Category: 2016: Vienna, Bratislava, Prague, Dresden, Berlin

Summer of 2016 trip to Europe.

  • Day 12, Sun 9/4: Going Home & Final Thoughts

    Day 12, Sun 9/4: Going Home & Final Thoughts

    [Started this Sunday morning in Berlin; finished it Monday morning at home.]

    Since we are going home to separate cities, we are of course on different flight schedules. Dan’s flight to London, then DC, then Raleigh, left at 7:05am. He left the hotel about 5am. For awhile I had planned on going with him and just hanging out in the airport lounge until it’s time for me to board mine. But mine doesn’t leave until 12:20, so that’s a serious hangout in the airport, even if it is the lounge. I still got up pretty much when he did – 4:30a – and started working on the blog. I went down to breakfast about 6:30. It’s now coming up on 9am and I’m going to finish up packing and head to the airport. Depending on security lines and all that, I’ll have about 2-2.5 hours before I board, much better than 5. The final day’s blog is taking awhile, as I knew it would. I finished the first section on the Berlin Wall, and still have 127 photos to sort through for the rest of the day.
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    It’s exactly 10am Berlin time and I made it to the lounge. Dan had given me a heads up that it’s before security, which is fairly unusual. He didn’t know that so he missed it; would have been too much trouble to go out and get back in the short amount of time he had. Poor thing :( He really looks forward to his lounge experience. I sent him pictures instead :)

     Sat here because it’s easier to type with this height of table, and they are only along this wall. But I’m also in direct sun; it’s much cooler just a few steps away. So will see how long I stay here. .

     

     Food selection is pretty minimal. Good thing I ate at the hotel before I left. And there are no restrooms here in the lounge! You have to go into the airport to use the restroom. Savages I tell you.

    Getting here was easy: a 10 minute walk to a bus stop and a 15 minute ride from there with only 4 stops. I couldn’t resist a couple of last Berlin photos along the way. We really enjoyed our stay in Berlin. It’s up there with Rome and London for us, maybe even Paris. We are most definitely city boys.

     

     

    Going to work on the Day 11 blog until they call the flight. The lounge attendant said she will give us enough time to get through security so I don’t have to worry about it until she calls it. My hope was that I could finish that entry and this one before I board. She’ll likely call it in about 90 minutes; don’t think it’s going to happen. One of these trips I’d like to finish the whole thing before I get home. It hasn’t happened yet.

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    It is now 2:24pm London time, which is one hour earlier than Berlin. Flight took off 30 minutes late but landed only about 15 minutes late. I have to say Berlin is the weirdest airport I’ve experienced. Security and passport check happened directly at each gate. Seems so inefficient. And then the gate areas themselves were tiny.

    I made it through Heathrow security and to the lounge in about 20 minutes probably – record time to be sure. It’s taken me as long as 2 hours before, especially when flying by myself economy. The business class ticket I have allows me to use Fast Track, and it’s also what gets me into the lounge. The biggest challenge was finding two plugs next to each other that both worked. Luxury problems to be sure. Back to yesterday’s blog. I’ll board in about 90 minutes….still probably won’t be done….
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    It’s 9am Monday morning, home. The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful. The flight out of London was delayed and landed almost an hour later than scheduled. Dan was worried when I first told him I thought I only had an hour between landing from London and the Southwest connection I was taking for the final leg. He said customs at LAX can be a zoo. He was right. My original schedule provided me with 2 hours, but the delay resulted in it being one after all. And customs was ridiculously frustrating. I’m not sure why they don’t have their act together like SFO, which is very easy. It wasn’t just about the number of people. It was disorganized and there were 3 pieces to it, with long lines each time. At the second piece, another traveler graciously let me cut in line since I still had a connection to catch. Apparently familiar with LAX she said “I still don’t think you’re going to make it, but I hope it helps.” It did. I literally ran from the international terminal on the outside past terminals 3, 2 and then 1, the Southwest terminal. As I was going through security at 9:15 for a 9:30 flight, Southwest paged me. “The flight is completely boarded and ready for takeoff.” IOW: hurry your ass up if you’re here. I was the last person to board and was So Happy I didn’t have to spend an unexpected night in LA.

    I Uber’ed home and got here about 11:30. I was oddly wired – considering it was 8:30am Berlin time and I hadn’t gotten much sleep in the prior 28 hours, maybe 2 hours tops. I unpacked and even went to Safeway to get a few things for breakfast so I wouldn’t have to leave the house today maybe.

    Before I forget, I watched 5 movies on the way home, each very enjoyable, and each very different from the next. I would recommend all of them if you haven’t seen them: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Deadpool, Eye in the Sky, Joy, Money Monster.

    As is our tradition, we finish with final thoughts.

    1. One of the reasons we love to travel is the history we come across. This trip may have surpassed all others on that front. In addition to the great stuff we got on the last day, I really appreciated all of the oddly personal connections I was able to make at the beginning of the trip between Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia – those regions that showed up in the Pre-Departure entry related to my heritage. I didn’t find any long lost relatives; still, it was satisfying to get a better sense of all of that, and to learn how important those areas were in the years from 1000-1900. And to learn that by present boundaries my heritage is like 75% Czech! Dan thinks I should now describe my background exactly as written: most of my people come from Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Bavaria. Since none of those exist anymore as entities, it’s an opportunity to tell the story when people go “I’ve never heard of any of those places.”

    2. The palaces on this trip were mostly “meh” although Schonbrunn in Vienna has its place. Do Versailles as some point in your life and you really never need to do any others. (At least based on the last 5 trips! We will still check them out in future trips to see if anything comes close…)

    3. The cathedrals and their endless varieties continue to fascinate us. St. Vitus in the Prague Castle complex was the most impressive of this trip, and goes into our top favorites.

    4. As always, language was not a barrier. And as always, Google Maps is our best tool.

    5. More as always: lots of smokers and heavy cologne wearers in Europe. And on this trip, add body odor. We’ve always noticed, but somehow it seemed more predominant this time.

    So beyond the history, this trip much the same as others, which is oddly reassuring. Probably because we’ve stuck to the same continent so far, things feel more and more familiar. Germany in particular this time, even different from Austria, felt like we were coming home as soon as we got off the train in Dresden. It is by far the country we’ve seen the most of, no accident since it’s the home of Bayer.

    It may also be prescient that in Dresden and Berlin we got glimpses of Turkish history that we hadn’t gotten before, because since the Italy trip in January we’ve been talking about Istanbul as part of the next one. Now we’re even more sure of it, but of course will continue to monitor the political situation over there to see if that has any impact on our decision. While we won’t do anything reckless, for the most part our sense of things is “if we let terrorists keep us at home, they win.” So we’ll be going somewhere for sure again, perhaps in May sometime.

    So we’re thinking either something like Istanbul, Athens and Budapest (which we realize now we should have done on this trip instead of Berlin – would have complemented the others cities we did historically so much more effectively) OR something completely different like rent a car in the UK and drive through the countryside, doing things like Bath, Cardiff, Southampton, maybe Cambridge and/or up to the Scottish Highlands. That 2nd one has been on our list for awhile, it’s just a matter of when. Dan is excited to take advantage of the drop in the British pound since Brexit before it recovers too much :)

    And a lot may happen between now and then. If things go well, I will be living with Dan in Raleigh by the next trip. Lots of moving parts on that front so will have to wait and see how it all unfolds.

    No matter what, we will continue to blog. Especially on the last day of our trip, I thought a lot about how the blog influences how we capture what we do. And I say it every time and it’s still true: we do it for us, because it helps preserve the trip in our minds in ways that wouldn’t happen if we were just going through our day without thinking about documenting it. And I really enjoy re-reading them later, and do it probably more than I should. But it’s always fun to have you come along, and we are grateful for the feedback we get when we know you’re enjoying it to.

    Hope to see you next time!

     

  • Day 11, Sat 9/3: Berlin, Part 2

    Day 11, Sat 9/3: Berlin, Part 2

    What a day. We packed a lot in and were pretty happy with it by the time we were done. The photo editing though is going to take awhile so who knows when this will go up! [I started at 10:50pm Berlin time Saturday night; continued in the morning at the hotel before, during and after breakfast, in the lounges at the airport at both Berlin and London before boarding. I finally finished Monday morning.] Between the 2 of us we took 184 photos today; that’s about 60 more than the record which was 125 at St. Peter’s and the Vatican in January. Many of those 184 are pictures of text explanations at exhibits to help with the blog narrative so many of them won’t actually make it in. But that means a lot of history is coming, so if history ain’t your thing, so sorry :) We are both definitely history nerds; today was our Disneyland.

    We were both very tired at the end of Friday and slept very well that night; Dan at least 7.5 hours, me about 9. So woke up pretty refreshed and ready to go.  And a good thing because we put together a very ambitious agenda for our last day. We did breakfast in the hotel as usual and were on our way about 9:45.

     We took the subway a block from our hotel and had a transfer on this route. It was a busy Saturday morning on the subway.

    Our first stop was the Berlin Wall Memorial. This was the item of the entire trip I was looking forward to the most, and I was not disappointed. Similar to my experience at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, I got choked up as soon as we walked on the grounds and stayed that way the entire time we were there. Our initial plan was to only stay 30 minutes because of the aggressive agenda we had for the day. We were there 2 hours. Fifty of the 184 photos were took today were just here. I’m going to include some of the text explanations directly because it will be both easier and in some cases more poignant.

    I love the things I learn on these trips. Dan is always amazed at some of the things I didn’t know – like how East Berlin and West Berlin came to be in the first place, which I finally learned here – and that I should keep that to myself :). I always assure him that I’m the norm and he’s the exception when it comes to history (and geography), so feel free to comment on that if you learn something, especially in this next couple of paragraphs:

    Ever since my early fascination with the Olympics starting in 1976, the whole East Germany vs. West Germany thing had always been of interest to me because of the way the sports commentators would reference the differences, but a mystery as to how it had all come about. Maybe this was covered in school and I just don’t remember. But I didn’t get clear on it until 2014 when I went to the German Museum of Contemporary History in Bonn: Once the Allies took over German in May of 1945, they divided the country into 4 sectors, one to be controlled by each – USA, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. From the beginning, the first 3 approached it in a united fashion and worked to create a capitalist society; Stalin of course did not play. By 1949, things had progressed along that route where it became necessary to split the country in two: West Germany was formed from the 3 unified sectors, East Germany was formed from Stalin’s, and East Germany became one of the many Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet Union, along with the Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and others.

    So that finally cleared that up, but I was still confused about East Berlin vs. West Berlin. For longer than I should admit, I always assumed that the border between East Germany and West Germany ran through Berlin, and that’s what created the two cities. I don’t remember now when I learned that wasn’t the case: that West Berlin was essentially a free democratic zone within a communist state, completely surrounded, and to leave citizens had to fly or take a train into West Germany, or some other democratic area. And what I learned here is how that came about: when the Allied powers split up the country into 4 zones, they also split up the capitol, Berlin, the same way: East Berlin was the 4th sector under Stalin, the other 3 became West Berlin. And for the first 12 years, it worked. Sort of, and depending on who you asked. Although there were border crossings surrounding West Berlin, citizens of both could come and go between the two pretty easily. People had jobs, families, friends, etc., across the border and going back and forth wasn’t a huge deal. The problem for the East was that it became too easy for communist citizens to escape to the West in general through West Berlin: easy to get to, easy to get out of. The problem for the West – and by West in this context I mean political – is that the tension between East and West Berlin was at the core of what started the Cold War. West Berlin was a conspicuously capitalist city in the middle of Soviet territory and Nikita Kruschchev said it “stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat.” The Wall went up in August of 1961, put up by the party called SED (the Socialist party that ruled GDR or East Germany; GDR ironically stands for German Democratic Republic). Politically, it was a success because it eased the tension between to political powers: 1000s of people a year were no longer able to flee the East as had been happening; over 3 million over the course of the decade. And the Wall eased some of the tension between the two sides: President Kennedy said “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” 

     

    But for the citizens it was a disaster. Their lives literally changed overnight, in many cases separated from families, friends and jobs by the Wall. This memorial tells the story of the impact on the people. There was a lot of information here, both technical and human; we tried to pick out the things that would complete the picture without overwhelming.

    The Wall 
    Here are various photos of the wall itself. Note that at first it was just barbed wire and then very shortly became a literal wall, then progressed to being an area with several layers of barricades with a patrol road and towers in between.

     This was right after it went up. For the first couple of weeks, people would make “wave dates” at the Wall to see loved ones and friends they had been suddenly torn from.

     West on the left, East on the right.

    In this photo, East is on the left, West on the right.
    From the observation deck at the memorial, some of it has been preserved. This is from the West side. Notice the TV tower in the background from our first day in Berlin (Day 9). Most of today’s central area was on the East side.
     The memorial stretched on both sides of this preserved section of the Wall. The upcoming blog section on Bernauer Strabe and the Reconciliation Church was all on the other/left side of this.

     

     

     

     Much of the memorial is bordered by these iron posts representing the wall. West on the left, East on the right. The photo below is the plaque in the ground above.
    These next 3 photos show the detail about how the Wall was constructed, all the pieces and parts, with an example of “Stalin’s Lawn.”

     

    Bernauer Strabe and the Reconciliation Church

    The Berlin Wall Memorial is located at the site of two adjacent locales that best represent the entire story of the Wall.

    On Bernauer Strabe (street) there was what were referred to as “border houses” which literally sat on the border between East and West: so much so that their front doors opened to the West, back doors to the East. In the first few weeks of going up, word quickly spread that this was a way out for those wishing to escape the East. Over time, the SED forced residents out of these houses and boarded them up to stop the incidents. This ground in this area was also very stable, and turned out to be a good place to build tunnels, usually started on the west side.

    Reconciliation Church had been a congregation since the late 1800’s. Most of its members lived in the West. On Bernauer Strabe, the entrance to the grounds were in the West, but the church itself was in the East. After the Wall went up, the majority of the congregation were forced to build another church. The SED ended up using the church tower as a patrol tower. In 1985, the SED demolished the church, simply because they got tired of it being a symbol of division.

    The wall of this building has photographs of people escaping in the earliest days of the Wall.

     

    These steps showed the path of the tunnel from the East side to the West opening on Bernauer Strabe.
    Foundation remains of one of those border houses.
    Over time, all that was left of the border houses on Bernauer Strabe were facades, which you can barely make out in the aerial photo below, which shows the entire fence area around the Reconciliation Church.

     

    A new church has been built on the site of the old one since the Wall fell. Although it is part of the Wall Memorial, it is also a functioning church with a small congregation that attends regular services.

     

     

    And finally….notice the street sign…

    We left feeling odd combinations of melancholy, uplifted and energized. I don’t think it’s just me; I think most Americans don’t really understand the impact of WWII in general and the communist regime that followed in much of Europe after. I get a more real sense of it every time we take one of these trips; it’s always the thing I look forward to the most. For me at least it’s important to understand the level of human suffering that occurred here. While certainly Americans suffer in many ways, and many in the military have given their lives to various democratic causes around the globe, there’s something about delving into the everyday life of those who lived it day in and day out that’s humbling, maddening and petrifying all at the same time. And the current level of uneducated, non-civil discourse that’s been going on in American politics for well into two decades now just makes me that much more crazy. As you see here and will see later, using labels like “communist” and “Nazi” to describe things happening in America is ridiculous when you deeply take in what really happened here. We’ve never experienced anything like this. (OK, I’ll try to make that the only diatribe on that topic for the rest of the blog…)

    Next we went to Neues Museum. Along with the Pergamon, it’s famous for it’s collection on ancient civilizations. Our intention was to stay only 1 hour because there was really only one thing we wanted to see.

    We made excellent use of our transportation passes in Berlin, at some point taking trains, buses, subways and, above, trams. (This one was full when we got on!) We love cities with great public transportation systems and Berlin is one of them. And Google Maps makes using them So Simple.
    The “Mona Lisa of the Neues” if you will is a 3300 year old bust of Nefertiti, discovered one of the the many digs Germany did in the early part of the last century funded by James Simon. Photos weren’t allowed of that exhibit and others here and there throughout the museum. Here’s one I stole off the internet. My guess is you’ve seen it before.
    Here are some other shots of the museum in general:

     

     I loved these ginormous halls and staircases built with remnants of ancient digs throughout; gives you a feel of being in an Egyptian temple.

     

     I swear I never know half of what he’s taking until I put this together.

     

     A replica of a horn from the Bronze Age.

     

     Also from the Bronze Age, this was the other item the museum was very proud of: the Golden Hat. That base sits on a man’s head then goes up maybe 3 feet from there.

    We stuck to our hour and left at 1:30. It was lunch time. We’d decided on Thursday we were having lunch at the Ritter Sport restaurant to made our way in that direction, walking this time.

     

    You saw this in Thursday’s blog: Berliner Dom. We passed it again; loved the park in front of it and how many people were out enjoying it. Dan liked this particular shot because it catches the TV Tower in the left background.

    This is Humboldt University. The square in front of it is Bebelplatz, where books were burned for being “un-German” during the early days of the Nazi regime.

     This is me realizing that the building behind Dan is the Catholic Cathedral, so we popped in and took the photos that follow.

     

     The altar was on a lower floor than most of the pews; never seen that before.

    We had planned to come back to Ritter Sport to get some chocolate to bring home, and to have lunch and take advantage of something we saw on the menu we hardly ever get to do.

    It was very colorful. The restaurant was on the 2nd floor. We sat by the windows (that’s Dan’s back bottom left.)
    We split a caprese salad (above) and a ham sandwich on foccacia (below). We needed a little substance to provide our stomachs with a foundation for what was coming next.

     

     The reason we came: Chocolate fondue – one dark, one milk, with a healthy serving of 7 kinds of fruit to dip into it: honey dew melon, cantaloupe, pineapple, banana, nectarine, apple, and grapes. It was worth every calorie.
    Next was the German History Museum. German history prior to 1871 has always been both fascinating and confusing to me and I was hoping this could clear up some of the mystery. And it did. German people have been around since the late Middle Ages but Germany as a single entity didn’t exist until 1871. How does that happen? This museum tied together a lot of what we’d learned in Vienna, Bratislava, and Prague as well.

     

    The front of the museum. This was definitely a history museum. It’s collection of artifacts was vast and varied, and the permanent exhibition was well structured and easy to follow. But huge. And the collection was noteworthy from a historical perspective, not really an art perspective. So we didn’t take that many photos. Following is a simple list of the main historical points we got to help fill in the blanks of our Germany history knowledge:

    • Historians generally agree that German history starts with Charlemagne. who became King of the Franks in 768, King of Italy in 774, and was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo in 800, the first Roman Emperor since the fall of the Roman Empire 300 years before. Similar to the exhibit we saw in Bratislava, this museum follows the theme that, because of Charlemagne, German history and European history are one and the same. For the next thousand years or so, references to what we know of today as Germany is referred to as the Holy Roman Empire because of Charlemagne.
    • The Northern section of his empire eventually became Belgium and the Netherlands.
    • The Western section became France, and broke off relatively early.
    • The Eastern section remained the Holy Roman Empire and eventually became Germany; when the German label was used it was Deutsch and was calling out those who spoke the language more than the people as a whole
    • Germany makes an impact on world history with inventing the mechanical clock in the 1300’s – like the ones we saw in Prague and Dresden. Prior to that, society still counted out 12 hours in a day between sunrise and sunset, but because that interval changed based on the time of year, it was horribly uneven. The clock allowed for regulation of time, a disciplined approach to gatherings at church and other social necessities, etc, for the first time, and became a “fundamental condition of middle-class life.”
    • Another significant contribution about this time was Guttenberg inventing the printing press in 1448 in Mainz (my very first European city in 2013!); the Bible was the first book printed. Both sides of the coming Reformation saw this advance as a gift from God, since it for the first time enabled many to read the word of God themselves.
    • In 1522, Martin Luther translated the Bible into simpler German to make it more accessible to the lay public, with illustrations provided by Lucas Cranach (whose work we met in Dresden). “The translation was of as decisive and fundamental importance to the Reformation as it was to the development of the modern German written language” because of its clarity and overwhelming sales success.
    • Short version of the next 400 years: war, war and more war. Lots of mentions of empires we’d been hearing about the entire trip, especially the Habsburgs and Napoleon. The big 5 powers were England, France, Germany but known as Prussia then, Austria, and Russia. Dan and I found it interesting that, with the exception of Austria, not much has changed compared to today.
    • The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806 after Napoleon’s victory across the content. Germany was united again in 1871 under Wilhelm the First.
    • The other common theme was revolutions by the people against monarchies and/or authoritarian rule, much of it fueled by the success of America’s independence, which swept the continent between 1789 and 1850 (some with more success than others). Austria and Germany were the last to fall, the result of losing WW1.

    For the sake of brevity, I’m going to leave much of the rest out with the exception of a few particular items.

    While it probably wouldn’t go over well today, apparently having a dwarf as a part of ones court in the Baroque period was encouraged due to a “delight in the unusual and bizarre.”

    This museum covered history from the Dark Ages up until 1918, the end of WW1. A couple of sections in the 1800’s touched on the industrial revolution. One of the entries for the last half of the century was on Bayer under a heading on innovative industries.

     

     This piece covered the move of its corporate headquarters to Leverkusen (roughly between Cologne and Dusseldorf) where it still is today.
    Are you tired yet?
    We spent 2 hours in this museum and agreed later we should have done it much faster, because it didn’t leave much time for the two other things we really wanted to see.
    Next was the Holocaust Memorial, again. If you recall from Thursday, we only saw the top because we got there too late to get in. (We think – turns out we may have just been using the wrong entrance! Oops.) At any rate, we went back to see the exhibit underground. And it was well worth it. The following attempts to capture what we experienced there. This was a well done memorial, focused primarily on personal stories and there were lots of them, and presented with photos, letters, recordings.

     

     

    The exhibit underground was designed to mirror the concrete blocks above. Including another shot from Thursday below.
    This is a close-up of the individual floor exhibits from the room above. Each one had letters, postcards, etc., from captives as shown the below. The photos that follow this one include just the translated messages which were in the bottom right side.

     

     

     

    We only stayed an hour. It would have been easy to stay longer, but we wanted to get to the final item which was still 15 minutes away and closed at 8pm. We left here a little before 7pm. The final destination: an exhibit (also free) called The Topography of Terror. This was my 2nd most anticipated item of the trip, after the Berlin Wall. It is located in a section of the city that housed many if not most of the administration offices for the Nazi regime and details what life was like during their rule. Dan took a couple of photos along the way.

     

     

    We only had 45 minutes here and wished we had longer. The level of detail was highly impactful. The one thing that stuck out was that the Nazis were a nasty bunch from the beginning. I’d had the impression before that they were more subtle. For example, in Amsterdam, we definitely got the impression that when they first got there in 1940, very little changed. They initially played well with others and got people to go along with things like national identification systems. It wasn’t until the Jews started being rounded up in 1942 that people really started to panic.

    This exhibit showed how in Germany, it was pretty clear from the beginning where things were headed for anyone paying attention. The problem was that Hitler was seen as a savior, bringing the country out of a depression – both financially and emotionally – that it had been in since losing WW1. So many believed that they were benefiting from his actions that they chose to look the other way on the other stuff, if they were aware of it at all. What Dan and I found most refreshing about this exhibit, as well as the Wall and the Holocaust exhibits, is how unflinchingly honest the Germans have been in documenting and portraying what really happened. They want to keep talking about it to help ensure that it never happens again.This was very much not true immediately after the war; that generation had so much shame about their complicity that it wasn’t talked about at all until the 60’s.

    There are 36 images following. We included the text directly because there was no point in recreating the wheel, and I was afraid something would be lost in summarizing.

     There was an inside and outside exhibit, although very similar in content. This is a section of the outside exhibit, which is next to a preserved section of the Berlin Wall. All of the photos that follow were taken from the inside exhibit.

     

     

     

     

     Above and below describe contributions to the Nazi party from major business.

     

     

     

     Just concentration camps. The earlier map from the Holocaust exhibit were “all” sites including labor camps, prisons, etc.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    They shooed us out right at 8pm. We took a bus directly to a restaurant that the hotel clerk from our first day had recommended, right by the hotel. It was Italian and called 12 Apostels.

     This was located in an alley. There was a ton of outside seating, but all was taken. This place was hopping for close to 9pm at night. On both nights we were walking around late, we noticed there was a ton of restaurant activity way later than we’re certainly used to.
     Dan always says “you closed your eyes again.” My response is always the same: they’re open all the time from my perspective! Apparently, he says, my lids stay closed longer than others when I blink. Who knows. This is me attempting to remedy that.
     Dan had a chicken and vegetable dish, I had a pizza.

     

    As we always do, we discussed our favorite aspects of the trip and logistical details of going home the following day. Some of that will be in the next and final entry. We got back to the hotel some time after 10pm. It was a long day but was definitely our favorite of the trip. We hope you enjoyed it, too, and didn’t find it too depressing. This is the stuff we travel for. Granted, I haven’t been to any of the major holocaust museums in the US, but my guess is they wouldn’t be quite the same. There’s something special about getting it first hand, on the very ground where it all happened.

     

     

  • Day 10, Fri 9/2: Potsdam and a bit of Berlin

    Day 10, Fri 9/2: Potsdam and a bit of Berlin

    Today was pretty light. We were both pretty tired and feeling the full effects of the prior 9 days. It’s shocking to me now to think that our first couple of trips were both 17+ days. It will be a long while before we do that again. Two weeks is definitely a good amount.

    We had two solid days planned for Berlin, what we did yesterday and one other, which we’ll do tomorrow. The third day had several options: more stuff in Berlin, a concentration camp about an hour away, or Potsdam about 20 minutes away. We decided on Potsdam and chose today as the day based on the recommendation of that gal at the visitors center yesterday.

    If you have heard of Potsdam, it could be from the Potsdam Conference which was held there towards the end of WWII with Truman, Stalin and Atlee, the PM who replaced Churchill. Otherwise Potsdam is known as a place where Prussian Kings built palaces, which was what we went to see today. It is part of the Berlin metro area and on its own has a population of about 170,000.

     It’s own little Brandenburg gate as you enter the centrum. And that’s no accident: Potsdam is the capital of the German state called Brandenburg.
    We took a train from Berlin to the Potsdam central station, then took a tram to the centrum. This was the first thing we saw getting off the tram from the main train station.
     Our destination was Sanssouci Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (which, by the way, we’ve seen a bunch of on this trip, I’ve just been negligent in pointing it out as I have in prior blogs; the central areas of Dresden and Prague for example). The park contains the palaces and gardens of the Prussian Monarchy built from the 1700’s onward, and where they lived including the German Kaiser until WW1 ended in 1918.

     

    This was the smaller “summer palace” Sanssouci after which the park was named; it was the first built here by King Frederick the Great in 1744, and translates to “without worries” in French. He was big on French culture, gardens and vineyards and built the palace accordingly. Voltaire was a frequent visitor here as one of his friends and advisors.

     

     Dan got this one photo in when he learned there were none allowed; then snuck in the in 2nd one below but that was it. As palaces go, we weren’t very impressed so that ended up being OK.

     

     An antique windmill in the park on the way to the next thing.

    This photo and the two below were taken at the gardens at Orangery, another palace in the park built to hold, as the name implies, a greenhouse. This was a term we picked up in Vienna; Schonbrunn had one but it wasn’t in operation and not much to see. This one apparently was, but it was only available as a tour and it was only in German so we passed (despite their token offer for the text that went along with it; it was minimal).

     

     

    The park itself was beautiful and made for a nice walk in great weather; the high today was 76.

     

     

    This is the “New Palace” but like most things in Europe called “new” it’s still pretty old, completed in 1769. It is the last great Prussian baroque palace built. From the front it looked more impressive than Schonbrunn. It was occupied by Prussian and German leaders from 1769 to 1918. It’s where the Kaiser signed the war documents in 1914 while having breakfast in one of the rooms here.
    There were two identical buildings in the back that looked pretty cool in their own right. Come to find out they were service buildings, where among other things the kitchens were.
    Unfortunately, photos were not allowed here either, otherwise we would have gotten a bunch of this room. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen something truly unique and this was it; none of the regular words like amazing or stunning are enough. It was called The Grotto and was intended to create an atmosphere of relaxing at the sea. Everything in this room was done in a shell motif. And just not images, actual shells, of every imaginable kind, size and shape, put together to make wall paper, animals, flowers, you name it. It was completely impressive.
     The was the only other photo Dan got; the other impressive room in the place was the one right before this, the Marble Room. It was directly above the Grotto. Much of the palace was shut off from visitors due to major restoration going on.
     The two service buildings I mentioned earlier.

    We had gotten to the first palace around 10:10; it was now 1:30 and we were ready for lunch. We headed into town and ate a the #2 place in Potsdam according to TripAdvisor. It was Italian and we hadn’t had it yet on this trip which is pretty unusual for us.

     Dan had the risotto which was amazing. Those chunks of meat are tuna.
     I linguine with beef, mushroom and arugula. Pretty good.
     This is the main drag in town with a cute little church at the end. We meandered from shop to shop, just browsing. We are generally fond of this large towns / small cities and we liked this one.
    It was pretty busy for a random Friday afternoon.
      It was a Catholic church, St. Peter & St. Paul.

     

     We took this for the sign at the bottom, something I say to Dan frequently.
    It was just approaching 4pm but we were both pretty tired and went back to our room, getting there about 4:45. I crashed for about an hour and Dan slept some too then worked out the final plan for tomorrow and found a place for dinner.
    This was in a cute neighborhood a couple of subway stops away: a Vietnamese restaurant run by a very friendly Turkish guy and his Mexican wife. And the food tasted more like Thai to us. But it was good. It was clearly a popular neighborhood spot and the guy knew many of the customers and passers-by it seemed.
     We split a warm chicken salad for an appetizer. It had a kick to it and was excellent.
     Dan had a red curry with tofu.
     An interesting mixture of beef, mango, mushrooms, green beans and other vegetables. I really liked it.
    We walked back to the hotel from there and checked out an area we hadn’t been in before, just kept seeing form a distance, including this church: Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, circa 1890.
    With that, a decent bedtime coming. And good thing, too, because as our final day, we’ve packed tomorrow, but it will be a good one.
  • Day 9, Thu 9/1: Berlin, Part 1

    Day 9, Thu 9/1: Berlin, Part 1

    It’s not quite 5am on Friday morning as I start this. We got back to the room last night a little before 10pm, which is by far the latest we’ve been out the whole trip. The blog process is generally  2-3 hours – one hour for photo prep, another 1 or 2 for writing. – and I hate getting behind because it’s too hard to catch up. But it was a long day with lots of walking (11.43 miles and 40 floors according to Dan’s phone) and I just couldn’t think straight to do the writing. So after the photos were uploaded here I decided the writing would work better (for all of us!) if I did it over coffee in the morning. So here I am :) I slept a decent 5 hours and the room coffee ain’t bad for being instant. (Which is always the case here, by the way: instant, and surprisingly good.)

    We got an early start yesterday, but intentionally. Dan set the alarm for 5:45 so we could get one more spa round in, which opens at 6am. And we did. Made it to breakfast a little after 7 and out the door by 8:10 for an 8:56 train to Berlin from Dresden. This one was on time.

    The two hour ride was uneventful. We both slept a little. This train was more crowded, and there were 2 other women with us in a compartment for 6. So still comfortable.

    If you’ve been traveling with us for awhile you know we love train stations. And the Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof (main train station) is huge! As soon as we stepped off the train we were like “this is going to be our kind of town.” We stopped at the visitors center and picked up public transportation passes which we can use unlimited for 4 days, and Dan added some extras to that for museums and such. Mostly we were interested in the transportation because we knew we’d be using it a lot, and much of what we would do (today especially) was free.

    And we had that feeling again as soon as we got off and started walking to our hotel. We like cities that have a lot of diversity, in people and neighborhoods, and like to see as much of it as we can. We especially like to taste neighborhoods that feel very lived in, as opposed to touristy areas. Neustadt in Dresden so far was the only one we’d done on this trip. Our hotel is out of the city center – there’s something going on in this town this weekend and we had trouble getting a room – but pretty close to 2 train stations so it will still be easy to get around. But the neighborhood is great so we’re really happy with it. Nothing touristy about it.

    This is a Hampton Inn, still part of the Hilton chain, but very basic. Honestly, we don’t really care that much about the rooms because we spend so little time here!

    We went in search of lunch and decided on a German place the hotel clerk had recommended, Gasthaus Krombach. It was #43 on TripAdvisors list of 6439 restaurants in Berlin so figured it couldn’t be too bad. And it wasn’t, but very German for sure.

    The restaurant as you walked in above. We took the one below as we were leaving, the waitress is clearing off our table.
     This was probably the most unappetizing looking meal I’ve had, but it tasted good. Boiled pork knuckle – sort of like eating a turkey leg – with boiled potato, mashed yellow peas, sauerkraut, and a killer horseradish sauce I kept taking too much of and would get that burn.
     Dan had a standard German staple: Currywurst and fries. Currywurst is a sausage with a sort of BBQ sauce and curry powder sprinkled on top.
    After lunch we took the train towards the city center. Although we’re both getting a little museumed out, Berlin actually has a “Museum Island.” Ruh-roh. You know you’re in trouble if there’s an actual island full of them. We only did one of them today though.

    About to cross onto the island. You’ll probably see a lot of cranes over the next few days. There is a ton of construction going on in this town. Dan said there was even more when he was here in 2002, and it was on the “east” side where the post-Communist area was trying to catch up to the West Berlin side, which, while completely surrounded by the Communist state East Germany, actually belonged to the democratic state West Germany. That part of history is always very interesting to me for some reason.

    We decided to do Berliner Dom, the Berlin Cathedral, first. This was the view approaching it from the side. For some reason, probably the name, we had both assumed this was Catholic. Turns out it’s Lutheran, like the one in Dresden, which makes more sense. Also turns out it’s not a cathedral, in that it’s not the seat of a bishop. It’s just what it’s called. It’s official name is Evangelical Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church, a parish which dates back to 1451 and would have been Catholic then of course. It converted to Lutheran in 1538 by the ruler at the time, Joachim

    The front view, taken from a large park across the street after we were done here. This church isn’t huge real estate wise – we’ve certainly been in a lot bigger – but it’s dome is huge and it’s very impressive inside and out. It was finished in 1905, and up until 1918, served as both a place of worship and a state site for public events. The Royal Palace was across the street and the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was also the head of the church, was very involved in its construction and used it a lot, including for his own birthday celebrations. Once he was out of power after 1918 and the end of WW1, it fell out of use publicly until the Nazis in the 30’s. Goering used it for a very public wedding in 1935. (And added a fun little photo below for emphasis.)

    Notice the guy in the left background, who was also the best man.

    It was damaged by bombs during WW2 and much of it sat unrepaired for awhile. Because of it’s association with governments the people were tired of, there wasn’t a ton of interest, therefore no funds, to bring it back. The parish continued on though. Long story short: West Germany ended up funding it’s repair in the 70’s-80’s. After the Wall fell,  people were committed to restoring it and it was re-inaugurated again in 1993.

     This is the same entrance as the one above.
     At this point I was still thinking it was Catholic. You don’t typically see the crucifixion like this in Protestant churches. (At least not the ones I’ve been in!)

     

     

     

     

     Martin Luther is the predominant figure left of the altar.
     This seriously cracked us up. All the way up the dome there were these lines like “still 180 steps to go!” and constant reminders of how physically demanding it was. The last line above we found hilarious. Did somebody die or something from physical exertion? The repeated emphasis was unusual.
    The Berlin TV Tower, finished in 1969. At 1207 feet, it’s the tallest structure in Germany, and 2nd tallest in the EU. (A radio tower in Riga, Latvia, is 2 feet taller.)
     The park we were in when we took the front shot of the church.
     A museum on the island we will not go into, but we liked the look of it.

     

    We headed to the Pergamon. As if it could read out minds, this museum focuses on what Dan has been wanting to see: civilizations from the Mesopotamia region, including now Turkey. There’s a lot of history there we know nothing about. The museum gets it’s name from a site discovered that was part of the Babylonian empire.

     The map of the areas covered.
    The next 3 photos are from the Ishtar Gate, which has been reconstructed here in the museum to the degree it can be. It was built in 575 BCE in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.

     

     

     

    The next several shots are all from a market square in Miletus, from what is currently Turkey, dating around 350 BCE.

    Mosaic flooring similar to the Roman stuff we’ve been, only this is several hundred years older.

     

     The reconstruction of these in this room was just kind of amazing.

     

    These next 3 are intended to be the rebuilding of the corridor that lead up to the gate of Ishtar, although these walls would have to be double the height to get it accurate.  In the 3rd photo you can see a model that shows what it might have looked like. We picked up the walls on the side matching the model; the Ishtar Gate in the background is hard to make out. But this was an impressive exhibit; we’d never seen anything like it.

     

     Looks amazing for being 3000 years old.

     

     

     This is a water basin, cut from a single basalt block.

    The next grouping of these came out of the Islamic exhibit. So from Arabia and Iraq, circa 700 AD.

     

     A palace wall.
     A very intricately decorated room.
    We left around 4:30 after just 75 minutes; were ready to be outside the rest of the day. We went in search of water and coffee, which we found at a train station not surprisingly, and decided where to go next.
    Ritter Sport is Dan’s favorite German chocolate. There’s a store here where you can design your own chocolate bar! We passed on that, but enjoyed looking around anyway. We will come back on Saturday and try out there restaurant.

     

     

     You can buy this in most grocery stores in the US, it’s just much cheaper here.
    Next was the holocaust memorial. These blocks are intended to create of sense of order that’s actually confusing (mission accomplished); some have also said it looks like a cemetery. We got there too late to go into the museum portion underneath all of this so just walked around. It was interesting being there as sunset approached, made for interesting shadows.
     They start at street level, get higher as you go in, and the ground turns into a valley. So suddenly you find yourself surrounded and you can’t see out, lose your sense of where you are.

     

     

     

    We had dinner after at a Thai vegetarian place. There are a lot of Vietnamese and Thai places here so decided we’d try one. This was vegetarian and it was very good.

     

     Dan had an eggplant dish and I had a simple vegetable hot plate dish, both with rice. Very satisfying, almost like a taste of home! We love Thai food and there’s a lot of good Thai food in Sacramento.

     

    This is Brandenburg gate, the most Berlin-y thing you could possibly see. Constructed during the reign of Frederick William II of Prussia, completed in 1791. Used for all sort of ceremonies, battles and demonstrations over the years, it was originally a gate used to collect taxes as merchants came in and out of the city. I loved some of the description provided about more recent events: “The thousand-year Reich proclaimed by the Nazis led to mass murder and a world war which ended 12 years later in catastrophic defeat.” and later: “The Brandenburg Gate took on a new significance after 13 August 1961 when work on began on building the Berlin Wall just a few meters away. The gate now became the symbol of the division of Berlin and the entire country. For 28 years it was completely inaccessible, being locked into the prohibited zone and death strip controlled by GDR border guards. the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, however, and on 22 December 1989 Germany’s most prominent historical structure was reopened.” Nothing more I can say about that.

     This is the US Embassy, to my left from the photo above it.

    Next we went to the Reichstag. This is the German Parliamentary building. It was free, but you had to make an appointment to get in. We made ours a month ago, for 8:30pm. We got there around 8pm, left around 9pm, and there were still lots of people around. Everything about this was impressive and we’re very glad we did it.

     We took this on our way out. The dome at the top if what we got to tour. This is the #1 thing to do on TripAdvisor and we agreed.
     A viewing deck, taken as we were ascending the dome, it was still dusk then.
    We took this after, but it’s where we spent our time. It’s very well done, with ramps that lead you up and down, and an audio guide that plays automatically, describing things you’re seeing as you move about, stopping and starting based on where you are.
    On the right: mirrors that reflect sunlight into the plenary chamber below. On the left, a shade of shorts that follows the sun throughout the day to block glare. And below: a nice shot into the chamber with the chairs being reflected in the mirrors.

     

    A 30 meter hole in the top that allows creates passive ventilation. Dan was very impressed!
    The next several are all shots of the city from our walk on the deck.

     

     The Brandenburg Gate on the left.

     

     

     We went back to Brandenburg Gate on our way out to get a better photo at night.

    We took a bus back, which dropped us off at one of the train stations close to the hotel. We had seen this earlier in the day, just as Dan had said “I haven’t seen any Bayer signs.” They have pharmacies in Germany and we typically see them fairly regularly. Not 30 seconds later we came across this building, across the street from the train station.

    It was a good first day in Berlin. We are headed to breakfast soon, and after are spending the day in Potsdam, and will complete Berlin tomorrow.

  • Day 8, Wed 8/31: Dresden, Part 2

    Day 8, Wed 8/31: Dresden, Part 2

    It’s only 5:00 and we are done for the day, well sort of. We finished our agenda early and decided to continue with the “take it easy” theme we started the day with and return to the hotel and just relax a bit. So I’m getting an early start on the blog and Dan is continuing his watching of Penny Dreadful, a Netflix series he’s been watching the whole trip. We said we would go out again for a walk at night so we’ll see if that happens! As we were walking around the hotel on our way back in, we found a shortcut from the hotel to “the balcony of Europe” so it will be easy to do.

    Although we were up pretty early, we wanted a more relaxing day so took our time moving about and didn’t head downstairs until after 7. Breakfast was typical Hilton European – complete with pork-n-beans and mushrooms – and of course the normal variety of eggs, breads, fruits, deli meats, cheeses. Each location has some slight variations. Vienna had congee. Prague had 4 kinds of sausage. This one had eggs 6 ways: hard fried, over easy, sunny side up, scrambled, hard boiled, soft boiled.

    After breakfast we went into the “wellness” area. Dan worked out. I did rounds in the sauna, steam room and hot tub, where he joined me eventually. It was very relaxing. Almost too relaxing! I had trouble moving fast after that. But at some point vacation should be about relaxing, right?

    We left the hotel about 10:30. Yesterday we had purchased a “Welcome Dresden” card, which would get us into a number of museums. We had only picked three really that we would do and they were all on the card, so it made it worth it The Albertinum yesterday was one, so today would be the other two.

    Our first stop was Zwenger Palace. A string of 3 museums now, this used to be the public space for the Saxony court back in the day. Like this church was saw yesterday, this has been rebuilt from the ashes of destruction in the war. And actually much of the reconstruction is still going on. In the first museum in particular, only about half of it was open.

    Similar to the Kunst museum in Vienna, much of the collection here is from the Saxony Courts own Kunsthammer: collecting things to learn about and then reflect their understanding of the world in both art and science, because what they understand they can rule.

     

     This and the two paintings that follow are by an artist named Lucas Cranach the Younger, a German Renaissance painter whose work occupied much of this wing. Him and his father, oddly enough Lucas Cranach the Elder, both did several paintings of Adam and Eve; the father’s are more studied but we didn’t see any of his work here.
     Pygmies messing with a sleeping Hercules above; Hercules waking up below.

     

     Called “The Dentist,” we both went “ouch” when we saw it. The look on the guys face is awful.
     This is the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. Anything look familiar? Look at the bottom of it.
    You’ve probably seen these guys a million times and didn’t know where they came from. There are a couple of stories about their inspiration: one is they were the model’s children, and they would come and watch him paint and he painted them in just as they watched. The other is he was painting two kids looking wistfully into a bakery.
     If you read the Prague, Part 2, entry from this blog, you saw my musings on European streets I just like the look of. This was one of those streets in Haarlem, Netherlands, from our trip in 2013, with Grote Kerk (Great Church) in the background. Now look at the painting below, which we saw this morning in this exhibit.
     Apparently someone else liked the look of this street about 300 years ago, too.
     This was a nice area outside of one of the museum cafes. See the stairs in the back? We came down them later when we were walking around and found ourselves back here; it was the only way down from where we were.

    Next was the Math and Physical Science gallery. It displays a collection of scientific instruments at Dresden court that began around 1560. In particular, there were lots and lots of clocks. Mechanical clocks begin in the medieval period, when large clocks powered by falling weights were installed in the towers of town halls in churches. This collection runs from mid 1400s to mid 1800s.

     This was extremely intricate, and there was a visual aid that showed how the mechanics of how the pieces moved around and bobbed up and down when they did. Reminded me of the clock in Prague. Pretty ingenious stuff for the Middle Ages.
     They loved things that moved on their own. We saw a bunch of this stuff in Prague, called automatons.
     Yes, scales.

     

     Same clock above and below, just front and back. These things were amazing. Like the astronomical clock in Prague, it wasn’t just about time; they tracked the entire year including seasons and constellations.

     

    Believe it or not, a calculator. Each of the dials represents a place – tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. A stylus was used to turn each of the dials to enter numbers into the machine, and the sum appears in the windows at the top.

     

     This was all about telescopes and instruments that created heat from the sun.

     

     A thermometer!
     Every time we changed galleries, Dan took more photos of the courtyard.

     

     As we found our way to the final gallery, we discovered a path a level up that took you almost all around the court.

     

     

     The final gallery was porcelain. This is me going “you’re kidding, right?” Asian porcelain isn’t really our thing, but the exhibit kept going and kept changing.

    Meissen porcelain, named for the town it is made it just outside of Dresden, is the first European hard-paste porcelain made, starting in 1708.

     A porcelain replica made of an actual bouquet to a Saxon King by this daughter, 1749.

    We spent about 2.5 hours there then went in search of lunch. We first went to this place where Dan had made reservations for dinner for tonight, but at that point we’d already decided we weren’t going to go out but would just hang out in the lounge. So we tried going there for lunch but it didn’t open until 4pm. We ended up at a place close to Frauenkirche again. We typically have a rule about doing things this close to tourist attractions because they are usually not that good. But we had good luck yesterday and reasoned that it’s because almost all of the tourists here are German, so the restaurants are catering to their tastes.

    That’s Dan right of center. The table next to us were seated after and all 4 of them were smoking, which is the reason we typically don’t take advantage of outdoor seating in Europe. But the breeze was strong enough it was bearable.
     I had roast pheasant with stuffed with a chestnut dressing, shallots and polenta.
     Dan had sea bass (German, not Chilean; tastes more like trout), with rice and vegetables.
    This photo was taken from the church tower yesterday, but I realized as I was putting this together that we forgot to take an outside photo of where we went next, Residenzschloss (Royal Palace). See the building top left that also has a tower? That’s it. We went up there today, too; so you’ll see a photo from there looking pretty much to here. Like Zwenger, this has also been rebuilt and now houses several museums. We were here just over an hour so moved through them pretty quickly.
    They had an interesting exhibit of Turkish things from various interactions – both friendly and not – that the Saxons had with the Ottoman Empire over the centuries. We’d never seen stuff like this before and enjoyed it. We’ve been discussing Istanbul as one of our future trips so this gave us a little taste that we really liked.

     

     This tent was pretty cool; I liked how it looked on the other side below the best.

     

     

     

     Turkish armory above and below.

    The next gallery was a variety of treasures in gold, crystal, ivory, etc., that the court has collected over the years.  Dan took photos of his favorite pieces.

     

     

     For some reason he’s had Nebuchadnezzar on his mind, this piece represented a dream of his so it was impossible to resist.

     

    I’m leaving the explanation of this one in below because there’s no way to do it justice.

     

     The names of Saxon rulers were carved into the sails.
     Tiny ivory sailors climbing the nets on the ship in this one.

     

     Intricate golden coffee set made in Dresden around 1700.

     

    We both thought this was amazing. This is the court of a Grand Mogul from India, made in Dresden around 1705. The two photos below show the throne closer up, and then me beside it for perspective. It was the most detailed thing we’d seen all day.

     

     

    The Dresden Green Diamond is the most valuable of the jewels in the treasure at 41 carats. It is mounted with two other large diamonds, though a mere 19 and 6 carats, and 411 additional small and medium diamonds.

    We went up yet another tower from here and took photos from there.

     The guts of the clock in the tower.
    The church on the right is where we were yesterday.
    The Catholic church we couldn’t get into yesterday, and the Elbe River in the background.
    Same church, but went there after this today. Like the other buildings in the Centrum, this was also rebuilt from original material where possible, and based on original plans.

     

     

     And like the church yesterday, you can tell that all of the inside material is brand new.

     

     

     

     This is the pulpit, which is where the priest stands to deliver the sermon. I’ve only seen these is older European churches, but they are very common  here.
    A cute little row of restaurants lining the street that goes up from Bruhl’s Terrace into town, with our hotel on the right.
    ————————————————–
    We did go out again about 8:15pm. It’s now 9:30. We will do another round in the spa before bedtime and still be asleep by 11 hopefully. We’ll have an early morning again, catching a train to Berlin. Here are the photos we took of Dresden at night. We really do need to make a point to get out more at night, some of these are really pretty.
    At the beginning of “the balcony of Europe.” This started out with me being grossed out by a spider on the lamppost; Dan decided he liked it as a pose!
     By the Albertinum we visited yesterday.
     This is the back of Frauenkirche on the left, which is in the main square; and the Hilton logo bottom right. That’s how close are.
     The main hotel entrance with the Procession of Princes in the background and the tower of the Royal Palace behind that.
     Same shot just closer.
     Frauenkirche from the front.
    Opera House.
     Catholic church from the back and the dome of the Royal Palace.
    From the front.
     

     

     The top of those steps on the left is where Dan took the two shots above, and is sort of the start of the balcony of Europe, which he loved saying :)
    And that’s a wrap for Dresden.

     

  • Day 7, Tue 8/30: Dresden, Germany

    Day 7, Tue 8/30: Dresden, Germany

    [Wow, this internet is so much faster than the one in Prague!…actually the one in Vienna, too…]

    We set the alarm for 6am, packed up again, headed down for breakfast a little before 7, and were out the door about 7:40am.

    These were photos of our room in Prague that I took last night.

     They upgraded us to a suite, but it was just adjoining rooms where one of them was a living room. Nice enough to be sure, just an awkward layout. For as little time as we spend in our rooms, we don’t actually care about it that much. But Dan’s hotel’s status kicks in when they have the rooms available and they often upgrade without him asking.

     

     The view from our room, taken this morning. There was a decent sized tennis complex across the river. The river, by the way, is the Vitava.
     The Prague Hilton had this huge courtyard, with the rooms 8 floors up around it, to allow for more rooms with natural light I guess. That space there behind the staircase on the first floor is where we had breakfast. This was taken from a glass elevator that looked out into the courtyard.
    All that effort to make it to the train station on time and the train was 45 minutes late. Notice the “45 min” in the bottom right corner of the sign. We got there about 8:05 for an 8:27 train; they didn’t announce it was late until 8:21, and then it was only 5 minutes, which kept expanding. They finally announced the platform around 9:05, in the mean time we were just standing in front of the monitor in the station, watching the board. With about 100 others!
     The train wasn’t full; we had a compartment that sat 6 all to ourselves.
     Some pretty views from the train. It was a 2 hour ride to Dresden.

     

    We got to Dresden around 11:30am.  Why Dresden? It’s a good question. The primary thing we knew about it was it had been bombed to hell in WWII, and that they had done a nice job of reconstruction, especially since Germany was reunified. Dresden was in East Germany when they were split. We were originally only going to spend 1 night here but Dan’s colleagues at Bayer encouraged him not to rush it. There are a fair number of tourists here, but the vast majority of them are German. (Unlike in Prague and Vienna where we saw folks from all over the planet.)

    Dresden’s bombing became somewhat controversial after the fact, but at the time it was considered an important strategic target for the Allies. Dresden was the 7th largest city in Germany at the time. (Today, with a population of just over 1/2 a million, it’s #11.) It hadn’t been touched by the Allies despite being a major industrial, transportation and communication center, with lots of connections to other parts of Central Europe. Over 3 days in February of 1945, the Allies dropped 3900 bombs and incendiary devices, destroying 1600 acres and killing 22k-25k people. The Nazis propoganda machine blew that number up about 10x, and downplayed the importance of Dresden to Germany overall, which led to some of the controversy. After the war, Dresden became part of East Germany and was Communist until reunification.

    Dresden has been around for over 800 years and before Germany was unified in 1871, it was the seat of power for the Duchy of Saxony (Kingdom from 1806-1918), and Saxon royalty ruled here for many centuries.

    We walked to our hotel, about a mile. The entire way we hardly saw any traffic because there was a pedestrian mall that stretched essentially from the train station into the Centrum (downtown) and our hotel is right there in the center of the city. We can see the church below from one of our windows, because it’s at the end of the block.

    This is Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. It’s the predominant building in the main square. That’s a statue of Martin Luther in the middle of the square, although in the photos above and below it looks like it may be right in front of the church. It’s not. Notice how small the people are by the church compared to those by the statue and you’ll see what I mean.

     

    This is almost the entire square and you get a better perspective of size, with the now small Martin Luther in the middle.

    This is of the back of the church. Notice the darker blocks here. And if you look again, and in the photos above, you’ll notice some dark blocks spread throughout the building in seemingly random places. Here’s the story:

    This church was destroyed in the bombing described above. After the war, it was left in ruins – literally, just as it was after being bombed – as a war memorial. And it sat that way for over 50 years. After reunification, they decided to have a go at rebuilding it, and used the original plans from 1720 which had been kept all this time. Where possible, they used actual material salvaged from the ruins. Hence the black blocks.
    Wild, eh?

    Here’s what was left of it after the bombing. The Martin Luther statue stood there all this time.

    Reconstruction started in 1994 and took 10 years.

     

     

     We, of course, took the option to go up, which you had to pay to do; the church itself was free.

    This hole here in the floor? The same hole in the middle of the dome 3 photos above.

    Dan having fun with the camera….

     Some pretty views of the town from above.
     See the awning in the shadows of the street towards the bottom of the photo? That’s our hotel.

     

     Martin Luther again from above. Those yellow tarps top left next to the red ones is where we ate lunch after. See the table below. (Although we sat at one farther in.)

     

     

     Dan kept saying “I can’t believe we’re eating at a burger joint in Germany” but he admitted more than once it was pretty good. He had an Italian burger – with Gorgonzola cheese among other things.
     Mine was French with Brie, and sweet potato fries. Both kinds of fries were delicious. The red sauce was a spicy something like you’d get with Asian appetizers. It was weird in that setting but worked well.
     Take note: Ketchup, and Fried Potato Sauce. Never get them confused. (And I love that the mayo bottle is bigger in a disgusting kinda way…)
     This is called the Procession of Princes and it literally outside out hotel door. It’s a mural painted on the wall of the royal palace showing all of the Saxon princes since around 1300. That’s not history I’m familiar with so didn’t recognize any of the names.

     

     This is a square around the Catholic church below, which we were going to visit, but we couldn’t figure out how to get in. The steps I’m on lead up to “the balcony of Europe.” (More on that later.) There was construction tape around the only entrance to the church we could see so something is going on. This was also destroyed in the war and reconstructed based on original plans.
    The full church, and that’s the opera house in the background.
     It was about 3:00 by this time and we went and checked into our room. They also upgraded us to a suite, although this is the real deal. We will be very comfortable. Too bad we don’t spend too much time in our room! The photo above is the first floor. There’s a half bath to your right.

     

     

     

     That’s where I’m sitting right now as I type :)
     We left about 3:30 to do the only museum we were going to today: The Albertinum, a nice little museum with a wide range of art (including a little modern…).
     Those stairs in the background also take you to the Balcony of Europe….
     This wasn’t a great museum, we were only there an hour. But there were a few pieces we liked. Especially this sculpture made of plywood.
     Dan thought she was whimsical.
     This was the huge entrance hall. You can see how crowded it was! Notice the baby on the floor on the far right just below center.
     Roman mosaic, probably around 200 AD.
     Dan likes it when we come across art of ancient civilizations that isn’t Egyptian, Greek or Roman. In this case, Assyrian. This stuff is about 2500 years old.

     

     

     Careful, we are entering the modern art arena. Dan thought this was whimsical as well. The upside down text is: No Rejection, No Annual Contract, No Credit Check.
     This was called Freedom.
    Dan couldn’t resist. Complements the black one from the Albertini in Vienna. (I keep wanting this museum – Albertinum – to be named after the same guy, Albert of Saxony, Maria Theresa’s son-in-law. But it was a different Albert of Saxony who was King about 100 years later. There was probably a relation there somehow, I just couldn’t track it.)
     This was a photo of Dresden after it was bombed. Dan ended up liking his reflection overlaid on it.

    We left the museum by the back door and took some steps up to Bruhl’s Terrace, AKA “The Balcony of Europe.” We thought that was an incredibly lofty nickname so kept making jokes about it, but it’s been used since the 19th century.  This was a pretty garden. You can barely see me standing on the other side if you look hard enough.

     It’s grainy because Dan used his zoom feature. This section by the river used to be the private gardens of the Count of Bruhl, hence the name.

     

     Elbe River.

     

    This is all still considered Bruhl’s Terrance.
     The Augustus Bridge is the oldest bridge in Dresden, built between 1907-1910. We crossed it to get to Neustadt below.
     This section of town was destroyed by a fire in 1685, and was referred to as “new town” when it was rebuilt. So not exactly new anymore, but it was adorable.

     

     Lots of shops and restaurants lined this park.
     There were several big fountains like this.
     We came into Neustadt to find a specific artsy area known as Kunstofpassage. On our way, we found ourselves going along this street that had a funky vibe that we really liked. Reminded us both of the strip on Telegraph in Berkeley. A pretty wide variety of ethnic food, including Italian of course, several Vietnamese, also Spanish and Turkish. And pot stores, despite weed still being illegal here. That image dead center is Mickey Mouse with pot leaves all around him.
    Lots of walkers and folks riding bikes. We love that.

    This is kind of blatant for weed not being legal.

     

     We found our destination.
     It was definitely funky, but we liked it.

     

     

     Gutters made into a water feature.
    This was opposite that, across the courtyard.
    We walked back to our hotel after that. We were pretty tired – walked over 11 miles – and had thought about getting a light dinner in the lounge and going out for dessert. We scratched the dessert part because we just didn’t want to go out again, despite getting back at about 7:15pm. The food in the lounge was good, we hung out there a bit while I prepped the photos and wrote some. (And thank god for high speed internet: So Much Faster than last night.) We came back to the room about 9pm, headed down to the spa area around 9:30 for sauna, hot tub and steam room. It’s now almost midnight and it’s bedtime. We have a full day in Dresden tomorrow, leaving for Berlin Thursday morning.
    PS: I don’t remember getting these notifications from TripAdvisor before this trip. Borders somewhere between cool and creepy….

     

  • Day 6, Mon 8/29: Prague Part 2

    Day 6, Mon 8/29: Prague Part 2

    We came back to the hotel early escaping a thunderstorm, but we were pretty much done with our day anyway. I thought “yay, I can get the blog up early and get to bed early.” Not a chance. We started with over 115 photos, and really only did 2 things! I finally got it down to about 70 and the internet here is dreadfully slow so getting them off our phones and uploaded here took awhile. Oh well. It’s a picturesque place that we wanted to remember so hopefully you will enjoy them, too. And if not, too bad  :)

    We both slept good but didn’t get up as early as we’d hoped. The plan was to take advantage of the hotel breakfast that starts at 6am so we could get on with our day before the crowds set in. We went down about 7:15 and left the hotel about 8:30. So much for that idea.

    This was on our way into the city center. We stayed about a mile away and took a different path in than we did yesterday. I probably took more of these shots than I needed to but I always enjoy them. What are you looking at exactly? Nothing in particular. I love the way certain blocks look that strike me as quintessential Europe and this was one of them. Minus the James Dean sign on the shop on the left that is.

    And this is another of those. You turn a corner and something appears. As we were approaching this I was like “hey, that looks like the Astronomical Clock.” Cuz it is. We had just approached it from a completely different direction so was surprised to walk into the same square we’d left last yesterday. So we started where we ended essentially.

    At 8:50am, there was a crowd already forming for the same reason we were there: the 9:00am show.

     The Apostles doing their thing. We managed to get a video of it, too, which you can check out here if you like.

    This guy was at the entrance to the Charles Bridge. Couldn’t figure out who he was, mostly I just thought he looked cool. Art had made a comment on our photos yesterday about them looking like a fairy tale, and everywhere I looked today, that’s what I saw. Doesn’t he look like a fairy tale king? Everything here really does sort of have that look about it.

    The entrance to the Charles Bridge. It is the oldest bridge in the city. Construction began in 1357 and it was finished in 1402.  It is famous for having 30 or so statues situated on it. (Don’t worry, we only took photos of a few!) It gets compared to a bridge in Paris that is also rich with statues but I like this one better. It’s older, has more history, and is only for use by pedestrians, although they did used to allow cars and trams. Much better this way.

    View of Prague Castle as we approach the Charles Bridge.

     

    We got there a little after 9am and the crowds weren’t out yet. You’ll see later it doesn’t stay that way.

    A bride and her groom getting their wedding pictures done here. Kinda cool.
     Several of the statues have areas like this on them that appear to be polished. They get that way from people rubbing on them for good luck.
     Empty. For now.
    A fun photo of Dan as we were approaching the end.
    Another of those “I just like this look” shots.  Across the bridge, on our way to the castle.
     The stairs up to the castle.
     I’m pretty sure we haven’t climbed this many steps since Montemartre in Paris in 2014. And pretty sure this was higher.

     

     This is the exit actually, but one of the first things you see. There were guards and military police stationed here and there throughout. The castle also had administration offices for the President of the Republic, similar to (now I don’t remember which palace) in Vienna.
     This and below is St. Vitus Cathedral, and really what you see all over the city. It sits fully inside the castle walls, and is surrounded by the castle structure on all sides. More on this later.

     

    This was in the Castle, Diet Hall it was called. It was the meeting place for the King at the time (or Queen if you’re Maria Theresa) and the other folks in his circle who made decisions for the town. There was a lot of history in this first section of our tour, and it was interesting to see how well this trip tied history together: so many connections between Vienna, Bratislava and Prague. The Habsburgs used this castle as the seat of their empire for a short period of time in the 1600’s. Maria Theresa and other Austrian monarchs also held the Bohemia crown as well as Austria and Hungary. Not shown here, there was a big painting of her on the left. But for the better part of 900 years, this was considered the seat of power for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The name of the first Bohemian king, year 1086? Vratislav. I had seen that reference in Bratislava, too, only there it was spelled Bretislav. But now we know where that name comes from.

     Decorated administration rooms in the castle.

     

     This was St. George’s Basilica, just behind St. Vitus, whose backside you see below. It was founded by Vratislav in 920. It was pretty simple inside, we didn’t take any photos.
     Construction on St. Vitus began in 1352 but proceeded very slowly, if for no other reason the architects would die before it could get completed. The 2nd architect was Peter Parler, who also did the Charles Bridge. It actually sat unfinished for several hundred years. Things got going again in 1844, and it was finally finished in 1929. It’s hard to tell what’s new and what’s old – they did a pretty good job of keeping everything in Gothic style, which is definitely 1300-1400’s. But I will say it’s one of the more impressive cathedrals we’ve seen. Starting with the premise that St. Peter’s in Rome is in a class by itself, we’d put this up there with Cologne, Westminster Abbey, or any of the three in Gent. Not a lot of explanations below, just a lot of photos.

     

     

     

     

     Tomb of Vratislav by the main altar.

     

    After the cathedral we went to watch the changing of the guards, which is a 10 minute ceremony that occurs every day at Noon. There were a lot of people gathered around when we got there 10 minutes before so we didn’t have the best view. But it was close enough and Dan was able to get some good shots, especially since “the change” (3 outgoing, 3 incoming) marched right in front of him and into the courtyard where we were standing.

     

     

     

    When he wasn’t shooing away overzealous tourists, he was standing in front of Dan blocking his view.

     

     And then 3 others – the change – marched by him again…
     We went walking around the castle grounds after and literally stumbled across this. We stopped here to rest on those steps you see below and heard some American tourists talking about the echo chamber that exists on this disc. Sure enough, when you stand directly in the middle and start talking, you hear a perfect echo of yourself. Step outside of it, and it’s normal. It’s a trip.

     

     Dan caught me doing a little stretching.
     These guys were in front of the government administration entry.
    A nice view of the cathedral in the background from this path.
     Outside of the castle complex headed towards town for lunch.
     Dan made reservations at a cute little place that was highly rated on TripAdvisor.
     Dan had roasted duck, similar potatoes as we saw yesterday.
     I had rabbit, potatoes, and spinach with lots of garlic. The gravy was excellent.
     Apple strudel again for Dan, although he liked yesterday’s better.
    This was called a honey cake. The flavor of the cake was somewhere between spice cake and graham cracker, with cream between the layers. They were both so big we split and half of each.
    Next we went to Petrin Hill. Well, hiked to Petrin Hill. It’s up, way up. By the time our day was done we’d walked 11.82 miles and 58 floors. A good chunk of those floors occurred here. It was essentially a park on a hill overlooking the city, not unlike the one yesterday, but more to do. First stop was a mirror maze, that also had a fun-house of sorts. I had said to Dan earlier today: at some point we’ll need to have someone take a nice photo of us. He says: we can do that at the mirror maze! I’ll admit, not exactly what I had in mind…but they’re fun…

     

     

     

     

     

    Next was an observation deck built to look like the Eiffel Tower. It was constructed in 1891. Earlier in the day we’d been talking about this thing he has for disasters. It usually starts with him saying “wouldn’t it be funny if…” and then this horrible thing comes out of his mouth that he would find exciting. When we were at the top level of this – as seen in the photo – it wasn’t open like the first level, you were enclosed except for a few windows. It was pretty crowded, noisy, and my claustrophobia was kicking in. And it was swaying. Just a little, but you could feel it. So there goes Dan: “wouldn’t it be funny if this toppled over? I wonder if anyone would survive.” Me: “No, it wouldn’t, and I need to go now…” I just walked down the stairs a bit, which were all outside and there was a terrific breeze blowing. Felt great. All that said, the view from the top was amazing and it was well worth the climb.

     

     This was from the first level. The ones that follow are all from the second level.

     

     

     That’s the Charles Bridge on the right. Can you see the people?

     

     We zoomed in to the Charles Bridge on the right. It’s a sea of people. This was about 3:15pm. We would need to cross that to get back to the hotel.
     Above and below are more of the grounds we covered as we were making our way to a monastery.

     

     

     

     Just another one of “those” shots as we made our way down out of the castle hill.
    Shortly after that it started to rain. By the time we got about 1/3 of the way over the Charles Bridge – which had pretty much cleared due to the rain – it was suddenly pouring and there was nowhere to go. When you’re already that wet there’s no real point looking for cover. We were only going to do one other thing and just decided the thunderstorm was a good excuse to call it early. We got back to the room about 4:30, went down to the spa to shower and take advantage of the hot tub and sauna.
     We came back up to the lounge for a light dinner and I stayed here to write the blog. Suddenly I realized it was 10:15 and they were trying to shut down so I finished in the room.

    It is 11:00pm on Monday and that’s a wrap for Prague. We leave for Dresden, Germany, tomorrow morning.

  • Day 5, Sun 8/28: Prague, Czech Republic

    Day 5, Sun 8/28: Prague, Czech Republic

    Dan slept pretty good. I just slept OK – kept waking up – but wasn’t concerned about it because I knew it would be a light day and I could make up some sleep on the train. I’d set the alarm for 6:30 to avoid our timing missteps the day before. We packed first, then went downstairs for breakfast. We left the hotel about 8:15.

     The traditional shot of the room, albeit a bit of a mess since we’d already started packing. Oh well :)
     From our window: one of Vienna’s main train stations, Wien Mitte, across the street. Very convenient.
      We got to the platform about 8:35, more than enough time. It went by fast. The train arrived around 8:50 and seemed to take off right after we sat down, but it was right on time. Just took awhile to get on and settle in; there were quite a few people getting off.
    We had started out in regular seats but after the first stop the table across from us freed up so we took it and it had for the remaining 3 hours of the 4 hour ride. Four hours on a train, unlike on a plane, somehow goes very fast.
    We crossed the border at the first stop and I snapped a map photo. This shows the whole itinerary: Vienna and Bratislava in the middle, Prague center left, Dresden and Berlin above that. The distance between Bratislava and Berlin is less than the distance between Sacramento and San Diego.

    We arrived right on time a little after 1pm. The Hilton we’re staying it is about a mile from the train station. We walked. Our room wasn’t ready yet do we just dropped our bags off and headed out to start exploring a bit and find lunch.

    The architecture here is fairly unique. We saw a fair amount of this intricate outside painting on some of the older buildings.

    One of the gates into Old Town.

    We found a cute little place that had an interesting Czech menu.

     

     


    I had fried pork belly. Think crispy but moist pork rinds with meat still attached. Kind of amazing. The purple stuff on the side was cooked cabbage and beets, also amazing. the white things above are something like mashed potato patties on the left and this interesting bread with no crust on the right. Great for soaking up that gravy.

    Dan had a beef goulash with the same bread I had, but it shows better here.

    The desserts looked too good to pass up, so we didn’t! I had the chocolate creme brulee. .

    Dan had apple strudel again. Why not? He really liked it!

    After lunch we made our way to Vysehrad, an old fortress on a hill that was about 2 miles away, well outside of the city center. We figured we could use the walk after 4 hours on a train and all that food. We took some random photos of building we liked along the way.

     

     

     This was a tunnel we came across after we’d climbed a pretty steep hill. Almost there! (And when did my hair get so gray? That’s just a trick of the light, right? Holy cow….)
     An old entrance to the fortress. Notice the iron gate. When we asked a woman working at the church about where the fortress was, she said something like “you missed it by about 600 years.” It’s clear as we were walking around this is just a park now. But a beautiful one, and we got some nice photos of the surrounding area.
     There’s also a church and a cemetery. This is in the cemetery.

     

     We couldn’t go in because there was a concert happening there this evening and they’d stopped allowing tourists in early.

     

     Prague Castle in the background. A little later, we walked down an alternate path that eventually connected with this one then took us down to the river.

     

     

     

     We walked around the river for awhile and eventually made it back to the center of the city. On our way we cruised through this street fair that was happening, focusing on vegan food as far as we could tell.
    This is the astronomical clock in the main square. It’s been in operation since 1410 and is the oldest operating clock of its kind in the world. We got here just in time for the 6 o’clock show, which consists of 6 of the apostles walking around behind those windows above the two dials. At Noon you get all 12. Tomorrow at some point I’m hoping to get up behind all that from within the town hall so more on all that when that happens.
     A closeup of the dials.
     The direction of the square we entered from….
     …and the direction we were heading.
     These are both still sort of in the main square, or at least in the adjacent one.
    By this time it was about 6:30 but we still needed to get our room and settle in so we went back to the hotel. Believe it or not, in the 4.5 hours or so we were out and about we walked nearly 10 miles; and that includes at least an hour for lunch. So we didn’t do much but we were kinda ready. Tomorrow will be a full day.

     

     

     

     

  • Day 4, Sat 8/27: Bratislava, Slovakia

    Day 4, Sat 8/27: Bratislava, Slovakia

    We each slept well and headed down to breakfast just after 7am. What started out as a leisurely morning thinking we had lots of time, ended up being a morning of bad timing and we missed trains and trams by minutes. All that to say: we didn’t get in to the city of Bratislava, an hour away from Vienna, until about Noon.

    The history of Bratislava is complicated. Like Estonia which we visited last summer, Slovakia has only been an independent nation since the fall of the Eastern bloc in 1993. When the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was broken up at the end of WW1, it ended up as Czechoslovakia. It changed forms several times between 1919 and 1993, but it’s simplest to say it was mostly Czechoslovakia during that time, then split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. Prior to World War 1, its population was 42% German, 41% Hungarian and only 15% Slovak. After WW1, the city name of Bratislava was adopted and the Czech and Slovak populations sort of took over. (That’s a huge over-simplification by the way.) Prior to 1919, the city was known as Pozsony or mostly Pressburg for over 1000 years. Where the name Bratislava comes from is not well documented, but it’s been around since about 900 AD, as a derivative of castles and/or rulers.

    It also has a very close connection to the Habsburg monarchy we’ve learned so much about this week, and was the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1536 to 1783. Maria Theresa is as well known and loved here as she was in Vienna, and was crowned in St. Martin’s here as Queen of Hungary, as were about a dozen other monarchs.

    Unlike Estonia, Slovakia doesn’t seem to have thrived as well since its independence. Definitely poorer, it doesn’t have nearly the charm that Tallinn did and but it does seem to be working at it.

     This is St. Michael’s Gate, a major entrance into the Old Town. Like many medieval cities, it was once entirely surrounded by a wall, with 4 gates at intervals to let people in and out. This is the only gate left standing. Originally built in the 1300’s, the decorative top was done in the 1700’s. No matter what, old by any standard.
     Looking back up at the clock on the gate tower, Old Town beginning behind me. This town has lots of public clocks we discovered.
     The town square, with the Old Town Hall in the background, where we went first. And another clock.
     Outside the Town Hall…
     …and the inner courtyard of the Town Hall. This was supposed to be the history of the city. We had great luck with these in other towns but this one was hard to follow. It was in desperate need of a professional curator. They tried hard, but we didn’t feel like we learned much. (Much of what I wrote in the intro we got later in the castle or from other sources.)
     We did get to go up to the clock tower and got some nice shots off the city form there.
     The steeple on the far left is St. Martin’s that I referenced earlier. We went there next but couldn’t go in because there was a local wedding going on. the big white building left of center in the background is the castle we went to after that.

    After we went in search of lunch and found a cute little restaurant that had an interesting local menu.

     Dan had potato gnocchi stuffed with smoked meat, ham it tasted like to me. Sauerkraut and onions in the middle.
     I had the mutton that came with roasted potatoes, carrots and parsnips. It was excellent, but oddly disappointing in that it tasted exactly like something I’ve made at home. The mutton tasted very much like beef to me.

     It was a hike up to Bratislava Castle, locally referred to as Hrad. This was already several hundred feet up front street level and there is still a ways to go. All those stairs came next.
    But we got some nice views once we were up there. The thing in the background – the flying saucer on stilts? It’s called a UFO Observation Deck. Supposedly the best views of the area up there, and a restaurant, but since we were now higher than that we didn’t feel the need to go.

     

     

    Full front of the castle. There has been a structure on this hill of some kind dating back 3500 years. Bratislava history dates it back to around 900 AD, having been through several renovations since. It was largely destroyed by fire in 1811 after being bombarded by Napoleon and left to ruin. In 1957, after much talk of destroying it, it was decided it would be restored. The results you see are renovating it back to the glory it was during the reign of Maria Theresa. This was one of her residences as Queen of Hungary and her daughter, Maria Christina, and her husband Albert of Saxony (of Albertini fame if you read our “Vienna Day 1” entry) lived here as well.

     

     They have put a ton money into restoring the castle, it’s essentially been completely renovated inside out, but keeping to the design from the mid 1700s. There’s a display outlining the reconstruction, with some remnants of some of the original pieces.
     A photo from 1898 showing the castle and St. Martin’s.
     If it looks brand new it’s cuz it is. It’s stunning though. The white, gold and red work well together and with the sun – especially as we were leaving there was a lot of it – really makes this feel light and airy.

     

     The inside courtyard.
     A painting from the original castle that had been restored. The documentation around how they did the restoration – including the before and after – was pretty interesting.

     

     A model of the front of the castle with a peak of the town in the windows in the back.
    Several rooms like this with a fair amount of art, several other rooms all part of the museum with a wide range of history documented, all the way back to Stone Age.
     We went up into the tallest tower and got some great shots of the Danube River.

     

     And some nice shots of the rest of the town as well.

     

     There was like 5 or 6 flights of these from the fourth floor of the castle to the tower lookout. We’d never seen stairs this steep before.
     We walked around town a little more and made our way over to the last stop before heading to the train station.
     St. Elizabeth’s AKA “the Blue Church.” Folks onTripAdvisor raved about it.
    It’s blue alright. Couldn’t get good shots of the inside because there was service going on.
    We caught the 5:38 train and were back to the hotel by 7pm. We had dinner in the lounge, then went down to the steam room about 8pm. We had planned on going out for dessert again but decided we were tired, and certainly didn’t need any more calories!
    Tomorrow we leave for Prague.
    Ah, almost forgot. So for the past couple of days, my siblings and I have been discussing our ancestry over Facebook. As I said in the Pre-Departure entry, the narrative we grew up with was we were mostly German with a good chunk of Austrian thrown in, and some “Bohonk” in there somewhere. As I studied a genealogy that was done in the early 1990’s based on birth records, I figured out the 4th generation – great-great grandparents to us – is only 12.5% German (but where Haas comes from), 25% Austrian and 50% Bohemian. We also knew that Granny, our mother’s mother, was from a place called Silesia in Austria. For some reason I always thought Silesia was a town. But I could never find it on a map anywhere. My sister Anne this week supplied the name of the town Granny was born in: Fulnek. According to Google Maps, that city still exists – in the Czech Republic. According to Wiki, it is in an area now referred to as the Moravia – Silesia region. Moravia was a name I saw referenced a couple of times in the birth records – on both sides of the tree as I recall. And I kept seeing that name today at the castle, usually as “Great Moravia“; it was a big deal about 1000 years ago.
    At any rate, the last thing we did at the castle was this exhibit called “The Legacy of Charlemagne” and it was a pretty interesting piecing together of a lot of European history over 1000 years. No photos were allowed but there was a map of the Austria-Hungary Empire as it was in 1914 just before WW1. Sure enough, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia were all there. Granny was born in 1910. So yes, she was born in Silesia and it was part of the Austrian empire. None of those names exist anymore, but according to this map those areas are now completely within the current borders of the Czech Republic. What’s the capital of the Czech Republic? Prague.
    Excited.

     

  • Day 3, Fri 8/26: Vienna, Part 3

    Day 3, Fri 8/26: Vienna, Part 3

    I slept much better last night, 8 hours total in two shifts but I’ll take it. Dan didn’t sleep as well but felt rested enough. We went to breakfast in the lounge and took our time; me reading while Dan was working some. We went down to the sauna area after before heading out.

    The food area in the lounge. This morning was scrambled eggs, although Dan will special order his, which they’ll happily do; veal sausage, standard array of fruit, breads, cheese and deli meats. Basic but a good start.
    We sit in the corner away farthest away from the food, just because it’s quieter.

    We left about 9:50, took the subway towards the Museum Quarter again, this time to (finally) go to Kunst Historiches. This is #3 overall on TripAdvisor’s Things To Do, and #1 on their museums list for Vienna. (Of 114. 114? After about 25 they start to get questionable. Note MUMOK was #41….) Unlike MUMOK, Kunst is sort of a museum lover’s museum, especially the collection called Kunsthammer Vienna. The term “Kunsthammer” describes a style of collection that evolved in the 16th and 17th century which serves as a  comprehensive survey of “natural wonders and artifacts produced by virtuoso craftsmen, assembled in designated rooms as a reflection of the cosmos.” I couldn’t come up with a more lofty definition of museums myself.

    The Habsburgs proceeded to create collections with this objective in palaces and castles spread all over their vast empire, and did so for several centuries. Much of the inventory has been lost over time due to wars and other things. In 1891, Emperor Franz Joseph attempted to pull it all together and put it under one roof. The Kunst Historiches is the result.

     Above and below: the foyer.

     

     A chess game.
     The cover of an urn. Hmm….
     Delicate, detailed pieces I liked, the center one blown up below.

     

     

    Bellerophon taming Pegasus; artist is Bertoldo di Giovanni, about 1460.
     A “winged” altar piece, with 3 pages of art on either side.
     This is essentially a large salt and pepper shaker, although we never did find that functionality. It was pretty though; and small, just about 8 inches across.
    Lots of intricate clocks. See description below.

     

     Lots of intricate stuff in this room. I just noticed the piece on the right looking very familiar. Oh, that’s cuz I’m standing there staring at it, about to take the two photos below.
     Color me embarrassed: I thought a bezoar, displayed above, and its function, explained below, was something JK Rowling made up. Art, did you know this?

     

     This didn’t quite capture it, but I was fascinated by the bird and two men holding him up.
     Bird dragons in crystal. Why not?
     One of the things that always gets me about stuff like this is the detail. You just don’t see anything produced like this much anymore. As I’m standing there appreciating this, Dan walks up behind me, takes one look and says “that’s a lot of dead elephants.”
    As is often the case, the building itself is always worth looking at even if you don’t appreciate the art.
    Most of the first floor was the Kunsthammer collection which we really enjoyed. It also held Egyptian and Roman stuff which we moved through pretty fast because we’ve seen a lot of it before on prior trips. Dan did like the mummy stuff though. Below is an intro for the next few photos.
    Dan liked the detail on this sarcophagus. He took the photo below standing right up to it; it’s about 4-5 square inches in the middle just under where the “hair” stops.

     

     

    We moved to the 2nd floor which was all paintings of German, Dutch, and Flemish masters, of which we’ve also seen lots. There was some Spanish and Italian, too. Lots of it was stuff we’ve either seen or don’t care for so we cruised through this floor in maybe 30 minutes.

     

     Bablyon.
     Above and below are the same room. Notice 1. there’s nothing on the walls to tell you what anything is. That’s because 2. all of the description is on those laminated cards by the benches.

     

     We really liked this. Medusa by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.
     This is the 3rd time now we’ve seen this done: many paintings within a painting. This may be by the same painter each time, we never paid attention to the name. But this guy was Hans Jordaens, a Flemish painter out of Delft. And the first one we saw was in 2013 in The Hague which had a huge Flemish collection. We saw it again in 2014 at the London National Gallery. Anyway, we love it. The detail is just amazing.
    That was the perfect antidote we needed to MUMOK from the day before. We got there about 10:15am and left a little before 1pm. We headed towards Rathaus, Vienna’s City Hall, but decided on lunch first.
    Pretty parliament building we passed along the way.
    We found a place around the corner from Rathaus. It was definitely not for tourists, we had to ask for an English menu. Which works for us – helps identify authenticity in our experience.

    It was a cute little place, not crowded at all. Dan found a great table by an open window, and there was a nice breeze.

     

    Dan had a homemade spinach ravioli in a simple brown butter sauce with pine nuts and Parmesan. I had pork schnitzel which came with a potato salad (cold) in a mustard sauce. All very good.
    For dessert I had the cheese strudel with a warm vanilla sauce. Apple would have been better but when in Rome and all that. The cheese was like a ricotta. Glad I tried it. What I really wanted was the vanilla sauce and that was excellent. When Dan saw the clean plate at the end he said “and here I thought they put too much vanilla sauce on it.”
    Maybe they did, what’s your point? (I didn’t say that then of course because it just came to me! Always the case…)
    Next was Rathaus, City Hall. We weren’t sure what we were going to do there, but it was in TripAdvisor’s top 10 overall so we felt compelled.
    It is a pretty building. There was a huge screen in front of it. There’s a film festival going on this month – ends tomorrow night – and apparently the showings are public. There was seating arranged in front of the screen, too, and lots of food vendors in the park that precedes it.
    Definitely a local vibe, we didn’t pick up many tourists as we were passing through.
    We meandered into an open doorway and roamed the building for a little while.
     This was on the top floor, they were definitely setting up for something big.

     

     

     A cute courtyard. There was some kind of kids activity going on behind, couldn’t quite figure it out.

     

    This is Votive Church. It was a couple of blocks away and we thought “why not?” Built in 1879, young by Europe standards. The most amazing part was the randomness: there was a concert going on being performed by high school students from Japan. They were the same kids we ran into in the hotel restaurant for breakfast yesterday! We stayed for a couple of numbers than mosied along. (Greg: see, we did a concert in a church! Although I’m sure that’s not quite what you had in mind…)

     

     

     

     Votive Church, not the one below.
     St. Peter’s in the city center was something I’d planned on us getting to the first day. It was #14 on TripAdvisor’s overall. We missed a picture of the outside somehow, but the inside was sweet. Definitely worth a quick stop. We weren’t there more than 5 minutes.

     

     

     

     

     Dan had skipped dessert for lunch because he had planned on us coming here. I wasn’t paying attention to all that somehow so I ended up having 2 desserts for lunch. Darn. Zanoni & Zanoni is a local chain. We stopped at one of their little places the first day and got gelato. Many of them are the “order and walk away” places, this most definitely not. Big place, big menu, including lots of different kinds of cakes and crepes. But today we settled on ice cream.
     This was Dan’s. Four kinds of ice cream: strawberry, raspberry, bilberry and cherry. Plus fresh fruit and whipped cream. We couldn’t believe how big it was, we literally gasped when they put it down.

    I had what they called Spaghetties. Only it’s not spaghetti, it’s vanilla and fiocco ice cream with a strawberry sauce and grated coconut. For the fiocca, think vanilla without the vanilla – just a simple cream taste. It was about the size we were expecting. And it definitely worked.

    We don’t know what this is, just thought it looked cool. Passed it on our way to a boat ride on the Danube that turned into a bust.
     But there’s the Danube anyway.

    So all that was left: the Ferris Wheel. Only because it was on the pass and we could see it from our hotel window. Built in 1897, is it part of an amusement park on the same site as the 1873 World Fair.

     It’s 210 feet high.
     You can arrange to have a nice meal served in it’s dining car! This was the car that stopped as we were waiting for ours, so the waiter could come on to serve the next course and pour more wine. You gotta admit, it’s a cool concept.
     The two cars behind ours were both party cars for special events. You can see different setups of tables and chairs. The normal cars, like the one we were in, had a simple picnic type table with benches on either side. There were about 15 other people in it besides us.
     Above and below: The rest of the park, still in full operation.

     

     Vienna’s financial district across the Danube.
     One of those on the right is our hotel.

     

      The dining car came into view again the way back down.
    It was 6pm when we got off and we headed back to the hotel. Having left before 10am, we were done for the day. We ate in at the lounge (fish, bread, cheese), spent some time in the sauna area, and called it a night. Today’s walking: only 9.42 miles. Every trip we go “we really need to get a pedometer” and finally realized on this one we have it built into the iPhone. We’d always guessed maybe 7-8 miles a day. Turns out it’s more than that; we know we’ve walked more than this before. Much more. So will be interesting to see how it tracks.
    We saw the sign below on our walk back. Good timing, since Bratislava is where we are headed tomorrow. Budapest is on our list, and we considered trying to work it in to this trip (I can hear Dan saying “but it’s so close”…) but it really would have been a lot. As it was, 3 days in Vienna really pushed it but we tried to round it out today. There’s always more to do, but we felt like we did enough to get a taste. And we couldn’t have asked for better weather: blue skies with highs around 80 the whole time so far. We’ll see how it holds up the rest of the trip.