Saturday, June 23, 2012

Homeward Bound


5 June

By Tuesday, 5 June, our holiday had essentially come to an end. We were due to return to London for one last night before getting on a plane to go home. We had a relatively early train, so we checked out at breakfast and went straight to the train station. Brugge train station is very easy to navigate and so we found our train without any problems.

From Brugge we took the train back to Brussels, where we arrived about fifty minutes before our Eurostar train back to London was due to depart. We went straight to border control because we knew it would take time as we were leaving the schengen zone (a group of European countries who allow free travel between borders - border control only applies when you are leaving the zone and entering a country not in the zone. Every country we visited was in the schengen zone, except the UK). We had a pretty long queue to wait in, but the staff were efficient and after asking a few brief questions about our travels (how long have you been in Europe, why are you going to London, where are you going after that) we were through. Then we had to queue to get up the escalators to the train platform, and after a bit of a mix-up about where we were sitting (the train came in the opposite direction to what was expected, so our carriage was down the other end of the platform) we were on the train. The people in our carriage took a long time to be seated, so a lot of us were stuck standing for the first ten to fifteen minutes of the trip while people messed around with luggage and seats.

The train ride was fairly uneventful and we arrived in London at about 12, realising after a text message from a friend in London (Sean, who we had met in Rome) that we were arriving just in time for the final festivities of the Queen's Jubilee weekend. If we'd had nothing else to do we would have been able to make it to somewhere along the procession route to see the royal family, however we had to get to Greenwich and check in to our hotel. By the time we recharged our Oyster cards which we'd kept from the last time we were in London, got the train out to Greenwich and checked into our hotel, we decided it was probably too late to get a good place to see the procession. So we just watched it on our TV in the hotel room!

For our last night we had chosen somewhere a bit flasher to stay - a 4 star hotel in Greenwich (which we still got a decent price on through a third party booking website). It was possibly the most comfortable bed we had the whole trip! Unfortunately I had booked it when we thought our flight the next day was leaving at 1pm, so would have plenty of time to get to the airport. However due to Michelle's scenario, we discovered it had been moved to 9:45am, so we would have to leave early to get to the airport on time. If I'd known it was an earlier flight I would have booked a hotel at the airport!


That night we met up with Sean for dinner. He took us to an english pub near Trafalgar Square which served cheap but yummy meals. Again, we stayed up late chatting for hours, but not as late as we had in Rome as Sean had to work the next day and we had to be up early for a flight and hadn't finished packing yet!


The next morning we were up early to head to the airport. The previous afternoon we'd used an online journey planner to figure out what trains we had to take to be at the airport by 8:45, an hour before our flight was due to leave. Nothing we had told us how early we had to be there, but if we were going to get there much earlier we would have had to wake up at 5! In hindsight we should have allowed more than an hour, but we'd only needed an hour when leaving Australia so I didn't think it would be any different flying out of England.

But of course, did our train get us to the airport by 8:45 as the journey planner said it would? No, it was slow, and only got us there minutes before 9. And then of course we realised that the trains come in to the South Terminal, and Vietnam Airlines operates out of the North Terminal, so we have to catch the light rail to the North Terminal. Fortunately we got to the platform about a minute before the next train came in so we didn't lose too much time doing that. We got to our check-in counter 40 minutes before the flight was due to leave, and of course it was a mad rush - check in had technically closed, so the airline staff rushed our check-in, gave us priority passes and directed us to take our baggage round to the oversized luggage drop-off to be fast-tracked to the gate. Our priority pass got us straight to security where there were only about two other people going through and we arrived at our gate just as they were commencing boarding.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Chocolatey Brugge

Our last full day in Brugge was cold, windy, and rainy. We started the day again with that wonderful chocolate spread on bread & croissants and were generally lazy. We eventually headed out with the mission of buying chocolate. Belgium is, after all, pretty much the chocolate capital of the world, and we hadn't really eaten very much belgian chocolate yet.

The first shop we stopped at was Chocaholic. We bought a few chocolates as presents there, and a box of various pralines to sample ourselves. (It made the flight home a bit more tolerable). They were also advertising cheap hot chocolates, and as it was such a miserably cold and drizzly day outside, we bought some. What they served us surprised me at first; a cup of hot frothed milk, and one of their hot-chocolate sticks that they also sold separately. Basically it's a paddle pop stick with a chunk of chocolate on the end, and you stir it round and round in your cup of hot milk until it has all dissolved.

It was like drinking hot melted chocolate. It was divine. I have resolved to figure out how to replicate it at home!

We then window-shopped at a few more chocolatiers before stopping in at Dumon. They had less variety and were a bit more expensive than Chocaholic, but we bought a little block of their chocolate for comparison's sake before going off to find lunch.

Afterwards we came across a lolly shop filled with far more than just chocolate, and we found actual cuberdon lollies! We had a laugh when we realised our waitress from the night before had probably mistranslated - rather than nose-shaped, they were cone-shaped. Andre reasoned that was still basically nose-shaped. So we had to buy a bag of those as well. Andre also bought three belgian beers to sample at a local shop. Unfortunately they were unrefrigerated, however when we got back to the hotel we just set them outside on the window sill and by the time we returned to our hotel after tea, they were cold enough to have one or two!


We had tea at the same place we had waffles on our first day where Andre had a flemmish beef stew made with belgian beer and I had belgian sausage. And of course, for dessert: waffles! As we'd had the Brussels (thick, very light and crispy) waffles previously, we had the normal 'sugar' waffles this time. I got strawberry sauce and Andre had the same butterscotch sauce I had previously.

I was disappointed with the waffle. Andre said his was good, but mine wasn't cooked properly and was still a bit doughy in the middle. Overall not that impressed by my belgian waffle experience. We headed back to the hotel via the Minnewater again to take more photos of swans and ducks, and packed our bags ready to leave first thing in the morning.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Ypres Salient Tour


3 June

The next morning I had an email from the first tour company saying they didn't have any space in their tours for that day, as I had expected. So I called the second tour company, Quasimodo tours, and fortunately the man I spoke to said yes, they had space! We arranged to be picked up in front of the train station just minutes down the road from our hotel at about 9am. Breakfast was only served at our pension from 8:30, and I wanted to find an ATM to get cash out as I wasn't sure if we could pay for the tour on card, so we skipped the pension breakfast to get to the train station early enough to find an ATM. It was a cold and drizzly day so we had our jackets and scarves on for the first time in weeks. We had no problems locating the ATM to get cash, then went inside the train station to find somewhere to get breakfast. The first thing we saw when we walked in was a little fast-food type bakery, so I got a chocolate pastry & fruit juice and Andre got a muesli, strawberry & yoghurt breakfast cup. We ended up at our meeting spot with heaps of time to spare.

A little after 9 we were picked up by Phillip in the Quasimodo bus. He had already collected a few people, and we picked up about another fifteen from another meeting point nearby. In total there were around 20 people on the tour, not small but not too big either. The tour ended up being very good. It was all located around the Ypres salient, about 30 - 45 minutes' drive south of Brugge, depending on the weather and roadworks. Phillip and his Australian wife have been running these tours for over ten years (I think he might have even said twenty years?) so he knew a lot about the area and World War I. I had read a lot about the three battles of Ypres and the battle of Passchendaele before we went, but didn't really understand how it all fit together. He painted a perfect mental picture of how the war started, how the Belgians were caught up in it, and the part the battles of Ypres played in it all.


He took us to see Hill 60 where the Australian 1st Tunnelling Company dug and maintained the tunnels below the German front at Passchendaele ridge during the Battle of Messines (featured in the movie Beneath Hill 60). We were able to see a british bunker there, and the remains of a German bunker that has now mostly sunk underground into the muddy clay soil. There are still a lot of undetonated munitions in the ground, so he warned us that we might want to stay to the well-worn path, although there are no fences restricting where you walk. Beside Hill 60 there was an Australian war memorial, which ironically, now bears holes from World War 2 bullets. We also saw several Commonwealth war cemeteries, the largest being Tyne Cot near Passchendaele.


We also saw another at Polygon Wood, the site of a significant battle involving Australian troops, where there now stands a memorial dedicated to the 5th Division of the Australian Imperial Forces, which I thought was the division my great-grandfather's cousin served in, but it wasn't. He was in the 3rd Division, which did still fight alongside the 5th Division in, among others, the Battle of Messines and the 3rd Battle of Ypres, which included the Battle for Passchendaele, the 'suicide mission' where the allies decided to launch an assault on the Germans, rather than the other way round as had been the case for the first two Battles of Ypres (which turned out to be an utter catastrophe).


We also saw the Canadian war memorial, 'The Brooding Soldier', possibly one of the best war memorials in Belgium, and the German Langemark War Cemetery. Unlike Commonwealth war gravestones, German gravestones are black rather than white (a condition of the Treaty of Versailles). They also normally lie flat on the ground, not upright, and this particular cemetery is modelled not like a garden (like the Commonwealth ones often are), but is covered in plain grass and tall oak trees, a german symbol for strength.



The trip also included a visit to the Hooge Crater museum (the crater itself has since been filled in) where we had lunch (somewhat disappointingly, just a sandwich, but it was included in the price so can't complain too much) and to Ypres where we saw the Menin Gate, engraved with the names of Commonwealth missing soldiers from WWI bar the New Zealanders (who requested their names be recorded at memorials located at the actual battle sites). We also saw one of the few restored trenches in the area and even that has not been very well restored. Our guide Phillip was very critical of the poor effort the Belgians have put in to conserving their trenches and bunkers, in comparison with countries like France that have done a very good job. Belgium has now realised the opportunities they have missed out on and is now scrambling to recover and restore as much as it can (I think he said they are even digging and building new trenches), spending much more than they would have originally if they had just restored trenches and bunkers as they discovered them. I think he said there are only two restored trenches in the Ypres Salient area.



Phillip also took us to a farm off a side-road to show us some of the 'iron harvest', the various shells that farmers still, reasonably regularly, recover from their fields. Belgians recover, on average, 200,000kg of munitions each year, one third of which is still live. They just leave it by the side of the road for the military to recover, which can take a few weeks! As a result, these shells just sit by the road for anyone to come and look at and take photos of. One lady in our group asked, "so how do you know these won't blow up right now?" Phillip looked at her, at the shells on the ground, then back up at her and shrugged and said "I don't really! But they've been there for 90 years and haven't blown up yet so they're probably ok. I wouldn't go throwing them around though!" I loved it because I thought there was no way in the world that would ever happen in Australia!



Despite getting very wet feet from walking around in sodden fields in perpetual foggy rain all day, we had a very good trip. Not only did we see some of the most important Commonwealth WW1 sites, but Phillip was very knowledgeable and seemed to know pretty much everything there is to know about Belgium and the Commonwealth's involvement in WWI.

That night we decided to have our anniversary celebratory dinner, and 'went out' for dinner at the restaurant right next door to our hotel. Andre had marinated pork ribs with mashed potatoes, and I had sugared ducks leg served with roasted potato and baby carrots. The ribs were a bit dry, but the mashed potatoes were excellent. My duck's leg was very well cooked, the best duck I've ever had - not at all dry, I kept referring to it as chicken by mistake. The veggies were also very tasty. For dessert Andre had cuberdon ice-cream and I went with what belgians know best and had chocolate mousse. At first we didn't know what cuberdon was, so we asked the waitress who took our order.

"It's, uh... hmm, I am not sure how to say in english... it's a lolly, it's very flemmish, it's.... umm, I am not sure how else I can describe it... it is nose-shaped, it's a nose-shaped lolly." Intrigued by this, Andre decided to go ahead and order it anyway.

It was a very, very familiar flavour, but we couldn't pick it for the first ten minutes or so. It was a pinky-purple coloured ice-cream with crushed musk lollies on top. After a while, I picked it - "fairy floss! The good fairy floss, like from The Show, not the free stuff you get at O-week. Raspberry! Pink raspberry fairy floss!" And that's exactly what it tasted like. The mousse was also very good, though perhaps not quite as set as I'm used to.

Overall it turned out to be probably one of our favourite days out of the entire trip!

Brugge

2 June

Our first day in Brugge turned out to have beautiful weather. Breakfast was a little bit odd, they only served various breads with spreads - white & wholemeal bread, raisin bread, toast, bread rolls and croissants. No cereal, fruit, yoghurt etc. But they did have an amazing chocolate spread. It tasted just like my favourite chocolate spread which was the stuff Woolworths' homebrand used to make about fifteen years ago before they added hazelnuts.



We first decided to visit a local brewery which has now been operating for six generations, De Halve Maan (The Half Moon). We took a guided tour of the brewery, with the traditional beer-making methods explained. It was a pretty interesting tour as far as breweries go and they had some good displays with a lot of the old equipment retained. After some beer tasting at the end (I don't like beer at all, so Andre had mine), we had waffles and ice-cream for lunch. We got Brussel waffles, which are much thicker than the ones we typically have in Australia, but very light and crunchy. I had butterscotch sauce on mine and Andre had chocolate on his. They were quite good but I didn't think they were anything especially better than the ones we make ourselves at home.




Afterwards we went to the Choco-Story Museum which was pretty interesting. It's a museum about the history of chocolate, featuring the Aztecs, Mayans and Spanish, its development from being a popular drink for the European upper class into a common sweet, the different equipment used in its production and consumption over the years, how it is made, how it is grown and about fifty years' worth of different chocolate packaging. It also had a chocolate-making demonstration where you got to eat the final product, but it was a hazelnut praline so Andre got the rest of mine. Europeans seem to have this obsession with putting hazelnut in all their chocolate!

After the chocolate we walked across to the northern end of the old town to see some old-school windmills. None of them were open, but it was interesting just to get to see them. Then we walked back into the town to take a boat ride through the canals. Brugge is very pretty from the water, and one bridge we went under was so low we had to duck our heads! There are also lots of swans, ducks and geese around the canals in Brugge, and many of them had ducklings and we even saw a cygnet!

That night at home I checked my emails to check the details of a battlefields tour I had booked for the next day. Or so I thought. Once I read the email, I realised the tour was supposed to have been that day. Whoops. So I raced off a very apologetic email to the tour company, and tried to figure out how I was going to organise a replacement tour within two days. In my email I asked if they happened to have any places on their Sunday tour, but when I went back and read my original emails requesting a booking, I noted that they didn't have any space on the Sunday or Monday. Hmmm. I had a look at the pamphlet for another company I had considered booking with, and they said that we could call anytime between 7:30am and 10:30pm. It was just past 10:30pm by that point, so I decided I'd call them first thing the next morning to see if they had any spaces on their Sunday tour, as they didn't run tours Mondays.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Bacharach & Brugge

31 May & 1 June

Our second day in Bacharach also happened to be our wedding anniversary. As we had been to see castle ruins the day before, we decided to go and see an intact castle. We were tossing up between two near the little town of Trechtingshausen south of Bacharach, Burg Rheinstein and Burg Reichenstein. We decided on Reichenstein as it was a shorter walk from the town.

We actually ended up being a bit disappointed with it. They seem to be more interested in attracting functions, especially weddings, than tourists, although they do put out tourist promotional material, so I'm not really sure what their target audience is. There was absolutely no interpretive signage, printed or audio guides, although they had photos of weddings everywhere on the lower level. It was also poorly lit- although we saw electric lights everywhere, none were turned on. Daylight could still get in but lighting would have made the place look better. To our surprise, we were also the only ones there.

We still enjoyed getting to go inside a castle, especially as there was access to the top of one of the exterior walls with a good view of the valley. It also didn't cost very much so we didn't feel ripped off, although we did wonder if our time would have been better spent at Rheinstein, or even at one of the castles near Koblenz, a 40 minute train trip down river.

We decided then to take the train down to Bingen and get the ferry across the river to Rudesheim. Once we got to Bingen though, it began to rain, and didn't look like it was moving on anytime soon. We decided it probably wouldn't be worth paying for the ferries to and from Rudesheim just to spend only an hour or so there in the rain. So, back on the train we got to Bacharach, after first buying our onwards tickets to Belgium for the next day.

We chose a little cafe overgrown by climber vines for dinner. We chose a cheaper place as we had already had a few more expensive meals in Germany, and decided we would have a fancier anniversary meal in Belgium. However it was very good value, and André had a rabbit dish. We also got very German desserts- apple strudel with ice cream, and a black forest (schwarzwald) ice cream sundae (vanilla and chocolate ice cream with cherries, chocolate sauce and cream).

The next day it was time to move on to Brugge (or Bruges) in Belgium. Our trip required a few change overs - first 40 minutes to Koblenz, then on to Köln (Cologne), then a high speed train to Brussels in Belgium. We had a bit of a break in Brussels before catching a regional train to Brugge.

Our pension ended up being a very short walk from the train station, just inside the old town. We got there at about 3pm so after we checked in we had time to wander into the town square and investigate the shops, including taste-testing the fries that Belgium is famous for. Not terribly impressed, and the whole eating fries with mayonnaise is weird. They still offer you ketchup though (I don't know why Europe has adopted the American term) which André liked, especially as Belgian ketchup seems to have more sugar in it than Australian tomato sauce, and a spice that I first thought was cinnamon but now think might have been nutmeg. For dinner we found a cheap little döner & kebab shop among the more expensive restaurants in our area with a friendly owner who lives upstairs from his shop.

The daylight hours in Brugge were crazy. It was the furthest north we had been in several weeks, and now that it's summer, it didn't get dark until about 10:30. This resulted in some late nights because it just didn't occur to us to get ready for bed while it was still daylight!

Munich to the Rhine Valley

29 & 30 May
We did not pre-book our tickets from Munich to Bacharach in the Rhine Valley as we had checked on a ticket machine previously and found the necessary trains ran reasonably often. So we decided we would take an afternoon train to give us a bit more time in Munich.

In the morning we first went to the hoptbahnhof, or central station, to put our bags in lockers. We also bought our tickets then so that we could make any necessary seat reservations. From there we went back to Marienplatz to explore the markets that had been closed the previous two days. We bought some cherries and a beer for André but before long it began to rain. We headed back in the direction of the train station, ducking into a few shops along the way to escape the rain and buy a few more presents and souvenirs.

Because the rain seemed to have set in, we went back to the Hoptbahnhof early, where we found a post office to send another parcel back to Australia. Lucky we did go back early, because there was quite a line up in the post office. After that it was pick up the bags, get some lunch and find our train to Bingen am Rhein. We switched trains in Bingen, to a local train that took us the last twenty minutes up the valley to Bacharach.

Bacharach is only a very little town, with one main street a few hundred metres long and half a dozen smaller back roads. It's filled with old half-timbered buildings and has vineyard-covered hills behind it, with a castle on top (which is now a youth hostel). Our pension was located down one of the side streets, and was a half-timbered building built onto the old city wall. The room was very spacious and was actually a triple room just for the two of us, and we got a private bathroom again! The first night we had dinner at a small restaurant just down the road from our pension, and sat by the front window which opened onto the cobble stoned street outside.



For our first full day in Bacharach we walked up the hill behind our pension to see the castle Burg Stahleck. It wasn't a long walk, and along the way we also saw the ruins of a gothic chapel. Once we got to the castle we couldn't go in to see too much, as it's a youth hostel, but they did have a courtyard we went into. It gave a good view of the valley below and part of the castle exterior.


We didn't spend long there before catching a train north to the little town of St Goar. We explored the idea of taking a ferry, but it was so slow, didn't run often from Bacharach and even less often in the direction we wanted, and was a lot more expensive than the train. We went to St Goar primarily for the complex of ruins of the castle Burg Rheinfels which stands on the hill above it. Part of the castle has been restored into a 4-star hotel now, and part into a restaurant and gift shop. Otherwise it stands in ruin, but when you purchase entrance (only 4 euros) you are given a leaflet which outlines two routes around the complex, explaining what each area was. The directions on it weren't always easy to follow, but we did both paths around the castle and ended up with a good understanding of how the castle once was. The ruins are in pretty good condition, with a lot of rooms, tunnels, towers and passageways still intact.






We spent most of the day at Burg Rheinfels and watched ferries go by on the river while we waited for the next train back to Bacharach. Dinner was at a restaurant with an open courtyard surrounded by half-timbered buildings where we were appropriately German and André had pork roast while I had what I think were pork sausages and fried potato. We finished the day with gelato! I had mango and lemon which was very good, but still not quite Giolitti's!

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Palaces & Concentration Camps

27 & 28 May

The problem with Munich is that it's catholic. And the problem isn't theological (although there's that too). Because it's catholic, everything closes on Sundays. The main tourist attractions are open, as are the restaurants in the main tourist areas and the public transport. But grocery stores, souvenir shops, bakeries, markets, snack bars, restaurants outside of tourist areas are all closed. This is also the case on catholic public holidays. Of course, we were in Munich on Saturday, Sunday, and a catholic public holiday Monday. Fortunately on Saturday we bought pre-made sandwiches at the grocery store and kept them in the fridge at home for our explorations on Sunday. But it made finding other food a bit harder, especially cheap meals.

On Sunday morning we decided to visit Hofbrauhaus to actually go inside. André got a beer and we bought a large heart-shaped gingerbread biscuit which we saved for lunch. The inside of the building is entertaining to see too, as the ceiling is covered in murals and they often have oompah bands playing, such as when we were there. It's also interesting to see the stamptisch signs hanging over certain tables. Stamptisch is a permanent reservation for locals, which gives them the right to kick out whoever may be sitting at their table. To gain a stamptisch in a beer hall, a local must drink in the same establishment three times a week for fifteen years. Then you get a sign with your name on it to hang over a table as a permanent reservation!

After the Hofbrauhaus we caught a train out to see Schloss Nymphenburg. This was the palace the famous 'mad king' King Ludwig the second was born in. We had our sandwiches and gingerbread for lunch in the gardens before we went inside. The gardens are enormous, we saw only a fraction of them, but they were very pretty and the weather was wonderful for being outside.

Inside the palace actually ended up being a bit of a disappointment. There was an impressive elaborately decorated entry hall/ ballroom and two or three other fancy, beautifully furnished rooms, but otherwise it mainly displayed art collections (and not many) of the various kings who lived there. Our combination ticket also got us into another section of the palace to see a collection of carriages, sleighs, and horse equipment and one of the mini-palaces out in the gardens (a summer hunting lodge of one of the queens). On the whole I think someone would be better off, if they had the time, to take a daytrip out to one of the palaces Ludwig built himself in the Bavarian forests and mountains.

After Nymphenburg we took a tram back to one of the train stations to get a train to the Englischer Garten (English garden, or park). Here we took a walk and spent half an hour in a paddle boat on the lake in the middle of the (very large) park. The Englischer Garten is Munich's equivalent to central park in New York. We saw lots of ducks, geese and swans, but no squirrels to André's disappointment.

We returned back to Marienplatz to find dinner, and ate at the Augustiner beer hall, as we had been informed Augustiner was Munich's best beer and André had tried it once already and been very impressed. I has pork escalopes (scallops) with chips and side salad while André had venison with mushroom sauce and potato dumplings. My side salad was excellent (Germans and austrians know their salads!) but the pork was a bit average, but André said his meal was excellent.

The next day we intended to go out to the Dachau Concentration Camp. We were tossing up whether to go with a paid Sandeman's tour or by ourselves. We ended up going by ourselves as the tour was 5 hours long and we could do it cheaper ourselves too.

We realised why the tour took five hours. It takes half an hour just for the train out there, and we spent three hours there until closing and could have spent a fourth. We got lunch from a little snack bar right by the train platform (I was amazed it was open on the public holiday, I thought we would be stuck with McDonalds for lunch) before catching the bus to the concentration camp. We got a bit of a fright when the bus sign said the memorial was closed on Mondays, but we confirmed on the website it was definitely open every day except Christmas Eve (which is what I thought).

Entry to the memorial is free, but it's a good idea to get an audio guide if you don't have your own guide. They are only 3.50 so not expensive. Many of the buildings are original nazi constructions, including the watch towers, although the dormitory buildings were demolished by the liberating forces, so two have been reconstructed. The Americans also used the other buildings for their own purposes after liberation, so in many parts layers of paint have been removed to return sections of the buildings to the condition they were in the 30s and early 40s. Aside from Nazism, modern German history and WW2 in general, the memorial also tells the stories of many individuals who were imprisoned at Dachau, which was the first concentration camp built by the nazis.

We spent the rest of the day there until it closed at 5. We had our last dinner in Munich at the Augustiner again where André had a platter of German sausages with mashed potato and sauerkraut and I had a grilled half-chicken with side salad. André was not impressed with their sauerkraut but everything else was very good.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Munich

26 May

Our first full day in Munich was a Saturday. For our first exploration of the city, we decided to take another Sandeman's New Tour like we did in Paris. On our way to the meeting place in Marienplatz, we got breakfast in a bakery and wow, I want to bring a German bakery home. We both got pastries and they were both excellent!

Our tour started off in Marienplatz in front of the new town hall just in time to see the glockenspiel go off at 11am. It's really just a bunch of bells playing an old song nobody really knows, with some wooden mechanized statues doing a simple performance. Again, contrary to the stereotype (myth?) of German efficiency, this is not yet automatic, and a man has to climb the stairs at 11 and 12 every morning to press a button for the glockenspiel to start. Our guide said once during Oktoberfest, he never actually turned up. What's more, the bells are actually out of tune, despite being sent to the Netherlands for tuning several years ago. The Dutch, who are supposed to know their bells, sent back all the 'C' bells playing C#. The Germans reckon this was on purpose.

Our tour guide took us round to many of the well known and some less well known sights in Munich, including the cathedral, Hofbrauhaus (the most famous beer hall in the world), the Munich Residenz, the opera house, the markets, the street of the Munich Putsch (google it) where Hitler was arrested, still as a near-nobody, and subsequently charged with treason (a charge that normally attracted the death sentence or life in prison -the nazi-sympathising judge sentenced him to five years, of which he served less than ten months) and she showed us many of the little, often unnoticed, signs of the nazis that still remain. An example is the nazi eagle which was put on everything the nazis built. The Germans have left the eagles there, but decapitated them, so all over Munich on buildings, bridges, monuments etc you can find headless eagles.

After our tour we decided to visit the Munich Residenz. It's the old residence of the Bavarian rulers -electors, dukes and kings, whatever title they had at the time. It was very damaged during the second world war and was reconstructed in a basic fashion, with the facade painted on, as they did not have the time or money to reconstruct an elaborate facade. The real facade is only now being rebuilt, slated to be complete in fifteen years. Our guide suggested it would be more like twenty. Inside however, much was preserved, with paintings and furnishings removed before the war and returned afterwards. We spent several hours walking through the bedrooms, state rooms, dining rooms, etc of the old kings, who were only deposed in 1918 after the first world war.

Afterwards we did a bit of grocery shopping for breakfast food, fruit and chocolate (you know, the essentials), before having tea at a tavern-type restaurant down the road from our hotel.

Oh- funny story from our tour. A few hundred years ago, a new opera house was built in Munich. One day, a fire started inside as often did in theatres with all the candles. The architect said- never fear! I built in this great gadget that will save the day!

He had built an upside down dome into the ceiling with a hole in the roof above it. The idea was that it would collect rain water, and when necessary, you could pull on a rope which would open the dome, releasing all the water onto the theatre below. So he pulled the rope. Nothing happened.

You see, it gets very cold in Munich. The water has frozen, and was stuck in the ceiling.

So everyone panicked because their opera house was still burning down. Then someone realised- hey, we don't have much water, but we have lots of beer! So they formed a line from the nearest beer hall to the opera house, and started passing the barrels of beer along. But Munichers are very much like australians, in that they really like their beer. So as the barrels got passed to each person, they took a swig before passing it on. The barrels reached the end of the line empty.

They still threw the wooden barrels onto the fire. The opera house burnt down.

From Cesky Krumlov to Munich

25 May

We initially had some problems with arranging transport from Cesky Krumlov to Munich. Two days prior, about the time we would normally book our onwards travel, we heard from Michelle that Vietnam airlines had changed the time of her flight and nobody had told us. We didn't know if they had notified Flight Centre and Flight Centre hadn't told us, or if they just hadn't told Flight Centre. As a result, Michelle had missed her plane out of London back to Australia. For the rest of the day, if we weren't actually doing something in Cesky Krumlov, we were in contact with her or other people about the issue and kind of forgot to plan our transport to Germany.

When we realised this the day before though, we weren't too worried. We contacted Daniel to see if he happened to be free to drive to Munich the next day, or possibly Linz in Austria. Our Plan B was to get one of the regular trains from Linz to Munich. Well, he wasn't going to Munich, but he did have a car going to Linz. At 8am. We decided that was too early for us at this late point of the trip and said no thanks. There were other shuttle companies in town that we would try in the morning, or otherwise get the train out. We knew we would have a few changes, but we'd get there.

Well, none of the other shuttle companies were running cars or buses to Linz or Munich the next morning, although one said they would be able to take us to Munich at 3pm, getting us there close to 8pm. We decided that was a bit too late, and the price wasn't any better than getting a train. (At this point we realised we should have just booked Daniel on the day we arrived in Cesky Krumlov, but because we weren't familiar with the exchange rate at that stage we weren't sure if he was offering us a good price.) So we decided to take the train. We got a taxi up to the train station (would have been a 20 min walk, minimum, uphill, and the taxi was about AU$6) and found a ticket office to buy tickets into Munich. No ticket machines in Cesky Krumlov station, and even if there had been, ticket machines often can't handle more complicated international connections. The lady was able to sell us tickets no worries, and even printed us an itinerary with the stops and changes we needed to make, including listings of the other stops we would pass through. We had good timing, as the train we needed out of Cesky Krumlov came along about ten minutes later.

The Czech regional trains were the oldest trains we travelled on for the whole trip, and the stations were the least technologicised (yes I made that word up). No LED displays on the platforms telling you where the next train was going, no ticket machines, the train carriages were the old-school ones with slide-down windows and had the destination printed on an A4 piece of paper stuck to the inside of the carriage window in a plastic slip. The train took us to Cesky Budojivice (home of Budweiser), where we got off at a deserted, unmanned, closed-looking platform for our connecting train. Double-checked our itinerary, yes, this is the right one. Ten minutes later, along came another train with the familiar Austrian QBB on the side. On we got, and it took us on to Linz, back through Salzburg. At Linz we had an hour to kill before our next train, so we found a cafe to have lunch. Before we knew it, it was time to get our final train which took us in to Munich, arriving about 6pm.

Once we got off our train in Munich, we realised we needed to take a city train to get us closer to our hotel. So we visited the Info Centre to get a rail map and some other info about the town. Munich rail defies the stereotype of German efficiency. There are two rail operators who run the two services, the U-bahn and S-bahn. Their platforms are in different parts of each train station, and directions to the platforms are not clearly marked, especially considering how large many of the main stations have to be to deal with several lines from two different rail services.

Then there's the ticketing process. If you are using a single trip ticket, you need to validate it by date-stamping it in a stamping machine before boarding. No magnetic strip tickets like you get in Paris, London, or even Sydney, and that's not new technology. We didn't notice any NFC passes being used, or the technology for them (like London's Oyster cards or Brisbane's Go card). There is something wrong when Brisbane out-technologies a German city of equal size. Day passes don't need to be validated from what we could tell, because they have the date already printed on then.

Fortunately the guy in the Info Centre told us all about this, so we got to our hotel fine. We were quite impressed with the hotel too. It's the only real 'hotel' we have been to the entire trip, a 3-star establishment with a rather spacious room, nice bathroom, mini-bar (with free beer and mineral water) and even a little stove-top. Remarkably, it was the cheapest place I could find in Munich without going too far out into the suburbs (booked via a hotel booking site, so cheaper than the normal advertised price). It is still the most expensive place place per person that we stayed the whole trip. And it didn't even include breakfast!

Friday, June 1, 2012

Canoes, Puppets, Trdelnik & Mead

24 May

For our second day in Cesky Krumlov, we decided to start the day with a canoe down the Vltava River that runs through the middle of the town. I read before we left that it was a popular activity and Daniel reinforced that during our drive.

He explained there are a lot of camp sites placed along the river, and people are able to row between campsites, set up camp for the night, then move on the next day. Some companies offer arrangements where they have everything you need at the campsite, so all you need with you as you row is yourself, a wallet, and perhaps some clothes. Alternatively you can be relatively self-sufficient and take your own tents, food etc in your boat. Daniel told us you used to be able to pull up and camp wherever you like, and while you still can, they are trying to discourage it and encourage people to stay in camp grounds.

Obviously we couldn't do a multi-day rowing trip, but we ended up choosing a one-hour trip through the town itself. The companies will either drop you off elsewhere and you row back, or you leave from the town and they will pick you up. Other popular trips are to be taken up river and you row back to the landing (about 1 to 2 hours) or to leave from the landing in town and row to a town downriver (about 3 to 4 hours).

I wasn't keen to take up most of the day with the rowing trip, but André wanted to row through the town itself, something we couldn't really do with the 1 to 2 hour trip because the landing place in town was before you got a chance to go through most of the town or past the castle. So we just went with the short town row. It was very enjoyable though and didn't require much work because the river flows quite smoothly. For people who come from upriver, there are a few little weirs which have little canals built beside them for the boats to traverse the weir. Those are mostly upriver from where we left though, so we didn't go through any of those. There would normally be one for us to go through, but it was being reconstructed so we had to get out, carry the canoe below the weir, then get back in the water. The day before we watched a group try to take their 6-person raft over the weir itself which ended pretty disastrously (getting stuck, people falling out backwards, hitting rocks, filling up with water etc). But we and the two guys nearby who were watching it happen were all laughing (the American blokes thought it was hysterical). What's worse is that they did this straight after they saw a raft of their friends get stuck doing the same thing! André and I bet they were either American or Australian. While we were eating dinner at the hospoda, the same group turned up to the hostel next door, returning from their rafting trip, and it was all we could do to stop ourselves bursting out laughing when we heard their Australian accents. Yup.

So, we went rowing the next morning with nowhere near the same amount of trouble. Afterwards we did a bit of souvenir shopping and visited a puppet museum where we also got to play with a few traditional marionettes. We found some wine called 'André', so obviously we had to buy a bottle of that, and we had lunch at Deli 99, linked with Hospoda 99 and the Hostel 99 next door! While shopping we decided we needed to have another trdelnik, but this time we had one with chocolate. As well as having sugar and cinnamon on the outside, the inside was coated with a nutella-like chocolate spread (but not too hazelnutty so I didn't mind it). André also had some mead, which he quite liked. Before dinner we walked up behind the castle to see the castle gardens which we didn't get to see the day before. It was a combination of manicured flower beds and tall forest trees, ending with a large pond covered in lilies with ducks. André was especially excited when he spotted a squirrel in the gardens, a much darker variety than we saw in London.

All up, we decided we very much liked Cesky Krumlov. It had great food, interesting history, entertaining culture and activities and overall, very cheap!

Cesky Krumlov

Unlike most first-time visitors to the Czech Republic, our czech destination was not Prague, but rather a little town of about 14,000 people in the southern state of Bohemia called Cesky Krumlov. We picked it because I was looking for a smaller destination to break up all the cities we would be visiting, wanted to see somewhere in the Czech Republic, and because I saw pictures of it on Trip Advisor and loved it.

It ended up being possibly one of our favourite places. We spent three nights there, and on our first full day had a lazy start (hooray for sleep ins!) before spending most of the day exploring the castle that towers over the old city. There is actually more to Cesky Krumlov than the old city, but it's a bit further away.

The castle doesn't really look like a castle, possibly because it's passed through a few owners who have added their own touches and because it was never a defensive fortress of any sort, but more of a palace. There are several entry fees, depending which parts of the castle you want to see. We bought the Cesky Krumlov card which ended up being a waste of money for us because we didn't go to enough of the attractions on it to make it worth the price, but we ended up only being 50 crowns down each, or about $2.50. But the card got us into the castle tower and museum free. The museum was interesting, but we didn't spend a lot of time in there because we had to catch another tour. The tower gave a good view over the old town and river so was a good opportunity for photos.

We also took two tours of the castle (neither of which the card covered)- a general tour and a tour of the baroque theatre. The theatre was the most expensive tour but also the shortest and you saw less than in the general tour. However, the theatre is special because it is one of only two baroque theatres in the world which still operate with their original sets and stage machinery. The other is in Sweden. Despite not getting to see a lot, we did get to go beneath the stage and see the timber machinery that moved the sets around, and some of the sound-effect equipment. While most of it is original, it has all been pulled apart, cleaned and repaired as necessary, then reassembled.

The general tour was also quite interesting, and as there was only André and me and two others, it was nearly a private tour. We saw bedrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms, formal audience rooms where the royalty would have held audiences with people, and an elaborately painted mask ball ballroom. The walls are covered in paintings of people dressed for a masked ball, and the painter has specifically arranged each person to be looking at someone or something else in the room. So there are some interesting little stories between some of the painted characters around the room.

We had a very late small lunch after we came out of the castle- just a small burger to hold off the hunger until dinner! As we walked through the town, we stopped at a bakery to watch something being cooked that smelled amazing. We asked what it was and were told trdelnik. It was only 50 crowns so we decided to try one. The best comparison to something Australian I can think of is donuts. It's a dough that is rolled into a long log, then wrapped around a metal log and baked over heat so it forms a tunnel. So it's breadier than donuts, and baked, not deep fried. They can be served with a few different toppings, but most commonly it's sugar and cinnamon. Very tasty!

For tea we went to a 'hospoda' that I read about before we arrived (basically a cheap restaurant), Hospoda 99. The food was excellent, and cheap. André had chicken in a mustard sauce with potato dumplings (Daniel told us dumplings are a traditional Czech food) while I had a chicken and bacon salad, and we had a side of garlic bread. We both got dessert too- André had pancakes with raspberries and 'warm vanilla cream' (custard) and I had homemade sesame ice cream with chocolate sauce and 'caramel chips' (shards of toffee on top). The sesame flavour was a little odd to associate with ice cream at first, but I got used to it and it ended up being quite good. I also had hot chocolate which was excellent, and nearly as good as the one we got in Florence! André had a Czech beer and locally made liquer which had a very strong cinnamon flavour. And it all totalled less than $30! We returned to our pension very content that night.