Photos: London & Prague

I have gotten some photos for London and Prague online. These are only a subset of the photos I´ve taken in both places since its hard to find time and the right equipment at internet cafes:

• London Photos
  
  
• Prague Photos
  

Day 15 (21 June): The German Frathouse

So I dropped Hugh like a bad habit today and headed to Berlin on my own, since he has plans to go back to the US and hike parts of the Appalachian Trail for the rest of the summer. Before getting to Berlin, I wanted to note how much I enjoyed Budapest, I would definitely go back. In many ways it rivals Paris and London except that its a lot cheaper, a lot more surprising, and more culturally different.

Upon arriving at the airport in Berlin, I was greeted by a exchange student we had in high school, Jullian. He drove me into the city where he arranged to let me stay at his former fraternity house, where his younger brother Götz is still and active member. Its different from an American fraternity in a number of ways:
1) it started as a fencing/dueling society
2) it has more aristocratic roots since it orignally only privledged students/noblemen were allowed to carry swords
3) it is much smaller and has less than a dozen active members, yet their houses are equally, large and nice.
4) people who attend different universities are in the same fraternity; in this house threedifferentt universities around Berlin were represented.

They have a website if you´re interested:
http://www.guestphalia-berlin.de/

That afternoon, we BBQed and went out to watch Germany play Argentina in apparently a very important soccer match. I´ve never seen so many people, so excited about a sport before, even at a Red Sox game. I didn´t get it as an American though, just as they wouldn´t have understood last year´s World Series. Oh yeah, Germany won which meant more party afterwards.

Economic observations of the day:
1) In some countries where they seem to operate under an honor system, they do check your public transport tickets. This happened to me in Budapest today. Budapest is a lot better off economically, however, than Zagreb was. Fortunately, I had validated my ticket and got through.
2) At the Budapest airport, the coke vending machines only dispensed 100 mL per push of the button and had a counter, measuring the amount dispensed over the day. I imagine this prevents ripoffs, etc. Why don´t they have these everywhere or do stores just accept that they are going to get ripped off and people will steal their beverages.
3) Beer. We´ve been lied to in the US. Hefeweizen isn´t actually beer or at least it doesn´t qualify as one in Germany. I learned about the strict requirements of German Beers from the members of the German Frat.
4) Smaller cars, smaller engines, more fuel efficiency. The car discussion came up again today and I learned that VW and Audi actually put smaller engines in some of the same cars here in Germany and all over Europe. You can get an Audi A4 with a 1.6 liter engine and no turbo if you want, but I´m not sure why you would unless you wanted fuel efficiency really badly.

Day 14 (20 June): Giant Communist Statues

Today we tried to get into a lot of sites in Budapest to no avail: the parliament was mysteriously closed, the Enthnography Museum was closed because it was a Monday, etc. We did manage to get into the Budapest Grand Market, which was interesting, but not that different than any other large indoor market hall anywhere. We also saw a church built into a cave. Later in the day we hoped on a bus to head out to the suburbs to see `Statue Park´ which was a park full of old communist statues from countries all over the East Block. Some of which were erected as late as 1989 and were enourmus in size. While it was cool it probably wasn´t worth the several bus/tram transfers it took to get out to it. What was kindof interesting though is that at the park we ran into a group of kids who had just graduated from MIT: one of them rowed their freshman year and two of them were moving to LA in the fall to start PhDs.

Economic/cultural observations of the day:
1) I saw my first non-white person in over a week today. For some reason there doesn´t seem to be much immigration of people into the countries that I´ve been in.
2) Snoop Dogg was here. I think the Hungarians should sue him for copyright infringement on their language since a number of words on their signs take the randomly placed ´z´s that he adds to words and do the same. Fo´ shizzle.

Weird sighting of the day:
One of the Headlines in the English langugage ´Budapest Business Journal´ read ´Tough Times Ahead for Richter.´ Quite ominous. Apparently ´Richter´ is also the name of Hungary´s biggest biotech company.

Day 13 (19 June): Taking to the Waters

There is a lot to do in Budapest and we took on a lot of that today.

We started with the Szechenyi Bath--which are natural thermal baths both indoor and outdoor at 6 different water temperatures housed in a very ornate art deco building--in the city´s large park. Since we wentrelativelyy early on a Saturday morning, we found a lot of men with some impressive beer bellies in speedos, but later in the morning that began to change.

We then proceeded from the park down Andrassy Boulevard, which is Budapest´s 5th Avenue, to the ´House of Terror´ Museum which was in the building used by both the fascists and the communists at varying times aprisonsiotortureture center, etc. The museum documented the history of the city and country under the variregimesemes. It was interesting to compare to the Communism Museum in Prague as it took a very different perspective on the topics. Pragueauge, I remember seeing the quote "thanks for having undergone communism, because without the pain, we would not ask questions," putting a positive spin on some bad times; however, in Budapest, the museum took much more of a victim type approach to the topic.

From there we climed to the top of St. Stephen´s Basilica where there are some excellent views of the city. We continued across the river, back to Castle Hill where we perused the city museum. Later we indulged in wine tasting at the ´House of Hungarian Wines,´ before heading back across the river for dinner and bed.

Economic observations:
1) Beef is Eastern Europe is of terrible quality. We found this out at a very cheap restaurant for dinner, that was describedtruly´truely local place´in our guidebook. Its surprsing that such a staple product in a meat and pasta/potatoes type country, can´t be of at least a similar quality to low end meat in the US.
2) There is a reason why I´d only heard of two varieties of Hungarian wine (Tokaji desert wine and Egri Bikvar) before the wine tasting. Most of their other wines aren´t something to aspire to.
3) Pricing of Hungarian wines in the US is fair. When I looked into shipping some Tokaji back, and then added in shipping charges, I realized that the price per bottle in US stores would be exactly the same as what I´d pay.
4) Merged cities. Budapest is actually the merged independent cities of Buda, Pest, and Öbuda as the three cities grew together and now have one government. Zagreb was similar, in that it was the product of two merged cities, now with one government. Are we heading in that direction in the US as our cities grow? Washington-Baltimore, San Francisco-San Jose, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Los Angeles-Orange County, etc.
5) Magyar is a nearly impossible language to learn... That explains more and more why they all speak English. Its pronunciation is harder than Mandrin, we learned during a conversation with a shopkeeper after failing to pronounce ´thank you´about 100 times. He also told us the grammar is more complicated than French.
6) Hungarians seem to be very good at adapting to external circumstances and taking a practical view on politics and religion: e.g. they change their religions quickly and do the same same with the economic regeimes. They´re smart, after all this is where George Soros came from.

Day 12 (18 June): Wandering the labyrinth

Took a train from Pecs to Budapest this morning. Unfortunately we had to take another local train so there we spent a lot of time looking out the window at what is actually some quite nice looking farm land for 5+ hours.

Budapest turned out to be quite a simple city tonavigatee once we arrived and they have a very efficient subway (which is the continent´s first.) The only strange thing about their subway is how quickly thescalatorrs in the station move--much, much faster than I´ve ever seen before. We stayed again in another ´guesthouse´or room that an old woman was renting out; she turned out to be just as polite and crazy as the woman in Pecs was. It was also in a fantastic location near the Hungarian Parliment--a buliding on the Daunbe that dare I say it with any Brits around bests Westminster.

Since it was late when we arrived there wasn´t much we could do in terms of sites, but we got ourselves oriented with the city and made it into the Labrynth under the city´s castle. The Labrynth is a natural cave formed by sulphur deposits since the city sits at the edge of a large mountain range. They were originally inhabited by ´cave men´ in ancient times and late used as basement storage for the castle and occasionally prisions. They served as a cold war operations center as well.

We continued North on the west bank of the Danube to Obuda (or really, really old town) where we had dinner at a nice traditional Hungarian restaurant that was quite tasty. Hungarian food, thus far, has been the best, most flavorful food, on my trip. We also climed a hill to see the tomb of Guli Baba (which has become an Islamic pilgramage site) as Guli Baba was a Turk who helped overtake the city.

Economic observations:
1) Nothing will prevent Europeans from smoking. I personally hate smoking so this is getting frustrating for me, since all of my clothes, etc. smell like smoke by now. High sin taxes don´t phase them, nor do no smoking signs on trains.
2) Transportation in Hungary could still be better; it seems to me that Saturday would be a higher traffic day for long hauls, but they run no express trains on Saturdays.
3) Magyar, the Hungarian language, is like no other language in the world (except remotely like Finnish.) The Magyar people, Hungarians, came originally to Europe from Asia )Mongolia and Norhtern Inida, but certainly look Caucasian. As a result of having such a unique langugae, Hungarians all learn English, German, or both in order to deal with outsiders.

Day 11 (17 June): South Central (Hungary)

Took a morning train from Zagreb to Pécs in South-Central Hungary today. Pécs is a really picturesque town that is a UN World Hertiage site given the number of historical ruins it has: Roman city walls, early Christian musleoums, Mosques (that now serve as Christian churches) from the period of Turkish rule, functioning mosques, and synagogues.

We came on the day when the town was hosting a festival for Hungarian folklore and Hungarian folk music, so it was very hard to find a place to stay. We ended up in a very nice place (that incidentally was also cheaper) than anything in our guidebook as well, run by an old woman out of two extra rooms she had in her court-yard style house. It was great spending the afternoon listening to the local music and eating local food at the festival despite some quite warm tempratures.

Economic observation of the day:
1) Its hard to understand the evolution the American dream in some ways when you look at a town like Pécs. The goal of people in Pécs was to be within the city walls and have a private courtyard inside your house with flowers and grass there, yet the American dream is to live in the suburbs (outside the city walls), have a small yard around your house that's less easy to use and enjoy in many ways as the internal courtyard, and not be within walking distance of everything you need.
2) Why don't more people in the US rent out rooms as guesthouses? It seems like a great, low-maintence way to supplement income.
3) Transportation networks do not flow very well between Croatia and Hungary and its surprisingly difficult to get between the two countries. We managed to do so on local-only trains that stop every 5 km for Pécs. There are inter-city trains to Budapest, but as far as we could tell, no bus lines between Zagreb and anywhere in Hungary. This is all very surprising to me considering the two countries share long borders, both were communist countries, and never fought a war in recent history. Even more surprising is the number and frequency of routes between Serbia and Croatia considering the two just got out of a war with each other.
4) 'Rat tails' never go out of style. Almost instantly after crossing the Hungarian border, we began spotting men with the 'rat tail' hair style popular in the 1980s. 'Mullet' like haircuts are also big in Hungary, at least in the more rural areas, but the same might still be said in the US.

Weird sighting of the day:
We saw a man putting a kid tri-cycle on the roof bike rack of his brand new 3-Series BMW. It looked really funny because tri-cycles are so small and not expensive looking like his car. Besides which, the tri-cycle would fit easily in his trunk. Maybe showing that he had one for his kid was some kind of additional status symbol and that was the point?

Day 10 (16 June): Recent Warzone?

We took a very early bus from Ljubljana to Zagreb (Croatia) this morning. I ended up striking up a conversation with an older woman who generously paid in Slovean Tolars our 2 USD luggage transport fee for the bus. Such a fee was not advertised, but the driver would not let us on the bus without paying it, even though we had spent our last Tolars since the currency is pretty much useless and illiquid outside of the Delaware-sized country.

She was an older Croatia who had left the country over 30 years ago first moving to Germany and then to Canada. Some interesting tidbits from the conversation were:
1) There are over 500,000 former Croatians living in Toronto alone (although she said they don't have a very cohesive community there)
2) She thought many of the former Croatians living in Canada would start moving back to retire on the supposedly beautiful Adriatic Coast in Croatia on their foreign pensions which are worth much more in the former Yugoslav state.
3) Young people in Croatia no longer have forced military service (which seems strange for a country that in the last very recently fought a war). Instead she complained that they all waste time and money taking 6 months off to spend them at the 'Disko-teka'

Zagreb itself was a much nicer city than I imagined it would be and there were no signs that it was a recent warzone which surprised me. The president's house which was shelled during the war, in particular, showed no signs of damage or even recent reconstruction. The city itself is built into a hill overlooking a large valley.

Zagreb was also much more overtly Catholic than any other city I've been too which was surprising for a place with a 1.5M population. I've never seen so many nuns on the street or a place with such strict clothing guidelines for entering its churches. (I guess this lends credibility to the war between the Serbs and the Croats being over ethnic and religious differences.)

Later that evening, I experienced a slight scare that turned out for the best: I left my day pack with passport and onward plane tickets for the rest of my trip in a restaurant downtown, but didn't realize it, until we had made it back to our hostel, 45 minutes on a tram away. Fortunately, the girl who managed the hostel (an American from Lancaster, PA) had here Croatian husband drive us back to the restaurant in his 20-year old Yugo (which I thought was cool to get to ride in) and my bag was still there. Along the way we talked about a couple things:
1) Particularly high unemployment in Croatia. He seemed to think it wasn't as bad the official statistics since a lot of people work contract jobs and don't report the income or their employment to avoid paying taxes. He attributed this to why the government doesn't' have any funds to do anything with.
2) He also solved the public transportation mystery from Prague for me (since Zagreb has a similar system where you are supposed to validate tickets you purchase elsewhere). The truth in Zagreb at least is that the government intentionally doesn't check people's tickets because it wants to encourage public transit for those seeking jobs. For people with jobs they are required to buy longer transit passes through employers.

Economic observation of the day:
1) Highway infrastructure in the Balkans is definitely improving as we saw a lot of construction along the bus route. Many American style highways with exits and dividers are being built.
2) There are very few traffic lights in Zagreb despite huge intersections and a large number of cars. At the busiest intersections instead there are people directing the flow of traffic and at others drivers seem to wait for a certain period of time and then the flow of traffic just switches. Its pretty amazing that more accidents don't occur or that the government doesn't fund public works for it, since clearly there will be more and more drivers as the country recovers from the war, from Communism, and from being led by a non-communist totalitarian regime.

coincidence of the day:
The NY Times Travel Section just wrote an article about hiking in Europe including a section on the Slovnia's Julian Alps where I just was:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/travel/19hiking.html?th&emc=th