.

Wendy and Frank

Budapest

Hi Everyone!

Once again, this instalment of our blog comes to you from a train, as we leave Budapest, the  beautiful capital of Hungary, for the spa town of Eger in the countryside.

After an easy train ride from Vienna, we emerged at midday last Tuesday into a very foreign-feeling city with an incomprehensible language and almost no English signage.

In Amsterdam and Vienna, we were able to decipher a lot of written content. But not so much with Hungarian, which is almost a unique language. For example, can you guess what this sentence means?

"A gyors barna róka átugorja a lusta kutyát."

I didn't think so! I'll tell you at the end of the blog :-)

As a result, we found navigating so stressful that there was only one way to recover: buy a bottle of cheap but tasty Hungarian wine and drink the whole thing (straight from the bottle) with a picnic lunch in the park near our B&B. Phew!

That first afternoon, once we sobered up sufficiently, we toured an area called Castle Rock. The highlight was seeing "The Hospital in the Rock". This vast, underground complex, built into natural caves that honeycomb the hill, was developed as a hospital and used as such near the end of WW II, then again in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising, and was expanded to house a huge bomb shelter in the Cold War era. It was only declassified as "top secret" in 2000, and is frozen in time in the eeriest way imaginable, with operating rooms, wards, decontamination showers, supplies, etc. perfectly preserved. The strangest gift shop ever sells actual WW II and Cold War artifacts: gas masks, glass syringes, Red Cross armbands. Hey kids, guess what mom and dad are bringing you from Europe!

We have learned more about 20th century European history here than in any other place we have visited. A lot of our learning has been thanks to conversations with our excellent hosts at the B and B,  Judit and Liosh.

 

Budapest allied itself with Germany right from the start of WW II, as there was a home-grown Fascist regime, the Arrow Cross, already in place as early as 1920. Throughout the war, but especially during the 100 day siege of Budapest near the end, both the Nazis and the Allies bombed the crap out of the city. Since the "fundamental changes" (what people here call the fall of the Iron Curtain) most historic buildings have been rebuilt, but not all.

Visiting the House of Terror museum (it sounds like a hokey tourist trap, but is a legit museum) was very distressing. It's housed in the actual building where two regimes of secret police, first Fascist, then Communist, detained, interrogated, tortured and executed thousands of people. We both felt physically ill afterward, and have decided to limit our exposure to graphically-disturbing displays (especially Holocaust-related) for the rest of the trip. Trish, we know you will understand and approve of this decision....

On a lighter note...we spent a couple of hours on a blustery day (the cold weather has surprised us) at the huge thermal bath complex in the City Park. We tried every single one of the dozens of pools, ranging in temperature from less than 20 to over 40 degrees. Many were green and murky and stinky...but in a good way! At least, that's what the Hungarians think. Every age, size, shape and condition of body was displayed in every style and size of bathing suit. My favourite sight was clusters of old guys playing chess while soaking.

Another highlight was attending a performance of Hungarian folk music and dance. The very-professional performers radiated joy, pride and humour as they leaped, spun, kicked, snapped, stomped, whooped, whistled and slapped their way around the stage. I think only someone with a heart of stone could have resisted being delighted and charmed by it. Frank thought it was  "just okay...." (Ha ha, just kidding, he loved it too!)

One last adventure to write about before I sign off. 

Last night, we teamed up with a very friendly couple from Salt Lake City, Bill and Jean (also staying at our B and B) to explore some of the city's "ruin pubs". These bars and restaurants squat, paying minimal rent to the city, in decrepit buildings that were damaged in the war and sat abandoned for 50 years or more.

 

The largest and most mind-boggling we saw was in a tenement-style apartment building in the former Jewish Quarter of the city. The rust-eaten beams and crumbly bricks have been "decorated" with every imaginable piece of detritus, including a dentist's chair, a claw foot bathtub and scary dolls.  Although we were some of the oldest people of the 500 or so in the huge bar, and despite the techno music, we really enjoyed the ambiance and the company. It's clear Budapest knows how to party!

So: after our initial confusion wore off, we felt safe, welcome and constantly stimulated in this city of 2 million. It wasn't was genteel and cultured, or as easy, as Vienna, but it was more interesting...and more fun. We both agree we would return, given the opportunity.

We think of family and friends often and are constantly seeing variations of your faces in European crowds! We'll write next from Prague.

Bye for now,

Wendy and Frank

 PS: The sentence in Hungarian says "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."