Tuesday, June 18, 2013
17/18 June
17 June
Day started early, and we were picked up promptly at 6:15 for our transfer to the airport. Getting checked in was easy, and I received my first female pat down. I have no idea why I set off the sensor gate. I've worn similar clothes in the past, no underwire etc. I guess it was the screws and anchors in my shoulders, because the lady gave me a nice massage on both shoulders. She also gave me a thorough rubbing of my ankles. Once we got inside we started our wait. Our flight was delayed over 1.5 hours, but fortunately I had planned on us spending the night in Dusseldorf. It would have been tight making our connection. I've been E-Mailing with Jaime in hopes of meeting up this afternoon.
It's a small world. After getting to Dusseldorf and checking in to our hotel, we had several phone calls from my cousin Jaime Andres. His parents, Jaime and Maria Helena live in Bogota Colombia. They happened to be visiting Jaime Andres in Essen Germany, which is about 1/2 hour train from Dusseldorf. Rosario, Jaime's sister therefore another cousin, was visiting from her home in southern Germany. I met Rosario in the lobby and she went up to our room, and about 45 minutes later Jaime, Maria Helena, and Jaime Andres showed up at the hotel. This was not planned as part of our travel , but it just happened to work out that my cousins from Colombia and Germany were able to meet up with us in Dusseldorf! What are the odds? What would have been more amazing would have been stumbling across Jaime, Maria Helena, and Jaime Andres in Istanbul, because they were in old Istanbul the same time we were. Anyway we had a GREAT VISIT with them, although it took a couple of reminders to get Rosario to either speak in Spanish or English and not German. Roger was sort of able to follow the conversation in Spanish. Jaime Andres has excellent English, so poor Roger wasn't completely out of the picture. I think the last time I saw my Colombian cousins was 3 years ago. It has been probably 15-20 years since I've seen Rosario. Rosario recounted a story about my parents' last visit, it had something to do with remodeling and not having a bathroom in the house in Hungary when my parents and their friends visited. We had some EXCELLENT wine from Rosario's vineyard which is in Hungary. She said that one of her friends wants to export her wine to the Philippines, so she's in the process of figuring out how to do that. Her wine is a three grape blended red wine, with no additives, and no added sugar just the sweetness from the grapes. It was very good, especially since I'm not a big fan of red wine. Rosario also brought some smoked pork from a local place in Bad Reichenhall, where she live. After the wine and meat, we left for a short walk about in Dusseldorf with Jaime Andres as our guide. The Rhine river is very full in Dusseldorf, with a strong current still running. The didn't have a lot of flooding, because the river is wide in Dusseldorf and northwest of a the extra rain that caused flooding elsewhere.
We went to a place that Jaime Andres likes and the restaurant brews its own beer. Apparently most restaurants brew their own beer and each says their beer is the best. At the restaurant we had beer, and it was good and cold with a little bitterness to it, all in all not bad. We also ordered a board for 4, which is a platter of meat for 4 people with potatoes, mash potatoes, and saurekraut . The 6 of us made a dent in the food, but there was still a quarter of a pig on the platter. There was pork knuckle fixed two ways, pork steaks, bratwurst, spicy sausage, and ham. It was a lot of meat. Rosario ended up with a large "doggy bag" of food. Roger and I looked at the platter and thought of it as "a coronary attack in the making." The company made it worth the sit down and supper. We parted ways about 2230, and we got on the tram and they were going to catch a train back to Essen.
When we got back to the hotel, it took my brain a long time to process all the conversations we had. Plus the fact that I had to replay and translate some of my thoughts. Roger said he was mentally exhausted, and impressed with Jaime Andres' language skills (Spanish, German and English). Maria Helena was enjoying her European trip and had the pictures on her iPad to prove it. We did take a lot of pictures, so hopefully when I get theirs, we'll have one good one of the group.
Right now, we're at the Dusseldorf Airport waiting for our flight. If all goes well we'll be in San Antonio this evening and hopefully home before 2200. It has been a good trip and hopefully I haven't rambled you to boredom with all my blogging.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
16 June
16 June
Pest and Buda today. We're staying on the Pest side of the Danube and took a walking tour through both Pest and Buda. Pest is more "modern" than old Buda. Pest has the new government buildings built in the 1850s, whereas Buda has older structures that date back to the founding of the city including over 10 km of city wall. There are new buildings in Buda, which includes the buildings in Trinity square, and the view from higher up Buda to lowland Pest was good this morning. The Danube is lower now, but it is still high after the floodings, which is seen as old news since it happened almost two weeks ago. Finally, we have a very nice view outside our hotel room window. There's a traveling Ferris wheel "eye" (like in London) which is in the park outside out hotel. The wheel will be in Pest for 6 weeks, and then it will go to another European capital city. Our walking guide told us the tickets were expensive, and since we've been on the London Eye, we'll skip it, especially since the lines are really long.
Apparently it is going to be "hot" today in the cities, predicted to get up to 85. It was warm walking, and it's funny to us to hear the Brits say "it's bloody hot!" We just enjoyed the walk, since we've been doing a lot of drive-by bus touring. Our guide was very good, and we all had radio receivers so hearing her wasn't a problem. Sonja speaks Hungarian, English, Russian, and German. This helped her get her job as a tourist guide. She initially learned Russian in school as a mandatory language and after 1989 she switched to English and found out she was good in languages so she added German to her skill set. Puts us from the USA to shame, in that the average citizen only speaks one language. Of course our country is a continent and wasn't occupied by the Russians.
This afternoon we went out to Godolloi, which was the Palace of King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth in the 1800s, although construction started in 1725. Queen Elizabeth, "Sissy" was extremely popular as queen. Unfortunately her husband Frederick was a philanderer and gave her VD. Sissy also had anorexia, and was a typical reflection of Eastern European royalty, who was married off to her first cousin. Sissy ended up spending a lot of time at Godolloi without her husband. She was eventually assassinated by a Russian anarchist. Godolloi Palace was plundered by the conquering military, depending upon which period in Hungarian history. It was renovated with EU assistance. Roger and I have learned a new term with regards to the contents of a historical site "genuine authentic copy." Our tour guide used this term quite often throughout the no photos allowed tour. There were several items that were exact authentic copies of portraits, photos and furniture. The gardens of the palace are about 1/3 of what they used to be, as the Russians confiscated the land and re-purposed it for the good of all Hungarian people.
Tonight we'll be repacking for travel tomorrow. Off to Dusseldorf and then on Tuesday we'll be headed back to the USA.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
15 June
15 June
The ship got us going only to have to sit on the buses for almost an hour, not a great start to the day. We left at 9 and headed north to Budapest. Rest areas/gas stations in Serbia are not designed to have 5 buses pull in at the same time. So our scheduled 15 minute stops turned into well over a half an hour, with the women commandeering the men's room once the men were finished with it. We suspect the average age of the group might be 67, so there are a lot of folks who suffer from TWB. Seniors are also slow getting off the bus, and back on the bus due to mobility issues and just getting them up and going. Once we all got back on the bus, we headed towards the Serbia Hungary border. It took over 45 minutes to leave Serbia. We don't know why Serbia was so particular on scrutinizing our passports when we were leaving the country? It took about 20 minutes to clear Hungary border control. Fortunately we weren't headed into Serbia, because there was well over a kilometer of commercial trucks waiting to clear with trucks and buses in the same line. After the border, we had to make another restroom stop. Are you getting the picture that our 5 hour bus ride might take a lot longer than advertised? Once we were all back on the bus, we actually did some traveling and stopped at 1 at a Hungarian farm that raises and trains world famous Hungarian trick horses. We had a typical Hungarian lunch that included goulash. After lunch we watched about a half an hour show that demonstrated various skills of the horses and their riders. It was more a country demonstration than a formal dressage demonstration, that a lot of people expected. To me it was like a cowboy show with horse tricks. After the show they offered wagon rides, and of course the seniors wanted to take their wagon rides, since they paid for it. I passed, because the wagons were kicking up a lot of dust, and I was already sneezing/coughing a lot. Roger went to see the livestock and I went as far away from the animals and dust as I could get.
We finally got to Budapest around 6pm. Of course we had to stand in line at the hotel to check in, but it was organized chaos, so things went surprisingly quick. Note to self-- don't get in way of a senior who is trying to check into their hotel room, they'll whack you with their cane, because they have no spatial perimeter.
Random notes that occurred to me while we were on the bus:
-- In Belgrade, newspapers are printed using both the Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet using both Serbian and Hungarian languages.
-- Graffiti is international, every where we've been there's been lots of it.
-- Pharmacies are separate stores from food stores. All products are behind a glass partition, and I can't read ingredients in Cyrillic to guess what's in the cold drug.
-- The crops we've seen in the Puszta River plain included corn, wheat, sugar beets, carrots, and onions. If the family house has a yard, there's a garden which has peas and generally a plastic arched "hot house" for tomatoes. Paprika is a very common Hungarian spice.
-- Roger got an unsolicited "welcome to Hungary" text on his phone from Vodafone, which he had to pay for. What a great business trick.
-- In Hungary, if the town has a stork family it is up to the townspeople to take care of the stork's nest when it has migrated to Africa for the winter. It is considered a privilege to have a stork live in your town. Townspeople often do winter repairs to the nest if damage occurs from a hard winter. Storks raise their young from April until September in Hungary.
-- The land between the Danube and Puszta River is really sandy and flat, as a result of being former river basin land.
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