Below: MORE PICTURES TO COME: CHECK BACK SOON!!!!

July 5, 2007
Pension Peko in Prague

Hello Hello and Happy Late 4th of July!
Below I will be posting (hopefully) two different blog updates, one that I wrote on the train to Prague and one this morning.

Before I get into the details of the past week and a half, I feel the compelling need to address several things.

1) Inflation in England is the highest it has been in 26 years according to CNN International. I fault my parents for this because I’ve always loved England yet have never been, and 7 years ago I was told we couldn’t go because the exchange rate was bad. Who’s happy now? I’ve been forced to go at my last opportunity before I am tied down to work/internships in the worst economic conditions since before I was born. All I can say is thank God my housing price and two meals a day are already paid for and set since the value of the pound is set to increase even more next Wednesday when the National Band raises interest again. Depressingly enough, even within Britain food prices etc. are inflated as well, so what you get for your pound is very little. Sucks. So aside from Aunt Susan who has made a souvenir request, nobody is getting anything from England, sorry.

2) Both in Germany and the Czech Republic we’ve been watching the English news, which is either BBC or CNN International. I’m glad to see things regarding the terrorism in the UK are settling down, but I just wanted to say that for one thing they were not successful, and secondly, I’ll be darned before I let terrorists strike me down with fear to ruin a dream trip 19 years in the making. They will not be getting what they want from me. They do what they do to scare the average person and I would hope that everyone back at home doesn’t give this a second thought since that is exactly what they want. It will be business as usual here.

3) Yesterday, obviously, was the 4th of July. It is a little bit weird to watch fireworks and celebrations on the international news here in the Czech Republic and be so far removed for all of that. I got to see the early fireworks off of Mt. Rushmore, and the news obsessed over a hot dog eating contest they had somewhere in the US. Silly.

4) MTV is the only other station I’ve been able to get that is half in English. You know you’ve been gone from home a really long time when you are walking around a foreign city and you hear songs on the American radio station at various vendors with imported songs you’ve never heard before, and this is even after delayed adoption. Sometimes I don’t even identify them as American songs because I’ve never heard them before.

5) Daddy doesn’t understand Europe and their bathrooms. He keeps buying these enormous bottles of water which means you have to lug it everywhere and that eventually we must go in search of bathrooms, and either you have to pay for a dirty one or they simply don’t have them. Doesn’t matter if it’s a McDonalds, big department store, or lobby of a hotel they just don’t exist. I don’t think he gets that yet. Funny enough a lot of Czech bathrooms are lit with blacklights because apparently you can’t find your veins in the blacklight and therefore cannot shoot drugs in the bathroom. It’s weird.

6) My laptop has gotten annoying. My battery is now shot (won’t hold a charge) and the ‘W’ key on my keyboard has a sprung spring, so even if I just rest my finger on the key it types a thousand W’s before I realize, or inserts random W’s into words. At least I don’t think I’m crazy anymore with all these random W’s everywhere.

7) Pretty much nobody but Mom, Aunts, and maybe James are expected to read this entire thing. :)


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Planes, Trains and Automobiles Part II
July 2, 2007
6:50 a.m.
Train Leaving Munich for Prague

Finally I have plenty of train time and a laptop to get this blog updated! I’ll start by saying that I have been very disappointed in the infamous German ingenuity. It’s crap. All of our Austrian trains always had plugs for a laptop, I just never got to use it because all of our weekend trips I went laptop-less for obvious reasons. Our train to Budapest had it, but that was another day trip so no laptop. Then all of our other trips have had older trains, and I think all the trains in Germany are older, so I haven’t been able to type my lengthy narrative of adventures. This is all complicated by the fact my laptop battery decided to fry on this trip and tops has about 15 minutes of power, so not even long enough for me to put on the time stamp. Thus, I am on my dad’s laptop which has an extended battery life thank you Dell.

Ok, so I left off on Bratislava. The rather short trip through the farmland west of Vienna started early and took us through one of my favorite regions that consists of a bunch of farmland dazzled with these stealthy, slender white windmills that go as far as the eye can see throughout all the farmland. There is something just serene about watching these enormous turbins calming spin in the wind. There were also several fields full of sunflowers which were just plain pretty.

Ok, well I started to explain the first church and the body of the dead saint. You would think things like this would evoke feelings of the divine, but instead it’s more like a random cabinet of curiosities. When we where in Budapest we saw the right hand of St. Stephan, and really, it’s just weird and how does one respond to that?
Apparently I felt compelled to take a picture and share it with all of you, sans flash (or blitz as they call it here) of course.

So after walking around the church, we set about to figure out the exchange rate between Slovaks and euros. Slovakia hasn’t completely switched yet, so some places have both listed, so we looked and the basic rate was 300 slovaks to 1 euro. My family is going to love this. Poor Daddy had a really hard time learning the exchange rate. I kept going shopping, and in the store I’d show him something and he would be like “so that’s like 19 euros” and I would respond “Daddy, this is like 7 euros.” I was always right, so I guess the hell called Calculus 408D with 3D linearizations taught me something. I’m serious when I say this went on all day. He tried to blame jet lag, but he had been on Vienna time since Friday AND Ireland before that. He just didn’t understand the concept that handing over 500 slovaks was still less than 2 euros. He kept handing shop keepers like 20 slovaks and I would have to say Daddy, that’s like 20 cents, hand them the 1000. I am sure he will detest this for his own pride, but dear Blog readers I would not lie to you. This is a sincere account of how it went down last Monday.

So we walked around the old town square, and Bratislava has some really beautiful buildings no doubt. Since we both wanted to eat Slovakian food, but weren’t confident enough to just randomly order things, so we found a menu that had pictures. The Slovakian food was good, but not the greatest. It was pretty heavy and not super tasty, but it wasn’t bad.

After lunch I stumbled upon this fabulous, and I mean fabulous, souvenir shop called In Vivo that had a lot of funky, handmade small art pieces for really good prices. Again, Daddy had some issues understanding how much things costed, but I found some great things. After that I also found a really great small Slova kian china shop, and bought some small pieces there. After that we walked around, I looked in more shops, we walked around the old city center, and we promptly ran out of things to do. It didn’t help Bratislava’s case that it was blazing hot there, but even so….. We decided to try and catch an earlier bus, but someone who wasn’t me misread the bus time table and the bus had left an hour earlier, [which would have been too early anyway] so we really just sat around and chilled. We went and cooled off in the lobby of a hotel, walked more, then went and got dessert, then finally got the bus back to Vienna for the night.

Next morning we got up early and caught our train to Budapest. Going into Hungary, and coming out, we were double checked, by the Austrians saying we were leaving, and then by the Hungarian boarder patrol. They were doing a little construction on the tracks, so our train ended up delayed about an hour, but we sat next to this German man who was in his approximate 40’s who was a train enthusiast and goes traveling on different types of trains on his holidays. He spoke decent English, so he and Daddy talked about different types of trains and looked a map of Budapest. Once we finally arrived in Budapest we walked into the center of town by the Danube, which splits the old town of Buda and old town of Pest. lol on that one.

I will start this section by saying, I LOVED Budapest. Not love in a way I want to move there, but it was just a grand big city. It was a lot more urban than say Vienna felt, but it had these enormous old buildings everywhere. You can tell they are still trying to pick up their economy because some of the buildings were still falling apart, but I say give it 20 years it will be cleaned up. There weren’t mobs of tourists everywhere, but we definitely stayed in the touristy part. Well we went and walked around, as usual, then went to find lunch. Duh, we wanted Hungarian food, so we finally found a place that offered a giant meal for two with an assortment of meats and Goulache soup. Not only do the Hungarians use spice, THANK GOD, but we had the best soup, and some type of meat called Gypsy Roast and also another spiced piece of roast. Also, we had rice which was ok, but the most wonderful browned mashed potatoes. The Hungarian food was most assuredly a highlight. Also, we are seeing patterns with countries like Hungary and Slovenia. We have a theory they are still slightly, um, “irked” at the Germans, because EVERYONE spoke English, very good English, and there was hardly any German anywhere. Italian and French maybe, but hardly any German. I just can’t relay how interesting Budapest was, and I couldn’t have been more sad that we only had one day. Our choice was one day in Budapest or no days in Budapest, so I’ll take the one day, but one day I want to go back. The only thing that was bad about Budapest was that the souvenirs weren’t very good prices, but prices in general on everything else were pretty good.

After more walking around, we went to the Basilica. Its imperial Romanesque style ranked up there with the church in Melk. The inside was so breathtaking it makes you imagine that the place could not have been built by anything other than a holy hand. Coincidentally speaking of a holy hand, the in the back of the church was the right hand of St. Stephan from what we gathered around 530 AD. Another awkward turtle moment there. You can’t even tell by looking at it what it is. I think they even had it in a silk bag, but on the wall they had pictures of it from when they took it out like 30 years ago. I’m sorry, but that thing was nasty.

Before we actually went into the church we took the elevator up to the top of the dome and went and outside on a balcony and got to see the panoramic view of Budapest. This only further proved and increased my like for the city. All around you were these buildings of stone and majesty that may have shown their age, but it just seemed to fit into the mystique of the city. I’ll let most of the pictures speak themselves, although I don’t think it does anything justice. When we were up on old medieval walled city of Buda Dad went in for information to confirm how we were getting back to the train station and I turned around outside and saw one of my roommates from Vienna Lindsey! Go figure! She was in Budapest for a few days with her roommate from Austin so that was really neat to run into her!

Let me interject what is going on right now. I had taken a break from writing and took a nap since it was so early in the morning and a particular person had held my attention the night before I left, so I didn’t get tons of sleep (although I got enough) but so I took nap and we had a cabin to ourselves because of my tip to close the curtains to the outside, which people usually don’t want to disturb so they leave you alone. We are now on the other side of the Czech border, and picked up a bunch of passengers from a small town, and this older Czech couple just got on, and came to share a compartment with us. They were rather amused at all our luggage we have, but of course don’t speak a word of English. The old man has ears that remind me a lot of Grandpa’s, and the older women started showing Daddy pictures. LOL.

Ok, so we finally ended our day in Budapest. Really most of these stops were what I call cultural experiences. We didn’t have time to see all of the museums, go inside everything, like say a normal tourist would, but we did what you can do within a day [which means no trips just outside the city to sites that are just too time consuming for one day] but we did have enough time to observe people, see the city, eat the food, buy a few things, and just get a feel. I also categorize things in my mind by Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 tourism. I would say a level 3 tourist is someone who plops themselves down into the middle of Siberia, which definitely doesn’t apply to us, but I think we really strive to be the level 2 tourist. Go a little off the beaten path. For instance, Vienna at first glance would be a Level 1, but the way we got to experience it we took it to Level 2 but avoiding Cafés off of the main Kartnerstrasse, or going to the Volksoper instead of the Staatsoper. Things like that. Well Budapest is like automatically 1.5 tourist level, and Slovenia was automatically a Level 2. This leg of the trip we really started getting into our Level 2. Sorry that was a ramble, but it’s what I’ve been talking to Daddy about recently. Always try to be a Level 2.

So we got back on the train, and returned to Vienna. On the way back “home” I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets over the fields of Hungary and Austria I think I’ve ever seen in my life. The sky was ablaze with orange (hmm, wonder why I enjoyed it so much?) and it just radiated over the fields.

The best way in Europe to buy your train tickets is like the day before so you can get deals, and they rarely ever would sell out so it’s no big deal. So we went and got our train tickets to Ljubljana, Slovenia (pronounced Luby-ana) and departed promptly the next morning. Neither one of us knew what to expect. For those of you who don’t know, I really wanted to make it down into Slovenia because my grandpa on my Mom’s side was Slovenian, and both this parents immigrated to the US from Ljubljana and the surrounding region.

The train ride down into Slovenia was really pretty since you cut through a lot of the lower Alps. There was a definite difference between farm houses in Austria verses farmhouses in Slovenia. First of all, it was so obvious it was almost ridiculous to see where my grandpa got all of his woodworking skills. There were crafted things everywhere. The best way I can describe everything is by saying it was practical, resourceful, functional, and sometimes a bit odd but it was all impeccably thought out. Here is actually a shot I got on our train ride back of one of the sheds they had to hang dry hay and store it. Some of these were like two stories high, or fatter, but they had sheds that were completely reminiscent of Grandpa’s sheds, and then once you were in the city all their souvenirs were handcrafted. So we shared a cabin with a man coming home from his work as a translator. At first the train was packed, but by the time we reached the Austria/Slovenian boarder it was very spacious. Well this guy was from Iran originally but now just works as a translator and lives in Ljubljana with his Slovenian wife and three kids. He was really nice and talked a bit to us since it ended up only being the three of us in a compartment. You meet interesting, and sometimes just completely random people on trains, more so than say an airplane.

Well so we arrived, no place to stay or any real idea of what we were going to do. All we had in the beginning was a train ticket the next day for Salzburg. We wondered into the tourist information center, which was brand new, and there was this young, and I will admit very handsome young Slovenian sitting there helping this Japanese tourist. If we thought English was good in Budapest, it was perfect here in Slovenia. No German, which could have to do with the fact that less than a hundred years ago Nazis just walled off and made all of Ljubljana a concentration camp. So this guy finished helping the Japanese tourist, and asked us if we would mind private accommodations, we said we would prefer it, so he just started calling down his list of people he knew and said ok, I have you for one night with Peter. So we were asking him how to get there, like how to get a taxi, and he said “oh Peter is coming to pick you up from the train station!” For 60 euros for the both of us Peter picked us up, dropped us off the next day, and we had a private apartment that he rents out by his that was a short walking distance to downtown.

Really, what I want to do is stop right here and tell all of you Slovenia was horrid, don’t go there, avoid it at all costs because I want it to stay this way and not get ruined by mobs of tourists, but I can’t tell everyone that big of a lie.

To be truthful, it was an absolute gem of Europe. I’ve never been to a place where people were so eager to help you, make you feel at home, welcome you and all your luggage. I mean they call places for you at the tourism help desk, give you advice on where to eat Slovenian food, and tell you everything you want to know. Slovenia already switched to the euro, so no problems there, and their brochures were professionally done and looked very attractive and nice. So after we got to Peter’s place, he advised us on where to go for dinner so we did, and it was fabulous, ranks up there with Budapest.

We walked around the old center, but it started to rain and I was so tried I was collapsing, so we went back to the hotel and I fell asleep at like 6:30 p.m.

I cannot say enough how nice everyone was, how easy it was to get around, how reasonable the prices were, how clean the city was, and I could go on and one.

Ok back to real time: there was one extra seat in our cabin that we were sharing with the old couple. We are now about an hour outside of Prague, and a bunch of people got on the train. We had one of our giant bags in front of the seat (since it folded up) and this rather large Czech women just came in and demanded she sit there. The old couple fired back, saying something along the lines of “they can’t move the suitcase anywhere” and she was demanding we lift it and put it up (which ask any engineer, that would not have ended well) she started talking really fast at us in Czech, and we were like “we still aren’t going to understand you” but really just sat here watching the old couple meanwhile fire back she needed to go somewhere else, but she barged her way in. We are now crammed in like sardines by our luggage and the old Czech couple are not happy. And I thought Germans were mean.

Back to lovely Slovenia. We went and found breakfast the next morning by the Dragon Bridge and the farmer’s market. We had what was like a rolled quiche that had spinach, eggs, and cheese rolled up and spiraled around. It was really good, duh, and then we had these sparrows come and have breakfast with us, meaning they were landing on my backpack, or on the table, trying to get our food. They had some guts, but were harmless just the same. After that we went to find the pathway up to the castle, and we couldn’t find it so we asked this younger girl in a coffee shop where, and she didn’t know which one to tell us, so she studied the map and was trying so hard to give us the best direction she could. That’s the thing, nobody there wanted to turn you away without help. Well we found our way up, hiked up, and then got to see a lovely view of the city and countryside, as well as the castle itself was a mix between old and a really classy modern to make it a useable space for the community. Well in the video we saw they talked about a Gregorcic poet monument and a street named after it, so we went and asked someone working the gift shop how to find it (that is one of the family names) and she didn’t know because she wasn’t from the city, so she called her friend for us to ask. The people couldn’t have been nicer.

Well so we found the street and walked along the canal which was again, millionth time to say the word, beautiful. A lot like what I think people imagine places like Venice to be until they get there with the masses. We walked and found lunch, which was good as well, but the last night had been the best. Before we got on the train I wanted to make sure I got strudel and to try Potetsa bread (can be desserty or made with spices like tarragon) and I had that for dinner on board. Both were very good, and I could tell some slight differences between Austrian strudel and Slovenian strudel, but both are very comparable.
This picture was taken from a moving train: this is how they dry their hay.

Several things reminded me of Grandpa here, aside from the general look of the people (although it was a good mix). The woodworking was an obvious thing, but the use of pepper in the cooking, Peter whistled through his teeth and if you remember Grandpa did something like that, and the way they were clever about how they built things.
Oh, and when I told Peter my great grandparents were from Slovenia he said I had good blood. lol

On the way out to Salzburg we sat next to this girl my age, who lived in a small town and went to school in the city. She was nice and very friendly.

We weren’t even checked by boarder control here. But around the Austrian line Daddy, who I will point out makes himself very busy on train trips. He is constantly up and down and looking out the window, out in the hall, “getting air circulation” and making me mad by leaving the cabin door open to where I could smell smoke down the train. Well after one of his “expeditions” this Italian guy came back stuck his head into the cabin, and gave Daddy a 2 euro coin and said “Austria” and Daddy said “Austria” back.

So he left and I was like “what was that about?” He said he was from Italy and doesn’t speak English so he has no idea. Well the guy was standing out in the hall, so he went out to give it back and the guy proceeded to give him about 5 more euros in coins. Daddy kept trying to give it back, but when he did, the guy would give him more. Finally he ended up giving Daddy like 9 euros and then getting off the train at a patrol stop point. No clue what that was about other than free things for daddy.

The train ride into Salzburg from Slovenia cuts right through the Alps. I think it was the most beautiful train ride I’ve taken yet. There was a settling mist over most of the valleys and there are no words to describe it. We passed through several towns with hot springs. Our train kept losing cars, and gaining cars, and changing engines throughout our ride. We went from being the first car, to the last car, to a middle car, to like the first again.

Salzburg was kind of a repeat of things I’ve already detailed in here. I showed Daddy around for the next day, the only thing we did that I hadn’t done was go up to the convent where the real life Maria from the Sound of Music was. We got to hear the nuns singing their prayers, so that was neat, and possibly a little scary. : )

We went back to the Steigl Brewery we went to that is perched up on the hill on the way to the castle. We had a fabulous view overlooking the city, and we were there right at noon so all the bells went off and we could hear all of them echoing through the heights of the city. I think I impressed Daddy with my recommendation. He got a Steigl beer and I got a Radler, which is beer and lemonade, which was much more to my liking. That’s about it for our Salzburg trip.

More later.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Part III

We arrived in Munich on Friday. Our hotel was pretty close to the train station so we were able to get our stuff there with relative ease. After that we took the 10 minute walk to the city center and walked around the old Glockenspiel and some really old buildings, again. lol

Compared to Slovenia the information center was rude and no help at all, but compared to the whole of Europe it was normal. We found this place called Ratskeller, appropriate for my rat Gulliver (I’m going to explain Gulliver in like my about me section here so everyone can be up to date with the rat I’ve been traveling with, pictures to come in a slideshow soon.) We had a fabulous traditional German meal, which ranks up there with the food in Budapest and Slovenia. Budapest made use of spices from the Middle East and South Asia, Slovenian food was spiced with things like pepper (another reminder of Grandpa) and more southern Europe spices, and then Germany is into vinegar. All good, which blows the other cuisines out of the water.

Munich is a huge city, and really crowded which is a bummer. Saturday we got up early and caught a train to Dachau and went to the concentration camp there. It was set up differently than Mauthausen but was still good. Not only was it interesting to compare the two but also how I reacted to both of them. Mauthausen made me really horribly depressed, contemplative, and sad. Dachau seemed to just make me angry. I wasn’t so much sad as I was just angry that this happened and things like this continue to happen. I think I’m beginning to also synthesize my encounters in Austria. This is going to sound blonde, but I think I hadn’t really put two and two together that the bombs that really destroyed Vienna etc. were American bombs, which explains why random Austrians would tell me things like “what, so American museums make it look like Americans were all heroes?” Which confused me at first, and now I realize. One thing is for sure, I am still as stubborn and obstinate as I’ve always been. I’m also just as loyal to my Grandpa as ever. What I now want to snap back at them when they get their chip on their shoulder about how we heaven forbid destroyed their Opera House is three things:
1) If Austria hadn’t just rolled over to the Nazis we wouldn’t have had to do it.
2) If Allied forces hadn’t been as aggressive as they were places like Mauthausen would have killed thousands of more people.
3) War is war. It sucks for everyone, and Austrians were on the wrong side whether they chose it or not. I’m sorry people they loved died and things they loved were ruined, but the same thing happened to Americans. Countries like Austria who didn’t completely resist in my opinion and because of those “choices” people like my Grandpa lived the rest of his life unable to hear half of the things I said.
4) Austrians don’t take ownership over anything regarding the war, and this is a big thing for me apparently.

It was time for me to leave Austria, I got a little sick of their attitudes.

So Dachau made me angry, also because at first the museum seemed pretty comprehensive until I realized the things that had been “edited” out. Compared to the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. they just happen to leave out anything regarding the killing of women and children. This is frustrating for obvious reasons.

On a much lighter note aside from previous rants, on the bus ride back into the town of Dachau, there was this giant group of German teenage boys on some type of group trip. Either too much drinking the night before or the heat got to one of them, but when the bus stopped at a local stop one of them ran off the bus, headed for a tree, and started throwing up, the teacher followed, and all the other boys started yelling and taunting as the bus rolled on, all in German of course. Rather amusing.

We had gelato for dinner, which could not have been more fabulous.

The next day we headed for Neuschwanstein Castle, the one that inspired Walt Disney. We had to take a train out of Munich a ways and then a local bus, but it could not have been more worth it. The weather was just perfect and the castle’s inside/outside was fabulous. We took a horse drawn carriage up the mountain to the castle (we hiked down) and on the way up sat next to this giant American family which had two brothers and their wives/kids and a grandmother. They didn’t realize we spoke English until half way through, so that was embarrassing for them. lol

Ok, this is where I’ll end today. I venture to say that this is more than anyone wanted to know about my trip thus far.

Love,
Elaine