I e-mailed this in daily installments to my friends, and this is just a compilation of those e-mails. I have corrected some bits of misinformation, and added some other corrections in square brackets [ like this ].
Day 1 Thu.-Fri., Sep. 8-9, 2016 Safe trip, but tiring
I flew from O'Hare to Berlin on Air Berlin. I've flown on them before, and it's a fine, no-frills airline. The seat was comfortable enough, until about the last hour, which was OK. The aisles were narrower than I remember them from the last flight. The only problem I had was with the sound for the movies. It was controlled by a sliding bar, but it didn't want to slide. It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to get the sound turned up, and it was still not good. Some dialogue was fine, and other parts were hard to catch. So I mostly watched action movies, where the dialogue wasn't so important, though the missing talk sometimes made the plot hard to follow.
I was seated way in the back of the plane, and decided to wait for everyone else to get off before getting up. Then I noticed a lot of the other passengers in my area looking toward the back of the plane. I turned and saw there was another door at the rear, and we wouldn't have to wait for the rest of the plane to empty – very nice.
I had a layover in Berlin of about an hour and a half, then on to Budapest on a smaller plane. The baggage collection area was a long hike from the gate, and I had almost reached it when I remembered I needed to get some local money. So I went back to the main part of the terminal, with lots of shops, looking for an ATM. After a long search, I finally asked a clerk in a duty-free shop if there were any ATMs, and he told me where to find one. It was next to a free-standing stairway, and I had walked around the wrong side of it earlier.
Then I went down to get my suitcase, and found ATMs all over the place. But no suitcase. I had spent so much time looking for an ATM that my luggage had been removed from the rack. I asked an airport employee where it might be, and she pointed me to the Air Berlin service desk. And there was my suitcase, waiting for me. I bought a Budapest Card, which gives unlimited travel on buses and subways. Then I took a long walk to find the car rental desk. I wasn't picking up the car yet, but I wanted to know where to find it.
Then back to the main part of the terminal to catch the bus, which takes you to the subway, which takes you downtown. I had time on the trip to figure out what stop I needed at the end. The only problem was the transfer from the bus to the subway. The signs pointed toward the subway station, but if I followed the signs, I would have had a long flight of stairs to climb. So I went back to the bus stop, which was by a big store. There were overhead passages connecting it to the subway terminal, and an escalator! Saved!
When I got downtown, the subway station had a nice large map, showing where the buses ran, so it was easy to pick a bus that would drop me off near my hotel. I had a map showing the hotel's location, but it was not very detailed. I knew I was in the right neighborhood, but didn't know exactly where it was. I saw a nice, imposting building with a golden stag sign out front, and a menu, but no name. So I went down the street a bit, and finally asked the proprietress of a book shop if she knew where it was. She didn't, but, looking at the address for the hotel, she was able to point me to the right street.
The Hotel Orion Varkert is quite nice, with large comfortable rooms and decent wi-fi. It was almost 2 pm Budapest time, and way later in body time. My plan had been to take a nap, then head out for the Basilica and the National Museum. HA!
I napped until about 6, then turned on the netbook to look up a restaurant. And there was the place with the golden stag – very highly recommended and right around the corner from me. Venison goulash or duck breast with duck liver – wonderful! So I went there, and found that it's closed. I went back to the hotel and asked the desk clerk for a recommendation, and he sent me to another place just beyond the closed restaurant. I had a nice meal of their venison goulash, with ice cream for dessert, and a half liter of beer for about $20 US. That includes the normal tip. I rounded up because the forint is not worth a lot. I bought my Budapest Card for 9900 forints, and got a coin back from my 10,000 forint bill.
The beer was Soproni Demon, a dark, slightly sweet beer. It's OK, but nothing to go out of your way for. After dinner I went out for a walk and a smoke. I walked up toward the castle area, and it wasn't too bad a walk, even tired out. I stopped on my way back to the hotel to finish my pipe on a park bench near an underground parking garage. While I sat there, I saw the same guy in a small red car come out of the garage three times. But I never saw him go back in. There must be another entrance, but I couldn't figure out what he was doing.
Anyway, it's late, I'm tired, and there's lots to see tomorrow.
Update: I haven't used this netbook for sending out these vacation diaries in quite a while. In the meantime, I have changed my email password. I forgot about that before leaving home, and my memory of the new password is wrong, apparently. So, I have called Dolores, told here where I keep my passwords, and asked her to text it to me. So this will reach you later than it should.
Day 2 Sat., Sep. 10, 2016 I can't get there from here, but I'm still popular
Budapest is a very nice city. There are multi-story buildings, but no skyscrapers, so it doesn't have the overbearing feel of a lot of modern cities. The streets are clean, the people are friendly, the traffic is light enough to jaywalk almost anywhere. The old town on Castle Hill is brick and stone post-medieval, but still attractive. Few outstandingly beautiful buildings, but nothing ugly, either.
My plan had been to walk to the Military Museum, and then back again. But I was still a bit tired from yesterday, so I checked the bus routes. One went from near my hotel to a block or so from the museum, as the crow flies. Not being a crow, I had to climb up a long series of steps to get to the top. I knew the museum was on top of a hill, so I was not surprised by the stairs, but they were a challenge. On the other hand, walking both ways would have been tiring, too.
I got there about 9:30, and the museum didn't open until 10, so I sat on a bench and waited. The first thing I wanted to see was a collection of medieval weapons, but the guide said it was closed for the next hour and a half to accommodate a tour group. But when he saw my disappointment, he let me go in. I timed it just right – he came to throw me out just as I had finished seeing everything.
It was not a great collection, nor very large, but there were a few interesting pieces. I then took a quick look at the set of rooms on Hungary under the Communists. Even less interesting, but there were a few items of note. Some of the 1950s rifles were still bolt action, with a 5 shot clip. And there was an AK-47 with a weird contraption on top – it looked like a scope, but it had a large box attached to it. [The picture I took of it identifies it as a night scope.]
The largest part of the museum was devoted to Hungary's role in the First World War. There were examples of uniforms and weapons, and descriptions of some of their campaigns, with maps. They also had some big maps, one showing the normal size of the armies on all sides, and the size after mobilization, and another showing the location of prisoner of war camps on the continent. Russia had POW camps as far east as Vladivostok.
I left the museum and started out through the old town, intending to catch a number of sights, and end up at the Castle. I had just started when a couple of young Hungarians stopped me. They said they had an assignment to photograph someone with a beard – this is the third time this has happened, there were two others in Germany last time I went. I'm getting famous over here!
I went into the Matyas Church, named after the early king who helped finance it. You buy your admission tickets across the square from the church, which seems odd, but it keeps the crowd away from the church until they've paid. The church is nice, with patterns painted over all the walls. But it's not thrilling. Nothing wrong, and parts are very fine, but not thrilling. It did have some nice stained glass, but my new camera couldn't handle it except in small batchs. So I have a few pictures of single pieces of glass, but no whole windows. I'll have to read the manual to see what to do about that.
I kept working down toward the Castle until I came to the Wine Festival. You had to pay to go in, and I wasn't interested in it. But you couldn't go further without going in. They did leave a narrow, fenced off walk-way to take you to the National Gallery, which I wanted to see, so I went.
The gallery is large, four joined buildings with lots of rooms. There were some nice paintings and sculpture, and some boring stuff as well. There were two paintings by the same artist, with side paintings he had done as studies for the main painting. That was nice to see. I wandered through most of it and realized I had come to the other entrance. So I thought I could get out there and avoid the Wine Festival, but a sign at the door said only people who had tickets to the Festival could go out that way. So I had to walk all the way back through the museum to get to where I had come in. I was already getting tired of walking, and didn't appreciate having to retrace my steps.
There were still two more places I wanted to see on Castle Hill, but the Festival was in the way. One, a famous decorative fountain, was apparently enclosed by the Festival. The other, the Budapest Historical Museum, was not, but there was going to be no easy way to get there. I decided to skip it, and go on the the National Museum. I had planned on going there yesterday, but didn't have time or energy. Now I had time, though my feet were complaining.
I could take a bus most of the way to the museum, and I knew where to find the bus. But I didn't know how far back I would have to go to find a place to get down from the hill. Right in front of me was the funicular rail that takes people up and down the sheer side of the hill. So I took that, and walked around to the bus stop. At the other end, I had another two or three blocks to walk to get to the museum, so I got there tired out already.
But it was worth it. They had a nice, large exhibit of the history of Hungary from the Ice Age on. There were nice archaeological finds from all the different time periods, some ordinary, like pottery and beads, but some unusual ones, too. They had a chariot wheel with a bronze hub and spokes, and bronze reinforcements for the wooden wheel. The section on the Magyars was especially nice, as it showed their invasion of Hungary, and most of the rest of western Europe. I had always heard how the Frankish emperors had been worried about them – now I knew why. Some of their raids took them to the toe of Italy.
I rested for a while on a nice comfortable couch in the museum, then came back to the hotel for a rest before dinner. Last night's meal was good, but I wanted to try someplace else. The clerk at the hotel told me to try Vaci Street. I kept finding places online that had both lovers and haters. I even saw a Budapest tourist page criticizing some of the places I had been looking at. So I tried a slightly different neighborhood, and found a nice sounding place, the Karpathia.
It was right across from the bus stop when I got off, so it didn't take any extra walking. I had fried duck leg and roast duck breast (just two small pieces), with cabbage strudel and plums. The cabbage strudel put me off a bit, but I tried it. It looks like a strudel, but stuffed with ground up cabbage. It doesn't taste like sauerkraut, or cabbage, or cole slaw, but it was good enough to eat it all. The duck leg was very good, with crisp skin. And the two bits of duck breast were tender and tasty.
I didn't do dessert – nothing on the menu tempted me, and I was pretty full, anyway. By Hungarian standards, this was an expensive meal, 7000 forints including tip. But that works out to about $21.25 American, so I wasn't going to complain.
Tomorrow I pack up, get the rental car, and set out to see more of Hungary, and the rest.
Day 3 Sun., Sep. 11, 2016 Even my GPS can't find my hotel
I discovered today that I had forgotten two things at home. Forgetting either was OK, but both was not good. One was the dual FM jack to connect my Walkman to the car stereo. I bought this a few years ago when I had the same problem, and it should have been with the other connectors for the Walkman. But it wasn't, and I didn't think to look for it before I left. The other was my thumb drive with my music that I have in my car. Either one would give me music in the car, neither gives me none. However, I do have a spare thumb drive with me, and I can move songs from my Walkman to the thumb drive, so I will have music.
The car I got is a Skoda Fabia, and it's a standard economy car. Not too much acceleration, but it can hit the top highway speeds. It drives well, has a big trunk, and the gears shift easily. And it doesn't seem to be a gas hog. What more could you ask for?
My first stop was Visegrad, north of Budapest on the Hungarian Grand Prix course. Unlike some of the other courses, Hungary does not mark its curves, even when they come back to back to back. It's like driving in Ireland, except the roads are wider, and the curves aren't marked.
I got to the castle safely, anyway, but couldn't get in. The GPS said, “You have reached your destination”, and I could see that I had, but the parking lot was closed. It seems the lot, while not small, was not big enough for everyone who wanted to see the castle today. I passed by, turned around, and by the time I got back, some cars were leaving, and they were letting others in, including me.
I'm glad, because it's a nice castle. It's a ruin, but fairly complete, and you can walk around pretty much everything. They do the tourist thing properly, with little booths where you can shoot arrows, or throw knives, or get your picture taken on a throne. It's all silly, but it helps pay the maintenance bill.
It was nice to walk around it, and the view up and down the Danube was spectacular. Most, if not all, of the weapons on display were reproductions, but they did give a fair amount of detail about the castle's history. This used to be the main royal castle, and they had a replica of the crown on display. And they had a model of the castle showing how it was connected to its outworks. Normally, a gatehouse would be near the main castle, and the bailey would be fairly flat. Here, the gatehouse was at the bottom of the hill, and the bailey went straight uphill.
Next I went to Esztergom to see the basilica. It is huge, with a wing at each side that gives it an odd appearance. Inside, there is no stained glass, but it does have a pair of very large bronze panels at the top of the nave. It's impressive, with marble everywhere, but nothing like any cathedrals you might find in Germany, France, or England.
I started out for my hotel near Bratislava, a 2 hour drive away. The countryside was very nice, very home-like with lots of corn fields. Crossing the Danube put me in Slovakia, but it was hard to tell by the looks, or the signs. Signs you can't read in Hungarian look pretty much like signs you can't read in Slovakian.
Eventually, Tom-Tom said “here's your hotel”. And I looked at the building, and at the picture on the reservation form I had printed out, and realized they were not the same. This was a problem. Apparently I had mistyped the coordinates for the hotel. And now I had no way to find it. So I went to a gas station and asked the man behind the counter where it was. He didn't speak English, but he had a little German, and, with the aid of a map, he showed me the general area of the hotel.
Tom-Tom did not want to find the hotel, rejecting its name, and even the street. But I drove to the right town, and asked at another gas station. The girl at the register said her English wasn't so good, but I should talk to her co-worker, taking a break outside. He spoke fairly good English, and he and his buddy knew the area. They gave me mostly good directions, and ended up with the best information. They said that Hotel Agatka was the old name, the new name was Hotel Kamila.
Tom-Tom like Kamila, recognized it as a hotel, and knew the way to get there. Which was good, because the directions I had from the 2 guys were not quite good enough. I might have found the place with them, but the name made all the difference. I mentioned this to the girl at the hotel, and she said, “No, Kamila was the old name, Agatka is the new name.” Which is why Tom-Tom did not know about it.
It's a nice hotel – it looks like a mansion, and may have been one in a former life. The room is big, with an enormous bathroom – my bathroom at home would just about fit in the empty floor space in this one. There's a small bar, and a good sized dining room. Tonight there was just me and a couple who seemed to be finishing up a very prolonged dinner. The had completed their meal, and it had been cleared away, when I arrived. They were still finishing their dessert when I left.
Day 4 Mon., Sep. 12, 2016 Bratislava is closed on Mondays, so I went to the country, where everything is closed, too.
This hotel is very nice, as I said yesterday, but it is not air-conditioned. Normally I would not care, but the weather has been very warm, mid to upper 80s. I am fine with that, but not at night. The nights do get comfortable, but a closed hotel room doesn't. So last night I opened the windows, and got some really nice cool air. And mosquitos. I had thrown off the comforter, because it was too warm, but Europeans don't seem to believe in top sheets. So I had no protection from getting bit. Tonight I think I will use the bottom sheet as a top sheet, since it's not fitted. Fortunately, the birds did not come in. In the morning, I looked out the window and saw a huge flock of sparrows or wrens or something, flitting about, coming to rest on the wall near my room, then taking off again.
The guidebook was very clear, all the museums and places of interest that I wanted to see would be closed on Monday. So I decided to visit some places just north of Bratislava, and none of them were supposed to be closed. This proves you shouldn't believe everything you read.
My first stop was in Svaty Jur to see an interesting old church. I found it without any trouble, then hiked up the hill to it. And the door was locked. So I went back to the car and headed for the next town. As I drove off, it occurred to me that I might have been there too early, since it wasn't yet 10 am. I thought about trying again at the end of the day, but by then I was too tired to care.
The next stop was Modra, and I had had some trouble picking which church I was looking for. It's the church of St. John the Baptist, but they don't call it that in Slovakian, of course. The best I could guess was that it was right next door to a Protestant church. And Tom-Tom took me right there. Except that there were two Protestant churches – a German Lutheran one, and a Slovakian Lutheran one. But I could see another church steeple a few blocks away, and tried that one. It was Catholic, and the outer door was open, but the inner door was locked, and you could only look through the grill. This story will be continued later.
Cerveny Kamen, Red Stone Castle, was my third stop for the day. I got there at 11:20 and saw on the welcoming sign that an English guided tour started at 11:30. What I didn't know was how far it was from the entrance to the ticket office. I made it in time, and went to wait with some other English speakers. They asked if I was the guide, and I said if I knew enough about the place to guide them, I wouldn't need to be there.
Soon the guide showed up, with a big bunch of keys of all sizes on his belt. His English was not perfect, but acceptable, and he gladly took our corrections or suggestions for words he wasn't sure of. He explained the history of the castle, and its various remodelings. The original castle on the site had been bought by Jacob Fugger, the extremely rich financier, trader, and mine owner of the 16th century. He wanted a safe place to store his copper between mining and selling. So he tore down the earlier castle, and built a bigger, stronger one.
The guide mentioned that most of the furniture and weapons were from other collections, the previous owner having to flee the country after the Soviets arrived. Even though the furnishings were from different collections and time periods, they were very nice, some really beautiful. The weapon collection was not large, but they had a nice large flamberge. They also had a left-handed flintlock musket.
There was a long section of paintings of the family men, all in the same clothes, and with almost identical faces. Apparently the latest of them wanted his ancestors to look like him. There was a painting of a woman, whom the guide said was supposed to be the most beautiful woman of her time. The guide was honest enough to point out that the painting had been done about 200 years after she died. The guide showed other tricks, too. In the chapel, he knocked against the marble altar, and noted that it was actually wood made to look like marble. It was cheaper and less weight for the floor to hold.
After going through the upper rooms, the guide led us into the cellars. They were immense – 75 meters long, 15 meters wide and 9 meters tall. Fugger had a lot of copper to store. The guide said that the cellars are still used today for concerts and filming rock videos. All in all, it was a very good tour. The guide’s English wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and he certainly knew all about the castle.
The other people on the tour were an American couple, their son and their son's Slovakian wife. After the tour I had lunch, then went to the Castle's tavern for a beer (half a liter of good beer (Staropramen) for about $1.65). They were also there, but I didn't want to intrude on them and sat at another table. When they left, they stopped by and chatted with me. The Slovakian wife told me about another very nice castle nearby. I then mentioned my problems finding the church in Modra. She knew Modra, and told me how to find the church. So I thanked her for both tips, and looked forward to an afternoon of fun.
The castle was Smolenicky Zamok and Tom-Tom took me to some place with hrad in its name. It was a castle, I guess – I never got close enough to find out. The track (road suggests something way better) was rough and did not look like the way to a great castle, and the renovation sign seemed to indicate rebuilding. So I tried the Tom-Tom entry with Zamok in it, and it worked. I went up and up a pretty tall hill and finally got to the castle. It's beautiful – I got a picture from below on my way up – and closed.
So I figured I could at least get to see St. John the Baptist's church, and headed for Modra again. It was on my way back to the hotel, so I was going that way anyway. I drove into town, past the locked Catholic church, past the 2 Lutheran churches, and saw another church. The road had split, and this church was just visible on the other fork of the road.
So I tried to get to it, but there were a number of one way streets, and I couldn't see it because of trees and buildings. I stopped at a police station to ask directions, but it was locked up. (I have seen many police stations in many parts of Europe in all my travels, but I think I have only seen one that was actually open.) I finally found the right street on my own and parked near it. I walked into the huge grounds – it includes its own cemetery – and went up to the door. I was apprehensive, as there were obvious signs of work being done. And, of course, it was locked. I checked later on Google maps, and I had found the right church at last, it just didn't matter.
After that, I just came back to the hotel. I was going to try another restaurant tonight, but the couple I saw at dinner last night were at breakfast this morning with their young daughter. And I haven't seen any other customers. And I thought that business might be slow for the hotel. They are setting up as a resort type of hotel – there's a golf course nearby, they have a swimming pool, and a pavilion for outdoor dining, and other pavilions for partying. So I will contribute to their success by having dinner here again.
Later: Well, maybe they didn't need my help. There 's a party of 6 to 8 people having dinner in the outdoor pavilion, a couple of young women in the bar, and a couple of guys on my floor going into their own rooms as I was going to dinner. Still, it was worth eating here – I got double portions of Wiener schnitzel.
Day 5 Tue., Sep. 13, 2016 Tom-Tom doesn't want to let me park the car.
There were several people at breakfast this morning, so maybe I was wrong about their doing well. The man who waited tables the last two days wasn't there, but two young women were. He gave me a menu, they didn't. He had no problem when I ordered a bacon omelet. The women I asked wasn't sure that was allowed. On the other hand, the bacon omelet I had yesterday was basically just three eggs fried on top of some bacon. Today's bacon omelet looked like a proper omelet, but it had sausage instead of bacon. I didn't complain.
I got to Bratislava before 10 am, and pulled into a very conveniently located parking garage. I noticed that the parking ticket I got at the gate had the license number of my car on it. That's good technology. And when I paid before leaving, the machine spit out the ticket, and a receipt. The parking garage had a large map of the city, and I marked on a smaller map I had just where to go to see what I wanted.
I started with Michael's gate, the last remaining gate from the old town walls. It serves now as the city museum of weapons. It's not a big collection, just 5 rooms, but that's all the space they had, because each room is another floor on the way to the top. They had the usual assortment of swords and halberds and guns – nothing really special, but nothing bad, either. Though there was a large musket barrel with a crack and hole about 6 inches down from the muzzle.
My next stop was going to be St. Martin's church, and the easiest way to get there was to just follow the street from the gate. Most of the old town in Bratislava is a pedestrian zone, and the streets are full of people. There were several tour groups following their leaders up and down the streets. Which is good for the local economy, because every other store was a souvenir shop.
Someone in Bratislava has a puckish sense of humor. There's a bronze statue of a Napoleonic soldier leaning against the back of a bench, minus one boot, with his toes sticking out of his torn socks. And there's a guy in a hard hat, peeping up out of a manhole.. And there was a fake statue. I saw this goldenish statue of a knight, not very well sculpted. And then I saw his eyes move – it was a guy dressed up, with goldenish face paint. I saw a couple of people do this in Berlin a few years ago. I guess that's their job – hoping people will drop some money in their hat. I added my bit.
St. Martin's church was quite large, and fairly nice. The vaulting is good, especially at the end of the apse. There is some nice stained glass, but I still can't get any good pictures of it. There's a nice statue of St. Martin dividing his cloak to share with a beggar, and St. Martin is depicted as a Hussar. There are two immense altarpieces on side altars, and a very garish chapel to some fellow who gave lots of money to the poor.
I went to the Slovakian National Gallery next, but it's mostly being remodeled, and only a small part of the collection is on display. There were a few nice pieces, but it didn't take long to see everything. It was barely noon, and I had already seen three of the four things I wanted to see. Of course, I was going to finish off by just walking around the town, so that was OK.
The Old Town Hall was originally several residences that were taken over for the town government. Over time, they were replaced and remodeled and reworked into what they have today. They haven't changed everything, though. There's still a cannonball from Napoleon's attack in 1809, stuck in the wall next to a second floor window. Some of the rooms have the most wonderful painted ceilings, and there are a couple of beautiful doors. I took a picture of the lock mechanism on one (it covered the entire back), and the matron watching the collection pulled the door closed to show the front – beautiful!
There was a really nice scroll from an emperor, giving Bratislava the right to a coat of arms, and a page from some missal from 1487 with musical notation. As the exhibit progressed, it got to more modern times, with examples of the stuff of ordinary, everyday life. There were sewing machines, clothes, candy boxes, all kinds of things right up to 1948. And nothing to represent the years under the Communists.
It was still not yet 2 pm, so I walked around the town a bit, and realized that I had seen most of it. It's not a big old town, but it is pretty nice. It's mostly late 16th to 18th century architecture, nothing medieval or renaissance. But it is attractive, and easy to get around in.
So I left earlier than I had planned, which was actually good. I forgot that the reception desk at my hotel in Vienna closed at 4 pm. I started out down the autobahn, and Tom-Tom said I would get to the hotel by 3:48. I drove like fury, but worried about what traffic in Vienna might be like in the late afternoon. No problem, I got to the hotel at 3:50. Even better, I found a place to park on the street, just 50 feet from the door.
A very friendly woman, who spoke excellent English, got me checked in, showed me the room, and warned me to move my car as soon as possible. I had already set GPS coordinates for 3 different Park & Ride garages, and she suggested one of them as being closest. So I got everything of value out of the car, except the Tom-Tom, and started out.
Tom-Tom took me to the coordinates I had given it, but they were wrong. I had had some trouble figuring out just where this garage was on Google maps, and I must have guessed wrong. So I looked to see if Tom-Tom had it in its database. And it did. And it took me right past the entrance before saying “you have reached your destination.”
Now I knew where the garage was, because I had just driven past it. So I asked Tom-Tom to take me there again, and it did, almost. I was just exactly alongside of the garage, with a river between us. So I asked a third time. And Tom-Tom led me to the right side of the river, and was going to go right past the garage, but I was ready. I saw the sign showing a turn-off for the garage, and the entrance lane, and I finally got in.
I got the car parked, took the Tom-Tom and my subway maps, and went looking for the subway, and couldn't find it. I found lots of signs for it, but no instructions on how to get to it. I finally asked someone, and was told to go out this door, up those stairs, and walk that way. And sure enough, there it was. The hotel is only a few blocks from the subway, so it's not so bad. I can get a 3 day pass for the entire public transit system, and a bus runs from here to the Cathedral.
Then I started thinking about dinner. I tried Googling restaurants in Vienna, and got lots of places that were expensive, too trendy, or didn't serve anything I wanted. Then I went to Google maps, because I knew that if you looked for hotels, it would also show you restaurants. A pretty thin list it was, too. There were three just down the street from me – one served only sandwiches, one was called “I Love Veggie Burgers”, and the third seemed odd.
So I just went out, partly to check the local choices in the flesh, and partly to see if there wasn't some other place to eat. The only surprise I had was that the third restaurant wasn't open at 7 pm. But I got to the end of the street and saw Tony's across the street. It sounded Italian, but I didn't care.
Fortunately, it was Austrian, and good. I had pork Cordon Bleu, which is a breaded pork cutlet stuffed with ham and Swiss cheese. I had a half liter of an anonymous dark beer – it came in a bottle which I didn't see, and was on the menu only as “dark beer” - which was OK but not great. With the check, the waiter also brought me a shot of imitation Amaretto, on the house, as an aid to digestion. Very nice touch.
Day 6 Wed., Sep. 14, 2016 Art – Old exhibitions are good; new ones, not so much
I had two full days of sightseeing planned for Vienna, but I wasn't sure what order to see the sights. I had originally planned to see the Kunsthistorisches Museum (that's art history museum for those of you who don't speak German) tomorrow, but I changed my mind this morning. It's the farthest from my hotel, and my local bus doesn't go there. But I was going to the subway station to buy a three day pass, and the streetcar from there would drop me off right by the museum.
These 3 day passes are great, but I don't know why I bought one. I had one in Budapest, and no one ever asked to see it. There are no turnstyles at the subway, and the bus drivers don't even bother to look. Same here, you can just get on the bus or subway without a ticket and no one's the wiser. I suppose if the transit cops ever did a spot check, you'd be in trouble, but they don't. Anyway, it cost 16.50 euros, which is just under 7 regular tickets. I've already used mine for 5 trips, and it's only the first day. Damned if I know how they stay in business.
Anyway, I got to the museum, which is quite a large rectangular building. I didn't see a door on the short end facing the street the tram took, so I went up the side street. Still no door. It was on the other long side, so I wound up going 3/4 of the way around it. Still, it was worth it, because it's a very nice looking building, and the museum of natural history across from it is even nicer. They do museums right in Vienna, they are beautiful in and of themselves, and then they fill them with lovely things. This museum is like the Louvre, with many frescoed ceilings, and other embellishments, just to make the inside look good, too.
Half of the mezzanine level is devoted to Habsburg treasures. I guess it's overflow from the Hofburg, across the street. There are rooms just full of gold objects, or glass, or ivory. Items that would dazzxle you anywhere else are just ordinary pieces here. One of the best is Benvenuto Cellini's Salt Cellar, or Saliera as they call it. It's the only piece Cellini made in precious metals that still survives. He made it for King Francis I of France. When Francis' grandson Charles IX married Elizabeth of Austria, he asked Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol to be his proxy. As a way of thanking him, Charles gave Ferdinand the salt cellar. Not a bad payoff.
I couldn't really look at everything there, or I'd still be there. It's a wonderful collection, and it's only the Habsburg family stuff. The rest of the mezzanine level had a lot of Greek and Roman stuff, and some Egyptian things. Most of it was ordinary, but there was a nice collection of gold items from late Roman times. And they had a mummified crocodile (two if you count the baby), and an ibis mummified to look like a human.
On the first floor one half was devoted to German, Dutch and Flemish painters. People you may have heard of like Rembrandt (3 self portraits), Breughel, Cranach (Adam, and Eve), Van Dyke, Hals, Reubens. Such a wealth of great paintings. There were 20 foot high walls covered to the ceiling with paintings. The other half of the first floor was given to Italian (mostly), French and Spanish painters. Not so many big names here – I don't think I saw any Da Vinci or El Greco works.
The only problem with the collection was that when you got to the next to the last room, on either side, the last room was closed to prepare for a new exhibit. And that last room was how you got out of the wing. Now you had to retrace your steps all the way back to the entrance. So I got plenty of walking today, but it wasn't too bad, because the museum had lots of comfy benches, and even a lot of soft couches. So I got a chance to rest every so often.
Which was good, because I still had some time left in the day. I took the tram, and the subway, to Stephansplatz. Not to see the cathedral, but some other sights nearby. One was Baecker street, full of old buildings. It wasn't until I got there that I realized old buildings in Vienna meant 18th and 19th century. It's a nice, quiet, restrained style, and I like it. But it doesn't make you say “Wow!” the way some medieval or renaissance styles do.
I walked on, seeing lots of restaurants to try, to the Hoher Markt, which was literally just a wide spot in the road. At the end of my trip, I was in my hotel's neighborhood, and in the right place to see the church around the corner from my hotel – Maria am Gestade. I saw it this morning, but it's at the top of a long flight of stairs. This afternoon, I was able to arrange my approach from above, and only had to walk down the stairs. It's a nice church, tall and narrow, with some marvelous altar pieces and nice stained glass – I even got some of it in my pictures this time.
I sat around for a while, then took the bus into the center of town for dinner. I tried the place that boasts the best wiener schnitzel in town, but there was a line. The next place had lots of “reserved” signs outside, but they found me a table inside. I had veal ragout with (good) spaetzel, a decent enough beer called Schremser, and some Malakoff cake for dessert. That is ladyfingers stacked up with buttercream between the layers, and apricot sauce. (Sorry, Aleid).
I went back to Stephansplatz to catch my bus home, but there was a sign saying it was closed for the night. Well, that happens on some bus lines. So I walked back, and found a couple of stops that didn't have the sign. By the time I saw one, I was so close to the hotel, I just kept walking. So, a LOT of walking today.
My legs were pretty wobbly last night, but tonight, they're just worn out. Another day or so, and I should be ready for anything, or some things. Tomorrow it's the Hofburg, and maybe something else.
Day 7 Thu., Sep. 15, 2016 In Vienna, don't ask a cop.
The weather has been great all week – sunny, warm, no rain. It was windy today and I thought it might mean a change in the weather, especially as this evening was a bit cooler than usual. But I checked the forecast just a bit ago, and tomorrow will be more of the same. After that it will cool a bit, and maybe some rain, but that's the forecast for Vienna, and I leave here tomorrow.
I went to the Hofburg this morning, arriving at 9:15. The museum doesn't open until 10, so I sat on a plinth and smoked a pipe while I waited. I got to watch people parking badly in the lot in front of the museum. One woman pulled her BMW SUV into a spot, missing the lines by a good 2 feet. She got out, looked at how she was parked, and decided that was good enough. There were other cars that missed their marks, but none as badly as she did. The spaces are marked oddly, too. Instead of stripes between the spaces, they put a single stripe at the drive side of the parking space, and expect that your bumper should align with that stripe.
Anyway, 10 am came, and I went in. My ticket from the art museum yesterday was good today at the Hofburg. The Hofburg, like the Louvre, used to be a royal palace, and it looks it. Long, graceful corridors, large rooms, marble everywhere, decorated ceilings, and a huge mosaic in the central courtyard. I wonder how old Franz Josef handled all the stairs.
The first floor is the museum of Ephesus, where the Austrian archaeologists worked for a long time. The sultan was so pleased with their discoveries that he made a present of some of them to Franz Josef. A lot of the stuff is broken bits, odds and ends, and such. Almost everything is broken in some way – one statue of a woman is in good shape, except for the wedge missing from the top of her head.
But there are some nice things, too: a bronze statue of an athlete that was reconstructed from a bunch of scraps, some sections of a frieze that almost tell a complete story, and an excellent small bronze statue of Hercules fighting a centaur.
On the second floor is the arms and armor collection, much larger, and more impressive. LOTS of suits of armor, especially from Habsburgs and their relatives. Charles V is represented by his armor when he was a boy, and at least one of his adult suits. They stuck that one up next to a suit of Philip II of Spain, sort of father and son day. Some of the armor was plain, some was etched or colored. Some had weird attachments I haven't seen before.
There were tons of swords and halberds, a fair selection of shields (many of them embossed), muskets, pistols, boar spears, and Franz Josef's own personal weapons. He lived so long, they include a pair of percussion pistols, a big heavy revolver like a Webley, and a small automatic. In an age when even tsars get assassinated, I guess he didn't want to take any chances.
I finished with the museum and went back to the hotel for lunch. Then I went to see St. Stephan's cathedral. Surprisingly, there is very little light shining on it at night, just a couple of small lights that don't really show it off well. I saw the cathedral that last time I was in Vienna, 17 years ago, but wanted to see it again. I think I saw the whole thing last time. Now, you can look, from a distance, at anything you want, but you can only walk down one aisle unless you want to pay. I didn't, and left.
I worked my way to Rupertskirche, the oldest church in Vienna. I'd seen it before, too, and my memory was of a more interesting church. It's plain, and small, which makes it dull, but that's the way most churches were 800 years ago.
I still had some time left in the day, and stopped in at the Romer Museum – dedicated to, and built on top of, the Roman ruins in Vienna. Several years ago, while doing some work in the square outside, the workmen found some Roman ruins. Some enterprising fellow got permission to turn them into a museum, and here we are.
Because all Roman forts were built to a standard plan, the archaeologists don't have to dig up all of Vienna to figure out the layout. The fort covers at least a third of the Old Town of Vienna, not quite reaching Stephansplatz.
The museum was quite informative, but the ruins were pretty limited, and you couldn't tell much from them. The only good thing was that they were ruins of officers' quarters, and you could see the under-floor heating system. But they had lots of signs explaining what they couldn't show.
I then went back to my hotel and say around for a couple of hours, resting. I went back downtown to find a restaurant, and saw a sign for a restaurant called Zwolf Apostelencellar. It said “10 meters on the right” and gave an address on Sonnenfelsgasse. I looked around, and the only street within 10 meters was not Sonnenfelsgasse, and I didn't see the restaurant's distinctive sign.
But I saw a cop, and asked him. He pointed and said go up there and turn left. That didn't sound right, and it wasn't. I wandered for a while, working my way back to the cathedral. There I found another cop, holding up traffic while a religious procession went down the street. He pointed and said, go down 3 streets and turn right.
So I went down 3 streets, and it wasn't Sonnenfelsgasse, nor was the 4th, or the 5th. I came back, and by chance turned up Lugeck street. There are a lot of restaurants there, and one would do for dinner. As I went up the street, I noticed that Lugeck forked, and there was a familiar looking sign hanging over the road. There was my restaurant! The second cop was only off by 1 street in his directions, but the first one had been standing on the corner of Lugeck and pointed in exactly the opposite direction to where the restaurant was.
In the end, it didn't matter. Zwolf Apostelencellar took itself seriously in that cellar bit. It was downstairs. I have nothing against restaurants in the cellar, some have been very good. But I'd have had to climb the stairs again after dinner, and I wasn't up to that.
So I went to the Gutenburg restaurant, down the street, and had a very nice schnitzel, almost a meisterschnitzel, with a decent dark beer – Konig Ludwig Dunkel. I'd have finished off with a sachertorte, but I was too full. Tomorrow I leave Vienna and see some more of Austria.
Day 8 Fri., Sep. 16, 2016 Halberds, and swords, and guns, oh my!
I left Vienna this morning and headed for Burg Forchtenstein. I had never heard of it before, but I found it in the Michelin guide, and it sounded nice. Good old Michelin. The castle sits high up on a very tall hill, and presents a fine picture from many angles. I had a chance for a really good picture, but I didn't stop in time. I wasn't worried because I could get it on my way back down the hill. Except Tom-Tom didn't want to go back down that way. I still got plenty of good pictures of it.
It's a big castle, with a huge round central keep sticking way up. Fortunately, the tour didn't go up the keep. The castle was owned for centuries by the Esterhazy family. They were of Hungarian origin, but made their mark by supporting the various rulers of Austria. As a family tradition, they were proprietary colonels of a cavalry regiment, which means they own the regiment, and have to cover all its expenses out of their own pocket.
Which is kind of a drag, but they also got to keep the equipment when it was no longer needed. So they have a very large collection of cavalry gear. There are rooms full of swords, and cuirasses, and muskets, and helmets, and all the small appurtenances of a cavalryman. There are also a few cannons, one of them on a limber, which I've never seen before in person. Throw in some halberds, a few wallguns, and some armor, and it's a very nice collection.
There are paintings of a great number of family members, some of whom would not win any beauty contests. It's scary, actually, to think about this, because the artist was obviously trying his best to make the likeness lifelike, but also attractive. If this is as attractive as he could do, how bad was the original?
There wasn't a lot of personal items or furniture, but there were some interesting things. In the kitchen area, there was a hollowed out tree trunk about 10 feet long by maybe 2 feet wide that was used to knead the dough. The cooking area in the next room was a platform about 8 by 12 feet, with a hood that was even larger. The next room had a cistern for quick access to water; the well was in the courtyard.
After the tour, I headed for Graz to see another great armor collection. I thought I'd be going back down the hill so I could take that picture of the castle. But, no, Tom-Tom didn't want to go downhill just yet. Up I went, and ended up way up above the castle. They grow corn up there, but they grow corn all over Eastern Europe. I haven't seen so many cornfields since I left DeKalb. There were even cornfields in the middle of a small town.
Eventually Tom-Tom ran out of hilltop, and had to take me down to lower ground. Lots of twists and turns, and then the fun began. I got on the autobahn, and was trying to keep up with traffic on a road that didn't run straight for any distance. The curves were gentle enough to allow the speed, but it was still a challenge. I was glad when the road finally straightened out.
Then there was the road construction – a long stretch of narrower than normal lanes and a slower speed limit, the equivalent of 50 mph. The challenge was getting the slow drivers and the fast drivers sorted out again once the construction zone ended. It took several minutes to work it all out.
When I got to Graz, I went straight the Zeughaus, which is what they call the arsenal of old weapons. Back in the 18th century, Maria Theresa wanted to gather all the old weapons in Vienna, and, presumably scrap them. But the people of Graz appealed to her to let them keep what they had, and since they had been loyal defenders against the Turks and other enemies, she let them keep them.
So there is now, in Graz, enough swords, spears, muskets, pistols, breast and back plates, helmets of all kinds, plate armor, and I don't know what all, to equip a pretty good sized army. There are a few items standing out by themselves as examples, but almost everything is stacked in racks. I didn't want to climb all the stairs to the top, so I took the elevator up and walked down. On the third floor, I calculated there were about 1000 pistols in 5 racks. There were more on the second and first floors as well.
On one of the floors, in between the racks of weapons, there was a parade of suits of armor, like so many ghost knights. I would show you a picture of it, but photography isn't allowed. It's really a shame, not because there is any really, fantastically wonderful piece, but because there are so very many ordinary pieces. And it's hard describe the quantities of arms and armor stored there. They have a book with lots of pictures, but not in English. They're not out of the English version, there isn't an English version. I find this hard to believe, considering how English is the second language in most museums here, and even stores have signs in English that aren't translated into German. Anyway, I got the French version, because my French is better than my German.
After the Zeughaus, I wandered around a bit looking for the wonderful remains of the medieval parts of Graz, but could only find some late 16th century buildings. So I got in my car and headed for the hotel. Tom-Tom took me right there, even though it's in a pedestrian zone. I got out without being stopped by a cop, and found a parking garage a couple of blocks away.
After resting a bit, I went out for dinner to a place by the parking garage. It had finally rained a little bit, and we may be leaving the 80s at last (I'll miss them). I decided to try something new, and had veal lights with bread dumplings. It was actually very good, and so were the dumplings. The rain was over by the time I finished, so I walked around a bit. My hotel is right by the Kunsthaus, the modern art museum, a hideous building that looks like some sort of demented spaceship, or a giant sow on her back. I hope the designer was hanged. Slowly.
Tomorrow is Ljubljana, Slovenia, and cooler temperatures because I'm coming down from the mountains in the Mediterranean basin. Or is that backwards?
Day 9 Sat., Sep. 17, 2016 A lot of driving, not so much sightseeing.
I left Graz in good time this morning – I needed to refuel the car, and get a toll pass. Germany doesn't charge any tolls on the autobahns, except for trucks. Slovenia, as I found out today, does have toll booths for those who need them. But like most of the other EU countries, Slovenia wants you to get a sticker for your windshield. I got my Austrian one in Graz, and hope I don't have a problem with the days earlier when I drove on the autobahn without one. I had to wait until I got close to the border to get the Slovenian one. And then I saw they had a special pull-over area at the border so you could buy it right there.
It was a 2 hour drive from Graz to Ljubljana, but traffic wasn't too bad. There were some tunnels through the mountains from time to time, another work zone (but it took almost no time today to reorganize the fast and slow cars), and toll booths. If you had the pass, you didn't have to stop, but you did have to slow down. My car will drive at high speeds without strain or shaking, but it takes its own sweet time to get up to high speed.
I set Tom-Tom to take me to the nearest parking lot to the castle in Ljubljana. The front end of the lot may have been close to the castle, but that's not where I parked. The parking lot is really on street parking. Someone got permission to turn a regular street into a parking lot, with gates on each end. Where I went in wasn't far from the castle, but I couldn't find a place to park until almost the exit, 2 or more blocks away.
By the time I got back into the old town proper, it was 12:30. There was a tour of the town hall that started at 1:00, and only on Saturdays, and I wanted to take it. I got there with time to spare, and saw a sign that said the tour starts there, but you have to get your ticket at the Information Office, a block away. I did that, and still had time to spare.
There was another English speaker waiting, also, a Canadian, I think, because he said he had once gone to see the Parliament in Ottawa. But he didn't sound Canadian, eh. Anyway, he didn't have a ticket, so I told him where to get one. It was already almost 1:00, but off he went. He came back in about 5 minutes with his ticket, and the news that the guide would be wearing a red tee shirt.
So far, the only person in a red tee shirt we had seen had been about 6 years old. Time passed, and a woman went in the building, and off to one side, where there was a half-hidden office. This looked promising, but she went off somewhere else, and the guy in the office only told us to wait out front. After a while, I lost track of the Canadian (?) guy, and thought he had gotten tired of waiting. But no, here he was, dragging a guy in a red tee shirt behind him. He had gone to the Information Office and forced them to give us a guide. The guide was supposed to give a different tour at 2:00, but he gave us a tour of the private parts of the town hall first, and let us tag along with the other tour for the public areas.
It was not without its moments, but it wasn't worth a half hour wait. There were just the two of us, and we got to see the council chamber, the conference room, the press conference room, the concert room, another press conference room used by the Clintons when Bill was president. This room has a tapestry depicting naked people cavorting, and the Clintons felt that it might offend America, so instead of being a backdrop for them, they were facing it. I'm not sure who would be offended – the figures were naked, but they weren't doing anything sexual.
We saw a room filled with modern stuff, apparently a storage room, with a set of shelves holding lots of gifts that had been presented to Ljubljana. On the other side of the door, was an old arch, part of the original 16th century building. There were city treasures tucked away in peoples' offices. There was the beginning of a stairway up to the castle, but it never got beyond the second landing. The only really nice part was the courtyard on the ground floor, which was open to the public and which I had already seen. So I had lots of stair climbing for very little.
And that was a problem when I went to the castle. My knee was bothering me, and nothing says castle like stairs. Fortunately, there was a funicular to take you up to the castle. If something of interest required more than 3 steps, I ignored it, which left out most of the castle. The parts I saw were fine, rather standard for a 14th-15th century castle. They put glass panels in front of lots of the stonework, so you couldn't get a picture without glare. It made sense for the huge hole in the wall of a tower, which must have been the location of a door at some time. It was a long drop down to the town from there. But other things didn't need that kind of protection.
Since I couldn't get around well, I headed back to my car. I wasn't that far away now, and I only had to stop and rest once. It turns out my hotel is only a couple of blocks from where I had parked. I asked the desk clerk about parking, and he said anyplace with a white line was free over the weekend. So I just saved a bundle on parking tonight.
I had pork medallions with roasted potatoes for dinner. Pork medallions could mean tenderloin, but this time, as usual, it was slices of pork loin. It was good, and there was a lot of it. I had a beer called Union Beer, a lager that didn't have a lot of flavor to it.
Tomorrow is Hochosterwicz, the castle with the 14 gates. I hope my knee feels like working tomorrow. I do know there is a funicular, like they had here, to get me up. I figure I can walk down, taking pictures of the gates as I pass through them.
Day 10 Sun., Sep. 18, 2016 A wonderful castle and some horrid driving
In addition to everything else that made me sore yesterday, I got a sore throat, and it tried to get into my chest. I gargled, and sweated the sore throat into a weak state. And this morning I found a pharmacy that sold me some expectorant. Which makes me feel a whole lot better. Even my legs were feeling up to a lot of walking.
Which was good, because I was going to Hochosterwitz, the castle with 14 gates. It’s on top of a tall hill, and you can park below the castle proper. But the castle is so high that they have a funicular to take you up to the top. I thought that would be great, I could ride up and walk down, taking pictures as I went. When I looked at their website a few months ago, they mentioned the funicular was broken, but I figured they'd have it fixed by September. No.
I could see the funicular, but there was no one around it, and I couldn't see a moving car. So I asked this older guy about it, and he said, it was still broken. I gulped, and decided I'd just have to tough out the climb up. He, meanwhile, had gotten into his car, and was starting up the road to the top. Suddenly he stopped and waved to me. He was offering me a lift all the way up. A very kind man, indeed.
The original family still owns the castle, from the middle of the 14th century. I don't know if he is one of the family – he looks sort of like the owner on the website. But he felt free to offer a stranger a ride to the top. I might have been able to make it on my own, but I'm glad I didn't have to try. It's a long climb.
I was in the outer courtyard around the base of the keep. The first thing I saw was the staircase going up into the keep – alright, I'll have to do some climbing anyway. But first, I wanted to walk around the base of the keep. There was the discharge channel for the garderobe, and some nice views of the ground way below, and some nice panoramas of the countryside. I passed the defunct funicular, and ended up at the blacksmith's shop. They actually do smithing there – partly to entertain the tourists, and partly to fill their own needs. A short flight of stairs brought me up to - the top of the long flight I hadn't wanted to climb. I guess my walk had taken me imperceptibly up bit by bit.
The inner courtyard at the top has a snack shop, a gift shop, a museum,, and an artist in residence. This is a very nice castle, but the presentation is somewhat lacking. There are no maps of the castle for the visitors, not at the ticket counter, not in the gift shop. They have a descriptive book about the castle in German and Italian, but not in English (and every sign in the castle has an English translation). I went down into the vaults, and they were your standard vaults. But they had some pictures of the smith and some other family members in armor, or waving swords around. Nicely done, but what was the point?
And the one really cool thing in the vaults should have been up in the courtyard for everyone to see. It's a description of The Siege. Back in the 15th century or so, some noblewoman was trying to get the title to the county of Carinthia, but first she had to capture every single castle in the county. She did pretty well, but Hochosterwitz was said to be impregnable. So she sat her army down around it to starve the garrison out. Time passed, and the garrison was down to its last scrawny bull and some mouldy bread. The commander of the castle had the bull killed and the hide stuffed with the bread, then had the carcass thrown over the walls, and down on the enemy below. They took this to be a signal of defiance – we've go so much food, we can waste it – and went away, demoralized. Now I don't know if this is true, but it's a great story, and shouldn't be hidden away in the vaults.
The castle on top of the hill is nice, but nothing special. But then you have the gates, fourteen of them, all different, some big, some small, all impressive. One or two have regular drawbridges, and two have special bridges. They are 40 feet long, supported in the middle by stone pillars resting on the ground down below. They might have been drawbridges, too, but their length would make that difficult. Anyway, if these bridges were out, no one was going to get across. It's easy to see why no one ever captured Hochosterwitz.
I left about 2:15, heading for Regensburg, a drive that should have taken about 4 hours and 45 minutes. Six hours later I finally pulled into my hotel. There had been an accident on the autobahn in Austria, bad enough that when I joined the line of cars, it was already 10 kilometers long. I turned off the engine to save gas, and waited, and waited. The drivers were all very polite – those in the left lane pulled over to the left shoulder, those in the right lane moved to the right shoulder. This left a wide land in the middle for emergency vehicles to pass through. And no one down there to try to get ahead of the crowd, even when the traffic finally started moving. I didn't take notice of the time I got there, but it was probably 45 minutes before things started to move.
The traffic moved pretty well at first, then it slowed and went by fits and starts. The authorities may have been moving the vehicles, and that would have slowed things down. With all this, and road construction, and rain, it was getting to be a long trip. Then I passed into Germany, and had to wait through another traffic accident. Three fire trucks, an ambulance, a squad, and a truck with an electric arrow to shunt the traffic past the wreck. We were only a kilometer from an exit, but no one was moving, so I couldn't get off. This one was no more than half an hour. I was thinking, if I hadn't stopped for gas, I would have been through here before the accident happened. But if I hadn't stopped for gas, I might have run out before getting to the next gas station.
I should have arrived in Regensburg about 6:45, but it was actually about 8:15 before I got here. That's 6 hours for a 4:45 hour trip. I had called the hotel to tell them I'd be late. When I got there, the desk clerk told be about a good Bavarian restaurant a short walk away. I went there, but it wasn't quite so short a walk, because I misunderstood her directions. But she had given me a map, and marked where the restaurant was, so I was not without resources. But by the time I started out, it was almost 9 pm on a Sunday night, and I wasn't sure if the place would be open,
But it was, and pretty full of people. I got the roasted pork – 2 huge slabs of pork, big and thick, with a potato dumpling and some good sauerkraut. I was hungry, but I couldn't finish it all. The beer was an old Bavarian dark beer, but it wasn't too dark. It tasted OK but not great.
Day 11 Mon., Sep. 19, 2016 Lots of sightseeing, but an unplanned early day.
It rained, on and off, all day. The temperature, I found out tonight, was in the mid 50s. I was comfortable enough with a sweater and a jacket, except when the wind was blowing – then it was chilly. I bought my cheap bus ticket (2.50 euros for all day, when a one way ticket costs 2.30) and went into the old town. Looking at my town map, I decided to get off at St. Jacob's church, built in the 12th century for Irish monks. It was the farthest from the hotel, and I could easily walk back along the bus route, seeing other sights.
St. Jacob's church is rather plain inside, although the capitals on top of the columns are all different and very interesting. But you don't go there to see the inside, you go for the north entrance. It is elaborately sculpted with statues, designs, and columns. They built a glass shelter covering the entire entrance to protect it from the weather. Definitely worth seeing.
I worked my way west, toward the cathedral, stopping on the way to see some “wonderfully medieval streets”. Humbug. I saw better medieval buildings last night on my way to dinner. And there are some nice medieval parts to Regensburg, though not always clustered together. I saw one 16th century building squeezed into a row of very modern buildings.
In time, I got to the Altes Rathaus, the old town hall. There is a new town hall somewhere else, but a lot of town offices are still in the old town hall. There's no tour of the town hall, but the outside is attractive, with an 8 story clock tower.
Next door is the building where the imperial Diet used to meet under the Holy Roman Empire. There was a tour here, and I wanted to take the English version. But the one English tour was sold out 3 hours in advance. So I went on the German tour, and couldn't follow anything the guide was saying. But it was fine to see the rooms and the decoration. Some of the doors had the walls around them painted to look like a large stone door frame.
I wandered around for a while, just looking at the town. It is such an odd mix of old and new. Some old medieval streets are just as narrow as they ever were, but the buildings in them are new (at least on the outside). There are two or three mementos to Don John of Austria, the hero of Lepanto, including one to the house his mother used to live in. There are signs on several about famous people who slept there, or ate there, or looked at it as they rode past.
I found a snack bar and had three tiny bratwursts on a bun. All the regular restaurants were offering more to eat than I wanted, and at a higher price. In Ljubljana, I got a big bratwurst which the cook cut up into bite sized pieces. While I was having my mini-brats, a crew was dismantling a similar stand next to mine – tourist season is coming to an end.
I was finally ready for the cathedral. I took a couple of pictures outside, and one down the nave inside. I was getting set to take another picture, when the camera said, the battery is dead. Well, that's why I carry a spare battery. So I switched batteries, and found the spare was dead, too. I've been swapping them around for some time, and the same battery was always the backup. So, when I recharged the dead battery, the backup went back into reserve. I never got around to recharging it. I didn't think it was getting used enough to worry about it. I was wrong.
So I went back to the hotel about 3, and recharged both batteries. Tomorrow I can see the cathedral before leaving for Nuremburg. I caught up on some online reading, and took a little nap. I got up about 6 and looked for restaurants for dinner. I saw a couple of possibilities, then decided to go into town and see what I could find.
The Hofbrauhaus had good reviews, but it was packed. So I went 50 yards down the street to the Rathskeller. It is decorated with the coats of arms of all the burgermeisters since time began. I ordered the Hungarian beef goulash, which had no relation at all to Hungary, unless the beef was raised there. No paprika had ever been near that dish. But it was a very good beef stew, with the best spatzel I've had in a long while. The beer was Weltenburger Kloster Barock Dunkel, and good. So was the strudel for dessert. With the check came a shot of liqueur, the second time I've been given a digestif after dinner. And the waiter added in less for a tip than I would have given him.
So, tomorrow is the cathedral and then off to Nuremburg. It is supposed to be warmer tomorrow, and for the next few day. It's not going to get back into the 80s, but upper 60s to lower 70s will be an improvement over today.
Day 12 Tue., Sep. 20, 2016 Big castle and lots of churches - isn't that what vacation means?
I got to see the cathedral in Regensburg before I left. It is big, it is tall, it is wide, it is fairly long. There are some interesting blind arcades, with human heads at the bottoms of the arch. There are several shrines along the walls with elaborate gothic outworks to show them off. It was a cloudy day, so I was actually able to get some pictures of the stained glass, although it was nothing special.
A block down from the cathedral is the only part of the Roman fortifications still standing. It's a 6 story tall Roman tower, that look pretty impressive.
I left Regensburg for Nuremberg, about an hour and a quarter drive. No problems today, though there were a couple of work zones. I went straight to my hotel, and parked in their underground garage. The desk clerk was very friendly, and gave me two maps (the hotel isn't quite on the official map), and told me how to get into town.
The imperial castle is only about 2 blocks from the hotel, and I had to go past it to see anything else, so I started there. Everyplace in Germany (and Austria and other countries that used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire) tries to claim some connection to the empire. Regensburg has its memorial to the Diets that met there, but Diets met wherever the emperors called them. Nuremberg points out that the emperor's first Diet had to be in Nuremberg, by law. But after that, he could, and did, hold them anywhere he pleased.
The castle occupies a lot of ground. It's got high walls, large towers, and some nice 17th century bastions. The castle is divided into two sections. The largest part is the imperial section. If the emperor visits, he stays there. If he doesn't visit, no one stays there. The other part belongs to the burg graf, who is responsible for looking after the castle.
They have made the emperor's living quarters into a museum, which starts out dedicated to the imperial office, but ends up as a general medieval museum, but a decent one. The chapel is odd – it's on two levels (three if you count the emperor's balcony view). The lower level is accessed from outside, so the servants can attend services. The second level is reached only from the lower hall of the living quarters, so the nobles in attendance on the emperor can hear Mass. The emperor has a balcony in the back, so he doesn't have to mingle with counts and such riff-raff.
The lower hall is mostly empty, so you can get a feel for the size of the space. The upper hall is filled with statues and plaques, and exhibit cases, and computer information kiosks to explain various things. Nuremberg was where the Golden Bull of 1354 was mostly drafted. This decree formalized the rules for electing the emperors. A lot of it was already being done, but this made the procedure official. They have a kiosk that lets you read the whole thing in translation, but it's too long, and I gave up early.
There was a big arms and armor collection. Most of it was pretty standard stuff, but there were a few nice weapons, They had a very nice grouping of 2 handed swords, but the lighting was wrong. No matter how I placed myself, there was glare on the glass case. They had several wheellocks, both pistols and muskets. There was also 3 videos of a guy in garb loading and firing a wheellock, and matchlock, and a flintlock.
After I was emperored out, I went down the hill to Albrecht Durer's house. I was disappointed that all of the paintings were copies, mostly done in 1928. A big collection of his original works was brought to Nuremberg for the 400th anniversary of Durer's death, and Nuremberg used the opportunity to have good painters make copies of everything.
There were a few examples of woodcuts, but not much. There were a few blocks which may have been original, but they weren't labeled as such. Even the furniture wasn't original. Still, it's better that they have a lot of copies, than that they have nothing and ignore him.
Then I went to the church of St. Sebaldus, which has some really beautiful vaulting, especially in the apse. A lot of the church was destroyed during bombing raids in WWII, but it has all been restored properly. They make a big deal of this, saying St. Sebaldus is a monument to peace. Of course, they are forgetting who started that war, and where he held his rallies. This is strange because Germany makes a point of not forgetting the past. They don't go around begging forgiveness every five minutes, but they don't hide the truth. And considering how awful that truth is, this says a lot about the modern German character.
Then I went to the Frauenkirche, the church of Our Lady. It's big, too, with a broad roof, and a very elaborate facade. There's some very nice stonework inside, but not so many interesting statues. I shouldn't complain, it is a proper gothic church. Yesterday I went to this Romanesque church in Regensburg that had been turned into a rococo disaster. Beautiful round arches, plain and simple as can be, covered in gilding and it was just awful. It was like giving the Venus de Milo a tattoo.
My last church was St. Lorenz, another big impressive gothic church. This one went Lutheran back in the Reformation, and it stuck. I got there just after 5 pm, and see a sign: church service at 5 pm. But the sign suggested it would be short service, so I waited. After a while, I checked the board listing the hours, and found that the church closed at 5 anyway. I got some nice pictures of the outside, and I hear that the inside is really nice, too.
By now I had discovered something about Nuremberg that I had not known before. A river runs through it, and the land on both sides rises steeply up from it. This is fine if you're going toward the river, but once you hit bottom, you have to start up again. This may put a damper on my plans to walk around the walls.
Tomorrow I go the the German National Museum, which is supposed to be the best museum in Germany. I checked with the desk clerk here, and I can take a subway all the way there, and back again. “Back again” being a rather loose expression. St. Lorenz church was on the far side of the river (but not too far), and near a subway station. It wasn't the line that passed near my hotel, but I know how to transfer between lines.
Well, I thought I did. I got to the right platform, but couldn't see a train going toward Friedrich Engels Platz. This station is only a couple of blocks from my hotel, and is the end of the line, except for 2 or 3 other stops maybe. I saw another train going to a station just short of mine, but not mine. I saw some subway employees talking, and asked them, and they told me to take the train with the wrong destination. So I got on and it ended at the station it listed as its destination, and said that was the end of the line. But across the platform was another train, with the right destination. So I got on, and off we went. The trip was exactly one stop long, and then that train had reached the end of its line. How bizarre!
For dinner, I went to a restaurant next to the castle. It was close and looked good. The menu was a bit limited – four or five varieties of pork, and a beef goulash. But I had had beef goulash last night, so I went with the pork schnitzel and potato salad. The schnitzel was fine – it's hard to ruin a schnitzel. The potato salad was very nice. There was no onion that I could notice, just diced potatoes in a creamy sauce, with just enough salt for flavor. The beer was Kloster Scheyern Dunkel, a pretty good dark beer.
Day 13 Wed., Sep. 21, 2016 I'm the luckiest man in Nuremberg.
Today, looking at the map, I realized that the subway stop where I had to change trains last night is actually slightly closer to my hotel than the other stop. So that saved me about a block of walking.
I took the subway down to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum this morning. The museum is about a block away from the subway, so it's pretty convenient. A long section of the town walls goes through the area, and is rather impressive. I had planned to walk the whole length of the walls tomorrow, but that was before I learned the topography of the town. Walking down to the river is no big deal, but walking up again is a pain. I may wait til morning and see how strong my legs feel.
Why, you ask, is this the Germanisches Nationalmuseum? Shouldn't it be the Deutsches Nationalmuseum? No, when the museum was founded in the mid 19th century, there was no country called Germany or Deutschland. And the founders wanted to show off the talents of all Germanic peoples, not just those in modern Germany. So they used the term Germanisches as an all-inclusive word for things German. Think of it as the way everything in the United Kingdom is English, or Scottish, or Welsh, or Northern Irish, but it can all be lumped together as British.
The museum is big, and full of wonderful things. There's an entire Carthusian church inside, just to show what a medieval church was like. Next to it is the arched arcade from a cloister, surrounding a room full of medieval art. There are paintings, statues, altar pieces, and lots more. There's a very beautiful picture frame about 6 feet tall and 5 feet wide, with no picture in it – some nobleman took it off to Munich.
There's a golden sailing ship, fully crewed, that was a table decoration for a rich merchant. There are several paintings by Durer, including an imperial set. On one side is Charlemagne, looking very imperial. On the other side is the Emperor Sigismund, who brought the Imperial regalia to Nuremberg for safe-keeping. Nurembergers, including Durer, felt a lot of local pride in this, which is why Durer painted him. By the time the paintings were done, Sigismund was long dead, as was Charlemagne. But Durer painted a very favorable portrait of Charlemagne, while Sigismund is slouching, looking almost like a hunchback. Very odd.
They have several porcelain stoves – big ceramic things about 5 or 6 feet tall used to heat rooms. I've seen lots of these, so I wasn't too impressed, until I saw one that had a seat built into it, so you could get really warm.
Besides the Durers, they have a Rembrandt, and several Cranachs. They have a pair of Cranach's Venus and Cupid, one small, one large. The poses are almost identical, but the backgrounds are different.
They have a lot of early clocks, some powered by weights, some by winding up. And a very nice selection of sundials, including one with a flintlock mechanism on it. I don't know why it's there, but it is.
It's a wonderful museum, full of marvelous items. I bet they have a lot more really nice stuff in storage. My only real complaint is that some of the descriptions for paintings or sculpture don't tell you what the subject is. You don't always need that information; the Magi are pretty obvious, as is the crucifiction. But there are some historical figures, and even saints, who are not so known, and you'd like to know what this scene is about. Sometimes they tell you. Sometimes they discuss the artist's use of color, or his knowledge of anatomy, or the influence of some artist on his work. This is nice, but it doesn't help explain what's going on.
I didn't see the entire museum; there were sections I wasn't interested in, and a few rooms were closed for remodeling. But I spent almost 6 hours there, and saw just about everything I wanted to see. I left about 3, and realized that I had time to see St. Lorenz's church.
It's a very nice gothic church, with all the gothic details, which is interesting since it's been Lutheran since 1525. I guess the Lutherans didn't care what the church looked like, as long as it didn't belong to the pope. Wikipedia says the rich town families had donated so much to the church over the centuries that they didn't want to see it thrown away. I don't care why, the church would be poorer without the art.
One very interesting, and beautiful, thing is something like a spire, inside the church. The base is about 10 feet square and 6 feet high. The spire rises from the top of the base. The spire is about 5 feet wide at the bottom, and tapers to almost nothing as it goes up. It reaches to the vaulting in the apse. I've never seen anything like this, and don't know what it is. But it is a really beautiful piece of gothic stonework. [When writing up captions for my pictures, I learned that it’s the tabernacle.]
Then I went back to the hotel, and recharged my camera batteries, both of them. I read some stuff online and relaxed. Then I started looking for a restaurant for dinner. Nuremberg is the sausage capital of Germany, so everyplace offers some variety of sausage, especially bratwurst. They sell 6 or 12 bratwursts about the size of a breakfast sausage as a meal. They are good, but I would rather have something else for dinner.
This being Germany, pork is the other choice. But I've already had most of the different ways to cook pork. But the Albrecht Durer Stube offered one I hadn't tried, and the comments on it were all raves. So I went there, stepped inside, and was told there were no tables available (with the place mostly empty). The waitress/maitre'd then checked with someone else, and said I could have a seat if I could be done in 45 minutes. I said no problem. What a lucky guy I must be.
So I ordered my Ofenfrisches Schäufele, baked pork shoulder, and it was delicious. There's a strip of fat on top, all crispy and tasty. The fat runs down through the pork as it cooks, and the meat is tender and flavorful. The meat literally fell off the bone. The beer was a Landwehr-brau, altfrankisches dunkel, and very good. I've been worried about the beer lately, even though I'm in Bavaria. Both Regensburg and Nuremberg have lots of places offering wheat beers. Nobody seems to care about the reinheitsgebot anymore.
The only problem with the restaurant was that it is downhill from Durer's house, which is downhill from the castle. Which means I had to walk quite a bit uphill to get home. But I took it easy and didn't have any problem.
Day 14 Thu., Sep. 22, 2016 Forget sightseeing, let's talk about hotels
I didn't walk the walls in Nuremberg, and it's a good thing. I had 2 traffic backups, and if I had spent more time in Nuremberg, I would have gotten to Prague quite late. When I came to a stop the first time, Tom-Tom told me I was 4 kilometers from the problem. And we were crawling, if we moved at all. Eventually, I saw a highway sign that said the right lane was closed. It lied, it was the left lane that was closed. The second backup wasn't as bad, but still annoying.
But before the traffic trouble, I went to Amberg, a small town in Germany that I found in Michelin. The town hall has a wonderful 14th century facade. And the church across the square is also very nice. There was another church I wanted to see, but it was all baroque and too gaudy for words. There was a chapel up in the hills near town that was supposed to be worth seeing, but I couldn't find it. So I gave up and headed for Prague.
It was a nice day for driving, nice and sunny. The car's thermometer kept bouncing around, but the temperature was going up. By the time I reached Prague, it was almost 70. Tom-Tom took me right to my hotel, but I didn't see it. I did see the drive, an enclosed, covered alley-like thing, into the parking area, but couldn't connect it with anything.
So I went around the block. Well, that was the plan, but it's practically impossible to go around any block anywhere in Europe. I found myself on an access ramp to a freeway which darted into a tunnel, and dropped me off someplace. So I asked Tom-Tom to take me to the hotel again, and it did, and this time I saw the hotel's “sign”, a couple of streamers hanging from the front of the building. But there was the sign, and the drive, so I pulled in.
There was a gate at the end of the drive, with a call box to the reception desk. I pushed the button several times, with no effect. Finally I got out of the car, and looked around, and saw a door mid-way along the drive. I went in, and there was the reception desk, but no clerk. I waited for a while, then noticed a sign on the front door was partly in English. It was a set of instructions on how to get your room.
Normally, this would not be a difficult thing to do. But not here. This hotel is owned and run by another hotel around the corner. I had to go there to check in, and pay for the parking, and they gave me a card with my information to show the clerk at my hotel. Back I went, and this time the clerk was there, a very sweet, friendly little old lady. She gave me my room key, and opened the gate for me. She also led me down into the underground garage and showed me my spot. She also showed me how to open the doors with a magic blue chip on the key ring.
Everything was fine. I got my luggage, went to go upstairs on the elevator, and realized that I didn't have the room key. I might have left it in the car, while getting my bags out, but I couldn't check because I needed the magic blue chip to get into the garage, and it was with the rest of the key. So I went and apologized to the sweet, friendly little old lady that I had lost my key already. She took me back down into the garage, and there it was, on top of the car roof.
So far, this sounds like a lot of hassle, but this may be the best hotel of my trip. The room has a balcony (so did my room in Nuremberg), small but it has an ashtray. As the room is non-smoking, I guess this is a way to tolerate their guests’ habits. I also have a kitchenette, with electric kettle, microwave, mini-frig with yogurt and cheeses and fruit, tea and instant coffee. And, get this, they ask you what time you want your breakfast, because they will bring it to your room at that time.
The room is large, with two tables, three chairs, and a couch. One of the other hotels had a couch, but no chairs, and no table. I had to type this diary using a nightstand for a table. There are two overhead lights in the room, when some have none. The double bed is just two singles or twins pushed together, but that's OK. I've had twin beds, or even singles, before in Europe, and I always worry about rolling over and falling out of bed. I did have a real double bed once, or maybe twice, so far, but the fake works well enough.
One problem with European hotels is that they only use a bottom sheet, and a duvet. You can add a blanket, but there is nothing lighter to cover yourself with. So if the night is warm, and the air-conditioning is off, you have to throw off all the covers. If the night is slightly cool, the duvet is still too much, although you could open the windows and make the room cooler. At home, in the summer, I have the windows open, and sleep with just the top sheet. But if you don't have a top sheet, you are stuck.
I went out after getting checked in, and got some money. I have way too many currencies, and too much of them, crowding my wallet. When I got to Hungary I used an ATM to get some forints. I had forgotten to learn what a forint was worth before coming over, so I picked what looked like a safe amount, the second choice on the menu – 100,000 forints. Turns out that worth about $360, and I still have over half of it left.
Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, and Germany all use the Euro, so I've got a bunch of them, too. At least, the end of the trip will be through Slovakia, so I can use some of them up. I had some dollars when I left home, of course. And now I have a bunch of Czech koruna, starting with about $200 worth, but I've already spent some. And I have five days in Prague, and a long drive through the Czech Republic before I get to Slovakia. Between the four currencies, I have over $430, and that's not counting any of the change. I will probably have to wait until I get back to Hungary to convert the forints, the rest I should be able to spend away.
Besides getting money, I also went to get tram tickets. The trams run right by the hotel, and the stop is only a couple of blocks away. A three day ticket sounded good, but the ticket machines didn't sell them. I went into the information office, and saw a sign for the Prague Card – unlimited public transportation, free entry into places I wanted to see anyway. It's good for four days, too, which matches better with my plans.
I walked around a bit in the neighborhood, and found where the tram stops are. They come by fairly frequently, and run late into the night. I also found a restaurant for dinner, just around the corner from the hotel. I chose it because it served duck. The menu said, for big eaters, and meant it. This was no ordinary duck, he had had hopes of becoming a goose one day, and he was well on his way.
The beer was good, a Czech beer called Velkopopovický Kozel. The German menu dropped he “velko” and translated Kozel as Bock. There was a dark version on the menu, but the waiter said they didn't carry it anymore. It didn't taste like bock, and Wikipedia says it's a lager. Doesn't taste much like a lager, either. But it does taste good.
Day 15 Fri., Sep. 23, 2016 Sightseeing is fun, if you're alone.
I mentioned yesterday that this hotel delivers your breakfast right to your room. This is true. The sweet little old lady came by with a basket of bread and rolls, and a nice apple super kalochky, and some cheese and salami. I had to make my own instant coffee, and I softened the hard butter from the fridge in the microwave. I didn't finish all of it, and wondered what would happen to it. The bread is sitting on the kitchenette counter, and the cheese and salami are in the fridge. I don't know what I'll get tomorrow.
I spent some time planning the day, figuring out where to change trams to get to Prague Castle. I had a full list of places to see, and I managed to get it all in. Fortunately, I started early enough that I was at the castle before 10. The Czech president has an office there, and the security is much tighter than when I was here in 1999. You have to go through a magic wand checkpoint. My camera triggered the wand, but when I pulled it out of my pocket, the soldier smiled and waved me in. When I left in the middle of the afternoon, the line was incredibly long.
One reason was the special attention one young woman got. She was very attractive and shapely, and the soldier made her take off her jacket, and turn around. From 30 yards away I could see she didn't have anything concealed under her clothes, but the guy took his time making sure.
My Prague Card got me a free ticket (though I still had to pay for a photography license) that got me into everything in the castle complex. You hold the barcode on the ticket to a scanner on a turnstyle, and it lets you in.
I went into St. Vitus' Cathedral first, and learned something I hadn't known before. The signs are in all sorts of languages for tourists, and the French sign called St. Vitus, St. Guy. I don't see any linguistic connection, but there it is.
There were lots of people in the castle complex, and a great many of them were in tour groups. The problem with tour groups is that they tend to stop right in front of the very thing you wanted to take a picture of. Of course they are there for the same reason you are – it's something beautiful, or historically important, or something. But it's still irritating to have to wait for them to move on just to take one picture.
But the tour groups were not the only hazard to photography. As soon as I got in the cathedral, I wanted to take a picture down the nave. I was getting set to snap it when a couple of guys got in front of me. One took a couple of pictures of the other, then they changed places.
I managed to get around the building, taking pictures of some very nice art. Some of the chapels behind the choir have special interments. There are a couple of early bishops, and the gravestones (only) of the two principal architects of the cathedral. There's the tomb of St. Vitus, half inside the sanctuary, and half outside, so pilgrims could have access to it. Then there's the tomb of some Czech king. There are two signs saying there's a Czech king buried there, but neither one mentions his name. King Wenceslaus has a large, beautiful chapel for his tomb.
Then I went to the old royal palace. It seems to me that I saw more of it 17 years ago, but I could be wrong. Lots of tour groups here, and I had to dodge them to see anything. They are worse in smaller spaces, because they fill a greater proportion of the space. I almost got thrown out of the palace (and not even the traditional way - defenestrating) when I started to take a picture. Two guards started saying “No pictures”. When I showed them my photo license, they got all apologetic. Some places give you a sticker to put on your shirt, but all I got here was a piece of paper, so there was no way to let them know in advance that I had permission.
I went to the Golden Lane, a row of small cottages built for the craftsmen who worked on the castle way back when. Now they are mostly simulations of medieval jobs – an herbalist, a goldsmith, a puppet maker, etc. What I wanted was what was upstairs. The main floor shops are all distinct and separate. But the upstairs is all one long corridor with displays of weapons and armor. I got a picture of a chain hauberk, with removable mail gloves. There was a leather pine-cone armor, and a couple of metal pine-cones, too.
After this I had a light lunch, and went to the Prague Castle Picture Gallery. This was not included in the Castle ticket, but the Prague Card got me half off. There were some nice paintings there, but I wasn't allowed to take pictures. It's a shame, because I took a picture of a painting by Cranach titled “Mismatched Lovers” at the museum in Nuremberg, and there was another one here, slightly different.
Then I went looking for the Sternberg Palace Gallery. This is a big, important museum, and there are no signs showing how to get to it. There is just one signpost pointing in its direction, but nothing when you get close to it. There were some big posters for a Cranach exhibition, and the small print mentioned the Sternberg. I finally figured out I had to follow the posters, and they did lead me to the museum.
Once again the Prague Card got me in free. Hurrah for bargains! They have a lot of nice stuff, with paintings by Reubens, Goya, Veronese, and a lot of Cranachs (there was an exhibition, after all). Two of his paintings were called “Perfect Matches”, to go with the mismatched pairs.
The museum was in a converted palace, so the building itself was part of the art. There were a couple of small rooms that had always had a “theme”, and these were left as they were. Some of the paintings needed to be cleaned, a common problem with old paintings. Some were so dark, you couldn't see any details. One picture of a “Man holding a carnation” had the man holding a black carnation, which is probably not how it was painted. Another painting of a landscape showed the shadow of some trees, but the shadow was falling on very un-sunlit grass. But it was still a very good collection.
I was getting pretty walked out, but I had one more item on my list. Nerudova Street was supposed to have some very nice old buildings on it. The guidebook said it was very steep, but I was already at the top end, and going downhill was not going to be a strain. And it would end by my tram stop.
And the guidebook was right, there some very nice old buildings on it. Some of the old mansions are now embassies. I wanted a picture of the Italian embassy. It had a very big door flanked by two smaller doors, all covered in big studs. There was a huge carving of two eagles over the doors, and a little cupola to top it all off.
It took me about 10 seconds to take the picture, when I finally took it. But first I had to wait on a couple of Japanese tourists. The husband wanted to photograph his wife against the big door. And he took a bunch of pictures. Sometimes they would look at the pictures to see if they were good enough, or something. Then she took a picture of him against the big door. Then he took some more of her against one of the small doors. Then he took some more of her against the big door. They spent 10 or 15 minutes at this, while I was waiting across the street to get my picture. They finally walked off, and I was ready to take my picture when some guy came up and stood right in front of me. I asked him to move a little to one side, he apologized and moved, and I finally got my picture.
I got back to the hotel and rested for a while. Then I started looking for a place for dinner. There was a place right next door to the hotel, but it was also a club and provided rock entertainment, and it's a Friday night. But there was another place a couple of blocks away that sounded good, so I went there. But I couldn't find any place with its name, but there were several others.
One place looked good, but everything was reserved. I don't know how full the dining room was, but the bar had tables, and they were almost all empty. Still, I couldn't get in. I didn't want to have to wander the streets looking for a restaurant, but I didn't want something awful, either. Then I came upon a restaurant across from the subway station, and they offered venison.
The place was pretty packed, but I found an empty table and sat down. There were too few waiters for the crowd, so it took a while to get a menu, and it was in Czech. But I remembered the price for the venison, and only one item had that price. The waiter confirmed that that was the venison, and he got me a bottle of Velkopopovický Kozel, the beer I had had last night, but this time it was dark, and still good. The venison came with bread dumplings made with bits of bacon, and plenty of gravy to keep them moist. The venison itself was very good. Dessert was fried meringue, with home made ice cream and blackberries. Weird sounding, but tasty.
Day 16 Sat., Sep. 24, 2016 Another beautiful day in Prague.
The few days I spent in Germany were a bit on the cool side, their normal temperature. But now that I'm in Prague, it has begun to warm up again. I wore my jacket yesterday, because it was cool when I went out. But by mid-afternoon, I was wishing I had left it behind. It only got up to about 68, but that was too much for a jacket. Today was warmer, so I left the jacket behind. It was a little cool in the morning, but it warmed up nicely, with bright sun.
I took the subway to the stop by the old powder tower, the last of the old fortifications (except the castle). It's right around the corner from where I stayed last time I was in Prague. I got out of the subway in the right direction, and started off OK, partly because I could see the tower. But when I got to the tower, I somehow got turned around, didn't read my map correctly, and started down the wrong street, in the wrong direction. Fortunately, I kept checking the map, which listed hotels all over town, and I passed one that wasn't on the route I wanted to take.
I went back and found the right street, Celetna Street, with a lot of scenic buildings. And I found out that I'm still famous. Two women in their forties, I guess, stopped me and one took my picture with the other hanging on to me. And she didn't pick my pocket, either.
Eventually Celetna brought me to the main square, with the old town hall. It's a very large square, with lots of fine buildings all around it. I got there just before 11, and there was a huge crowd of tourists in front of the town hall, waiting for the hour to strike. They didn't read their guidebooks properly, and so they were early – the parade of saints happens only when the clock strikes 12.
After a few minutes, the crowd dissipated and I was able to take my pictures without too much trouble. The tourist office is right there, so I went in. I wanted a more detailed map, preferably of just the old town, and I needed another Prague Card book. I had lost mine yesterday somehow, and I wanted another because it had nice detailed maps of various parts of town. If I couldn't get a big detailed map, this would do.
There were three clerks, and I picked one who was waiting on a couple of Chinese women. I've been seeing lots and lots of Japanese tourists, but now I'm starting to see some Chinese as well. These two women kept asking the clerk for something else. He must have given them two of every pamphlet and guide he had, some in English, some in Chinese. The clerk opposite him had served three or four other tourists while I was waiting. When he went off to find some other thing for them, I noticed that she was available, and got my book. I think the two Chinese women were planning to open a rival tourist information business, and wanted to stock up on brochures.
The town hall actually occupies five connected houses (six if you count the one that's rented out), and the tourist office is in part of it. So it's easy to go up a flight to get a ticket for the town hall tour. The next English tour was at 12:30, so I went out looking for my next sight to see. I wanted to see the church of Our Lady before Tyn, and could see its steeples sticking up over the surrounding buildings.
Two points of information: It's called Our Lady before Tyn because the church is dedicated to Mary, and because it is just in front of (before) a place where merchants used to stay called Tyn; and when I say surrounding buildings, I mean exactly that. I went along the side, looking for an entrance, and saw a sign pointing me back the way I had come. I went back to where the front of the church should have been, and there was a music shop. But I noticed you could pass through the shop and out the door on the other side, so I did, and there was the entrance to the church. There was another covered alley leading straight up to the door as well. The entire front of the church was hidden by buildings.
And after all that, they didn't allow photography inside. It's a shame, because there was a nice gothic chapel on the nave side of the left aisle. But the only vantage point to get a good picture was roped off anyway. I saw another guy taking pictures, so I did sneak one snapshot of a beautiful wooden alterpiece.
I went back to the town hall for the tour – I was early for it, but didn't want it filled up before I got there. I was too late, though, for the noon clock strike. When the clock strikes noon, the 12 apostles parade around in front of the clock. I saw it the last time I was here, and it is nice, but it attracts an awful lot of tourists. So I waited a bit for the crowd to thin, and then went it and got my ticket.
The guide was a young woman who spoke good English, and knew her stuff, but her voice was not very strong. She led us through one level of all five houses, telling us what parts were original and which had been restored after damage. Then we went down into the cellars, and onto a lost street. In the early middle ages, the town flooded every so often. So they raised the street level quite a bit, and added more floors to the houses. But in between two of the houses making up the town hall (which hadn't been created yet) there was a street, and after raising up the other streets, this one was roofed over and a house built on top of it. So you go out of one house, across this narrow strip, and into the next house. And the door from that first house is the original door, 800 years old.
It was about 1:15 now, and I was getting hungry, and tired already of walking. I still wanted to see Charles Street and Charles Bridge, but they would be on my way toward the tram to take me home. All the restaurants near the town hall are expensive, even for lunch, so I walked on. Every place I was going through was going to be full of tourists, so prices might not come down, but I hoped to find a snack shop.
Then I got turned around again. I was going down Charles Street, and it jogged to the right. I made the jog, then noticed a nice carved doorway, and stopped to take a picture. And then I continued down the street to the other end of the building, where there was another nice carved doorway. A little bit further on I came to a small square that wasn't on my map. And there was a signpost saying the bridge was behind me. So I went back, missed some other turn, and wound up back by the town hall.
So I started off again, being more careful. I got to the jog in the street and found where I went wrong. I was so interested in the doorway, that I hadn't noticed the street sign. I had gone right, but Charles Street had gone left.
I went the correct way this time, and soon passed a place offering burgers and brats. I went in and had a bratwurst, very thin, in an almost flaky bun, topped with fried sauerkraut. Quite good, actually. And I had a nice chat with the owner, who comes to America often. We talked about food and beer and why a hot dog is called a hot dog.
Soon I got close to the Charles Bridge. I had seen it before, and didn't need to see it again, but it's a nice bridge, with statues and a great view of the castle. But as I approached, it looked as if the whole bridge was covered with people. The crowds have been thick all over town today, with phalanxes of tour groups sweeping down the streets. And this looked like they had all gathered in one place just to stand in my way.
Well, no, of course not. As I got closer, the crowds actually looked smaller and less jammed together. The appearance from up the street was just a trick of perspective. There were still a lot of people on the bridge, along with a great number of hucksters selling trinkets, photographs, paintings, and performing music. There weren't any hucksters here in 1999, though it was March and chilly. The crowd was not impossible to get through, but it made it hard to see the statues on the bridge.
I finally got back to the hotel, and collapsed on the bed. My knee was quite strained from the stairs in the town hall, and I needed to rest it for a while. I tried watching TV, but there weren't many channels, and there was nothing interesting on. BBC news and CNN and Euronews were in English, but weren't talking about the news. There was a sports channel, showing the last few minutes of a bicycle race, and then tennis. A Russian news channel, a German channel with some drama, and a German channel showing the German version of Family Feud. So naturally I dozed a bit.
I decided to go back to the restaurant I ate in last night, as they had good food, and some items I hadn't tried yet. And it wasn't a long walk. I got there early enough to have any table I wanted, and ordered the chicken rouladen. It's a chicken breast flattened out, and rolled up with spinach inside. It was served with a goat cheese and bacon dumpling. For dessert I had Grandma's Bread Pudding, two pieces of toasted bread on top of a bowl of bits of bread, and apples, and raisins, and nuts in a cream sauce. And everything was good.
Tomorrow I've got three castles scheduled, and I'm not sure how that's going to work out. I haven't met many castles that didn't include a lot of stairs to climb. I hope my knee recovers enough to see them.
Day 17 Sun., Sep. 25, 2016 I drive the Czech Grand Prix course.
When I talk about driving the Grand Prix course in any country, I mean I was driving on some of the twistiest, winding, challenging roads around. There are hard left turns followed by hard right turns, sometimes with no straight stretches in between, and with a few hairpin turns thrown in for good measure.
That's what I was driving on today, on hills, in forests, in towns, it didn't matter. I was planning on visiting 3 castles – Kokorin, Krivoklat, and Karlstejn. The first bit out of Prague was fine, nice straight highways. Then I left the highways for the byways, and the twists and turns started. On top of that, it is Sunday and warm, and everyone was out enjoying the day off and the good weather. So the roads were full of bicyclists, and hikers, and sometimes both at once. If they are on opposite sides of the road, there is only one lane left for the two-way traffic.
And then there's the idiots. Like the guy who pulled his car almost off the road, and was standing on its roof, shaking an apple tree. His wife was standing beneath the tree to recover any apples he knocked loose. Or the bicyclist who stopped in the middle of the lane to talk to his young daughter, who was safely by the shoulder. Not only was he in the middle of the lane, he was in a double curve.
I got to Kokorin castle at last, and saw the parking lot. Then I saw the castle. It's a really nice looking castle, in good shape, and on top of a steep hill. And you are expected to walk up. I didn't want to kill my legs right away at the start of the day, so I gave it a pass. And a good thing, too, because if I had visited Kokorin, I would probably not have had time to see Karlstejn.
Back to the Grand Prix course to get to Krivoklat castle. It was getting more challenging, but I made it and pulled into the parking lot. This castle was a novelty for me. I've climbed up to a lot of castles, and I've even been to castles built on level ground. This may have been the first time I've ever gone downhill to get to a castle.
The parking lot is on slightly higher ground than the entrance to the castle, so you go downhill. If there had been more space at the castle entrance, they could have put the parking lot there, as the castle is next to the road. Of course, by entrance I mean the beginning of the walk up to the gate.
Krivoklat is a nice castle, with a huge round keep, currently sheathed in scaffolding. It has a big courtyard, and some of the medieval workrooms around the courtyard are being used by some craftsmen today.
The tour was in Czech, but they gave me an English summary of the spiel. It was supposed to be presented in the order of the tour, but some rooms seemed out of sequence. And we were supposed to see the Royal Hall, second in size only to the great hall in the palace in Prague. But we didn't see it, and some of the things we were told to look for in some rooms weren't there.
But it was a good tour of a nice castle. I was miffed because they didn't allow photography inside, and there were some really wonderful things. I bought a pamphlet about the castle hoping to get some of their pictures of these things, but they only showed some. One thing they did not show was the ceiling in one room. It had a large number of rafters, spaced about 18 to 24 inches apart, and each one was carved differently.
In the chapel, the altarpiece shows God crowning Mary as Queen of Heaven. Normally, Mary would be looking straight out of the picture, at the congregation. But here, she's looking off to one side, right at the king's seat. In the next room is a collection of old books, printed and in manuscript, and scrolls, and maps, and some fake books. I was looking in one of the cabinets, and noticed a nice old book spine stuck onto a block of plaster. The book next to it was real.
When the tour was over, I headed to Karlstejn castle. I was there in 1999, and wanted to see it again. The last time I looked at a map, and made my own route. It followed a river that didn't know how to flow straight, so the road was very twisty.
Tom-Tom didn't take me that way, but it did take me right to the base of the castle, and the road going up to it, and the police barricade. I don't really know why the police were there, but they said I couldn't go up, and that I'd have to drive 7 kilometers around to the other side of the castle. Tom-Tom didn't believe them and kept trying to make me go back. Later, when I was near the other side, it tried to get me to take itty-bitty lanes up the hill.
The parking lot is at the bottom of the hill, and you have to walk up. My legs still felt up to it, so I started up. I seem to recall parking right outside the castle last time I was here, but I also recall the courtyard being twice as big as it really is. I do know there were no hucksters, souvenir stands, or food booths on the way up. Considering how many people were there today, the shop owners must do pretty well.
It's a long upward sloping road, until you get to the last of the stalls. Then the walkway gets steeper. I had to stop and rest a few times, but I finally made it to the top. I kept seeing people in medieval garb who were coming down the walk; it was late in the day, and I assumed they were “color” and their shifts were over. And I soon learned that the tour guides were in garb.
But they also had a stage set up in the courtyard, with a throne, and some guy being MC. Since I don't speak Czech, I don't know what he was saying, but he was definitely working the crowd. He introduced some musicians who played a medieval piece at a juiced up tempo. Then some guys with snare drums came out and started banging away while another guy dressed like a king boogied with a woman in tight black slacks and top. It was not a medieval boogie.
It sounds absurd, but it seems to be drawing the people in. The castle is supposed to close at 5:30 in September. I left at 6, after my tour, and people were still walking up to the castle as I was going down. I don't know how many of the people took the tours; it would seem silly to walk up all that way and not take the tour. But the 5:10 English tour had a total of 2 people.
It was the same tour I had had before, except it was in English and not German, and they had a nice big model of the castle in one of the rooms. And I could now photograph the one thing they wouldn't let me snap last time. In one room is a very big model of the keep, with a cut out, to show the rooms inside. Last time, this was the only thing I couldn't shoot, because there were valuable and delicate things in the room, and they were afraid of damage from flash. But now there was no problem in taking pictures of the model. I was so happy.
The tour was over, and it was 6 pm and time to head back to Prague and dinner. It was later, of course, by the time I got to the parking lot. Even going downhill I had to stop and rest. Which was good, because some more of my fans showed up. About a half dozen tipsy twenty-something guys came down the path. One, a white guy with a gigantic Afro, plopped down next to me on the bench, threw his arm around my shoulders, and asked his friend to take our picture. I should start charging.
I managed to get off the Grand Prix course before darkness fell. It was very strange; at one moment, I'm spinning the steering wheel back and forth like crazy, and the next I'm on an entrance ramp to a real highway. Driving was much easier and faster, until the last exit. The whole ramp was backed up because one lane was closed ahead.
I wanted to eat at the place I ate the first night in Prague. It's right around the corner, and that's as far as I wanted to walk. But they were closed, so I went to the place that wouldn't let me in on Friday without a reservation. On Sunday, it was a lot easier.
I had duck breast with toasted ciabatta – the ciabatta was OK, but I would have preferred bread dumplings. But the duck was excellent, tender and already sliced, with a marvelous taste. My beer was Granata, from Staropramen, an amber beer with a good taste. Dessert was chocolate souffle with raspberries and vanilla ice cream. It wasn't actually a souffle, just a big, dark chocolate cupcake, but it was very good.
Tomorrow is my last day in Prague, and I'll use the free transit a lot to see the sights left on my schedule.
Day 18 Mon., Sep. 26, 2016 I forgot it's Monday.
Today I was going to see a last few sights and wrap things up for Prague. The first stop was Vysehrad, which means Castle on the Hill. Yeah, more climbing. And when I got there there is no trace of the early medieval castle. The plan of the place, as depicted on their maps, is a set of 17-18th century bastions to defend Prague. It's big enough that I didn't want to walk all over it, and you can't see much from the top of a bastion, anyway. So I didn't stay long, just enough to see Sts. Peter and Paul cathedral, a nice place.
My next stop was the convent of St. Agnes, which is now a museum of medieval art. It's hidden away in a maze of back streets, and it took some doing to figure out the easiest way to get there. But I did it, and discovered it was Monday. I had meant to go here on Saturday, but it didn't work in with my other plans. And now it's Monday, and the museum is, of course, closed.
My plan for the day was to spend more time at Vysehrad, which wasn't all that interesting and required more walking than I wanted to do, and then a couple of hours at the museum. Then I would go to Wenceslaus Square, named after St. Vaclav, the patron saint of Bohemia. It's a big promenade, several blocks long. After wandering around there, it should be late enough for me to have an early dinner there.
But I didn't spend more time at Vysehrad, and I didn't spend any time at the convent/museum, so I got to Wenceslaus Square with hours to kill. And there's nothing really touristy about the place. It's full of big hotels and Michigan Boulevard type stores, and small booths in the pedestrian area selling food and other stuff to the passersby. Up at one end is the National Museum, so I thought I'd go in and take a look around. But the main building is closed for renovation, so I had to settle for the new building.
The new building is very modern looking, and, judging by the floorplan, has a lot of unused space. There is a woman on every floor who will push the elevator button for you, just to make sure you don't get lost, I suppose. She will also tell you which way to go to see the exhibits, even if the way is marked. The first floor had an exhibit of the work of a man who painted bad pictures, and took bad photographs. I walked through there as fast as I could.
Above was Noah's ark. It was a natural history display of animals from all over the world, with an underlying theme that some of these animals are in danger of extinction, and why can't we build a new ark to save them all. This was more a statement of desire than any plan for action.
They grouped animals by their place of origin, or type of climate. It was not a very comprehensive collection, though they did well by Australia. Some of the animals looked natural, but some seemed a bit seedy. The Tsavo lions at the Field Museum are showing their age, but the lion here wasn't in any better shape despite being newer.
There were small animals like moles at the bottom of the cases, which made it hard to see them well. And some of the specimens seemed to be undersized. There were 2 ocelots, and one looked hardly bigger than a house cat. The wildebeest was definitely small.
There were a couple of giant white crabs, one of which must have been at least four feet across. There were a fair number of different types of fish. I thought one was a fake, because I couldn't see his scales. But then I took a closer look, and saw they had varnished him so thoroughly that the scales were almost completely hidden.
I hate it when I go to a foreign museum, especially one with National in its name, and find it doesn't meet the standards of our Chicago museums. Chicago's museums are not the best in the world, but they don't have to blush and hide in the corner when they meet other museums, either. The Art Institute doesn't match the Louvre, but neither does any other art museum. And any art museum can have one or two really nice pieces that justify the price of admission. But a poor natural history museum is just sad. Every natural history museum has specimens of the same animals, so the quality of the specimens and their display makes all the difference. And this one didn't make it.
It was now after 2, and I was hungry, and couldn't wait for dinnertime, and couldn't find anything else to do to pass the time. I fixed the hunger problem with a trdelnik (don't ask me how to pronounce it) which is a Czech pastry. It's a sort of bread dough, seasoned with cinnamon, cut in long strips and wound around a wide spindle. They cook it over a charcoal fire, and sell it in about 4 inch lengths. It looks like one of those things for keeping your beer cold, only it's pastry, and too narrow to hold a beer. But you can get them with ice cream inside, if you want. I took mine plain, and it was good, like eating a spiral cinnamon roll.
I went back to hotel and spent some time checking the foreign exchange rates. There are currency exchanges all over Prague. Unlike the ones we have in the states, these exist only to exchange currency from one type to another. Everyone says “No commission”, but, of course, they make it up in the exchange rate. And everyone has his own different rate.
I'm going to need euros for Slovakia, but I don't want to draw any more from an ATM. I already have too much cash on me. I will change my remaining Czech korunas for euros, and that may give me enough to get by in Slovakia. The Hungarian forints are another problem. Most places aren't giving very good exchange rates on them, and they might only change them for korunas. I don't want to have to change them through too many other currencies, since I will lose something in every exchange. So I will keep them until I get back to Budapest, where I can change them for dollars.
I also spent some time looking for a new restaurant. I decided to try a different neighborhood, which I knew would have good restaurants. The problem with looking for restaurants online is that TripAdvisor and all the other groups give you a list of the 10 best restaurants in your city. And all of them are expensive and trendy and don't serve what you want anyway. Google will give you a map of restaurants, but they're just the same.
That's not quite true. Google, if you focus in very tightly to one small area, will give you lots of ordinary restaurants, too. But it's a lot of work to go down to that level and search around. I wanted something in the Malostranske Square area, and kept getting things that were very expensive, or that no one liked. So I just took the tram there and walked around a little. I found one that had pork tenderloin cooked in a special way, but there were no open tables. So I went across the street and had venison goulash with potato pancakes. The pancakes were good, and the venison was great, and it was goulash. The beer was Budweiser, the Czech one, and dark. I had the regular Czech Budweiser when I was here in 1999, in the town of Budwar, where it's brewed. It's better than its American namesake, but not much better. The dart version is actually decent.
Tomorrow is a visit to the cathedral in Kutna Hora. I went there in '99, but got there too late in the day to see anything. So first thing in the morning, I'm off to see it. Then on into the depths of Slovakia to see Castle Spis.
Day 19 Tue., Sep. 27, 2016 I have a two story room.
I changed by Czech korunas for euros this morning at the exchange next door to the hotel. I didn't want to look all over town for the best exchange rate, and it turned out to be not too bad. I got 84 euros, and at the official rate, I should have gotten 85. Close enough. When I had arrived in Prague, I had asked the friendly little old lady at the desk of my hotel where I could find an ATM. She didn’t know, and didn’t know where the nearest exchange was. The bank across the street had an ATM, and there was an exchange next door to the hotel. Not very knowledgeable, but very friendly.
The last time I went to Kutna Hora was the driving day from hell. I had trouble getting out of Prague, the road I needed was completely torn up in a small town to lay a new sewer, and I got there too late to see the cathedral. This time Tom-Tom took me there without any problem, and found me a parking place closer than I had had last time.
The church is beautiful. The roof looks like two circus big top tents, and the apse is surrounded by a forest of flying buttresses. It doesn't look like any other church I've ever seen. The inside is less spectacular, but still very nice. There's a bit more baroque than I would like, but there are still some old medieval wall paintings.
Most gothic churches have a walkway under the clerestory windows, but it's never open to tourists. This church has a very wide walkway, and they let tourists go up for a fee. I didn't want to climb all those stairs, so I stayed down. One other odd feature is the open confessional. The confessional is not a box, there are no walls. The penitent kneels in plain sight of his friends and neighbors and confesses. The church at Vysehrad had the same arrangement. But at Vysehrad, each confessional was by itself, one to each chapel. At Kutna Hora, there's a row of 5 or 6 confessionals side by side, so there's even less privacy.
Then I started out on the drive to see Spis Castle, in eastern Slovakia. Google put it at 6 and a quarter hours, and Tom-Tom agreed. But that's driving the speed limit, and having no work area delays. So it was about a 7 hour drive. The Skoda Fabia can go as fast as you want, but it has no pickup. Trying to accelerate from 50 kph, or even 80 kph, is almost impossible unless you're on flat ground. Don't even think about it going uphill. But once you get to 100 kph, it's different – lots of zip. The bad acceleration is the only bad thing about the car. And I can say that with confidence after spending 7 hours in it. Very comfortable, I had no back strain or aches when I reached my hotel. And I haven't made such a long drive in quite a while.
I knew from checking Google maps last night that there would be lots of roadwork on the way, and there was. It slowed things down, but the traffic kept moving. Except for one work zone. We weren't in it too long when traffic stopped dead. For about 2 kilometers I never got out of first gear. Stop, move up a car length, stop, repeat ad nauseum. Then the other lane started moving into my lane. This doesn't happen. If they want everyone in one lane, they start you out that way. Once we were all crammed into one lane, the pace picked up a bit, and we saw the problem. A semi had blown one of his front tires. He couldn't move, and everyone had to dodge around him. I don't know how they managed to replace his flat. They must have stopped the traffic entirely until it was done.
I was on the D1/E50 for most of the way. Part of it is multi-lane divided highway, the rest is a nice 2 lane road. It's hard to pass trucks on a 2 lane road, especially when you can't accelerate. In Slovakia, things were pretty much the same, except the 2 lane roads were not quite so smooth, and the autobahn was almost empty – drive, drive, drive!
The countryside was wonderful. There are lots of hills in the Czech Republic, and they turn into mountains with jagged tops in Slovakia. Fields of corn and pastures and farmers out plowing. And forests everywhere, right to the tops of the mountains. Everything was still green, and the sun was shining, and the day warmed up nicely. It was a great day for a drive. And that's what I did pretty much all day, so this report is going to be a bit shorter.
I pulled into Levoca, where my hotel is, just at dusk. Tom-Tom said here's your destination, so I parked. I hadn't seen the hotel, but I found I had parked right in front of it. After I checked in, I moved the car to the hotel's parking lot behind it. The hotel and its restaurant are in a 14th century building; the restaurant has nice rounded vaulting.
There are 3 floors to the hotel, and I am on the third floor. I opened the room door, and saw the bathroom, a stand for my suitcase, and a wardrobe. That's it, except for the staircase. The bedroom is upstairs. It's actually a nice big bedroom, with a desk, local TV, satellite TV, a coffee maker, and a mini fridge. It's a good thing I spent the day driving, because that didn't strain my knee, and I can handle the stairs tonight.
Fortunately, the hotel comes equipped with a restaurant, because I wasn't up to searching a strange town after dark for someplace to eat. I had duck breast with Slovakian tater tots. Well, that's what they looked like, but they tasted better. The duck was delicious and tender. I had a very rich chocolate cake for dessert. The beer was a Czech beer (dating from 1454) called Bakalar, a lager that was OK, but not great. They had a dark bottled beer on the menu, but not in stock.
So tomorrow is Spis Castle, and then another marathon drive to Budapest. This one should be just under 4 hours. I hope.
Day 20 Wed., Sep. 28, 2016 I get a traffic ticket.
This morning was very cool, about 46 F by my calculation. And it was foggy, very foggy. I left the hotel and drove to Spis Castle without any trouble, the fog wasn't too bad to drive. But when I got to the castle, I couldn't see it. It stands on top of a hill (of course) and offers a great picture from anywhere around, but not this morning.
I parked in the parking lot, and tried to find out which way to go. There was a building on one side of the parking lot that looked like a ticket office/snack bar/souvenir stand, but it was closed up. There was a dirt trail going behind it, but it didn't look promising. On the other side of the parking lot was a big sign telling all about the castle, except how to get to it. I guess that's not a problem when there's no fog.
But there was a semi-paved drive going up that hill, so I took it and hoped it was the right way. It was steep, and fairly long and I had to pause every so often to catch my breath. But finally something stood out of the fog. I don't know what they are or why they are there, but several large pillars stand in front of the castle, and that's what I saw. [They were apparently watchtowers.]
It was just about 10, and still chilly. In fact, before starting up I put my sweater on, as well as the jacket. The entry level is just a courtyard, the main castle is up above. The path up is made up of large, irregular limestone rocks, interspersed with dirt. It is somewhat steep, and the footing is not too good. I almost slipped on a dry stone coming down; I'd hate to try it when it's wet.
After the upper gate, you're in a small courtyard, with the main castle still above. There was a short tower there that would give me a good photo of the main castle, if it wasn't foggy. I waited for a while, but fog doesn't go away just because you want it to. So I went on up, hoping to find things to photograph that wouldn't be hidden by fog.
The castle burned down in 1780, and has been somewhat restored. Large sections are just walls, but there are some parts that are actual rooms. One is called the castle kitchen, but there's no fireplace and the stove is clearly not big enough to feed a large number of people. Most of the other rooms are like that. They obviously wanted to show something of how medieval people lived, and do it on the cheap.
There's a small museum in the nicest set of rooms, with wide arched ceilings. The usual collection of weapons and armor, except for one suit of armor whose helmet looked like it was 5 sizes too small for the owner of the armor.
I climbed up to the top of the keep. Yesterday's driving kept my legs from getting worn out, so the climb wasn't too bad. But it was a nasty climb anyway. The stairs weren't a real spiral, but they curved around in the outside wall of the keep. The rise from step to step was not uniform, but usually high. And the stairs were narrow – my shoulders touched both walls at the same time.
But it was worth it, the view was fantastic. By now most of the fog had lifted from the castle, although some patches hung around in the valley. I took photos of many of the parts of the castle, including the lower bailey. This stretches out below the entrance courtyard, and was mostly empty. The keep has a hole cut in the middle of every floor, so you can look up or down and see the height, I guess. I think it was something they did in restoration for the effect. It can't be original because there's no living space on any of the floors with the hole there.
The castle passed through several families, and some of them added their own personal dwellings to the complex, in whatever was the latest style. The Csaky family owned it from 1636 to 1949, when the Communists took over. Even they had moved out to more comfortable mansions elsewhere, so when the castle burned down, no one really cared.
Halfway up in the keep, the thought occurred to me “How am I going to get down these steep stairs?” But I managed without any problem, just taking care to place my feet carefully, and letting the right leg take more of the taller steps. The only real problem was that the stairs, being so narrow, were one way, and you had to make sure no one else was on them.
After leaving the keep, I went back down through the castle, taking all the photos they fog had denied me earlier. When I got to the car park, I looked up and the castle just looms over everything. And 2 hours earlier, there was no sign of it. I stopped on the road down from the castle to get one last picture of the whole of the castle on its hilltop.
It's a really nice castle, and I'm glad I made the trip to see it. I've seen better preserved castles, but this is in pretty good shape for a ruin. Winifred may remember the castle we saw in Luxemburg, Vianden. It was a ruin much like Spis, but when Tim and I went there a few years later, it was totally restored. They say this is the biggest castle in central Europe, and it may well be. The main castle is pretty big, and the lower bailey is just as big. I don't know if they will ever fully restore it. I think too much of the upper parts were lost when the place burned down. If they have any drawings of the castle before the fire, they may be able to restore it. But it is still worth seeing. At least, if you're as much of a castle junkie as I am.
The drive back to Budapest was right on schedule. There was a problem shortly after leaving the castle. Tom-Tom wanted me to get on the autobahn at a certain place, but it didn't look right. The road had a warning sign I couldn't read, but it wasn't fully blocked off. But when I got to the top of the ramp, it was obvious the road was being repaved, and it wasn't finished. I turned around and went back down the wrong way (no one was coming up, because all the locals could read the sign). There was a big highway department office right there, with a police station. The police station was locked, of course, and they didn't even answer the doorbell. But a guy at the highway department who didn't speak English told me where to go – up and over the mountain.
And then there was the traffic ticket. I was trying to get on the autobahn in another spot, missed my turn somehow, and did a legal u-turn. I was immediately pulled over by the police. Not for the u-turn, but for going through a stop sign. I hadn't seen it while watching Tom-Tom and the road at the same time. What is surprising is where it was. The off ramp from the autobahn has right of way at this spot (not everywhere), instead of a yield sign. The regular road has to stop for the off ramp. And that's the sign I missed, one I wasn't even expecting. The cop was nice enough. He said the maximum fine was 100 euros. When I said I didn't have that much, he said the minimum fine was 20 euros, which I gave him. I'd have thought it was a shakedown, but the stop sign was there, and I hadn't stopped.
There was some road work, but it didn't really slow traffic down any. The only reason it took almost 4 hours is that Slovakia is still building its highway system. I stopped at a highway gas station and saw a map of the road network, with highways marked “Completed”, “Under Construction”, and “In Preparation”. So I'd be going down a nice autobahn type road, and get dumped out onto the old road they hadn't replaced yet. Same road number, just not the same quality. And the non-autobahns seemed to attract more trucks, or maybe two lane roads made them more obvious, since it was almost impossible to pass them. I did finally figure out how to pass a truck – drop out of 5th gear into 4th, and use the extra torque to gun the car faster.
Now that I know this, I have no further use for the knowledge. I doubt I'll be driving a Skoda again anytime soon.
Tom-Tom took me right to the hotel, but didn't like my choice of parking lot. I wanted to park in front of the hotel, and Tom-Tom wanted me to go somewhere to the side. I won.
Tomorrow I'm up early. The flight leaves at 6:30 am, so I'll have to be up by 4 am. Interestingly, the hotel starts breakfast at 4 am. How convenient! So this is the last chapter of this saga. I've had fun, and I've seen some places I may never get back to. I didn't have any bad beers; though none were fantastic, most were good. I had some wonderful meals, too. I just hope I've walked off enough of the calories. I will see you all for dinner Friday.
[Added later: Breakfast was available at 4 am, but there wasn’t anything I wanted, and I’m not all that fussy about breakfast. So I went to the airport, dropped off the car, and went looking for breakfast. All the lines were long, so I went without. I changed my remaining stock of forints for dollars and got on the plane for Berlin. \
In Berlin, I was looking for the gate for my flight home, and an airport employee told me where to go. I followed his instructions, and found myself outside the terminal, without having passed through immigration and customs. How unusual! I finally got something to eat, and then boarded the plane home.
A great vacation, even if I walked too much. I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see, even if I had to force myself. When I was younger, this trip would have been a breeze, but age has slowed me down a bit. I’ll have to be more careful about planning my next trip.]