End of the road

Three weeks with the Mutt and all went well with the exception of losing two hubcaps…after our madcap hubcap adventure in New Zealand last year, it seemed a fitting continuance of the travel spirits guiding my life…I noticed one was missing on one morning as I was getting into the car and then on our last day with the car, I noticed the second one on the driver’s side was missing…stolen? Fell off? Aliens?....who knows what powers dictate the hubcap world. I’ve never lost a hubcap in 58 years of driving at home, but the last two trips have added mystery and amusement to our journey. We finished our trip with a great family in Eger, Hungary…the kind of open minded, generous spirits that we meet through Servas connections. I had made contact with Boglarka through Emails and was told that they would be happy to host us. We coordinated tines for our arrival and I was told that the parents also spoke English in case “Bogi,” as the email was signed, was not hone when we arrived. After getting lost, as per usual, we finally found the house and I knocked on the door. A happy smile on a college-aged female’s face greeted me with the opening of the door and I asked “Bogi’s house? Yes, came the answer…we went in and the mother was bustling around in the kitchen preparing a lovely meal and I asked what time “Bogi” would arrive…I was then told with laughter that our “host” was actually this college student…we had a good laugh all around at the miscommunication.

Bogi is a serious-minded young lady working on her Master’s degree in English who laughs easily and was our guide as well as host in Eger. Alice, the mom, is a math teacher who has to be told to come home because she is so dedicated to her work that she loses track of the time and a cell call starting “MOM, when are you coming home comes when the clock passes 7 pm. Atilla, a proud name in Hungary, is a Lawyer and practices in Budapest an hour and a half away. He is a thoughtful man whose opinions are shaped by his basic humanity…They have an apartment there where he, Bogi, and the bright-eyed sister, Dora all live as they split their time between home and work.

Dora studies chemical engineering but whose happy spirit would seem more attuned to lesser academic endeavors. She’s one of those individuals who livens up the room when she enters….The girls both did an exchange to Texas last year and were just 30 minutes apart. They were really open and honest in their evaluations of the refugee situation, speaking of the fears and concerns that all in these four countries expressed, while empathizing with the human tragedy…there are no easy answers and they were very conflicted about being overwhelmed by huge numbers in their small country of 10 million people while agonizing over the plight of so many desperate people….We found this duality throughout our trip…There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on the issue. There are not any easy answers. Bogi showed us around the sights and sounds of Eger and since Alice and Atilla had a previous engagement, Carol, Bogi and I had a lovely dinner in a traditional Hungarian restaurant before heading to Prague the following morning. It’s only fitting that we got lost once again after misunderstanding Atilla’s instructions and turning the wrong way on the freeway….the signs kept saying Slovakia and not Budapest, and the brain kept saying: “This isn’t right.” We finally got straightened out as we always do and dropped Bogi off at the Metro stop and made our way to Anna and Tibor’s house where we stayed three weeks earlier. The banter and frivolity of the evening was crushed the following morning when Anna and I were walking Zeus, the dog. He sprinted away from Anna, and she called and called him…we were walking parallel to the 4 lane road and then I heard that unmistakable “Thud” followed by painful yipping and sure enough he had been hit by a car…there were so few cars on the road on a Sunday morning it seemed so illogical that he would be hit…I comforted him while Anna ran back to the house to get Tibor and the car….they took him to the vet, but he had such spinal injuries that they had to put him down…A total downer for everybody involved, including the visitors. We got out of their hair as soon as possible so that they could deal with their own grief as a family without distractions. Turning in the rental car and making our way to our plush river boat where we will live for the next two weeks as we cruise to Amsterdam seemed a little other-worldly when we knew that our friends were hurting so badly.

With the end of the road behind us and the rivers ahead of us, it was time to shift gears and recalibrate. They had a free laundry and since we got on board early, we hustled down to get in before the rest of the passengers got there. That was a fabulous start for the 15 days…all clean clothes, and clothes that could be hung in a closet or put in a drawer…with a passenger list of 94 and a crew of 64 it’s a very different scene than the megaships where you have 3,000 of your nearest and dearest friends to be dealt with full time. So hello M.S. Maria Theresa, and good bye Mutt…., no more suitcases, no more schlepping them around, just clean sheets on a fabulous bed and a hot shower with heated floor in the bathroom…now that’s really over the top.

Old Lady's Summer

This is the time of year of the long shadows as they were once described to me. The sun sets low in the sky and the days grow shorter by the day. The weather have been especially kind to us on this trip as the rain has stayed away and the temperatures have been nippy but not restrictive of our activities. It is the time of the “old ladies summer,” as they are known here in Hungary. That time of the year where the old ladies go out and sit in the park and soak up the last rays of warmth and sunshine before the harsh onset of winter. We call it our “Indian summer,” but I like the analogy as described by our Hungarian hosts…but first we had to get here.

We left Krakow and started to leisurely wind our way back to Budapest for the river cruise. Krakow is in the south of Poland and so we continued heading that direction. We spent the night in Zakopane, a ski/winter resort area near the Slovakian border at the foot of the Tatra mountains. It’s a lovely village with chalets dotting the landscape and the ever present flower pots adorning the balconies. The houses are stained a clear varnish color rather than being painted and that gives them a warm appearance. The town itself is filled with the usual resort attractions of shops both kitschy and sublime…Carol found a shop what had a really nice, classy variety of what can be officially labeled as sweaters, but are certainly more dressy than that. It’s off season, the summer crush of Krakow visitors looking for their summer hiking on the myriad of trails and off road opportunities are fewer now, and the snow has not yet arrived, so we easily found a hotel for $12 per person through a local hotel booking agent. A three star hotel as it was designated, but with a surly receptionist who obviously didn’t want to be there. There weren’t any towels in the room and when we told her about it, she got on the phone and made a call to the booking agent that didn’t sound all that friendly. She passed the phone on to us and the agent told us that: “For that price, you don’t get towels…you have to pay an extra $3 per person…okay….then there was a $4 charge for parking and a $5 charge for breakfast…but in the end it was fine and the entire bill the following morning came to $32. I think they forgot to charge us for breakfast and with the sourness of our welcome, I didn’t feel any compunction to point out their error. With some extra zlotys in my pocket, I topped the car off with gas and still had coins which can’t be exchanged for another currency, so a rummaging through the mini—mart at the gas station produced a bag of chips, Lays, no less, a bag of pistachios, a chocolate bar, and a Twix candy with a few coins left over for the grandsons to add to their international coin collection….nothing like making your money work for you….LOL. About 30 minutes later we crossed the border into Slovakia….gone are the goon border guards, the sniffy dogs, the concrete barriers, no more passport stamps which show where you’ve been….the only things left are the old booths which look like bridge toll booths. You slow down because they are narrow but other than that you just zip through in the new European Union where border crossings are simply a blink of the eye…

We wove our way through some glorious fall foliage with leaves falling all around us. Some became hitch-hikers on the windshield wipers until they blew off to rest in a new location. The roads are good, traffic is light in the morning and the Mutt (our car license plate is “MUT 405”) chugged up the hills complaining but still did the job. It was a most picturesque drive and an easy one. We only drove a couple of hours and came to another resort town, Slovakian style, with a large lake where we drove to a water fall and generally just relaxed for the afternoon after a lunch which we had no idea what we were ordering, but we had confidence since we hadn’t had any bad meals anywhere on the trip. We stayed in a hotel near the lake and hit the road the following morning heading to Hungary where we were to stay with a Servas family in Eger, the main town in a spa valley which is also renowned for its wine. We stopped often in little villages which is what I had been craving after the large cities…these throw-back places are such a contradiction. The houses are a mixture of new construction painted brightly in oranges, yellows and reds, while next door is an old barn or house that has been around long before I came to this earth. Supermarkets have everything available to the modern shopper while two ladies stand talking outside in their long dresses, head scarves and shawls, and rubber boots. Tractors pulling a variety of items in a wagon slowly ply the winding, narrow streets while some impatient driver in a hot car follows looking for the very first opportunity to pass and zip on down the road.

There are areas of public space where people have formed their own little private world of gardens…no bigger than the average back yard of an American home…well, the size of a back yard as I knew it growing up, anyway….but they are well manicured with flowers and vegetables. Each plot has a small shack where tools and a couple of chairs can be stored for use and enjoyment. Right next to one plot another sits, with no real border distinction, each seems to blend into the other, but each has its own little hut and the variety of crops is different depending on the family’s needs/desires. In other areas the plots are considerably larger measuring an acre or more. At one such place a man ran a rotor-tiller with a furrowing attachment which lifted and fluffed the soil and a very down-home woman walked behind with a bucket picking up the potatoes which had been unearthed. The earth looks very rich…The soil is dark and productive.…I always get the feeling that the people in these villages are a lot more in touch with nature and a simple life than we can imagine. After many navigational errors as we got close to the Hungarian border, we finally crossed back where we had started…The area is dotted with small villages which don’t show up on the maps and road numbers seem to change without any reason. You can be on E521 and the next thing you know it’s highway 23. We try to look at google maps in the morning before starting out to get an idea of where we turn and what the highway numbers are but this is of limited value. In the end, we’re on holiday and there is no reason to get upset because the journey takes an hour or two longer than originally planned…and besides it always leads to unexpected little treasures that would be missed, like Dedinky, which was anything but Dinky. We caught a glimpse of it through the canopy of trees, a lake and village below in a valley. It looked like a scene out of Switzerland where you are high in the mountains and a valley is laid out before you, except this was merely a glimpse, not a panorama, a bend in the road brought it into view for just a second. We found a spot where we could pull off the road, stopped for our photo op, then found a small road which seemed to be heading in the direction of the lake. Unmarked on maps it could have easily been passed by without any knowledge of the fact that such a little jewel lay waiting to be discovered. We stopped for some hot chocolate, walked around looking at how picturesque it was, took lots of photos and then headed on our way…the scenery was so beautiful, everything we had hoped for since we were missing our Autumn at home. A tunnel of yellow and gold trees formed an archway under which we passed, the forest floor was covered with fallen leaves looking like a carpet had been laid out, and the hillsides literally burst with color. Finally about five in the afternoon we crossed into Hungary and found our way with some local help to a lovely home and family where we are happily and very comfortably ensconced for two nights. Our road journey is coming to an end…Budapest lies just an hour or so down the road. A last night at Anna and Tibor’s house were we began will bring this portion of the journey to an end…then it’s lap of luxury time on the river cruise…..what a contrast that will be…I don’t think they will charge us for towels….LOL Life is good and we are living large in Central Europe.

The Yin and Yang of Poland

The Yin…..the entry of Poland into the European Union had an enormous effect in uplifting the country from its rural roots into the fast lane of economic develop. Poles that we talked to said that it changed everything. They were no longer a pull toy, they were part of something big and bold, Europe. Roads were built, Poles went all over the place freely, industry moved in and development was huge. All of this has made Poland a different Poland, a Poland looking west where they can see their future development continuing. The yang…The election of JPII, as he is called in Poland, to the papacy was a huge boon to the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. For an already deeply religious and most devout of all European countries to have a Polish Pope was the most amazing thing to Poles. It just ingrained the church into their DNA. The country became even more dedicated to the church.

The Poles are traditional Catholics and there is now a huge pushback against Francis whose attempt to modernize and liberalize the church is met with outright and public scorn…..show’s how much I know..I always thought there was a thing called “Papal infallibility.” But most Catholics here are totally opposed to the new agenda. The church’s influence comes early and constant…students spend twice as much of their academic time studying religion as they do learning about their own history and culture. Elections are even held on Sundays and people go to church first and then to the polls…nice segue for the church. The political ramifications of this were seen in the national election for prime minister held while we were in Krakow. The party that won was the party that espoused the heaviest dose of Catholicism. And with that result, Poland has made a sharp turn to the right with potentially massive implications for all of Europe…at least that’s what is all over the news, and even this morning there was a lead article in the Washington Post about that very same thing. The party that won the election, in what was considered a landslide, did all the usual promising of everything to everybody, but embraced the conservative agenda of the Polish church hierarchy. The new prime minister to be is a huge fan of Urban, the president of Hungary who is even further to the right and has made a big splash about the refugee situation. They talk about this group of nations that we just happened to visit as some kind of sub-section of the EU. They say that they think alike and it’s becoming more different from western Europe. It will be interesting to watch the various forces working within the country determining the direction the country will head. Poland has had the ebb and flow of history cross its path on so many occasions, reading a list of all the people they had wars with for a variety of reasons reads like a who’s who of Europe…Everybody wanting to go west went through Poland…everybody wanting to go East went through Poland. And they had their own forms of aggression to kick up the numbers as well.

And now for one of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, Krakow…. Krakow is a lively gem with a market square to rival any that we’ve seen. There is a certain similarity to them in various cities of Europe, at least the ones that didn’t bombed into oblivion during WWII. Warsaw got leveled during the war, but they rebuilt their old town just as it had been before the war…brick by brick. Here in Krakow all around the very large square there are many outdoor eating establishments and with the Autumn nip in the air blankets and propane heaters create a relatively comfortable atmosphere for dining al fresco. Street performers do their thing from break dancers attracting large crowds to mimes standing mute in whatever costume they have decided to portray their “Performance Art.” The clop-clop-clop of horses hooves on the cobble stones announce the arrival of another white horse-drawn carriage to take the tourists around to areas where they have probably already trod, but they do seem very popular. Carol noticed that the horse shoes were like women’s high heels and raised an inch or so in the back…..must have something to do with the difficulty of treading on cobblestones. The tourist gift shops around the square range from the kitschy to the sublime, read expensive. One of our Uzbek “granddaughters,” Guli, came from Warsaw to see us and we had a nice two days with her. She studies at the university in Warsaw. Her mother had moved to Germany about 15 years ago and remarried. Guli had been terribly unhappy without her family. She has a little brother which she had not seen since he was born 10 years ago, but finally she was able to obtain the necessary documents and is now studying in Poland where she can visit her family on weekends after an 8-hour bus ride.

She had wanted to go see Auschwitz, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. We weren’t really interested because we have seen Dachau in Germany, and how much of man’s inhumanity to man does one need to see? However, we were willing to take here there. Good news, bad news, there were not any tickets available for the days she was with us. It never occurred to me that it would “sell out,” and that they limited the number of visitors. So plan B was a visit to the large salt mine in the area. It was very interesting……1,000 feet deep with 178 miles, (that’s not a typo) of horizontal shafts some of which date back to the 13th century where the miners picked and shoveled this commodity worth the price of gems in the Middle Ages. We walked down 378 steps to a depth of 443 feet on our tour. We walked for several miles to visit many of the chambers which included high-arched full cathedral like ceilings where they actually do celebrate mass every Sunday. It’s hugely popular with over a million visitors each year. A touristy rip off folk show with mediocre food was a disappointment, especially after the wonderful dinner at the Mozart show in Prague. But Guli enjoyed it and that made it better to handle. We are staying with a Servas family now that Guli has returned to Warsaw. Like so many families in so many places, their apartment in a block of apartments is small but serviceable….Kitchen and bathrooms (one for a toilet only, and the other with a sink and tub) are extremely small but suffice to their needs. Getting here proved to be our usual adventure of trying to decipher directions and signs. It was complicated by the fact that we were told to arrive about 6 p.m. but they went off daylight savings time that day and so our late afternoon search was further complicated by darkness. A little guess work as to where to turn onto streets we weren’t sure were correct proved successful and my usual practice of finding gas station where there is usually somebody who knows where we are trying to get proved very rewarding as a lady said “Follow me, it’s not far.”…so off we went. We’ve been met with this kindness several times already….people going out of their way to be our personal GPS. Once we arrived at the block of flats came the next part of the adventure. The address of 24 Na Blomie 9/19 was very confusing since there were about a dozen buildings all marked with a “9.” However, once again the local population comes to the rescue and people found it for us with a little exploration. Eva and Andrew were gracious Servas hosts even in their very small flat which got smaller with two guests. But, like so many it is functional and does the job. The world doesn’t operate on granite counter-tops and Jacuzzi bathtubs.. They were/are university professors. Andrew now retired and our age, was a font of information. Eva, 15 years younger still lectures at the university. They are cultured, have traveled widely and are very interesting people with whom to converse. I can’t imagine that other Servas hosts would have been as knowledgeable about, and as open, Poland than these two..it was a very lucky find…lots of good conversation, lots of honest insight was gained. It was a pleasure to meet them as well as informative. Now, we are through with the big 4, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague and Krakow…time for us to slowly weave our way back to Budapest for one last night and then get on the river cruise…I think it’s time for some country and rural living for our last week.