Jolimont Sharehouse

Friday, May 30, 2003

We have arrived safely back in Melbourne. While colder, there is still plenty of blue sky so it's not too bad.

I really enjoyed our stay in charming Budapest. Marie and I went for another spa, this time at Gellert Hotel Spas. Below is a photo of the magnificent men's spa. Fortunately, this image does not include the middle-aged men with their "aprons" on. (These are A4-sized flaps of thin white cotton with ties for the waist, leaving the wearer feeling more nude than simply being naked!)

We had dinner with Sabine and two of her friends, Jenny and Uma. Sabine is doing well, and it was great to catch up with her and meet her friends. They have been flitting from city to city every couple of days, covering most of Europe in a month, and plan to keep on doing the same in the US (seven months). Unbelievable!

For our last night overseas, we stayed at a swanky four star place in Vienna (we got it cheap through a last-minute web booking). As we only had one evening in Vienna, we strolled around die Innere Stadt taking in the architecture. As the photos on this link show, this city is just chockers with jaw-dropping monumental buildings. It was a case of walking around a corner, seeing yet another huge palace and saying "well, that's the Hapsburgs for you". (Does a townhall really need Gothic spires of such grandiose appearance? I guess it depends on the message the civil administation is sending to the monarchy and church.) I realise now that the beautiful neo-Gothic parliament and St. Stephen's Basilica in Budapest are just left-overs from what was happening in Vienna in the preceeding decades. I can't help but wonder if European history in the 20th Century wouldn't have panned out differently if some of these resources went into building up the Austro-Hungarian army instead. Anyway, they lost (twice) and so now these city-centres are a postcard from 1910.

My last meal in Central Europe was dumplings with bacon-bits inside, clovey sauerkraut with baye leaves and frothy beer. I'm really going to miss that beer.

--- posted by Greg 4:50 pm

Monday, May 26, 2003

Hello world! We're now back in Budapest - our last stop before returning home :-(

Gerd, glad to hear that your trip to Paris was enjoyable. Don't worry about not seeing all the sights in one week - it's not like there is an official list of 54 things to see in Paris, and once you've done that you're finished with the city. The main thing is that you and Anna enjoyed your time there, and you know that you will when you go back.

I've not blogged for a week or so, so I'll bring you up to speed. We visited a little spa town about 12 km out of the Sibiu (Baile Ocna Sibiului) It took about 40 minutes on the train, because it moves so slowly. We were expecting a spa, but it's actually a series of ponds about 20m across. We got changed and sort of got a little way in before chickening out - it was green, slimy, cold and full of insect larvae. Given I was on antibiotics I feel my piking was acceptable. So we went for massages and jacuzzi at the health centre next to it.

We travelled to Brasov, which is a much larger (former Saxon) town in the south east of Transylvania. I was particularly impressed by the surrounding Translyvanian Alps. It was weird for me to be in a train surrounded by green and 27 degrees while looking at snow-capped mountains. We did a trip to nearby Sinaia to viit the Peles Castle, and got to see more snowy mountains. This amazing castle has each room decorated in a different style. A tad overdone - in fact quite gauche - it still impresses. The piazza at Brazov has a wonderful Gothic Church - apparently the largest between Vienna and Istanbul. I also discovered tasty Romanian food at Restaurant Karmel. The ciorbe ("chorba") sour soups I'd been having to date were so-so, but here they are fantastic! We travelled up a cable car to admire the views of the city. A highlight for me was visiting the Museum of Ethnography where we were given much good advice and commentary from a young curator there, Tristan. They have an excellent display on textiles showing how the raw fibres (wool, flax, cotton, silk and hemp) get processed into threads, fabrics and garments by different ethnic groups at different points in history. I also liked the short video on the traditional folk art of egg-painting.

We took the overnight train from Brasov to Budapest (6pm to 8:30am, with customs at 4am). We slept in couchettes (6 to a cabin) and it was odd having my face 10cm from the ceilling. But, I slept quite well and the gentle rocking and muffled clacking of the train was actually soothing. We had a bit of a mixup with our accomodation booking. The website for Marco Polo Hostel is actually www.marcopolohostel.com/ NOT www.hostelmarcopolo.com/ like the Lonely Planet says. So, our booking was "stolen" by Hotel Rila, which has the faux site, and that's where we're staying.

We've been hanging out with Richard, Marie's Dutch friend from her exchange in Amsterdam (and his exchange to Melbourne). It's been great and Budapest is a fanstastic city. The food is good, the public transport top-notch and the sight-seeing unbeatable. Yesterday Richard and I took the waters at Lukacs baths. Both Richard and I are quite blind without our glasses and neither of us can read or speak Hungarian, so we got a bit disoriented and baffled. Actually, being nearly naked, wet, lost and blind in a foreign land where you don't know the customs while public nudity is involved is pretty close to my worst nightmare. At least I brought my own bathers, and, unlike Richard, wasn't in a pair of tiny speedos rented from the lost and found bin. Last night we made a visit to the Operahouse to watch the ballet (Adam's "Gisele"). It is an amazing building and seeing a first-class performance for $5 is too good an opportunity to pass up.

Today and tomorrow we're seeing museums, galleries and churches, and tomorrow night we're going to catch up with Sabine for dinner, as she's in town at the moment. I have to say I'm loving this city - there's so much to see and do but it's not a tourist factory like Certain Other Central European Capital Cities. Even though we have to leave on Tuesday, I'm sure we'll return. My half hour is up - so I will write more next week.

--- posted by Greg 12:07 am

Monday, May 19, 2003

Congrats from me too, Neal and Penny. We must cool the house when you depart.

We had a nice time in Cluj-Napoca. I'd like to give a plug to Hotel Piccolo Italiano, as the landlady was adorable. If you're looking for accomodation in Cluj-Napoca, you can't go wrong. It's a private room attached to a house (not a hotel), it's a big room (not piccolo) and she speaks French and German (not Italian), so I don't get the name. But, if you want personalised yet intrusive service (in a nice old lady way), you can't go wrong.

We went to Sighisoara, a really cute UNESCO-listed medieval citadel. It's very historic and interesting, and claims to be the birth place of Vlad Tepis (Vlad the Impaler - historical figure Dracula was based on). As well as seeing the sights in the township, we got a day trip to visit surrounding Saxon villages and castles by Werner our waiter at the Hotel Pioenita. (It's a sly side-business of his. This area has been Saxon for 800 years, but most have moved back to Germany when the wall came down.) It was a great trip - we even got to bribe the custodian of a Hungarian castle to get a look around (the restoration project has been abandoned).

No we're in nearby Sibiu (Hermannstadt to the Saxons). It's a lot bigger and we've been doing the usual piatsa/church/gallery/museum thing. We're going to hear an organ recital in the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church tonight, and hopefully get out to the spa resort out of town tomrrow. Next stop, is Brasov in a couple of days.

My cold has lingered as a sniffle for the last few days, and this morning I woke up with an earache. I figure that this is NOT the place to be having any medical problems, so I headed down to the pharmacy and self-prescribed some Amoxcyllin antibiotics (for US$1). I hope that's what it is - I had to order in French! But the packet looks right, and I can kind of read the instructions Romanian is close to Italian :-) I find this interesting - you see this part of the world was very late in breaking the institutionalised royal monopoly power of the guilds (I think around 1875). However, they're also very late in re-instating the medical guild through state-enforced monopolies on prescribing rights (ie nurses, vets, pharmacists - even "well-informed" citizens - can prescribe here). Anyway, I'm hoping that this treatment will head off any possibile complications arising from the gooey ear.

Some of my readers - alright Taj - has asked for sweeping generalisations about Central and Eastern Europeans. I feel that it's a bit rich to sweep through a country for a week or two, hanging out in pensions, museums and trains stations and then speak about the entire region. Still, I can say this: these people by and large think very differently about health. But, all the bad habits seem to cancel out to a certain extent. For example, not eating fruit at all, and only eating vegetables occasionally and when boiled to death in a soup. This is no problem, as the gristle in the poor quality meat takes the role of fibre and roughage in a normal diet. Similarly, drinking spirits for breakfast (this first time I ordered a capuccino at 9am and it came with rum was a shock!) and wine throughout the day (white wine only before lunch, please!) and beer just when ever (why sit on a train when you can sit on a train drunk?) might seem like it will kill you young. Not at all. The cigarettes will wipe you out long before that. I suspect that Eastern European cigarettes are in fact the collected butts of the rest of the world, shredded and re-sold. They are so bad, and EVERYONE young and old (well, 50 is old, but they look 70) smokes more or less continually everywhere. Including in between courses in restaurants. Mindboggling.

I watched a bit of cable TV a week ago, and this channel EuroNews (like CNN) had a "high tech" cutting-edge science show. The story? Some scientists (Hungarian?) have found that eating fruit and vegetables can make a major difference to bowel cancer, and like, 20 other health things. Seeing a scientist solemnly intone "We think you should eat these every day to get the benefits" being presented as cutting-edge science news was bizzare to say the least.

I'll have more ill-informed opinion about queue etiquette here in the next installment.

--- posted by Greg 12:19 am

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Now we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania (Romania). We decided to travel through Oradea as it didn't look that interesting. I've had a pretty shitty couple of days as I've been crook with a head cold. I managed to drag myself out of bed on Sunday at 6am, load up on cold tablets and hit the road, or rather, the rail. The Romanian customs doctor that was handing out World Health Organisation SARS brochures at the border sure gave me a damn hard look.

We're staying in a tiny old lady's private room near the city-centre. She must be at least 75, and speaks French and German, as well as Romanian, so we get by with a pidgin mix of French, German and Italian. She found out I was sick and insisted on plying me with tea with lemon and honey. She's very sweet. Marie has been a very patient nurse as well. So I feel much better today and am up for sight-seeing.

Romania is Vietnamesque. I don't just mean that turn-of-the-century-grand-architecture-gone-shabby. I mean you can't drink the water, there are piles of rubbish in the street, pitiful dirty kids hassle you in cafes and restaurants to buy posies from them, business is conducted in hard currency (Euros in this case), beggars are rife, disfigured and persistent, toilets are a hole in the ground and packs of wild rabid dogs roam the streets. Vietnam has a more entreprenurial spirit though. Ie you could haggle with them. Maybe they never bought into the communism thing so completely as here. Still, it's very cheap here - a good room (with hot water!) costs about $10 a night and food is even more affordable.

Speaking of food, I had a dream about vegetables a couple of nights ago. I miss them. I dreamt that I was pleading with a waiter for some cauliflower au gratin, like my Aunty Dexter makes. I remember pleading "but it has two kinds of cheese and paprika!", by way of compromise with the stern Hungarians. I'm still making up my mind about Romanian cuisine. There seems to be a hell of a lot of pork and potato and brain. Hmmm.

The train trip into Transylvania was amazing - rivers, waterfalls, cliffs etc. I'm looking forward to seeing a bit more of the countryside on the train tomorrow.

--- posted by Greg 8:49 pm

Friday, May 09, 2003

We're visiting the picturesque Danube Bend now (Esztergom, specifically). It's a lovely and relatively relaxed town. We're thinking we'll head over to Romania (Oradea) tomorrow or the next day. We'll spend about 10 days in Romania, getting about as far as Brasov and avoiding the capital Bucharest. Then we'll come back into Hungary for four or five days in Budapest, hopefully catching up with Richard and Sabine.

We hiked into Hungary from Slovakia over the Danube River. We got off the train at Komarno (Slovakia) and trekked across the steel bridge over the Danube into Komarno (Hungary), clearing customs at a peninsular in the middle of the river. Marie, of course, tried to rush through the customs bit on the left (ie entering) side. Fortunately, the border guards showed great restraint and she wasn't mowed down in a hail of gunfire. Anyway, for us Aussies crossing a national boundary on foot was something of a novelty, but lugging our heavy packs around in 30 degree heat for a couple of hours probably won't be required again.

This part of Hungary seems well and truly Germanified. This makes a nice change from the suprisingly Italian Czech and Slovakia. I had an amazing ragout (soup) at this restaurant here: it was rich with venison, peas, champignons and other veggies and served in a hollowed out crusty bread "bowl". The waiter was under the misapprehension that Marie spoke German, so when I tried to order the pumpkin soup he would hear none of it and joked with Marie in German about something (possibly involving me needing my strength?) and insisted I have the ragout. For some reason, this kind of pushy behaviour is only tolerable in classy places with very fruity waiting staff. Anyway, it was well worth it.

I always knew that Hungarians were not a Slavic people, but I'm struck by how different the language is. As I understand it, English is part of the German/Dutch/Danish group, with strong elements of the Romance languages (French/Italian/Spanish). Slavic is sort of like cousins - there are some common words but it sounds quite different. Hungarian though is from Central Asia and English is closer to Indian languages based on Sanskrit than Hungarian! The gap is about as big as between English and Japanese. This makes things very disorienting. As a sign of the magnitude of the communication gap, we have to fall back on our German (Gerd, you should have heard me booking the doppelzimmer for drei tags on the seben, acht and neun!) From the reading on Romania, it should be a little easier as it is a Latin-based language and some stuff is similar.

Re: Prague. Marie tells me that the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has updated the travel warnings there since we left as a result of the tourist scams. I can't say I'm suprised. I don't regret the concrete bloc homestay - it was an eye-opener and a memorable experience. Maybe we can find a worse one in Romania.

--- posted by Greg 9:32 pm

Monday, May 05, 2003

After Prague, we went to a small town about 100km away called Kutna Hora. It has a great Gothic cathedral and really cute cobble-stoned sqaures. The main draw card is this gothic ossuary - a kind of crypt decorated with about 40,000 human bones. It's both creepy and cheesy. Well worth the visit. We stayed at the excellent Hotel Anna. Centrally located, really clean, quiet, beautiful rooms and extremely helpful staff. At less than $25 each (including breakfast) it's the best value for money we've seen.

Now we're in Bratislava (capital of Slovakia) and staying in a cheap and cheerful pension in the heart of town. The gorgeous weather has followed us here. For the last few days, it's been clear blue skies, a slight breeze and well over 25 degrees. In fact, the weather has been outstanding for our whole visit so far, with no rain to speak of.

I'd like to write a few things about Prague now. Basically, I didn't enjoy it that much. Judging from some of the people we saw and the posters around the place, I get the feeling that there is a vibrant underground culture there - progressive house music and avant garde jazz, experimental theatre and student-driven filmmaking. But, it only survives by making sure that people like me don't find it. It is unbelievably touristy in the old town. Like thousands of tourists being led through squares by tour guides holding aloft umbrellas and staffs with coloured ribbons so they know who to follow. It does for travelling what battery hens do for egg laying. The non-touristy outlying areas that I saw are so bleak and ugly and rundown it's depressing.

We stayed at Opatov, 20 mins out on the metro. There were two or three dozen 15 story communist-era grey architectural crimes perched on a hill. To make it more depressing, you could tell it was once a nice meadow because the bright green lawn strewn with daisies is still there, with metre-wide concrete paths criss-crossing it and these disgusting eyesores just plonked haphazardly around. The room itself was okay, but the owner was a grotesquely quintessential spiv - hugging us and nearly being moved to tears when we left, while slapping down a mysterious "tourist tax" (that we politely disputed) at the last second. Nauseating.

If Berlin is a document of 20th century European history, Prague is a laboratory for idealogies: which will break the spirit faster - unchecked capitalism with it's sex shops, non-stoping gambling and rip-off merchants, or communism with it's disregard for human sensibilities, shabiness and decay.

For any travellers reading this, here are some tips and tricks for surviving Prague:

Food:

Get the menu in Czech first, stare at it for a while, and then ask for the English menu explaining that your guide book isn't as good at translating as you'd hoped. Getting both has two advantages: you can check that the prices are the same and you can find out Czech words like meat, appetizer, chicken, dessert etc. The food is great - I had three kinds of pork and three kinds of dumpings in the one meal. Vegetables as we know it are not widely available. I recommend Apetit, north of the Jewish quarter.

This is how the bread scam works: they automatically bring out a basket of bread, usually with a folded tea-towel on top. This is not complementary. If you move the towel, you bought the whole basket (at unposted prices). If there's no towel, it may be safer to send it back when they bring it out.

Transport:

Don't bother with taxis. One offered us $50 to take us 10 minutes (we just got out when he said "fixed price"). The usual thing about only using meter taxis applies, but it made difficult by the fact that many taxis don't have meters, even if they have elaborate taxi signage on them. Also, the train information staff are very helpful, but the ticket staff are not. Go to the info office, get your itinerary printed out (in Czech and English with train numbers, times etc) and then go to the ticket office. The bitch there still managed to sell us the ticket for the wrong day, so we had to go to the mysterious and hard to find desk 32 to get it changed. In fact, the main station is just dodgy as all hell - sex shops, 24 hour gambling, hustlers, drifters, alcoholics, money changers, con artists, pimps, dealers and rich-kid backpackers.

Also, the conductors may throw you off the train for no reason. This happened to us about half an hour out of Prague. He entered the carriage, bypassed 16 other passengers and went straight to us, looked at our tickets and told us to get off and go back to Prague. So we did. At the info office, the guy explained that we were on the right train, with the right ticket and there was no reason to be thrown off. I think it was because they needed the space.

The metro itself is excellent, and the trams are a great way to see the city. One last tip: that scruffy down-and-out trying to sell his war medals in the subway is actually an undercover ticket inspector flashing his badge. If you say shake your head and walk off he'll chase you down. Fair enough.

Accomodation:

We got badly burnt on the first night in a hotel, so we went for the authentic communist homestay experience. It wasn't pleasant, but certainly interesting. After seeing Dresden (formerly East German) with it's beautful homes overlooking the Elbe River, I was starting to think that the Western propoganda about Eastern living conditions was fabricated. Not any more. It really is bleak. Sure, most big cities have high-rise public housing, but this was really grim. I'd recommend it for a night or two, as it's out of the tourist ghetto in the old town and gives you a different perspective.

Entertainment:

As I mentioned, there's probably heaps of really cool stuff happening, but not for the likes of us. You can go to Wenceslas Square and hang out in gambling "casinos", or be coaxed into the various stripclubs by the young girls working the crowds in the street. One endearing memory I have of Prague is an overweight American frat boy shouting at a 16 year-old Czech girl "But I have ten in this group - TEN! TEN!" to extract a discount on the stripclub she was spruiking for. Of course, there are boys and girls for rent on a few street corners just off the Square, which is charming.

On the cultural side, most churches have a twice-daily classical music program for pumping the tourists through. We went to the lovely St. Nicholas Church and heard Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart from a string orchestra and choral group. It was a lovely venue for the music, but we chose this one because it was the only one not just playing the "crowd pleasers". In terms of appreciating the city itself, just walking along the river bank at dusk with Marie, crossing back and forth over the bridges was the best part.

Musically, the best bit was when we went to this underground "jazz club" with a great band. If I told you they were called "Gothart" and had an electric mandolin with a funky wah-wah pedal, you'd probably go "Oh right. One of those." But they were excellent. They are an 8-piece with drums, percussion, two violins, electric bass, an accordian and a weird half-sized clarinet/kazoo thing. They play traditional Balkan tunes, with traditional instruments, but with a funky and/or metal edge. They put on a very slick two-hour set, and dressed like mafiosi (the five guys in black pin striped suits, three-day growth, black hats and white carnations in the lapels) they had good stage presence and (although impenetrable to me) patter. The music is very energetic and hard to describe - the nearest thing in my CD collection is the early work of The Tea Party.

On a more somber note, we did a tour of the Jewish quarter and checked out the synagogues and musems there. There is a suprising amount of "Judaica" (Jewish art and memorabilia) in Prague, because the Nazis gathered artefacts from synagogues all around Central Europe to make a "Museum of an Extinct People". That's inconceivably horrible. Before the Holocaust, Jews were about 10% of the population of Czech (out of ~10 million people). Now, there are 1,500 in Prague. Most of the Jews using the synagogues and (only) kosher restaurant are tourists from America. Apparently, these statistics are typical of this part of Europe, which goes to show how close the Nazis came to succeeding.

Okay, I've been writing this up for over an hour now, so I'm going to go outside and enjoy the beatiful sunny afternoon. I can't seem to access my uni email from here, so I'm sorry if anyone's trying to reach me (try SMS or telstra.com address).

--- posted by Greg 10:47 pm