Budapest and Salzburg

It is hard to believe our time in Austria is coming to an end and in a mere two days the Grays will be moving at warp speed once again. In the past two weeks we have visited Budapest and Salzburg on the weekends and gotten into almost a routine during the weekdays. Fiona and Harley have become empowered enough to do some of the grocery shopping, play soccer in the local park, and check out Citybikes and ride to the library without the parents--Scott has been busily making sure we have places to stay and ways to get there for the rest of our trip while I have been working at the University of Vienna (which, by the way, has 90,000 students! Wow.). The weather is getting chilly and we have all commented on the amount of wind experienced in Vienna.
The first weekend of November we drove to Budapest, about 3.5 hours away. Our tiny apartment had one bed and a kitchenette upstairs and a bedroom and bathroom downstairs and the tightest spiral staircase I have ever seen, approaching a ladder. The location could not be better, as we were steps from St. Stephen's Basilica. We found a unique donut and bagel shop for lunch. We were good, we each had a bagel sandwich first with things like lettuce on them, but we did have to try out these pretty amazing donuts...Fiona's was the poop emoji and Harley's was an Oreo panda. Afterwards we set out to walk the city, which does live up to its reputation as one of Europe's most beautiful in my opinion. We crossed from the east bank, the historic Pest side, to the west, the historic Buda side of the city, crossing the Szechenyi Chain Bridge. We walked along the Danube and crossed again to get to the historic Parliament building, joining a tour of the interior. We continued our way around the city and capitalized on a last-minute cancellation for dinner--a place with traditional Hungarian cuisine that was otherwise booked out for three days straight. Scott learned the true meaning of Hungarian paprika with the small (but potent!) pepper atop his dish. We finished our evening with the night projections on St. Stephen's Basilica commemorating the Hungarian memorial day and some souvenir shopping...the inventor of the Rubik's cube was Hungarian and Harley needed a new addition to his collection. We collapsed having put 7 more miles on our shoes that Saturday.
The next morning we went to a unique museum: the Miniversum, which is a series of miniature city representations of Hungarian, Austrian, and German cities with model trains and cars. The museum boasts over 1 kilometer of train tracks and 5,000 figures; it reminds me of my grandfather's basement when I was a kid (he was a train

guy). Harley says this is his favorite museum we've been to so far. The museum was interactive, so the kids had a great time pushing buttons and lighting up different points within the exhibits. Scott and I also learned a lot from the posters around the museum describing what life had been like under Communist rule, which in Hungary ended in 1989. That is just not very long ago, and to us it made the current economy in Hungary--at least the parts evident to tourists--all the more remarkable. The economic engine appeared to be in full swing from our experience.
From the Miniversum we visited Dohany St. Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe. The interior actually looked very similar to many of the cathedrals in Europe, although with galleries of seats above for the women in the early 20th century. This similarity had a cultural purpose of assisting the Jewish population in assimilation in Hungary. We learned of the terrible toll paid by the Hungarian Jewish population during WW2: within a span of 56 days in the summer of 1944 over 65,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Those numbers are staggering, and the remaining population was cordoned into ghettos with horrid living conditions. The synagogue was within the ghetto, and is home to a mass grave of over 2,200 souls who were killed during the war. We saw several posters near other memorials throughout the city that placed blame for the genocide on Hungarian officials in addition to the Nazis; apparently the Hungarian government has not accepted any responsibility to date.
After lunch we explored several of the other beautiful places in Budapest: the Heroes Square with its statues of kings beginning in 987 AD, the Vajdahunyad Castle with its mishmash of architecture, designed for the millennial celebration of Hungary and representing many of the most important buildings in the country; we crossed the river again and walked around the area of the Buda Castle, including the Matthias Church and the beautiful views of the Pest side from the Fisherman's Bastion. And after a packed 36 hours, we headed home.

Between Budapest and Salzburg we said goodbye to Thierry and Sharon, my University contacts who were headed to Japan for a conference, with a fantastic dinner at Fuhrgassl-Huber, a heuriger restaurant with a vineyard behind the building. We sampled several different selections and tried to tell the difference between one vineyard and the next one up the street. Also that week, Fiona achieved a major goal: she got a library card from Vienna and both she and Harley have had a great time perusing the English-written section. Scott and the kids discovered outdoor trampoline opportunities at Prater, and occasionally I have been required to grade algebra.
Last Friday we headed out to Salzburg, about three hours to the west. Fiona and Harley had already been with Grandma Arlene, but it was a new place for me. I had never actually seen the Alps before! Salzburg is on the edge of the Alps, and the mountains added a beautiful dimension to our travels. Along the way we stopped at Wolfgangsee (lake pictures). We stayed at an alpen gastehaus on the Austrian-German border in Berchtesgaden, only four miles or so from the infamous Eagle's Nest, Hitler's private hideout on a cliff. The building is now a restaurant, closed for the season, but apparently sensational views of both Germany and Austria on a clear day (we

did not have a clear day while we were there so no loss). We were the only guests in the gastehaus as it was the end of the season, but the Slovakian couple caring for the place took good care of us. The pool was a little chilly, but the kids really loved the sauna and lamented the fact that the sauna in our house is in a really weird place: the office above the garage. Hmmm. The roads going up to the gastehaus made our driveway look like child's play and the threat of snow along with icy rain made Scott's insistence on winter tires for the rental car appear as money well spent (plus it is required in November in the Alps).

Fiona and Harley did the Sound of Music tour with Grandma Arlene, so we spent our Saturday at the Festung Hohensalzburg, or Salzburg Fortress, for something different. Salzburg was economically advantaged historically because of its access to salz, yep, salt, so this fortress got its head start early--1077 AD. The beautiful state apartments (next page bottom, picture on the right is a ceramic stove) inside date from 1498 AD. We learned a lot about the complex through the centuries, including the history of marionettes, historical precursor instruments to the tuba and trombone, saw some frescoes billed as original from the 13th century and evidence of the fortress' use as a military barracks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We wandered the old city and saw the Advent markets just setting up for Christmas shoppers.
The next day, with the weather as gray and rainy, we struck out for Berchtesgaden and the thermal springs there. We spent about four hours at a complex housing the indoor and outdoor pools from the

springs. It was definitely the family place to be for the locals, and we enjoyed the waterslide with lightshow inside, the lap pool, the play pool with a hyped-up "lazy river" current, and the outdoor naturally heated pool with the snowy Alps in the background.
A few comments on living in Vienna: one of the student researchers asked me what was different in Vienna from the US. One way our life has been different here is we have been living in a city, in an apartment, without a car (at least during the week). Vienna is extremely easy to get around between metro, tram, buses, and Citybikes, and coupled with Google Maps it has been a breeze. Vienna is very civilized, both in the culture it presents to the world but also in the way people treat one another. I haven't seen people blow up at one another or give each other the stare-down. The kids in the city are largely very well-behaved, and we have not wanted for a thing the whole time we've been here. I will say the city does not have quite the citizen diversity even seen in Eagan, or definitely St. Paul.
So tonight I am looking around at our apartment and thinking about how we're going to have to spirit everything back into our suitcases; it's been a little while since we've had to pack up completely. We'll take the overnight train to Venice on Thursday night.