2009 04 25
just entered last year's trip notes into the rantose web page. this is a new height (or low) of slackness. using today (saturday) to prep for trip. need to pack sufficient underwear in order to avoid having to interpret czech waist sizes. do not want a repeat of [last year's] embarassing attempt to buy right size of undies from clerk who cannot hazard a useful guess at my size, with a mutual language barrier [i found the one clerk in germany who could not speak perfect english when i needed translation the most].
2009 04 29 weds.
plane ride hell. 8 hour flight to frankfurt. arrived there in early morning of next day.
2009 04 30 thurs.
took bus tour of prague and tour of prague castle. this was a hot trek and we were totally exhausted and without sleep after the plane ride. [ugh] our guide made a strange trilling noise when she wanted to gather us. we learned that people often get thrown out of windows in prague.
2009 05 01 fri.
nizbor glass factory tour, quite interesting. our guide margetta was really well spoken and friendly. [she was very convincing on the point that beer is medicine, and is really good for one's health even for breakfast. i think i'm in love.] wandered around downtown for a while and ate lunch at a small cafe. cab ride back to hotel after lunch was 3 (or almost 4) times as expensive as night before. we are saps? [we were told later at the hotel that if one suspects the cabbie is breaking the price controls, you can ask for a printed receipt which can later be used as evidence if necessary, but which usually makes them behave and charge the right prices.]
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nice dinner at pivovarsky club, which was quite delicious. when we got back, we went down to the casino [in our hotel]. i lost 300 koruna on stupid slots. barb won about the same amount. [the balance of the universe is maintained.]
2009 05 02 sat.
we explored prague, using the subway and trams to get to the funicular and the "eiffel" tower on top of the hill. we rested in a nice garden [with beautiful plantings and nice round walkways with benches under cover] for a while and then rode back down.
we ate lunch at the staropramen restaurant near the brewery, which was delicious. afterwards we went on the brewery tour, which was a bit underwhelming. [we did at least get free beer samples, which were delicious.] [also, there seemed to be some kind of circumambulatory death march involved in finding either the restaurant or brewery or both, where we walked around the entire complex of buildings three or four hundred times.]
that night, we went to the folklore party with dinner, which feature traditional czech music and dancing. we drank quite a bit, starting with an appertif, then on to bad wine, immediately followed by switching to beer, and then had champagne with dessert. everyone was pretty toasted. [the only endearing thing about the wine was the way it was served by a bald-headed man holding a wacky glass apparatus who would like stand on his head or something to serve. however, the wine held inside his magical glass wine flute was crap and we could not drink it.]
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note: the toilets here all have two types of flush--half and full.
and last night at the restaurant (5/1) i nearly got locked in the toilet stall. [it was malfunctioning and not unlocking, while meanwhile everyone else had filed out of the place.]
2009 05 03 sun.
lounged around the hotel before bus trip to nuremberg. bus trip was 4 hours and very boring, plus painful due to lousy seats. [sorry, some amount of griping may occur.]
got to viking [corporation's] ship and got interminable orientation briefing. dinner was okay but not great, wine and beer were not free and in fact were expensive. 7 euro corking fee if you bring your own wine [to the table]--outrageous! cheap tour company this viking seems to be. [oh, get over it, yoda.]
2009 05 04 mon.
nuremberg tours (nürnberg) to coliseum, built by the nazis and never finished. we also went to the parade grounds, where the big rallies were held. the facility there had been partly demolished since the war. then we went to the imperial castle and walked through it. afterwards we got to the center of town and stopped at a bratwurst place to have beer, which was tuchen dark. [my apologies for the incredibly brief summary of the incredibly historic bits, clearly my mind is more on beer than history or architecture during these trips.] dad insists on spelling the beer name incorrectly. [was he claiming it was tuckus dark?] although i also thought the guide's name was 'speeder' instead of 'dieter'. [so perhaps we are even on whatever doofus scale that is.]
a boring meeting at 4pm for knot tying--retarded. an orientation at 6pm--also boring. dinner at least was nice, although they had no vegetarian soup. we drank vicki's wine and a moravian (we think) bottle [purchased back in prague]. after dinner, we had a short port party in jeff and donna's room.
a note to viking--having the pa system pump music on the same channel as announcements--very stupid. it's bad music too. make these separate or ditchy the lousy music. many [passengers] seem to turn off the pa system in the room entirely to not have music, and then they get no announcements.
2009 05 05 tues.
viking cruise line internet sucks.
today we went to regensburg on a walking tour and checked out the jewish quarter. there was a synagogue that had been rebuilt after the evil [expletives deleted] nazis burned it on kristalnacht in 1938. there was a previous pogrom forcing all jews from regensburg in 1518 or so too. one boat of them [the fleeing jews] sank with no survivors in the frozen danube. nazis [of any era] suck [expletives deleted].
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later we went on a danube boat trip on a ferry boat, which was super cold. we got to the monastery (benedictine) in weltenburg, where we saw the beautiful baroque monastery with 12 monks in residence. afterwards, we quickly drank their dunkel [dark] beer before going back to the bus.
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entertainment at night was "hans", a national embarassment for bavaria. he tooted a bicycle horn and blew a whistle and capered about like an idiot. [his act was both depressing and obnoxious, and i wonder how many of my fellow american passengers felt like they had finally met a 'real' german. argh.]
2009 05 06 weds.
nice walking tour through passau today. we ended up at an incredible baroque style church for an organ concert, with more than 1700 pipes. [unfortunately, i seem to remember thinking that perhaps we were used as a teaching concert for chimpanzee organists in training, given some of the not so heavenly tunes that were jumping out of that thing.] we ate lunch at an innstadt restaurant which was very good.
after lunch we took the bus up to the passau oberhaus, a large castle that has become a museum. it has at least 5 museums in it (the first we walked through (1), then middle ages (2), then an apothecary museum (3), a bohemian forest museum (4), a metalworking museum (5)) we didn't get to see all of them. jeff lost his phone, but luckily found it on the return bus. after that, dad and bud and i went for a beer at a nice bar called simplex, that might have been a gay bar. it at least had good beer.
2009 05 07 thurs.
forgot to mention--last night, zuzana the maid created an elephant out of towels. see picture.
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travelled up to the melk abbey, which was another amazing cathedral, as well as a school with active benedictine monks. a huge complex with many beautiful rooms and a huge (100K books) library.
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at 4:30, a fun wine tasting with zoltan, the maitre'd. i managed to spill a red wine on myself and dad and a woman next to me.
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at night we went to a strauss and mozart concert at a concert chamber in vienna. it was really pretty great. they had a pair of dancers also and a pair of singers and a 13 piece orchestra. they played some favorites and ended with blue danube and another piece my dad thought was from the 3rd man (the movie). very nice despite the painful chairs.
2009 05 08 fri.
vienna bus tour this morning and a trip to the imperial winter palace of franz joseph, which was a mammoth ornate place.
afterwards we ate a sundae at a small cafe in downtown vienna and then bud and dad and i had a beer before heading back to the boat (we got a staro brno[?] at the wienerwald restaurant). [i believe wienerwald means sausage forest. i also believe in ufos.] [actually it seems to mean vienna forest. this trip has been like being lost in 'sausage forest' though.]
back at the boat--surprise--more food for lunch. an afternoon nap pretty much decimated the rest of the day until the captain's toast and captain's dinner, which was very good. we had matus, instead of our more frequent waiter tamas, but he was good too. baked alaska for dessert. then our 3rd little port party in j&d's room.
2009 05 09 sat.
budapest walking tour. boat parked in pest, and we took the bus up to buda and went around the old town and cathedral. stayed in town for lunch and i had a nice fish soup (4 types of fish). then we had a tortuous walk in the heat back down to pest. now overheated and exhausted. budapest overall is cool but also dilapidated; many buildings look dirty and crumbling. communist rule had not been good to this place.
[flew out of budapest early early on sunday.]
2009 05 12 tues.
last day of vacation. spent monday in a semi-comatose daze, sunday was infested with air travel, which was not totally horrible but also not so great. ass is totally numb from airplane seats. tuesday was mellow, went to star trek movie that came out prior thursday, theater was deserted. back to sort of normal here. work tomorrow--weds.