So here I am lounging in a comfy chair on board the MS Amsterdam - one of the Holland America line's lovely boats - somewhere between St. Petersburg and Helsinki, while Ron uses another hotspot somewhere on the boat. What on earth are we doing here?
We left Izmir for good (or not - who knows?) towards the middle of July. First stop was Warsaw, to catch the last two shows in the Warsaw Chamber Opera's annual Mozart festival: Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. As far as I'm concerned there's no such thing as too many Magic Flutes, and this one was another completely different and wonderful experience. We sat in the second row of the 150-seat hall and felt like we were right in the middle of it all. DG the next night was less wonderful but still very good.
Then on to Kiev to catch the MS Dniepr Princess for a cruise down the Dniepr to the Black Sea and on to Romania. We'd booked this through the UBC alumni association and found it most pleasant to be among a bunch of alumni from various universities getting a somewhat deeper view of the life and history of the people we were sailing past. The boat was built in East Germany in the communist era and had some eccentricities (whole-bathroom shower, for example) but was seaworthy. The staff was definitely not Holland-America trained; you had to pysically grab a restaurant server to get some coffee in the morning, and the notion that one might want a second cup was not one that had occurred to any of them, but those were not significant problems. It was most interesting seeing Kiev and the site of its Orange Revolution, where the people hoped to have won their democracy back from the oligarchs - whether they have or not remains to be seen. The Ukraine makes Turkey look affluent, but they're trying as hard as they can to get on their feet again. Still, there's been a lot of psychic damage done by war and communism, and it may take another generation or two before people learn again how to really work and create. I wandered through a department store where everything was protected behind glass counters and the clerks didn't seem interested in getting things out for you to buy. (Tried on a sun hat that was too small. Told the clerk it was too small and she said, "Yes, it's too small." End of transaction. Why would she want to find a bigger one for me?) So it's a very different place from Turkey, and it's got a lot further to go to join the developed world I fear.
We cruised down the Dniepr through vast reservoirs behind huge dams, great wetlands for flocks and flocks of waterfowl. Once Kiev's wastes had been diluted the algae blooms disappeared and the water seemed clean and full of fish for most of the distance, except around Dniepropetrovsk. We passed that area in the late evening, sailing through clouds of coal smoke lit by the glow of steel mills and other factories - "dark satanic mills". The next day we visited a Stalin-era industrial town that also celebrated the Cossack heritage with a museum and a show of riding and dancing. The contrast nearly made my brain crack with the shock. The Dniepr delta was another peaceful green place where we visited dachas for traditional meals and admired handicrafts - another contrast with the dirty port city our ship was moored in.
Then across the Black Sea to Sevastopol, a place full of history where the guns of the Crimean war are still warm. We saw the valley of Balaclava ("into the valley of death rode the 500") on our way to the palace of the khan of the Crimean Tatars, where we felt for a moment that we were back home in Turkey. As we were leaving we heard someone saying "Hoş geldiniz" - "Welcome" in Turkish. We instinctively replied "Hoş bulduk" and ended up buying some local baklava in Turkish - the Tatar language is so close to Turkish we had no problem communicating with the lovely old woman selling the stuff. She was quite tickled to be dealing with a couple of Canadians in her own language.
From Sevastopol we also toured Yalta and the summer palace of the Romanovs, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met towards the end of WW II. The building reeked with history - you could almost believe Nicholas and Alexandra and their kids had just left the upstairs room, and the rooms downstairs still seemed to smell of Churchill's cigars. Beautiful views of the sea, too, both from that place and from the road all along the coast.
Back across the black sea after that to the mouth of the Danube in Romania. If the Ukraine made Turkey look modern and developed, Romania makes it look as rich as Las Vegas. Another country with a long, long way to go - I can't believe the EU could accept Romania ahead of Turkey. There's still a feeling about the place that makes me want to check for bugs and spies and watch what I say in public. I guess there are still a few ghosts around. We had a boat trip through part of the Danube delta, another bird-filled place if you didn't mind the piles of garbage. And then off to Bucharest, which still feels a little like Paris east even after Ceauşescu demolished a large area of elegant old buildings for his horrendously huge People's Palace (the second-biggest building in the world after the Pentagon). We had a look at the place and left feeling the Romanians would go bankrupt trying to heat the place, let alone maintaining it.
Anyway, it was a worthwhile trip and I'm glad we took it. We'll probably try another alumni tour sometime.
Ooops - out of battery. More tommorow, with any luck
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Alive and well in Sebastopol
We have 10 minutes at the post office internet facility in Sebastopol - just long enough to say we still exist and we're having a great time on a cruise down the Dniepr River from Kiev to the Black Sea. Last night was a little bumpy - we were crossing a chunk of the Black Sea just as a major weather front seemed to be going through with lots of flashing and banging. Only complaint with the cruise so far: no contact with the outside world. I have no idea what's going on out there or even if there is a world outside. I assume since the internet still seems to be functioning there is someone alive in North America. I'm going to use the remaining few minutes to try to catch up on the news. More later.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
It's not the humidity, it's the heat
I missed a wonderful photo-op yesterday. Both of us went to bed with socks on - wet socks, with a fan blowing over them. The idea, from an Australian, was that the socks would cool our feet and thus the rest of us as the water evaporated, and the evaporating water would also cool the air blowing over us.
It seemed to work for Ron. He slept much longer than usual, even after his socks dried. But I couldn't help feeling that my feet were soaking in clammy socks and I'd get dishpan toes.
Extreme measures have become necessary. In the last few days - and for the next week at least - forecast high temperatures have been at least 40C. According to my portable indoor-outdoor max/min thermometer/humidity gauge 39.9 has been the maximum, but that's hot enough. And during the night it's stayed around 30.
But the humidity has been less than we experience in midwinter in Canmore, where everything dries out including my skin. The readings on my little instrument here range from 25% to "LO" - below 20%. That's dry. It's also very nice when there's a bit of wind; sweating works. But when there's no wind it's just plain hot here.
The weather in Turkey has been just as crazy this year as it has been everywhere else in the world. Last winter, the rainy season, there was almost no rain, causing a lot of worries about the water supply. There's been a very little rain since we arrived - again surprising the locals, who assume there will be none after the end of March - but not enough to do any good. The trees and garden plants look very droopy indeed, and there's a watering ban. Even so, the water goes off in our apartment from time to time, quite unpredictably. We're back to keeping full bottles of water around so we can flush the toilet if necessary.
It's interesting living in Turkey, that's for sure. And I for one am a firm believer in climate change.
It seemed to work for Ron. He slept much longer than usual, even after his socks dried. But I couldn't help feeling that my feet were soaking in clammy socks and I'd get dishpan toes.
Extreme measures have become necessary. In the last few days - and for the next week at least - forecast high temperatures have been at least 40C. According to my portable indoor-outdoor max/min thermometer/humidity gauge 39.9 has been the maximum, but that's hot enough. And during the night it's stayed around 30.
But the humidity has been less than we experience in midwinter in Canmore, where everything dries out including my skin. The readings on my little instrument here range from 25% to "LO" - below 20%. That's dry. It's also very nice when there's a bit of wind; sweating works. But when there's no wind it's just plain hot here.
The weather in Turkey has been just as crazy this year as it has been everywhere else in the world. Last winter, the rainy season, there was almost no rain, causing a lot of worries about the water supply. There's been a very little rain since we arrived - again surprising the locals, who assume there will be none after the end of March - but not enough to do any good. The trees and garden plants look very droopy indeed, and there's a watering ban. Even so, the water goes off in our apartment from time to time, quite unpredictably. We're back to keeping full bottles of water around so we can flush the toilet if necessary.
It's interesting living in Turkey, that's for sure. And I for one am a firm believer in climate change.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Another day, another language
That's the way it felt as our Central European jaunt wound up. We moved on from Poland to the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia the day after my last post - by bus and taxi! We arrived at the town on the Polish side of the Tatras just 15 minutes after the last bus to the Slovakian side. There was no train, so we had two choices: walk or taxi. It was only 20 km, the taxi fare was quite reasonable, so that's what we did.
Interesting trip, really. I don't know if the driver deliberately chose back roads or if there really are no main roads from Poland into Slovakia. But it felt like he was giving us a tour of some truly scenic countryside. He spoke no English and our Polish was limited to hello, yes, no, and thank you, but when I asked him if he spoke Russian (in Russian) he gave us to understand that thanks to Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II he didn't have to speak that @#%#@$% language any more and he wasn't going to, so there. And then he carried on a cheerful and friendly-sounding description of what we were seeing - in Polish.
When we got to our Slovakian town he asked for directions to our hotel in what I'm sure was Polish. But later when we tried out our extensive Polish vocabulary on the locals they either laughed or tried to teach us the proper Slovakian words. What a difference 20 km can make.
A couple of days later when we took the train from Slovakia to Eger in Hungary (home of Egri Bikaver and other fine wines) we had the same sort of experience. Cross the border and suddenly all the other people on the train are speaking Hungarian. And yet around the border they must be able to make themselves understood to their neighbours.
In Slovakia we didn't meet many people who spoke useful amounts of English. My smattering of German was quite essential at times - most tourists seem to come from Germany. We thought the scenery was lovely, but the area really wasn't ready for large-scale tourism yet.
Hungary is quite a different story. Even in Eger, which is quite a small town, many people spoke good English. The restaurants were excellent - and cheap: $Can 30 for a fine dinner for the two of us complete with wine. Clothing and shoes seemed to cost about half Canadian prices, two-thirds Turkish prices. Great scenery, lots of history - I think Hungary is my favourite place on this trip.
Budapest was more expensive but no less interesting and worth visiting. It's quite exciting watching the restoration work going on in the historic centre of the city. The country, like the rest of the former Communist-bloc countries, is still recovering from the dark years between 1945 and 1989. Hungary seems to have more to recover from; the memory of the 1956 revolution is still fresh in people's minds, just like the bullet holes in the walls across the street from the parliament buildings. In the areas that are being restored it feels like decades of pain and corruption are being washed from the walls along with the grime. And the result: Budapest is probably the most beautiful city we've seen in Europe so far. Well worth a visit.
And now we're home in Izmir. We arrived just as they started tearing up the street again to run natural gas lines into the buildings (just over a month ago they laid the pipes in the street). On of the good things about our area is that the bedrock is right below the surface so the buildings aren't bothered much by earthquakes. But that means that any excavation work involves jackhammers. And with the weather so hot just now (high 30's) they like to start as early as possible. A jackhammer under your bedroom window sure beats an alarm clock when it comes to getting your attention. And now the beautifully rebuilt steps into our courtyard from the street that seemed to get done last winter while we were away have turned into pieces of rubble again.
I guess life in Izmir has been like this for at least the last 4000 years. I wonder what sort of public works got done in Homer's time?
Ten days or so until we have to get packed and out of here. Some things I won't miss.
Interesting trip, really. I don't know if the driver deliberately chose back roads or if there really are no main roads from Poland into Slovakia. But it felt like he was giving us a tour of some truly scenic countryside. He spoke no English and our Polish was limited to hello, yes, no, and thank you, but when I asked him if he spoke Russian (in Russian) he gave us to understand that thanks to Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II he didn't have to speak that @#%#@$% language any more and he wasn't going to, so there. And then he carried on a cheerful and friendly-sounding description of what we were seeing - in Polish.
When we got to our Slovakian town he asked for directions to our hotel in what I'm sure was Polish. But later when we tried out our extensive Polish vocabulary on the locals they either laughed or tried to teach us the proper Slovakian words. What a difference 20 km can make.
A couple of days later when we took the train from Slovakia to Eger in Hungary (home of Egri Bikaver and other fine wines) we had the same sort of experience. Cross the border and suddenly all the other people on the train are speaking Hungarian. And yet around the border they must be able to make themselves understood to their neighbours.
In Slovakia we didn't meet many people who spoke useful amounts of English. My smattering of German was quite essential at times - most tourists seem to come from Germany. We thought the scenery was lovely, but the area really wasn't ready for large-scale tourism yet.
Hungary is quite a different story. Even in Eger, which is quite a small town, many people spoke good English. The restaurants were excellent - and cheap: $Can 30 for a fine dinner for the two of us complete with wine. Clothing and shoes seemed to cost about half Canadian prices, two-thirds Turkish prices. Great scenery, lots of history - I think Hungary is my favourite place on this trip.
Budapest was more expensive but no less interesting and worth visiting. It's quite exciting watching the restoration work going on in the historic centre of the city. The country, like the rest of the former Communist-bloc countries, is still recovering from the dark years between 1945 and 1989. Hungary seems to have more to recover from; the memory of the 1956 revolution is still fresh in people's minds, just like the bullet holes in the walls across the street from the parliament buildings. In the areas that are being restored it feels like decades of pain and corruption are being washed from the walls along with the grime. And the result: Budapest is probably the most beautiful city we've seen in Europe so far. Well worth a visit.
And now we're home in Izmir. We arrived just as they started tearing up the street again to run natural gas lines into the buildings (just over a month ago they laid the pipes in the street). On of the good things about our area is that the bedrock is right below the surface so the buildings aren't bothered much by earthquakes. But that means that any excavation work involves jackhammers. And with the weather so hot just now (high 30's) they like to start as early as possible. A jackhammer under your bedroom window sure beats an alarm clock when it comes to getting your attention. And now the beautifully rebuilt steps into our courtyard from the street that seemed to get done last winter while we were away have turned into pieces of rubble again.
I guess life in Izmir has been like this for at least the last 4000 years. I wonder what sort of public works got done in Homer's time?
Ten days or so until we have to get packed and out of here. Some things I won't miss.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Polished Poland
We've been in Poland since last Saturday night, 5 days now, and it's growing on us. We came by train from affluent and burgeoning Berlin, where the architectural mistakes of the communist years are rapidly being replaced by adventurous and eye-popping creations, and we knew almost as soon as we crossed the border that we'd left the land where money grows on trees. The smooth whirrrr of the German rails was replaced by rattle-te-bump-te-bump-te-BUMP and my attempts at knitting grew futile. The farmhouses we saw in passing looked like they were standing up more out of habit than anything. Even Warsaw looked grubby in places.
But there are compensations in Poland. Sunday we explored Warsaw's historic centre, beautifully reconstructed from the mass of rubble left by the Nazis (Hitler wanted Warsaw eradicated after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising). We strolled through a lovely tree-filled park looking for an afternoon Chopin piano concert, and when we found it had a great time listening to the whole soundscape - thrushes, happy kids, passing traffic, and occasionally some tinkling from a piano. As musical art it was disappointing, but as an experience it was totally wonderful.
Sunday evening we happened upon Warsaw's greatest treasure, in our humble opinion: the Warsaw Chamber Opera and its Mozart festival. Over six weeks in June and July they present all of Mozart's stage works, every single one of them. Their theatre seats about 160 people, so it's like having the performers in your living room. And such performers. We saw The Abduction from the Seraglio, which turns out to be sort of a rough sketch for the Magic Flute - not a great work, but fun, and sung and performed beautifully and with great enthusiasm. We decided that the WCO deserves at least a Michelin two star rating: worth making a detour for if you're in the neighbourhood; when we're heading to Kiev for our Dniepr river cruse in July we'll go via Warsaw and catch the last two performances, Magic Flute and Don Giovanni.
We've been in Krakow since Monday. It's Poland's ancient capital and very lovely, having escaped destruction in the 20th century's wars. It's full of music; we've gone to a concert every night this week, of uneven quality - but wow! you can go to a concert every day! There are incredibly lovely old churches, and a castle, and burial mounds - all good stuff. We had a different sort of city tour yesterday: the Crazy Guide's Real Krakow Tour. Worth doing if you're ever here. We were taken around the city in an ancient Trabant, a product of communist East Germany with a two-stroke engine and 23 hp. This one was made in the 80s, although the design was from the 50s. Most of the time it needed to be pushed to get it started, although strategic hill parking could make that unnecessary. Our guide showed us things like a 19th-century burial mound from which we could view the whole city, the old Jewish area (there are now maybe 100 Jews in Krakow, but around 5 functioning synagogues), and Nowa Huta, a steel mill and associated town given by Stalin to this bourgeois city to try to bring some proletariat and support for the communist party into the area. Our guide was a young man studying sociology in the excellent university here, so we heard some thoughtful and knowledgeable meditations on Poland, communism, and this lovely city.
The day before we took a more normal tour of a salt mine that has been operating for at least 600 years - very interesting. And today we had the same type of tour to Auschwitz, just an hour away. It was a hard place to visit, but I thought I owed it to the people I've met in the past who had numbers tatooed on their arms. I can't begin to imagine what makes an ordinary person dream up such horrors, or cooperate with those who dream them up. Imagine gassing and cremating a few thousand people at work every day and then going home and kissing the wife and playing with the kids. And yet I know, given the right circumstances, that we could all do it. But why? And how did it make sense to do such things to other ordinary people, people who could have been next-door neighbours if the times had been different. I don't understand.
So when we got back I took a walk into the ordinary Krakovians' shopping area looking for a wool store. Found a couple, and also found that the excellent English we'd been treated to around here exists only in the tourist area. My Polish vocabulary is "thank you" and "hello" - very useful but limited. Nevertheless I found some nice sock wool and had my current project, a top-down summer cardigan, admired by the lady in the store. Knitting is fairly universal. It also keeps one sane when confronted with horrors like Auschwitz.
Tomorrow we head off to the mountains of Slovakia, buses and trains willing.
But there are compensations in Poland. Sunday we explored Warsaw's historic centre, beautifully reconstructed from the mass of rubble left by the Nazis (Hitler wanted Warsaw eradicated after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising). We strolled through a lovely tree-filled park looking for an afternoon Chopin piano concert, and when we found it had a great time listening to the whole soundscape - thrushes, happy kids, passing traffic, and occasionally some tinkling from a piano. As musical art it was disappointing, but as an experience it was totally wonderful.
Sunday evening we happened upon Warsaw's greatest treasure, in our humble opinion: the Warsaw Chamber Opera and its Mozart festival. Over six weeks in June and July they present all of Mozart's stage works, every single one of them. Their theatre seats about 160 people, so it's like having the performers in your living room. And such performers. We saw The Abduction from the Seraglio, which turns out to be sort of a rough sketch for the Magic Flute - not a great work, but fun, and sung and performed beautifully and with great enthusiasm. We decided that the WCO deserves at least a Michelin two star rating: worth making a detour for if you're in the neighbourhood; when we're heading to Kiev for our Dniepr river cruse in July we'll go via Warsaw and catch the last two performances, Magic Flute and Don Giovanni.
We've been in Krakow since Monday. It's Poland's ancient capital and very lovely, having escaped destruction in the 20th century's wars. It's full of music; we've gone to a concert every night this week, of uneven quality - but wow! you can go to a concert every day! There are incredibly lovely old churches, and a castle, and burial mounds - all good stuff. We had a different sort of city tour yesterday: the Crazy Guide's Real Krakow Tour. Worth doing if you're ever here. We were taken around the city in an ancient Trabant, a product of communist East Germany with a two-stroke engine and 23 hp. This one was made in the 80s, although the design was from the 50s. Most of the time it needed to be pushed to get it started, although strategic hill parking could make that unnecessary. Our guide showed us things like a 19th-century burial mound from which we could view the whole city, the old Jewish area (there are now maybe 100 Jews in Krakow, but around 5 functioning synagogues), and Nowa Huta, a steel mill and associated town given by Stalin to this bourgeois city to try to bring some proletariat and support for the communist party into the area. Our guide was a young man studying sociology in the excellent university here, so we heard some thoughtful and knowledgeable meditations on Poland, communism, and this lovely city.
The day before we took a more normal tour of a salt mine that has been operating for at least 600 years - very interesting. And today we had the same type of tour to Auschwitz, just an hour away. It was a hard place to visit, but I thought I owed it to the people I've met in the past who had numbers tatooed on their arms. I can't begin to imagine what makes an ordinary person dream up such horrors, or cooperate with those who dream them up. Imagine gassing and cremating a few thousand people at work every day and then going home and kissing the wife and playing with the kids. And yet I know, given the right circumstances, that we could all do it. But why? And how did it make sense to do such things to other ordinary people, people who could have been next-door neighbours if the times had been different. I don't understand.
So when we got back I took a walk into the ordinary Krakovians' shopping area looking for a wool store. Found a couple, and also found that the excellent English we'd been treated to around here exists only in the tourist area. My Polish vocabulary is "thank you" and "hello" - very useful but limited. Nevertheless I found some nice sock wool and had my current project, a top-down summer cardigan, admired by the lady in the store. Knitting is fairly universal. It also keeps one sane when confronted with horrors like Auschwitz.
Tomorrow we head off to the mountains of Slovakia, buses and trains willing.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Rainy Monday in Dresden
We've been on the road for more than a week now and this is the first time we've had a chance to sit still and get an Internet fix. And I'm not sorry. It's been far too interesting to waste time in front of a computer.
We flew from Izmir to Istanbul and then Vienna a week ago yesterday. Ron had found us a nice little hotel a block or so outside the historic center of the city so we were able to walk to nearly everything of interest - if we'd had time. But the first evening we went to a concert in the Baroque summer palace at Schönbrunn (a nice little place where the Habsburg family could get away from things and relax with 2000 of their closest friends) - same room as Mozart and Salieri had their head-to-head competition (Salieri won, the movie Amadeus notwithstanding). The next day we had a bus tour around the old city and Schönbrunn, then scored some tickets to Verdi's opera Otello at the Staatsoper, which we toured in the afternoon. Most interesting to see the stage being set up for the show we watched that night. Our seats didn't have the best view - back of a box - but the music was magnificent and we could see well enough if we stood up. The opera house was destroyed in 1945 (by accident), and it says something about the Austrian people's set of priorities that it was one of the first things they restored.
Tuesday we had a most interesting bus tour into the countryside - a historic house, an old and beautiful (and growing!) monastery, and the second-largest underground lake in Europe. Loved it all. Beautiful cities full of historic buildings (which Vienna certainly is) are all very well, but the unique thing in any part of the world is the countryside.
Wednesday we headed off to Prague by train, which is really the only sensible way to travel in Europe, fast and comfortable and environmentally friendly. But it is slower than plane, so we had only a short time to walk around after settling into our apartment-like hotel suite. Again we were in the middle of everything. Prague made a great impression. It's less uniform in style than Vienna. Not being the capital of the empire means the city doesn't get remodelled every time fashions change, so Prague is a delightful mix of medieval, baroque, classical and modern styles (Frank Geary did a great building there that I hope I have a picture of - looks like a couple dancing). The language took some getting used to, and I never got used to feeling illiterate there, but many Czechs speak fine English.
We got a trip out into the country there, too, on Saturday - a bus tour to the brewery at Pilsen. That was nice, especially the old parts, but one factory is very much like another. The best part for me was the tour of a vast cave system in the limestone area near Pilsen. It had been used by coin forgers in the 15th century and then forgotton until the limestone diggings nearby hit it. It has some wonderful stone formations and was fun to visit. The beer in Pilsen was great, too, and helped us continue our eponymous degustation tour: Pilsner in Pilsen (and wieners and wiener schnitzel in Vienna).
So now we're in Dresden. We got here yesterday by train to a border town, paddlewheel steamer along the Elbe river to a town on the outskirts, and train into the city. What a spectacularly beautiful area the Elbe flows through! And we were the only English speakers on the boat - the tourist industry hasn't discovered this part of Germany yet. The Black Forest is nothing compared to the Elbe. Come before it's ruined by tourists.
We're staying right in the centre of Dresden, the part that was fire-bombed into oblivion. There wasn't much restoration done during the communist times. They just built cement monstrosities, which are gradually being knocked down and replaced by something closer to what the city used to have. And the only people who speak much English are the under-30s, although I'm sure the older ones are fluent in Russian. It's very different from other parts of Germany we've seen, but worth a visit - if only for the Saxony wines, unknown and underrated in the rest of the world.
Time's running out but that's it for the most part. We're still able to walk. My broken wrist is healing little by little. We're at a comfy, warm and dry Internet cafe. What more can we want? (Just a kezboard that has the z and y where I expect them instead of switched. grmp.)
Cheers, y'all.
We flew from Izmir to Istanbul and then Vienna a week ago yesterday. Ron had found us a nice little hotel a block or so outside the historic center of the city so we were able to walk to nearly everything of interest - if we'd had time. But the first evening we went to a concert in the Baroque summer palace at Schönbrunn (a nice little place where the Habsburg family could get away from things and relax with 2000 of their closest friends) - same room as Mozart and Salieri had their head-to-head competition (Salieri won, the movie Amadeus notwithstanding). The next day we had a bus tour around the old city and Schönbrunn, then scored some tickets to Verdi's opera Otello at the Staatsoper, which we toured in the afternoon. Most interesting to see the stage being set up for the show we watched that night. Our seats didn't have the best view - back of a box - but the music was magnificent and we could see well enough if we stood up. The opera house was destroyed in 1945 (by accident), and it says something about the Austrian people's set of priorities that it was one of the first things they restored.
Tuesday we had a most interesting bus tour into the countryside - a historic house, an old and beautiful (and growing!) monastery, and the second-largest underground lake in Europe. Loved it all. Beautiful cities full of historic buildings (which Vienna certainly is) are all very well, but the unique thing in any part of the world is the countryside.
Wednesday we headed off to Prague by train, which is really the only sensible way to travel in Europe, fast and comfortable and environmentally friendly. But it is slower than plane, so we had only a short time to walk around after settling into our apartment-like hotel suite. Again we were in the middle of everything. Prague made a great impression. It's less uniform in style than Vienna. Not being the capital of the empire means the city doesn't get remodelled every time fashions change, so Prague is a delightful mix of medieval, baroque, classical and modern styles (Frank Geary did a great building there that I hope I have a picture of - looks like a couple dancing). The language took some getting used to, and I never got used to feeling illiterate there, but many Czechs speak fine English.
We got a trip out into the country there, too, on Saturday - a bus tour to the brewery at Pilsen. That was nice, especially the old parts, but one factory is very much like another. The best part for me was the tour of a vast cave system in the limestone area near Pilsen. It had been used by coin forgers in the 15th century and then forgotton until the limestone diggings nearby hit it. It has some wonderful stone formations and was fun to visit. The beer in Pilsen was great, too, and helped us continue our eponymous degustation tour: Pilsner in Pilsen (and wieners and wiener schnitzel in Vienna).
So now we're in Dresden. We got here yesterday by train to a border town, paddlewheel steamer along the Elbe river to a town on the outskirts, and train into the city. What a spectacularly beautiful area the Elbe flows through! And we were the only English speakers on the boat - the tourist industry hasn't discovered this part of Germany yet. The Black Forest is nothing compared to the Elbe. Come before it's ruined by tourists.
We're staying right in the centre of Dresden, the part that was fire-bombed into oblivion. There wasn't much restoration done during the communist times. They just built cement monstrosities, which are gradually being knocked down and replaced by something closer to what the city used to have. And the only people who speak much English are the under-30s, although I'm sure the older ones are fluent in Russian. It's very different from other parts of Germany we've seen, but worth a visit - if only for the Saxony wines, unknown and underrated in the rest of the world.
Time's running out but that's it for the most part. We're still able to walk. My broken wrist is healing little by little. We're at a comfy, warm and dry Internet cafe. What more can we want? (Just a kezboard that has the z and y where I expect them instead of switched. grmp.)
Cheers, y'all.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Time out in Bodrum
Ron's been busy planning our next major excursion, to Eastern Europe and thereabouts, for some time, and we didn't think we needed much more travelling than that. But things have been getting a little noisy in Üçyol recently with the natural gas coming to this part of the city, and it has been unreasonably hot. We needed a break from the jackhammers and the sweat. So I went onto Trip Advisor and looked for an inexpensive, quiet hotel near Bodrum.
Bodrum had never been high on our to-see list. It's supposed to be a noisy tourist trap. But it's a part of Turkey many people see and we thought we should, too.
And it was a delightful surprise.
The summer season doesn't really start here for another week, and Bodrum was only maybe 1/4 full of visitors - many of them Turkish. And our hotel wasn't in the town but along the coast 20 km or so in a quiet little village. The Sunny Garden Nilufer is quite a large place, but there were only maybe a dozen guests there in this quiet part of the season. And what a pleasant group of people they were! All English except for us and two Irish girls (who immediately captured the heart of the barman). We enjoyed the company of all the other guests and ended up hanging around the breakfast or dinner table far later than we'd planned.
Usually I'm upset to see rampant tourist developments taking over an area, but the Bodrum peninsula is different. For whatever reason the land seems barren and desolate - recently volcanic, probably, and very dry and rocky. There's not much agriculture possible, and fishing isn't providing a very good living these days either. It looks like tourism is the best possible use of the land. And the sea is so warm and clear, and the people so warm and hospitable - it's a perfect place to holiday. We were surprised, too, to see how much real Turkish life still goes on around there. A tourist with eyes to see can learn quite a bit about Turkey hanging out here. It's not a bad place at all. And places like this give young Turks a reason to learn English - many of the people you meet there are able to make a good effort in at least a couple of European languages, which is not normal in Turkey. I suspect anyone who manages to learn a bit of English heads there to work for the summer. Maybe that's why you can't find English speakers in Izmir.
Anyway, it was worth doing and we'd recommend the Sunny Garden Nilufer to anyone. Now we're back among the jackhammers of Izmir looking forward to the peace and quiet of Vienna in a couple of days.
Bodrum had never been high on our to-see list. It's supposed to be a noisy tourist trap. But it's a part of Turkey many people see and we thought we should, too.
And it was a delightful surprise.
The summer season doesn't really start here for another week, and Bodrum was only maybe 1/4 full of visitors - many of them Turkish. And our hotel wasn't in the town but along the coast 20 km or so in a quiet little village. The Sunny Garden Nilufer is quite a large place, but there were only maybe a dozen guests there in this quiet part of the season. And what a pleasant group of people they were! All English except for us and two Irish girls (who immediately captured the heart of the barman). We enjoyed the company of all the other guests and ended up hanging around the breakfast or dinner table far later than we'd planned.
Usually I'm upset to see rampant tourist developments taking over an area, but the Bodrum peninsula is different. For whatever reason the land seems barren and desolate - recently volcanic, probably, and very dry and rocky. There's not much agriculture possible, and fishing isn't providing a very good living these days either. It looks like tourism is the best possible use of the land. And the sea is so warm and clear, and the people so warm and hospitable - it's a perfect place to holiday. We were surprised, too, to see how much real Turkish life still goes on around there. A tourist with eyes to see can learn quite a bit about Turkey hanging out here. It's not a bad place at all. And places like this give young Turks a reason to learn English - many of the people you meet there are able to make a good effort in at least a couple of European languages, which is not normal in Turkey. I suspect anyone who manages to learn a bit of English heads there to work for the summer. Maybe that's why you can't find English speakers in Izmir.
Anyway, it was worth doing and we'd recommend the Sunny Garden Nilufer to anyone. Now we're back among the jackhammers of Izmir looking forward to the peace and quiet of Vienna in a couple of days.
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