Dedham Choral Society journal, 2004 European tour
Created | Updated May 14, 2023
Aug 2, 2004
Here I am in lovely downtown Prague. Our touring chorus arrived here a little after 2:00 p.m. local time after a mostly uneventful flight that robbed us of six hours of sleep due to crossing 6 time zones from West to East.
I'd like to be able to say that there were lots of thrills and chills about the flight, but the truth is there were no gorillas on the wing of the plane, the pilot and copilot did not succumb to rare ttropical snakes that got in through the centillating system, and no guys with funny beards and headgear tried to hijack the plane and fly it into anything it should have been flown into.
No, it was just a rather cramped, though not out of the ordinary plane. The ride was pretty smooth. My ears didn't do much popping during ascents and descents. Heck, our first leg of the trip was completed ahead of time.
The only mishaps were: One chorus member forget to get his tuxedo out of the overhead bin, and the airline was not cooperative about helping him get it back; two chorus members were unable to find one bag each (neither containedhugely important items).
When we got to the hotel (Pyramid Hotel), it was decided that we should take a walking tour of downtown to help us get oriented to Prague. We saw a clock tower with an astronomical clock--instead of 12 hours on the face, there are 24. Some mechanical figures are supposed to emerge and do little dances or whatever at regular intervals, just like Imogene Coca and Sid Caesarin an old "Your Show of Shows" skit. Whatever. erm
Our first concert will be tomorrow at 2:00 p.m.
I'll be back with updates as I get the chance....
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Posted Aug 3, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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<Has no idea what boom they're talking about>
Today, I started with a sumptuous breakfast of chocolate granola, cherries, sausages, hardboiled eggs, rye bread, an apple, and lots and lots of coffee--at 6:30 in the morning, because it was too hard to sleep because of all the racket from trams and trucks going by the hotel (and we couldn't close the window because there was no air conditioning, and it was hot and muggy puff .)
We hurried off to downtown Prague in a doubledecker bus, taking along our tuxes and music for the afternoon concert at St. Nicholas Church. We left the hotel at 8:45 a.m. (I had to go back to my room twice because I kept forgetitng stuff like my medication erm )
We had two local tour guides for our tour of the Jewish section of town. My tour guide was Petra. We saw several synagogues (including one that is the oldest synagogue in the world outside Jerusalem). There were rules against synagogues being higher than nearby churches, so the bottom floors of this synagogue were built underground.
We saw a memorial to the 80,000 Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust. Each onehad his/her name hand-written on the walls. A flood two years ago damaged the bottom part of the walls, so the names at the bottom had to be rewritten by hand.
We were given a tour of a Jewish Cemetary, some parts of which were higher than others, as new graves were laid on top of old ones, to a depth of as many as 12 layers.
After a quick bite to eat, we gathered at St. Nicholas Church to rehearse and then give our 2:00 p.m. concert. It's a gorgeous church. The floor area is rather small, but the vertical spaces are huge, and the murals on the ceilingsand huge chandelier (donated by Czar Nicholas) are gorgeous.
We sang the Dvorak Mass uo\p in the choir loft, then hurried down winding stairs to the front of the sanctuary for the rest of the pieces. The concert went quite well. We had a good audience, and more people arrived near the end. As an encorre, we sang "Prsi prsi,"
a Czech folksong about rain. We were well-applauded.
We then returned to the hotel so some of us could get ready for the opera tonight (Don Giovanni). I did not attend the opera, but instead swam fifty laps in the hotel pool (which is only ten meters long) and then retired to the Koppernik Restaurant for a leisurely mealof duck simmered in wine and apple and almond sauce, accompaniedwith good rye bread and garlic butter, blackcurrant tea, and mixed vegetables.
That's all for now. Tomorrow we do sightseeing in the morning, and a dinner cruise on the river in the evening.
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Posted Aug 4, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Day three of the tour finds me still in Prague (Tomorrow we head for Vienna).
In the morning, Petra (our local tour guide) showed us through the castle complex near the hotel. It's quite huge and sprawling. Much of the area was destroyed in 1541, when a great fire roared through it. Buildings were reconstructed then, some of them dating from the 8th or9th centuries.
The jewel of the complex is Saint Vitus Church, which started being constructed as a basilica in the 10th century, and was still in the process of completion 1,000 years later as it got added to and turned into a grand gothic cathedral with a Baroque tower (for which it was criticized, as Gothic and Baroque styles are not supposed to go together. nahnah Defenders point out that this makes the place unique smiley ). It is huge and majestic and awe-inspiring. I'm a sucker for stained-glass windows, so I could spend a lot of time looking at them and be very happy. smiley
The palace itself is quite sprawling, with no fewer than four courtyards. Despite beging next to a grand cathedral (St. Vitus), it has a chapel of its own, done in French Renaissance style to reflect the upbringing of Charles II, the 14th century Czech king who put the country on the map. Charles had been educated at the Sorbonne, so he knew quite a bit about French culture.
We also saw a grand hall where medieval tournaments were held. The walls and ceilings were Gothic, while the windows were boxlike Renaissance in style. Petra took us into a tiny side room from which some people were defenestrated (i.e. thrown out the window), but they escaped unharmed because they fell on deep piles of manure which softened their fall. smiley laugh
We also saw a monastery, got some great views, bought souvenirs at the gift shops, and walked up and down many many many stairs.
My feet will be sore tomorrow, but hopefully the long bus ride will let them recover for the day after.
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No, Lady Scott, the peasants with pitchforks nave not thrown any of us out the window....at least not yet. laugh
Anyway....I am typing this in Vienna, which we spent most of the morning travelling toward, through empty countryside. This keyboard has the Y key in an unexpected place, and I cant even find the apostrophe and quotation marks.
Last night, we had dinner on a river boat in the Vltada River (a.k.a. Moldau River). The buildings on either side of the river look spectacular at night, lit up beautifully. smiley We had an accordian player to entertain us, and we sang along with some old standards "Those were the days, my friend," "Beer barrel polka," etc.
One of our local tour guides sang some Czech folk songs, and we got back to the hotel in a pleasant mood.
We had to be up early so as to leave the Prague hotel by 8:30 a.m. for our long bus ride to Vienna.
We arrived at the Hotel Mercur in Vienna almost an hour late, and almost immediately launched into a tour of the city, starting with a ride on the subway system. We got off at Stephansplatz, where we had a light meal at Rosenberger restaurant, and then saw the exteriors of >Hoffbrun Palace and St Stephans Church.
Gotta run now. Supper is a at 7:00 p.m.
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Posted Aug 6, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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laugh
I惻l deal with those cookie things and Prague idiosyncracies after I get back home to my own computer. For now I have another report to make:
Friday, Aug. 6, 2004
We arrived in Vienna from >Prague yesterday afternoon, and were immediately led around on another guided tour.
We saw exteriors of St Stephan愀 Church and Hofbrun Palace, plus an interesting statue commemorating a Plague in the 1600s. erm The reqard for all our tramping around was to be taken back to the hotel for a dinner of beef goulash and dumplings, and fruit-filled dumplings
for dessert.
After dinner, a few of us wandered the streets near the hotel, looking in store windows and marvelling at how many other tourists were around, doing the same thing. laugh
Anyway, this morning I visited the Haydn Museum, which is on Haydngasse, which is 3 blocks from our hotel. Haydn spent the last 8 years of his life in the house. His harpsichord is on display in a room on the second floor. There are also a lot of pictures of Haydn and his associates, as well aas some original scores of his music. The house also has a wing devoted to Johannes Brahms.
My plan for this afternoon is to swim in the pool at Marienbad ("bad" means "bath" in German, so technically it is a place for public baths). After that, I shall see Schonbrunn Palace.
Tonight we will sing at Votivkirche in Vienna. The church was built in 1856 to commemorate a deranged tailor who tried to kill Emperor Franz Joseph in 1853.
That愀 all for now.
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Posted Aug 7, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Saturday Aug 7, 2004
YesterdaY afternoon didn愒 work out quite as I had planned.
I took the subway to St. Stephan愀 Church, hoping to wander around inside. When I got into the back of the church, I found that a service was in progress, so I could only see what was in the back. There was a section of votive candles, where people were praying. The ceiling is high and vaulted, as The stained glass windows are more muted, but still very lovely.
Coming out of the church, I decided to find a place for lunch. I wandered around, finally settling on a little cafe in the middle of the square. I ordered Asian tuna on a baguette, which turned out to be sashimi (raw tuna). I had never had raw fish before. It tasted all right, though very strange.
I got on the subway again and went to marienbad to swim, but the pool is closed till September, so I went to Schonnbrunn instead.
At Schonbrunn, I walked around a lot, and found a great pool.
At night, we sang at the >Votivkirche.The resonance is superb.
Afterward, I had a sachertorte in the hotel.
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Posted Aug 8, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Greetings from Budapest.
Yesterday was my last day in Vienna. It was quite a day.
In the morning, I took the subway and tram to the Central Cemetary (which is not at all central, but rather southeast of Vienna). We first went to see Antonio Salieri's grave, then worked our way into the VIP sexctin, where Schubert, Brahms, and Beethoven are buried. Schuibert's grave was ornate and lovely, and Beethoven1s was more severe. We also saw a downright obscene gravestone which depicted a naked woman having sex with a skeleton, while a male torso writhed in front of the tombstone.
We wernt into the chapel in the cenetr of the cemetary, and were given a toru of the place. The style is Art Nouveau. There is a high dome above the sanctuary. We sang "Amazing grace" in front of the tour guide1s mother1s grave (she is one of the 800 people buried in the crypts in the cellar of the chapel).
We took the tram and streetcar back to the hotel.
There wasn1t much tinme for lunch, but I tried going to the central Cafe, which tour guide Kerstin had recommended. It has gorgeous ceilings, and an excellent staff. I ordered turkey medallions in cheese, with noodles. It took 30 minutes to come, so I pretty much wolfed it down in 10 minutes so I could get back to the hotel by 2:00
At 2:00 p.m., we gathered in the hotel lopbby for a trip to the Vienna Woods (Tis cost extra: I had paid 42 dollars before the tour started). We didn1t acutally go into the woods, but rode around a lot on the bus. Our first stop was at a grotto where there was an underground lake that had been used by the Nazis in WWII for manfacturing aircraft in secret. You had to get to it by boat, and I wasn1t crazy about the idea, so I didn1t go on that.
Later, we stopped at Heiligcreuze and were given a tour of the monastery and chapel. I saw a lovely round room with stained glass windows all around, and a fountain in the center. I'd not mind living in that room. smiley In the courtyard of the monastery (Cistercian order)
is a monument for the plague survivors. It is the original, from which the ones in Prague and Vienna were copied.
We got back to the hotel about 6:00. I had chicken and rice and vegetables at a small restaurant on a side street near the hotel. There was also liver-dumpling soup, and I had apple strudel for dessert. Later I went with friends to the Cafe Central for hot chocolate. We stayed til closing time (10:00)
This morning (Sunday, August 8), we all piled onto the bus at 8:00 for an 8 hour ride to Budapest. We stopped at the Hungarian border at 10:10, and a blond girl came on the bus to check and stamp our passports.
We continued on, passing flat farmland with electric transmission lines in the background.
At noon, we stopped in Gyor. Our tour guide was Charles. A lot of the houses had balconies. The streets were cobblestoned, like those of Prague. There were chapels with green turban-shaped steeples. We saw the town1s fortress walls. The Virgin Mary is patron saint of Hungary.
The buildings tend to be yellow with red tile roofs, just like those in Prague. We had lunch at one o1clock in a hotel: beef goulash with rice and veggies, with apple strudel for dessert.
We arrived in Budapest about 4 o'clock, but I1ll talk about that next time, as I am running out of time now.
Forgive my speeling, as thuis keyboard is laid out differently from the ones I am used to.
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Posted Aug 9, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Yesterday afternoon we arrived in Budapest, and what was the first thing we did? If you guessed that we went to our hotel (The Hotel Mercure), you're wrong. No, we went to St Stephan's Church and rehearsed for about half an hour, as we will not have another chance to rehearse there before Monday evening1s concert.
St Stephan1s Church is a huge basilica with a great dome over the center. There is red flecked marble in the columns. The church is not just very wide, but also very wide, with a lot of gold filigree and velvet. This is a major place to perform. The place is evidently a major tourist attraction as well, so the pews were nearly full of tourists while we were practicing. I hope some of them will want to come for our actual concert.
After the rehearsal, we went to the hotel and unpacked. We had dinner together in the hotel restaurant at 7:00 p.m. After dinner, I went walking as far as I could along the road (Rakoczy Street) the hotel is on. According to my map, the road leads past some important museums and monuments, ultimately reaching a bridge across the Danube River. Tuesday, my hope is that I will walk to the bridge, and then go to the public baths for some swimming.
I did not reach the bridge, though, because I was overtaken by a married couple from my group, who were looking for a public park they had heard about: they wanted to go jogging there early Monday morning. I went with them, and ultimately turned back to go to the hotel.
This morning (Morning), we all got up early so we could go on a sightseeing tour to Centendre, which is about 30 kilometres from Budapest. We climbed to the top of a hill overlooking the Danube bend, to some forts and parapets where people used to look out for ships coming up or down the river. They would make anyone sailing by pay a toll.
From there, we went to Centendre itself, and looked at some local historic churches and a museum dedicated to the artist Margit Kovacs, who worked with sculptures and glazed ceramic tiles. I liked her (Dressing the bride" and "Sleeping Beauty," just to name a few.
I stopped in the village square for peach-stuffed chicken breast with mashed potatoes and tomato salad.
While I was waiting for the rdie back to Budapest, I was approached about sitting for a caricature, which turned out quite well, though it cost about forty dollars.
We got back to the hotel about 3:00. At five, we1ll ehad for St Stephan1s for our concert. We have to sit through a Mass before we can sing our concer
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Posted Aug 10, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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AUGUST 10, 2004
The concert went very well, with quite a large audience and no major train wrecks nor major missed entrances. The plan was that the regular 5:30 and 6:00 masses would take place, then we would go behind the altar to do our concert. As we arrived at St Stephan's a little after 5:00, that gave us a lot of time to kill if we weren't planning to sit through the two masses. In my case, I saw no reason for an agnostic/Protestant/whatever like me to subject myself to two baffling half-hours listening to someone drone away in Hungarian, so I sat in the square in front of St Stephan's with a great view of the church itself. smiley
This was absolutely the grandest place we have ever sung. Let's take a European tour every year!
After the concert was over, we all posed for group photos in the church, then we all went on our merry ways. Some of us went back to the hotel to remove our tuxedos or other concert dress and change into something more comfortable for the 80-degree weather.
I fell in with a group that wanted to eat dinner at a little restaurant-cafe along the Danube River: the ringleader had eaten at such a place the other night, but group members had three different ideas about what direction we should go to get to the river. We couldn't agree, so we split up into three groups. The group I was with had 6 other members, but even we had trouble staying together. The ringleader went right when she should have gone left, but none of the many restaurants we saw was the one she had remembered. She finally found the right one, but couldn't find a way to get into it, so we all went the opposite direction along the river, and finally settled on a place with lots of huge umbrellas over the tables.
This restaurant was evidently a fine example of the reasons why communists should never try to run a country, as the waiters seemed to have no idea what they were doing. It took two waiters to not quite do the work of one. The cold beer we ordered sat waiting for the waiters to pick it up, so it got warm and had to be thrown away. Two of us ordered Hungarian goulash, but the waiter kept asking how many of us wanted it, because he couldn't remember. Even sprite took about half an hour to be served. We asked what foods would be the quickest, as we were starving by then. When told that goulash and salads were the quickest items, that's what we all ordered. I had goulash and sprite. The goulash was very peppery at first, but after I got used to the hotness of it, I liked it very much. There were chunks of beef, carrot, potato, and green pepper in it.
In our group, there were two people who were trying to figure out the bill, and they were in over their heads. They finally got angry and simply walked away from the rest of us, leaving us to get the bill paid.
We didn't feel like walking back to the hotel, so we waited at a bus stop. Naturally, there were pickpockets buzzing around, hoping to catch us anawares. We waited forty-five minutes for the number 7 bus, which never came, so we ended up walking back to the hotel anyway.
Even after we went to bed, there was plenty of trouble: down on the street in front of the hotel, I could hear some woman crying in distress. I never did figure out what that was all about. Maybe it's a nightly occurrence, for all I know....
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Posted Aug 11, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Tuesday, August 10, 2004
I am not exaggerating when I say that it took most of the day and 6 miles of walking to finally get to the Turkish baths of Budaőpest.
Embarrassing confession: My sense of direction could not possibly be worse. I set out from the Mercure Mteropol hotel on Rakocsy St a little before ten a.m. I walked in what I _thought_ was the direction of the Szabadsag bridge, which crossed the Danube, on the other side of which was the biggest and best-known collection of baths and pools in Budapest.
Okay, so the Gellert Gyogyfurdo (a large, swank hotel) owned the baths, but they were generous enough to let anybody who had lots of cash use them.
The sun was hot, shade was hard to find, and I found myself getting no closer to any recognizable bridges, ladmarks or anything else on my map. I found a decaying church, but it didn't seem to have been used by anybody lately, nor were there any signs on it that I could use to figure out where I really was.
Finally I saw a recognizable name: Kerepesi. I looked on a map and found that it belonged to a street that was on the other side of Budapest from where I thought I was going.
I walked back to the hotel and tried going in the opposite direction from the one I had been going in. Suddenly everything clicked. It was lunchtime, so I had a nice buffet lunch across the street from my hotel at Pasta Dost Restaurant: curried turkey, grilled duck, cream of onion soup, yogurt salad, potato and some nice Italian pastries, all washed down with espresso.
After letting my lunch settle, I set off again, with my bathing suit and towel in a khaki bag I had bought at an Army store in Vienna. I reached the bridge just minutes after a bad traffic accident that closed it down completely. Even the pedestrian walkways were closed.
Not wiling to give up, I walked along the river to the next bridge (Erzsebet), crossed it, and walked along the other side of the river to the baths. The hotel complex is huge, so I ahd to ask directions in the hotel lobby.
The entrance to the baths is through the Post Office ( who knew?). You stand in line to buy a ticket (2300 forints get you two hours of swimming pool time, plus a locker). To get to the men1s locker room, you go up one corridor and down another, then up some stairs, down some stairs, then up more stairs. The locker room attendant gives you a medallion with a number on it (mine was 160), but the number on the locker did not corresapond to the number on the medallion (mine was 173). He wrote 160 in chalk on the inside of my locker, and then locked it with a key which he kept. I got custody of the medallion while I was swimming. More weirdness: to get to the pool, you had to go through a corner of the wommen1s locker room.
I swam in the indoor pool, which was standard length and width, but the shallow end was more rounded than square at the shallow end. Also, every swimmer had to wear a blue shower cap, which was provided by a nonexistent woman at a counter next to the pool.
The swimmers swam counterclockwise aound the pool if they felt like it. I didn1t bump into anyone. There was a man in white who blew a whistle if anyone did anything wrong. My shower cap self-destructed once, and he handed me another.
By the time I finished swimming, the bridge had been cleared of debris, and I walked back to my hotel easily, stopping for orange juice and peach iced tea and frozen yogurt.
I rested in the hotel, inspecting my feet for blisters. There were blisters on each of my big toes
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Tuesday, August 10 was our last day before departing from Budapest, so a final blowout dinner was scheduled.
We met at 7:30 p.m. in the hotel lobby, to board the bus for a place that our tour guide said translated as "Catacombs of wine" drunk . If left untranslated, the Hungarian name was Budafoki Borkatakombak.
Either way, it was predicted that the staff there would try to get us to drink as much wine as possible.
We were prepared for what was to come: There would be a lot of singing and dancing. There would be a gypsy orchestra, which would consist of lead violin, second violin, cymbals, string bass, and optional flute (there wasn't any flute this time). We would get photographed in gypsy costumes if we wanted to, and our pictures would be put on the label of a souvenir bottle of wine.
In fact, this was a pretty acurate prediction. If they couldn't get us to drink more wine, they compensated by putting wine in most of the food. We started with duck soup (Minus the Marx Brothers), then waited what seemed an interminable time for an entree consisting of roast duck, mashed potatoes, barley, red cabbage, and a few greens. Evidently they had found a duck big enough to serve 60 people, and wanted to serve it to us. winkeye Dessert was sponge cake topped with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. If you guessed that the cake was soaked in wine, you are right. biggrin
Then came the entertainment. The gypsy dancers and musicians were
lively. I noticed that the manager of the place was also one of the musicians: he played lead violin. Occasionally, members of our group were drafted (or temporarily kidnapped, as these were gypsies) and brought to the stage to participate in dancing or baton twirling or whatever.
A girl in traditional Hungarian folk costumes posed with each of us. Later, the picture of this posing was placed on the label of a bottle of red wine, which we were able to buy for 12 Euros or 2,500 forints
at the end of the show. I bought the bottle with my picture on it, so I could show it to the folks back home.
We arrived back at the hotel somewhat drunk but mostly happy.
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Posted Aug 12, 2004 by Online Nowpaulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004
We could sleep late the following morning, as we did not need to get on the bus to the Budapest Airport until 11:00 a.m. I spent my time jotting down some of the things I would miss about Budapest. Since it took me so long to figure out which direction was which, I didn't feel I got to know Budapest as well as I knew the other two cities.
Still, much of what I did see was really nice, except for the pickpockets and the closed bridges. yikes
--I will miss the shopping arcades under each of the major intersections. You can buy drinks, fruit, mags & newspapers. and other necessities there, or just sit in a bar or cafe if the weather outside was too hot or cold for one of the outdoor places.
--English and French are about equally successful if you wanted to communicate with the locals, especially the ones who were selling things you wanted to buy. Since I can manage with both languages, this was rather helpful.
--The Mercure Metropol Hotel. This was the best hotel of the three that we stayed in. The bedspreads, rugs, and sinks were gorgeous, and the rooms were quite a bit bigger. You didn't mind spending time in your room, unlike the rooms at the two other hotels. sadface Some of the staff members were nice, and others didn't mind gouging you for an extra 1,000 forints (or, in the case of a "free" telephone call to an 800 number in the USA, 5,000, which equals US $25.00). We all got taken at least once, but most of us had extra forints that we couldn't spend in the US, nor easily convert anywhere.
--The view along the Duna (Danube) River night or day. The views from the Liberty Bridge (the one that was blocked by the traffic accident) and the Elisabet Bridge (the one I used for a detour) were especially lovely. You can see *most* of the grand buildings from either bridge.
We arrived at the Budapest Airport about noon, having had to go back to the hotel for a missing chorus member, who called our tour guide to say she was taking a taxi to the airport and would meet us there. Whatever.
Our connecting flight to Frankfort left late, but got to the Frankfort airport on time. Our flight from Frankfort to Boston left on time, and got to Logan Airport 50 minutes early. In spite of arriving early, the 7-hour flight seemed like 12 hours. We had 2 lunches, a dinner, and three rounds of drinks. We had TV screens and headphones, so we could see the news, the Flyrobis lessonb, and "Shrek 2".
When we got to Logan, we went through Customs and baggage claims. I took the MBTA to Forest Hills, where a fellow chorus member picked me up and gave me a lift home.
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