Steve Haas Travel

Blog

  • 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.

     

     

  • Day 2, Thu 8/25: Vienna, Part 2

    Day 2, Thu 8/25: Vienna, Part 2

    So much for catching up on sleep. I went to sleep easily just before 2am, but was up wide awake at 4:30am and never went back to sleep. So Tired Right Now! I may have to finish this in the morning. Dan slept about 6 hours and he felt great.

    We went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast around 7am. It had more variety than the lounge but not necessarily of stuff we would eat (like cereal). They did have congee and I had a couple of bowls of that. It’s an Asian rice porridge; I haven’t had it since the Hilton in Venice. This was better than that, but Dan thought it was too salty.

    We headed out about 8:30 and caught a subway in the station across from the hotel directly to Schonbrunn Palace, just a 12 minute ride away. The estate has been around over 300 years; the current iteration built in the mid 1700’s during the reign of Maria Theresa. It’s got over 1400 rooms, several gardens including a maze. We walked about 2.5 miles just on this property and stayed about 4 hours.

     It opened at 8:30; we got there about 9am so it wasn’t too crowded yet.
     Once again, photos weren’t allowed. Once again, Dan got a few in. Someone’s bedroom :) We don’t remember whose!
     “The yellow room” is all I remember about this one. That thing in the corner? We saw one in every room and finally figured out it’s a heater of some kind.
     The site of Mozart’s first public performance, age 6. (This town is crazy for Mozart if I haven’t said that already…)
     The ballroom, the prettiest room in the house we thought. Also the spot where Kennedy and Kruschkev met in 1961.
     They called this the “millions” room because it was the most expensive room in the house. All the wood is imported from somewhere in South America.
     From the back porch if you will. That’s Neptune Fountain at the end of the gardens and Gloriette above it.  Originally built in 1775, Gloriette was destroyed in WWII and has been restored a couple of times since. We headed there next.

     

     Looking back at the palace from the fountain before heading up to Gloriette.

     

     Gloriette just houses an observation deck and a cute little cafe.

     

     

     The red dot is where we were at Gloriette. We came down to the left edge of the pool then took that small trail down that does a half moon through the woods. It was a lovely walk. We were on our way to #4 on the map, the maze.

     

     This turned out to be pretty hard. It took us about 10 minutes to find our way to the center where this observation deck was.

     

     These were “harmony stones” by the observation deck, a feng shui item around balancing energy for couples. Or something like that :)

     

     Notice the springs. There were “bouncing boards”, there were 3 of them, and they were pretty fun. Once you got going on it just the right way it was hard to stop and difficult to keep balance.

     

     A human kaleidoscope in the middle of the gardens.

     

    Next was “The Apple Strudel Show.” Very sweet girl demonstrated how to make perfect apple strudel. With samples of course.
     Watching her work with the dough was pretty amazing. So thin you could read a newspaper through it, but it didn’t break even little bit.
     Making a big log of the apples before rolling it.
     Beginning of the roll….
     And the end of the roll. Then she asks “how do I get it from the board to the pan to put it in the oven?” Dan says “with the cloth.” She asks him to come help her for getting the answer right. Priceless.
     He got an apron and cute little hat. This is him spreading melted butter on it.
     And a little certificate at the end!
     Next was the Carriage House. This was the funeral carriage used for Franz Joseph in 1916. The empire essentially ended with his death, and was broken up after WW1.
     An “every day” carriage used by the monarchy.
     Franz Joseph’s official state carriage.
     The carriage used by Empress Elizabeth for her marriage to Franz Joseph.
     Right out of a fairy tale.
    One of the gardens on the side of the palace.
    We took the subway from there to Naschmarkt. This is an outdoor market nearly a mile long. Most of the vendors seemed to be Greek, Turkish or Italian. Lots of fruits, especially dried, nuts, sausage, olives, baklava, falafel, etc.
     We stopped at a Turkish place for lunch. This drink was sparkling water with mint, lime and ginger.
     We got the mixed grill for two: chicken, beef, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, falafel, salad, french fries. It was all excellent.
     Olives.

    After this we were supposed to make our way over to the museums we didn’t get to last night. We never quite made it in – just walked past on our way back to the hotel about 5pm because we were so dang tired at that point! Because on our way to it we happened across the Museum Quartier and Dan couldn’t resist. He’s never met a museum he didn’t want to go into I swear.

     We went into the Leopold first, which housed mostly the work of a couple of local artists. This was a view into the courtyard of the Quarter from that museum. The black thing across the way is MUMOK where we went next. The Leopold, by the way, is #10 of 114 museums on TripAdvisor. Keep that in mind. (The museum we skipped? #1 on the museum list and #3 overall. Oh well. We’ll get there tomorrow…)
     I already forgot the name of the artist, but this was one Dan really liked in the Leopold. For the most part it wasn’t our thing, but because it focused on the work of a few artists, at least it made sense from a body of work perspective. It was modern, but not the sort we laugh at.
     Cute little cafe in the Leopold.
    The MUMOK, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of modern art museum we laugh and shake our head at. Really, I said to Dan? Sure, he says, it will give us something to make fun of. MUMOK = Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (something must get lost in the translation) and was everything we hate about modern art. It’s #41 of 114 on TripAdvisor. Why do we do this? So we can have ridiculous conversations like this:
    Dan: It’s a vagina.
    Me: It’s a piggy bank.
    Dan: No, look, it’s a vagina!
    Me: No, it’s a piggy bank that looks like a vagina!
    Seriously, that conversation happened. Thankfully, photos were not allowed here either.
    Dan did like the elevators though, which is the primary reason he likes to go into every museum he comes across: the architecture.

    We were drop dead tired after this and took the subway back to the hotel. We only walked 9.9 miles today. Slackers! We were back before 5:30 or so. We made our way down to the steam room for a bit, then up to the lounge for dinner. We just stayed in the rest of the evening. Dan was asleep before 8:30. I went down to the steam room one more time to get enough energy to finish this. And it worked! It’s 9:39pm and I’ll be headed to bed soon. Hopefully to sleep well this time!

  • Day 1, Wed 8/24: Vienna Part 1

    Day 1, Wed 8/24: Vienna Part 1

    We both slept well: Dan 7 hours, me 8. I haven’t slept that much in months. Hoping to catch up on sleep on this vacation and that was a heckuva start. We are on the 12th floor of this Hilton and the Executive Lounge is around the corner from our room so we just had breakfast there. Dan’s hotel status strikes again.

    Where we had breakfast. Typical Hilton European fair – fruit, cheese, breads, eggs, sausages, deli meats and salmon.

    This was in a park across the street from the hotel that we made our way through on our way to the city center.


    We stopped first at the Opera House – above, although this shot taken in the evening – to pick up our Vienna Passes. Just about every city we’ve visited has a museum pass of some kind. We always literally do the math to make sure we’re going to get our money’s worth, and for Vienna we will. Most of what we want to do in Berlin is either free or not on that particular pass so it didn’t make sense there. The nice girl at the pass shop gave us some tips on getting around that we will take advantage of. The “hop on hop off” bus comes with it and there was one ready to leave as we walked out. (In the far right of this photo you can see the yellow tip of one.) We had a good experience on one in Rome so decided to try it. It wasn’t what we were expecting – turns out here there are 5 different routes, and the one we got on took us on a path we didn’t expect outside of the city center. I’ll leave it at that. The good thing to come from it is we learned the Schoenbrunn Palace is not as far out as we’d imagined and that helps us figure out timing of things. We do that tomorrow.

    After we got off the bus we headed towards the historic city center. First stop was the Albertina museum. This museum is part of a huge complex of palaces and museums that I’ll discuss later in a photo of a model of the whole thing, which is pretty impressive.

    So this is the first thing we come across is this exhibit. Ruh roh. If you’ve been following us for awhile, you know our disdain for contemporary art. But it was paid for, so might as well. (PS: the only modern art we really like is in the Crocker! So if you’re in Sacramento and haven’t taken advantage of that, you should fix that…it’s well worth it…)

    And the epitome of what we hate about modern art. It follows Dan’s rule of “if I can do it, it doesn’t belong in a museum.”

     Despite the name on the exhibit, this was the only Warhol piece in it.

     

    So there were rooms of this Jim Dine guy, an American artist supposedly part of the same pop art movement as Warhol. This particular exhibit focused on his self-portraits, and it was titled “I Never Look Away.” Jim: perhaps that’s the problem. We were literally laughing as we walked through this one and the docent was amused that we were so amused.


    This was the study of Emperor Franz Stephan and Empress Maria Theresa. They had 16 children, several of them famous, including Emperor Joseph II (in the painting above), and of course Marie Antoinette. This table was a gift from her to them.

    We loved the intricate parquet floor in this room. We always marvel at the craftsmanship that goes into this stuff. All that design is made from slivers of wood delicately inlayed.
    The Albertina was founded as a museum by another daughter, Maria Christina. Her husband was a huge art collector and much of what’s here is from their personal collection. And it’s a good one. There were lots of names we recognized including Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Chagall, Degas, Picasso, and Miro (who we learned about in Barcelona), da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens and Raphael (although the latter 5 were all drawings, not paintings). Some of our favorites are below.

    And a new name for us: Sedlacek.

    We loved the look of this painting and especially the one below, both by a guy named Franz Sedlacek. The painting caught my eye first and then the name. Sedlacek is one of the fun names in my ancestry; the maiden name of my paternal grandmother’s mother as I recall. The style is called “New Objectivity.”

     

     Chagall
     Monet
     Renoir
    This was a stunning room.

     

    Still in the Albertina.
     Emperor Franz Joseph I believe, huge statue in front of the museum.
     There’s a nice park area to the side of it, behind some of the other buildings holding museums. We were going to the building in front of us next and were hoping for a back entrance. No such luck. It was a good walk around!

     Lots of guys on horses :) Don’t remember exactly where this was.

     This was the back of the Austrian National Library.
    The front of the Austrian National Library. This wasn’t on our list of things to do but it was on the Pass and we really just wanted to see the inside of the building.
     And we weren’t disappointed by the architecture one bit. This whole complex is brought to you courtesy of the Habsburg Empire, which ruled the region for about 600 years.

    This was a 3-in-1 museum: armory, musical instruments and ancient sculptures. We cruised through it pretty fast. The armor stuff was the most interesting, although there was rooms and rooms of this stuff so once you’ve seen one…

    We just kept marveling how incredibly uncomfortable all of that had to be :) In so many ways….


    The view coming out of the library. That’s Rathaus (City Hall) in the background, which was on our list for the day but we never made it over there. Oh well, 2 more days…we’ll work it in somewhere…

    We finally found the Hofburg Imperial Palace which we’d been heading towards all morning. But now it was lunch time, about 2pm. We went off the beaten path a bit for a bite at a Hungarian place.

    Dan’s was chicken in a paprika sauce and what they called dumplings, what I would call spaetzle. He just thought it was OK.

    I had beef goulash with Hungarian pasta, which was more like couscous. We both agreed this was the better dish.

    The entrance to the Imperial Palace. Most of this was an exhibit of the living quarters of Empress Elizabeth, one of the last, who was assassinated in 1898.There was also lots of china and silverware.

    You weren’t supposed to take photos but Dan snuck a few in. We loved this model of the area. In this shot, the Albertina is in the darkness of the top right. This building on the left in the foreground is the Natural History museum where we were this evening. The statue in the middle of two in the foreground is Maria Theresa, you’ll see it later. The building in the background in the light is the Library, which is also facing you in the photo below. The Imperial Palace is this square in the center left of the photo below.

     

    We actually take quite a few photos of explanations like this on our trips, it helps with the details of the blog later. They just never actually make it to the blog. Decided to leave this one in. Note that some of the buildings in this complex are still in use by the current administration.

     The beautiful state dining room. Dan tried to get a better shot on the other side. That’s how we learned photos were forbidden :)

    We liked this street shot; just off center is a large sculpture that we saw as we were leaving the restaurant for lunch off a side street. We were hoping to get a better shot but we were too far away.

    Next stop: St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Cologne is better :) (We are Such cathedral snobs…)

     

    We decided to do the catacombs tour. It started off a little snoozy – caskets of bishops, cardinals and royalty who’d been buried here over the last 600 years. Then we went into a different section and suddenly: bones, lots and lots of bones. Again, you weren’t supposed to take pictures but Dan snuck a couple in, it was just so dark they didn’t come out well. The first bones we saw – not in either of these photos – were of bodies that had been at caskets at one point, but the wooden caskets had deteriorated all around them leaving remarkably intact skeletons behind. This photo and the one below it are part of several mass graves from the thousands of people who died during the Plague from around 1350-1400.

    If you look really carefully you can just barely make out some of the skulls in the wall of bones in the background. Look top right edge not quite a quarter of the way down. There are several others you can pick out in the right lighting.

    Next was an elevator up the North Tower (the South was stairs but it was about to close). This portion of the room was tiled artfully, with an insignia mosaic.

     

     I believe the white building in the background right of center is our hotel.

    We went back to the hotel about 5:45 to rest and charge our phones. We hung out in the lounge and were there when they brought dinner. We weren’t too hungry but had some bread and cheese, Dan tried some of the deli appetizers. (Also the main course was hamburgers which didn’t look at all interesting.) That was pretty much our dinner. We went out again a little after 7, heading towards the Natural History Museum which is open until 9pm on Wednesdays.

    You saw this earlier in the model. That’s the statue of Maria Theresa in the middle of this complex.

     

     Again, we were more interested in the building than the exhibits.

     

     A giant spider crab, a gift from a Japanese Emperor to one of the Austrian Emperors, Franz Joseph maybe. Giant. No kidding. Can you imagine that thing showing up on your dinner plate?
     The ceiling above the stairs I’m walking down below.

     

     The other museum across the square. I don’t recall which one it is but I’m sure we’ll make it over there at some point.

     

     The National Library at night.
    We walked back to the hotel the long way through town. Stopped at a gelato place we’d seen earlier; excellent of course. We do love the ice cream in Europe. Dan had a work conference call at 9:30. I went down to the steam room and sauna and hung out there while he worked. There was no one else there so that was nice. It was the perfect way to end a full day. According to Dan’s iPhone, we walked 10.24 miles today. And I bet we do it again tomorrow :)
    It is now 1:10am. Dan’s already asleep. I’m headed there any moment. Here’s a bonus shot for hanging out with us today….

     

     

     

  • Departure: Monday/Tuesday, 8/22-8/24: Sacramento & Raleigh to Vienna

    [The majority of this was written in the lounge Tuesday afternoon during my 5 hour layover.]

    Monday was the first full day off I’d had since 8/6 and I was ready for it. I was afraid it would be difficult to disconnect from work but I filled the day and somehow that helped. 5am gym visit, 7:30 dentist (passed with flying colors, yay), quick trip to Ace to get an extra plug adapter, breakfast at Cornerstone, turn the electricity on in the now vacant unit downstairs and talk to the property manager; chiropractic adjustment and a massage after. Let the vacation begin!

    So of course we’re coming from different coasts. Dan went from Raleigh to DC, spent the night and did a little sightseeing. If he told me he was doing that, I’d forgotten. I get a text that says “we might come to DC instead of Philadelphia for Thanksgiving.” We’re always planning somewhere :) Thanksgiving was possibly Charleston or Savannah before we landed on Philadelphia. (See my first entry about maximizing time off around holiday…) So we’ll see where we end up!

    My start wasn’t nearly as exciting. My Uber driver magically showed up within a minute of submitting the order. A whopping 7 minute ride to the train station from home, but I just didn’t feel like dragging my luggage 1.2 miles. She dropped me off at the Starbucks at the entrance and I got something to sustain me for the trip since it was about 1:30, breakfast was at 9:30, and I wouldn’t eat again until I got to the lounge around 5:30.

    I intentionally got to the train early so I could get a table with plugs. I ended up having the whole thing to myself the whole trip, despite 3 stops along the way to pick up more passengers. I’d planned on watching Netflix on the 1.5 hour train ride but couldn’t get a connection so just listened to music on my phone. I’ve done this trip to Richmond half-a-dozen or more times but always for work, and always worked during the ride. This was the first time I just sat and looked out the window, enjoying my music. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I usually have music on in the background while I’m doing something else – paying bills, working, travel planning. It was very relaxing. More disconnecting.

    I got off the train at Richmond and transferred to BART. The map below shows the route. At some point while I was on BART I get a text from Dan that he’s taken off from Dulles, heading to London.

    The blue line is Amtrak; the yellow and red lines correspond to BART’s color system: the yellow line to MacArthur in Oakland, transfer to the red line to SFO. Gotta love Google Maps.  I left Sacramento on the train at 2:10 and got to SFO right at 5pm. Maybe a little longer than if I’d had to drive – who knows in rush hour traffic – but no tolls or figuring out what to do with my car. Cheaper than a one way rental. And relaxing. Can’t beat that.

    I got through security pretty easily – despite them holding back my laptop for reasons they didn’t explain and I panicked at first when I didn’t see it come through with my luggage. Made it to the lounge by 5:30 so pretty quick despite that.

    It was pretty crowded. I’m standing on one end of it where the coffee was; that lone high top table dead center in the photo with the diet coke can on top and bags underneath – that’s me. Right by the food. Convenient. It was literally the only table open.

    The food was finger sandwiches, with snacks and drinks out of view on the wall to the right. I just nibbled a little since I knew I would get dinner on the plane.

    We boarded on time but took off almost an hour late. A passenger got sick and had to deplane and they had to track down the checked luggage.

    Dan bought my ticket on an upgrade voucher he earned and got me into business class for cheap (which is why I had lounge access) and this was the setup. Pretty comfortable. I ended up not watching any movies – nothing really grabbed me – and just read or listened to music when I wasn’t sleeping or eating. The green thing is my Kindle.

    I have to say the food was pretty good. I don’t remember getting meals served in courses in economy! To the left is a very fresh salad of beets, green beans and lettuce, with a nice light dressing. To the right is boiled quail eggs with a mayo dressing, and a grilled asparagus salad that was excellent. And a roll.

    This tasted better than it looks, a portabella mushroom ravioli in a nice sauce with spinach.

    Dessert was an apple cheesecake with a killer salty caramel sauce. Pretty amazing.

    I usually try to stay awake on these flights as part of a strategy for managing jet lag: stay up as long as you can then crash on the other side. But I haven’t been sleeping well, only 4-5 hours a night for the past few weeks, where I do better with at least 6.5-7. So I decided to give in and managed to sleep 3-4 hours on the plane. It felt good.

     

    Two courses for breakfast: fruit above, “traditional English” breakfast below which is grilled tomato, mushrooms, grilled Irish bacon, eggs, hash browns, and sausage. This was like Noon Britain time, 4am Pacific. I won’t need to each lunch.

    This is one of my favorite things about landing and turning on my phone: getting the text from whatever country I’m in confirming that my cell service kicked in.

    Verizon has a “pay as you go” international option that I signed up for after the first trip we did and wouldn’t travel any other way. You don’t have to worry about whether or not your phone will work nor ridiculous roaming charges. I probably spend about $100 a trip on the additional charges this way. It’s worth every penny.

    These were followed by several from Dan, who was leaving breadcrumbs for me to assist getting from the Vienna airport to the hotel. He’s thoughtful that way :) When he was in town a couple of weeks ago he left euros for me so I wouldn’t have to worry about currency while I was on my way here if I needed anything.

    I got off the plane about 2pm. Dan had also alerted me that I would probably have to change terminals. We always land in 5 and so far I think I’ve always flown out of 5. He was right. So this time I got to take about a 7 minute bus ride to Terminal 3.

    The photo above and the two below are of the British Airways lounge in Terminal 3. Not nearly the size of the gargantuan one in Terminal 5 but comfortable still and the amenities are the same.

     

     

    This is the little care package (minus the coffee) that you get when you fly business class: eye shades, ear plugs, socks, pen, toothbrush and paste, lip balm, 2 kinds of moisturizer.

    It is coming up on 4:30pm. Another 2.5 hours before I have to board. What to do? I just checked and the massages are all booked. Will take a shower at some point and otherwise just relax.
    ____________________

    It is now 11:21pm in Vienna, which is another hour east so now 9 hours time difference from home. (Or 6 if you’re Dan). The rest of the trip was completely uneventful. The flight was just a little over 2 hours, left and arrived on time. There was food again, but sort of normal airline fair (jerk chicken and salad). It worked though.I had a hard time staying awake on this leg. Will be happy to hit the bed!

    This was the “breadcrumb” Dan had sent me earlier. The sign in the airport pointing you to the train that is a direct shot from the airport to the city center, 16 minutes. And it just so happens to stop at the station that is directly across the street from our hotel. Dan met me at the train station and walked with me back to our room. It’s good to be here.

    Tomorrow we start. Ready!

  • Pre-Departure

    I typically do this entry a mere week before leaving, but I’m feeling the need for a little distraction this morning: a combination of tired of politics (oh-so-tired) and delaying the inevitable of absolutely needing to work today.

    Getting my vacation time cut in half with the new job has been a bigger adjustment than I thought it would be. We now focus our travels around holidays to maximize the number of days we can be gone and minimize the number of vacation days I have to take. It wasn’t that important before because we both had plenty of time. But that’s what brought us here: a 2 week trip ending on Labor Day weekend. While we agreed after the first couple of trips that 18-19 days was too much, the 8 days we did in Italy in January was a little more packed than even we like, but that was, again, about maximizing my paid time off. Two weeks is what we did on the Barcelona/Helsinki trip last year and it was just right. And since neither of us have taken any time off since January to speak of, We Are So Ready For This Trip.

    So where to this time? “I’m meeting Dan in Vienna in August.” I put that in quotes because that line has become a bit of a joke within certain circles, usually preceded by “I love saying this.” How did this become my life? As a good friend said yesterday, “unicorns and butterflies should fly out of your mouth after you say that.” There’s a weird juxtaposition of surreal-ness and matter-of-fact-ness to that statement. Surreal in that – who gets to say that, seriously? But the reality is this is our 6th international trip and the 4th time I’m meeting him there. Traveling together is the exception with us. And we really just have Bayer to thank for the fact that we get to keep going. So keep taking that aspirin! Well, more like: keep using that pesticide :)

    We’ve had a great year. Challenging since Dan’s been living in Raleigh literally since the day we got back from Italy in early January. I’ve been there once since, he’s been here three times. Once to get married on June 30 if you missed that! Work has been challenging for both of us, albeit in very different ways. And at some point in 2017 I will move there. This will likely be my last trip abroad for awhile where I’ll be leaving from the West Coast, so that will cut the travel time by at least 5 hours once I’m an East Coast guy.

    On the evening of Monday, 8/22, I fly out of SFO to London. I was supposed to meet Dan there but my flight time got pushed back and he would’ve had like a 10 hour layover to wait for me. So I meet him in Vienna instead, which sounds ever-so-more-romantic than “I’m meeting Dan at Heathrow.” Although I wouldn’t complain about that either.

    We will have 3 days on the ground in Vienna, then take a side trip that Saturday to Bratislava, Slovakia. Then it’s 2 nights each in Prague, Czech Republic, and Dresden, Germany; then 3 nights in Berlin and home.

    I’m very excited about this trip for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. We will get lots of WWII history, which we love, but there’s something just about being in that corner of the planet that is very back-to-my-roots for me. Many years ago a sister-in-law put together the Haas genealogy and I’ve certainly looked at it before, but not as closely as I have recently. The vast majority of my ancestors come from that specific region of Europe: southern Germany and, depending on the year of birth and who was in power at that moment, some combo of Czechoslovakia/Bohemia/Austria. I remember “bohonk” jokes as a kid directed at Granny, my mother’s mother, intended to be a playful insult since that’s considered s slur. While her grandparents aren’t listed – the only missing generation from the records – her in-laws both came from Czech/Bohemia, a point I’d missed all these years because we never knew our mother’s father, so haven’t thought much about his background.

    The big shock was: I never realized that my father’s maternal great-grandparents all have Bohemia listed as birthplace. Back when Bohemia was a place, not just a state of mind. It’s sort of coming back to me: my paternal grandmother was the “bohonk”, which is probably why Granny wouldn’t have liked the reference very much :)

    My mother was first generation American and all of her ancestry was from the Austria/Bohemia/Czechoslovakia region. All this time I thought my heritage was mostly German. By current boundaries, our great-great grandparents break out this way: 50% Czech (includes old boundaries of Bohemia and Moravia), 25% Austrian, 12.5% German (Bavaria), 12.5% already American (KY & TN). Mind you, that whole region including all of Germany, not just Bavaria, occupies a plot of land smaller than the state of Texas where I was born.

    I don’t have any expectations about any of that manifesting in any particular way, it will just make it more interesting somehow to be there.

    And I’m ready. Now, to work…

     

  • Gratitude for Grief (and how I got there)

    It’s been a long time since I’ve written. So much for my intention of at least once a month! I’ve had several inspirations but nothing fully thought out and life has been so full (not complaining) I haven’t made the time flesh to them out.

    I ran across what I’m about to share below by accident this morning; I’d completely forgotten about it. Reading it today seemed fitting, one week after Orlando where so many are trying to make sense out of a world that no longer seems to make any. This reminded me why I often respond so differently than some to what I see around me. These tenets of my spiritual worldview give me a kaleidoscope through which to view external events that allows me to interpret things in a way that helps mitigate anger and sadness and be productive where I want to be. I’m sharing this today hoping it might help you do the same.

    What follows is a talk I gave at a grief workshop at the “25thand Final River City Roundup,” a recovery conference for the LGBT community. I was on the executive committee for that conference for its last 4 years and had the privilege of being the Chair for the last one. (A whole other story!) I led this workshop with a friend and this was my contribution. This is it pretty much as I delivered it then, with some slight edits made for the non-recovery folks who may be reading this.

     

    RCRU Grief Workshop, Saturday, November 2, 2013

    How many of you have lost someone very, very close to you since you’ve been sober?

    This is a human experience that no one will escape, unless you’re not really living. So if you haven’t yet, you might as well start preparing now for how to respond to these events in sobriety, vs. drinking our way through pain as we did before. And while there’s no way to be completely prepared, there are some things you can start practicing today that will help give you tools to use when it happens.

    On January 2, 2010, I found my then-partner, Michael, dead in our bed at home of an overdose of prescription meds. He had been beaten in a fight he’d gotten into on New Year’s Eve, spending that night in the hospital and coming home New Year’s Day. He had cracked ribs and a purple, disfigured face to prove it. That purple was now mixed with the gray and lifelessness of death. Nothing can prepare you for that. My body, mind, and soul took a beating for months; I suffered a mild form of PTSD as I kept reliving that moment when I turned him over and realized what has happening. (And just for added perspective: on the morning of New Year’s Eve I was in San Antonio at my father’s funeral. I could feel my phone ringing while standing graveside, which was Michael leaving me a message that he was on the way to the hospital. But I digress…)

    As I started to think about how to move forward, I realized that there were things I’d been doing in the program for years that provided the foundation I needed to handle this with some amount of grace.

    1. Relentless practice of Step 10. “Nothing pays off like the restraint of tongue and pen.” The 12×12 [Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions] makes it clear that the point of this step is to never have to make an amends again, knowing full well that that is an impossible goal. But the closer we can get to it, the better off we are.

    Michael and I were in the process of splitting up at the time of his death and had some horrific scenes the last six months of his life, in particular the last 48 hours. He was lost in his own addiction, angry at me and the world, and could hurl some incredibly nasty stuff my way. What I’d learned through the process of Step 10 was to “take it without taking it in.” I could acknowledge what he was feeling without taking it personally. Reacting in kind – which I had done in our earlier years – only threw fuel on the fire and escalated it. Now, I was able to bring enough consciousness to the moment to realize he was sick and hurting, and from there I could decide not to engage with him in that way. I knew from experience that when I did that, eventually the fire would burn out. As it did that weekend. His last words to me the morning he died were “Thank you for taking care of me”.

    Had I not been able to restrain my tongue and act in a loving way instead of in anger (cuz it’s not like I didn’t feel it), he would have died with me owing a huge amends that I would never have been able to make. I’m blessed and grateful to not have that hanging over my head, and the realization of that early – like several hours after he died – gave me a sense of comfort that carried me a long way. That his final words to me were said in love and not anger is priceless.

    1. The Spiritual Experience appendix in the Big Book [Alcoholics Anonymous] suggests our higher power is an inner resource we didn’t know we had, and suggests we use it and call on it regularly. For me it looks like this: I believe we are spirits in search of a human experience. And the goal while we’re here is to experience it All. We don’t want to miss a thing! And in those experiences, we get to call forth spirit to help us respond, and we can chose who we want to be in that situation. This IS what living IS to me. I can only “be” loving if I ACT in a loving way. I can only BE compassionate if I ACT in a compassionate way. And it’s all choice. “Life is 10% what happens to us, 90% how we respond.”

    And some of what I chose to be in response to Michael’s death was an example: that I can experience it all without getting lost in it, and to show how that is done. That it’s OK to be angry, to be sad, and to express it whenever you need to; that in fact “expressing it” is “Pressing it Out” and will help you move on more quickly. While I had long ago given up what people thought of me, I knew that, if nothing else, I had sponsees and others who were watching to see how I would handle this and the question “how can I be of service?” took me out of myself and gave me a different perspective from which to make choices. And I chose honoring who he was while honoring my own truth about who I wanted to be, all while moving on. Like with most things in my life, it’s not either/or. It’s both/and. And I got a lot of feedback as the weeks went on about modeling “grace under pressure” so I’m grateful to know that pulled it off to some extent.

    1. Don’t ignore the pain, and bring gratitude to it.

    I’d never experienced a loss like this before. That I was still experiencing it 11 months later at Thanksgiving was shocking to me. It was on and off by that time but still very much there. I was tired of it and ready to be done with it, and angry in a way that it wasn’t over yet. I was tired of crying.

    I sat down to do some writing and finally was able to weave together some of the greatest lessons I’ve had through the development of my spiritual worldview in AA: that all things are relative, and that gratitude on a full stomach doesn’t count. We live in relative world – hot has no meaning without cold. If you were happy all the time, you wouldn’t know it. And it’s easy to be grateful when everything is going our way. Our spiritual muscles develop when we can bring gratitude to our poverty, to our joblessness, to our loss. And to our grief. I was able to see – finally – that the only reason I was experiencing grief in the first place is because I had once loved greatly. There’s the relativity. Grief, then, is nothing but evidence that I’m living and loving fully. If I want to avoid the grief, I’m going to have to avoid loving. And I choose to love.

    Today, I’m able to be grateful for the grief as a simple sign that I’m living a great life.

    —————-

    6/19/2016 Post Script:

    How do I use this today? For years I’ve been very selective about the news I feed my brain, how much I choose to let in. And then I try to be conscious about what, if anything, I want to do about it. I figured out a while ago that my brain will answer any question I ask it. “Why” is rarely, if ever, a productive question. So I’ve trained myself to ask different questions. I’m sharing below three of the questions that are the most helpful to me in getting my frame of mind into a healthier groove:

    Who do I want to be in response to this? This correlates to #2 above. I can choose to “be” anything I want to be: compassionate, apathetic, political, angry, sad, and endless array of other choices in any combination. But I choose it, rather than let myself be a victim of it. Choose it and Be That, taking whatever action or not might go with being that.

    From “A Course in Miracles:” Do I want to be a hostage to my ego or a host to god? This question gets my head out of self-centeredness, fear, anger and the like – immediately. As a host to god I’m more likely to go to love instead of fear, compassion instead of anger, action instead of hiding, reaching out instead of self-centeredness.

    What would love do now? Do that, whatever that means for you.

  • Home: Final Thoughts

    Home: Final Thoughts

    [Most of this was written during our layover in London on Saturday. It’s now 4:40am on Sunday, January 10. I’ve gotten a total of about 7 hours of sleep between the plane and last night. I woke up at 2:30am and by 3:30 it was clear I wasn’t going back to sleep so got up to do laundry, etc., so Dan would be able to pack when he got up. He leaves for Raleigh in about an hour.]

    I’m sitting in the business center of the British Airways lounge. We have about 3.5 hours before we board our flight, a direct to SFO. We’ll rent a car one-way to drive home, and Dan will return it this morning when he leaves for Raleigh for 2 weeks. That’s how we roll these days. We’re glad to have had a full month together with this great trip included!

    The lounge experience when traveling with Dan is always appreciated. I think most of you know but just in case: he goes to Europe 5-6 times a year, and Raleigh about once a month, so racks up a ton of miles on British Airways and American Airlines, and Hilton. It gets us regular access to lounges, which is especially nice on these longer layovers. A few pictures:

     This is the lounge in Heathrow we’ve been in the most over the years. It’s huge; this photos represent maybe one-third of it. Food and beverages are free for the taking.

     

     The coffee bar by the business center. I keep forgetting to take a photo of the main food area.
     Business center, with a wall of computers on the other side. That’s my backpack and laptop on the left.
    As I’d stated in the first blog entry for this trip, the impetus for its planning was vouchers Dan had that needed to be used or else they would expire. They got us two round trip business class tickets for not much more than the price of one economy ticket. Hard to pass that up. This is the first trip out of the four we’ve done to Europe that we actually sat together (for the most part) the whole way there and back. We’re usually not even on the same plane much less the same cabin. On this leg, he was across the privacy screen from me, which we kept down. It was a great way to travel. I loved seeing that face every time I looked up :)
    I was really tired Friday night and didn’t get the final day’s blog posted. It was 11pm by the time I got the photos prepped and there were almost as many as the day before and I knew I didn’t have the energy to do it, especially knowing we’d leave the hotel about 5:30am. We took a bus to the train station, a 6:05pm express train to the airport, and an 8am flight from Rome to London. I figured I could easily finish it in the lounge but I had trouble connecting to the internet.

     

    I worked on this instead in Word. I was hoping I could get it all done before we board – it would be the first time I actually finished a blog before I got home; usually it’s a day or two later. [Post Script: and, it’s a day later. Best laid plans and all that…]

     

    This trip’s blog was really fun; there seemed to be more interaction with all of you than previous ones. Probably the subject matter – Italy is a prime destination spot and, like previous blogs, the interaction splits along two distinct lines: 1) vicarious traveling for those who haven’t been and 2) memory lane for those who have. Either way, we enjoy it. And it’s definitely a labor of love. At a minimum, the whole process – which in the most general sense is two stages: photo editing and writing – takes two hours a night. And I wouldn’t do it any other way; no way I could remember everything if I waited and did it later. Day 7 of this trip (Vatican and Capitoline) set the record at 3.5 hours. But it also had the most photos ever at over 70. When we started this thing we thought 25 photos a day was a lot. Average now is probably 50 or so.  

     

    But it’s all worth it for the memories we have for later – and I do enjoy reading them later and do probably more than I should! And for the true appreciation we get from so many for doing it. We thank you for coming along, and you’re welcome.  I’m also convinced that we – OK me for sure – wouldn’t pay as close attention to things as we do when we’re out and about if it wasn’t for the blog. And that attention in and of itself helps ingrain the trip in my head in a way that I’m positive wouldn’t happen on the same magnitude otherwise.

     

    As is the tradition, we finish with a few thoughts about our experiences this time around. Some will be generalized around Italy based on similarities we saw across all four cities (Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome). Some will be just about Rome.

     

    Italy:
    1. Oh My God the smokers! You’d think we’d be used to it by now. Europeans definitely smoke more than folks in the USA. (Or at least California.) It apparently gets worse the further south you go. Dan agreed with my assessment that from bad to worse the order of “ew” is Germany, France, Spain, Italy. While they can’t smoke indoors in public spaces, they do smoke in all of those cute outside eateries and cafes. Which means we typically sit inside. Friday night was the exception only because the music was so loud; but we knew we’d have to tolerate the noise as soon as the table next to us lit up. (And for those of you won’t don’t know: Dan has never smoked before but has a very sensitive nose; I’m typical militant ex-smoker from hell.)

     

     1. Tied for first place: perfumes. Again, Oh My God. Men and women, but definitely worse with the women. We’ve never experienced such an over-perfumed society before. Dan has always been very sensitive to it, and my sensitivity to it has increased over the years with him as I wore less and less, and progressed this year after working in a scent-free environment. Just walking down the sidewalk you practically pass out from the fumes. And the worst? Perfume attempting to hide the cigarette smell. Yeah, no. It just makes it that much more disgusting.

     

    3. People are nice to us wherever we go. When we went to Paris in May of 2014, many people told us “Parisians are rude, expect to not be treated well.” We didn’t experience that. We were told that Italians were the worst. We didn’t experience that, either. Everywhere we’ve been we’ve never had any problems. You expect good treatment at hotels and such; but even restaurants and cafes, servers are always very nice. We don’t shop so can’t really comment on retail establishments. So don’t be afraid!

     

     4. Most everyone we encountered could speak some English. Granted, we’ve never ventured into rural areas (although we will one day) and it’s probably very different out there. But in the now many cities in Europe we’ve visited, English is pretty universal. That said, it definitely helps to have learned a bit of the language before you go. Basic stuff like greetings, please, thank you, can I have the check?, where is the toilet? This also goes a long way, we believe, towards creating a sense of goodwill, which may facilitate the results we get in #3. We’d heard Italians were less likely to know English than their fellow northern Europeans but that wasn’t our experience. This despite putting zero effort to learn the language for this trip because we were so dang busy leading up to it. It’s not like Netherlands or Finland (where the answer to “do you speak English is ‘of course’”), but in the same ball park as Germany and France (“little bit”).

     

    5. You better like pasta. It’s true. Italians eat a lot of it. Dan put himself on a tortilla moratorium after just 4 days in Mexico last year. I sense the same thing coming with pasta.

     

    6. Especially compared to London or Helsinki, restaurant prices were somewhere between inexpensive and reasonable, everywhere we went. We ate a lot of good food for not a ton of money.

     

    7. Although we’ve seen lots of American stuff in other countries (Subway and The Body Shop have been oddly ubiquitous), about all we really saw here was McDonald’s. And saw it in every city. But that was about it. I only saw one Subway the whole trip in Rome. And it finally hit me on the train to the airport Saturday morning: no Starbucks. So I looked it up and sure enough, Starbucks made a strategic decision to stay out of Italy, despite (or because of) the café culture of Italy being the inspiration for Starbucks. Google “no Starbucks in Italy” and there are a bunch of articles about it. American music, however, is still what you hear everywhere you go. And yet it still surprises me every time.

     

    8. Koreans (and other diversity observations). Dan commented on it in every city we were in: He estimates 50% or more of all of the Asian travelers we saw were Korean. China has like 1.4 billion people. Japan, 127 million. South Korea, 50 million. Why is there such a disproportionate number of Korean visitors in Italy compared to other Asian cultures? His hypothesis is they learn English in school so are more comfortable traveling individually or as families, where Chinese may tend to travel in clans because of the language barrier. That said, every city we were in, but especially Milan and Rome, were very diverse. Not only did we hear perhaps the most number of languages spoken on the streets ever, things were  also likely to be written in 4-6 languages, especially at airports and train stations. When we got to the Rome Airport – Leonardo da Vinci – we saw the Arrival/Departure board flash in Italian, English, German, French, Russian and Mandarin.

     

    Rome
    Rome was definitely our favorite city of the four, and if you’re Dan perhaps your most favorite city of any visited yet. (I’m still undecided but it’s definitely a contender.) We’re so glad we did it last, although we went back and forth on where it was in the lineup. It underscored what we already knew: we’re city boys. And we like history, and culture, and art, and a variety of quaint little neighborhoods that each have their own personality, and there’s a ton of all of that in Rome; perhaps more than any other place we’ve been. Makes sense, don’t it? It is the birthplace of western civilization. We will definitely be back, especially because 2.5 days is just not enough.

     

    Here are a couple of things we found peculiar to Rome, and they both very much go together:

     

    1. Pickpockets. These guys (at least all we saw were men) are aggressive and they pose as staff of wherever you are, attempting to help. We mostly experienced it in the Rome train station, and we were batting them away like flies. “No, that’s OK, we got it.” They offer to help – show you where something is, how to use ticket machines, etc. – and then stay Very Close To You while you’re doing whatever you’re doing. We kept checking our pockets every few steps to make sure we had everything. Dan lost his room key for sure, and wonders if that’s how. It’s so bad, the AMT-like machine where you buy your train tickets have warnings on them, essentially saying: only allow uniformed staff to assist you, everyone else is pickpocket!

     

    2. Scalpers and other visitor scams. We noticed it the first day as we were walking up to the Colosseum. This very loud announcement about where to buy tickets, and what the actual ticket prices were, with a “be aware” message of the folks on the street trying to sell you “skip the line” tickets that wouldn’t have that effect, or other scalping scams. There were people hanging out the subway entrance at the train station doing the same thing; we saw it at the Vatican, too. If this has happened in other cities, we didn’t notice it. Here, it seemed to be everywhere.

     

    This was the shortest trip we’ve done to Europe. Eight days on the ground worked pretty well; wouldn’t want to do less than that. The next one will be a bit longer, and it’s already booked for the last week of August heading into Labor Day weekend. That will start in Vienna, with a side trip to Bratislava, Slovakia. Then Prague, Dresden (Germany), and finally Berlin. That will sort of complete our initial circle around Europe. We discussed several ideas about the one after that, but lots can happen between now and then so I won’t attempt to comment on it now.
    We’ll be back in August and hope to see you then.
    Steve & Dan