We are still going...whew. Since we last posted, we have been to
Prague, Czech Republic; Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary; Zagreb (Plitvice), Croatia; Ljubljana, Slovenia; and back to
Verona, Italy.
In
Prague we saw the castle and all the other major sight-seeing points. The
Charles Bridge was beautiful, but packed with tourists and street artists, so we got away from that as soon as we could. The weather was perfect and we spent much of the day getting lost and wandering around the
Old Town, New Town, Jewish Quarter, and
Little Quarter.
We tried to be adventurous and go to a Czech tavern for a typical lunch and a beer. I wound up with a hotdog soaked in vinegar and Doug got something strangely resembling Crisco, because that's exactly what it was. A big ice cream scoop of pork fat on a plate. He ate it because "It's food and we have to pay for it anyway." I like to remind him, that's what we call sunk costs. It was almost as gross as watching him eat the tripe. Nevermind, nothing could ever be that gross, but this was a close second.
That night, Kurt Cady, who was still travelling with us, went on a pub crawl, so Doug and I got a couple of Czech beers and walked down to watch the sunset behind the castle.
The next day we went to
Vienna. We stayed with a couple from the U.S. who showed us around the city and took us to a wine festival in front of the beautiful
Rathaus (City Hall) with a bunch of Austrians, who by the way are the nicest people we have met so far. Every where in Austria, we could of course look lost, and someone would come up, help us translate, and send us in the right direction.
Another highlight from Vienna was getting to see the opera in Vienna's famous opera house, the
StaatsoperOf course, we didn't show up in full length white gloves, a chauffeur, or opera glasses, but instead waited in line for a few hours to get 4€ standing-room only tickets with the other groundlings. We saw
An Italian in Algeria by Gioachino Rossini. It was a really neat experience, but the standing part got pretty old after having walked all day every day for the past two weeks.
We left Vienna and Kurt and headed for
Budapest to stay with one of Doug's middle school friends who left Charlotte in 7th grade. She was a fantastic host. After four hours in Budapest of trying find her number on a piece of paper that Doug "misplaced," trying to find a non-existent internet cafe to look her number up again, figuring out the exchange rate from euros to
forints, having a payphone eat of money six times, trying to figure out which side was
Buda and which side was
Pest, we thought Budapest was going to continue to be that stressful.
We finally got in touch with Kinga and she had a big, typical Hungarian meal of some sort of beef with paprika and noodles. Whatever it was, it was great. We had whatever the Hungarian word for strudel is for dessert. It restored our faith in Budapest.
After dinner, she took us to the top of Buda to a Palace and we did some slightly dangerous wall shimmy-ing and fence jumping and got to a look-out where we could see all of Budapest lit up. It was really cool. Doug and Kinga were much braver than me. All I could think of was falling off that roof two years ago on the mission trip and that maybe I had pushed my luck enough and that this was a bad idea, but I survived. Sorry mom.
We spent the next day wandering around the market, the shopping street and
Hero's Square before we headed to the Turkish Baths. We bought tickets for the metro and, unbeknowst to us, we bought the wrong ticket.
When we arrived at our stop, the ticket officer stopped us, told us we bought the wrong ticket (that was, by the way, only 2 euro cents more than the one we bought) and fined us 12,000
forints. When we told her we didn't have it, she called the police. We were sitting there with horrible visions running through our heads of Hungarian jail cells when a woman came up and gave us the rest of the money we lacked. Praise the Lord for that lady. It was terrifying and really just annoying.
We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in the Turkish mineral baths and I was asleep by 9:30 that night.
From Budapest, we went to
Croatia to see
Plitvice National Park. The guidebook write that I so love, Rick Steves, said he thought he had seen everywhere in Europe, then discovered this place and realized he had a lot left to see.
Doug and I both agreed it was, hands down, our favorite place in the world. We took the long hike that is about six hours and never got tired for a second. Rick Steves describes it as the Grand Canyon meets Niagra Falls. Pictures will never do it justice. There is a little wooden boardwalk almost at water level and it winds through the forests, around the lakes, up the hills and the entire time, from any place along the way, there are at least four waterfalls in sight.
We got in to
Ljubljana, Slovenia that night, slept in an old prison turned trendy hostel, trucked through the rain and got a train out the next day to
Verona via
Venice.Silvia and Viola, for whom I was an au pair, picked us up at the station. Viola didn't kick me or tell me to go away or anything! I couldn't believe it. She wanted to play with me and even tried to get Doug to take off his shoes and jump on the couch with her in her Ariel mermaid costume. I had to hold him back.
We got to go see Nonna (Silvia's grandmother and the nutso lady I lived with when I was here) last night too. She force-fed Doug some cookies, rattled off to him in Italian for a while and showed us her new piggy bank. It is a tin can with a Jamaican rastafarian guy on it smoking pot. I haven't laughed that hard in a while. It really made me miss all the Nonna-isms from last year. She still has her "Support Bitching" magnet in her house. I'm glad to see things haven't changed.
Every time I picture her, it is wearing the Carnivale mask, hiding behind a telephone pole, waiting for me to come out of school with her precious grandbambina, ready to give her espresso. She didn't give me any new lectures about how I was going to die like Pavarotti because I didn't put sugar in my coffee or anything, so that's an improvement, just that I need to feed Doug more.
We are about to go ride bikes around Verona then head out for Florence. We will try to write soon!
