Category Archives: Check Us Out

26Sep / 2014

No Pithy Title; I am Fresh Out of Pith

 

No pith so I’ll lead with the good stuff. How beautiful is that?
And yes, I actually took that picture, thanks. No postcard this time.

 

Those of you who know me well will find the following utterly unsurprising:

I got sick.

For someone as generally healthy as I am, I have the most porous immune system ever, and it bit me in the ass again. I got yet another traveling cold, and am sucking down hot tea at an astonishing rate.

So last night, Jim goes on an adventure to find me cold medicine after hours. A nice taxi driver takes him to an all night apoteke (drugstore) which, like a Las Vegas pawn shop operates out of a window at night. After some show and tell and some pointing, he comes back with a box, which I gladly take. Four hours of pacing later we realize the stuff had Sudafed in it. Full strength Sudafed. Up all night with the pacing around the room jitters. But no cold symptoms.

No sleep either.

But I am no wimp, Gang. There were tours to take and carbohydrates to eat, and so I bundled up in my heavy jacket, shoved tissues in every available pocket, and headed off with guide Aniko and our driver Zoltan to see the suburban town of Szentendre, which had been billed as an artist colony and cute little town with galleries and small shops and museums.

I’m sure by now you all know me and my blog well enough to know where this is headed. What was billed and what was observed were not exactly the same thing. Szentendre, while still a very pretty town with a substantive artist colony, was less a charming little village and more a tourist trap. Shlock souvenir stands filled the storefronts, most of them filled with the same kind of “paprika/tea towel/embroidered items/magnets and coffee mug” those stuff that we’ve seen all over. There was a Herren (high end Hungarian porcelain) store but even better, we found some quirky little museums that made the whole thing worthwhile.

In the Micro Museum you could see micro miniature art. This is a grain of rice on its side with a viewing microscope.

This is the view through the scope. A solid serving set of goblets and pitcher in solid gold, all invisible to the naked eye. The artist is Ukranian and has had a couple of exhibitions in the US. I don’t know why he has a permanent display in Szentendre, but it was cool to look at.

We also went to the permanent exhibition on Margit Kovacs, a Hungarian ceramic artist who really pushed the bounds of what can be done with ceramics. Many of her pieces look like they were made of wood or cast metal, they were beautifully created but you couldn’t take pictures and although I bought some postcards, I am sick and so no pictures for you today.

Instead, to honor the fact that we start heading home Sunday, you can have a picture of some cactuses made entirely out of marzipan, which is almond paste (like the stuff inside bear claw and almond croissants) that is colored, shaped and molded and left to harden. We went to an entire gallery of things made from marzipan (the marzipan museum) which was full of fun and playful displays made of the stuff. It mostly resembled very good polymer clay work, and so it was hard to remember that all of the items were (at one point anyway) entirely edible.

Marzipan Princess Diana
 

After the tour (which was filled with lots of good information from our guide on the area’s history, and the life of Kovacs and the founding of Herren) we came back to the hotel for me to try and nap, which didn’t work, and then we went for a very nice dinner and our evening jaunt up the river. But not before sharing one of these for dessert:

Those are hollow funnel shaped dough logs baked over a fire and then rolled in a topping of your choice, like vanilla sugar, cinnamon (what we had) nuts or coca. It’s a local “street food” and was really tasty.

Then Jim and I bypassed the crowded tour boats packed stem to stern with tourists and got on our tiny little boat for the trip up river. The guys who ran the boat were great, we got one trip up and back slowly so we could stand on the stern and take pictures, and then they sped up and did the whole thing again at speed, racing around the bridge abutments and whipping us around parliament. Despite how low we were to the water and how relatively choppy it was, we got some great pictures and had a blast.

Budapest is beautiful at night. (Budapest is beautiful any time of day but especially so at night.) And I’m so glad we took the private boat. We had so much fun and it was the exact right way to see the amazing place all lit up.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds, so I don’t know what to tease. I am pretty damn sick, and all the activity today didn’t help but it is our last day on our trip so I don’t know what we are going to do about me and the head cold of inevitability I finally came down with.

I have a couple of wrap up posts I wanted to write (one about the Hungarian people) and Jim and I were thinking about the Pflegenbaum Travel Awards for the best (and most Swarovski-like) parts of the trip so if we stick close to home and the lovely spa here at the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus, maybe I’ll work on those.

Either way I bid you a fond (and stuffy adieu), Home soon!

 

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21Sep / 2014

The Hills Are Alive …. With the Sound of Tour Busses

 

Gang, I cannot ever impress upon you all just how many tour busses there are in Salzburg. Filled to the brim with Chinese, (roughly two to one of any other nationality) American, and European tourists and all of them appear to be over the age of sixty-five.

Now I know there are two people reading this who are over sixty-five, one who is exactly sixty-five, and one young tiger who hasn’t hit the mark there yet (we love you and you are all awesome) but I can’t tell you how happy I am to be making this trip at the very young age of 40 and not some point after Jim retires. Thanks to some careful T-accounting (on paper thankyouverymuch) some tough decisions and the fact my parents would rather we spend my inheritance rather than, you know, have an inheritance, we have been able to start what we hope will be many more such Adventures in Dragging Down the Average Age of All Around Us.

As promised the “Ignore All Things Mozart” tour continued today in the Salzkammergut, the Austrian Lake District. We drove out to a little town called St. Gilgen with the intent of taking the ferry along the Wolfgangsee (Wolfgang Lake) to St Wolfgang (do you see how hard it is to get away from Mozart?) and then take the steepest cog railway in Austria to the top of a big mountain. (Schafberg – the train was the SchafbergBahn)

When we told the lady at the ticket office (both the ferry and the cog rail were official public transit lines for the Austrian National Rail) we wanted the combination ticket for the ferry and the ride to the top of the mountain she looked at us and said:

“Are you sure?”

 

The weather, you see, was godawful. I could write whole epic poems on how wonderful Gore-Tex and waterproof Clark’s are, but that would be boring. But while we waited for the ferry to come and get us, it actually broke and we were treated to some of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring scenery, which I will let speak for itself.

 

 

The rail line is a cog rail, which is necessary due to the steep trek up the mountain which, at times exceeded 20 degrees (we used a horizon indicator app on Jim’s phone to see how steep it was). The cog rail uses coal powered steam to spin a toothed cog which then bites into a track, pulling the train up the mountain.

The train was still wet when we got on it, sorry about the drops on the window

 

We got to the top of the mountain and were treated to some stunning views of the lake below.

Pretty, right?

I wouldn’t actually know. This was our view:

Yep the mountain is more than a mile up, and we were way above the good weather. It was foggy and pouring the entire time we were up there. I took those pictures from some postcards I bought. Surely you all didn’t fall for that trick again!

So we paid €88 to go and see the absolute worst weather in Austria (it actually started to hail wile we were hiking up to the hotel and restaurant at the very top of the mountain) and we LOVED every second of it. It was like our very own Amazing Race and we half expected Phil Keoghan to be standing on a mat somewhere in the worst of the weather at the top.

We had some very good Austrian food at the top of the mountain and then took the train back down, and once we got below the weather, the scenery again became incredible.

I took too many pictures and I wish I could share them all. This is a magic place, and I count renting our little land yacht of a Skoda as one of the best things we could have ever done. The Tirol and the Salzkammergut are some of the most amazing things we’ve seen on the whole trip, and to do them ourselves, in our own way, and to not be at the mercy of those damnable tour busses was the very very best thing so far.

Tomorrow we are capitulating to the charms of Salzburg and after we return the car and take care of some business at the Hauptbahnhof relating to our change of venue to Budapest on Tuesday we are going to take a walking tour of the old city and then ride the funicular up to the fortress and see what’s what.

Just a week to go now, and one more city on the itinerary. More tomorrow from our last day in Austria (and the absolute end of being understood, even in my mangled German.)

Tschüss!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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