Going home

Friday September 25th
This is another day to forget, the day of 5 trains.
The first train is from Berlin to Cologne
The second is Cologne to Brussels
The third is the Eurostar to London
The fourth is St Pancras to East Croydon
The fifth is East Croydon to Oxted

Then it's just the taxi home.

We were up well before 7, as our cases had to be packed and ready to collect outside our rooms at 7.45.

Berlin station was no problem this time, with no crowds of coaches and hordes of demonstrators. We were in Cologne after lunch, where we had over an hour to wait for the train to Brussels. This was late, but it hardly mattered as we then had over an hour to wait for Eurostar when we reached Brussels.

Eurostar was on time, and we found our seats. But then we were told that the tunnel had a power failure so nobody knew when we could set off. We were served dinner anyway - we were travelling First Class, so you get a tiny meal. You also get wine, and the staff were so anxious to keep everybody happy that the wine flowed like water, so everybody got very jolly. In the event, we only had to wait an hour, so we were in London by 9pm, which meant home by 11, after 15 hours of travel. I just fell into bed.

This is a very boring post, so here is a cheerful photo, which I meant to post but never found space for. Probably only people of a certain age will recognise it.



Did you guess right? It's a statue of Peter Falk as Colombo, with his trademark cigar and untidy Mac, and it's in Budapest. I had no idea that Peter Falk was originally Hungarian. You live and learn! It's quite close to the Danube, so a lot of tourists come to visit it, and as you can see, they all stroke the dog. I rather like the fact it isn't on a pedestal but just on the street, looking like a person who inadvertently just turned to bronze.

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In Berlin

Thursday September 24th
As we had been unable to visit all the planned places yesterday because of the demonstration and because of the streets blocked off in readiness for the Berlin Marathon at the weekend, our tour leader took us on a walk round some of the sights. We walked from our Hotel up to the Tiergarten, an urban public park located in the middle of the city. It's huge, apparently 210 hectares or 520 acres, and dates back to1527 when it was founded as a hunting area for the king. It has far more trees that Hyde Park in London, so from the outside it looks more like a forest. We only had time to walk round the outside, as we were making for the Holocaust Memorial which is, of course, a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The memorial is on a big sloping site - 4.7-acres - covered with 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern. The slabs are big. They are all about 8 feet long by 3 ft wide but they vary in height from 8 inches to almost 16 feet. They are organized in rows, some of them going north–south, and others heading east–west at right angles.




They are apparently designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, aiming to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with feelings of humanity, and it certainly is an odd place. If you go right in, it's like a maze and you can quickly get disorientated and lost among the high stones. Some people have also remarked on its resemblance to a cemetery.

We went on to the Reichstag building, but it was impossible to get a better photo than the one I took yesterday. There were stands being built, probably something to do with the marathon, and the whole area was cordoned off so photos were spoiled by the fences and obscured by the stands. I was glad I had managed a decent photograph yesterday.

Not far away is the Brandenburg Gate, probably one of the best-known landmarks in Germany, an 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch, built on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel. It was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace and built between1788 and 1791.

On top of the gate is the Quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses. The gate was originally named the Peace Gate and the goddess is Eirene, the goddess of peace.




I stood on an open square called Pariser Platz to take this photo. Up until 1989, I would have been standing in East Berlin to take this photo - except I couldn't have stood there at all, it was no man's land between the two walls, and just a wasteland of gravel and weeds.

The gate is nowadays restored to what it once was, the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, the famous avenue of linden trees, which originally led straight to the city palace of the Prussian monarchs. (In England, I am told we call them Lime trees.) Apparently, Duke Frederick William wanted to spruce up the route from his home to the Tiergarten hunting ground, so he ordered the planting of long rows of Linden trees, which would not only beautify Berlin but would also keep his route to the Tiergarten shady.



Nearly a century later, King Frederick II expanded the avenue by adding a collection of cultural buildings to the area, including the national opera house and the national library, making Unter den Linden larger and more prestigious, and it became a popular gathering place. It doesn't look too prestigious at the moment I'm afraid, since it's full of cranes and hoardings and huge holes, all connected with the building of new subway lines and stations. It's planted with four rows of Linden trees, about a thousand in total. I read somewhere that Hitler had them all cut down and replaced with Nazi standards, but it was so unpopular he replaced them. It's hard to think of Hitler caring about his unpopularity!

Unter den Linden is a long street, stretching 1.5 kilometres from Pariser Platz to the Palace Bridge near Museum Island, and we walked right along it to where the Royal Palace is being re-built. It will be a replica of the original Royal Palace, so Unter den Linden will once again lead from the Brandenburg Gate to the Royal Palace.

We stopped off at Bebelplatz again to see if we could photograph the memorial to the book burning this time, but it was behind a hoarding; it seems that the whole of the centre of Berlin is being re-built at present. It was a pity to miss the plaque, which includes a line from a play by Heinrich Heine, which translates into English as: ’That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people'.

When we finally reached Museum Island, I wanted to go to the Pergamon Museum, but it was closed, to my great chagrin. I've wanted to go there since I visited Pergamon itself in 1975, so I was really upset not to be able to see it. I thought briefly of visiting the Egyptian Museum to see the head of Nefertiti, but Paul wasn't keen, and we couldn't find good information about which Museum would be best for paintings, as things seem to have been moved about a good deal. So we decided to visit the Museum of German History, of which we had heard good reports.

This museum is housed in what used to be the Zeughaus arsenal, the oldest building on Unter den Linden, built between 1695 and 1706, and absolutely enormous. We decided to concentrate on the ground floor, which deals with the history of Germany between 1918 and the re-unification in 1989.

We began with the period after 1918, when the victor nations in World War I decided to assess Germany for their costs of conducting the war against them, and most German people suffered great hardship. This cartoon by George Grosz, shows the average German family looking hungrily through the delicatessen window at the food they couldn't afford.




George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of groups like the Berlin Dada during the Weimar Republic, before wisely emigrating to the United States in 1933. The Nazis didn't like those who caricatured them!

With no means of paying the reparations demanded, Germany printed money, causing the value of the Mark to collapse. Between 1914 and the end of 1923 the German mark’s rate of exchange against the U.S. dollar plummeted. In 1914, $1 was worth 4.2 marks; in 1923, $1was worth 4.2 trillion marks. It was said that many Germans carted wheelbarrows of cash to the shops to pay for their groceries.

During this hyperinflation, higher and higher denominations of banknotes were issued. Before the war, the highest denomination was 1000 Marks, equivalent to approximately £50 or $238. In early 1922, 10,000 Mark notes were introduced, followed by 100,000 and 1 million Mark notes early in 1923, then later notes up to 50 million Marks. The hyperinflation peaked in October 1923 and banknote denominations rose to 100 trillion Marks. This is a heap of some of these very high denomination notes.




At the end of the hyperinflation, these 100 trillion Mark notes were worth approximately £5 or $24.

The chaos in Germany lead to failures in Government, coups and attempted coups, and ultimately, the rise of the Nazis. I could fill this post with photos I took of posters of Hitler, exhortations to the populace about how to behave and so on, but I'll just content myself with showing the way National Socialism tried to permeate every aspect of people's lives. This is a child's Doll's House.




It may look fairly ordinary at first sight, but the wallpaper is covered in images of children taking part in Hitler Youth activities, and actually the whole house is decorated with posters and photographs of Hitler and other Nazi grandees. You could buy toy cars with Hitler in them, and children were encouraged from an early age to venerate Hitler and conform to National Socialist ideals.

There were many images from the war, though not perhaps as many as you might think. I like this photo of the Enigma machine.



An Enigma machine was actually a series of cipher machines developed and used originally for both commercial and military usage. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by the military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany.

By the time we had got to the end of the section on the war, we were both a bit tired, but we had a brief look at the period between 1945 and re-unification. There were a lot of information boards on the politics involved, but to my mind the most interesting displays were those contrasting the different material goods available to people in West and East Germany.

The West German consumer goods included the famous VW Beetle. The East German equivalent, of course, featured the Trabant.



The Trabant was the most common vehicle in East Germany, and it was also exported to other countries. It had an outdated and inefficient two-stroke engine so it had poor fuel economy and produced a thick, smoky exhaust. It was designed with a steel frame and a body made of Duroplast. Duroplast was a hard plastic (similar to Bakelite) made of recycled materials. This could well have been responsible for the popular misconception that the Trabant was made of cardboard. Although more than three million were made, production could not keep up with demand, and many people had to wait years for one!

By this time, we had spent about 4 hours in the Museum and both of us were exhausted. It would have been nice to look at the earlier German History on the upper floor, but we didn't have the stamina. We had no information about public transport, so we walked all the way back along Unter den Linden, all round the Tiergarten and back to our hotel, arriving around 5 o'clock. After this, we were fit for nothing and just ate in the hotel before packing for our journey home.

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Prague to Berlin

Wednesday September 23rd
Today we had to get up at 6am in order to catch an early train - then the train was half an hour late! It made up time on the way though, so we were only a few minutes late arriving in Berlin, around 1.30

We were due to have a city tour, but the traffic was truly awful because of a demonstration of some sort which started at the main station, where we arrived, and ended at the Brandenburg Gate, where we were supposed to visit later but couldn't because of appalling traffic and blocked off streets. At first we couldn't even get to our coach because of all the demonstrator's buses and the press of people. Because of the heavy traffic due to the demo and the road closures, we couldn't follow the tour plan, and didn't see everything that had been planned for us.

Our first stop was the Victory Column. It wasn't night time as you might think from this photo, it was just a dreadfully overcast day.



The column was designed1864 to commemorate the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War, but by the time it was erected in1873, Prussia had also defeated Austria in the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), so it different from the original plans. These later victories inspired the addition of the bronze sculpture of Victory on the top.

Our next stop was the Charlottenburg Palace which is the largest palace in Berlin.



The original palace was commissioned by Sophie Charlotte, the wife of Friedrich III, Elector of Brandenburg. It was designed in baroque style and completed in 1699.

Friedrich crowned himself as King Friedrich I in Prussia in 1701, and had the palace extended the following year. Sophie Charlotte died in 1705 and Friedrich named the palace and its estate Charlottenburg in her memory.

We also stopped at the Olympic Stadium, built to house the 1936 Olympic Games.



The area was used by the British Military after World War II, and during the 1960s it was used by the American forces for American Football. It was renovated in 2000, and today it is a multi-purpose arena and is used for international football matches.

We made a stop for coffee at The Topography of Terror, an outdoor and indoor history museum located on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regime (1933 to 1945) were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS.

The buildings were largely destroyed by Allied bombing during early 1945 and the ruins were demolished after the war. You can still see the walls of the basement, used for a prison. The boundary between the American and Soviet zones of occupation in Berlin ran along here, so the street soon became a fortified boundary, and the Berlin Wall ran along the south side of the street. The wall here was never demolished, so we were able to take photographs of it.



People are standing in what used to be the basement prison, with the remains of the Berlin Wall behind. The dreadful totalitarian looking building in the background is not contemporary with the Nazi headquarters but looks very threatening I think.

We drove past a public square called the Bebelplatz, which is known as the site of one of the infamous Nazi book burning ceremonies held in 1933 in many German university cities.



Joseph Goebbels made an inflammatory speech before the burning which was attended by members of the Nazi Students' League, the SA ("brownshirts"), SS and Hitler Youth groups. They burned around 20,000 books, including works by Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and many other authors.

I'm afraid I wasn't quick enough with some of my photos as we drove past - I ruined a photo of Checkpoint Charlie, and a bus got in the way of my attempt on the Brandenburg Gate as we drove past. I hope to do better tomorrow.

I did manage to photograph the Reichstag building, constructed in 1894 to house the German Imperial Diet (equivalent of the Parliament I suppose).



It housed the Diet until 1933, when it was severely damaged in a fire. After World War II, the building fell into disuse; the parliament of the German Democratic Republic met in East Berlin, while the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany met in Bonn.

The ruined building was made safe against the elements and partially refurbished in the 1960s, but no attempt at full restoration was made until after German reunification in1990, when it underwent a reconstruction, led by Norman Foster. After its completion in 1999, it once again became the meeting place of the German parliament.

It had become quite late by then, so the coach took us to the hotel to check in and have dinner. Tomorrow is another day!

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In Prague 2

Tuesday September 22nd
I'm on the most appalling connection, so I might have to post these photos one at a time - come back if you don't see 7!

Tuesday was a free day for us to do as we liked, but my hip and knee were so painful after two days with hours of fast limping over cobblestones that I determined not to go too far. So we caught the Metro 4 stops to Wenceslas Square and went off to find the Communist Museum.

This is ironically placed above the McDonalds in an ex-palace of an aristocrat and is next door to the Casino! This is the staircase outside the museum; the museum is on the left of this photo, and the Casino is on the right.




Although it is only a small museum there is a lot to see of interest to those looking for a view of life in a Communist State. There are information boards in every room which outline the historical background, beginning with the founding of the Czechoslovak state through to the Communist putsch, Normalization, and finally the Velvet Revolution. These explanations are in Czech but have also been translated into five other languages - otherwise I imagine it wouldn't be much of a tourist attraction.

Some effort has been made to recreate the experience of living under the regime. You can peer into a schoolroom with rows of wooden benches, the blackboard chalked over in Russian, the living room with worn and shabby utilitarian furniture, or a grocery store with a conspicuously empty chiller cabinet, which stocks only two kinds of canned goods.

The most successful mock-up, however, is probably the interrogation room. There are no instruments of torture on display: simply glancing around the spartan office is enough to make you imagine the horrors that took place here. There are more of those information boards, again detailing the most violent excesses of the period.




There is a short film, with some footage from the failed 'Prague Spring' in 1968, with images of Soviet tanks rolling in to the streets of Prague, and the events of 1989 that led to the end of Communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia.

The museum seems a bit one-sided - it tries to give visitors the impression that all Czechs were hapless victims of totalitarianism, which I'm sure isn't quite accurate. But it does paint a chilling picture of life under a totalitarian regime, with the population at the mercy of 'planners', denied any culture or intellectual pleasure, expected to work and not to question and encouraged to spy on one another for examples of politically incorrect thinking.

After that, seeking something more cheerful, we walked a short distance to the Alphonse Mucha Museum. For some reason I had a vague idea he was French, which just demonstrates my ignorance because he was Czech. He is an Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist who had considerable influence on the British Art Nouveau movement, and known for his very distinctive style. In the West, we know him for his many illustrations, advertisements and postcards.



He was born in Moravia and moved to Paris to study art in 1887, where he also worked at producing magazine illustrations and colourful advertisements. Around Christmas 1894, Mucha happened to go into a print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected need for an advertising poster for a new play featuring Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha volunteered to produce a lithographed poster very quickly, and the resulting poster on for the play Gismonda attracted much attention, so much so that people were cutting it down and taking it away to keep.


He visited America between 1906 and1910, where he did a lot of work and also met millionaire Charles R. Crane, who used his fortune to help promote Slavic nationalism. Mucha returned to the Czech lands and settled in Prague, where he decorated many public buildings and worked on his Slav Epic, 20 huge paintings in a more serious and much less decorative style, which are not really known in the west. When Czechoslovakia won its independence after World War I, Mucha designed the new postage stamps, banknotes, medals and other government documents for the new state.

After that, we felt in need of a late lunch, and found a Bistro nearby, which was convenient as both my knee and my hip were becoming more painful. However, I was determined to see the Old Town properly in daylight, so we set off for the Old Town Square, stopping at the Astrological clock.




As I think I said before, the clock was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest one still working.
The clock mechanism itself is composed of three main components: the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details; "The Walk of the Apostles", a clockwork hourly show of figures of the Apostles and other moving sculptures—notably a figure of Death (represented by a skeleton) striking the time; and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months.

I was extremely disappointed not to be able to see the figure of Death striking the time, but close perusal of my photo and comparisons with other photos on the Internet revealed that two figures are currently missing from the upper area of the astronomical dial, and one is the skeleton! I also waited until 4pm, but there was no parade of the Apostles - they are supposed to appear from the two doors at the top, just below the golden bird. The clock is clearly under renovation at present.

There are many beautiful buildings in the Old Town Square. This used to be the Kinský Palace, built between 1755 and 1765 and felt by many to be the most beautiful Rococo building in Prague. In 1768 it was bought by Štěpán Kinský, an Imperial diplomat, hence the name. In1948 communist rule in Czechoslovakia was proclaimed from the palace balcony. Nowadays, it belongs to the National Gallery.



Another notable fact was that it is where Franz Kafka attended high school and where his father, who was a haberdasher, owned a shop.

I tried desperately to get a proper picture of this amazing Gothic church, the Church of Our Lady before Tyn, but the building in front of it is actually built into the wall of the church, and there are only narrow alleyways all round, so this is the best I can do.



The church was built in 1365 on the site of an earlier Romanesque church. Its magnificent multiple steeples are 80m high and dominate the Old Town Square. Between the early 15th century and the year of 1620 it was the main Hussite (Protestant) church in Prague. I would have liked to go in because close to the altar there is a tomb of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe who worked at the court of the Emperor Rudolph II, but it seemed to be shut.

By then it was getting quite late, so we decided to return to the Metro and go back to the Hotel. We didn't want to have a late night, as we had an early start in the morning, and needed to be in breakfast at 6.30.

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In Prague 1, Part 1

Monday September 21st

We set off in the early morning for Prague Castle, though there is so much to see there I feel we only scratched the surface, and we intend to go back tomorrow. The castle complex dates from the 9th century, and I'm told is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ancient castle in the world.

Although the construction of the first walled building was in 870 AD, you won't find many examples of such early building, as the current ground level is well above what it would have been then. What you see is a real hodgepodge of architectural styles, with virtually every architectural style of the last millennium. It includes the Gothic St Vitus Cathedral, the Romanesque Basilica of St. George, Renaissance palaces, Baroque Palaces and Neoclassical style wings.

There are three courtyards and several streets. An ornate entrance gate at the Castle Square leads to the first courtyard, decorated with large sculptures of fighting pagan Gods and Titans.




The third and largest courtyard is dominated by the enormous St Vitus Cathedral, started in 1344 but not completed until the 20th century.




It is so enormous there seems to be no way of getting a decent photograph. It isn't open on Mondays, so we intend to go back tomorrow to see inside it, and perhaps see some other things as well. There is a magnificent 14th century mosaic and a clock, but I'm limited to the number of photos I can easily post, so I might manage some of those tomorrow if we go back.

The courtyard opens up into St George's Square, where you will find the Basilica of St George.




This was built in the twelfth century and replaced an older, tenth century church. The façade was added in the seventeenth century. Our Czech guide told us the the two towers were of unequal sizes because they represented man and woman, so they are called the Adam and Eve Towers.

In the same square you also find the Royal Palace, also known as the Old Palace. Romanesque and Gothic stories were built on the remains of the first, ninth-century structure. The biggest part you can visit is Vladislav Hall, built in 1493. Unfortunately, this is a place you have to pay to photograph, and we had not yet visited an ATM so we couldn't pay anything! The photo here comes from the Internet, and I hope it isn't too small to see, as it's quite impressive.




The last place we visited in the Castle was Golden Lane. Originally, there was just a wall behind Prague Castle. In the 15th century, the first very modest houses were built along it. As the original name of the street was Goldmakers Lane, it is thought most of the first inhabitants were probably goldsmiths. These houses were demolished in 1591. Six years later, Emperor Rudolph II allowed the 24 Prague Castle´s fusiliers to build their houses there, and because the area is small, the houses were tiny.

Later, various craftsmen and servants lived in the houses. According to local legends, Emperor Rudolph II had some of his court alchemists accomodated in Golden Lane, where they tried to turn metal into gold, so that could also be the origin of the name Golden Lane.

One of the more famous ones was number 22.



Frank Kafka lived here for two years, 1916 - 17, as he was looking for a quiet place to write. At the beginning of the 20th century, the owners of the houses became aware of their unique charm and many moved elsewhere to more comfortable apartments and opened their tiny Golden Lane houses to tourists, charging a fee. Others let their houses to writers or artists who were looking for inspiration.

Perhaps the saddest one is the little house of the psychic who called herself Madam de Thebes. She was a widow who could never believe that her son, who was killed in the First World War, was never coming back, and set the table for him every day.




She became a fortune teller and card reader, but her constant predictions of the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Third Reich led to her arrest by the Gestapo and she was tortured to death.

On that happy note, we left the castle and descended an interminable number of steps to the Lower Town at the foot of the hill. So I'll continue that in the next post.

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In Prague 1, Part 2

Monday September 21st

Once down from the Castle, we walked through some very picturesque streets with beautiful buildings, on our way back down to the Charles Bridge.




I mentioned the bridge last night, so I won't repeat myself here, but will just add that originally the Charles Bridge was devoid of any ornamentation, except for a wooden cross that was placed at its center. In the seventeenth century the cross was replaced by a bronze crucifix. The first statue - of St. John of Nepomuk - was added in 1683. There are now 30 statues, of which I think the one below is the biggest.



It represents the time the area came under the rule of the Turks. You might just be able to see the raised arms of the miserable people kept in prison under the main group. This photo isn't helped by the passer-by in the blue coat, but it's hard to take photos on the bridge, there are so many people.

There are beautiful river views from the bridge, so we spent some time admiring them, though the sky had unfortunately clouded over by then.



This is a view from slightly further along the bridge, showing the back of the Old Town, with many beautiful buildings.



It takes a while to walk across the bridge, there are so many people. Eventually, we made our way to the Old Town Square.



This is another picturesque place where we'll try to return, but there's so much to see, it's difficult to imagine how we will find the time.

By now it was lunch time, so we stopped to eat. After lunch, we walked through some very smart streets full of expensive shops located in some of the beautiful buildings.


This was absolutely the most beautiful, and if my photo doesn't end up too small, you will see that it is occupied by Bulgari. I was standing outside Prada when I took this photo, and had recently passed Louis Vuitton. There are not places where we shop - you may see Paul striding swiftly past! (He can't buy me a birthday present anyway, he has no money and no cards, thanks to the pickpocket.)

Eventually, we made our way back to the coach which returned us to the hotel about 3.30. Many of our group stayed in for the rest of the day, being too exhausted to do any more walking, having walked for about 4 hours.

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Budapest to Prague

Sunday September 20th
We had a distressingly early start this morning, so we were at the station in very good time for our train to Prague. The station has some wonderful murals in the entrance hall, though the platforms themselves look very old fashioned.




Our Hungarian guide was very keen for us to take photos of the murals, suggesting we could use Photoshop to select the angel above and use it to send in Christian emails to our friends! She didn't leave us quite enough time to take the pictures though, so mine was too hurried and not satisfactory. I really need to photoshop out the stray hand which got into this photo!

The train journey took 8 hours, taking us through Slovakia and eventually bringing us to Prague where a coach collected us to take us to our hotel, which is the smartest yet. We had dinner there - a very nice buffet - and then set off with our tour leader to see the city centre by night. It certainly is beautiful.

We caught the Metro to Wenceslas Square, then walked to look at the medieval astronomical clock.



Later, we were back to hear it strike 10, but somehow we missed the figures coming out, I think perhaps they do it at the beginning.

We then walked through the old town at a pretty fast pace, our tour leader having forgotten my painful knee. It was very crowded and the shops were all open even though it was after 9, but we didn't have time to stop and look at anything as the party galloped on towards the Charles Bridge.

This is the tower that protects the entry to the bridge. There's one the other end too.



The Bridge crosses the Vltava river. Construction on it was started in 1357, and when it was finished at the start of the 1400s, it was called the Stone Bridge.

The bridge is 621 m long and nearly 10 m wide, resting on 16 arches. It is is decorated by a continuous alley of 30 statues, most of them baroque-style, originally erected around 1700 but now all replaced by replicas. I'll take photographs of them in the light, you couldn't see them in the dark.

This is the tower at the other end of the bridge.



It marks the entry into what is called the Malá Strana or "Little Side", because it was on the left bank of the river Vltava, on the slopes just below the Prague Castle.

Thank goodness we went no further, but turned back to retrace our steps. My back and hip both hurt from walking fast on the irregular cobbles. I hope to be recovered by tomorrow, as this is clearly a beautiful city and I look forward to seeing it.

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In Budapest 2

Saturday September 19th

Dear me, this has been a day filled with event, and not in a good way.

After dinner last night in a restaurant near our hotel, I became aware that my right eye was painful and weeping, so I was glad to get back to the Hotel and take my contact lens out. Unfortunately, removal of the lens did not seem to help at all, and my eye continued to be painful and weepy. It was still painful this morning, so I wore my glasses, and considered going to the chemists for some eye ointment. However, it seemed to improve after breakfast, so I decided to delay any visit to the chemist.

As we had no money, Paul having changed only a small amount which had been used at dinner the previous night, we went out looking for an ATM and Paul used his card to get some more money out. We had a lot of discussion about how much to get, as we didn't know what expenses we might have during the day, and Paul was anxious not to get too much as he didn't want to be left with currency we will never use again. It came out in one big note, so Paul put it in his wallet, leaving me penniless.

Anyway, we walked down towards the Danube and caught a tram along as far as the Parliament building so as take photos.



This is a photo from the back, my previous photo having been taken from the front - just like our Parliament building, it stands on the river bank.

I had hoped to photograph 'The Little Shoes', a memorial created it on the bank of the Danube to honor the Jews who were killed by fascist militiamen in Budapest during World War II. I though this might be near the next Tram stop, so we caught another tram, but there was no stop nearby and we ended up going as far as the chain bridge so that we could cross the Danube.

We discovered that there was to be some sort of car racing, as streets were closed off and crowds were starting to gather, so there was no traffic across the Chain Bridge.

We walked across the bridge, stopping on the way to take photos.



This is a view of the Royal Palace, though of course it isn't a palace any longer.

Further down the river, we had a view of the statue on Castle Hill.


It represents Liberty, but had to be called Peace under the Soviets, as that was felt to be more politically correct. The bridge in the foreground is the Elizabeth Bridge; I imagine this was probably named after the wife of Emperor Franz Josef, as she was particularly popular, in which case it must also have been politically incorrect under the Soviets!

We intended to go to the Hungarian National Gallery. As I mentioned yesterday, the Museum of Fine Arts was closed but 57 of the best works had been transferred to the National Gallery, and we thought we would like to see them. The National Gallery is at the very top of the hill, not very far from Holy Trinity Square and the Matthias Church, and we intended to use the Funicular to get up there. However, the queue was truly enormous and we didn't fancy the wait in the hot sun, so we decided to take the bus instead. When the bus arrived, it was extremely crowded and Paul and I were separated in the crowd.

Once off the bus, we had some difficulty in finding the National Galley as the signpost pointed in completely the wrong direction, and then we were directed round to the side entrance because there was a special event taking place at the main entrance. Museum entrance is free for the over 65s, but you have to pay if you want to take photos, so Paul went to get his wallet, only to find it was gone! He had fallen victim to the pick-pockets again.

This meant we had no Hungarian money, as all I had was Euros or pounds. The value of the Hungarian money was not high - about £50 - but Paul also had a credit and a debit card, a Senior Railcard, a Bus Pass and his driving licence! We called to cancel the bank cards first, then called our tour leader. He pointed out that Paul might well have a £50 excess on his policy, and reporting to the police might take up to 5 hours and would require Paul to pay for an interpreter! So he decided against going to the police, and we just progressed into the Museum to see the art without taking any photos.

This was a shame, as, once we had wandered slowly through the rooms full of Hungarian paintings we came to some wonderful old masters which are not well known elsewhere. I had been excited by tales of a Raphael, but I found it very disappointing, it was an early one and I wouldn't have recognised it as a Raphael. But there was a beautiful Giotto and a totally unfamiliar Titian, a particularly lovely Canaletto, an El Greco I think I've seen in a book somewhere, a wonderful portrait by Franz Hals, and a Monet I was particularly anxious to take home with me! Paul took the opportunity of my bad behaviour - our tour leader rang me to check that we were managing without any money, and the museum guard escorted me off the premises - so he was able to sneak a photo of the Monet which I will post here if I can get it from his camera card. I would have bought a reproduction of it in the shop, if I had had any money...

I got told off a lot in this museum, there were no seats at all and I put my hand against one of the cabinets so as to take the weight off my sore knee, which necessitated the first telling off. Then my phone rang, a severe sin, and later I sat in a guard's chair when I got desperate to sit down. Our Hungarian guide had cautioned us that, if you were picked up by the police, they were likely to cut off your nose and ears, then 'the most noble part of a man's body', and then fire you into space, so I dreaded to think what I might be in for if I transgressed again!

We had the greatest difficulty in leaving the Museum, as the main entrance was blocked for the event, so we had to retrace our steps right through the museum to go out by the side entrance. Then we went back to the number 16 bus stop to rake through all the litter bins to see if the pick-pocket, who we assume had struck while we were in the bus, had thrown away the wallet when they got off. We had no joy - of course, the thief might have got off at a different stop, but with the temperature of over 30 degrees again, we weren't inclined to visit other stops on the off-chance. I used my card to get us some money, and we went to the Funicular to go down - there being no queue at all to descend. It wasn't cheap, especially for the few seconds it took to descend, but there were good views as we went down.

When we were back on the Pest side, we found that the go-kart racing had started, so we watched for a few minutes.


However it was very hot and we were right by a corner and a couple of them hit the tyres near us, so we decided it might not be the smartest place to stand, and went back to catch the tram.

I was determined to photograph the little shoes, so we got off at the Parliament building and walked back. As I said earlier, it is a memorial created it on the bank of the Danube to honor the Jews who were killed by fascist militiamen in 1945.


They were ordered to take off their shoes, and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The Jews were some that had originally been hidden in various buildings by Swedish people, Raoul Wallenberg and others. The memorial, which is made of metal, represents their shoes left behind on the bank. It was very moving, especially when you see that some of the shoes are the same size as my grandsons'.

We returned to the tram and went back to our hotel to have a little rest before going out to dinner. Dinner was actually a dinner cruise on the Danube. The main public buildings are lit up until midnight, so it is quite a sight.



This is the Parliament building again. I'm afraid other photos didn't come out so well. After dinner, the boat docked and prepared to take on its next quota of diners, and we got back into our coach and went for a drive round the illuminations. We went up to a viewpoint where we had a wonderful view over the whole of Budapest, but I'm afraid my photos were all a disaster.

We were back at the hotel by 10, but we needed to pack and get organised for the next morning - in our case, it was the 6am alarm to shower and have our cases ready to collect by 7. How I dislike early mornings!

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In Budapest 1

Friday September 18th
Today was a very busy day, and extremely hot, over 30 degrees. My feet had become unrecognisable by the end of the day as they were so swollen.

We had a bit of a rush this morning as we had to fight the shower; all the fittings were so tight they couldn't be moved and the shower was set to spray straight out so it sprayed the wall at the end of the bath. Washing my hair was almost imposible. By the time we had finished showering, the bathroom was deep in water and all the towels were wet and we were late and very ratty. The hotel is huge and so was the breakfast buffet - we took about 10 minutes to walk round it, pushing through the crowds of other eaters, and then we couldn't find 2 chairs together! We were in time to meet the guide at 8.40, but only just.

She took us in a coach to Heroes' Square, a monument to various important figures in Hungarian history.



It's a bit hard to photograph at present, as horse races are due to be run there this weekend, and large parts of the square are cordoned off and others strewn with bits of equipment. It's one of the major squares in Budapest and is noted for its iconic statue complex featuring the Seven Chieftains of the Magyars and other important national leaders, as well as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can see the statues of the seven chieftains around that enormous column in the centre. The column was built to commemorate 1000 years since Hungary was founded, so it was built in 1896, as apparently the tribes who migrated to the Carpathian plain and first formed Hungary arrived in 896AD. The figure on top of the column is the angel Gabriel. This is because the angel Gabriel appeared one night to the founder of Hungary, King Saint Stephen, and told him to join the western Christian Church, not the Orthodox Church.

At one side of the square is the Museum of Fine Arts, it's just behind the Millennium Column in my photo. It's shut for renovations at present, or else we would go. There's a matching gallery on the other side of the square, used for art exhibitions.

After that, we next went to to the largest cathedral in the city, St Stephen's Basilica.



It was built in the neo-classical style, but I'm not sure how to describe the interior - I think it's rococo.


As well as all the marble, gold leaf decorations, statues, murals and frescos, it houses the mummified holy right hand of King Saint Stephen. Unfortunately, I only found this out afterwards by reading the guide book, otherwise I would have gone looking for it.

After this, the coach collected us and took us over to Buda, which is the hilly side of the city. We went up to the top of Castle Hill, where the Royal Palace is situated. We did not go there however, but to Holy Trinity Square. The biggest feature in this square is the Romanesque style Matthias church.



The church dates from the 13th century and rebuilt for the 1896 anniversary of the founding of Hungary. It is actually the Church of Our Lady in Buda Castle, but everybody calls it the Matthias church after a king of Hungary who was very popular. I don't think I've ever seen a church roof like that before, in fact I was so concerned with photographing the roof, I managed to cut off the very top of the spire.

Just at the edge of the square is the Fishermen's Bastion. According to legend, there was a stronghold here which was protected in medieval times by the guild of fishermen.




You can pay to climb up and stroll on the walkways And the view from here down to the Danube is superb. Of course, we were fortunate in having a clear day.



The huge building you can see on the far bank on the right of the photo is the Hungarian Parliament building, modelled on Westminster. On the far left of the photo, the green area you can see is Margaret Island, an island in the middle of the Danube.

After a quick lunch, we were back in the coach and heading for an afternoon in the Buda Hills where we took a ride on the Children's Railway. This is really a sort of extracurricular educational institution, where children from 10 - 14 learn about railway professions. The idea originated in the USSR and was greatly developed in Soviet times. Apparently many children's railways are still functioning in post-Soviet states and Eastern European countries, and many use railway technology no longer current on the main lines so they can be seen as heritage railways. Budapest's one is a narrow gauge railway.



This shows the inside of one of the trains. Outside, you can see one of the boys who will collect the tickets and ensure safety procedures are followed.

Below is one of the little boys who has just signalled to our train driver that it is safe to leave the station



Apart from train driver, all the jobs are done by children under adult supervision, and our guide told us there was considerable competition for the places there, and children who are accepted have to be be successful in their studies at school.

It was a very pleasant ride through the forests, and we noticed many walking trails, so obviously this is a popular recreation area.

At the terminus, we walked a short distance to the terminus of the cog railway, a rack and pinion system that took us right down out of the hills to the level of the Danube, where our coach collected us to take us back to the hotel.

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