Thursday, May 6, 2010

Easter and travels

I know that Easter was a month ago, but here is a little recap of the holiday and travels over that time. My parents were able to come for a visit, so they made it in time for both my birthday and Easter. They arrived in Vienna, Austria April 1, picked up a rental car and then drove to my apartment.

They had an adventure right from the start. There was road construction I didn't know about, so the GPS sent them on the southern route instead of the northern route. I don't remember what time they were able to leave the airport, but I do remember we had a late dinner that night, around 9pm.

The next morning we left for our traveling adventure. Our first stop was Krakow, Poland. We chose to take the route that was about 20 minutes longer, but went past the High Tatras. My parents were able to get a really nice view of the mountains and also saw the devastation that is still present from a massive wind storm that happened about 5 years ago. The wind was so strong that it uprooted fully grown trees, most of which have not grown back yet. Here is an idea of what the mountains are like here. If we took a train we would have to transfer trains three times and would get to Krakow in 7 hours, I couldn't find any buses that would go between here and there, but with a car you could get to Krakow in 2 1/2-3 hours depending on if you drove up through the mountains or around the mountains.

We arrived in Krakow in the early evening. We found our hotel and were pleasantly surprised at the excellent location. The hotel was just around the corner from the main old town square, and was right next to some great restaurants. The hotel staff was also wonderful. They were very attentive and happy to help us with addresses and GPS coordinates for the sites we wanted to visit, if any of you plan to visit Krakow I would highly recommend Hotel Jan. We were in Krakow for four days and had a great time. We took a tour of the city in a little golf cart (we saw the old town, Jewish quarter and Schindler's factory), went to the salt mine there and visited Auschwitz. We were in Krakow for Easter Sunday and it was a great day. At breakfast there was fresh homemade potato salad, a tradition, and every church was open in the city. Pictures were not allowed, but we discovered there were over 20 churches in the old town alone! We did not see every church, but the ones we did visit were very impressive.

After Krakow we went to Warsaw. We also stayed here for four nights. Warsaw is a very different city than Krakow. It has the feeling of a large metropolitan area with many new buildings. This is probably partially related to the fact that Warsaw is the modern day capital of the country, but also because the city was basically destroyed by the Nazis during WWII. The old town was rebuilt based off of paintings and pictures. When a person sees the pictures of what the old town was like before the destruction, shortly after and today it is amazing. The reconstruction was done so well that it is now on the UNESCO list of culture and heritage. We took a city tour of Warsaw, went to the Uprising museum, and visited a bazaar. The bazaar was an adventure, finding our way to the parking lot and walking around the bazaar. I found a new spring jacket and shoes, my mom found some lace and my dad got a new tie. Basically everything a person could imagine was in the bazaar.

We then traveled to Berlin. Even though I have been to Germany a few times and even lived there I had not been to Berlin, except for the airport. We spent three days there and had an apartment. The apartment was huge; two bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen area (but nothing to cook with) and one and a half baths. It was a former communist apartment, we were in East Berlin, but it impressed my parents. Our hotel apartment was located one or two blocks from checkpoint Charlie, so we of course went there. We took a hop on hop off tour of the city and that was very helpful. We were able to see the main tourist sites and discovered we were within walking distance from the Brandenburg gate. It was chilly there and one day when we were at the Brandenburg gate stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts for some warm drinks to warm up and a donut. They tasted good and helped us warm up.

It is a long drive from Berlin to Mikulas, so we broke the trip up into two days. We spent an afternoon in Potsdam seeing the city and then went on to Dresden. When I was living in Germany one of the memories I have is listening to the radio and hearing the first church service in the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) after it being rebuilt. The church was not destroyed by bombing during WWII, but collapsed as a result. A fire started inside the church and was so hot that the cathedral collapsed in on itself. A story says that the ruins stayed where they were because it was turned into a memorial with flowers all around the cathedral until it could be rebuilt. The rebuilding process involved some very high tech processes, a computer program was used to figure out where the usable stones were and would be once again and new stones were used for the open spaces. It is amazing what was done with the church.

We ended up getting into Mikulas pretty late and spent the next two days looking around the area here. We saw an old Celtic settlement from a distance, went to a traditional village where people still live. It was interesting to see traditional houses with satellite dishes. We also went to a wooden church that is not far from here. During the counter-reformation Lutheran congregations could only build churches out of the cheapest building material, which was wood, Swedish ship builders even came to help. Even wooden pegs had to be used in place of nails. There are around six of these churches listed on a historical registry, but this church is not one of them. The church we went to was moved because of a dam being built. When the church was brought to the current location and was put back together people could not figure out how to put the church together without using nails. The last place we visited around here was the Cave of Liberty. I forgot to tell my parents we would have to walk part way up a large hill/small mountain to get to the cave, so they were surprised by the path. The cave was very nice. There were a lot of stairs, a little over 900. My dad even saw a bat in the cave, but my mom and I missed it because we were trying to figure out the number of stairs we had climbed.

After our tour around the Liptov region my parents and I headed to Bratislava. We were planning on being there just for the weekend. A nice, low key end to their two and a half weeks in Europe. Well, I ended up being in Bratislava for the weekend, but my parents stayed longer. They were supposed to fly out April 18 out of Vienna, but all the flights were canceled. They ended up staying in Bratislava for a week longer than planned. Thankfully the apartment we had used over the weekend was available for them to use during the week. They made their rescheduled flights and made it home safely and are currently working on figuring out what they missed, catching up on things and getting back on track with their everyday tasks and appointments.

Here is an album with a number of pictures from the trip. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=425137&id=682430592&l=36fb683414