Trip photos

Here are a few highlights from the many many photos I took on our trip. You can also see the whole album on Facebook (even if you are not a Facebook user) by clicking on this link.

St Stephen's Basilica, Budapest

Budapest

Budapest

Parliament, Budapest

Budapest

Bratislava

Bratislava

Bratislava

Bratislava

St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

Near Prague Castle

Prague

Charles Bridge, Prague

Prague day 3 - happy 100th!

This is the 100th post on my blog. I never really planned for it to last this long but since I apparently have a small following, I will shoot for another hundred.

A funny thing happened to me as we were waiting for a tram this morning. This was a long wait, since there are way too many lines and they come way too infrequently. A teenage boy walked up behind me, hit me on the butt a few times with a long stick made from braided reeds, all the while chanting some kind of rhyme. I didn't know what was going on, if I was getting somehow assaulted or targeted as a foreigner or slapped with greenery, but I backed off and said "what are you doing?" way too loudly in English. Then the guy then hopped on the tram that was just leaving, and acted like everything was normal. Brian, my faithful protector, stood back and started to laugh. So did I. Later on at the old town Easter market, I saw two boys do the same thing and shake their sticks at a woman selling painted eggs. She smiled and said something back to them and gave them each an egg. I asked her what was going on and she said it was what boys do to girls at Easter. We had seen these braided sticks around, some for sale at markets and flower shops, some with ribbons on the top, so it seemed like mine was not an isolated incident of attack with twigs. Not totally satisfied with the egg woman's explanation I looked it up on the internet, font of all cultural information. It's a Czech tradition to make pomlazka whips by braiding pussywillows together. Boys sing carols and whip women on the legs on Easter Monday. The pomlazka is supposed to bring the women health and youth. Here is a link if you want to read more: http://www.myczechrepublic.com/czech_culture/czech_holidays/easter/
I should have been honored, not bewildered. I was participating in a centuries' old Czech Easter custom. And some teenager on a tram was giggling about it.

Today in Prague we wandered. We started in the Jewish Quarter, looked at some synagogues and the old Jewish town hall, then decided not to pay to go in any of them. Next we ended up in the old town square, shopping (just me, not Brian) at the Easter market stalls selling crafts and stopping now and then to watch people, and horse carriages, and street performers. We kept wandering after lunch, stopped in a park, walked along the riverfront, passed the botanical gardens and a few dozen churches, and came back to our hotel. It's a lot warmer today. The sun is shining and snowflakes are not falling, and our trip is winding down.

Prague is a very beautiful city. It's a fun place to go out to one of the million bars and restaurants. It's an easy place to be a tourist and you could fill entire days looking at churches here. We are, however, a little weary of sleeping in strange beds and finding our way around and eating out. Our train back to Hannover leaves tomorrow afternoon so we have several more Prague-filled hours to spend.
I will be on alert for more pussywillow attacks. Easter Monday is not over yet.

Prague - Days 1 and 2

We were glad to leave Bratislava. Despite our huge hotel room, the city just made us a little... uneasy. The historic center was very pretty and we're glad we saw it but we felt like the tourists were confined there, sort of like Slovakian Epcot Center. It also seemed like the locals (unlike Disney World employees) were not sure what to do with us.

The train ride to Prague took about 4 hours so we arrived in the late afternoon. It's cold here. In Budapest we were pulling off layers and trying to stay out of the sun. In Prague we are wearing hats and gloves.

Last night we took the recommendation of our friend Tom Gillespie and visited two very different spots in the Old Town. First, we went to "The Pub". The name isn't too creative but the concept is. Every table has six beer taps and a computer screen. Each person gets a mug. You pour your own beer and the screen tells you how many liter your table has had. Then you can compete with other tables in the pub and in branches of the pub in other cities, to see which table can drink the most beer. A big video screen on the wall keeps track of liters consumed at every table in Prague, Plzen, and Berlin. There were big tables of English people and a table of Germans, all breaking into song every so often. Our table of two decided not to enter the contest. We weren't sure we could compete. I don't know how the game ends or if there's a prize, but it's a fun concept. Why is it fun to pour your own beer at a restaurant when you can do it at home? I don't know. Maybe for the same reason we like salad bars, or choosing what ingredients to put on our pizza. I am pretty sure that a place like that couldn't legally exist in the U.S. Unless it was a college party of some kind.

Next we went to a basement jazz club to see some live music. The basement was probably several hundred years old and looked like it could have once been a wine cellar or maybe a dungeon. The band was really good except that when the singer did Ray Charles songs, he sounded a little like a European white guy. I guess he can't help it.

When we left there it was a little after midnight and we went to catch the metro. The doors were locked. They had shut it down before 12 on a Saturday night and we weren't sure what to do. On top of that, the metro stop nearest our hotel (this one is just a normal, unremarkable hotel without a huge breakfast selection) was closed for construction. After living in Germany our standards for public transportation are fairly high, but we couldn't believe that a city like Prague wouldn't do transit as well as Budapest does, or even as well as Hannover does. So we figured out the tram situation in the dark and eventually made it back.

This morning we went to Easter Mass at St Thomas church. We took the tram across the river into the Little Quarter area near Prague Castle. After trying the wrong church first (there are a lot of them), we figured out how to get to St. Thomas and walked in.. People were walking in behind the priest and a statue of Mary, then they said a prayer in Czech and they started to leave. I thought my research had failed us and the English language Mass was somewhere else or didn't exist. Then the priest came out and announced, in English, that at the end of the service, all the men would follow the priest out with the statue of Jesus and the Eucharist, and all the women would follow the server carrying a statue of Mary wrapped in black for her mourning. We would meet in the courtyard, Mary's black robes would come off, and we'd go back into the church. Apparently it's an Easter tradition at St. Thomas and we'd walked into the tail end of it from the previous service. I never really appreciated having going to Mass in my native language until this year. Even when we go to Spanish language church in Hannover, it's nice but not as familiar. This one was very American - even the song books were the same as the ones back home. It was a good way to celebrate Easter. Plus right next to Brian's right elbow was the dead body of a martyr encased in glass. You don't get that in the U.S. Here is a link to the church in case you want to see it - it was originally built in the 1300s and rebuilt in the 1700s: http://www.praguecityline.com/prague-monuments/st-thomas-church-in-the-lesser-town

We walked up to Prague castle through the winding streets, and it started to snow. The castle is really a complex that is now churches, monuments, and museums. And tourists. There are a lot of them here and they even include Americans. We are not used to running into so many Americans and their accents jump out at us as we overhear them.

Once we'd taken in the views and started to shiver, we crossed the river and had lunch at a restaurant that we chose because it was off of the tourist track, and because it had a pirate on the sign. You can't go wrong with a pirate-themed Czech restaurant. Even if it doesn't have beer taps on the tables.

Happy Easter!

Bratislava

First I need to post a correction - on my first post about Budapest I spelled the name of the currency wrong. It should be Forint and I've gone back and changed it. I know you were all snickering about that obvious mistake but you will have to stop now.

Today we took the train from Budapest to Bratislava, Slovakia. This is the same train route that will bring us to Prague tomorrow and then to Berlin on Tuesday. We are just getting off to be tourists along the way.

Bratislava didn't sound like a hot tourist destination when we booked it. It seemed unusual and interesting enough to deserve a one-night stay. Apparently they do have a ton of summer tourists though, judging by the number of souvenir shops around town. I think what happens is that people take cruises down the Danube and make stops at Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest. So they spend the day walking around town here in large guided tour groups. Brian and I like to think that we are cooler than them and we watch with an air of tourist superiority as they walk in hordes and take photos with statues on the street. We only take photos of each other in front of castles and churches, which is much more sophisticated.

There is a very distinct old town in Bratislava, with some beautiful buildings, an old theater, churches, a town hall, some squares and fountains and winding streets... it's quaint and pretty and well preserved. The other parts of Bratislava that we've seen have tall office buildings, older houses that are not so well preserved, bad 60s era architecture, and huge complexes of soviet-style apartment blocks. There is a nice river walk area and a UFO observation tower. I know what you are thinking - UFO observation?? how awesome is that! Why aren't we all in Bratislava right now? Unfortunately, it's not because you can observe UFOs from there. It just looks like a spaceship because there's an observation deck and a restaurant at the top. One of the best places to look at the communist apartment blocks and the UFO tower is from the Bratislava castle, high over the town. There has been a structure on that site since the Stone Age, though the beginnings of the current castle weren't built until the 900s. Wow.

The historic (let's be honest, the tourist) district is cool but very segregated from the normal, working city. Part of what we liked about Budapest was that the local places and tourist places were all blended together and the attractions were in different neighborhoods around town. Even restaurants with English or German menus had local customers too. But since today is Good Friday, the only open shops and restaurants in Bratislava are in the old town, so segregation works out ok for us. 

I wasn't really excited about the hotel room that I booked here. It looked like a decent place to spend one night but nothing special. The place is in an old house that's 3 stories high and I picked it because it's fairly cheap and on a quiet street near the center of town. Somehow, though, we got the huge top floor apartment, with a huge living room, rooftop patio, and kitchenette. It's all white - white walls, white leather couch, white tiles - with an exposed brick wall and little chandeliers hanging from the sloped ceiling. Maybe they were out of regular rooms. Maybe no one else is staying here. Either way, I think we lucked out.

Perhaps Bratislava isn't so obscure of a destination after all. There is plenty to see here for one day. Just don't come here expect to spot any UFOs if you come. That's a tourist trap.

Budapest - day 3

Let me take a minute to tell you about our hotel. The building is a converted bath house (Budapest is famous for its baths that use water from thermal springs) that still has the high arched ceiling and huge copper revolving door from its glory days. A lot of buildings in Budapest are from the mid to late 1800s and their glory days are long past. Some are restored and cleaned up, others are crumbly and sooty and somehow beautiful in their state of disrepair. Anyway, our hotel is owned by an Arab hotel chain, the same one that owned the place where we stayed in Cairo. It's a nice hotel, at least by our standards, meaning that there are bathrobes to use and doormen whose job it is to spin the revolving door before you walk through it. It's a big place and the guests, guessing by languages and fashion, are German, French, Japanese, Irish, and Russian (and certainly some other nationalities that we can't identify).
This makes hotel breakfast very interesting. The hotel tries to accommodate all these people and their tastes,  so breakfast looks like this:
breads, muesli, pastries, scrambled eggs, hot hard boiled eggs, fried eggs, bacon, paprika-flavored sausage, beans, porridge, salamis and hams, cheeses, cucumbers carrots and other veggies with salad dressing, some kind of egg salad with mayo, onions and peppers, pancakes, fruit and yogurt. Whew. I probably missed a few items but it's a lot of stuff.

Our hotel has a workout room and pool, and you have to pay to use them. The wireless internet, however, is free. I am not sure what the hotel is encouraging by charging to exercise but not to go online... I guess it worked though because I am here blogging for you.

Our general observation of Hungarians is that they are not fat people, skinnier than Germans even, the women are pretty, and there are a lot more big men then you would ever see in Germany. I have heard the theory that so many big strapping German men died in World War 2 that it depleted the big strapping gene pool.  The result is that there are a only some big strapping German men and a lot of slight, narrow shouldered ones. (what is the opposite of strapping?) I am not sure whether that's true, but in Hungary there are some big dudes.

Today we got a slow start. That was due to our second (and final) stop on the tour of ruin bars of Budapest last night. We went to one with a big shady courtyard, a big chalkboard menu, and some shabby flowered furniture on the inside. They had food there but the menu was all in Hungarian. The bartender was nice enough to translate for me. Brian had some turkey in paprika sauce and I ate what the bartender called "pork cream with toast". It sounded gross but I ordered it anyway. It was actually pretty good - like a pate but a little meatier. Then we tried palinka. Palinka is a Hungarian schnapps that's made from fruit. It doesn't seem to matter which kind of fruit as long as it tastes very boozy. Ours was plum and along with the wine and beer, contributed to our sluggish start this morning.

We went on a walking tour to see some of the major sites in Pest and learn a little more about life under communism in Hungary, the 1956 revolution, and general Budapest history. As we were crossing a street during the tour, our guide joked that we should all be careful, since you wouldn't want to get to know the Hungarian health care system. A sarcastic Hungarian passerby said (in English) "it's better than the American one." I am not sure who else heard that comment but I appreciated it.

Brian and I went out to our first nice dinner since (we traced this back) our anniversary dinner in Dingle, Ireland. In Hannover there aren't that many good restaurants and we are too cheap to keep looking for one. We slowly ate some good Hungarian food and the whole meal cost less than we paid for bad pasta in the Stuttgart airport.

Tomorrow  morning we get on the train to Bratislava. It's been a good trip in Budapest. We saw a lot of sights, though not all of them, found some local places, and didn't squeeze in too much tourism. The worst part has been that the weather was so much warmer than what we'd packed for. I guess you can't complain much about that. We get one more chance to eat three kinds of eggs, multiple kinds of pork and salad for  breakfast, then it's on to Slovakia.

Budapest - day 2

Last night we visited our first ruin bar. Apparently ruin bars are a 'thing' in Budapest. We know this because there was an article about them in the German Wings in-flight magazine. A ruin bar is built into a building or a courtyard that has been abandoned, fallen into disuse, or is otherwise old. They make it look hip, leave the brickwork and the pipes exposed, and serve beer. Since we read about them in an in-flight magazine, we ran the risk of hanging out at a bar with a token Hungarian and a hundred German tourists. Luckily that did not happen. We ended up in what was once an outdoor courtyard at Foghasz (which Brian nicknamed Fog Hat so it would be easier to remember), sitting by the light of paper lanterns in a former outdoor courtyard. We drank Sopproni beer for about 1.50 euro a mug and ate slices of Hungarian pizza. (We liked the pizza, though Brian pointed out that our pizza standards have changed so much that anything with a decent crust is considered good pizza). The Budapest hipster crowd was there, as was a DJ playing loungey techno songs, at one point blending swing music with Rage Against the Machine.

Today was supposed to be rainy. We had plans for a museum, and were carrying an umbrella and no sunglasses. Instead, the skies were blue and we took a boat ride up and down the Danube. It was a tour boat complete with loud speaker narration. We mostly listened and maybe learned a few things. More importantly, sun and wind off the top of the boat were much better than getting to use the umbrella.

Next we crossed the river into Buda, the city on the west side of the water. Buda is hilly, affluent, quiet, and much smaller than Pest. The steep climb to St Matthias church and the Fisherman's Bastion was a challenge even with the daily stair training we get hiking up to our apartment. The Fisherman's Bastion isn't a castle but it looks like one. There is a real castle in Buda too, which is a big imposing government-looking building that houses a couple of museums. We didn't make it there .On a sunny day, the bastion was enough for us - it has turrets and twisty staircases, white stone walls and beautiful hilltop views. Who needs a real castle?

Today is also my birthday. Brian treated me to a wonderful massage at the hotel spa. Tonight we are going to continue our tour of ruin bars and check out one that also has a restaurant. It's supposed to be tricky to find, so it must be cool. As long as it's not full of German Wings passengers, I think we'll have a great time.

Budapest - day 1

Yesterday we took off for our tour of central European capitals - Budapest, Bratislava, and Prague.
It was good to get out of town. The weather was gray and windy and blah, and it had been a quiet weekend mostly because both Brian and I felt sort of blah also. A change of scene would do us good.

If you have to fly out of any airport, you could do a lot worse than Hannover's. It's small, unimpressive, uncrowded, lacks anywhere exciting to eat or shop, and the security lines are really short.We took a German Wings flight to Budapest. German Wings is like Lufthansa's little discounted brother.  Other than a really terrible, really overpriced meal during our Stuttgart layover, the trip went smoothly. Remember, if you are ever in the Stuttgart airport, avoid the pasta place. You can do better in the freezer aisle at your grocery store. I have to take the blame for making that choice. Something in my brain told me to give it a try when we should have just eaten sandwiches instead.

Even though Hungary is part of the European Union, their currency is the Forint. There are about 290 Forints to a Euro. That's a lot of zeros. We didn't have any Forints and set out this morning to #1 - get some of them, and #2 - get our train tickets to Bratislava for Friday. These things were more difficult than planned. The ATMs we tried wouldn't take our cards, meaning we had to go back to the hotel, call the bank in Germany, find out that the limit for international withdrawls was set at 0, fix that, and be on our way. We got pretty lost walking to the train station too. It was a happy, wandering sort of lost where we strolled past a tire store and some bakeries, watched people walking down the street and took in the sunshine. So when we had no idea where to walk anymore we found the metro and took on Budapest's public transportation system. In Hannover the subway trains are new and shiny and well upholstered. In Budapest the subway trains are squeaky, heavy, communist-era beasts and they have handles to hang on to for a reason. To get to them you ride way down underground on the fastest escalators I've ever seen. We got the train tickets for Friday and headed out to explore.

We saw St. Stephen's Basilica, wandered around an outdoor market, and then we did something that I am a little ashamed to tell you. Don't judge me as I make this confession ...

We had lunch at TGI Friday's.
Let me explain. In Budapest, as in much of Europe that I've seen, every other restaurant is Italian. After the gross airport pasta experience we were not interested. Also, when you've been outside the U.S. for a long time, the slightly kitschy, beautifully predictable chain restaurant is so much more appealing than it used to be. There is no Chili's, no Bennigans, no Friday's, no Olive Garden, and no Applebees anywhere in or around Hannover, so it seemed kind of exotic. We stared at the American license plates on the walls, the old album covers, the John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe cutouts. It was great. We got Coke with ice in it. I ate a salad with battered fried chicken and Brian had onion rings on top of his sandwich. It doesn't get much better. So now it's out of our systems and we promise not to do it again for a while. Though I hear there is a Dunkin Donuts in Prague...

We headed to Margaret Island, a big park in the middle of the Danube, to sit in the sun and watch the river flow by. From the park you can see the Parliament building on the Danube and look up to castle hill on the Buda side of the river (we are staying on the other side, in Pest). It was a beautiful day, maybe the best weather we'll have the whole trip. We rode the streetcar back to our hotel from there and now are relaxing and thinking about where to go tonight. Maybe we can try some Hungarian wine, or some goulash. I can rule out pasta places and American chain restaurants, but I'm up for anywhere else.