Storm Of The Century (May 2009 ed.)!!!

We live in a basement apartment... well, sort of-- standing up in the apartment, "ground level" is roughly at belly-button level. Ergo, a small flight of stairs leading down to the door. It's been raining REALLY HARD the last couple days, and well... the pictures speak for themselves at this point. The water seeped under the door, into the mud room, and was heading into the living room on a collision course with the carpets and electronics. I went out the side window with two buckets and bailed water for about 25 minutes. For more Storm Of The Century!!! photos, click HERE, or follow the links on the right hand margin of the screen.

Salzburg Pictures Are Up!

Sorry everybody for the slow posting here. The Salzburg, Austria pictures are now up on the photo site, so you can click on the link on the right hand margin, or HERE to see them, as well as the old Budapest photos for any of you laggards out there. As with the previous set, once in the photo site, you can select "slide show" to see the photos on a roll, or click and and advance each photo seperately, which allows you to read my marginally coherent commentary and comment on the pics yourself. My overall impressions:

- It's a beautiful city on a river ringed by the Austrian Alps-- in other words, everbody's dream version of an old European city, except this one is real. To steal a line from Douglas Adams, it's the kind of scenery that makes you want to break out in spontaneous applause. As nice as these photos turned out, the real thing is even more pretty.

- Despite it being touristy, I really liked Salzburg (and B was absolutely bananas ga-ga over it-- this must be how I look at an auto show). It's a really charming small city with things to see, places to go, and things to do. It was Mozart's birthplace and primary residence for many years (this is referenced everywhere you look, to almost comic levels), and it's a music lovers' paradise-- there's a free concert being put on almost every day of the year, usually by world class musicians.

- If you're not there for the fact that it's Mozart's birthplace (and if you didn't know it beforehand, you sure as shootin' will know within about 10 minutes after arriving in town), then English speakers are obviously there for The Sound of Music, which was largely filmed in Salzburg and the immediate area.

- Interesting thing about The Sound of Music: Most Austrians have not seen it. It was only about 9 years ago that this film was dubbed into German. The Von Trapp family story is known in Germany and Austria-- but through a different movie, the beloved German film Die Trapp Familie. The Sound of Music, an English-language musical with a (mostly) British and American cast, was immediately discounted as a pale imitation, and with the time lag between its initial release (1965) and its eventual dubbing into German (2000) is also very late to the party. Rest assured though that everybody in Salzburg has seen it-- 44 years after its release, the film still draws literally hundreds of thousands of fans a year to the city. This may break a few hearts but the movie took MANY Hollywood liberties, far too numerous to explain here-- another reason the Austrians don't care much for it. And the song "Edelweiss" is not an old Austrian folk song; it's something Rodgers & Hammerstein cooked up for the play and movie.

- Prepare yourselves for a bit of sticker shock. The Euro exchange rate is as bad as ever to the US Dollar, but some of the prices from the downtown stores bordered on price gouging: €7.40 for a 4-pack of AA batteries, and €2.70 for a small bottled water work out to $9.90 and $3.60 for all my American friends. Like I said, it's touristy. But reading up and being smart goes a long ways. It's a college town, and the locals sure aren't going to pay top dollar for their apple streudel (the local delicacy; the secret is in the sauce BTW)-- figure out where the students and local residents eat and shop, and you'll find better food and realistic prices.

Barring a quick 3-day jaunt to a close-by German city in the interim, our next scheduled trip will be to Dublin, Ireland in June-- but that's a month away. In the meantime, click on the links and enjoy the photos!

Why Guys Like Me Rarely Stay In Places Like This

Despite my initial ambivalence, Salzburg, Austria was a surprising joy and I'd recommend it to anybody-- you see, other than 5 minute bits here and there over the years, I've never seen "The Sound of Music," so I had no real reason to visit this city, but I came away a fan of the place. So while the pics are in the process of being put up, I'll give you this story of our stay:

We stayed at the 5-Star Sheraton Salzburg, mainly because we got a great deal on the room. I've traveled a bit and stayed in my share of nice hotel rooms, but on the whole, the majority of hotels/motels I've stayed in are on the "budget" end of the spectrum (best worst place: some motel in the jerkwater town of Mount Vernon Missouri, located between I-44 and a cow pasture-- the place was so sketch I felt the need to barricade my door with my luggage). Anyhoo, I'm taking a shower in the Sheraton, but the light switches don't seem to activate the fan. I notice a cord hanging in the shower. It's the same material and thickness as some of those hotel clothesline deals, but it's hanging free, so I give it a tug to retract it-- nothing. I try again-- nothing. Hmmm, maybe it's for the bathroom fan, so I yank on it a few times. Nothing. What the deuce, man? It was at this point I noticed the sticker at the base of the cord: It was an emergency cord to alert the front desk that, ahem, I've fallen and I can't get up. And I must've pulled on that sucka 5-8 times by this point. A quick shout to B in the other room to alert the front desk that I didn't keel over or fracture my skull slipping on a loofah, and there we go-- nice touch, but you shouldn't let card-carrying Super-8/Howard Johnson Express Inn frequent guests like me near things like that. For the record, the fan never did work.

More on Salzburg later this week!

Another Quickie Vacation

Well, B got an unexpected present in a rare Thursday-off request coming to pass, and Friday is a paid Holiday here in Germany, so... we're off to Austria for a long weekend. Salzburg, specifically. You know, the birthplace of W.A. Mozart, the greatest composer in all of western music. Oh yeah, B tells me it's also the place where that "Sound of Music" movie was filmed too. News and photos coming soon!

Pictures are Ready!!

Well, it took longer than I would've preferred, but the Budapest photos are up and waiting for all to see. In the end, I did use the newer BlueMelon service, thanks to its massive storage, easy uploads and complete lack of advertising. To access the photos, the link will permanently be on the side margin, but you can also click HERE

You can enter each photo individually (about 90% have captions/commentary), or you can simply use the "slide show" feature to see the pics on a roll, without commentary. Clicking on the image will enlarge the photo. And please feel free to leave comments of your own. Enjoy!

Still Waiting? Yeah, Me Too.

Still waiting to see those Hungary photos, eh? Well, lemme tell you, trying to find a decent online photo sharing service that won't bombard visitors' emails with spam or pollute its own pages with banner adverts, afford us a bit of privacy and be easy enough for everybody to use is... still forthcoming. I like BlueMelon, but who in the blue hell has even heard of it? Soon, everybody, soon. In the meantime, it's almost a week later, so before I forget too much, here are some of the memories of the trip:

- We basically did it, for better or worse, without a guide book. The book that we ordered (from the hipster Wallpaper City Guide series, Phaidon Press) didn't make it to the bookstore in time. So we printed and cobbled together some pages from Lonely Planet online, which proved to be... outdated. Every one of the recommended restaurants we tried to go to not only was closed, but had been for quite some time. While this left our trip a bit more freeform and pleasantly unplanned, it sure would have been nice to know the backstory of what we were looking at sometimes.

- Everybody in Budapest speaks English. Not just passable English either-- fluent English. The one guy who didn't worked in this upscale pizza joint and spoke a bit of German, so we muddled through. If your travel plans are decided/overruled by perceived language barriers, don't worry-- you won't have any difficulties here.

- I'm a bit of an architecture buff and this city of 1.7M inhabitants has arguably the most ecclectic collection of buildings anywhere-- and lots of them. Baroque, Beaux-Arts, Classicist, Romanesque, Gothic and Art Nouveau, even a bit of Bauhaus thrown in. More depressingly, there's also a lot of tilt-up Communist slabs too-- yuk. I'd hazard a guess that about 80-85% of these gorgeous buildings are in a state of decay as well-- I muttered "gloriously decrepit" as a description and it stuck-- because these faded grand dames were still breathtaking-- almost as breathtaking as the fact that a lot of buildings (all of which had residents and offices in them) still seemed to be standing mostly out of habit. Don't let that stop you though-- there is a LOT of money going through Budapest and Hungary these days, and one-by-one those buildings are getting refurbished, and the finished product looks stunning. But for much the same reasons as I prefer Reno over Vegas, I like Budapest-- maybe I'm from the old school, but a little bit of grime and a little less clean-scrubbed is what makes a city a city. If you can look past the soot and peeling paint-- Budapest is beautiful.

- I avoid discussing politics as a general rule, but if anybody needs to see an example of the inherent failure of the Communist system, I say get thee to Budapest-- the reason those beautiful buildings are in such disrepair was because the Communists (who got booted in 1989-- it's a parlimentary republic form of government now) found the buildings vulgar, and didn't have the funds for upkeep anyways. Those awful concrete slabs with holes punched out for windows are, oddly enough, in about the same sham-bolic shape as their 100-year-older bretheren thanks to bad design, cheap materials, and lousy workmanship. With the influx of money occurring from tourism and industry, things are turning around at an astonishing rate. I've traveled a bit, and I can honestly say that I've never seen as many construction cranes in one place as I did in Budapest.

- Hungary's a good enough deal, though not rock-bottom cheap. It's not on the Euro, but on their own currency called the Hungarian Forint (HUF), whose exchange rate worked out to a dizzying 1 Euro = 290 HUF. A very memorable evening in a wine bar set us back a whopping 5800 HUF (20 EU), and we waddled out of there. Be warned: Hungary is planning to go on the Euro sometime in 2012-13, so get out here before everything normalizes. But folks looking for cut rate designer label stuff-- Armani, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Promod, etc.-- all of these stores are here-- the pricing equals out to the rest of the world, so no special discounts on that front.

- There is such a thing as Hungarian wine, and they are quite proud of it-- 22 distinct wine growing regions, with all the basic types covered (red, white, rosé, sparkling, dessert), and a history that dates back to Roman times. It's all quite drinkable stuff too-- and is not just the cheapo Egri Bikavér (aka Bull's Blood) you can find at Fred Meyer, Trader Joe's, etc. World class? Not really, but give these guys time. At the risk of damning with faint praise, it's still better than any German wines we've quaffed.

But... patience is a virtue as they say, so bear with us a little bit longer-- the shots (and commentary) will be worth it.

Holiday Teaser

B and I just returned last night from our first out-of-Germany trip: We spent 4 days in the terrific city of Budapest, Hungary. There is the temptation to do a full-blown travelogue, but that tends to make people's eyes glaze over. At the moment, there are a lot of pictures to be edited/cleaned up/sweetened, and they will probably be posted to an off-site photo blog like Picassa and liked to from here on this blog. But for now, I'll just say that I would recommend Budapest to anybody in a heartbeat-- it's not as well known as, say, Prague, and that's the hook-- before (re)development completely engulfs it and turns this city into a clean-scrubbed, Disney-fied version of its former self, there is much to recommend. But for now, enjoy this one photo-- that's the view from our hotel window of the Hungarian Parliment building at night (click on photo for enlarged view). While we did not find Budapest to be a hyper cheap "bargain," we paid only 70 Euros a night for a 4-Star hotel with Danube views like this. More to come!