European windows

Though we could not use Nancy's computer to blog while on the trip (except for the day I managed to connect to the Internet in a coffee shop in Linz) we did use it to download pictures as we went along.

At home I transferred everything again, and now have an instant scrapbook on the computer. Because of labeling as we went along (and making notes as well) I even remember where pictures were taken.

The new camera is good on closeups, and, if the light is just right (no glare or reflections) I can get interesting shots through glass. First two pictures are from Prague, the third from Passau. (No, I don't know what that shop was selling.)

Stamps in the passport

Years ago, after a family trip to Europe, my son came home disappointed that the pages of his passport were not filled, although we traveled through several countries.

It was the early 80's, the beginning of the end of EU border controls. Now you get a couple of stamps per trip - one when you enter Europe, one when you leave.

Unless you push on down the Danube, past Budapest, and come to places where customs officials board river craft and spend a significant amount of time checking and stamping passports.

On this trip we added stamps (complete with a stylized steamship in the upper right-hand corner) in Mohacs, Hungary; Vukovar, Croatia; Novi Sad and Belgrade, Serbia; Svishtov and Ruse, Bulgaria, and Cernavoda, Romania. Cyrillic lettering on the stamps from Novi Sad and Belgrade makes them even more noticeable on the page.

From past trips to Eastern Europe I have other favorites - Biharkeresztes and Lokoshaza for two, each with a tiny steam locomotive design.

The picture is of a Hungarian horseman, demonstrating the five-in-one. Although I was happy the camera was fast enough to stop the action and get a clear picture, I almost wish I had slowed it enough to blur, just to give some idea of how fast those five horses were moving.

Welcome to jet lag

Returning from a faraway time zone (Continental Europe is 9 hours ahead of PDT) means that for about a week you become a very early morning person. I have already updated this blog and Danube-A-Tube, for which I was Blogger-in-Chief on the trip. Not to mention catching up on other blogs I read, and many many e-mails.

Sparky the Cat likes all this computer activity, because it means she can sprawl across my lap while I reach over & around her. (No wonder I get mysterious shoulder twinges from time to time!)

This morning Europe and heat waves seem far away, as it's currently 51 F and cloudy skies here in Seattle. Later the overcast should burn off, but it won't get really hot. I am home just in time for local strawberries, which ripened very late this year because of our unusually cold, wet, dreary spring.

Finishing the trip in Holland made a circle of the Danube trip. Before joining the tour in Prague, Nancy and I spent four days with friends of hers who live in Zalk (a very small place between Hattem and Zwolle, northeast of Amsterdam.) Because they willingly chauffered us elsewhere, first to Elburg, then to Friesland, we were also able to visit other friends, and to visit the boat Nancy still owns. (Boat is for sale - check out this site in case you are in the market for a really nice classic 50-foot motor yacht.)


Staying at this lovely house in the country was a wonderful way to get over jet lag and transition into Europe. We helped celebrate a couple of birthdays, and each of us had a hair-raising motorcycle ride, on the back of our host's huge Gold Wing. (Here's Nancy, in full biker babe turnout.)


Before we left Amsterdam, Nancy called the Zalk friends, and was horrified to learn they were just beginning to recover from a very serious automobile accident, suffered about a week and a half ago. (Their car was hit from behind, and rolled into a ditch. "The car was so badly damaged that you could not even tell it was a Volvo," Joost told us.) Miraculously, their injuries were not catastrophic.

Safely home again

In Seattle, where 70 degrees means warm summer weather, and the Wednesday night regatta is about to begin on the lake.

What we thought was just normal Bucharest weather that was too hot and humid for our Northwest sensibilities turned out to be a genuine heat wave, that hit Romania before spreading north and west to places on the Danube where we shivered only a week or two ago. Some of us went out to explore Bucharest a little on Monday afternoon, but fled back to the air-conditioned hotel after less than an hour, taking advantage of every bit of shade we could find on the way (just as everyone else on the street was doing.)

When we arrived in Amsterdam, on Tuesday afternoon, we were delighted to find Holland cool and gray. Instead of trying to do the entire trip home in one long haul, we stayed a night at Schipol before catching the flight to Seattle today.


Luckily, the final tour excursion, on Monday morning, was to Snagov Lake north of Bucharest, where, after a drive through dense, cool woods, we took a 20-minute boat ride out to a small island. There a Romanian Orthodox monk cares for a church that was recently rebuilt on its own ruins. The late dictator Ceausescu destroyed the previous church, built himself a palace , and made the island off limits to everyone. Now the government has rebuilt the church, which is reputed to be the burial place of Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler, or, yes, Vlad Dracul. Except for tourists, and a few of the faithful who come to the island for Sunday services, the monk has only his goats, his dogs and his flowers for company.


While the church is new, many of its lovely interior frescos were rescued from other old churches and brought together in this protected facility.

Bucharest at last - by way of Cernovoda, Constanta, Mamaia...

A faithful reader e-mailed to ask if anything is wrong. She hasn't seen a new blog post in a couple of days. 

Nothing is wrong - it's just that we have been far from Internet cafés, dependent on the very slow shipboard connection just to get mail. 

For us the Danube ended yesterday, in Cernovoda. The port is a long way from the actual exit of the Danube into the Black Sea, but very few large boats venture into the Danube Delta.

So we loaded onto coaches for an hour and a half run to Constanta, on the edge of the Black Sea, where we could enjoy its blue color and saltwater smell. (The Danube is brown - all brown  - and in Cernovoda it is very slow and full of mysterious floating objects.)

Constanta, like so many of the places we visited along the Danube, was a Roman city for a long time (and a Greek one before that.) One of its most famous citizens in ancient times was the poet Ovid, exiled here for the crime of writing the Metamorphoses. The serious-looking statue was given to Constanta by the Italian government many years ago. (The other may have been inspired by Ovid's risqué verses - who knows?)

After Constanta we proceded to Mamaia, a fancy resort farther up the coast, where we were guests of a beachfront hotel for lunch and water access. This meant plastic lounge chairs under umbrellas advertising Coke or Ursus Beer, and masses of people baring as much flesh as you can imagine to the hot sun. On the whole, we were happy to be back at the ship, in plenty of time to get ready for the Captain's farewell reception and dinner.

This morning it was bags out by 8:15, load the coaches by 9:15, and drive to Bucharest, through miles and miles of wheat, sunflowers, and soybeans.

"This could be Kansas," someone said. 

Bucharest looks nothing like Kansas, unless Kansas has suddenly sprouted block after block of crumbling Soviet-era apartments. As you get closer into town, the apartments get a bit better looking, and there are occasional streets filled with large pre-war houses, in varying states of repair. 

Bucharest is booming. Since I was last here, in 2005, many new glass towers have appeared, and what is even more important is that many old public buildings are covered in scaffolding and plastic, being repaired at last.

"If you come back to Bucharest in a few years you will see many good changes," said the guide.

 

Here in the Balkans ....

It's warm, finally. We were happy this morning that a sprinkle of rain cooled the air quite a bit. I am happy that Belgrade possesses Internet cafes with English keyboards that let me access my e-mail. (And the towers even have a USB port, but unfortunately I've got no pictures with me to upload.)

Ever since arriving in Croatia (where we stayed in Vukovar, famous for being the first town destroyed in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s)we have been treated to varying explanations for just what caused the Former Yugoslavia to implode. In Croatia, the basic answer is: Serbia! In Serbia: many conspiracy theories, presented by people who speak impeccable English.

Especially in Belgrade one gets the feeling that no one has gotten over the Tito era, when a Yugoslav passport would take you almost anywhere and socialism worked reasonably well. Now Serbs, alone of all the other ex-Yugoslavs, have to get a visa for almost anywhere they want to travel, and the local joke about medical care is that it isn't free, it isn't medical, and they don't care.

We sail in and out of these places on a luxurious hotel ship on which we have 5-star accommodations no matter what the local situation. It's easy to feel a complete disconnect from the passing scene, even more than when you are traveling by local transport and staying in hotels.

Late yesterday afternoon we moored in Novi Sad, Serbia, and after dinner on the ship the customs permitted us to walk around the town a bit. We had to take passports with us (same thing today), a sure way to feel you are in a different country.

There isn't quite so much football (soccer of course) madness here as we encountered last week. UEFA European championships are being played out all over Europe, and in Prague, Salzburg, and Vienna we ran into hordes of fans.

Vienna was particularly football-mad. In the shops we saw tortes decorated to look like soccer balls, and some entirely unexpected places (buildings along the Ringstrasse, for examle) had piles of soccer balls as decor. Most extreme things were the bushes in the Stadt Park, trimmed and tinted to look like soccer balls, and the giant cutouts of soccer players applied to the support beams of the huge ferris wheel in the Praterstern.

Greetings from Budapest

We did not mean to bring Seattle weather with us, but this morning we woke up in Budapest to cold rain. By the time we left to tour Pest by bus and Buda on foot, the rain was gone, but the cold continued until well after lunch.

Now it is a bit warmer, and the sun is out - more Seattle weather. Wear a jacket.

Today most of the passengers, the captain, the cruise director, the hotel manager and all three of the tour guides who have been with us since Prague left the Swiss Emerald. Now we are to have a Romanian captain (replacing our Dutch captain, who invited Nancy and me to share his table at the farewell dinner last night. That was fun.)

Ship sails between 6 and 7 tonight. It would be nice to have another day in Budapest, but we saw quite a lot. Now to go back to the ship to meet the 52 new passengers coming aboard...

Bratislava

And here we are, for another hour or so. Beautiful day, in contrast to yesterday in Vienna, when we nearly got blown off the streets. In spite of all that, we managed a good quick tour, seeing the Nachsmarkt, St. Stephen´s Cathedral, and, most important, managing lunch and a shared Sachertorte at the Cafe Sacher. Wonderful way to warm up.

Slovak keyboards are even more impenetrable than Austrian, and my ISP just kicked me off when I tried the old familiar password. No one should expect email for a while, alas.

Bratislava is very nice, all renovated within the past 10 years or so. Our very knowledgeable Slovak guide, a native of the city, caught us up on several hundred years of complicated Central European history, then led us through the Old Town on an excellent tour.

From here it is on to Budapest, where all but 36 passengers leave the ship. By Sunday night we will be meeting many many new friends, as the Tauck tour guide put it. We will also meet a new captain, tour director and three new tour guides.

Visiting Wien

No pictures today, and possibly some odd spellings, because this is an Austrian keyboard. I have not worked one of these in a couple of years, and forget almost all the time that y´s, z´s and apostrophes are in unusual places.)

We left summer behind in Linz, and found weather more like Seattle as we floated through the Wachau Valley. In Durnstein, "Pearl of the Wachau," we sheltered from a 4-alarm thunderstorm in a 17th-century church, hoping its tower, almost the highest point in town, would not become a target! Rain continued through the afternoon, and we were happy to be invited in a bit early to the wine restaurant where we were to taste several of the (justly famous) local wines.

Ship arrived in Vienna about 11 p.m. We are berthed across the Donau from the big UN complex of striking new buildings, and have at least one other riverboat tied to us. This means that our lobby becomes a corridor - slightly odd situation.

Tonight there is another entertainment in a palace, and tomorrow we have a free day in Vienna. Since I have been to Vienna and Nancy has not, I´ve been appointed chief tour guide. Fortunately we had an excellent city tour today, on our way to Schloss Schonbrunn, and the tour director distributed good maps. Pictures in the blog have to wait until I can find a machine with a USB port (or we can finally use the Mac.)

From Regensburg to Linz -

Only after we had been on our walking tour of Regensburg for a few minutes did we realize why the city's name seemed so familiar - it is the home town of Pope Benedict. The cathedral (begun in 13 something and finished in 18 something - such is the history of cathedrals!) is quite impressive, especially under a threatening sky. Although we were prepared to break out the umbrellas, nothing more serious than a few big drops accompanied our walk.

And then we finally joined the Swiss Emerald, which will be our home until June 22. Only 36 of the present company will go that far - the rest depart in Budapest. There are 106 passengers aboard the vessel, very well served by an excellent crew.

Blogging while in transit is frustrating - no, impossible. Only in Linz was I finally able to pick up e-mail, first time since Prague. No hope of connecting to Blogger. Nancy can check mail on her iPhone.

One of our Danube-a-Tube readers says we sound like two sorority sisters on a post-college trip to Europe, partying our way from here to there. Not really -- although, since joining the group in Prague, we have been to (1) a welcoming reception (champagne & wine); (2) an elegant dinner at a castle in the country near Prague (champagne, of course, and wines from the castle's own vineyards) and (3) the captain's welcome reception on board the Swiss Emerald (need you ask? Champagne, followed by local wine.)

During the day we walk all this off, in interesting places. Today Nancy and most of the rest of the passengers are on an excursion to Salzburg, which is about 2 hours away. We who stayed behind are enjoying a hot day in Linz, third-largest Austrian city. The Swiss Emerald is moored alongside a waterfront sculpture park, and it's possible to walk for miles along the Donau, on either side of the river. All the way from Regensburg we have seen cyclists and walkers along the river, and many campgrounds and caravan parks full of holidaying Europeans. On the river the weather has been wildly changeable - from sideways rain to sun to wind and clouds and sun again, all within a short time.

Nancy, the boater, says she is glad she never had to go through locks as large and impressive as the ones we transited yesterday. In some places we estimated the boat went down 50 or 60 feet before the gates opened.

On the way to the Danube -

This is our first full day in Prague, and the weather is beautiful. This morning we followed a well-informed guide through the Old Town (conveniently close to our hotel) and finished the tour with a visit to the Museum of Communism.

We're ahead of most others on the trip in terms of recovering from jet lag, because we landed in Europe Sunday the 1st. Recovering from the visit to Holland takes a little longer - Dutch hospitality is something else!

We arrived in time to celebrate the birthdays of both our hosts. Birthdays are a major occasion in Holland, and these were no exception. For two days a steady stream of family and friends came to bring cards, presents and good wishes, and to stay for food and conversation. Lucky us - food included special treats such as New Herring (sorry, all you Scandinavians - New Herring puts pickled herring in the shade) and white asparagus, and cakes and pastries of all sorts.