The Land of Old Empires

After two and a half years of sticking within the bounds of this (admittedly very large) nation, I’ve finally set foot on foreign soil again. Back before the world changed, a friend and I had booked a trip to Central Europe, and this year, we actually made it. I don’t really know how to blog about a twelve-day trip to five different countries, but here goes nothing.

The Rathaus on Marienplatz, Munich

Czech Republic

Although the trip started in Munich, we only spent one very jet-lagged night there before our tour took us to Prague. The city set a rather high bar for the rest of the trip, as Prague is every bit as charming and beautiful as everyone says. The narrow streets lined with elegant facades, the exuberant jumble of red-roofed buildings, the cathedral and palace grounds overlooking the Old City, I fell in love with everything about Prague except its currency. No mental contortions ever succeeded in allowing me to convert the Koruna to the dollar. I never had any notion of what I was paying for things, but honestly, I didn’t even care, I enjoyed Praha that much.

Karlova Street leading to the Old Town Bridge Tower

Our Lady Before Tyn overlooking the Old Town Square

The Astronomical Clock, installed in 1410 and still going strong

Prague as seen from the top of the Lesser Town Bridge Tower

St. Vitus Cathedral

Slovakia

Our stay in Bratislava lasted approximately two hours; it was really nothing more than a glorified lunch break. However, the old town area was bright and welcoming, and even the parts that hadn’t yet been renovated had a certain medieval charm to them. Plus, I was able to pay Euros for my soup, which came in an edible cup like an ice cream cone!

Old Town Hall on the Main Square

An unrenovated side street

Winner for most innovative food presentation on this trip

Hungary 

My first impression of Budapest was that the Pest side of the city feels very much like every other modern city I’ve been in: it’s a bit sooty, it roars with the sound of traffic, and it smells like dirt and motor oil. However, I quickly learned to appreciate the consistent nineteenth-century architectural style (consistent because Pest was destroyed when the Danube flooded in 1838), the cultural gems hidden around practically every corner, and of course the beauty of the Old City of Buda.

My favorite building in Pest

The Parliament Building by night

Fisherman's Bastion

Matthias Church

Inside Matthias Church, which preserves Muslim decoration
from when it was a mosque under Turkish rule

Dohany Street Synagogue

Heroes Square

Austria

It's probably completely unnecessary to say that we could have spent months in Vienna and not seen everything that beautiful city has to offer. We gave it our best shot in the two days we had there, though! 

St. Stephen's Cathedral

Just a bishop contemplating divinity in St. Stephens'

Graben Street

Yes, we saw the Lipizzaners at the Spanish Riding School

And yes, I died.

It was a perfectly acceptable summer day when we set out from Budapest for Salzburg, but by the time we paused for a rest stop at Mondsee, the temperature had dropped into the forties and stayed quite chilly for the rest of the trip. In a way it was all the better for us, because on the day we visited Berchtesgaden, snow had fallen in the Alps overnight! Besides that, it was practically impossible to turn around without stumbling on a filming location for The Sound of Music, so naturally there was an impromptu sing-along on the tour bus, which fortunately no one filmed.

Mondsee

Salzburg, with the fortress overlooking the town

Getreidegasse

A shop advertising that it sells lederhosen

The Alps

With snow--in June!

An Alpine meadow

You may recognize these steps in the Mirabell Gardens
from the "Do Re Mi" scene in Sound of Music

Germany

The heart of the whole tour was a visit to Oberammergau, the very small town famous for a very big production of the Passion Play every ten years since the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures during the five-hour extravaganza, which involved hundreds of cast members, live horses and camels, a full choir and orchestra, and was done entirely in German. But I found the town itself just as picture-worthy as the play. It was everything I imagined an Alpine village would be, with the added bonus of being famous for something other than the Passion Play: wood carving. We were fortunate to have only an hour or two for shopping, because if we’d had more, I probably wouldn’t have been able to buy food for the rest of the trip!

The view from our hotel room.
The churchbells rang every 15 minutes 24 hours a day

Lüftlmalerei, the art of mural painting

The Passion features prominently throughout the town

My friend and I stayed behind one extra day after our official tour concluded in Munich because we wanted to see one more major attraction: Neuschwanstein, the building that inspired Disney’s iconic Sleeping Beauty castle. As usual, no pictures were allowed inside, but the outside was plenty photogenic, as were the horse-drawn carriages that ferried people up and down the mountain.

Neuschwanstein

Horses!

Carriage rides cost twice as much going up
the mountain as going back down

In a lot of ways, this trip was like drinking from a firehose: so many cities, so many stories, so much history my poor beleaguered high school teachers never had time to teach us. We talked to people who had grown up under Communist rule, who had watched revolutions unfold, who knew the stories of the Hapsburgs and the Wittelsbachs better than I know the stories of my own immediate family. It’s a very big world out there, and I was so fortunate to have this chance to get out there once again and explore it.

The hills are alive!