Digital photo wrap-up

I've uploaded the rest of the photos we took with the digital camera. There will be more when Terri gets her film developed and scans the pictures.

I tagged them using Flickr's tagging feature. So, all the vacation photos are tagged as "eurotrip2004". They're also broken down by place (Prague, Vienna, Barcelona, or from a plane). There are also some for special events (correfoc) or places (Prague castle or Vienna's central cemetery). We can tag the film photos with the same tags when they're scanned, so those links will eventually include the film photos, too.

Home again...

We're back!

Just uploaded some photos we had ready to go from Vienna. Many many Barcelona photos to upload.

I also added the three entries we never managed to post from Vienna. They are here, here, and here.

There is much still to put up about our last day in Barcelona, but my body thinks it's 2:30am. Perhaps Terri will give the update tomorrow.

Well, we were unable to get an actual connection from the free wireless in the hotel lobby we tried; there was some kind of extra authentication, which it looks like you´d be able to get through if you were a guest. So, we are back at easyEverything, and unless we are walking around and happen to come upon a place that says "free wifi!" on the door, we probably just won´t be able to upload the photos we´ve been taking until we get back.

Last night after we made our post, we headed up and down La Rambla, which is the big, mostly-pedestrian street that goes down the center of the central part of the city. Imagine Harvard Square, but a bit more seedy, stretched out into a single tree-lined thoroughfare, for over a mile. After agreeing that it seems even more sketchy since the last time we were here, we picked up a festival schedule (which is only printed in Catalan-- fun fun translation games), headed down by the water, took up residence at an outdoor terrace, ordered a couple of cervesas, and planned out how to shuffle around the festival events with the things we want to do while we´re here.

We left there for dinner at about a quarter to nine. We went to the excellent, excellent little place called Oolong, which has very friendly staff, lots of fun vegetarian foods (and beefy treats for me), and fun decor, in this tiny little hole in the wall.

Terri is making frantic grasping motions for the keyboard. I will cede it.

Just figured I might as well confess to how I was flummoxed by the sliding door to the toilets at Oolong. There was no indication that the door was supposed to slide, and I was tired, and well... I just sort of bent it up enough that I could get in. It´s a funky place, so I figured, maybe this is a new arty kind of door that we don´t have in the states. Anyway... the food was delumpcious. We oo-ed and ah-ed our way through the spring rolls, and had somewhat Spanish main courses... mine was beans and rice with corn and avocado... but so nicely done. Ezra had roast beef with plantain chips, since we´re keeping score.

Then we wandered briefly around the Gothic quarter and noted that we like that area (further from the Rambla, on the same side as our hotel). It´s very cute, with loads of little shops and cozy candlelit restaurants and bars. It´s all windy and some of the bars are like dark little caverns. Good stuff.

(back to Ezra)
We ended up over by the Cathedral, which is one of the stages for the B.A.M. festival (the music festival that coincides with La Merce), but there was nothing going on. Still quite a few people hanging around the stage, though. And we wandered back through the winding little streets to our hotel. Most of the streets in the Gothic quarter, where we´re staying, are way too narrow to fit cars through; some people ride bikes, some scooters, but most are on foot. As we passed the Placa de St. Jaume (another of the B.A.M. stages, this one well within ear shot of our hotel), a band took the stage. We don´t know who they were, but with a crowd of many hundreds of people cheering for them as they took the stage, they must be famous in Catalunya.

As suspected, sleeping was hard, because it was pretty noisy. We both woke up a few times in the night; I think the band stopped sometime after midnight, but there was still a lot of noise from people in the street. Terri woke up at 5:30 or 6:00, and it was quiet then, so at some point people did go to bed.

Today, we grabbed a quick breakfast, and walked to the Palau de Musica Catalunya (Palace of Catalan Music) and picked up tickets for a tour at 2pm. It´s one of the things we didn´t do last time, it´s a funky modernista building, and you can only see it through a guided tour. So, we picked up our tickets, and then walked north to La Pedrera (a.k.a. Casa Mila), one of the famous Gaudi buildings. Every Friday and Saturday in the summer, they have special evening events on the roof (which is extremely funky architecture) with live music and a bar. We wanted to try to go there tonight, because it would be fun, and also because there are fireworks down on the beach that we were hoping to see from there. However, apparently, summer is over, and there is no more La Pedrera at Night for 2004. Alas. We were thwarted last time, too; then, apparently, they had it in late September, because the reason they gave for cancelling it last time was the rain.

We were also thwarted with the shoe shopping that I wanted to do (yes, I, not Terri, also need shoes and like the fun Spanish variety), because all of the shoe stores seemed to be closed for the main festival day (which is today). So, we walked back down through a bunch of kid-oriented festival stuff (Terri got a folded paper hat), and grabbed lunch at a big cafe-type place near the Cathedral. Their logo is some kind of clergyman dancing around. We also saw that there´s a Dali exhibit at a museum not too far away from there, which is open late-ish, so we might end up back there this evening.

easyEverything has also put a Subway in the front, and let me tell you, they are pumping out the Subway smell.

Anyway, we left lunch, and saw the Castellers making their big human towers. We saw a couple of them take falls, mostly on the way down, some of them from two or three stories up. The Placa was extremely crowded, so we couldn´t see exactly what happened, but I presumed that people standing on the ground either cushioned the fall, or caught them, because I didn´t see any of the ambulances that are parked nearby spring into motion. Still, it seems like taking a fall from that high up (probably 25 feet) must have smarted.

We have to be off now, but we will write more later...

¡Barcelona 2004!

Greetings from easyInternetcafe, the internet cafe we posted from in Barcelona during our Honeymoon. It was easyEverything at the time, but now I think their parent company really is getting into everything; we saw several easyJet jets at the airport today.

We are also staying at the same hotel we stayed in during our honeymoon. Either we´re creatures of habit, or romantics, or just stick with something when we like it, but we´re doing it again in 2004. This time, our room faces the very busy (and loud) street St. Jaume I, which is bad, because it´s loud, but good, because we´ll be able to watch many of the festival´s parades right from our balcony. (At least, we think they go down our street.)

Anyway, that´s all for now. We came here to find out if they have wireless now (they don´t--boo), but we found some places that do. We have a couple of entries we wrote but never posted in Vienna which we have to get up. As well as lots and lots of pictures!

OK. We´ll be back, either from here or some wireless place, not that it makes any difference to you, dear readers.

´til then...

Language

So, it's definitely harder to get around in Vienna with my limited German than it was in Prague with no Czech whatsoever. Mainly because in Prague, everything is very tourist-oriented, and everyone knows English. I saw several cases where two parties of non-native-English-speakers used English to converse, because they had it in common. It also seems like the Czechs have always had to deal with the fact that they were a tiny country, and if they wanted to communicate with other Europeans, they had to use another language. In the late 19th and early 20th century, it was German (think Kafka: lived in Prague, wrote in German). After WWII, it was Russian. Now, it's English. Given the history, each shift makes sense. If people were annoyed at having to speak English, they certainly didn't show it. (Given Prague's history, I can also imagine that I would be fine with speaking English if it were the alternative to Russian or German).

Here in Vienna, too, there are plenty of accomodations made for us foreigners, especially at museums and tourist sites and lots of restaurants. But, it's a large, working capital city, and it doesn't really totally need tourists, so most things are just in German, and unless you ask otherwise, people expect you're going to be speaking it.

So last night I was pretty happy when I was successfully conducting a whole transaction at a cafe in poor but apparently good-enough German. We got some coffee, we got some water. A little later on, we also thought we'd get something sweet, but we didn't have anything specific in mind. So we picked, more or less at random, one of the deserts that looked like some kind of cake. I asked the waitress for that, and, apparently, what I ended up saying was something like "Can I have the assorted cake?". Because the answer was-- in English-- "Which one? we have chocolate, an orange torte, "... etc.

Alas.

Well, I was hoping that Terri would write tonight's post, but she has conked out, so I'll try to recount the day's events as best I can without her, and then let her edit in the morning.

Terri noticed this morning that her camera must not have been properly loaded, so she was pretty bummed that she's not going to get the photos she'd thought she'd gotten. The ones she'd really wanted were a lot of photos of the butterflies at the Schmetterling Haus we mentioned earlier. So the plan was to get the finished rolls developed, and if the Schmetterling Haus photos were missing, to go back and take more. So, after breakfast, we headed to a photo place we'd found out about, but went one stop too far on the tram, so we ended up walking back through the Stadtpark and taking some photos as we went.

We dropped off the film, and then took the tram to the Belvedere, which is a big palace just south of the inner part of town, built by Prince Eugene, after he beat back the Turks in 1683. It was out of town then, but since the city has expanded in the last 320 years, now it's pretty central. It's now mostly museums and gardens, but there's something about it that's not as meticulously well-kept as most of the other palaces and gardens around the city. Maybe we just hit it when they happened to have all the fountains drained, I don't know; that was just my impression. The museum we went to see, though, was another art museum; this one has a lot of older paintings, and some select turn of the century stuff, including a lot of the most famous Gustav Klimt paintings, like The Kiss. There was also a modern guy (30's - 90's) which Terri and I were pretty unimpressed with.

After that, we took the tram back up, and got some lunch at one of Vienna's many fine cafes, Cafe Pruckel. We then picked up the developed film (which was kind of hideously expensive; the rest are going to be developed back at Ferranti-Dege back in Cambridge), and as feared, the Schmetterling photos had not actually been taken. So, since our other big plan for the day was to go to MAK (I'll spare you the German: it's the museum of applied art), and on Tuesdays it's open until midnight, we went back to the Schmetterling Haus, and took some more butterfly photos. It was a little busier than last time, but we did see a few butterflies that had been hiding (or possibly, not-yet-emerged from their cocoon) last time. After we left, the Burggarten was full of teenagers who had just gotten out of school.

We headed back on foot, and decided to stop in at the internet cafe on the way, and upload some photos, and actually post last night's blog entry, and after that headed to MAK.

MAK was very cool; lots of Wiener Werkstatte furniture and designs. A few other exhibits, too, not all of which we went to. We had dinner at the MAK cafe, which came recommended. It was pretty good. By the time we finished dinner, managed to flag down our waiter to get the check, and headed out, it was already approaching 10pm, so we decided to head back to the hotel and rest up for what's going to be a pretty busy day tomorrow. We're planning to hit the central cemetery (which is huge; it's bigger than the city center, and there are 3 million people buried there: more than currently live here), walk along the Danube, check out a nifty, old mechanised clock, walk around some other older parts of town, find the statue of Nathan the Wise (in case you don't know, Terri's father's name is Nathan Wise), go to the Naschmarkt, and the Secession building.

Odd sign

I still haven't figured out what this sign is supposed to mean. My best guess is "no holding hands with headless women".

We just uploaded a whole bunch of new Vienna pictures.

Terri has been taking lots of photos with her film camera that we'll upload when we return.

Greetings from Hotel Zipser. Now that we've found a place with wireless, I'm freed to write posts on the laptop and just post them later, as I'm doing now.

Not too much has happened since our last post. We had dinner at a very cute Italian place around the corner from the hotel. I know it seems like we're constantly going to Italian and asian places, but they always have good vegetarian options (not to mention the fact that we know the names of the dishes since they're not in English to begin with!). The problem with traditional Viennese food is that it's pretty much meat with a side of meat. I do feel like we're getting plenty of local flavor, though. We have had excellent Viennese baked goods; great bread, great deserts at the traditional coffee shops. As long as I stop at any of the many wurstl stands around the city and have a sausage standing up, I'll feel like I got the whole experience.

The main thing I wanted to write about though were these cute kids that were running all over the restaurant. I'm normally not so keen on people letting their kids run wild in restaurants, but the place was not too busy (it's Monday), the parents seemed to know the restaurant staff, the kids weren't causing trouble, and they were cute, which goes a long way. They were totally transfixed by the waiter uncorking our bottle of wine, and giving me the first sip to taste. The little boy helped his little sister up on a chair to help her see the guys in the back making pizzas.

Their dad seemed to be wearing one of the Mozart-era costumes that you see people walking around in here, often in powdered wigs, usually promoting some concert or other. Vienna is like a classical music Mecca, and there seem to be five or six concerts, operas, or some such event every night, performed by dozens and dozens of different organizations. Example: today we saw a sign for the offices of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. You'd think that'd be too small a niche to be viable, but the scene here is so big, the niche seems to exist.

Greetings. We're sitting in an internet cafe that actually has wireless! Woo hoo!

So, we have uploaded a bunch of photos. You can get to them by clicking the bar of photos at the top of the page. You can also find the whole set here.

We also back-posted this entry that Terri wrote back in Prague.

Finally in Prague!

Well, we made it! The flight(s) went without incident, other than not being able to sleep as much as we hoped, which is always how it seems to work. That, and ending up watching a pretty bad movie with Liv Tyler, J. Lo, and Ben Affleck. I find it hard to tune in-flight movies out, even if I don't put on the headphones. Terri seems to think it was called Jersey Girl, but I don't recall ever hearing about any movie being made by that name. I believe her, I just somehow missed this. Anyway, this has also caused me to spend more time than I expected to trying to figure out why Ben Affleck is famous, because he really isn't a very good actor.

We switched planes in Amsterdam at 6am, and made it to Prague by 10, which was a full half-hour early. We were too early to check into the hotel, but we dropped off our bags there, took care of getting our train reservations to Vienna for late tomorrow night, and began our belated adventures in Prague.

We checked out the Mucha Museum. I'll let Terri talk about that since Alphonse Mucha is one of her artist guys. Then we wandered our way up to old town square. Everything is very medieval here. That's actually not entirely true. There seems to be something left from every period of history, but it goes all the way back to medieval stuff. There's baroque stuff, Austrian-ish Imperial stuff, fin de siecle stuff, Soviet stuff, and new stuff (they've got a Frank Gehry building too-- it's like a global plague!)

There are hordes and hordes of tourists of all kinds here. And they all seemed to converge on old town square every hour to watch the famous Astronomical Clock chime: a skeleton rings a bell , a little window opens, and a little statue of each of the twelve apostles comes out and faces outward, and then the window closes and the large bell begins tolling. It is really cool. But the kinds of crowds it draws, you'd expect it only happened once a week or something.

Terri is clamouring to make an update; she rightly points out that she has yet to post anything, so I'll turn the keyboard over to her.

We're off, finally...

Well... we hoped to be greeting you from Prague at this point... but, unfortunately, we're greeting you from beautiful Logan International Airport in Boston.

I'll try to tell the story as quickly and painlessly as possible, because we're ready to forget about it and get on with the vacation already. We were supposed to fly out yesterday at 6:20pm. We made it through the line to the check-in counter at Terminal E at Logan, only to find that there is a requirement to enter the Czech Republic that your passport has to be valid for 90 days after you leave. I don't know what sense that makes, but there you go. Mine expires on December 13th, so they wouldn't let us on the plane, but did give us tickets for today, in hopes that we'd be able to get my passport renewed.

I must say, it was a long ride home to Somerville from the airport after that. For a while I felt stupid, like there was some small print I hadn't seen. But I went back online, checked the stuff that I had gotten from Travelocity, and all that it said in the tool they give you to look up document requirements was that a visa is not required, but a valid passport is. I had looked at this. The airline (KLM operated by Northwest) website does give the correct information, but I never even thought to look there, because the Travelocity page says "here's all the informormation you need to get your document requirements".

So, I spent an unpleasant 45 minutes on the phone with Travelocity "customer service". All I really hoped to do was to get some kind of recompense for the hotel reservation we were losing, and the extra passport fees because I had to do a rush renewal. But their negotiation philosophy seemed to be "start with no" and also "end with no". I became actually unhinged when I couldn't get the rep (actually, the original rep's manager) to admit that the information was incorrect.

Everything I've read on the web since-- including actual newspaper articles, etc., not just posts by angry customers-- indicates that Travelocity's customer service is totally useless even in clear cut cases where they screw up.

The morals are as follows. I strongly discourage anyone from using Travelocity. We used a real travel agent last time, and franky, it wasn't that much more expensive. Also, it doesn't hurt to check with the airline, and talk to a human before travelling abroad!

Christening of our 2004 travel blog

Hello, gentle reader. When we went on our honeymoon to Florence and Barcelona three years ago, we kept a blog of our travels. Initially, the idea was to provide an easy way to let people know that we were OK, safe, and enjoying our travels. It became a full-blown trip diary, and we've enjoyed going back and re-reading about our exploits since.

So, for our third anniversary, we're heading to Europe again. Our journey begins in Prague, continues on to Vienna, and finishes up with a return to Barcelona for the Mercè. And we'll be keeping this blog updated with our adventures. This time, we have a few more blogging tools in our pocket, so, if all goes well, we should be able to upload pictures as we go.

Keep checking back here for updates! (or use the feed , if you know how; it's Atom instead of RSS, which is sort of the only bad thing about Blogger that I've found so far).