Elisa and I took the overnight train from Prague to Krakow. Compared to what I was expecting, we had a roomy comfortable compartment. The lady that sold us our tickets had misunderstood us though, so we were only in possession of a ticket upgrade instead of a real ticket. We were thankful that we had enough cash on us to buy our tickets from the conductor. During the night we worried that we would sleep too long and miss Krakow. Every time the train stopped we would both wake half-way up and listen for whether we had arrived. Finally I remembered to set an alarm so I could just rest for the last few hours of the trip.
Krakow didn’t impress us very well. We arrived at 6 am so the town was dead. We were pretty tired too. Our first sight-seeing destination was the old Wawel castle in the middle of Old Town. We took the kind of tour that always drives us nuts: everyone walks really slowly through an old building, learning uninteresting facts about faded tapestries (which weren’t even from Poland to begin with). I was not a happy person. We decided not to go through the other two exhibits we had already paid for because they were so stinking boring. What a waste! But we did go through into a pretty cathedral and climbed up its bell tower. The bells were enormous! After that we hiked down into a cave where their legends of dragons have come from.
Next Elisa and I checked in to our hotel and took a nap for a couple hours. Our original hotel had been over-booked and they sent us across town to a different one. We kind of missed out on the prime time for seeing the city. But we were exhausted. Then in the evening we went out again for food and window shopping. We were hoping that there would be a lot more sightseeing that would be fun for us. We were also hoping to have more luck finding some local amber jewelry. Only about half of the shops we have seen have people that are nice to us and/or speak English. My first impressions of Poland have been kranky people in a city that still has not recovered from the World Wars and communism.
We discovered another pet-peeve of mine–city names. It is so dumb that we do not learn the real names of cities. Instead we learn the Anglicized names. We went to Wien, Praha and Kraków on our trip. Why do Americans call them Vienna, Prague and Cracow?
Elisa and I arrived in Vienna by plane on Saturday morning. Our hotel was by Schönnenbrun Palace, so that’s where we went first. The gardens are pretty awesome. There’s even a labyrinth garden. They have a few versions. Two small versions include brainteasers and games. In the palace itself we saw lots of old regal stuff. It kept us pretty interested, even though that’s not normally the kind of thing that entertains us. For the rest of our vacation, we were saying things to each other like, “This castle isn’t as cool as the one in Vienna.” We even saw a presentation where they give you a recipe for Äpfelstrudel and teach you how to make it. Of course there were samples which were really good. It looked pretty difficult to make so I do not think we’ll be attempting it any time soon.
Elisa and I were up late Friday night, and we were starting to feel it. We stopped back at our hotel for an afternoon nap. Party on.
We tried to follow a walking tour from a Frommer’s Guide. We got kind of lost. The sun was going down. So we pretty much bagged the tour. Our fall back was to eat the famous “Sächer Torte.” We just kind of wandered around and ate stuff that smelled good.
On Sunday we took a train up the Wachau Valley and then we took a boat back down the Danube. There’s little castles you can see en route. Elisa taught me about the oldest form of pornography (a statue) that was unearthed beside the river.
The evening was really fun. We went to the Präter amusement park. There are the best rides there. We were doing all sorts of high spinning, upside-down, swinging rides.
Monday we walked around Baden. We just window shopped. The original plan was to check out the natural hot springs but it was just a dumb pool. We tried to make the most of the trip by sampling some local Traubenmost (grape juice). Then we watched chestnuts plummet from the trees while we waited for the train. Lucky Chad got smacked on the head by one of the falling nuts.
The pulled muscle in my chest is not hurting any more. I know you’ve been on pins and needles waiting to see how that turned out. 🙂 I’m happy because it means I wasn’t having a heart attack or even heartburn. I’m still young. Elisa and I had some “pepper Raclette” last week and it was really good! I was happy to be able to eat all the spicy toppings on the Raclette that I wanted. BTW, we had bought this Raclette cheese at a specialty store. It turns out that there is a big difference between off-brand cheese bought at the grocery store and cheese bought in an authentic rural shop. Elisa and I were in heaven for a meal.
On Monday my group at work moved from the old Google building to the new Google building. They are about a 15 minute walk from each other. The new building is not completed yet. The 5th floor where I am is just a temporary accommodation. The construction is months behind schedule. So during the workday there are people in the next room working with concrete drills! The door between us is thick, but it really doesn’t help. One guy working on the 2nd floor, on the opposite end of the building, says that it’s awful because the whole building is made of concrete, and even from that far away “the drilling might as well be inside your own head.” The facilities team gave us each a souvenir pair of earplugs. At first we thought they were only meant as a joke.
I’ve been spending a lot of time this month working on my computer program that analyzes stocks. Last week I was up until 4 am on three nights. Maybe I’m too old to keep that up forever though.
