== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
SALZBURG TOUR
We arrived in Munich, Germany about 7 in the morning and got some coffee in the airport. I also bought a couple of comic books, one of Uncle Scrooge (Dagobert) and another of Olympia. We got into the Höller Bus (Name roughly translates as: the Hell Bus or Infernal Bus) and began our tour with a description of the country side we were driving through. This was cruel and unusual punishment for a bus load of people suffering from jet lag. The worst part was he loudness of the guide’s speakers which blared out above every seat, plus no mute button! Even after I asked the volume be turned down, it was still so loud that my Bose Sound-Deadening Earphones kept whispering “Uncle” in my ear. I felt like I was in Hatlo’s Inferno. Hatlo drew a Sunday one-panel strip which showed the infinite varieties of torture in Hell in the Times-Picayune when I was growing up. In this one, a cartoonist is being forced to look at his own cartoons for a million years as penance for what he foists on his innocent readers.
I picture a Hatlo Inferno for the managers at Collette Travel, Sabine, and all the female tour guides they hired. I envision them each chained to a wall in Hell, while a NASCAR Race Announcer blares out a description of every person who enters Hell for a million years over cheap, noisy loudspeakers stuck only a foot over their heads! Since the trip into the Inferno will be a short trip, they will have an advantage our tour group didn’t have: Jet Lag. And when they are unchained for a walking tour around their new environs from time to time, Torquemada the Spanish Inquisitor will show up carrying a portable amplifier turned up full volume to ensure they can hear all his descriptions of the cells occupied by every tour guide who abused their customers throughout all the ages.
The “short ride to Salzburg” became a two-hour hellish torture for me in my jetlag state in an uncomfortable bus with a blaring loudspeaker constantly pouring out our guide’s hard-consonant pronunciation of English and her twisted attempts at humors replete with gallows laughter. Ha-ha yourself! The weather was cloudy and the drizzle kept me from making any photos through the drop bespeckled windows of the bus. We arrived at the Castellani Hotel on the edge of the old town of Salzburg. The hotel was an Italian-run and Italian-architecture of recent vintage. Clean, sparse, straight lines everywhere. Our room looked out over the entrance. When we got into the room, it was freezing cold, about 50 or so. In groggy jet lag state, here I was immediately forced to figure out the heating system which was steam heat through modern radiators whose only blessing was they were silent. Open loop control, which meant I had to be part of the feedback system to keep the temperature from getting too hot or too cold. Thankfully the radiators were quiet and soon heated the room and the bath. The coverlets for the entire trip were single bed coverlets folded over each side of king-sized bed made by moving two single beds together. Another thing to figure out before I could just take a long nap.
That night we drove to the restaurant in a monastery from the 7th century which served dinner to visiting Charlemagne in 806 and stayed open afterward as a restaurant until the present day. It was warm and cozy once we got inside out of the drizzling rain. We had a banquet room for ourselves, and were served dinner. We walked into the large dining/music hall at the end of the corridor where they hold dinner concerts. Huge baroque hall. Found out baroque architecture came as a result of the Counter-Reformation when the rebirth of the Catholic Church from its lugubrious mediaeval period happened.
We were visited by the Krampus, devilish creatures with scary faces and fearful costumes, usually with two large spherical bells over their rears which signaled their arrival on the scene. Their job was to scare people. They came through our dining room followed by St. Nicholas and his good elves who greeted us.
Mannfred was our Arnoldish tour guide of the Old Town of Salzburg on for our full day in Salzburg. He was the best of all the tour guides we had, and the only male. Spoke better English than his Austrian compatriot Schwarznegger. I tested him and he pronounced “California” with the silent “F”, which Arnold still hasn’t figured out. He took us through the Mirabell Gardens, Mozart’s birth house (on the very date of his death, Dec. 5, 250 years ago!) and the Cathedral. We walked past some cases of Stiegel Bier, a beer that has been brewed in Salzburg since 1492! He pointed out the funicular train which climbs to the Festum Salzburg, the old fort atop Salzburg which guarded the city. Mozart’s statue, his pen ever in his right hand, graced the square outside the Demel coffeeshop where we rested our tootsies and enjoyed some coffee and a pastry.
Newly refreshed, we took the funicular to the Höhen Salzburg Festung (High Fortress) which overlooks the city. The weather had cleared up for the first time, the sun was out, and we could see the mountains in 360 degrees around us. Took a lot of photos from the Festung from the parapets surrounding it. We did a tour of the insides of the fortress as well, stopping to view the Puppet Museum and buying Salzburg souvenirs in the Gift Shop. The one bag limit per person due to the size of the Tour Bus made the acquisition of lots of gifts problematic. But we bought a miniature Mozart violin and a couple of beautiful quartz crystals which seemed to be from the region. We walked through the military museum and saw one soldier with a handlebar mustache who looked ever so much like 
Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou. This was an amazing tour for us because we could go where we wanted, stay in each room as little or much as we wished, and guess what? No choppy English guide blasting out description of what we looked at! We bought some Glühwein (hot, mulled wine) in the open-air kiosk. We were told that this was the warmest weather in 1300 years in Salzburg and yet it was still brisk enough to warm up with some of this “glowing wine” in the open patios of the fortress.
We came down to Mozart Square again and walked through the Christmas markets. Took photos of the kids ice-skating under Mozart's gaze. We tried to change money at American Express, but it was closed for lunch till 2, so we walked the half mile back to Castellani and rested for a while till we went back to Old Town. We ate at the Café Mozart off one of the small streets packed with people. Met Kirsten, our waitress. Asked her how she learned to speak such good idiomatic English and she said she lived in Ireland for 3 years and then worked in an Irish pub where a lot of Brits from all over came in Salzburg. As she talked about living in Ireland, the Irish accent was clearly discernible, when she talked about her pub work, the other British accents bloomed. She said that she “drives the Brits crazy” because invariably they try to pick out her accent as to what part of Britain she’s from. Actually she’s from East Berlin. Was only 13 when the Wall came down. Asked her about “Goodbye, Lenin” and she said it is a movie loved by East Berliners because it recalls the pre-1989 era, and even though it’s not totally accurate in many ways, it gets close to the truth of those days. We invited her to visit us when she comes to USA to visit an uncle in Houston.
After dinner we were a bit tired, but stumbled into the square to look around. We looked through the lit-up Christmas Markets. I found some fuzzy red heart-shaped pillow with "I Love You" in German, which reads "Ich Liebe Dich" and the script "h" looked like a "k" which made Dich look like Dick, which was Del's father, Dick Richards, among other things. People were jammed to the walls like Mardi Gras day. The PA speaker was talking about something going on, but the only decipherable word was “Krampus”. I sidled over to a poster of events for December and there on the Eve of St. Nicholas Day (Dec 6), this very night!, was to be a Krampus Laufen or Krampus Run! Those beasties from the night before were going to be out in force and roaming the streets of Old Town scaring women and children!
This was amazing since I had just completed reading in “The Sun Mystery” (See Review Below) about how being scared helps one’s “I” to hold onto and revive the physical body (keep it from returning to the Earth), and how feeling compassion helps one’s astral body to hold onto the etheric body and keep it from spreading out into cosmic spaces. Here was an annual event to scare people and help them in the darkest time of the year to hold onto their physical bodies!
We walked to the Cathedral where St. Nick was talking over PA system now from the steps of the church as the dozen or so Krampus creatures assembled and listened. Some may have honored for their costume designs. Then the Krampus were released into the crowd. We walked behind a Christmas kiosk area to get away from the crowd and watch the Krampus and we were not disappointed.
A Krampus with fearful face came up to a young woman with dark hair near us, grabbed her, and she screamed and strove to get away from him, they wrestled and fell to the ground with the Krampus on top of her! No doubt she is now tightly bound to her physical body again! Here's a photo of the two of them on the ground right in front of us. She quickly got away and ran quickly to the side of the street. Apparently this kind of behavior is an accepted part of the Krampuslaufen each St. Nicholas Eve, Dec. 5, in old town Salzburg.
We were exhausted and began to make our way out of Old Salzburg for our twenty minute stroll back to the Castellani Hotel. On the pavement alongside a building was a strip of snow about two feet wide and twenty feet long piled about a foot or so high. Great! If anyone asks we can truthfully we saw the snow piled a foot and a half high on the ground in Salzburg.
LINZ TOUR
We were up early to check out of the Castellani, but first breakfast or rather Frühstück which translates from the German into “early piece” — well, we didn’t know what to do with all these early pieces of unknown foods. No labels on any of them, just dishes of various color pudding or yogurty things. I tried the pink pudding one because in a Thursday Next novel I read recently her time-traveling father changed the entire world into a pink pudding. It was as good as Thursday described it. Fortunately it didn’t change me into a pink pudding. But there was enough recognizable breads, juices, and coffee to get us going. The sky outside was clearing but as soon as we headed out of Salzburg, it got foggy especially in the mountains. Christian, our bus driver, managed to get us safely to Linz around midday and our first stop was in downtown Linz to pick up our Tour Shouter. 
You can tell from her face immediately that she didn't need a loudspeaker to speak to an enclosed bus of 31 people, but this easy logic seemed to have escaped the bus driver, the Collette Tour Manager, and the Linz Tour Guide, so we suffered through it. Take a moment to inspect the mouth of the Linz Guide — can you imagine any normal English sound made with one’s mouth wide open and one’s tongue at the top of the hard palette? No, not unless you were punching out a teutonic consonant full blast. Which is what she did, over and over again, first in the bus, then in the church. I listened to her and heard my mellifluous English transformed into the chugging locomotive of a teutonic martinet!
Our next stop was at Martinkirche, a very old church named after St. Martin. It was built over an even older Roman temple whose foundations are still visible on the outside of the church. There was even a portion of the original Roman wall in which you could see Greek letters engraved it, all upside-down. Noula Rodakis, one of our tour members noticed it and wondered why it was turned over. The guide said the Romans often re-used stones from earlier buildings and sometimes the workers being illiterate in Greek, would turn the stones over.
We were given free time in Linz to rest from the guide’s portable amplifier and loudspeaker and get some lunch. Del and I chose a restaurant right off the square and found a large portion of our tour group there, among them were Kiki Burgereit and Marilyn, Billy and Cornelia Weldon, Jane and Kris Kirkpatrick, Carole Ducote, Michaela York, Becky Pennington, Mary Vedros, and Barbara McCormick. Del and I ordered some Knoblauchsuppe, which I translated as some kind of soup, so I asked our waitress what kind? She said “onion soup”, but with a telltale hesitation. We ordered it anyway and found it absolutely delicious. Lucky for us we found out later that we had eaten “garlic soup”! Lucky, because we would have never ordered something called garlic soup.
We wandered around the Linz Christmas markets after lunch. I was impressed by the solid wooden carved creche sets of all sizes. One could outfit a mantelpiece or a church altar at one kiosk in the market. The monument in the center of the Linz square was about four stories high and was crowned with two golden figures on either side of a beaming Sun, looking ever so much like a monstrance in a Catholic Church.
VIENNA TOUR
Then we got back on the infernal bus for the afternoon leg of our trip to Vienna. More mountains and fog and not much to shoot photos of but the inside of the bus. We motored into downtown Vienna to the Hotel de France which was to be our haven for the next two days. We had just enough time to unpack and get dressed for our Vienna dinner followed by concert at the Schönbrunn Palace. It was a cozy little summer palace of 2100 rooms designed after Versailles, but I daresay the French palace could easily fit inside the backyard of this monstrous palace. The dinner was very nice, but nothing memorable except the lovely ladies in the photo above.
We left for the long drive to the Schönbrunn Palace and we got there, on time. After a walk through a drizzly, cold Vienna night for a block, we waited and observed a first-class SNAFU (Situation Normal All Fouled Up) in operation: the concert was not scheduled for the palace but for one of its “satellite” concert halls. So we reluctantly walked back out into the cold, wet air, climbed on the bus, drove back into Vienna proper where we had left some time earlier, and attended our Vienna Concert-Lite. Few people other than us in attendance, as you can tell from the photo at the left: only a small nonet of classical instruments and three or four young singers. This concert would be impressive in Peoria, Illinois, but in Vienna, Austria, it sucked big-time and smacked of a Collette fumble or a backfield in motion foul.
Woke up from a good night’s sleep at the Hotel de France and wandered downstairs to find the breakfast. It was up a half-flight of stairs and the fare was more recognizable than the Italian-German fare from the Castellani. We boarded the infernal bus for our tour from Hell of Vienna. Vienna is a great city, full of great architecture, but trying to photograph them from a moving bus through a window full of raindrops is no fun at all. Every other building had something famous of note and our teutonic drill sergeant du jour made sure the volume was cranked up so we would not miss one single over-articulated English consonant of her spiel. I felt like jet lag all over again by the time we arrived at the Schönbrunn Palace for the second time in two days. Hopefully they’ll actually let us in this time instead of dispatching to parts unknown again.
First, a few words about the Palace’s origin. When King Charles the Great or Charlemagne was hunting in the region outside of Vienna’s walled city, he discovered a spring with great-tasting water. He called it his “marvelous spring” or “schön brunn” and decided to build a hunting lodge there. Years later the Ottomans lay siege to Vienna and while they left without breeching the walled city, they burnt down the hunting lodge. After their major enemy had given up on seizing their country, Charlemagne decided to built a palace on the site of his wonderful spring and gave it the name Schönbrunn Palace. It was this huge palace that we were to tour today and stop in every room to hear English butchered over a loudspeaker in front 20 foot-high stoves, marbled bathrooms, parqueted floors, and gold-leafed scrollwork everywhere. I coped with the Tour Shouter by walking a room ahead so that only a drone of syncopation reached me around the corner and I could simply gaze on the marvelous handiwork which went into this incredible palace. No photos were allowed, so I was able to focus on the chambers where the royalty of Vienna hung out.
At the end of the tour and my wits, we were released into the grounds in front of the Schönbrunn Palace where the Christmas Markets were now open and doing business. Del and I enjoyed some Hot Chocolate in Schönbrunn Palace mugs. In America if you buy something in a keepsake mug, you get to keep the mug dirty and clean it later, but here in Austria we found a quaint custom: you return the dirty mug, they clean it and re-use and give you an unused mug! The grounds behind the palace were huge and beautiful and they missed our attention. Would require another day to enjoy the landscaped grounds which go some 300 meters back to an Arche de Triomphe worthy of Paris itself. I took a photo of the Arche through the window and let that suffice for this trip.
We then proceeded to St. Stephan's Cathedral in downtown Vienna, and having heard enough chopped up English for one day, we abandoned the tour and promptly got lost in old Vienna, a very nice city to get lost in. I took photos of the buildings on foot and enjoyed our walk right up until it became obvious we were lost and the map we had was absolutely designed to be interpreted only by a native of Vienna. We found a delightful café and had some delicious potato soup which tasted a lot like what my mother called potato stew. It would last us till supper in the Grinzing region outside Vienna. With the aid of our non-brusque and very helpful waitress, I figured out where on the map we were situated and what direction we needed to walk to get back to the Hotel de France. We finally arrived there and decided to take a simpler tour on our own of the ring.
Having heard about the ring around Vienna, I wanted me and Del to take the streetcar and make the ring. It follows the path of the old wall of Vienna and would give me a chance to take better photos than the hurried and harried bus tour earlier in the day. Well, that ring tour will have to wait for another day. We bought the ticket at the Tobacco Shop as directed. We walked across the median and asked for help as to where to board the bus as the signs were not visible to us. Once we had successfully cleared all these hurdles and found a seat on the streetcar, a horrible thought entered my head, “We didn’t get on Line 1!” A young man across the car from us helped us to get out of the car before it headed off into the far reaches of suburban Vienna, and then showed us what streetcar to take to get back where we started from. Instead of a ring around Vienna, we did an out and back in. When we arrived back, I figured that was adventure enough for the afternoon and decided to get a snack.
We walked over the Café Maximilian which was catacorner to our Hotel. It was the café that Sigmund Freud frequented because it was a couple blocks from his office, and he could often be seen in the afternoon sipping his coffee at a table there. As we walked in, we spied a creamy white centered strudel called a Topfen Strudel in a display case. We decided to get some coffee and one of those strudels. By this time, my non-German speaking wife, Del, knew just enough German to be dangerous, and as the waitress approached us, Del blurted out that we wanted a “topfen” strudel. But, alas, even though to my ear she seemed to say the word correctly, the waitress brought us a different strudel which clearly had apples in the middle. Since the waitress was very kurt and abrupt and the display case was well on the other side of the café, we were at a loss as to what went wrong and more importantly how to get what we really wanted without dragging the busy waitress to the case or pulling one out ourselves and carrying to our table. Our problem-solving reverie came to a quick and propitious end when the couple at the table across from us materialized a Topfen Strudel in front of each of them. When Miss Too-Busy-To-Chat came by again, I pointed to the other table and said, “Ein”. It turned out to be a delicious cheese strudel, unlike anything I’d ever tasted before. The filling was a bit like cheesecake, but smooth as silk and just as light on the palate. The light, crisp crust was dusted with a puff of powdered sugar and we would have licked the plate if we’d been at home or Siggie’s ghost were not watching us.
Where did we go wrong? I believe when Del ordered a topfen strudel, she used the English “o” sound which is exactly equivalent to German “a” sound in their word for apple, which is “apfel”. So, the waitress heard an American voice ordering an apfel strudel and that’s what we got. If Del, my dearest Aries, who rushes into any breech with her Ram’s horns lowered, had simply paused for a half second, I would have ordered a Topfen Strudel in my best German voice, and we would have received the white cheese strudel. You never know until you find out.
When we walked out of the Café it was night-time and the huge twin-spired cathedral which towers over the park outside the café was lit up and looked like a fairy castle looming in the night sky. There were several posters and bronze monuments to Sigmund Freud in the park. One was a stark monolith of granite with the words, “Die Stimme des Intellekts ist Leise”, roughly translated by me as “The Voice of the Intellect is Silent” carved into its smooth surface. At the bottom was this inscription: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
We arrived back at our Hotel de France in time to rest a bit before we board the bus for a ride to Grinzing, a quaint neighborhood on the outside of Vienna in the wine producing area. Our destination for dinner was a restaurant in an old wine pressing house of the Krischke family that was built in 1527, rather new compared to the 803 Stiftkeller we ate at in Salzburg, but ancient by American standards. When we returned home, I told our friend Rosie that we had eaten in a restaurant that was built in 803 and she said, “Wasn’t that the year of the Louisiana Purchase?” No, Rosie, that was about one thousand years before the Lousiana Purchase in 1803. This brought home to me the newness of the New World compared to the Old World.
We ate in the ground level restaurant, and our tour of 33 folks comprised the majority of the guests there that evening. We were serenaded by a trio of musicians with Christmas carols and other American favorites on the violin, bass fiddle, and the piano/accordian. During their break, the only blind member of our tour, Carole Ducote took over the keyboard and led us in a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Our table mates for dinner were Curtis and Diane Turner from Shreveport, and nearby is a photo of the two of them in the booth after the meal was over.
One more note about the restaurant: there were signs on the walls showing a young boy and his WC potty. (WC is short for Water Closet, the Continental euphemistic equivalent of our Rest Room.) In one he is standing and peeing in the potty, in two he is pointing to the Potty Rooms, and in the third he is drinking a bottle of wine while resting on his potty (See Photo).
That sign reminded me a Christmas story about our grandson Gabriel when he was about the age of the toddler in the WC sign. They were singing Christmas carols in his nursery school class late one afternoon, and when his mom, our daughter Maureen, arrived, the teacher came to the door laughing so much she could barely speak.
“Is it my son again?” Maureen asked.
“Yes,” the teacher struggled to get the words out.
“What did he do now?”
“We were singing carols a few minutes ago and he asked to be excused to go to the potty. Through the closed door we could hear him singing Jingle Bells. Like this: ‘Jingle Bells, unh! unh! Jingle Bells unh! unh! Jingle all the way unh! unh! . . .' and we've been laughing since.”
A week later back home at my club's Christmas party I told this story to our friend Jenny and she said that when she was having her first child, in Lebanon, using the Lamaze method, the teacher suggested that she choose a song to help her get through birth pangs and she chose Jingle Bells! It was Unh! Unh! Unh! all over again for her.
I told that story to Hoye and Jane Grafton and they laughed so hard. I told them several other funny stories and we all had a good time. I seem to recall a rousing Greek song with a circle dance Hoye, Noula, and myself near the end of the evening as well.
Notice I have not said much about the food except for the desserts. The Alte Presshaus was another forgettable feast of sauerkraut, sausages, and potatoes. The dessert was good. The wine flowed. The music wafted. The spirits rose. The ghosts of the old presshouse were no doubt pleased with our company before we shuffled off our mortal coils back to the modern conveniences of the Hotel de France in our diesel-snorting conveyance. The food may have been forgettable, but our evening in Grinzing at the Alte Presshouse was definitely unforgettable.
Del went to bed and I joined some of our group in the hotel lounge area drinking wine, listening to the piano player, and telling stories for a couple of more hours heading upstairs to join Del in a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we will be off to Prague and switching our Euros into Korunas. The Czech Republic has been accepted into the European Union, but are on hold switching to Euros until their monetary system stabilizes. Conversion rate was twenty korunas for one US dollar or 27 for one Euro. I thought of a koruna as a nickel and it worked for me.
PRAGUE TOUR
Our second breakfast at the Hotel de France was a little easier to figure out. So many choices. Granolas, oatmeal, juices, eggs, croissants, scrambled eggs, and the ever-present server to remove your dishes as soon as they were empty. Breakfast was often the main meal of the day for me on the trip because it was the only pre-planned one where I got a large selection of things to eat. After the garlic soup adventure, we were more careful about what we ordered during our off-tour restaurant stops. I recall now that on the bus trip into Vienna, we stopped at Rosenberg Inn along the way and bought the Kaiser-Melange, a wonderful hot chocolate drink in a souvenir cup, and a delicious croissant.
We were back on the infernal bus heading into Praha, Czeche or Prague, Czech Republic. The “h” sound in Czech must sound like the English “g” because Praha in Czech sounds to the English ear very much like Prague. Also the large castle there is called the Hrad which sounds like our Grad. The countryside was certainly picturesque as the brochure promised. Lots of quaint villas atop small hills, monasteries on large hills, lakes full of ducks and other waterfowl, brilliantly colored structures of homes and industrial buildings. We stopped at an inn just inside the Czech border and got some great hot chocolate. The hot chocolate was always more tasty than the too-strong Turkish coffee that was served everywhere in Austria and Czeche.
The Golden City, the City of a Thousand Spires, Prague, unfolded before us, one beautiful church tower or spire at a time. We were informed that the Hilton Hotel was overbooked and we had to move to another hotel. This snafu was a boon, however, as we passed the Hilton about a mile before we reached downtown old Prague and our replacement hotel, the InterContinental Hotel alongside the river and a short walk to downtown. Much shorter than from the Hilton. We even received a bottle of wine as a condolence from the Hilton, but it was an unwelcome gift because we couldn’t take it back, we didn’t drink wine, and we finally decided to chance leaving it with a note and our tip for the hotel cleaning staff. The ICH was the best hotel of the three we stayed in. First class everything. A combo and singer in the lounge at night. Great breakfast buffet with omelette chef on duty. A large area for boarding and unboarding the bus out front. A Casino across the street. A few blocks walk either to the old square and Christmas market area along the elegant shopping area with Hermes, clothiers, and Bohemian Crystal shops. We bought some Bohemian Crystal at one of the shops and were very pleased at the service the proprietor provided us. He calculated all the VAT and exclusions, filled out all the paperwork for the shipping for the two cut-glass vases which will be shipped directly to our home. The VAT we avoided by doing that paid for half of the shipping.
One word on the word Bohemia. Del asked me where was Bohemia. Turns out the original name of this area was something like “Boha’s Heimat” (Boha’s Home) and that gave rise to the name of the land as Bohemia, which later was renamed Czeche, but the original name has also stuck. So Bohemian crystal is simply crystal manufactured in Czeche. It is for sale everywhere from the exclusive
shops along the street from the ICH to the Square, to discount shops off the square where the tour guides urged so strongly to go to that I wondered about money changing hands behind the scenes, and kiosks in the Christmas markets.
Our guided tour the first day was a walk into the Square to get familiar with the area. Words fail me to describe the lush and varied architecture of the buildings in the old Square. Multi-storied buildings with carvings and paintings telling a story on each level — which is where we get our word “story” from in referring to the floors of a building. The famous astronomical clock was amazing. And the huge church which towers over the square seemed out-sized for the Square. It was enormously high with two huge square steeple resembling ever so much a fairy tale castle.
Our time in Prague was chilly and rainy, but it never seemed to rain except when we left our umbrellas behind expecting clear weather. The tour was a walking tour, so we were able to avoid the blast of the teutonic barker by lagging behind or wandering away from the group and enjoying the sights with a minimal amount of express train verbiage to assimilate. We finally left the tour group and found
a kiosk making fried bread dough. The dough was spread out by this woman on her hands and placed into a deep fryer, and then into a cooling rack from where she extracted one and covered it with ketchup, Nutella, garlic, and an assortment of mysterious stuff in large mugs. When covered with ketchup, it looked like a pizza and many locals ordered it that way. All I wanted on it was butter and the opaque mug whose contents I couldn’t see fully on my tiptoes resembled melted butter. I asked her what it was and she pulled up a container labeled “Maez” or something like that, so I chanced it and said yes. It was butter and the fried bread dough was a delicious treat in chilly mist we were in. Del got herself a Czeche hot dog which one is expected to use the bread (not a bun) to hold the sausage while one dips it into mustard and eats a bite at a time directly off the sausage.
We went inside of St. Peters Cathedral which had a beautiful altar, very high muraled dome, and an incredible chandelier. A truly awesome church in every respect. We walked back to the ICH by nightfall and ate dinner in the hotel where the band was setting up. Del went to bed early and I stayed to listen to the band’s first set.
I was up first and took a walk over the bridge directly behind the ICH. Took some photos of a fisherman in a boat in the middle of the river and some swans swimming in it. When I got back Del and I had breakfast in the dining area and prepared to load the bus for a trip to the Hradcany Castle, the huge structure which towers over Prague and can be seen from anywhere it seems. We walked up the roadway past the deer moat which is a steep gully which surrounds and protects the castle. The size of the Hradcany is amazing. It seems as large as a small city within a city. St. Vitus’ Cathedral with its Rose Window, amazing arched interior, stained glass windows and impressive statue-laden front entrance rivaling or exceeding Notre Dame in Paris, St. George’s Church and statue, the Golden Lane, and the fourteenth century Charles Bridge with its 16 arches and 30 statues. We saw graffiti tiles on the outside of buildings, each tile with a similar scrolled pattern. We walked though an ancient hall raised from the ground level with a very worn wooden floor that was used for indoor jousting tournaments. We walked along Golden Lane filled with tiny cottages built into the wall which were formerly used to house soldiers on duty protecting the wall. Franz Kafka’s apartment was in one of those small apartments. There were amazing views of Prague from every window in the high rooms of the palace. One picture window was composed of hexagonal segments of glass, most of which were old glass, but I found one clear segment and shot a photo through it. As we walked through the area approaching the Charles Bridge, I took a photo of an artist's rendition of Prague and you can see that photo in Commentary 3 in this Digest or simply Click Here.
Walking back through the Charles Bridge was an amazing adventure. We walked through a canaled section that resembled Venice with houses built right against the canals. We saw the water mark of the August 14, 2002 flood which reached above the lintels on doorways. It was a day of walking well away from the tour guide so we could focus on what we wanted to see and that made it a very enjoyable day. On the Charles Bridge Del and I took our turns placing our hands in the five stars, one finger on each, where the martyred saint went into the river.
This weekend was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Catholic Holy Day, and this meant a long weekend for the Italian tourists who were flooding the city to buy things at the Christmas Markets. They also filled the Charles Bridge and made keeping in a group very difficult. It was the most crowded area we had encountered during our whole trip, but of course it was a Saturday. The day of the week kinda gets forgotten when you’re on a tour.
We were aware that this was our last full day in Europe, and when we arrived back at the ICH, we rested a bit till it was time to head out to our final dinner together at the U Vladare Restaurant. It required us switching to two smaller buses to maneuver the side streets. Don’t recall the exact fare, some kind of stuffed chicken and a delicious dessert, of course.
We got our marching orders for heading for the airport for the next day and headed back to the hotel for the last night before we sleep in our own beds at home again.
Sunday December 10, 2006: Returning from Europe!
We got to the Prague airport and through customs in quick order, but nothing prepared us for the three hours we were going to spend simply getting from one terminal to another in Paris at the DeGaulle airport. But we finally made it onto the Airbus 340-300 which was a rather comfortable Air France liner with good service and good food. I awoke from a nap to find frost patterns forming on the outside of my window and shot some photos of it. When we landed in Atlanta we had to go through customs again, with our own bags, and then to return them to be loaded onto our flight to New Orleans. We had a long wait, but the time was made shorter by the Saints-Cowboys NFL football game which was telecast on the waiting area monitors. The Saints jumped out to a 21-7 lead at half-time as we boarded the plane and the captain kept us posted on the score as the Saints won going away. This assured them a playoff berth. They now have a chance to play in the Super Bowl. It would be amazing if the Saints were to play in the Super Bowl, something they have never done in their forty year history.
We found our bags, our Maxima in the long-term parking, and drove home, getting there about 11 pm local time, no telling time it was on our body’s confused clock. But we went to bed and slept soundly knowing tomorrow we had no more tour to go on, no guide yelling over loudspeakers, just me and Del and Steiner our Schnauzer. And just four days to get ready for our family Christmas present sharing with five of our eight kids coming to Timberlane for the occasion. Little details like putting up a Christmas tree and last minute wrapping of presents. With those thoughts in our heads we went off to sleep.
Woke up at home Monday morning and went through all the Times-Picayune newspapers that accumulated while we were gone. I had visited my friend of thirty years, 
Mike Nuccio, in the Canon Hospice in Elmwood the Saturday before we left. I suspected he might not last till I returned and I was right. He died on Dec. 5 and the memorial service would be the morning of the 16th, the day of our family Christmas gathering which began at noon. Del agreed we could make it happen if she stayed home and did the preps till I arrived. This was a busy week, too busy to have jet lag, but we both managed to get up together each morning at 2 AM and then go back to sleep — this lasted for about four days. My major activity was unloading the 800+ photos from my Sony P200 camera. Used two full 1 Gbyte memory sticks and part of a third. Unloading meant copying to hard drive, backing up to USB outboard hard drive, then individually enhancing for gamma correction (lightening), contrast, sizing, cropping, sharpening, red-eye correction, and saving each photo with the date taken, a code for the city, and a description of the contents. Sometimes I get a bit gitty and use facetious titles like for a large baroque dining and concert hall, I wrote, “If it’s not baroque, don’t fix it,” but mostly I add information not obvious to later viewers of the photos, like who is in the photos. We had 33 folks on our tour and getting the names correctly attached to the group photo was a challenge. Also their email addresses so I could send a link to view all the photos later in a slide show on Shutterfly.com.
On Thursday our friend Rosie had a dentist colleague of her husband die and I offered to take her to the funeral in Metairie. We had a good talk both ways. She asked me how Del and I met. When I dropped her off she gave me some cookies and date bars she had made earlier. Rosie is a great baker and we love all of the cakes and cookies she bakes. That night was my club’s Christmas Party and we had a great time there. For the first time, Del was so busy talking and having fun, she wasn’t ready to go home when I was, so I sat patiently and waited for her.
On Friday we went to a couple more Christmas parties. One at our investment broker, Mike Brown’s place. Was surprised to find my brother Paul and his wife, Joyce, there. They used live a few blocks away from Mike’s but now live several hours away in Opelousas. Stopped by Dad’s to give him his presents and the largest navel orange I could find to pick out of my Timberlane citrus orchard. It’s been a bumper crop after the loss of all the citrus the previous year to Katrina. I squeezed about 3 quarts each of navel orange juice and grapefruit with Del’s help one day. By Friday night I had completed processing all the Christmas Tour photos! I’ve found that from long trips like this one and the Alaskan Cruise it almost takes me as many days to process the photos as the lapsed time of the trip itself! It is an essential task, but without doing that they would become like prints of photos dumped into shoe boxes which is what we did before PC’s came along with their amazing ability to sort and store digital records such as photos. And the photo studio operations which can be done digitally are down right amazing to me.
Saturday came and I went to Mike Nuccio’s memorial service. It warmed my heart to see that the table in front of the service had four of the photos I had taken of Mike and gave to him in the hospice. I had
compiled all the photos I had of him over the years and had prints made for his wife Linda to have. The only photo other than mine was the one taken of him with Paul Newman, the actor, many years ago when Mike cut his hair for a movie made in New Orleans. When Paul was working on “Absence of Malice” in Miami, he paid Mike to fly himself to Miami to do his hair. As I think of it, there was no man I have ever known that was more “absent malice” than Mike Nuccio. I met a tall black man named Walter who had gone fishing with Mike every Tuesday for the past two years. Walter was Mike’s yard man and one day Mike asked him if he liked to fish, and when he said, “Yes,” they became great fishing buddies. From what I had observed over the past thirty years, Mike had few friends other than his customers. I went fishing with Mike once or twice a year, usually out of Hopedale, but once or twice out of Myrtle Grove. It was always a great trip whether we caught fish or not, whether the motor broke down or not.
I was back home before our children arrived: John and his two sons, Jim and Gina, Kim and Wes, Stoney and Sue, and Maureen and Steve. They brought their twelve children and two grandchildren and they filled Timberlane and its grounds with lively activity, conversation, and joy. Our two teenage grandsons, Weslee and Sam, were fitted with Santa hats and make quick work of handing out everyone’s gifts. The food went quickly, especially my specially prepared eggnog. And the afternoon went all too quickly and soon everyone was dispersed and Del and I had some quiet time to ourselves to rest up for the Saints game in the Superdome the next day.
Del took Steiner, our Schnauzer on Monday to get a fatty lump removed from his right shoulder. John Wayne Melancon, his vet, had suggested it when we got his shots back in October, and this was a good time to have it done. She returned just a hour or so later to say that John Wayne was going into the hospital for possible open heart surgery the next day and couldn’t do the surgery today. This made me think of going to Mike for my haircut in Metairie a month or so earlier and he had collapsed cutting the hair of his appointment before mine. When I arrived he was waiting for the EMT’s to come take him to East Jefferson Hospital. Both Mike and John Wayne were long time friends, a barber and a vet, for whose services we willing drove across the bridge to Metairie, chancing the heavy traffic which sometimes backs up on the bridges. We had lost Mike and now in a similar quirk, John Wayne was unavailable because of ill health when we went to use his services. As of New Year’s Eve, as I write these notes, I do not know if John Wayne has had surgery or how it came out, but I would have heard if it weren’t successful, so he must be okay.
On Tuesday night, John Rankin was playing at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue — it’s his annual Christmas carol sing-a-long. Called our friend Carol Fleischman and offered to pick her up and take her back home. She lives at 1119 Dauphine and has trouble driving in dark and finding a parking place afterward. I can solve all those problems for her. She at first declined until I posed my offer as a Christmas present. She had already said she loved John Rankin, so I knew she wanted to go. We had a great time singing along with John and his combo, a violin, a bass fiddle, and Debbie Nice on the piano.
Received a book on physics, my academic field of study, to review. It is titled, “Mind, Matter, and the Implicate Order,” and was written by Swedish physicist, Paavo Pylkänen. He had written me earlier for some information on a book review I had written and knew of my interest in the subject matter his book covered and gave my name to Springer the publisher to receive a copy of the book as a potential reviewer. I hope to get to reading it shortly after this madhouse of a month is over. It’s 8 PM New Year’s Eve as I type up these notes and Del has just left to go play Rummy Cube with Rosie because I’m working instead of joining her in the Screening Room to watch our movies and monitor the incoming New Year of 2007. She promised to be back before 11:30 and I promised to join her at that time.
In the middle of this busy month, I managed to complete reading two books and write reviews of them. But I was hit with a serious glitch in my computer system: my HP Scanner would not scan Editable Text ( a euphemism for doing OCR or Optical Character Reading). Something had broken and I could not possibly finish my reviews this month with this function unavailable. It was the HP Director software not coming up. Rebooted several times and no help. Wrote email to HP. Told them I suspected it was due to my upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 since the last time I scanned anything. They got back to me within an hour with an answer. Problem is an interaction between IE7 and the HP Software for HP Director. Simply need to Click ALT + Spacebar and a dialogue box comes up in the middle of the desktop by itself, but it’s really for HPD, Minimize (may need to do it twice) and then it will appear on the task bar and can be Restored. Anybody got HP Scanner and does OCR, you will need to do this each time you need to open HP Director, otherwise you can double-click till your mouse squeaks and nothing will happen visibly on your desktop, even though it’s ready to work if you will follow HP’s workaround instructions.
My daughter Maureen asked if I’d go Christmas shopping with her this year. We chose the first day she was off school (Asst. Principal at High School). I chose Canal Place. It has a Saks Store there and is an elegant shopping center full of stores. We spent most of the time in Sak’s where I bought two Christmas pins for Del. I was still looking around for some jewelry pins when Mo asked a couple of sales clerks and they pointed them out to her. Two pins: a Christmas Bell and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. One was $30 and the other $35. I bought them both and then puzzled over how to present them to Del: wrap one present or two? Give one to Del for Christmas Party on Saturday night or let her open one up. If so, which one? I left that an unanswered question, then on the way home, it occurred to me: Give her the Christmas Bell unwrapped, and then wrap the other pin so that on Christmas morning after she unwraps it she can say, “On the First Day of Christmas, my True Love gave to me, A Partridge in a Pear Tree.” With a little prompting on my part, that is exactly the way it went down. I mention the unanswered question delay because if you learn to hold an unanswered question, you’ll find often that your unconscious will develop some plan while holding the question, that you would have never thought of on the spot if you had simply decided immediately. Just the amount of time it took me to drive home from Saks was enough to come up with the plan. After our shopping was done, we ate an elegant lunch at the new Lowe’s Hotel in the Adelaide Café.
More bad news arrived near the end of the month. Casey O’Rorke who served me at PJ’s Coffee Shop for several years had died of leukemia at age 28. He had developed it shortly before Katrina and when I last him, he was looking great and I thought he had successfully overcome it. Apparently he developed an infection because of his lower resistance after his latest treatment and died from complications from that.
Christmas Eve we exchanged presents with Doris Richards in her apartment on Behrman Place in New Orleans. Then we went back home and got ready for Mass. Del and I went to Midnight Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Gretna and right as Communion was being served the smoke detectors alarms went off. Apparently due to the incense burners used to consecrate the Church and the altar during the High Mass. The priests were unable to turn off the pesky alarms and distributed Communion anyway. As soon as we made it back to our seats, I suggested to Del and that we leave for home. When we tried to leave in our car, we found our way blocked by two fire engines that had arrived. I managed to back up and find another way home. Still haven’t heard if that was a real fire or just due to the heavy incense burning or over-active smoke detectors.
Christmas morning Del and I opened our presents together and then went to Le Pavillon Hotel’s Christmas Luncheon. Doris was scheduled to join us, but she does get started well in the morning and opted not to come along. We enjoyed an elegant meal with live music in posh surroundings and came home to a quiet afternoon of relaxation watching the Eagles to beat the Cowboys to give our Saints a lock on a Bye Week for the first playoff game. Unfortunately it went so well that we got the Bye locked in and didn’t need to beat the Panthers in the last game. The coach decided to rest his starters and give the second and third string players the challenge of their lives. Fast Freddie McAfee scored a touchdown the first time he’s had his hands on the football except as a special teams player in several years. He wasn’t even sure where to line up on offense at first. So the Panthers won, and the Saints first-team stayed healthy and rested for the first play-off in two weeks. This the first time the Saints have been on the fast-track to the Super Bowl. They have the NFL’s best overall offense, Rookie of the Year Candidate Reggie Bush, Coach of the Year Candidate Sean Payton, and Most Valuable Player Candidate QB Drew Brees.
It’s been one heckuva year for New Orleans and the Best is Yet to Come. The Saints will be in Seventh Heaven in 2007! GO SAINTS ! ! !
And HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my Good Readers out there. May the Good Lord Bless and Keep you safe throughout the new year and multiply your blessings a hundredfold.
“Mrs. Henderson Presents” (2005) with amazing performances by Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins in depiction of The Windmill, a famous theatre in London showing live nude women on stage which stayed open during the bombing raids! Marvelous story of a widow who refused to go silently into that long night. On advice from her girl friend to go out and “buy things”, she bought a large theatre! Great songs, dances, and girls, girls, girls. (See also digest067) A DON’T MISS HIT!
“Bossa Nova” (2000) Why not fly down to Rio for the night? Watch this movie and leave your shoes on. Could be titled “Under the Rio Moon”. A psychic convergence of you, an Internet Lover, a Law Internist, an English as second language teacher, a family of Tailors, a Soccer Super Star, and a Corporate Lawyer. And love is in bloom. 
“Stay” (2005) Watched this psychological thriller earlier ( See digest067). Worth second look due to convoluted plot which keeps you on your toes. This time we saw sets of threes: bridge pillars, people dressed alike, and the refrain “we got three days” till the world ends. Watch for a segue from a chess game with three fingers on a rook which looks like the GW Bridge pier to a view from a car looking up at the bridge pier with huge fingers on the pier! A DON'T MISS HIT!
“In the Cut” (2003) Movie Critic Joe Bob Briggs would have had a field day with this one describing the “dis-articulated” body parts the cops find in lavatories and laundromats. At least two heads-in-a-bag. A blow-job, a 3-of-Spades tattoo, a suggestive Red Lighthouse which shows up first on Frannie’s wall as an artwork, then on a detective’s desk as a sculpture, then in real life. The sex scenes leave no body parts unfilmed. Oh, plot? Er, yeah, something about a serial killer and Frannie (Meg Ryan) who seems to be seeking an invitation to the hop-and-chop ball. A dark cinematography with bloody scenes and seamy interiors. 
things seem to cost less than back in the USA, then they say, “Why can’t our country make goods this cheaply?” But if the exchange rate is such that things seem to cost more than back in the USA, they say, “Why can’t our country have a better exchange rate?” It should be obvious to analysis that they can’t have it both ways, but since life is lived sequentially, one can only be in either state and not both states at the same! Lacking the ability or propensity to use logical analysis, they simply sequentially complain, no matter is the exchange rate is high or low compared to the US dollar.
![4 yellow onions, chopped 1 bell pepper, chopped 3 stalks celery 1 lb small shrimp 1 lb large shrimp 1 lb lump crabmeat 4 large eggplants 8 green onions 1/4 bunch parsley 1 tbsp chopped garlic 1 tbsp shrimp powder ½ capful Zatarain’s Liquid Shrimp Boil when called for Tony Chachere’s Seasoning Salt and Pepper Progresso Italian Bread Crumbs [in blue can] Bertolli’s Extra Lite Olive Oil](http://www.doyletics.com/recipes/seingred.jpg){kind=link}
