Originally, we were supposed to have a fifth day in Budapest—or almost. Our flight from Budapest to Fiumicino (the closest airport to Rome, which lies about 50 minutes outside the city center) was scheduled to leave at 6:30 PM. But after a nationwide travel strike in Italy, our flight was one of the only Alitalia flights not to be cancelled entirely; instead, it was moved to 10:45 AM.
Besides all the stresses that come with a travel strike (e.g., not being able to check into our flight, or even to contact Alitalia about it), we were bummed to lose time in Budapest. We arrived at the airport very early, only to find that not a single Alitalia employee had shown up to the check-in counters. Instead, there were half a dozen contractors who had no clue how to log into the system, find travel itineraries, check luggage, or print boarding passes. (This was obviously not their fault—the airport wasn’t prepared for a strike of this magnitude.) We were second in line to check our bags, which took well over an hour to do (and keep in mind that there were probably a hundred customers behind us), which made the entire flight even more stressful than it had to be.
Read MoreWe started our last full day in Budapest on the island I mentioned briefly in my last blog post, Margitsziget (Margaret’s Island), around which we circled a few times during our dinner cruise. We went without any clue as to what to expect, except its remarkable length and density of trees (which we noticed from the boat). The first thing we saw upon exiting Margaret’s Bridge (a neat structure that has an optional deviation halfway across the Danube to get to the island) was the “Musical Fountain”—a small-scale “World of Color” from Disneyland, where the fountain’s many jets shoot and swirl streams of water in time to music each night. We didn’t get to catch the music show, but even watching the fountain operate in the middle of the day was mesmerizing.
This was at the southernmost tip of the island, which is shaped like a football standing on one end. Along either side stretches a rubber-covered running track that had me drooling. (U.S., catch up!) The center of the island, on the other hand, was a lush forest with intermittent meadows that were being used as soccer fields, track rings, picnic spots, and play areas for kids on field trips. Every now and then, we’d pass a small cottage hotel or a pub, an art museum or a pool—but otherwise, it was just an island filled with nature and the people enjoying it.
Read MoreWe started our third day in Budapest with the craziest bus ride I’d ever taken. Budapest’s public transit is pretty excellent, with a mix of subways, trolleys, lightrails, and buses (all of which arrive regularly and on time)—but this particular bus ride, grounded as it might have been to the electric lines overhead—was about to give us both a heart attack. We averaged somewhere around 60 MPH through winding city streets heading northeast, toward Pest’s Heroes’ Square and City Park, with plenty of brake-slamming and near-pedestrian-hitting. Ryan ended up giving his seat to an older woman who couldn’t keep up with the crazy turns, and she sat down next to me and gently crossed herself while staring straight ahead.
No more buses after that.
Read MoreThis was the first day of our honeymoon when Ryan and I mutually agreed that we were ready to wrap things up and head home. We were exhausted, our feet hurt, our backs hurt even worse, and getting out of bed in the morning was becoming increasingly difficult. This isn’t to say that we didn’t love every second of our remaining time in Budapest, but we were a little more…slow-going, to say the least.
That being said, I wasn’t the happiest camper when Ryan told me late the night before that we had 9 AM tour tickets to see the Parlamento, or the parliament building of Budapest. The tours are notoriously crowded during the rest of the day, hence the early hour—and once we arrived, I was glad Ryan insisted on it. This parliament building is among the most beautiful we’ve ever seen, both inside and out. The interior hallways, domes, and even doorways are so carefully decorated that every detail is noteworthy, but the combined effect is far from overwhelming. We saw the crown jewels, which Hungary handed over to the U.S. for safekeeping during Nazi and Soviet occupation (the U.S. returned the crown only a few decades ago, when all was safe again); we saw the congress chambers, where important governmental decisions are still made to this day; and we saw one of the grandest two-stairway entrances I’d ever seen, which only opens with the induction of new congress members every few years.
Read MoreWe started our first full day in Budapest with an alternative to Rick Steves's written tours (he doesn't offer any audio walking tours...yet): Ryan found a group called My Personal Budapest, which offers various themed tours not unlike our tours in Florence. (In Florence, we went with a Médici-focused tour through the Uffizi and a more fantastical legends-based tour through the Accademia and surrounding old city.) The specific tour we chose was a 9 AM to 6 PM "Hungarian Soul" exploration through aspects of what makes Budapest unique in its history, culture, and expression. András, our tour guide, was born and raised in Budapest and now lives in Buda, the hilly side of the Danube. Just opposite its banks lies the much flatter Pest, less residential and more industrial in nature. In the late 1800s, six cities--including Buda, Pest, and Óbuda ("north of Buda," so you can probably guess where it's located)--joined forces to create a single metropolis, which would be more prosperous and more resilient against invaders. (Unfortunate side note: It didn't really help for the latter purpose. More about that soon.)
We met András in the Astoria district, where he walked us through gardens, plazas, and historic streets. Buildings considered "historic" were only deemed such because the structures that had stood there before might have been hundreds of years old, but given that Budapest has been on the losing side of every war for more than 500 years, much of the city is comparably new. The siege of Budapest--a fight between the occupying Nazis and incoming Soviets--was the second-longest siege of any city during WWII, and it had immeasurable destruction and casualties to show for it; so as is the case in Warsaw, most buildings really stem from no earlier than the 50s.
Read MoreWe started our third, and last, day in Vienna at Demel--a famous chocolate company that opened in 1786, and served Empress Sisi herself during her time in the city. We'd stopped by Demel a few days earlier to buy small bars of dark chocolate (which were amazingly smooth), but never would have imagined we'd be back...for breakfast.
Our last day was a Sunday, which meant the entire city was closed. Shop windows were dark, passersby were heading to late-morning services, and not a drop of coffee was to be found anywhere. The one espresso-brewing, milk-frothing location we could find was the royal chocolatier itself.
So we sat upstairs in what seemed like an old living room or lounge, with its almost Parisian décor and poufs and curved footed tables and gilded mirrors. I finally tried an apfelstrudel (you guessed it: apple strudel), and Ryan got a slice of chocolate cake so sweet that the waiter politely warned him twice just how sweet it was. (Needless to say, he didn't touch anything else with sugar for the rest of the day.)
Read MoreIn a nutshell, today was Day 1 of 2 of Jessica suffering Ryan's love and appreciation for modern art. Day 2 was much worse. At least today offered some Gustav Klimt and the discovery of a new favorite artist.
We started off at the Albertina Museum, just across from the opera house and the Monument Against War and Fascism. The Albertina houses "modern" (read: avant-garde) art stemming back to the 1700s, from Picasso to Egon Schiele. In fact, there was a huge Egon Schiele exhibit while we were there, which was fascinating to go through. (We'd gone through some of his works together while in a bookstore in Portland years and years ago, and a print of one of his many self-portraits hangs over Ryan's desk, but otherwise we knew very little about him. Dude was messed up, but his art was cool.) My favorite part of the museum was discovering an artist I really love, who Ryan also enjoyed enough to dub him "a new favorite": Franz Sedlacek, a thoroughly depressed Polish artist whose work is a perfect mix of creepy and amazing.
Read MoreOver the course of our trip, we've gotten into a sort of rhythm for how we explore and get to know a new place. By this point, we were on our seventh stop, and making our way to a tourist information desk in each new place would have been both exhausting and pointless. (We were aiming for the least "touristy" experience in each place, besides crossing the major sights off our list.)
So we've figured out that the fastest, most informative, and most enjoyable way to start our time in a new city has been to download Rick Steves's relevant audio walking tour (or, where impossible, open his iBook on our iPads) and follow along. Either format comes with a PDF of recommended walks around certain "themes"--the old city, a particular quarter or market area, a nature walk, an historic overview of a city's past. Besides just getting a lay of the land, we'd be able to bookmark sights and attractions we're interested in tackling later, and often Rick will throw in a few side notes about language, culinary, culture, or navigation tips that we couldn't have easily gotten elsewhere.
So we started our day in Vienna at the Wiener Staatsoper, the state opera house, which is absolutely beautiful both inside and out. It was a convenient first stop on our tour anyway, because we had to pick up tickets for the following night's opera (thanks to Carole). Across the street from the Staatsoper was none other than the original Hotel Sacher with its own Sacher Café, the same local chain we'd visited for tortes on the river in Salzburg the previous day. But in Vienna, the tortes were in such high demand--particularly among tourists--that the line wound out the door and snaked its way down the sidewalk.
Read MoreAs much as we loved the diversity of sights and experiences in Switzerland--from charming cities like Luzern to half-kilometer-long villages that haven't been touched by modern civilization--we've agreed that given the challenge of getting into and out of Switzerland, we aren't entirely sure we'll be back any time soon. Even though Salzburg, Austria is only 256 miles away from Interlaken (as the crow flies), it took over nine hours for us to get there by train. Interlaken, like so much of Switzerland, is nestled in wreaths of alps that make any attempt at direct transit impossible. We wound our way to Bern, where we changed trains to get to Zürich, where we changed trains to get to Münich, where we changed trains yet again to finally end up in Salzburg by the mid-afternoon.
It was pouring rain when we finally got to Hotel Mercure just north of the old city. After Bern, this was only our second "real" hotel of the trip, so I was beside myself when I found out we had an actual bathtub (a bathtub!). We dropped off our bags, prepared our umbrellas, and headed out into the onslaught of cold rain.
Read MoreOn our first day in Interlaken, I saw an advertisement for the Schilthorn--a peak not far at all from the town, but challenging to get to because of the stark altitude change from Interlaken (at around 1,800 feet) to the top of the mountain (almost 10,000 feet). But it wasn't the height that caught my attention--it was its fame for being an integral part of a 1969 007 movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." The movie was almost exclusively filmed at a rotating restaurant that had just been opened on top of the Schilthorn only two years before, and the movie culminates in a fight scene that breaks out in that restaurant and on skis all the way down the slope.
Having grown up watching old James Bond movies at my grandmother's, I immediately went running to Ryan while blurting something along the lines of "RYANRYANRYAN THERE'S A ROTATING RESTAURANT WHERE JAMES BOND WAS--" right as Ryan gave me a very Ryan look and said "Yes yes, surprise, we have a reservation for brunch there." (I actually cried.)
Read MoreWe woke up facing yet another cold, rainy day, which meant our original plans to take a boat across the Sea of Thun transformed into a plan to take the Eurail as much as humanly possible throughout the day. Our four-country Eurail passes allow for eight days of travel, which means once you take one train on one of those eight days, you can ride as many trains as you want that day--all for free (and as long as you don't go outside your originally planned four countries). We still had one day to spare, so we decided that if were heading the mere 45-minute journey up to Thun, we might as well ride wherever our hearts led us throughout the day...and with the rain clouds rolling in, there was no telling where that might be.
Thun is a small town on one far end of the Sea of Thun (Thunersee), the lake to the west of Interlaken. It boasts two castles--Thun Castle, atop a hill in the heart of the city, and Oberhofen Castle along its northeastern banks, in what used to be a separate village. It was clear when we arrived that something was off: As small as Thun might be, there was no excuse for the ratio of closed to open shops along its main streets and plazas. For every open store, there were more than a dozen closed ones; café windows were dark, awnings were pulled back (even in the pouring rain), street parking was empty. We trudged through the rain, grateful for our $5 umbrellas from a Coop in Bern, glancing into shop windows and at restaurant menus. It felt like a ghost town.
Read MoreAfter hearing promises of rain and storms for the next day, we decided to sleep in (note: 8 AM) and take it easy on our second day in Interlaken. We had a slow morning in the B&B, went back to the espresso machine one or two times too many, and eventually found our way to Barracuda--a grill just up the street that offered free wifi and great chorizo paninis. It was here that Ryan got to try his first Haarige Kuh brew (see end of previous post), which he loved. Hoping for a different response from Barracuda's owner than from Barrel the night before, he asked if they had a tasting room. The owner shrugged, said Glynn (one of the head brewers) was a friend of hers, and called him on his cell right then and there. A few minutes later, we had a scheduled visit down in our calendar to swing by their brewing warehouse and meet both head brewers.
So in a nutshell, our day comprised working, answering e-mails, catching up on photos and blog posts, and...getting a personal tour of a microbrewery that isn't even open to the public, and tasting beers that had only just been bottled (they hadn't even entered the market). Andy and Glynn were excellent hosts and walked us through the brewing process from a more scientific perspective, which I (as less of a beer person than Ryan) really appreciated, and we left an hour later with a few bottles clinking in our backpacks.
Read MoreWe started our day bright and early on a train from Bern to Interlaken, which was a decently scenic ride through rural Swiss towns, each seemingly competing for the tallest Protestant steeple in the country. (Joke's on them: the tallest steeple is that of the Berner Münster, mentioned in our previous post, in the heart of Bern. But really...these steeples were insane.)
Our train ride took us along the southern banks of the Thunersee (the Sea of Thun) to Interlaken, named for its cozy settlement between two lakes--the Sea of Thun and the Brienzersee (Sea of Brienz). Shockingly, the two cities on either end of these lakes are Thun (to the west) and Brienz (to the east).
We checked into our bed and breakfast, where the owner was a little too excited that we were from Arizona. We quickly found out that Scottsdale is one of Interlaken's few sister cities, which is such a statement for Interlaken that they have signs pointing southwest around the city, informing drivers and pedestrians alike that Scottsdale is only 9,257.61 kilometers away.
Read MoreWe started our day with a bright and early train ride from Venice to Bern. Given the distance from our bed and breakfast to the train station, we were overjoyed to find out that our water taxi passes were still valid for a few more hours that morning, so our day started as any Venetian would hope: rocking on the water with 20- or 30-pound packs, looking out over the unique city of more than 100 islands as tourists started milling around.
The train ride was lovely, and the first time either of us had ever seen the Alps. We passed through rural Italian towns that blended slowly into Swiss villages, and then--seemingly out of nowhere--came the peaks of the Alps themselves. Having grown up with the low, rolling Appalachians in all their ancient glory--and even Ryan, having been raised with relatively low peaks considering the huge shelf of the Colorado Plateau on the way to northern Arizona--these were unlike anything we'd ever experienced. A low elevation (about 1,800 feet for Bern and Interlaken) paired with towering peaks (in Jungfrau's case, 13,642 feet) created such a stark contrast that we could barely comprehend the sharp turn from flat terrain to harsh, craggy mountain.
Read MoreAs I said a few posts back, Ryan was so well-organized in planning this trip that he had the foresight to buy two three-day all-you-can-boat passes (note: this is not what they're actually called) through Venice's vaporetto network. We took one such vaporetto early on our last day to a few other islands in the Veneto lagoon, including Murano, Burano, and Torcello. We got off at Burano, only a 45-minute boat ride from north Venice.
Read MoreWhereas our first day in Venice comprised an overview of the Grand Canal (Venice's main waterway and thoroughfare of goods, vaporetti, and dedicated trash, police, and ambulance boats) and St. Mark's Square, our second day revolved around the square's main constituents: The palace, the Correr museum (and former quarters of Napoleon after he conquered the city), the basilica, and the campanile. The Doge's palace and Correr museum were appropriately fancy, with their velvet walls, gold furnishings, and wall-to-ceiling frescoes. We even saw the largest oil painting in the world, which adorned an entire wall of a 53x26-meter auditorium.
Read MoreBy the time we arrived in Venice, we were desperately in need of food and air conditioning. We made the long, winding trek through confusing canals, bridges, and dead-end alleyways from Venice's "new" train station (established over a century ago) to our bed and breakfast near St. Mark's Square.
For lunch, we found a "street food" vendor (i.e., a tiny closet of a restaurant without seating, but with excellent WiFi) who tossed pasta dish after pasta dish into small folded takeaway boxes. Even though their pesto was listed as having pine nuts (which I'm fine with) and walnuts (which are a bit of a question mark), I was so in need of good pesto that I dove into the order without a care in the world.
Read MoreBecause our thighs and calves clearly weren't complaining enough, we kicked off our last day in Florence with a climb up the Palazzo Vecchio's bell tower. The Palazzo, a town hall-turned-Medici palace (one of many), is testament to the ruling family's fear of rebellion: It's filled with trapdoors, prison cells, and other relics of a Game of Thrones-esque time. The top of the bell tower offered beautiful views of the city, and we were lucky to make it to the top by 10 AM to hear a chorus of church bells go off throughout the city on a sunny Sunday morning.
We visited the Piazza of Santa Croce and the Duomo's museum, the latter of which offered an interactive exhibit of some of the earliest examples of written choir books in existence. Ryan stood in the little room for at least 15 minutes (with books the size of my torso), flipping through digital screens and humming along to the boxy notes and nonexistent key signatures.
Read MoreIf Rome is known for its churches, Milan for its banks, and Venice for its canals, Florence would be best known for its art. The Accademia and Uffizi galleries, both located in Florence, are the metaphorical Louvres of Italy; their selections of Michelangelo, Donatello, Da Vinci, and works by other masters are among the best in the world.
In 2014, Ryan and I "did" the Louvre together: We walked in, found the wing with the Mona Lisa, took photos from the back of a claustrophobically crowded room of a block of canvas much smaller than you'd expect, given its name and reputation. After about a dozen photos each, we nodded to each other, left that wing of the Louvre, took one selfie with a painting of a particularly sassy-looking Jesus, and ended up at the Apple Store beneath the museum because free WiFi.
That was us "doing" the Louvre.
Read MoreWe woke up at dawn and took my first high-speed train to Florence, averaging 246 km/hr (about 150 mi/hr) straight from Rome to Florence's Santa Maria Novela station. Fun fact: This was our first European train experience (either separately or together, unless you count a quick jaunt from St. Albans just 35 minutes south into London in 2014. I was giddy to find out these trains have trolley carts with newspapers and little snack bags, Hogwarts Express style. (Ryan said I shouldn't shout that comparison too loudly.) For only $25 each, we were delivered--fed, watered, and caffeinated--to northern Florence in only an hour and a half.
Lastly, I should add that Ryan wrote all the notes for these Florence posts, so I'm going off his recollections. He literally wrote:
- Frecciarossa train
- Termini to Santa Maria Novela
- 91 minutes
- So fancy
So...I think I'm supposed to add here that it was a "so fancy" train experience. We had little wooden tables to work off and everything.
Read More