Beginnings

There must be a rich dot-com executive out there somewhere, looking for an exciting gamble…something to risk a small fortune on…who could sponsor a contest to find the next Michael Schumacher. And I could point him, or her, in the right direction to start looking--Slovakia. The drivers there handle roads the size of your average goat path with speed we reserve for straight, flat, three lane highways in the States. And I swear the Slovak engineers designed all their roads to be as twisty as possible and they look for area with the most incline (or decline, depending on your direction). Add to this the typical Slovak auto…a Skoda. For those who don't know what that is, well…a Skoda is to other cars what a training bra is to a WonderBra. It sure looks like the real thing, but there isn't much underneath. However, the Slovaks drive those Skodas like Ferraris, much to my delight.

Slovakia was the last country I visited during my two and a half weeks in Europe. I started in Brussels, traveled through the southern part of Germany, then along the Danube River in Austria and arrived in Bratislava, Slovakia, seven days later. I traveled by train through all of West Europe. Once in Slovakia, a friend was happy to save me the hassles of trying to get from point A to point B on Slovak trains. And I was only too happy to have him as my chauffeur. He is Slovak, but has lived outside the country for many years and now has Australian citizenship. He agreed to play the Australian role during our tour of the country so that I could attempt to communicate without his help. Only when we were really tired did he use Slovak to find a place to eat or sleep. After a grueling afternoon of romping in sunflower fields or climbing to spectacular vistas, sometimes it was necessary to take the easy route.

The pages of my travelogue would not work well on h2g2. They are personal accounts, and not what h2g2 guide entries are all about. So, I am working on adding the travelogues to my VirtualTourist pages. I will post links here to the site when I have a healthy portion completed. The site supports personal photos and is quite easy to navigate, so it will work well as a travelogue. What I will do here is write about my favorite experiences…and some of the screw-ups. Beginning with the flight to Belgium.

The day of my flight out of Boston coincided with the day the air traffic control computers in London would decide to go Y2K, or whatever technical glitch it was that took them all offline for a whole day. That set off chain reactions all over the world causing flights to be delayed or cancelled. My flight on British Airways was delayed 5 hours ¹. But, I met two really interesting people on the same flight, so I didn't mind. And let me tell you…British Airways is much better than SwissAir! I have flown SwissAir twice and it was horrid both times…careless service and uncomfortable seats (well…all economy seats are uncomfortable, but British Airways has little wing extensions to cradle your head…wonderful!). And I also heard one of my favorite British word for the first time (at least that I can recall)-"whilst." And it isn't pronounced like I thought! Silly me had the pronunciation all confused with "wilst." "Whilst" sounds like "while," but just has that extra added "s." But I still think it is a much prettier way of saying "while." Anyway, once in London, I had to reschedule my flight to Brussels and then wandered Heathrow for five hours waiting for that flight. And who the hell designed the payphone system in London!? I bought a phonecard and then had to find a specific kind of phone to use it with. I have never been so confused using a telephone in my life. And I speak the language! Sort of.

Once in Brussels, I took my one and only taxi ride to the one and only hotel I booked in advance. Dropped my backpack and headed out to sightsee. I ate dinner at a French restaurant and endured a haughty waiter who I could not get a smile from until the very end when I reached out, grabbed his hand, looked him in the eyes, smiled and thanked him for the very first meal of what I was sure would be a wonderful holiday. I headed off to the Grand Plaza to take pictures and have my first Belgium beer. There are pubs all around the plaza, so I chose one and took a seat. The waiter was quite friendly, as was the Australian sitting close by who picked up right away that I was American. He was a perfect gentleman. We chatted for an hour about nothing…what a friend calls "s**t-chat." It was a nice s**t-chat, though. And just as I was about to say good night, the riot police arrived. I was aware Euro2000 had been a quite raucous, but didn't expect to see the police in full gear. My drinking companion and I decided to investigate a bit and see what was up. As we walked toward a small crowd of noisy, but not particularly violent revelers, something changed and we were faced with a small mob…running pell-mell at us. He grabbed my hand and the two of us ran with the crowd. It was scary, but the adrenaline rush also made it exciting. A foreign city, holding hands with a stranger and running from something unknown…the stuff of bad TV movies…but it really did happen.

The next day I took the train to Brugge. The trains in Belgium have each station announced in four languages…clearly. And the trains are beautiful. Very clean, even the windows. This was my first experience with efficient, comfortable train travel. I wish I had discovered this 25 years ago. I would be a seasoned train traveler by now. And the trains were almost as good in Germany. The main difference being the station announcements. Not that I minded them being only in German, just that sometimes they weren't announced clearly, or at all. The comfort level went down a bit in Austria. The one Slovak train I took was just too sad looking to talk about.

Brugge is very touristy, but so what. It is very pretty and I would go back in a heartbeat. I even planned how I would live there, in a house along one of the canals, so that I could wave to the tourists passing by on little boats, listening to a tour guide tell the same jokes he tells every boatload, but with the sophistication to make each group feel they are hearing it for the first time. I was one of those tourists on one of those little boats. And the guide was as charming as they come…delivering his spiel in three languages. And I would have loved to have had the nerve to ask him out for a beer after his shift was over. And then I would have found out if there was any substance behind the charm. I think there is…but I'll never know because I seemed to have lost a bit of my boldness at the border.

I bought cherries, strawberries and a bottle of mineral water at a little grocery store and sat in a small park outside the touristy area to enjoy my lunch, watching people go about their every day business. No one noticed me and I could make up stories about the people that I watched. I made it a point to do that in every place I visited and the volume of my groceries increased as I went along. And I liked having groceries in my cloth bag brought from the States especially for this purpose. It made me feel more at home-like a routine I would do on any given day. And it sort of connected me with the every day lives of the people I watched, even though reality was not nearly so idyllic.

On To Germany

The price of EuroRail and EuroPass tickets astounded me when I was researching rail transportation. There is no way I am able to afford either of those options. So, I chose to buy point-to-point tickets, a bit of a risk since I didn't really know the routes prior to my arrival, although I did know the towns I wanted to visit. The one "if-I-had-it-to-do-all-over" comment I have about this trip is that I would have bought the Thomas Cook Rail Timetable so I could have planned my routes in advance. Another option I didn't know was open to me was that I could get off the train at any stop and get back on another, as long as the train was going to the same destination. If I had the Timetable, I would have been able to see many more of the small villages I only glimpsed through the windows.

Koblenz, Germany. I had read a bit about it in a guidebook and Festung Ehrenbreitstein, an old fortress overlooking the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, intrigued me. I love rivers. I love especially when they converge, each pouring its power into the other, usually producing tempestuous currents, but finally becoming one. In Slovakia, the Danube and Morava meet at a point close to the Austrian border. A friend told me about the barbed wire and guards to keep them from attempting to swim across that violent swirl. I wondered how many tried, but he couldn't tell me because it is something he never asked. There is a large fortress ruin at that confluence, too…Devín. Pretty name for so imposing a fortification. Ahh…I'm rambling. Back to my journal.

After leaving my backpack at a wonderful little pension very close to the train station, I headed out to explore the town. It is not a particularly pretty town, but there is a nice park, Deutsches Eck, dedicated to German unity. Something I began to notice about Europe…the way people respond to parks. We have lovely urban parks in the States; Central Park in NYC comes immediately to mind. But, watching the people in Europe enjoy their parks is quite different from watching the people at home utilize their parks. Perhaps I am over analyzing and contriving a difference that isn't there, but I don't think so. In Brugge people breathed in the parks. They sat on benches and breathed. In New York, people sit on benches and catch their breath. Go out and watch someday. How many people are enjoying the act of sitting in a park? I just don't see it happen as much in the US as I did in Europe.

A ride in a rather rickety looking ferry brought me to the other side of the Rhine and my chance to explore Festung Ehrenbreitstein. No signs directed me, but there is only one fortress over there, so it wasn't really a problem…until I got to the tunnel. The sign says "Sesselbahn," cable car. Nothing more. Okay…so there can't be more than one cable car and I knew the way to the fortress was by cable car, so into the tunnel. I don't like tunnels…I don't like any enclosed space. And walking into that tunnel gave me heebie-jeebies in the extreme. Nothing horrid happened…no slasher movie scenes. But I did not forget the feeling of dread throughout the rest of my trip and though the circumstances never presented themselves, I would not have entered another tunnel, or equivalent situation, with such spontaneity. At least not in any physical sense.

The fortress is unremarkable. There is a youth hostel up there and that would be fun to stay in, but my days of youth hostels are long gone (with no regret). After a spell of river gazing and a glass of cold mineral water, I headed down, walking along a winding path and back to the ferry. A quick stop to pick up groceries and back to the pension. My train would leave at 4:30 a.m. the next morning and I didn't want to miss it.

Na zdravie!²

The Slovak word for train is vlak. It sounds onomatopoeic to me. Pulling my big backpack along the sidewalks the next morning, I might have been mistaken for a train by someone trying to sleep….vlak, vlak, vlak…sounding much louder at 4 a.m. than it would in daylight. I was on my way to Regensburg, a Bavarian city on the Danube.

Morning gray colored the view from the train, but it only added to the scenery. I didn't visit any castles while in Europe. Somehow hopping from castle to castle seems more like collecting than visiting. And that's what I noticed was the inclination…see as many as possible, as quick as possible. No thank you. I liked the view from the train…the castles in semi-darkness with mists rising up from the valleys.

Regensburg is very pretty. And even more so on the Wednesday I arrived because it was a religious holiday and all the stores were closed. This meant the streets were generally quiet and tourists were few. I had a late breakfast at an outdoor restaurant, one of many meals I ate outdoors. Another thing I don't get enough of in the States. There are many fewer tables outside, probably because we don't have the huge open town squares like in Europe. If there is open space, it is filled with cars or people. Pedestrian zones? We call them "malls" and they are filled with cookie cutter stores and fast food joints. Regensburg has lots and lots of pedestrian space.

St Peter's Cathedral dominates the city skyline. The gothic architecture is everything you would expect; twin spires, arches and flying buttresses. Like so much of Europe, the cathedral is under renovation. St. Peter's has found a way to make the renovation an attraction…they sell tours to the catwalk between the spires high above the city streets. What a great idea! Unfortunately, the holiday also meant more people free to do weekend things…like tour the cathedral. The tickets were all sold out for the day.

Stienerne Brücke (Stone Bridge) leads to a lovely residential area of town on the other side of the Danube. Perfect for a mid-afternoon stroll, and more daydreams about living in one of those old homes with character overflowing like the flower boxes in all their windows. The bridge itself is reminiscent of Charles Bridge in Prague, though Stienerne hasn't been overrun by commercialism, as has Charles Bridge. Sitting in a park alongside the bridge, the pace of the previous days began to catch up to me. And…my throat started to feel a bit scratchy.

Wandering back to town, I stopped for dinner at a small restaurant where I found a menu with at least one vegetarian choice…a baguette. I ordered that and a huge beer, in my very bad German, trying not to look too American. The young woman who took my order returned in short time with my meal, complete with a small American flag. Resigned, I said something about not being able to fool her, which she answered with a smile. The sandwich tasted great…and the beer better. But, halfway through the meal, the sneezes snuck up on me. Sniffles weren't far behind and I climbed into bed with a package of tissue that night.

Desire Not Realized

Rain followed me all the ways to Munich. The central Munich train station is amazing; very clean and efficient. My hotel, a neat little place not far from the main train station with some of the friendliest staff I encountered throughout the trip, was a bit of a haul from the historic areas of the city. But, not being one to ever give into weather, I headed out in the rain to explore.

Glyptothek is a exquisite museum filled with an impressive collection of Greek and Roman sculpture. I had read a bit about it and its fraternal twin across the street, Antikensammlungen. The names alone persuaded me to put them on my list of things to see. I took the long way to the museums, through the main square, Marienplatz. There is a famous glockenspiel in the Neues Rathaus (New City Hall), which I didn't really care to watch, but I wanted to go to the top of the tower. How disappointing that an elevator takes visitors to the top! And I expressed that dismay aloud in the elevator. Fellow passengers from the UK quickly pointed out St. Peter's on the other side of the square has a stairway that would satisfy my craving for climbing. I made a mental note to go there later in the day. My head cold made mental note to thwart my plans.

When I reached Köngisplatz, the square the two museums are located in, I found Antikensammlungen was closed. So, I bought my one museum admission and figured that would give me more time to play in Englischer Garten, a huge park with hidden delights.

Glyptothek was originally constructed in the early 1800s. It was destroyed in WW II, and didn't reopen until 1972. Amazingly, the sculpture collection was preserved. Somebody had their wits about them and got the treasures out of harm's way. One statue I quickly recognized is Barberini Faun, a sculpture of a beautiful man sprawled in a drunken stupor. I like to think he is drunk with passion, but I am sure that is not the case. There are other recognizable pieces, too, but I don't know any of the names. The English guide book was not available when I was there, so I was left to my own interpretation of what I saw, which I guess is okay, unless one is an art history student.

In the last room, there are many busts mounted on pedestals. I sat on a bench placed so the faces all look at the viewer. Creepy is the only word I can use to describe the sensation of all those guillotined heads staring with their empty eyes. And to add to the strangeness, one bust is completely different from all the others. While the features on every other face are elegantly Roman, this one bust has flat features and a very broad face. Its placement in the room says nothing significant…it is mixed in with all the others. I could have asked, but I decided I liked not knowing. I decided I would make my own story up…that the different one is always among us, but is one of us. Perhaps it is another of my romanticized impressions, but it works for me.

Leaving the museum, I was cheered by a break in the clouds because my next stop would be Englischer Garten and I was very excited to visit the hidden pearl nestled in this park…the naturist meadow. I almost ran to the park.

Englischer Garten is the largest city park in all of Germany. I got about a half-hour into the park when I lost the battle with my head cold. Sitting on a bench, I gave into tears of frustration. It wasn't just missing out on the meadow…it was knowing I was going to miss out on other sights I wanted to see.

Back at the hotel I took a long bath and a short nap. Feeling a bit better, I went out for dinner at a restaurant I read about, Prinz Myshkin. The first vegetarian, and as it turns out, only, restaurant I ate in. Fantastic meal, horrible service.

I went to sleep without my fill of Munich, but with full intentions of returning. And I also discovered what "quiet room" means in hotel jargon…a room away from the busy street. Goodness Munich is noisy at night. But…it was kind of comforting.

Mozart, Spelunking and a Surprise

I've been to Salzburg before. I really like the feel of that city. There is the obligatory glitz and glamour, but it is also a very comfortable city. Maybe it's the coziness of a city so space starved, some of the buildings are built right into the cliffs behind them. Maybe it's the watchful eye of the fortress, Festung Hohensalzburg, high above the city. Whatever the draw, it holds me fast.

My cold really slowed me down in Salzburg. And I got a later start than usual, so my touring time was a bit shorter. And there weren't "raindrops on roses" in Mirabell Gardens…there was a "deluge on day-trippers." But I had never been to the gardens and I did enjoy them, even wet. A small group of tourists asked me to take their picture in front of the fountain made famous in the "Sound of Music." Just as I was about to snap the picture, they broke into song…."Do-a-Deer." I am so glad they had English accents and not American. Takes a bit of heat off us.

The next morning I boarded the train to Werfen and the world's largest ice caves, Eisriesenwelt. Cloudy skies prevailed, as did my cold, which had settled in my chest. Makes for a sexy voice, but sure doesn't allow for deep breathing.

The caves are accessible by a long hike up a winding path. The views are incredible, even with heavy cloud cover…maybe more so because when there was a break in the clouds, the panorama before us was a surprise. I am very much afraid of heights, so I didn't venture too close to the edges, but those who did were rewarded with a glimpse of nearly perpendicular drop-offs.

Inside the caves, every other visitor is given a lantern. All those flickering lanterns added romance to an excursion already steeped in the fantastic. The tour is in German (of course), but I got enough of the gist to follow along. The tour lasts about an hour, and feels like longer since it is all climbing stairs. Can you imagine what it must have been like for the first explorers to enter these caves? They must have been frightened by the sudden appearance of ice formations that look like huge animals. The climb would have been treacherous over the ice. I don't have the history of these caves, but I am sure it's available somewhere. But…I'll just imagine for now how magnificent it had to be to be the first to see these wonders.

The next stop on my itinerary was Melk, a town I only planned on as a sleepover stop since it is the starting point for a river cruise on the Danube. The guidebooks say little about this town so I didn't have any expectations. Well…Melk is a definite "must see" locale. The Benedictine Abbey that dominates the town is more than impressive…it is astounding. I arrived too late to do anything but look at it from the street below. The town is very pretty and the little tourist map I found at the train station details the dates of most every building. This town is a pleasant surprise for anyone looking for off-the-beaten-path destinations. And even more so because it really isn't out-of-the-way!

Continued in Brussels to Bratislava, Book II.³