The Wanderers Return - 10 Weeks in Europe - Part 5

Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany – Fairy Tale Land

Traveling by train from Italy to Austria, we found ourselves with a middle of the night train change and really didn’t know where we were. Eventually we found that we needed to order cafe o’lait, rather than cafe con leche or cappuccino. Ahha! We must be in France! It was a scruffy little station with strange procedures for obtaining a cup of coffee, and with stranger bathrooms. We happily continued on


to Austria.
In Austria, we visited Salzburg (which I feel we could have skipped, but everyone else who goes there seems very excited about it; I must be missing something) and Vienna, which was more beautiful than I could have imagined. Gene’s cold was still bothering him and it was still raining a lot of the time, so I spent one day wandering around seeing the sights on my own. The place is beautiful. Fairy tale buildings and parks. Music. And more good food! All in all a beautiful city that we definitely could have spent more time in.
Next on our agenda was Prague! Now I have to tell you that this whole “side trip” through Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany only happened because a zillion people kept telling us, “Oh, you must see Prague.” I’d never even thought of it as a place to go. Thank God for friends with good free advice! Prague is, I believe, the most beautiful city in the world! The beautiful architectural styles were quite different from the other places we visited. But what was fascinating was the fact that while very old, all of the buildings were so pristine that it seemed like they must have been built yesterday. There was music everywhere. And walking back over the Charles Bridge late in the evening, we had the most amazing view of the massive castle perched on the hill above our hotel. I kept thinking, “I thought Disney made this up, but it’s real and it’s enormous, like a whole town!”
We spent close to a week in Prague and would have liked to stay longer, but had other places to see and things we wanted to do, so we next took off for Germany, where we visited Freising, Regensburg, and Munich. Gene had visited these places on business and was anxious to show them to me and see them as a tourist. I had started getting the hang of beer drinking in the Czech Republic (the largest per capita consumers of beer in the world, the guidebooks told us), but refined my skills to another level in Germany, where I discovered that the “small” mug of beer is about a liter. But “it’s o.k.,” our B&B host tells us. “You can drink 10 or 12 of them without ever getting a headache or a bad stomach.” When I look at him questioningly, he says, “Really! It’s true. I’ve proven it!” So we wandered around the beautiful neighborhoods in Germany, visited beer gardens, had dinner at the oldest active brewery in the world (with some new friends from California, one of whom was originally from Germany). Wandering down a tiny alley-like street one afternoon, we noticed that every door step in front of the little houses had beautiful potted plants on and around it. Everywhere in Europe there seemed to be flowers. There may have been no room for a garden, or even a patio, but there was always room for a potted plant hanging off a wall.