Settling into Vienna, visiting Prague

Tonight we are in the apartment we'll live in for the next month, and it is the most space our family has had since we began this trip--everyone is spread out and loving it. The apartment is European lovely--chandeliers in every room, high ceilings, beautiful doors and windows, a tiny bathroom with more knobs and jets on the shower than I know what to do with, and a smallish kitchen. Grocery stores are not open on Sunday nights, but I foresee cooked meals just as soon as we can access the purchase of vegetables. We are all ready for that.

We arrived in Vienna a week ago and stayed in a shorter-term family apartment. We spent the first night at dinner with my university contact, Thierry, and his wife Sharon consuming some awesome wiener schnitzel. The next two days were spent with logistics: laundry, some groceries, figuring out the transit system and where the university was for me, and discovering awesome parks and the Citybike Wien system for Scott and the kids (they rode out to several flak towers while I was at the university). We met up with some of my parents' friends, Earlham professors emeriti who had led foreign study programs to Vienna, and enjoyed some terrific desserts. We did not do much in the way of sightseeing these first few days, but on Thursday afternoon we headed east to Prague.

We broke up the four hour drive to Prague with a stay in Sloup, Czech Republic, population 902. If you ever find yourself in this area, Hotel Skola Sloup, a converted school to hotel, really does live up to its Booking.com reputation. Why were we out there? This town is near some of the best caves in the Moravian karst cave system, the Punkya Caves, and Scott found a place for us to tour. Half the tour was on foot, and half was in a boat following an underground river. Though the tour was entirely in Czech, a language in which I now know precisely two words, bathroom and thank you, the caves were pretty impressive and the Czech countryside was autumn-gorgeous. The guides spoke perfect English, but they had been instructed to do the tours in only one language. In one of the groups we knew there were no Czech speakers, only English, but the guide continued in Czech--even after some Russian tourists pointed this out. Oh well, didn't bother us, really, just interesting.

On Friday afternoon we continued on to Prague. Twenty-five years ago Scott visited Prague towards the conclusion of his semester in the U.K., and loved it as an undiscovered treasure. In the intervening time others have decided Prague to be worth visiting and it was pretty packed. We walked around the old part of the city on Friday night, including the St. Charles bridge, Mala Strana, and the central square. We promptly ruined our dinner by trying a chimney, which is a pastry in the shape of a tall cup filled with ice cream or whipped cream. Yummy, but we quickly learned they were not so careful about which ones had nuts and which did not, and Fiona looked like she had the Botox treatment pretty soon. So we called it a day and went to our hotel, which was a sports complex in a suburban area--we were right on a soccer field and surrounded by tennis courts in domes.

Saturday we went to Prague Castle, which has some foundations from the 9th century. Prague Castle is really a small town within the city, and we visited St. Vitus Cathedral (beautiful mosaics), St. George's Basilica (the kids can now distinguish what makes a cathedral versus a basilica), the Royal Apartments, and the Golden Lane complete with armor through the ages, display of medevial torture instruments, and dungeons.

Sunday we returned to the old city and wandered around cobblestone streets before heading back to Vienna through the Czech countryside. The pictures on the last page are mostly from the St. Charles Bridge, including Fiona touching one statue that is apparently for luck. Also the Astronomical Clock in the old city.