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