It's been exactly a month since my last entry, and I've fallen so far behind that I don't know how to catch up. Since then, we've gone to Munich and the Neuschwanstein castle with Joel and Jenny, and then sent them off on their way home. We had about ten days on our own, then our friends Sharon and Bill Schermbrucker arrived from Vancouver for two weeks (Sharon is Marlyce's childhood friend and singing partner). We had a lot of fun with them, including a four-day trip to Vienna and Budapest and several smaller outings in the area and around Salzburg. Yesterday they left as well, and today Marlyce and I made what seemed like an epic journey on our bikes to the Freilicht (Open Air) Museum near Salzburg, a fine collwection of historic buildings from all over this part of Austria. e'll be heading back to Bluffton in less than two weeks. I am expecting about 145 finals for my North American Civ. class (though I just have to grade one essay question for each one), 18 20-page papers for my seminar class, and 5 10-pagers for my other class.
There. Caught up, right? Well, OK, I'll put some photos in, and add some comments and stories.
Here's Marlyce with Joel and Jenny at a street cafe in Munich that seems to have been there forever. We got a great deal on the train trip there--29 euros/day for all for of us--but that was complicated by a large number of German soccer fans who got on with large quantities of beer which they set to work consuming at once, though it was still morning. They were more loud than anything, but it did make it hard to doze on the train.
We spent a good part of the day in the Deutsches Museum, which was sort of like the Museum of Science of Industry crossed with the Smithsonian, German style--airplanes, bridges, science, all sorts of stuff. In the evening we walked around in the famous, huge English Gardens, where a select band of hearty fo
lk actually surf on a curious ripple in a fast-moving stream. But for another photo, here are Joel and Jenny, inspired by the statue behind them.
The next day we took another train out into the country, then a couple of buses up into the mountains to see one of the grandest of King Ludwig's castles. He was a 19th century king of Bavaria who was more or less a figurehead, so he whiled away his time and money building castles until the rest of the government got tired of it and had him declared unfit. He died the very next day, in suspicious circumstances, but left behind these gaudy, extravagant buildings. I hear it's good to be king. We took the full tour (and of course took in the mountain scenery as well). King L. died before Neuschwanstein was finished, and within a few weeks the government was showing paying customers through it on tours, a practice that continues to this day. Maybe it's not as good to be king as it used to be. Anyway,
it's better to build a grand useless building than to drop a lot
of bombs on people, don't you think?
Marlyce and I made a day trip out to Mondsee the next weekend, partly to see the church there which was used for Julie Andrews' wedding in
Sound of Music and partly to ride around on the lake in a cool little electric boat. The lake was fine, but a lot like Wolfgangsee (see below) so I'll just drop in a picture of the inside of the church. It's fancy.
Here are Bill and Sharon with us on their first day here, doing the obligatory Mirabell Garden visit. We had fun showing them the Salzburg landmarks and feeling like real veterans. We also took a half-day cruise on the Danube from Krems to Melk and back again, with lots of castles, grapevines, ruins, quaint villages, and so forth along the way.
Our biggest trip with them, and the last major jaunt we'll manage, was to Vienna and then on to Salzburg. The Fulbright folks staged a farewell gathering at a "Heurigen" on the outskirts of Vienna--there are a lot of them, places that make wine and serve food. It was too cold to eat outside, but they had a warm and cheerful room for us inside and we had a nice time. The smiling guy in the middle is Lonnie Johnson, the
Fulbright director for Austria. We showed Bill and Sharon a bit of Vienna as well. (It was filled with soccer fans, and a huge section of the old city had been walled off into a "Fanzone" with great big tv screens and so forth.) We decided we could do without the soccer fans, though they were pretty quiet when we were there.
The next day we set off on the train for Budapest--just another three hours. The trip was fine, but we were a little disturbed when the guy who was supposed to meet us at the station to take us to the apartment Marlyce had reserved wasn't there. We called, and eventually somebody showed up, but of course we'd read too much about the frequency of ripoffs in Budapest beforehand and had to be convinced that he was on the level. Istvan turned out to be just fine, though, and if anybody wants to go to Budapest, let me know and I can set you up with a cheap and clean place to stay, right in the heart of the city!
It was late afternoon by the time we found the apartment (the street it was on wasn't exactly spotless, and neither were the several flights of steps to what we'd call the third floor) but it was roomy and clean and just around the corner from a main avenue. So we went out for dinner nearby (to a fine little place called the "Blue Rose" in English, also recommended by Istvan), and then stopped into another little place called the Spinoza Cafe where a guy was playing show tunes on the piano. By the time we left, we were all thinking that this might be fun after all.
Budapest is a big, modern, complicated city--parts brand new, parts run-down, sometimes right next to each other. It was easier to understand why afte we went through the Terror Museum the next day. It's housed in a building which first the Nazis and then the Soviets used to house their secret police. The exhibits have a lot to say about how people try to persevere in the face of large-scale murders and intimidation and all the rest; the Hungarians as a whole seem to be both relieved to be finally free of such things and proud of having come through such a terrible time.
We also wandered around the city. We stayed in Pest, on the west bank of the Danube. Buda is
on the east bank of the Danube, along with the castle quarter and some great views. Here's the river with the famous "Chain Bridge" on the right and the Parliament building a little ways upstream to the left, with all the towers.
The esthetic highlight of the trip was definitely on Sunday evening, when we got tickets to see a ballet in the State Opera House, a wonderfully gaudy building that's almost as grand as Vienna's (and the tickets are a lot cheaper!). Ballet's a good choice when you're in a foreign country, becauuse there's no language barrier! We saw a production based on
Taming of the Shrew, and it was a surprising amount of fun even for a farm boy like me.
That's not really the end of the story, but it's going to have to be all for tonight!
With all that out of the way, another brief travel report: yesterday we took the bus back to St. Gilgen, took the cable car to the top of the Zwölferhorn mountain, had a fine lunch up there, then took a quick look at Fueschlsee (another lake close by) on the way back. It was a hot day, and the buses were packed with people coming out to the beach and going back. The bus going out also had major problems with the air conditioning; we were pretty much parboiled by the time we got to St. Gilgen.
behind her.
