9 May: Prague, day 1

We began the day by finding the nearest ticket outlet for one of the Prague hop-on-hop-off bus tours, and took a ride around the city: past the national museum, the opera house, the castle hill, and the old town. We got off near the furnicular that goes up to the lookout tower (shaped kind of like the Eiffel tower but a bit out of proportion), and rode that up and back for a grand total of CZK32 each. The view from the lookout was pretty spectacular.

After this – and lunch – we took the bus further around, to the castle complex – which was more of a collection of buildings rather than a ‘castle’ as we would usually think of it. The largest of the buildings is the church of St Vitus, which dominates the Prague skyline. We had a wander around inside, which had quite striking stained glass windows and mosaics. There was also an organ playing while we were there, which made for an uplifting atmosphere.

From there we went to the Old Town, and watched the astronomical clock tick over to the next hour (accompanied by a parade of the twelve apostles). At the end of the display, and the bells etc., there was a lone trumpeter at the top of the tower who played a short tune. So that was something a bit different.

Crowds waiting for the astronomical clock display

Trumpeter

Finally we walked across the Charles Bridge (Kustov Most). Like the other places, it was packed with tourists and people selling various things, including caricature sitting (although I got the feeling that if you asked to have your picture drawn, you’d end up looking a little bit like a film star, since that’s whose pictures the artists seemed to practise with).

8 May: Vienna to Prague

This entry is going to be on the brief side – there’s not much to write about 6 hours on a train.

In Prague we are renting an apartment for the time we are here. This is something we did on a previous trip as much as we could, because it often works out cheaper and having kitchen facilities gives you more flexibility – especially if you’re not keen on trying the local cuisine every meal! It also means we have more space; there are two separate rooms with beds in each of them, which will be good for both of us.

After we’d dropped our bags off, we went for a wander to find the tourist information centre. We managed to get a little bit lost and frustrated in the higgledy-piggledy streets of the ‘old city’. But eventually we found it and have made a list of things to visit in the next couple of days. Unfortunately we probably don’t have time to visit Kutna Hora (where there is a church made of human bones), or the Karlštejn castle, both of which are day trips that sound pretty interesting.

Stupidest thing of the day: getting some money out of an ATM at the train station when we arrived (the foreign exchange places in NZ wouldn’t issue Czech kroners). The exchange rate is about 1 CZK = 0.07 NZD, so we decided to get 2000 CZK out. The ATM took my card happily enough and gave us 2000 kroners – as a single 2000 kroner note.

The view up Václavsk náměstí towards Národní muzeum (National Museum) – not too far away from where we are staying.

7 May: Vienna, day 2

Today being Monday, we decided to visit the Schönbrunn Palace and gardens, which includes the Vienna Zoo. The gardens were enormous – which may have explained why there were so many daisies and dandelions in the lawns? (Imagine the conversation: ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ ‘Oh, I spray the weeds at Schönbrunn. It’s a full-time job – once you finish, you have to start all over again.’) They had a hedge maze and labyrinth there, which we had a go at for something a bit different. Then we wandered around the zoo.

I was really impressed with the zoo. They say they have over 600 different species of animal there, and the zoo is certainly huge and it would easy to spend the whole day there. They had regular feeding of the animals (we saw the tigers, jaguars, pandas, elephants, and sea lions being fed). Although it’s one of the oldest zoos in the world, it has kept up with the times – the animals aren’t kept in sterile enclosures or cages (like at the Berlin Zoo for example). Also, they didn’t group the animals by type (e.g. putting all the monkeys together), but rather by the region of the world they come from. In some cases they had different types of animals in the same enclosure, for example the Barbary sheep and Barbary apes. Watching them for a while, we even saw one of the apes grooming one of the sheep! So I would highly recommend the zoo to anyone visiting Vienna – and it was very reasonably priced too.

Barbary ape grooming a Barbary sheep

Tiger feeding: fresh rabbit

Pandas feeding

Elephant feeding

Sea lion feeding (or showing off?)

A hug from a 280 kg sea lion

6 May: Vienna, day 1

Our first day in Vienna, which we managed to fill up quite successfully. Our first stop was at the Wien Spanische Hofreitschule (Spanish Riding School), where we managed to get standing-room tickets for the show that day for 26 Euros each... There were about seven different segments to the programme, each showing different skills at the different levels of training for the horses. It was something quite different, although standing in one place for 90 minutes was quite a challenge.

After this we took the hop-on-hop-off bus on two routes around the city. It’s pretty impressive how much green space there is in Vienna. We took a stroll through the Stadtpark (city park) where there are several monuments to various composers and other famous people.

Mime in Stephansplatz

The Danau (Danube River), just before it rained

5 May: Venice to Vienna

Today we travelled from Venice to Vienna, a journey that took the best part of eight hours. The first part was on an intercity bus, with only one stop until we got off. It was comfortable and we had good views of the countryside from the Italian autostrada (motorway). Some of the scenery through the Alps was really impressive, and even more impressive was that tunnels had been dug through basically every mountain so the motorway could go through. These were in addition to the tunnels for the train line and what was obviously the original road!
Shortly after we crossed into Austria we got off the bus and took a train through to Venice. On this we had a compartment to ourselves, which initially we thought was great, until the heating system got too much to bear. Eventually it was turned off externally, but it did make for a long ride through some very pretty countryside.

It was the very first part of our journey that was the most annoying, however: getting from Venezia St Lucia (main train station on the island) to Venezia Mestre (main train station on the mainland, where we caught the bus). It was nothing wrong with the train, losing anything, being fined for failing to validate our ticket, getting on the wrong train, etc. It was a group of about 6 American women who were in the same carriage as us.

Now I wrote earlier about ‘spot the tourist’. It’s very easy to spot Americans – in fact (note: gross generalisation coming up! I apologise to all my American friends who don’t do this!) you normally hear them before you see them. They’re usually the loudest people in a restaurant or on a train. They often have the biggest bags (although we have come across more than a few Aussies with enormous bags, taking up more than their fair share of the room and thinking they can sit anywhere they like when clearly there’s a seat reservation system for a reason). So these six women got on, and we heard every detail about their trip, the sights they had seen, their opinions about Venice – and most of what they talked about only showed their ignorance of the place. ‘We didn’t see a single tree or bit of grass while we were on the island, I think they don’t have any.’ (Well, Mum and I spent a lovely afternoon in a park with loads of trees and grass.) Approaching Venezia Margareta: ‘Where are we? I don’t think we’re in Venice anymore.’ (Um, look at the sign?)

This isn’t the first encounter with other tourists that has left us cringing. In fact, I’ve taken to calling it ‘the bubble’. Everyone takes their bubble with them wherever they go. Your bubble is your comfort zone – the way you speak: whether you’ll give the local language a go or only ever learn the phrase ‘Do you speak English?’, also your volume in conversing with your travel-mates. The bubble also extends to how much you compare everything with where you come from. For instance, Mum and I are making a concerted effort not to give in to getting McDonalds or Burger King on this trip. The point of travelling and seeing the world isn’t to see how similar it is to back home. It’s going to be different, so enjoy it. Don’t complain about the way that Germans queue or about how the seating system on trains doesn’t make much sense. That’s just the way things are: deal with it.
The bubble is also about how much you stand out as a tourist. Speaking loudly, taking photos of anything and everything, being obnoxious, means that you have a big bubble. Your bubble shouldn’t be so big that other people end up in it. So every time we’ve had Aussies putting their big bags in someone else’s allocated seat and expecting them to move, or Americans talking really loudly on trains about stuff they know nothing about, we’ve just sighed to ourselves and longed to be out of their bubble. And hoped that our bubble isn’t as big as theirs!

4 May: Venice, day 2

Today we took the vaporetto out to the island of Murano, famous for its glass-making. It took us a while, but eventually we found a place where they were giving demonstrations, and watched a craftsman make a vase and a horse. There were plenty of shops selling things – from abstract shapes, vases and bowls, to caricatures, lampshades, figurines (including orchestra musicians, Smurfs, animals, etc.), glass ‘lollies’, jewellery, and so on. Our favourite was one shop that was selling spiders and spiderwebs about a foot in diameter. There’s no way we’d be able to get them home in one piece!

Public sculpture in Murano

In the afternoon we went to a park at one end of Venice. While we were there a cruise ship sailed past...

Finally, a quirky shot for the day. Farmer’s market, Venetian style!

3 May: Venice, day 1

Today we explored the city by foot and canal. Our first stop was San Marco (St. Mark’s square), where sitting on something that’s not a seat is penalised just as severely as making graffiti. Anyway I digress. We had a look around the square, and I went up the bell-tower to look at the view. (Mum stayed at the bottom – we didn’t realise you got to the top in a lift!)

View from San Marco bell-tower

Crowds along the waterfront near San Marco

From San Marco we went overland to the Ponte Rialto (‘Bridge of Sighs’). It was like a maze, with all these dead-ends that ended up in a canal, and churches hidden behind every other corner. I’m not sure what all the churches are used for now, but I’m guessing the vast majority don’t hold services. When we were in Edinburgh we noted how many of the old churches had been turned into cafes etc., but here they don’t seem to be used for anything.

From the Ponte Rialto we took another boat to Ponte Accademia. When I was growing up I had a jigsaw puzzle of Venice (in fact, I still have it) and this is the place the picture on it was taken from.

We decided to have dinner and then take the water-bus around again, thinking that at night-time the canals would be quite pretty. In actual fact, they were dark and deserted – especially compared to how busy they were during the day.
I’ve also realised that gondoliers are the cyclist-equivalent of the canal world!

2 May: Florence to Venice

We – and our bags – arrived in Venice intact. We found the hotel really easily and headed out to explore the city. Now in Venice, you’ve got the choice of two modes of transport: foot, or boat. Today we went by foot, tomorrow we’ll get a day pass for the vaporetto (water-bus) that runs along the Canal Grande and out to the surrounding islands.

Canal Grande

Rio Martin

Gondolier on Canal Grande at dusk.

While waiting for dusk at the bridge near the station so I could take that last photo, we watched a few groups of hawkers trying to sell their wares. We had seen similar groups in Florence. One group tries to sell replica handbags; the other, squidgy balls. What they are doing is clearly illegal, because every time the cops came within 50 metres, they’d gather up their things and take off. For the guys selling the squidgy balls this was relatively easy; however for the guys with the handbags, it was somewhat more challenging. But they had it figured out: they would set out the bags on a sheet, then when they saw cops (or were alerted by their spotters) they’d gather up the corners and run off.

1 May: Florence (Pisa)

Today we took a day trip to Pisa. Last night I read up about what to see and do, and the website I looked at was strongly critical of the 'tourists' that go to Pisa only to see the tower (as opposed to the 'travellers' who want to see and experience it all). Unfortunately for them, with only a day to see what there is, the tower was of course the main point of us going there. So does that make us tourists then?

Our first view of the tower was kind of surreal. As you can see from the photos, it was a grey and rainy day in Pisa. Now some things, you can turn up to see, and be disappointed by them (like seeing the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park). Other things, they're bigger than you expect and you can't quite get your head around it (like the Grand Canyon). But this was just the right size.

Since it was raining, we spent most of our time in the cathedral. It had lots of seemingly random paintings around the walls, presumably of notable people of Pisa, but we only found one painting of Jesus (which was quite striking). They also had a few relics of body parts of various saints which was mildly disturbing!
We also visited the baptistry, which is a circular building with interesting acoustics, as demonstrated by a member of the staff. He sang three notes in succession, and the echo continued for so long that you could hear it as a chord.

Finally, I had - and took - the opportunity to climb the tower. Now this was weird. The tower is hollow inside, with double walls and the stairway winds up the outside between those walls. As you go up and around, the change in tilt is really noticeable, so one minute it feels you are going left, the next down, the next right, etc. To get to the very top the stairway is really narrow - with my arms by my sides I was touching both walls, so I'm sure some of the bigger people who I saw later wouldn't have made it through there.
Anyway it was kind of cool to say, I'm actually standing on the leaning tower of Pisa. And it was at that exact moment that the batteries in my camera died.

Back in Florence we relocated to another hotel - which turned out they had shifted us to a partner hotel across the square - but it was good to have a much quieter bed to sleep in!

30 April: Florence

After the drama that was yesterday, we had a reasonably good day today.* It was kind of 'business mixed with leisure', because first on our list of 'must-sees' was to find a doctor to write a prescription so Mum could get new medication to replace what was in her suitcase that disappeared. We headed towards the train station, which happened to be the first stop for the hop-on-hop-off bus, which happened to pass fairly close to the address of a doctor recommended last night by the hotel staff. So we took the bus, saw the doctor, then headed towards the Santa Croche. This has a beautiful white/green/pink marble facade like the Duomo Santa Maria, but inside it was shrine after shrine erected for dead people, some of them even saying 'pray for me' - a bit too late for that, methinks. We both left it, thinking, if that's what people think Christianity is all about, then no wonder they don't want to have anything to do with it - even we don't want to have anything to do with what was on display there!

After that we found a pharmacy nearby and picked up the prescription. Then we got the bus again around the rest of the route, which included a stop at the Piazzale Michelangelo, which had a fantastic view over the city.

While we were having dinner we watched people parallel parking their cars in the street. In Florence, this isn't as trivial as it sounds.

"That man deserves a DB."


*
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, at 11:00 pm and really wanting to sleep, our room is being plagued by the bass from a nightclub down in the street below, which has been going on since about 5:30. We've decided to lump the 75 Euro cancellation fee (it's one night's rate) and move to another hotel with 'nice, quiet' reviews for tomorrow night. It's kind of spoilt Florence for us, but what can you do.