Euro Trip Day 45: Nuremburg, or Nuremburg, or Nürnberg, or Nuernberg. Several spellings, one city.
I’m trying to play catch up on posts here, so bear with me. :-)
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On Monday morning, July 19th, we got up, went and availed ourselves of our free breakfast at our hotel, and got our stuff packed to head to the train station.
At this point in time, we have packing down to a science. We LONG ago dispensed with the “his and hers” bags and went to a more practical system. My backpack (the big orange one) contains everything we don’t really use on a regular basis. This includes our cooler weather clothes (since I still haven’t convinced John to get ditch the TWO pairs of jeans and TWO hooded sweatshirts he brought with him), souvenirs, the small food bag we have, and the small toolkit we have. One of his bags contains all of the clothes we typically wear and the toiletries bag, and his smaller backpack has our laptops. When we pack, I’m responsible for packing my clothes and everything that lives in the big orange pack, and he’s responsible for his clothes and everything that lives in his packs. It works out really well, and there’s none of the usual scrambling of “did you remember to check the shower” or something like that.
Anyway, so we got on our train, which wasn’t one of the ICE trains (Germany’s high-speed network), just a little regional one. So I was expecting it to behave like a little regional train, puttering along at around 55mph. Then about 10 minutes into our trip, I glanced at the GPS readout on my phone, and about fell over. We were puttering along at the quite glorious speed of 102 miles per hour. OMG SWEET.
I’m SO all over this high-speed travel kind of thing. I love trains so much.
The other nice thing? Because I’m (sigh) over 26 and John and I are traveling on a saver pass (two or more people) we were required to buy a first-class pass. We haven’t had much opportunity to use it until now, as most trains we’ve been on have been second-class only. But German trains always seem to have both classes–SWEET. Heck, yesterday a… train attendant? (like a flight attendant, I guess?) came around and offered us newspapers and snacks!! Oh yeah!! First class also usually means air conditioning, bigger tables, and more seat room and leg room. I’m all over that.
So yeah, it’s nice to actually use the first-class passes we paid for. Why can’t air travel be that comfortable and comparatively inexpensive?
When we got to Nuremberg, it was only about 11:30 AM, but, continuing with the good luck we’ve had so far this trip, our hotel let us check in and leave our stuff in our room. I LOVE the feeling of taking off my backpack and leaving it somewhere so I can go explore — sooooo nice! We headed back to the metro from whence we’d come to go into the Old Town part of the city. When I got there I realized I’d somehow managed to leave my camera in the room. I’m thinking my shoulder was tring to sabotage me or something — it’s tired of lugging that camera around. But at least I had my phone camera, as always.
On our way into town, we stopped at a McDonald’s to see what their local offerings were (since the only other German town we were in, Neusorg, was too small to have a McDonald’s, or any sort of fast food place, for that matter.)
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All hail the pun. I had to smile when I saw this. :-) Although, if you think about it, we have the hamburger, and Hamburg is a city in Germany... so why not the Nuremburger?
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Old Town Nuremberg is really pretty — it’s its old European feel that is one of the reasons Hitler chose to hold the Nuremberg rallies there. He was apparently all for the traditional feel. The old town itself is centered around a large market square (Hauptmarkt) and a number of neat churches. I think we went into almost all of them. ;-)
My favorite church was St. Sebaldus, the only Lutheran Gothic church I’ve been in this entire trip. It started out as a Catholic church when it was constructed in the mid-1200s, but when the Reformation happened, it converted to a Lutheran church. However, with an eye toward preserving the “medieval piety” (according to the brochure I picked up at the church) they saved the icons, wall paintings, and shrine to to St. Sebald. I looked him up, and had to laugh. First, apparently no one’s really sure who St. Sebald actually was, or when he even lived. He was some hermit who came out of the forest somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries to evangelize to some townspeople, and then died. Second, they built the church and the shrine to him before he’d officially been canonized by the Catholic church (which didn’t happen until 1425.) Heck of a risk there. I can just imagine it now — “O hai, we know you built a church for this dude, but FOOLED YA! we’re not actually going to make him a saint.” Heh.
For some reason, St. Sebaldus's shrine is held up by large snails. I have no idea why, but I grinned and had to force myself to walk (instead of run) over there to check it out when I saw it. :-)
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Anyway, you all know by now that I’m a huge sucker for the Gothic churches, but even by normal Gothic church standards, this one was one of my favorites because it still had a lot of its original paint job inside, and hadn’t been Baroqued almost at all. I don’t know why, but seeing the original medieval paint job is one of my favorite things about Gothic churches. A lot of places would paint almost the whole inside with not just religious art, but different designs and patterns almost like wallpaper. They’d go straight up the pillars and over the archways with really vivid colors. I would LOVE to see a Gothic church that’s been completely restored to what it would have looked like in the 14th century — not just by removing any design elements from later time periods, but with the original paint job restored to new.
I am so lucky that John is as patient with me as he is about seeing pretty much every single church we’ve come across on this trip. :-)
The door of the church had that kind of scary looking guy hanging above it, and it was supposed to represent a soul descending into hell. The top of the door handle is actually a skull. Kinda creepy, kinda cool.
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Sorry about only having cameraphone pics on here. I did go back right the day we left Nuremberg and take pictures with my real camera, but those will have to wait until later when I get around to posting them. :-)
Original medieval statue with original pattern painted on the wall around it.
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After we finished checking out the churches, we wandered up through the old castle and down around the other side, then headed back home in search of someplace to eat dinner before crashing for the evening. It was a nice, relaxing day. :-)
There is a statue of a rabid, deranged rabbit at Nuremberg Castle. Apparently it's a modern artist's tribute to German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, who lived right next to the castle and who painted a painting called "Young Hare". The rabbit in his painting didn't look happy, but it wasn't nearly this deranged. It was quite amusing.
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Me at Nuremberg Castle.
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I long ago gave up on trying to get him to shave.
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Where we are now:
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Sunrise and sunset are my two favorite times of day.
(Sorry about the Facebook “Like” buttons appearing at the top and bottom of each post — I haven’t figured out how to just get them to stay on the top of the post yet. I’ll worry about it when I get home.) :-)
Changing light at the Cologne Cathedral, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie. Click on the picture to view a larger version.
I’m playing catchup right now, writing blog posts offline and going through pictures to figure out which ones to use. I have WAY too many pictures, and that’s just my cameraphone pictures!
We’re heading home the day after tomorrow — I’m not very enthused about this, but all good things must come to an end. I have to admit that my own bed will feel pretty good… but there’s also something really neat about waking up in a different place every few mornings and listening to the new sounds of the morning where I am.
Anyway, in the meantime until I catch up, here’s a fun picture. Last Thursday night we were waiting for our Couchsurfing host to pick us up at the train station in Cologne, and so I pulled out my cameraphone and took these pictures of the Cologne Cathedral picking up the last rays of the sunlight. I timestamped them so you can see not only how late it was, but also how quickly the light changed as we waited.
I love catching golden light like this.
Euro Trip Days 42, 43, and 44 all rolled into one post
Sorry if I’ve managed to totally bore you all to death with all of the pictures of buildings… but there are more church pictures in this post. Only a couple, though. Promise. :-)
On Friday (Day 42) we left Prague and headed to Neusorg, Germany. I had no idea where this was when I booked a place to stay — all I knew was that it was in the mountains and therefore cooler than the miserable, humid heat wave that had enveloped most of the continent. And it was, thankfully! In fact, we got a fair amount of rain, meaning we didn’t even do some of the hiking we’d planned to do. Neither of us were complaining though — it’s been a lovely chance to have some downtime and do a lot of reading and napping.
Anyway, before we left Prague, I got up at dawn and headed over to Prague Castle at 6 to make the 7AM service at St. Vitus Cathedral. Back in Ireland, I decided I was going to try to go to church in every country we went to, and so far, the only one I’ve missed was Bosnia.
I love being out at sunrise. I love being up when so few people are, and the only people who are out are out for a purpose, so they’re going somewhere quickly and generally not paying too much attention. I don’t know how someone could not pay attention to that sunrise, though — it was absolutely amazing. At the service, there were a total of eight people, including two nuns. The priest was old and wore Ecco sandals under his robe. I’m not sure why I found that amusing, but I did.
Yes, it is good to be alive.
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East end of St. Vitus, facing the morning sun.
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Facing east and the altar, with the morning sun coming through the front windows.
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After church, I wandered around town for a bit longer, enjoying the early morning peace, and then I headed back to rouse John so we could pack and catch our first of three trains of the day.
This is the last of our three trains, in Marktredwitz, Germany. They had to plug it in and charge it before we could leave. I for some reason found that amusing.
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We got to Neusorg, Germany around 6:30 PM. We checked into our hotel and went wandering around the very very small town for a bit before dinner. I found some wild raspberries -- this made me very happy. Well, that, and the 25-degrees-cooler weather.
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Our first night in Germany, we were woken up at 4AM by an INCREDIBLE electrical storm. I tried to get pictures with my big camera, as well as video with my cell phone, but for some reason neither one came out. Bummer. So you’ll just have to imagine a huge, booming storm. It was fantastic. :-)
You can't tell from this picture from our room window, but it's POURING outside. It poured most of Saturday, off and on. So I took three naps and read in between naps. It was heavenly.
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Today it threatened rain off and on, but eventually cleared up. I was going to go to church in the morning, but I found out that the local church only has services once a month (the pastor rotates through several villages in the area) so there was no church in town this morning. Oh well. So we had breakfast and took a short hike into the forest, then came back and read for a while and took a nap, then headed out for a walk to find a lake I'd seen on Google Earth, only we couldn't find it, so we headed back and parked it under a tree in the backyard to read. I can't complain. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 41: Bones, churches, and bone churches
Today we got up and tried to get on a train at a relatively early hour to go to the town of Kutna Hora, a UNESCO World Heritage site about an hour from Prague, and home to a few really neat places.
To be fair, we did make it on the train at a reasonable hour… and then we proceeded to not only miss our stop, but overshoot it by about a half hour. Then we had to sit and wait at some train station in the boonies for the next train to show up, and then we had to go a half hour back. As a result, it was almost 1PM by the time we finally got to Kutna Hora. WHOOPS.
The #1 reason we wanted to go to Kutna Hora was to see the bone church (Sedlec Ossuary) there. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you might remember that we went to a bone church in Rome last fall, and since I heard about this one, I’ve wanted to see it, since it’s supposed to be much bigger than the one in Rome. It was… but it had a different feel, for some reason. I really liked how the one in Rome had murals, whereas this one mostly had nicely arranged piles. Still, there was some really neat stuff, and I totally enjoyed it. Here are all of the pictures I took with my phone, if you’re curious… eventually I’ll get the ones from my “real” camera put up, as I’m sure they came out much better.
Bone church
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Bird on the shoulder
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Crown of, well, crowns.
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Afterwards we walked across the street to the Cathedral of Our Lady, a medieval Gothic cathedral that got Baroqued and then mostly un-Baroqued. It’s really interesting because of its style — it’s VERY plain and simple, but instead of having plain stone walls inside like most Gothic cathedrals, it has pale yellow plastered walls. It’s a very light, airy, open, beautiful church, and the light that streamed in through the mostly plain glass windows was absolutely gorgeous. I can’t wait to process the pics I took with my regular camera, and I had a ton of fun just using the cameraphone.
South (I think) aisle of the cathedral. I'm pretty sure it's the south aisle because the altar is at my back, and most cathedrals were built with the altar at the east end and the main door at the west end. Clearly I've spent way too long reading about cathedral architecture. Maybe it's time to go reread "Pillars of the Earth".
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Music stand in a stairwell on the south side of the cathedral.
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As I was upstairs in the balcony, checking out the view from up there, I heard chanting start… apparently there are still monks there. COOL.
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After that, we wandered around town for a while and eventually made our way to St. Barbara Church, yet another Gothic church, this one of the super ornate classical Gothic variety. It was really neat, not only because of the architecture, but because a fair amount of the 14th century paint on the stone pillars and frescoes were still intact. SO NEAT.
The ceiling of the crossing and the apse (area over the altar) was covered with crests of various guilds and noble families from the town. Neat!
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520-year-old choir stalls. I didn't get to sit in them, but I did get to sit in 400-year-old pews.
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View of Kutna Hora from St. Barbara Church.
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We're finally getting the hang of this -- it only took us three takes to get this one right! :-)
Incidentally, notice those arch things on the church behind us? Those are flying buttresses, and every time I think of the term “flying buttresses”, I think of Cogsworth in the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, where he’s showing Belle around the castle and talking about architecture and makes the “if it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it” joke. Anyway, go rewatch the movie if you can’t remember what I’m talking about. Flying buttresses.
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As it crept toward sunset, we hopped a train back home, and had a nice Chinese food dinner before crashing for the night.
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 40: Getting to indulge my love of Gothic cathedrals AND geology, all in the same day!
AKA, Why I’m the biggest nerd EVER. :-)
On Wednesday we headed up to Prague Castle to check out St. Vitus Cathedral, a HUGE Gothic cathedral. Now, I’ve known since my freshman year of high school in Spanish class, when we learned about Santiago de Compostela in Spain, that I’ve been fascinated by cathedral architecture. But if I’ve learned one thing about the dozens of churches I’ve seen in the past three years since I got my last passport, it’s that not only do I have a thing for Gothic architecture, but I don’t really care all that much about Renaissance, I like Romanesque, and I can’t stand Baroque. Sorry, but there it is. As I commented to John a couple of days ago, if it ain’t Baroque… DON’T. Just don’t. Unfortunately, some really really neat churches got Baroqued over time. Fortunately, in the late 19th century there was a huge classical architecture revival all over Europe, and so some dilapidated and Baroqued churches got restored to their Gothic glory (and in some cases, completed. Heh.)
Ok, so back in an entry about Budapest, I mentioned that Matyas Church (on Buda Castle hill) is one of my all-time favorite churches. Well, I’ve decided that St. Vitus Cathedral is now in my top five. It’s absolutely flipping AMAZING. I honestly think that, no matter how many Gothic churches I’m fortunate to see in my lifetime, I’ll never get sick of them. Ever.
Cathedral from the outside. This thing is at the absolute tip of the hill that Prague Castle is on, so an already huge church looks even bigger. It's just AMAZING.
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Be still, my Gothic-architecture-loving heart...
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St. Albrecht!
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St. Wenceslas chapel in St. Vitus Cathedral. The walls are inlaid with semiprecious stones, and the whole thing dates back to the mid-1300s. It's INCREDIBLE.
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The rose window.
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Front of the cathedral.
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John, being the wonderful man that he is, didn’t drag me out of the cathedral, but after almost an hour, he started strongly hinting that maybe we should let the other tourists enjoy it too, so we left, but not until after I’d found out when the daily church service times were so that I could come back and go to a service here. :-)
On our way out of the castle hill area, we decided to walk through the castle gardens. This was a GREAT idea, because we got to see BIRDS! LARGE ONES! And we got to HOLD THEM!!
If I thought the church was going to be the highlight of my day, I was sorely mistaken. I think this was the highlight of my WEEK. Can you tell by the grin on my face? That's a peregrine falcon, by the way. And why the heck am I wearing the same shirt in every picture?
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John holding an eagle owl. He really was thrilled about this, we were just having a hard time getting Mr. E. Owl to look at the camera. :-)
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Apparently it’s a tradition at Czech castles to keep birds of prey, so Prague Castle has turned theirs into a demonstration kind of thing. For about $5, you get to hold the bird of your choice. AWESOME.
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After John pulled me off the ceiling, we headed down to the National Museum of Natural History to see what there was to see.
Main hall at the museum.
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Being the nerd that I am, I made a beeline for their geology exhibit when I saw the sign. I can’t help it — I like rocks. Maybe it’s because I have plenty in my head. Anyway, since I’m a bit of a geology nerd, I generally judge a museum’s geology exhibit (however fair/unfair this may be) by if they have a sample of benitoite, California’s state gemstone, which is found only in San Benito County in central California. Picky, I know. Usually when a museum has a sample of benitoite, it’s a very small sample, and it’s usually polished to look like the lovely blue gemstone it is. Prague’s Natural History Museum didn’t have a very pretty, polished sample, but darned if it isn’t the LARGEST sample I’ve seen… it’s just a trip to see it all the way over here. So cool!!! And to be fair, they did have quite a nice display of other rocks too, including some really neat meteors.
California's state gemstone.
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We closed down the museum and headed across the street to McDonald’s for dinner. I know I know… McDonald’s. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here on my blog or just on Facebook, but we’ve been going to McDonald’s on this trip for several reasons. #1, McDonald’s in Europe almost ALWAYS have free wifi and free bathrooms. If we have time to kill while waiting for a train, it sure as heck beats waiting at the train station, and there’s almost always a McDonald’s near a train station. Second, their local menu is somewhat interesting. In Krakow, I had a chicken curry burger, and I swear I’m starting a petition to bring these to the US. Who’s in? I promise they’re really good! I mean, it’s not like having real chicken curry, but to me it was quite an acceptable substitute!
So anyway, I’d been seeing ads in the metro stations for a tzatziki beef burger. I had no idea what this was, but the picture looked interesting, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. And it had these really interesting seasoned potatoes that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
The potatoes were good, but the burger… not so much. The burger had feta cheese and fresh cucumbers in it, as well as some sort of pinkish sauce that wasn’t Thousand Island, and I think that’s dried dill as the seasoning on the bun. I kind of liked the feta and the sauce, but the cucumbers and the dill… notsomuch. To be fair, I’m not a cucumber fan anyway, but even after I took them off the burger, it was still really cucumber-y. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well, I tried. I’m now 1 for 3 in liking foreign McD’s burgers (the chicken curry was great, but I had a McCountry in Zagreb that I couldn’t finish either. Oh well — you win some, you lose some. Even at McDonald’s.)
Seriously. Fresh cucumbers. The fries in the background are John's, by the way. He's not quite as adventurous when it comes to McDonald's as I am... which makes sense given that he's always been happy with and able to finish his meal. :-)
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After dinner, we headed to a DVD store to amuse ourselves with the cheap Czech offerings (I still think they’re pirated, but John doesn’t think so) and then we headed home. It was the perfect relaxed day. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 39: I have some catching up to do!
I’m really going to try really really hard to simplify things here, since I really need to get caught up.
On Day 39 we slept in… I think travel fatigue is really starting to get to us, because we both wanted to see Prague, but neither of us was enthused about going anywhere. So we opted to stay an extra night. Good idea.
We finally dragged ourselves out of the room and wandered the city for a bit. It was SO FLIPPING HOT. I know it’s not as hot as Sacramento, but at least at home pretty much everywhere has a/c. In Prague, not so much.
Want to know the best place to hang out? Near one of the vents for the subway. It was like a gigantic outdoor air conditioner. Greatest thing EVER.
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Anyone notice anything interesting about this street? There are NO STREETLIGHTS. OR STOP SIGNS. And this is a fairly large street in the middle of downtown Prague. I'm really not sure how more accidents don't happen here -- maybe they just pay more attention? CRAZY.
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See if you can guess why I took a picture of this. Hint: I'm amused by it. Give up? Well, the little devil that constantly resides on one of my shoulders wanted me to relocate this guy's bike to somewhere nearby just to give him an object lesson in what not to lock one's bike to. I didn't though... my nice side (the part of me that doesn't want to get arrested for bike thievery) won out.
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Around mid-afternoon, we met up with a tour guide for a free walking tour of the city — the guides work for tips, and we tipped quite well after enjoying the tour quite a bit. Our guide was an Irish college student, and she was flipping hilarious. I think she needs to be a high school teacher — she’s got the energy level down!
Our awesome tour guide standing in front of composer Antonin Dvorak's statue and reenacting the story of how the Nazis wanted to push the statue of composer Felix Mendelssohn off of the national music hall, only they didn't know what he looked like, so they figured that since he was Jewish he must have a big nose. So they went to push the statue with the biggest nose off, only to find out right at the last minute that it was really Wagner. Wagner, incidentally, happened to be Hitler's favorite composer. HA!
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See that small dried thing hanging up there? That's an arm, and it's hanging from high up a wall in the Church of St. James in Prague. As the legend goes, it belonged to a thief who tried to steal jewels from the statue of the Virgin Mary on the altar one night. But the statue miraculously came to life, grabbed his hand, and wouldn't let go. The thief had to wait until the next morning when the monks showed up. The monks tried to separate the thief from the Madonna, but they couldn't, and they weren't about to break the statue. So they cut his arm off instead. Right as they finished cutting it, the statue came back to life and released his arm, and then turned back into a statue again. The monks hung the arm to remember this event and as a warning for other thieves, and there it still hangs, some 400 years later.
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Rather kafkaesque statue of Franz Kafka (he's the one sitting on the headless dude's shoulders.)
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After the tour, John headed home and I headed to a classical music concert at an old church. It was by far the most expensive event ticket I bought this trip, and I hate to say it, but I was kind of disappointed. The music was a treat, and it was at an 800-year-old church with great acoustics, but (a) there was an American woman behind me who talked incessantly through almost the whole concert, and (b) the musicians kind of rushed through everything. They played the most popular parts of things, rather than the entire piece, and they went fast for a lot of stuff. The flier said they’d play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but they only played Spring, Die Moldau was TOTALLY cut short, and that was the absolute fastest rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon I think I’ve ever heard.
Don’t get me wrong — I definitely enjoyed it, but I don’t know that I would have spent that much money twice. Oh well. (I actually almost cornered the talking woman after the concert and told her that I didn’t know how much she was spending on her trip, but my ticket that night represented a significant portion of my daily budget, and I really didn’t appreciate listening to her talk throughout the concert. But I chickened out.)
I do have to say that my favorite part was hearing them play (a piece of) Smetana’s “Die Moldau”, since Smetana was Czech and the Moldau is another name for the Vltava River that runs through Prague. It was better than hearing “Blue Danube Waltz” when I was on the island in the middle of the Danube in Budapest, since this was live and that was a recording. (Although that was still pretty freaking awesome.) :-)
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Here’s a playlist to most of the rest of the concert. And Mom, before you get worried about copyright, there were a number of people in the (very small) audience openly recording this, and no one stopped them… so I guess it’s kosher. :-)
Hmmm, apparently I can embed the playlist into this blog post. Click on the arrows on the right or left sides of the video below to scroll through all of the videos. Fun!
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After the concert, I still had daylight and energy left, so I walked over to Old Town and climbed up the Old Town City Hall tower to get a view of the city. I was hoping to get some decent sunset shots, but it was really hazy, so I just enjoyed the views for about 30 minutes before heading down.
View of the Old Town Square from on top of the Old Town City Hall. I went to that church (Church of Our Lady Before Tyn) three different times, trying to go in and see it, but it was closed every single time. GRRRRRRR. I hate being deprived of a good Gothic church, darn it! :frownyface: Not like I haven't seen enough churches this trip. :-p
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View looking down.
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At the top of the tower, there were a bunch of informational signs about things you could see from the tower. Read the English translation of this one -- the last two lines are pretty funny. :-)
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As the sun set, I hopped a metro and then a tram to get back home, where John was waiting for me at the tram stop. I had a fun day, but I think getting off of that tram and seeing him there waiting for me was the best part. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 38: No shower feels better than the one you take after stewing in your own sweat on an overnight train
John actually wrote the post title as a Facebook status update. Lovely, I know, but man was he right about that!
We got into Prague around 7:30 AM, got our bearings, and hopped a tram to our night’s lodgings, a guest house about a mile from the train station. We knew we wouldn’t be able to check in until that afternoon, but we were hoping to at least drop our bags there. We rang the bell, but even though it was after 8 at that point, no one answered, so we lugged our stuff to a coffee shop down the hill and hung out there drinking tea and reading for an hour. I left John there with the luggage and hiked back up the hill to try ringing the bell again. Not only did the owner answer this time, but she said the room was ready and that we could check in right then. FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC. OMG. We hadn’t showered since the previous morning, so we were both sweaty and sticky from spending the previous day in the sun and in an un-airconditioned bus and train. And, even though it was barely 9AM, it was already 90+F in Prague.
I went back and got John, and we checked in, took the aforementioned GREATEST SHOWERS EVER, and crashed for a nap in the most comfortable bed we’ve slept in the entire trip so far. OMG HEAVEN. Neither of us had slept much or well on the train, so the nap was absolutely wonderful.
After a few hours, we woke up and headed out to see what there was to see. Mostly this consisted of trying to figure out how to get places and instead getting lost, despite both a map and a GPS. Street signage here is like it was in the Balkans — fairly non-existent. I found out yesterday that during the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, when the citizens tried to replace the Communist government and the Soviets came in to quash the rebellion, one of the ways the people of Prague tried to mess with the Soviets was to take down all the street signs. I think they still haven’t put them back up, or something. Gah.
But at least in our wandering we figured out where things were and what we wanted to see. We wandered down to Charles Bridge and watched the view for a while.
John on Charles Bridge, with the Vltava (Moldau) River in the background.
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Then we hung out cooling our heels in a fountain with a lot of other people. Aaaahhhhhh. Relief from the heat.
As evening turned to night, we headed back to our guest house, stopping by a grocery store to get some food for dinner, breakfast, and lunch the next day. Easy, relaxed day. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 37: Auschwitz: A world I can only envision in black and white
**Disclaimer: As the post title should indicate, this is kind of a downer of a post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Only for a bit, though — then it perks up towards the end.**
Sunday July 11th, we got up early and got our bags packed, then took them to the train station and stuffed them in a locker so that we could pick up our train reservation and tickets for Prague, and then hop a train to Oscwiecim (the town where Auschwitz is) before taking the night train to Prague.
We hadn’t looked at the train schedules in advance, because we’d looked before, and there was always a train an hour to Oscwiecim. Well, for some reason there wasn’t today (maybe because it was Sunday?) so we ended up at the bus station behind the train station, to take a bus. While the bus was on the highway, we encountered a very recent traffic accident blocking the road (and “highway” is being generous–there wasn’t even a single line dividing the two halves of the road.) The bus couldn’t squeeze by, and the cops on the scene didn’t have any word as to when it’d be cleared, so the bus driver decided to backtrack and take a different route. And I discovered something. The frustrating part about having GPS is that when the bus driver is going THE WRONG WAY and he doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Polish, there’s really nothing you can do except for sit and watch him go the wrong way. At one point we were going down a farm road in the middle of a bunch of fields and NOTHING ELSE, and the road was so narrow that branches from trees were hitting us on both sides as well as the top of the bus. The driver pulled over four different times to ask for directions (including one time on that farm road, much to the farmer’s bemusement from which the driver got directions.)
So we ended up getting to Auschwitz over an hour late. This kind of screwed our schedule up, unfortunately, as we had to leave by 6 to catch our train to Prague, and we ended up cutting our visit short, which I was kind of bummed about. But at the same time, we kind of saw enough, you know?
I took almost no pictures. Two with my phone, and maybe four or five more with my regular camera (I’ll post those later, of course.)
Auschwitz is actually three sites–Auschwitz I (the original camp that was mostly used for political prisoners), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) which is the most notorious one where most of the atrocities occurred, and Auschwitz III, a labor camp that we didn’t see (and I don’t think is on display.) We actually went to Auschwitz II first, since between the hours of 10AM and 3PM the only way you can access Auschwitz I is via a guided tour, which is not only expensive, but not something either of us was interested in. Seriously, who wants to be rushed through something like that?
Auschwitz II is outside the town a couple of miles, so we had to take a free shuttle bus over there. There’s really not much left–the main building where the main gates were, a few of the barracks, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria (ruins because the Nazis blew them up when it became clear that the Soviets were going to come in and liberate the camps.)
I had a really hard time grasping things at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think partly it’s because so little remains, but also partly because we’re so used to seeing everything as black-and-white pictures, and here we were in full-color on a 90+ degree summer day, with everything around us green and leafy. In my head, concentration camps are always in black and white and it’s always winter, because that seems to be how it is in the pictures I’ve seen. Heck, even in the pictures where there’s no snow, since they’re in black and white, it’s hard to get a sense of the vibrancy and reality of things.
So I decided to turn the two pictures I took into black and white shots… maybe you can see what I mean.
Remains of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Same picture, turned grayscale and some other tinkering done to it. This is how I picture it, ya know?
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The blue sky, puffy white clouds, and green trees just don't jive with this infamous sign over the gate at Auschwitz I.
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Yeah, this picture is about how it should look. Incidentally, did you know that some indescribably stupid people stole this sign last winter with the intention of selling it to a collector? When it was recovered, they'd cut it into three pieces, ostensibly to smuggle it out of the country. Wow. Just... yeah.
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After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was after 3, so we headed back to Auschwitz I. That camp is MUCH better-preserved. The majority of the buildings were brick rather than wood, and they’d turned a lot of them into museums on different topics, so we wandered through them with the time we had remaining. Again, looking at the buildings themselves, I had a really hard time grasping what went on there… but looking at some of the exhibits made some things come alive. They have one room that’s full of nothing but hair the Nazis cut off of the women. It’s dusty and all looks gray and clumped and matted together, but here and there you can see braids, and that caught me. It was hard to look at the buildings and see what’d happened there, but for some reason, all I had to do was look at a braid and envision the woman braiding it for the last time. There was another room just full of shoes, including a large display of just thousands of children’s shoes. That was another really really difficult one for me. There was another one full of clothes. One full of brushes — hair brushes, toothbrushes, clothing brushes, shaving brushes. One of suitcases, suitcases plastered with the name and address label of the owner, and in many cases also covered in stickers from exotic locations to which the owner had traveled. New York City. Paris. Istanbul.
Ya know, I’ve been to the Holcaust Museums in LA and Washington DC. I’ve seen similar displays of personal artifacts, and those definitely affected me. But there was something about seeing the ones at Auschwitz and knowing that this was where they were brought originally — that they were brought there for their intended purposes, and not shipped there after the fact for the purpose of a museum exhibit… something about that hit me pretty hard.
We saw other places where horrible atrocities occurred (the camp prison, the excecution yard) but nothing came to life like room after room of personal belongings. That’s what resonated with me, and is lodged in my brain.
Like I said earlier, we had to leave an hour before the museum closed, so we didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to see… but at the same time it was enough.
***HERE ENDS THE SERIOUS PART OF THE POST. ENOUGH ALREADY.***
We hopped a (very very crowded) bus home (we got the last two seats on the bus — the 15 or so people who boarded after us ended up standing for the almost two-hour ride back.) Once we got back, we retrieved our bags from the locker and headed to the mall next to the train station so we could eat dinner and I could finish postcards. It was here that I discovered something quite amazing.
McDonald’s in Poland serves CHICKEN CURRY BURGERS.
DUDE. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THESE AT HOME. SERIOUSLY.
Ok, granted it’s not as good as actual chicken curry, but for a chicken burger, it was PRETTY GOOD. Just spicy enough without being so spicy that it’d scare people off, and that lovely curry flavor… mmmmmm. Where can I start a petition to get these at home???
Oh, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about McDonald’s here or just on Facebook, so I’ll explain here for posterity. While I’m all about eating local food while traveling, McD’s in foreign countries are good for two reasons. First, as you saw with my previous example, it’s fun to see what the local menu contains that the American menu doesn’t. So far I’ve had a raspberry “summer shake” (quite good!) and a burger that I tried in Zagreb called a McCountry, which was like a Big Mac only with this very mustardy dijon sauce. I didn’t realize what it was before I bought it, I just wanted to try it. I like mustard, but this was too much mustard for me. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well. I’ve seen this same burger in Poland and in Hungary (where it was called the McFarm… I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why it’d be called the “McCountry” either.)
The second reason McDonald’s in foreign countries are great? They ALL have FREE WIFI. And they’re huge — much bigger (more seating) than pretty much any American McD’s I’ve seen. So they’ve become, for John and I on this trip, a meeting spot for when we split up to do our own thing, and also a waiting room when we’re waiting for a train. Heck, it’s a lot nicer than the train station, and you can get a soda and sit there for two hours and no one will hassle you (unlike at a cafe.)
We headed to the train about 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave and found our train car. Have I mentioned yet how night trains work in Europe? It’s really very cool! You board a car that’s going to your destination, but the other cars on the train may be going to different destinations. In the middle of the night, you make one or more stops where your car (or the other cars) is unlinked from the train and hooked to a different train that’s going where you want to go. It’s really nifty!
Anyway, so I hand the conductor our reservation, tickets, and rail passes. Let me explain how that works. We have railpasses, but for some trains (including overnight trains) you also have to purchase a reservation (fairly cheap on day trains, more expensive on night trains) so that you’re guaranteed somewhere to sit. Also, our rail passes weren’t valid for Poland, so we had to purchase tickets from Krakow to the Polish border, and then our passes would be good once we crossed into the Czech Republic. So we had four pieces of paper total — the reservation slip, two tickets, and the railpass. I hand all of this over to the conductor for our car, and he shakes his head and says no, that the reservation and tickets aren’t valid until the NEXT night.
WHAT.THE.HECK.
I looked closely at them for the first time, and sure enough, he was right — they were printed for July 12th. I thought back to that morning, and how the woman who’d printed them had JUST gotten to work — we were her first customers of the day, in fact.
I looked at John, and looked at the time. We had less than 15 minutes before the train was going to leave, and the international ticket counter was on the far opposite end of the station (pretty much as far opposite from where we were standing as we could get) and down and up a couple of sets of stairs (since you have to go underneath the tracks to get to the platforms.) I’m glad I chose to wear my shoes that day rather than my sandals! I left John with all of the bags and took off running, clutching the tickets and the passes.
I got to the counter, completely winded, and was shocked to see that, almost 12 hours later, it was the same woman who’d sold me the passes that morning!! I managed to gasp out our dilemma, and her response was, “Yes, I remember you. Did I really put that as the date? I know you wanted them for tonight.” No apology. She got a new reservation printed out, but handed me back cash and told me we’d need to buy the tickets on board the train. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it and ran, literally. I sprinted back to the train and we grabbed our bags and got back in line and handed everything to the conductor outside the train door with less than five minutes to spare.
Right before the train left, the conductor came into our compartment looking for us — he wanted our rail passes, and he needed 5 more Euros, since it costs more to buy tickets on the train than in the station (which seemed really unfair to me, since the ticket woman was the one who screwed up in the first place anyway!) He said he’d take payment in Euro or Zloty (Polish currency.) We were out of both currencies — we haven’t been anywhere on the Euro since Montenegro (FIVE COUNTRIES AGO) and we’d tried to use up all of our Zloty so we didn’t have extra left. After dumping out all the small pockets of John’s and my backpacks, we located a 5 Euro bill that had somehow escaped detection. This, however, left our rail passes. The problem was that I’d already given them to him, and he insisted I hadn’t.
At this point I was TOTALLY freaking out. I’d already sprinted across the train station and back to get the reservation changed, it was hotter than hell outside and inside the station, and now he was telling me we never gave him our rail passes (which I KNOW we did, and which are NOT replaceable if we lose them.) John’s yelling at me to calm down and think about where I might have put the passes, I’m yelling back that I know I gave them to him, he’s yelling back that the conductor doesn’t have them, and our compartment companions are watching this in bewilderment.
Finally I go into the conductor’s berth and refuse to leave until he goes through the pile of tickets and railpasses. Lo and behold, there are our passes!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH.
I go back into our compartment and want to just curl into a little ball and cry out of sheer relief. We’re on the train, and I didn’t lose our passes. As I go to empty my pockets so that I can stretch out on the bed, I realize that the postcards are still in them. I’d meant to put them in the mailbox on the platform, and in the chaos, I TOTALLY forgot. GAH. Every time we stop for the rest of Poland, I hang my head out the train window to look at the platform and see if I see a mailbox… Nope. Sigh.
So some of you will be getting postcards from Poland when I get home and can stuff them into envelopes. Oh well, at least they have stamps on them. :-p
The other two guys in our compartment were pretty cool. They were two Swedish architecture students who were spending a couple of weeks traveling around Europe, and we talked for several hours, until the Spanish gals in the compartment next door banged on our wall for the third or fourth time (since it was around 1:30 AM and they probably wanted us to go to sleep, even though we were talking fairly quietly.)
Sonne and their traveling mascot. Apparently they put him into pictures at random. I SOOO love that idea -- I wish I'd done something similar on this trip!
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I was miserably hot, and of course at this point our train was stopped in a station waiting for another train for something like 45 minutes, so there was no airflow and no lovely white noise to put me to sleep, so I didn’t fall asleep until well after 2. Ugh. I still like night trains, though, even though it was A THOUSAND DEGREES IN THERE.
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Euro Trip Day 36: Monks on Segways with flamethrowers
Since I’ve managed to get behind in blog posts, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to post pictures and give a brief rundown of the day, at least until I’ve caught up. :-)
July 10th John wasn’t feeling well, so he relaxed and I wandered around Krakow, seeing more of the historical things to see. First I headed over to Oskar Schindler’s factory (yeah, the Oscar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame.) There wasn’t anything left to see of the factory, but there was a quite good museum on the Nazi occupation of Krakow, and on Schindler and his workers.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsbluff/4781699309/
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One of the things the museum has on display is pieces of firsthand accounts of life in the Krakow ghetto that were written by the children who lived there. Director Roman Polanski (yeah, the sleazeball) actually grew up in the Krakow ghetto. Whatever his sleaziness now, it’s hard not to be struck by what he wrote when he was 8 years old:
Roman Polanski, on the building of the wall of the Krakow ghetto: "I suddenly realized we were going to be walled in. I got so scared that I eventually burst into tears."
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Then I headed over to Zgody Square, now called Bohaterów Ghetta (Ghetto Heroes) Square. It was the main meeting place in the Krakow ghetto, and where all of the selections, deportations, and many violent incidents took place. Now the square has a bunch of empty chair sculptures. The explanation for the chairs was in Polish, but I assume it has something to do with commemorating the people killed there.
I swear I got a better picture of this with my big camera.
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On the square is the old pharmacy Under the Eagle, which was the only pharmacy in the ghetto (and the pharmacist was the only non-Jew permitted to live in the ghetto.) It’s now a museum on the Krakow ghetto. It cost extra to take pictures, and there really wasn’t much to take pictures of, as the only original piece of furniture that remains is a desk. Still, it was a neat place–the pharmacy ended up as a kind of community aid center. People who were being deported would leave messages there, and they’d sell things like hair dye (for people trying to look younger to avoid being declared too old to work and therefore shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz) and sedatives for infants so that they could be smuggled out of the ghetto. The whole place was really, really eye-opening and sobering.
After that I walked back across the river and through the old Jewish quarter of Kasmiriz, and then on to Wawel Castle, the old seat of power in Poland for hundreds of years.
Part of Wawel Castle.
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I wandered around for a while, then headed over to the castle’s cathedral to catch the 5PM church service. Pictures aren’t allowed inside the cathedral, unfortunately, but I took this one outside the cathedral.
Wawel Castle Cathedral.
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This statue is right outside the cathedral door -- Pope John Paul II celebrated his first mass here, and it was his cathedral when he was the bishop of Krakow. In fact, there's pope stuff all over the city. It's kind of crazy.
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After church, I walked through Planty Park from the castle to the old town square. Back in the 1820s, the city decided to tear down the old city wall (which was falling into disrepair and wasn’t being used to protect the city anyway), fill in the moat, and turn that space into a park. Now there’s a lovely green park that rings the entire old town, and it’s a really really nice place to relax on a hot day.
Planty Park.
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I forgot to mention that this entire time we’ve been in Krakow, there’s been a street festival going on, with different performing acts from all over the world (no seriously–there was an Iranian group there.) There was music, drama, performance art, and some just plain fun and silliness.
Bubble makers!
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I went back and watched the accordion players for a while (see the video in my previous post) and finally broke down and bought one of the CDs they had for sale. I couldn’t help it–they were fun!
I also finally managed to get the Hejnal on video. The Hejnal Mariacki is a traditional Polish hymn that was at one time used as a bugle call to signal the opening and closing of Krakow’s city gates. Nowdays it’s played once an hour, 24 hours a day. According to legend, the tune is cut short at the end because back in the 1200s, a bugler played it to announce the Mongol invasion of Poland, and was shot in the throat by an arrow. If you’ve ever read the Newberry-award-winning book The Trumpeter of Krakow, it revolves around this legend.
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I also stuck around until 9PM to watch a French musical group I’d seen rehearse earlier in the day. Now, I’d seen them rehearse in their street clothes, so I really wasn’t prepared for their actual musical act, which involved fire, monk’s robes, and Segways (yeah, those two-wheeled contraptions.) All but one of them were playing brass instruments that had been massively modified from their original shapes (well, except for one guy who had a plain old soprano saxaphone.) The one woman in the band was the only one who didn’t have a musical instrument. Instead, she had two wands with fire coming from them, and periodically in the act she’d light the ground on fire (I have no idea what they prepared it with ahead of time so it’d do so.)
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The whole thing (about 30 minutes) was beyond bizarre, but again, it was fun. :-)
That completed, I headed home… and managed to get really, really lost. It turns out that they closed the tram line for road construction that I’d normally take to get back to our dorms. Well, they didn’t actually CLOSE it — they switched the tram line to another route and street entirely, but called it the same line. And the sign announcing the change was only in Polish. (And yeah, I know I was in Poland, but given the HUGE number of tourists there, having a translation would have been HELPFUL.) And since it was nighttime, I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t the same route — silly me for assuming the same Line 15 tram that we’d been taking the past couple of days was anything but the same as it’d been.
I didn’t get home until after 11, at which point I was really, REALLY grumpy. But at least I made it home.
A side note about English. Both John and I have found the relative ubiquity of English really interesting. Heck, I heard a FRENCH person complaining in Budapest that a museum didn’t have enough English translations, or at least an audioguide in English. And that’s far from the only non-native English speaker we heard complaining about the lack of English. As John pointed out, it’s an issue of practicality, since English is more widely spoken than any other European language. And there’s something neat about listening to two people converse in English, but neither of them speak English as a native language (and in some cases, I’m guessing not even as a second language.) However, as a native speaker, I still felt a bit self-conscious and self-centered about wanting signage in English. Oh well.
…and I’ve now concluded I’m incapable of giving anything resembling a brief rundown. But you knew that. Sigh. :-)
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Where we are now:
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What’s better than Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor on the accordion? Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor on FOUR accordions!!
Watch these kids on the piano (old piano with the keys fused so that it was a public art piece rather than a piano.) HILARIOUS.
These accordion players are a Ukranian group called Harmonia — I bought their CD of classical tunes. LOVE it. :-)
Euro Trip Day 35: Sleep, eat, rinse and repeat
So yeah… we really did nothing yesterday. It was glorious. We woke up late, lazed around reading, headed downtown, found some fairly mediocre pierogies for lunch, hung out in a park under a tree and read and napped, then headed back to our room, where we read, napped, and traded off the internet connection (we have one cable for the two of us.) Boring day, but sometimes we need that. :-)
What we do for fun in the evenings -- laundry! :-) I can't wait to have a washer again... bathtub laundry gets old after a while.
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 34: I am 5,762 miles from home
You know how there are some sights that you’ll never, ever forget as long as you live? This trip’s been full of them for me, but stamped on my brain until the day I die will be watching the sun come up over the Polish countryside as the train chugged toward Krakow, and seeing an entire armada of storks stalk a freshly-shorn field in search of breakfast, the rising sun turning their white feathers pink and orange.
I didn’t take a picture because, for once, I was too busy watching. I couldn’t look away long enough to get even my cell phone camera. I can’t even find the words to describe it beyond “absolutely spectacular.”
So yeah, July 8th started bright and early when the sun rose around 5:30 or so, and I hung out the train window and watched it until we got to Krakow at 6:45. Once we got there, we found the baggage lockers, left our bags, and found a place to eat and hang out for a bit. Then it was time to find a place to stay. This was my test of patience… we showed up in Krakow and didn’t actually have lodging booked for the night. I’d emailed a college dorm about staying there (one of those ones that turns into a hostel in the summer) but hadn’t heard back. So, armed with the GPS coordinates of the hostel, we headed off on foot to see if they had any open spaces. This was also the first time we’d navigated anywhere without a map, just an arrow on the GPS on John’s phone pointing us in a direction. I have to admit, it was kind of fun! We found the dorm fairly easily, and not only did they have a room for us, but they also let us check in right then, at before 10 in the morning. This is unheard of! Most places have 2PM check-in times. Of course, we didn’t have our luggage with us, but it was still nice to find the room.
Now that we had a home base, we were free to explore, so we hopped a tram and headed down to the old part of the city, called Stare Misto (which means old city.) Once upon a time, it was a walled city, but in the 1820s they tore the wall down, filled in the moat, and turned the moat into a park. So now there’s this lovely tree-filled green ring around the entire old part of the city — such a nice park!
St. Mary's Church in Stare Misto
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on an accordion, much less a quartet of them…
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I just realized I didn’t take many pictures… it really was a lovely lazy day. We finished up with some nice grilled kielbasa from a street vendor for dinner (hey, it’s Poland!) and walked home, enjoying the lovely evening weather. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 33: Rugs with guns and trains with bunks
Wednesday, July 7th started somewhat busy as we went to run some errands and then head back to our hostel and proceed to conduct the now-usual jigsaw of trying to fit all of our stuff into our backpacks. We got packed up and went to the train station to get our tickets for the night train to Krakow, put the packs into a locker, and see one last thing in Budapest before we left.
There's a bunch of 4x4s in place as construction scaffolding (or something like that) in the international ticket office at Budapest Keleti train station. It appears to have been in place since 2007, judging from the dates on it. At some point, someone wrote their journey's stops and signed their home country, name, and that day's date. Now the scaffolding is covered, and as we waited, we enjoyed perusing the gallery of where everyone had been before they ended up in Budapest, or where they were planning to go. John added us to the historical register. I love it.
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Bags in lockers, we headed over to the Great Synagogue and Jewish Museum to see what there was to see.
This is the world's second or third largest synagogue (depending on which source you read.) It's absolutely BEAUTIFUL.
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Something that absolutely fascinated us about the place (aside from its size) was the resemblance it bore to, well, a church. (Incidentally, the word for both church and synagogue in Hungarian is “templom”.) It had an organ and an altar and a choir and frescoes on the walls and a dome and a bunch of marble. It just seemed somewhat odd to us, but we both still were amazed by its sheer size and beauty.
A couple of things I somehow neglected to get a cameraphone picture of, but that I know I have pictures of on my big camera. First, in the courtyard area next to the synagogue, there is a mass grave where over 2000 victims of the Nazis from the Budapest ghetto during the winter of 1944-1945 are buried. The courtyard now contains trees, ivy, and a lot of gravestones that are just leaned up against each other and against the trees, since because they’re mass graves, people aren’t sure where the gravestones need to go. Around the outside of the courtyard are pictures of the courtyard (which was supposed to be a garden originally) from the early 1900s until the 1980s, including pictures of the bodies and their burial. Very, very sad and moving.
The other thing I don’t have a picture of is the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, a silver sculpture designed to look like a weeping willow tree. On the leaves are engraved the names of the 300,000+ Hungarian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. It’s located next to the synagogue in Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who used his position to help Hungarian Jews emigrate to safety during the war, and was eventually taken into custody by the Soviets and “died of a heart attack” at the age of 35 while in Soviet custody in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. What’s the old grim joke? Something about a .38mm heart attack? Not very funny, but sadly most likely true.
In any case, as part of the memorial park, they have plaques and pillars honoring him and many other Hungarian members of the Righteous Among the Nations, the designation for non-Jews who assisted Jews and helped them be saved from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I’m not quite sure why Wallenberg gets a plaque in the ground and certain names go on it (there were tons more names on three other pillars surrounding this central plaque.)
This is located in Raoul Wallenberg park behind the Great Synagogue in Budapest. The names on the stone are other Budapest members of the Righteous Among Nations, those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The stones are part of a Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a person's grave as a sign of respect.
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After that, we went inside the museum. The top floor of the museum housed a temporary exhibit of Jewish rugs. At this point in the day, I was already kind of tired, so I almost asked if we could skip it… I’m so glad we didn’t! John and I actually spent more time here than we did in the rest of the museum. I’m not quite sure how to explain why we both found the whole thing so fascinating, but we did. It wasn’t just rugs made by Jewish people and/or for synagogues, either. They had Chinese-made rugs and Afghani-made rugs and even Navajo rugs.
This rug was made in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghani conflict. It has woven into it tanks, machine guns, and grenades. Sad.
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There was one more rug that both really really caught John’s and my attention, and left us thinking afterwards… but that’s going to be its own blog post. It’s that special. Yeah, I know we’re weird.
After we got out of the rug exhibit, we ended up at a Chinese food place (don’t laugh — we had to try it!) for dinner, and then we headed over to the McDonald’s by the train station to wait for our train. Yeah, we could have waited IN the train station, but for the price of a Coke, McDonald’s is clean, has clean bathrooms and free wifi, and is free of annoying people who keep asking us if we want to give them money or if we want a taxi or accommodations. Sometimes it’s just nice to not have to deal with that. I did my usual last-minute postcard writing (why do I always wait until the last minute??) and then we headed over to find our train.
Something that I find really cool about trains in Europe — you sit in a specific car based on your destination. A single train doesn’t always travel to a place in its entirety. Our train was at least 15 cars long, and it contained cars going to different cities all over eastern Europe (like the car in the following picture, whose final destination was St. Petersburg.) Then, at various stations on the journey, cars detach from one train and attach to another train, and are carried to their final destinations. Our car was the only one on the train going to Krakow, for example. SO NEAT.
Am I a freak for wanting to hop this train and go to St. Petersburg? I'd LOVE TO.
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Lousy cameraphone picture of us in our triple-decker bunks on the train.
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Train next to us leaving the station. I wonder where all those train cars are headed to.
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Sunset as seen from the train. It was an absolutely amazing one.
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I don’t think there are words to describe how happy I was to be on that train. I know I’m odd, but honestly, that’s been one of the highlights of this trip for me–lying in my bunk, hanging my head out the window, and watching the countryside go by. So so so amazing and wonderful.
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 32: I don’t care if there are other neat cities. I want to stay in Budapest, darn it
I feel like I should specify that Day 32 was July 6th, since I’m not getting these posts posted before bedtime anymore, like I’d originally intended. My plan before I left was just to post one picture and a quick writeup of the day, but I like doing the longer posts (despite the time they take) because I like working in more of the pictures I take.
Well, when I started writing this, it was July 7th and we were going to be leaving Budapest on a night train for Krakow. (It’s now July 9th and we’re in Krakow. Whoops. I think my post for Day 33 and 34 will be short and combined. And I’ll work on it later, because I have a city to explore!)
While the itchy traveling feet part of me was looking forward to moving on from Budapest, at the same time I didn’t want to leave. It’s the second time I’ve been there, and the only city on this trip that’s a repeat for me, and I think it’s my favorite city. I really do. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is I like about it here. The Hungarian people aren’t always hugely friendly. It’s not a really clean city (although to be fair, it’s not as dirty as Rome.) The weather’s been hot and muggy and there are a ton of mosquitoes. It’s inexpensive, but not as inexpensive as some other places.
But there’s just something about the culture, the language, the scenery, the architecture, the river, and the stubbornness and pride in their history that the Hungarian people have that I really, really enjoy. It’s a noisy, busy, bustling city, and there are so many neat little things and places to explore. So as sad as I am to leave, I’m not overly so, because I know this won’t be the last time I’m here. I know I’ll be back.
Anyway, part of the reason this post is late is that I’ve been trying to upload some spiffy videos (singer at the Budapest Opera House and a whole choir of singers in a church) from yesterday (July 6th), but since the uploader is stubbornly refusing to cooperate (it might have something to do with the glacial speed of our internet) I’m giving up for now and just posting what I have.
We started off the day by going to the Central Market to see what there is to see. It’s a HUGE old indoor open market that has everything from fish to souvenirs to lots of tasty food. We didn’t partake of the food, but it smelled really good.
The Central Market as seen from the second floor (or what they call the first floor in Europe.)
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I found the pottery that I’d been looking for the entire time I’ve been in Hungary — it’s actually made in a small town called Korond (Hungarian spelling) / Corund (Romanian spelling) in Romania that’s famous for its pottery, but it’s in a very ethnically Hungarian region of Transylvania, which is why I was hoping I’d find some here. I found ONE store in the entire marketplace that sold it (tucked away into a back corner — not easy to find!) so I was really really happy. This time I made sure we packed it VERY well, since last time half of what I brought home broke. I looked into shipping it, but it would have been ridiculously, obscenely, prohibitively expensive… so in order to alleviate space concerns, we jettisoned some of the food we’d brought (which we’d planned to eat through anyway so that we’d have space for souvenirs) as as well as one of the two pairs of cargo pants I’d brought (the pair that I had to make the buttonhole for.) They didn’t fit anyway without a belt — I’ve taken them in twice on this trip and they still kept falling down, and I’d brought a belt, but it broke. So oh well — I’d rather have the pottery. I bought three small handled serving bowls, and John bought a coffee mug. Fun. :-)
Just in case it breaks again, I took a picture so at least I can remember how pretty it was. :-)
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After finishing up at the marketplace, we hopped the metro and headed to St. Stephen’s Basilica. I took pictures of the inside, but they’re on my other camera, so like the other ones (with a few exceptions) I’ll post them at some later date.
Front of the Basilica
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After that we headed to the House of Terror, a museum on the the fascist and communist regimes in Hungary and the victims of those regimes. The building itself once was a jail and interrogation center for the Arrow Cross party and then the Communist Party, and Not Good Things happened in that very building for many years. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, but I snuck one of the atrium.
Atrium in the House of Terror with mug shots of people who were detained, tortured, and/or killed in the building. (Side note--I love how my phone rendered this shot. Awesome.)
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The museum itself was very intense and moving, and John and I both agreed that it was the best presentation of that sort of subject matter that we’d seen outside of the Holocaust museum in DC.
And then we both realized, for about the umpteenth time this trip, just how fortunate we’ve been to have been able to visit so many neat places. I’m not trying to gloat here… it’s just something that keeps coming back to us. We’ll look at something and talk about it and say something like, “This reminds me of…” something in DC. Something in London. Something in Amsterdam. Something in Rome. Something in LA. Something in San Francisco. Something in one of the other places we’ve been on this trip. I love that we’re both such museum geeks, because we both really get into the process of reading and analyzing exhibits in museums and historical sites and then we tuck them away until another day when we dredge them up and use them for comparison purposes. I know we’re nerds, but it’s so much fun. I love being at a place in my life where I can focus on travel. I can’t necessarily afford it, but hey, I’m not going into debt to do it, and breakfast cereal for two meals a day isn’t THAT bad, really. :-)
After the House of Terror, we headed a few blocks down Andrassy Avenue to the Budapest Opera House. I’d planned originally to see an opera here (their cheap seats are $5!) but since we took that unplanned side trip to Sarajevo, we missed the end of the opera season. DARN!! Incidentally, the tour of the opera house costs more than actually going to see the opera itself. HEH.
I’m only going to post a few pictures below, but I have some more good ones if you just click here. :-)
Front of the opera house. Taken with my "real" camera, not the camera phone.
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So this is a picture of a picture, obviously. Can you believe they use (or at least used) LIVE HORSES in performances? INSANE. Fun fact: the stage itself, back to front, is the size of an Olympic swimming pool, although they only use about half that for the actual performance.
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Go Go Gadget wide-angle camera lens!! :-)
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I REALLY REALLY wish we could have seen a performance here!! The 5 minutes the tour guide gave us in the main hall wasn't NEARLY enough time to really take in the room. This is why I generally really don't like guided tours.
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We didn’t get to see a performance, but for about $2.50 extra, we got 5 minutes of an opera singer’s time. SWEET!!
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Painting of some opera singer who played Carmen, taken especially for a friend of mine who requested something Carmen-related and this was the ONLY DARN THING I COULD FIND IN THE ENTIRE OPERA HOUSE. The gift shop not only didn't have ANY Carmen swag, but would you believe the ONLY CD they had of it was recorded in SLOVAKIA?!?!? DUDE.
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We got out of the opera house around 4 and hopped the metro to Gellert Hill, the highest point in Budapest. It was named after a monk named Gellert (who later became St. Gellert) who, in 1046 during the great pagan rebellion, was put into a spiked barrel and rolled down the hill to his death. Cheerful. Today it’s a woodsy park full of hiking trails, with a monument and the old citadel at the top.
On the way up we saw the GREATEST PARK EVER. Seriously, why don't they still make them like this??
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We may have gone down these slides. More than once.
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On the top there's a statue called Liberation Monument (well, it has several names, actually) that can be seen from all over Budapest. Originally it was ostensibly built by the people of Hungary to thank the Soviets for saving them from the Nazi scourge during World War II. After the fall of Communism, they changed it to a more generic "thanks to all patriots who have lost their lives defending our country" kind of thing.
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These kids were American -- I'm not sure from where, but I'm basing that assumption on their accents. Anyway, they unicycled up the hill. How cool is that? I mean, who brings a unicycle to Budapest? I LOVE IT!! :-)
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John and Budapest.
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We got to the top and were going to hang out and watch the sun set, but the weather quickly turned ominous, so we opted to head down. Good thing, since by the time we got to the bottom, an absolutely drenching rain was pouring out of the sky. We were hungry, so we went down Vaci Utca (famous pedestrian street near our hostel) in search of a reasonably-priced, tasty-looking place to eat. On our way, we saw a church with an open door, so I decided to stick my head in, and it turned out that a Canadian choir was there giving a free concert, and it’d just started. Since they didn’t seem to mind a couple of damp, informally-dressed Americans, we decided to stick around, and ended up standing in a corner since there were no seats left.
If you click on the picture, it'll take you to some details of what they were singing. Amusingly enough, I was able to find this choir on Facebook, so I posted a link to the picture and videos on my Flickr for them to see. Ahhh, technology! :-)
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More videos are here on my Flickr page. :-)
After the concert, we emerged to find that the weather had cleared up, which for me means (of course) night photos!! I already posted the one of the bridge in my last blog post, so here are a couple more.
Vaci Utca at around 9 PM on a rainy night.
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Buda Castle on Buda Hill, as seen from the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge.
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Liberation Monument and the Citadella on Gellert Hill, as seen from the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge.
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Finally, we had some very good (and cheap!) Hungarian food for dinner before heading back to our hostel for the night. I love Budapest so so so much — it’s SO NICE to be back!! :-)
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Where we are now:
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I love Budapest at night
This isn’t my Day 32 post, by the way. I’m working on that. This is just a lovely shot of the Liberty Bridge and the Danube River, with the Gellert Hotel in the background.
It was a lovely evening yesterday. :-)
Euro Trip Day 31: A water day from start to finish
This morning started bright and early when John and I headed to the Szechenyi Bath. One of the things Hungary is fairly famous for is its abundance of thermal baths, and while there are at least a dozen in Budapest alone, the Szechenyi is one of the most famous, and rightfully so. It’s huge, and absolutely beautiful. We got there around 8:30 this morning and stayed until well after noon, soaking in the different pools (some of them colder, some warmer, some indoors, some outdoors) and talking and relaxing (and having a REALLY bad chicken sandwich.) It was so so so wonderful and relaxing, and just what we needed.
Took this with my $25 eBay wonder camera (as I call it) -- an old Canon Elph. I keep it for situations where I don't want to take my normal camera. It works pretty well!
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The weather was perfect, and it wasn't too crowded... so so nice.
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Oh, did I mention that we randomly decided to spend two more nights in Budapest? I really really love it here! So we booked a cheap hostel… it’s pretty weird. I mean, I understand that it’s a hostel, and maybe we’ve lucked out in the past with our hostels, but this one is… interesting. It’s owned by two sisters who apparently got their signals crossed about our booking, because we showed up after 4PM and no room was ready for us. So they proceeded to yell (really!) at each other for ten minutes in Hungarian while they sorted things out. Then, our hostel room was supposed to have an ensuite bathroom, but not only does it not, but they don’t actually have ANY ensuite rooms. When I looked it up on HostelWorld prior to complaining about it, I saw that the ensuite and shared bathroom rooms were listed as the same price. So I guess I can’t complain? But seriously, what the heck? Also weird –to get to our room, we have to walk through the 8-person dorm room, and to get to the bathroom, we have to walk from our room through the dorm room into the hall. Also, our door only locks from the outside, not from the inside. So when we’re in here, we can’t lock it.
I guess we’re lucky that if finding decent hostels is hit-and-miss, we’ve had mostly hits. But I’m not quite sure whether to be annoyed or amused about this particular miss. I’m leaning toward amused. :-p
After getting our stuff dropped off at the hostel, we headed out to Margrit Island, an island in the middle of the Danube River (which bisects Budapest. Interesting historical fact: until the late 1800s, Budapest was actually two cities — Buda, the side with the hill and castle, and Pest, the flat side where Parliament is.) The bridge (Margrit Hid) that goes to the island is under construction, but it’s still walkable, so we joined the throngs heading out there to spend a nice afternoon. On the island is a fountain called Music Fountain, which is a water and music and (at night) light show. Think the Bellagio in Vegas, only not quite as high-tech… but it was still really neat. We’d planned to stick around until the evening so we could watch the lights, but first we almost got eaten alive by mosquitoes, and then the thunder and lightning and rain started, so we opted to head back. Still, we got a very lovely couple of hours there, and we had cotton candy. :-)
This was the coolest one by far — not because the effects were anything really great, but because I was sitting on an island in the Danube and they played the Blue Danube Waltz. LOVE IT.
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I think this was the largest cotton candy I've EVER seen. And it only cost $1.40!
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I swear John and I split this. We had to eat quickly though, because first the mosquitoes (why I'm wearing long sleeves and a hood--stupid bugs!) were sticking to it, and then it started raining. Whoops!
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When we got back across the bridge, we stopped right above the waterfront to watch the storm. I didn’t manage to get lightning on video, but you can see the flashes, and you can hear the huge BOOM — SWEET! :-) Just keep watching past the first few seconds. And I’ll try not to cringe at how bad my voice sounds on video.
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Last but not least, I actually got this dress for my niece yesterday, but I wanted to email a pic of it to my sis before I posted it here. Now that she’s seen it, I can post it here. All together now — AAAWWWW!!!
The lace at the bottom has hearts on it. I love having a niece to get cute dresses for. :-)
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Euro Trip Day 30: In which we get yelled at by an old lady on the bus, go to a Latin mass, get kicked off the subway, and end up at an apparently fascist rally
Ok, I’m a day late posting this. So sue me. My excuse is the world’s.WORST.upload.speed.EVAR. Even my cell phone camera pics are going slowly, and the ones from inside the sanctuary are my big camera. I did get this post at least STARTED on Sunday, though. :-p
Yesterday we got up and took a metro to a bus to the top of Buda Hill, where we went to Matyas Church to go to their 10AM Latin high mass. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve never been to a Latin mass, and it sounded interesting. Besides, I figured I’d understand it better than a Hungarian service. :-p
On the bus on the way there, for some reason, a well-dressed older lady (I’d say mid-70s at least) started yelling at me for no apparent reason. I have no idea what she was scolding me about, as she was speaking Hungarian, but she was quite irate, and went on for a couple of minutes until we got off the bus. She got off at the same stop as we did, so I worried for a minute that maybe she was going to church too, given her nice attire. Thankfully, she walked a different direction. So I was kind of surprised when the service started and I realized she was two pews in front of us… Go figure.
Anyway, this following video doesn’t have video, just sound — it’s the choir doing part of the service. I didn’t want to be obvious about recording, and I really did just want the audio, so hit play for a bit of soundtrack and keep reading the post. :-)
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Standing in the back and looking forward.
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This door is actually not centered on this wall, so to make it less obvious, they painted the angels on each side. Look closely at it.
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I LOVE the quality of this picture. Not bad for handheld at 1/8 of a second and f/4. :-)
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Altar view. The balcony on the left is the former royal box. Oh, this was the church where all of the coronations took place. Neat!
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If I had to rank my all-time favorite churches I’ve seen, I think Westminster Abbey in London would be first, then St. Mark’s in Venice, then this one. Seriously. Fourth would be the Duomo in Milan, incidentally… this even comes in ahead of that. I’m not sure why I like it so much. I mean, it’s obvious I prefer gothic churches, but there’s something about the first couple and then this one that I really, really like. I know all of them have been extensively restored, but to me it’s not as obvious as some other churches I’ve been in… so maybe that’s it.
Outside of the church. Ignore the scaffolding -- they're doing restoration on the church.
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After church, we stopped for a bite to eat, then we went wandering on Castle Hill. We walked down the hill to the river, then took the funicular back up. Have I mentioned it was a gorgeous day out? Because it was. A tad warm, but not unbearable.
Danube River and Parliament.
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Hungarian Parliament.
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At the top of the hill, we headed toward Buda Castle (which is no longer an actual castle, as the Communists stripped it of anything cool and castle-like. It’s now three different museums.) On the way we saw several groups of kids scattered around, playing musical instruments. I’m thinking it was for a class or part of their music lessons or something. They were quite good! There was actually a string triplet (violin, viola, and cello) that I kept trying to get a video of, but we ran into them three different times, and they were always in the middle of what seemed to be their last piece before packing up and moving to a new location when I’d get to them. By the third time this happened, John thought it was hilarious.
Again, the video is kind of lousy, but just hit play and scroll down the page. At least both are short… they’re fun though! I really enjoyed listening to the kids. Ignore my sniffles — there’s something here in the air that’s causing both John’s and my allergies to flare up.
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Anyway, we ended up at the Budapest History Museum, where they had a bunch of stuff from Budapest from prehistoric times to now. Very interesting stuff. And since it’s built into the castle, some areas are obviously old and castle-y. Neat!
It's either Han Solo in carbonite, or a 14th century knight's tomb. I'll let you be the judge.
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Stained glass window, with the castle wall beyond.
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Reflection in a castle courtyard window.
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After this, we headed back to our neck of the woods… only to be kicked off the metro for some unexplained reason several stops before home. We headed up to the surface to see if we could walk to the next stop, when we saw literally HUNDREDS of riot police in full gear (face masks, shoulder pads, shields, giant Halo-esque helmets. Much to John’s dismay, I insisted on crossing the (very large) street to see what was going on (hey, I like a good unexpected rally again and again…)
But this wasn’t a good rally. I took a few pictures with my other camera, but we both got a really really creepy vibe pretty quickly (despite the fact that everything was in Hungarian) so we left. After we got home, I Googled the name of the organization that was on the flags, and it’s an organization that Wikipedia describes as being extremely right-wing, fascist, and fairly racist. Ummm, WHOOPS. Yeah, glad we left that one. It’s not going to stop me from running toward every large crowd gathering I see — hey, stuff like that is interesting! but I understand why they had the riot police out like they did.
We walked multiple blocks until we found an open Metro station (we got turned away from a couple) but by the time we got there, our tickets had expired. GRRR. So we stopped for ice cream then bought new tickets to complete our journey home.
Oh! I have to mention the metro line near where we were staying — Line 1, AKA the yellow line, AKA the Millennium Line. It was built in 1896 (the same time as Heroes’ Square) for the Millennium Exhibition, which was World’s Fair type of event to celebrate 1000 years since the first Magyar tribes (Hungarians call themselves Magyars) settled in the Budapest basin. The subway hasn’t been updated since then, so it looks more or less like I would think a New York subway would have looked in 1896 — wooden ticket booths and paneling on the wall, white subway tile, cast iron painted support beams… I love it. So neat!
Oktagon station.
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And that was it for our Fourth of July. :-)
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Euro Trip Day 29: Art is long, life is brief.
I’m writing this post quickly because I need to get ready so we can head up to Buda Castle Hill to Matyas Church, where I’m going to a Latin high mass at 10AM. Neat! (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but one of my goals this trip is to go to church in every country. I missed Bosnia, but I’ve gotten every other country so far. Sweet.)
Sign on our train from Pecs to Budapest.
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The train ride through the Hungarian countryside was amazingly beautiful. This video quality is kind of lousy just because we were on the train and the windows were tinted and dirty, but you get the general idea. They had massive flooding in June, and it was still clearly evident as we passed through flooded fields, roads, and in one place, houses. Sad.
Train station in Budapest.
Our Couchsurfing host lives RIGHT in the center of the city, near some pretty famous stuff. He wasn’t home when our train got in, so we walked across the street from his apartment to the Museum of Fine Arts and Heroes’ Square.
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Heroes' Square
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Inside the Museum of Fine Arts. What a beautiful museum!
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"Art is long, life is brief." (Ars lonca/ Vita brevis.) At least I'm pretty sure that's what it says, based on my almost non-existent Latin ability.
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Museum of Fine Arts from Hosok Tere (Heroes' Square) at sunset.
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I do realize we're going to tourist hell for this, but we did have Mexican food for dinner. Their horchata was basically milk with sugar and cinnamon. I was like, "Dude, you forgot the rice!!" On the other hand, though, I had a 20 ounce glass of absolutely excellent fresh-squeezed OJ that cost me about $3.50. Can't beat that. OMG GOOD. (In Amsterdam, they'd sell 0.2 ml glasses of fresh-squeezed OJ for 3 or 4 Euro... expensive!)
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We both got a kick out of the wall display teaching Hungarians the finer points of Mexican cuisine. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 28: Relaxed day today, Budapest tomorrow
I’m starting to feel like a broken record. “Today we relaxed. Today we hung out. Today we had ice cream.” Part of me feels like, hey, we came all the way here, shouldn’t we be running around and doing stuff all the time to make the best use of our time?
Know what? We can’t. It’s physically and mentally impossible. John and I both realized this in DC a couple of years ago and again last summer in London, when we tried to hit every museum we possibly could. After about four or five straight days, we just got museumed out, and the last thing we did was want to cram some other bit of knowledge into our heads.
So it’s been no coincidence that this trip has had a pretty good mix of running-around-doing-things time and sit-on-our-behinds-and-veg time. Seven weeks is a long time to be on the road, and the last thing we wanted to do is burn out. Besides, we’re not on a really strict schedule with anything here… so if we have to shortchange something at the end (which I think will be Germany — I don’t think we’ll see nearly as much of Germany as we’d hoped) well, we can come back some other time. I’d rather be relaxed and have both of us enjoy this trip than try to cram in everything.
Anyway, as you can gather from the post title, today was a nice, relaxed day. We got up early, but puttered around the dorm, and ended up getting out of there later than we’d planned. We headed into town, saw a few sights, hung out in a park and had lunch, wandered a bit more, had ice cream, went home and did laundry, and headed out to meet up w/ the couchsurfers again for dinner/dessert/drinks/whatever anyone felt like having. It was quite nice!
Mosque of Pasha Qasim
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The above mosque is actually a Catholic church — check out the cross on the roof (and, if you’re bored, the Wikipedia article.) Originally there was a gothic church on the site, but when the Turks took over the city in the mid-1500s, the church was razed and the mosque built in its place. In the mid-1700s, the Austro-Hungarian empire brought Catholicism back to Hungary (and to Pecs), and instead of tearing down the mosque to put up another church, they simply turned the mosque into a church.
Holy water font in a niche next to the main door of the church. Right above it (out of the picture) is a huge crucifix.
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Fresco, stained glass windows, and dome. This building was beautiful!
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Something else that caught my attention, but that I somehow neglected to get a picture of (I should have one with my big camera though… I hope!) were the Turkish rugs used in various places throughout the church. I know mosques are typically carpeted with rugs, and it made me wonder if those rugs were originals from when it was a mosque. They sure looked old… but they were still in use! Granted, it was in a couple of places with fairly low foot traffic, but still. Crazy.
This is pretty much looking in the opposite direction of the exterior mosque shot above. Not quite, but you get the idea -- they were both taken in Széchenyi Square, facing opposite directions.
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And here’s a video I took, since I like doing that. Yeah, that is a McDonald’s, right on the square. We tried not to let it ruin the view. Besides, it was too much fun watching the kids have fun in the fountain. :-)
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On to Budapest in the morning! :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 27: Anyone know what flavor “Smurf” is?
Yesterday we slept in… we’ve been doing that a lot on this trip, oddly enough. I think yesterday I was tired because a horde of angry mosquitoes woke me up at 3AM. Well, the mosquitoes didn’t wake me up so much as the violent itching.
Have I mentioned that I don’t think I’ve seen a single window screen the entire time I’ve been here? Yeah. Just open windows.
And as it’s been hot in Pécs (mid-to-high 90s yesterday) and these dorms aren’t air-conditioned, we’ve had no choice but to sleep with the window open. Amusingly enough, the town’s name of Pécs (pronounced PAY-ch) is of Serbian origin and means “furnace”. No kidding. Although I suppose it beats Sacramento at this time of year.
I’d prepared myself. Despite the heat, I was sleeping in long pajama pants, socks, a long-sleeved shirt, and I pulled the comforter over my head. But the darn mosquitoes took advantage of anything they could find, which was my hands (which gripped the comforter) and my ankles, where there was the gap between my pajama pants and my socks. UGH.
I really, REALLY hate putting mosquito repellent on to sleep, but anything’s better than waking up itching like I did. I have hydrocortisone cream, but that didn’t help. I ended up in the fridge’s tiny freezer compartment, trying to dig out slivers of ice with my fingernails to ice the bites (which were incredibly swollen and almost painful.) After about an hour, the itching subsided enough that I could sleep, so I took the comforter out of the comforter cover and crawled inside the cover, pulling it over my head like a sleeping bag. Don’t laugh, it worked. I only got one more bite the rest of the night — on the tip of my nose. Lovely.
Here's our dorm. We're on the second floor on the one end, on the backside of the building.
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We finally got out of the dorm around 11 and headed downtown, first stopping by the store to pick up bread and cheese for lunch. We ended up in a park in a square near the town’s cathedral, and we found a nice bench in the shade where we could make our sandwiches. It was so nice that I ended up taking a nap there, while John just relaxed and waited for me to wake up.
Before we went to the cathedral, we first went to check out the town’s UNESCO World Heritage site, the early Christian necropolis, a cemetery that dates back to the 3rd and 4th centuries BC. I took pictures with my big camera, but none with the phone, so I don’t have any to post yet, but it really was beautiful, and amazing to look at some of the tombs that still have original frescoes in them. Neat! (And bonus–as they’re underground, they’re NICE AND COOL. Yaay for natural air-conditioning!)
(As an aside, there’s something I’ve learned this trip. John and I, being the geeks that we are, and especially being the museum geeks we are, can spend almost as long inside a museum when none of the exhibit info is in English as we can when all of the exhibit info is in English. Go figure.)
After that, we headed to the cathedral, which was GORGEOUS, inside and out. After staring for at least 15 minutes in amazement, John dubbed it the most beautiful church he’s seen (and I’ve dragged him to some pretty nice churches in London, Amsterdam, and Rome, not to mention on this trip.) I don’t think it makes my top favorites list, but it was nice. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a sucker for good architecture anywhere, but I tend to prefer churches that haven’t been obviously, visibly renovated to the hilt, and I also tend to prefer Romanesque and Gothic. If I had to pick, I think my favorite churches have been St. Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Milan, Westminster Abbey in London, and Mattyas Church in Budapest. No particular order for those, though — I can’t pick.
Pecs Cathedral.
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Inside the cathedral.
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Have I mentioned how much I love my new lens? The wide-angle? These pics were taken with my phone, of course, but just wait until I post the other ones… Wow. SO AWESOME. (Why am I not posting them now? Because it takes enough time out of my day just to write these blog posts… no time to go through my camera pics and do post-processing and post them online. I will though!)
Archway in the cathedral.
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Staircase to the choir loft. Amusingly enough, there was a bicycle parked at the bottom (out of the picture, though.) Talk about out of place!
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Crypt under the church. This was my favorite part, for some reason. Don't get me wrong -- I liked the cathedral, but there was just something about the spare, simple interior of the crypt that I preferred.
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I took another one of this crypt… well, actually it was the original of the above shot. I tinkered with the saturation and contrast for the above picture to try to get a more interesting effect, but if you’re curious, click here to check out the original.
After the cathedral, we headed in search of ice cream, since even though it was creeping toward late afternoon, it was still hot and miserable, and we’ve been eating a fair amount of ice cream on this trip. (Despite that, both John and I have lost weight… not that he needed to lose any, unfortunately. I just hope he doesn’t disappear by the end of the trip. Fortunately, Hungarians seem to subscribe to the philosophy of cooking good food, and then smothering it with sour cream, since sour cream makes everything better. I’m hoping he can put back on some of that weight… and hoping I don’t, since I’m already enjoying Hungarian food!)
Anyone know what flavor "Smurf" is?
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Seen on the way to ice cream. Someone please get this guy some fashion sense. OMG.
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Also seen on the way to ice cream. Underneath this sign, the guy actually has a small cooking area to cook you your sandwich on the go. Awesome.
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After ice cream, the next order of business was to find somewhere that sold prepaid SIM cards for our phone, so we could contact someone for our evening plans. We’ve picked up SIM cards in a couple of other countries (Croatia and Bosnia) and it’s a matter of going to the nearest newsstand and trying to make yourself understood as to what you want. Apparently Hungary doesn’t roll that way though. We found out we had to go to the T-Mobile store, and received incomprehensible directions, which resulted in us taking refuge in McDonald’s to use their free wifi. We made it to T-Mobile a few minutes after they ostensibly had closed, although the doors were still open and they were still serving customers. This was no in-and-out thing like I’d planned — it took almost 20 minutes of waiting for the sales guy to enter information into the computer and signing papers. WTH?? This wasn’t even for a phone contract, just a prepaid SIM. When we left, they gave us such a large stack of papers that they gave us a plastic T-Mobile shopping bag in which to put them. It’s great. Oh, and the papers I had to sign were in Hungarian. Even better. It IS prepaid, though.
The nice thing about T-Mobile, though, is that we can top it up anywhere (a lot of ATMs even do T-Mobile top-ups) or online, and we can still top it up when we’re in other countries. The problem we had with the ones from Bosnia and Croatia is that they were for local cell providers, so to top them up, you had to buy top-up cards locally. So once we were in Bosnia, for example, we couldn’t buy a top-up card for the Croatian phone company (which almost became a problem when we ran out of credit trying to communicate with our host for where we were staying in Sarajevo. Whoops.)
So I now have a Hungarian phone number. Whee.
After that, we headed back up to the cathedral to meet up with some people. I’m signed up with CouchSurfing.com, which is a network of people who want to host travellers to stay overnight, or just meet up with them and hang out while the travellers are in their city. I’ve been hosting off and on since I moved to Sacramento, and we couchsurfed when we were in Amsterdam last summer and will in a couple of days when we’re in Budapest. It’s a fun way to meet people from all over when I host them in Sacramento, and also to meet local people while traveling. And hey, if we can get a free place to stay, that’s nice too… but that’s not the point.
So anyway, each city has a Couchsurfing “ambassador” (this is an official position) who helps keep the local CSing network together and oversees things. When you log onto the CS website, it collects your location based on your IP address, and gives you a listing of couchsurfers near you. Yesterday morning I received an email from the Pecs ambassador. She was hosting a Slovenian CSer, and was planning on going out to drinks with him and some friends of hers last night, and invited us to come along. We thought it sounded like fun, so we arranged to meet up. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures, but we had a TOTAL blast. Besides the Pecs ambassador and her CSer, it was another couple of her friends, and an American guy from Missouri who just arrived from teaching English in South Korea and is now looking for a job teaching English here. Drinks turned into dinner, where conversation and eating continued at such a leisurely pace that we got up to leave thinking we’d already paid… WHOOPS! :-D (Not just John and I — all of us! Heheheh…) Some of us are going out again tonight — it was totally fun. :-)
Oh, and the dinner? John and I had WAAAY too much food. I ordered a main dish (pork chops with rosemary potatoes, covered in a mustard and sour cream sauce), and then a “half” side of chili, mostly because I wanted to try the lavosh (fried bread) that came with it. The “half” turned out to be a small saucepan’s worth, and the pork chops and potatoes were also a huge plate’s worth. Fortunately, they had take-out containers, so John and I now have lunch and dinner for today. :-)
One more day in Pecs, and then it’s off to Budapest. While I’m enjoying Pecs, I can’t wait — I’m SOOOO looking forward to going back to Budapest!
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 26: Last stamp day of the trip :-(
Today was our last stamp day of the trip, and I’m oddly sad about it. Honestly, I should have realized it’d be when we crossed into Hungary, but I just wasn’t thinking about it.
What’s a stamp day? It’s any day I get a new stamp in my passport. Technically, this isn’t even a NEW stamp, since I already have one from Hungary from three summers ago. But it’s new to my passport, and a new port of entry, anyway.
Why no more stamps, you’re wondering? Don’t we have several more countries to visit still? Yeah, we do. But most of continental Europe, including everywhere we’ll be from here on out, is party to what’s called the Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border controls (and therefore the need for passports) within the member countries. All of the countries we’ll visit from here on out (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, and Belgium) are all Schengen countries. So no more stamps. Sigh. It’s a tough life, I know.
Today is also a bit bittersweet because my paycheck went into my bank account, and that means that now I have to buy my plane ticket home. I haven’t bought it yet, but it’s a pretty sure bet that, barring volcanoes and other unforeseen circumstances, we’ll be flying home on USAir on Wednesday, June 28th. In other words, we passed the halfway point of this trip without realizing it. Wow. It doesn’t seem like it at all. We’ll have been gone for 54 days total–sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll be ready to head home by then (especially since the last few stops on our itinerary are short ones relative to the beginning of the trip.) But I’m not ready now, and so it’s kind of a depressing thought for me.
In any case, I’m happy to be here, and I’m enjoying it now and I’m not going to think about things like heading home or the fact that my next stamp will be a re-entry one to the US. This trip is too much fun to dwell on its inevitable end. :-) And I am, for some odd reason, SO HAPPY to be back in Hungary!! I really really loved it last time I was here three years ago, and I’m excited to have more time here!
Today was, as many of these days have been, a bit of a learning experience. When I looked online at the Rail Europe website (with which I have a love-hate relationship) there were two trains that would take us from Zagreb, Croatia to Pecs, Hungary (where we are now.) One train left at 9AM, the other one left at 10AM. As the 9AM train had only one connection and got into Pecs an hour earlier, I opted for that one. Only I didn’t write the route and connection information down. Stupid me.
We got to the train station, which took longer than I’d planned, and so we only had 15 minutes to activate our passes (this is our first day traveling on them, and they have to be activated the first time they’re used) and make our train. I left John with the backpacks, went to activate the passes, went back to the waiting room to look at the departures board, and realized I had no clue which train we needed, since I didn’t know where the connection was. So I went back to the ticket window. The guy behind the counter looked at me like I had two heads and told me there was no 9AM train, that there was only one and it left at 10. I KNEW there was a 9AM one and I wanted to catch it, but he wouldn’t even check his computer, and he was the only one at the international ticket window.
Now, there was only one train at 9AM that was heading north, so I guess we could have taken it, but as I would have had no idea where to disembark, that seemed like a bad idea at the time.
Now, if you’ve traveled with me before, you know that being rushed close to a departure time stresses me out just a bit. John and Joel!, quit laughing. Ok, so “a bit” might be an understatement. Whenever I fly, I’m ALWAYS at the airport at least a hour before boarding (not departure, boarding) and for trains I prefer to be at least a half hour early. At this point, the train was supposed to leave in about 8 minutes, and I didn’t know which one it was, and the ticket guy was totally unhelpful. Fortunately, we knew there was free wifi about two blocks away outside a hotel, so we headed over to check. Alas, it wasn’t enough time — by the time we got connected and on the Rail Europe site and found the 9AM route, it was 9AM exactly. No way we’d make it back and onto the train in time. Oh well.
As it turned out, the reason the guy may have said that there was no 9AM train was that I went to the international window, since my destination was international. The first train’s connection was within Croatia, so I should have gone to the domestic window. But the guy could have at least checked his computer. Oh well, lesson learned — always write down your train numbers and connections when looking up routes!!
Ok, here are some pics from the train ride (since that’s really what we did all day — riding the local train? Really kind of a bummer!)
This is a pretty typical lunch for us--trail mix, bread rolls with mustard and cheese, and chocolate pudding. We don't alway shave dessert, and we generally have fruit (there are dried cherries in the trail mix, so I counted that this time) but it's generally some variation of the above. Yum!
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I'm still trying to figure out what this sign means. I was thinking it was "no throwing trash out the window", but there's no / through the circle to make it "no". Weird.
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Reading while we're at a stop. After we made our first train transfer, the train was almost entirely empty, so we got the entire back of the car to ourselves. SWEET. :-)
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OH! Something else I learned today… or rather, John learned and shared with me, since he’s nice like that. Apparently the train toilets (or at least the ones on the local second class train we took today) empty right onto the tracks. I’ve heard of that, of course, but I had no idea that any modern European trains still did this. Crazy!! And ummm, kinda gross!
(I was going to make a joke about how European in Hungarian train bathrooms, but I decided not to. Feel free to thank me.)
ANYWAY. Here in Pecs we’re staying someplace a bit different than we have thus far — a college dorm. When school is out for the summer, a lot of universities in Europe open their dorms for travelers like us — excellent! We get a private room and bathroom with two twin beds, sheets and blankets (no towels, though) and a fridge, laundry facilities, internet access, and access to the school’s swimming pool. And it’s about $20/night cheaper than the cheapest hostel we found. Sweet. :-) It’s not in the center of town, but who cares? Not like we’re adverse to walking!
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 25: I should be packing, so instead I’m writing today’s blog post
Tomorrow morning we’re heading out of here bright and early at 8AM to hop a train to Pécs, Hungary, yet another checkmark on a list of my attempts to see as many UNESCO World Heritage sites as possible (we’ve seen 3 so far on this trip: the old city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, the city of Kotor in Montenegro, and the city of Mostar in Bosnia.)
Anyway, so because we’re leaving early, and because we’ve done the pack-and-scramble thing twice now (when leaving Dubrovnik, because I forgot it was Sunday, and when leaving Montenegro, because we accidentally fell asleep the night before) and it’s really not all that much fun, I really should be packing right now. But darn it, I’m comfortable here! So because I’m lazy, here’s today’s post.
Today we got up… well, kind of late. I’d wanted to be out of here at 9, and we didn’t actually get out of bed until 10. We both kind of stayed up until 4:30 (I was working on trip planning and the blog post, John was reading) and it was already starting to get light when we went to bed (I HATE it when that happens) so neither of us was in the mood to leave early. Oh well. Vacations are about relaxing, right?
So we got up, had a leisurely breakfast of bread and honey and yogurt (sold in 1 liter bottles here), and headed downtown to go museuming. Unlike yesterday (when we read “14″ on a tram and somehow both read it as “4″, and it ended up taking us an hour and two different trams to get where we needed to be) it took us only about 15 minutes to get downtown. We had intended to head to the Natural History Museum, but got sidetracked by the Zagreb City Museum (sidetracked=”this looks interesting and it’s on the way — let’s go in here!) and I’m so glad we did. Like the archaeological museum, it wasn’t huge, but it was VERY VERY well-displayed (even if there was an unfortunately small number of English translations of things — audioguides, folks, they’re the wave of the future!)
They forgot to reset this sundial for daylight savings time.
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A lion that used to be at the entrance to the Zagreb Cathedral. Neither John nor I thought he was particularly scary. I believe my comment was something along the lines of, "Dude needs to pay a visit to the Wizard."
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Take a look at the picture below, and take a guess which picture is the cathedral before being demolished by the 1885 earthquake, and which picture is the cathedral after the earthquake (well, and subsequent remodeling.)
If you guessed "the left one", you win... something. I think I have a piece of Tupperware I can give you.
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Here’s a frog that used to be on the old cathedral. I mean the new cathedral. I mean the old one that was renovated in 1885, when they added the frog, and it became old and so they removed it when they started doing restoration in the 21st century.
They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince...
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After the City Museum, we went to the Natural History Museum, but that was so tiny and depressing that I didn’t even take pictures. It’s not a *bad* museum, it’s just incredibly incredibly outdated. And I’m not talking Smithsonian Air and Space Museum outdated either, with its 1980s exhibit on the personal computers of the future (anyone know if they’ve gotten rid of that? It was still up when I was there in November 2008.) I’m talking display cases that were built sometime in the late 1700s/early 1800s and haven’t been moved or dusted since. Motheaten stuffed animals (as in, dead and stuffed, not the cutesy plush kind.) Virtually no displays that explain to the viewer (in any language) how what they’re seeing all ties together… just dead, stuffed animals, and signs in Croatian, Latin, and English as to what they are. I will concur that they had some interesting specimens, and for the most part, their dead animal collection (which, I kid you not, mostly dates back to the late 1700s/early-to-mid 1800s) is in better shape than the one in the Smithsonian Natural History museum. But still… yeah. Needs a lot of work. And note to the museum — an entire litter of dead, stuffed tiger cubs so small that their eyes weren’t even open yet? Depressing, even if they were killed in 1812.
After that museum, we wandered around for a bit.
Skyline of part of the upper part of the city. The two spires in the background are the deceptively-young Gothic Zagreb Cathedral.
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St. Mark's Church, built in the mid-to-late 1800s. The crests on the roof are for the city of Zagreb and for the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia (Slovenia), and Dalmatia (which is now Croatia.)
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Since it was hot out, John and I went in search of air conditioning and something sweet to eat. We found a nice little bakery/sweetshop that had a line out the door. We figured that was a good sign, so we ordered.
Here's my cake...
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...and here's John's caramel sundae. I wish I had his metabolism.
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Ban Josip Jelacic Square, the main square in Zagreb. That's the ban (governor) on the horse on the left.
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And since I for some reason like to do short videos of my surroundings (in case you haven’t noticed!) here’s one of Ban Josip Jelacic Square. Ignore John talking about random stuff in the background — he tries to videobomb every video I take. :-p
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 24: In which we ponder why the Balkans only has two kinds of breakfast cereal
You know it was a REALLY slow day if I’m talking about breakfast cereal.
As much as I like Zagreb so far, today we ran into a problem that we encountered in Dublin. Namely, that virtually NO museums are open on Mondays. They open on Sundays for a whopping THREE HOURS, but Mondays? Closed. The only one that was open today was the Croatian History Museum, which is in the process of moving, and as such, had one exhibit on some historical dude who freed Croatia from the feudal system in the 19th century. It was interesting… to a point. I hate to say it, but it’s not my history, and the ENTIRE exhibit was just on him.
Anyway. So I guess that was good though, for two reasons. First, John felt lousy again this morning (he likes to travel, but his stomach often has other opinions.) Second, I had a whole heap of planning to do. I was so happy last night about having reliable internet… and then it died on us and didn’t resurrect itself until after 10 this morning. I had planning to do, darn it! There are Couchsurfers to email, hostels to book in case no Couchsurfers come through, train sleeping car reservations to make, plane tickets home to price and consider, a budget to rebuild since the old one died with my phone (yeah, I have the Google Docs one, but I had a separate one I was working with that tracked just debit card purchases.) I had a lot to do, darn it!
So I got some stuff done this morning before we left for downtown, and then I kept working when I came back. This turned out to be immensely more time-consuming than I thought. First, our train passes only cover 10 days of travel, but I nailed down the rest of our itinerary, and we had 12-13 days of travel. So I priced out EVERY SINGLE TRAIN ROUTE to see which would be the two cheapest that we shouldn’t use our passes on.
This wouldn’t and SHOULDN’T have taken so long, but the raileurope.com website is hideously, painfully, immensely slow and kludgy. It should NOT have taken as long as it did. I was ready to throw my laptop after a couple of hours of searching.
And then came a painful realization… it covers five countries of travel, and we have six planned, and the one country it doesn’t cover is Poland, which, because of the night trains we’d planned to take in and out, would be the most expensive trains to take.
I spent a while berating myself for my stupid oversight, and then I went back to the pass website and realized that, for some reason, Poland wasn’t an option on the five-country pass anyway. So at least the mistake wasn’t mine, but I was still really upset to realize this.
Now we may have to cut Krakow off the list entirely, and I’m quite sad. We’re under budget right now, so I’m trying to convince John that it’s worth paying for the tickets to go in and out, even if we’d have to take a second-class sleeper car instead of the first class one that our passes SHOULD cover. But second or first, we’d still get an actual bed, and NOT get woken up in the middle of the flipping night for ticket and passport checks, which is what happened on our way to Zagreb (when we were trying to sleep on seats.)
So who knows. I really, REALLY don’t want to cut Krakow off the list, but it’d cost $500 to take the train there (Budapest–>Krakow–>Prague.) We could take a daytime train, but it’s honestly not that much cheaper, and then we’d lose an entire day of doing and seeing things, AND we’d have to pay for a hostel. So really, in my opinion the night train is a win-win situation, if we can swing it.
We should have that nailed down by the end of the week… or sooner if anyone wants to give me $500. No? Well, it was worth a try. :-) We’ll also have our flight home nailed down by the end of the week, but it’s looking like we’ll fly out of Brussels on Wed. July 28th, which makes our trip exactly 54 days long, and incidentally, means we’ll leave in a month. *sob* Honestly, it doesn’t seem like this should be Day 24, and a month just doesn’t seem like enough time to do and see what I want to do and see!! Oh well, I’m not going to focus on the countdown, I’m just going to enjoy what I have left.
So breakfast cereal… yeah. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re on a pretty tight budget. I know we’re under budget, but we’ve been keeping it under budget with the knowledge that Germany, Belgium, Austria, and Prague (I know, city not country) are going to be a lot more expensive than the Balkans have been (and Hungary and Poland will be, assuming we make it to Poland!) So we’ve been eating a lot of bread, and more recently, breakfast cereal. Which kind of cracks me up, given that we’ve eaten a lot of breakfast cereal in the past year to be able to afford this trip in the first place.
Anyway, honestly, the Balkans have had some of the best and cheapest bread I’ve ever eaten, and I’m a sucker for a good fresh loaf of bread. It doesn’t keep very long — after a day, it’s so stale as to be almost inedible — but given that the average unsliced loaf has been somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.80 regardless of where we’ve been, we can afford to get a new one every day, for pete’s sake. So we’re acquiring quite the condiment collection. We started off with margarine and jam in Ireland, then added in basalmic vinegar in Korcula, then mustard in Sveti Stefan, and I picked up a bottle of honey in Sarajevo. Anything to make it less boring, because while it’s good bread, it still gets boring after 2-3 meals a day of it. And cheese, always the cheese. We’ve currently got three kinds of cheese–two local ones and a soft cheese from Dublin that we’ve been stashing (along with the margarine and jam) in any fridge we’ve been able to find along the way. Yum.
Sarajevo we decided we wanted something different for breakfast other than bread and the occasional bottle of yogurt, and we both were craving milk, so we went to the store with the intention of getting a liter of milk and a box of cereal. Only the cereal selection was extremely limited. There was a wide variety of shapes and brands, but there were (not counting museli, which is NOT the same as granola and which I like only in small quantities) two kinds of cereal: corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
Poor John, who wanted Frosted Flakes (which he remembered seeing at a Tesco in Dublin) went to three different grocery stores, but they all had the same selection. Corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
This was only about half of the chocolate cereal collection. I'm not kidding.
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Ok, so there’s a Cinnamon Toast Crunch knock-off in the center there, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on the top right, but those are the only ones of their kind. The chocolate continues to the right of the picture and turns a corner on the shelf, and then there’s more around the corner, and then the corn flakes start in.
John finally settled for corn flakes and adding honey to them. Not the same, but better than nothing. Heh.
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 23: Sarajevo to Zagreb
This post is coming a bit late because it seems like our internet access always seems to die on us in the evening, which is when I’d prefer to be sitting around working on things like reservations for upcoming cities and blog posts and the like. In any case, most Zagreb museums are closed on Mondays, for some reason (we had this problem in Dublin too!) so it gives me time right now (now that the internet has decided to work again) to get stuff planned. I’m trying to make hay while the sun shines (or the internet works) I guess.
Anyway, before I post a few Zagreb pics, here are a few leftover pictures and videos from Sarajevo that I wanted to post. There are more pictures on my Flickr than I’ve posted here, so feel free to go look at them. :-)
Here’s a video I took of pigeons in the Turkish marketplace in the old section of town:
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Here’s another video from the marketplace.
Here’s a video I took of the main street in Sarajevo — to me the main street (Austro-Hungarian influence, from when it was a part of that empire) is a really interesting contrast to the marketplace (Turkish influence, from being part of the Ottoman Empire.) Regardless of empire, it’s a beautiful city.
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Not to get too morbid (that was Day 21′s post) but here are more roadside graves from the war, right in the center of town.
These were on the main street right across from a huge shopping mall.
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While we were sitting at the train station waiting for our night train to Zagreb, we heard the evening call to prayer (Sarajevo has a fairly large Muslim population as it was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.) I’d been trying to catch this on video (well, audio) the whole time we were there, and I finally succeeded just before we left. What I think is really cool about this one is that you can hear two different calls from two different mosques. Neat.
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Here are links to two other videos (video 1, video 2) of it that I took–I kept them both because they both have different things that I liked about them (in one of them I look around the train station where we are, and the other one I just like the sound.)
The night train to Zagreb wasn’t bad, even though there were no sleeper cars so we had to sleep on the seats. Seating is in compartments, so you can shut the curtains and door and it’s a bit more private than open train seats, although the conductors come in periodically for ticket checks and three different people came in to check our passports around 4AM when we crossed the border from Bosnia to Croatia. That was pretty irritating, because they didn’t come all at once. One came in, we fell back asleep. 10 minutes later, the next one. We fell back asleep. 15 minutes later, the third one. At that point, when that guy left, I sat up and looked around and said, “ANYONE ELSE??” GEEZ.
Other than the sleep though, the ride was quite enjoyable. We ended up sharing a compartment with a late-20s British guy living and working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He’s a reader (although he prefers fiction like John does, rather than nonfiction like me) and has a BA and MA in international relations, so we ended up talking books and politics (British, Irish, American, and Bosnian) until almost 2AM. He was REALLY interesting to talk to! He made an observation that John and I both were amazed by — he pointed out that both Northern Ireland and Sarajevo (well, Bosnia in general) went through a really war-filled, violent period in the 90s. However, if one looks at both cities now, Sarajevo has transformed into what appeared to all three of us to be an atmosphere of peace and tolerance, whereas he said that Northern Ireland is still very filled with tension and is very segregated — that the peace largely exists because Catholics live in neighborhoods that are 90%+ Catholic, and Protestants live in areas that are 90%+ Protestant, and all you have to do to tell which neighborhood you’re in is look around to see if the flags being displayed are for the UK or not. It’s neat to see how far Sarajevo has come, and it’s sad that Northern Ireland hasn’t managed to do the same, despite centuries of tension in the respective regions.
Although to be frank, I’m pretty sure not all of Bosnia is as tolerant as Sarajevo appears to be. In the city of Mostar, where we spent the night before Sarajevo, by law, 50% of the city council is Muslim, and 50% is Christian. They also live on different sides of town and support two entirely different soccer teams. And the country of Bosnia itself is actually divided into two regions per the 1995 Dayton Agreement — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is mostly Croats and Bosnian Muslims, and the Republika Srpska, which is the (88%) Serbian region of the country. Each has its own government, flag and coat of arms, president, parliament, police & customs departments, and postal system. Technically the country has one armed forces, but both entities maintain their own armies. To make things even more crazy, there’s one city that’s claimed by both FBR and RS, so it’s currently under international supervision. So they’re still very, very divided within their own country.
Anyway, so it made for an interesting train ride that passed quickly, and even though we ended up sleeping on train seats, hey, it was one night we didn’t have to pay for lodging for. I’m all about that. :-)
John, trying to sleep on the seat at around 5:30 AM.
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When we got to Zagreb, it was about 7:45 Sunday morning, and we realized that nothing was going to be open for a while, so we found a comfortable place to relax that had free wifi (outside a hotel) and we hung out there for a couple of hours.
About 10AM, the Zagreb Archaeological Museum opened, so we headed over there, and I have to say that I am REALLY impressed with the breadth their collection. The whole museum only took about an hour and a half, so it wasn’t a huge collection, but what they had, they had a lot of and quality examples of.
900,000-year-old stone hand tools -- COOL!!
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I had to laugh at this. This is a stash of coins from a Greek hoard that was found in the pot in the picture, but whoever put the display together snuck in a 10 lipa (about 1.7 US cents) coin right in the middle. If you click on this picture and then click on the picture on the Flickr page it goes to, you can see where I put a note on which one is the modern coin. :-)
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After the museum, which closed at 1PM, we wandered up to the Zagreb Cathedral and caught the last half of the church service. I missed Bosnia, but so far I’ve managed to go to a church service in all of the other countries we’ve been to. Neat! Anyway, the cathedral is a Gothic cathedral, but it’s not actually all original — the main nave collapsed in an earthquake in the 1800s and the whole thing sustained serious damage, so it was mostly rebuilt back then, and it’s been remodeled/reconstructed at various other times in history as well. Still, it was really neat, and there’s been a church on that site since 1094, so that’s something.
Doorway of the cathedral
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Crucifixion at the back of the church. This was one of the more interesting ones that John and I had ever seen -- I can't remember if I've ever seen the complete scene like this as statues within a church. Also, the way the guy on the right is looking down on the onlooker is kind of creepy. Finally, anyone know what language that is above the scene? We were trying to figure it out. Aramaic, maybe?
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I know I’m a horrible person, but I took a couple of videos during the service, just because the choir was so beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking and held my phone vertically to capture more of the scene, and when I used a program to rotate the video, it lost image and sound quality. Oh well. Here’s one video, and here’s a link to the second (shorter) one.
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Inside the cathedral. Don't worry, I took this (and the other pictures) AFTER the service was over.
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After church was over, we went back to the train station (where we’d stashed our backpacks in a locker) and went in search of our lodging for the night, a guest house we’d booked through hostelworld.com (which has been my go-to website on this trip when we can’t find somewhere free to stay.) I was a bit leery of this place when I booked, because it had no reviews and because it was considerably cheaper than other double-room accomodations in Zagreb. Well, turns out that it’s a bit of a ways outside the city (but a few minutes walk from a tram stop that serves several tram lines into the city) and because it’s pretty new. I don’t care about either one — John and I both agreed that this is a really nice place. Everything’s new, it’s clean, it’s quiet, the owner speaks fairly decent English, and while we share a bathroom, there’s only one other person staying here right now, and there are two bathrooms, so it’s really one to ourselves. Excellent. :-)
Lovely room!!
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We ended up taking a nap for a couple of hours since we still were exhausted from the train ride, then we woke up and went in search of a McDonald’s. I know, we’re horrible typical American tourists… but after 23 days on the road, we both wanted something familiar. Well, as familiar as one can get at McDonald’s in a foreign country. I ordered a burger called a McCountry… is this something that only exists overseas? ‘Cause I don’t usually eat at McDonald’s at home, but I don’t ever remember seeing it on the menu the couple times I have been there in the past few months. It was two chicken patties (slices of chicken, not McNugget style) and a funky beige sauce that was VERY mustard-y. Too mustard-y, actually — I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. And it really wasn’t a big sandwich, either — maybe the size of a regular McD’s burger, only with the two patties instead of one? Oh well. The fries and strawberry shake were good, even if it did end up being quite a bit more pricey than at home. :-)
Odd McFlurry mix-ins. I believe Cornetto is chocolate-dipped (on one side) ice cream cone pieces, I know Smarties are kind of like M&Ms, and a Kit Kat is a Kit Kat (do we have Kit Kat McFlurries in the US though?) But I'm not entirely sure what Daim is. And also, can we order just plain strawberry, chocolate, or caramel McFlurries in the US? I may have to go back just to try one of these. :-)
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Where we are now:
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