Some things I like about travel in Europe and some  things I don't

No sheets, no blankets only comforters in crisp duvets

Expandable mirrors in the bathroom

Fleece blankets on all outside dining chairs

The little "trash containers" on the table at most meals.  So handy for neatly disposing of fruit peels and scraps, wrappers, bones etc

Tankless toilets -when you flush, it's flushed !

Hand held shower heads

Soap dispensers in showers and at sinks

Bounteous breakfast  buffets - but maybe not the hot dogs or spam slices

Pay public toilets at tourist sites - attendants keep them clean and well supplied

Heated towel racks

Public transportation


And not so much...

Extremely slow working toasters - never had a real piece of toast on this trip

Very undercooked bacon

No washcloths

Small elevators, or maybe none and all

No tissues in most hotels

Great bread but where's the butter?

Auschwitz and Birkenau

"Work will set you free"

Jim and I visited Dachau on our first trip to Germany in 1976 and I have never forgotten the hot summer day we wandered around the grounds and reflected on the horror of what happened there.  In intervening years I have read (three times)  Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" in which he recounts his time in Auschwitz.  In the forward to the book Harold Kushner remarks that the book is less about what Frankl  suffered and endured but more about how he survived.  Frankl himself quotes Nietzsche, " He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." This is the message I find so helpful at those times in life when life itself seems  to have lost its meaning.  In my own life that was in 1996 when I was blindsided by a second cancer, in 2001 when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell and so many innocent people died within,  and in 2011 when my mother died in a manner that troubled and confused me.

Because he has been such an inspiration to me in these (by comparison) small challenges in life I feel as if I "know" someone who was in this awful place and I visited it with Viktor Frankl in my mind. He had already described the places so clearly to me and they were so much as I had pictured them - the overcrowd barracks, the train tracks, selection platform, gas chambers and crematorium.  When I gazed at the railroad car on the tracks at Birkenau I shuddered to be in this place. As many as 100 people were crammed so tightly in a railroad care such as this. Some  crouched on the floor while others crowded around the small barred peep holes which were the only source of light and fresh air. The transport could last for days and many did not survive the trip.

Our tour group walked mostly single file and quieter than on any other day as we went from room to room guided by a appropriately sober woman who had tears in her eyes as she told us to "take pictures and show them to everyone - let all the world know what happened here."

I have a copy of "Man's Search for Meaning" at home but at tour's end I headed for the small shop to purchase another and it's this one I will treasure as a lasting momento of the hot summer afternoon I walked where Viktor Frankl suffered but survived.

Rick Steves - Best of Eastern Europe: Prague

Everyone said we would love Prague - and we did once we stopped being lost!

Our train ride from Berlin to Prague was very nice - beautiful scenery along the Elbe River, reminiscent of the train ride from St.Paul to Winona along the Mississippi.  We shared our train car with an Indian couple from Scotland and a couple from the Czech Republic and the afternoon passed quickly with interesting conversation about travel, health care, life under communism , and assorted topics about family, parenthood and aging. These moments are the best part of travel, when strangers meet and instantly form connections - reinforcing my belief that people all over the world want the same thing - to just live as happily as possible.

Finding the hotel was a challenge!  We easily managed the Metro system but once we surfaced the confusing street names and layout completely baffled us.  After walking in the wrong direction (pulling our suitcases over the rough cobblestones) we finally were set in the right direction by a very helpful policeman.  After more wandering we made a call to the hotel for directions but were told to just ask someone on the street!  This is not very helpful advice when you are lost in a city of other equally lost tourists! Jim finally solved our problem by asking a very helpful young woman at a hotel we entered.  She delivered the best news we had heard all afternoon, "you are very close."

I did enjoy Prague but I think after being told the past few years by so many how beautiful the city is and how much fun it is to visit, my expectations were very high.  That said, we did love the red roofs viewed from many vistas, the great food and beer, the impressive buildings and squares, and the city's long and interesting history.  Our delightful guide "Katka" is from "Praha" and she is the "jewel in the crown" of this tour.  Born and raised in a small town about an hour from Prague she lived under communist rule until she was 14 and fascinated us with stories of that time as it effected her and her family. It was chilling to stand in Wenceslas Square  and recall those televised reports from 1969 when the Russian tanks rolled in and Czechoslovakia came under communist rule.  Wenceslas Square was also the place where over 300,000 Czechs gathered every evening in November, 1969 awaiting word that the freedom that had already come to Berliners would soon be theirs.

Jim and I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague which traces the story of communism in Czecholovakia from the beginning, including the promise, the reality and the Velvet Revolution when communism ended without bloodshed.   The exhibits depicting the austere life under the communists and a short video with interviews of people who lived through that time confirm what we believed about communism, growing up in the US..

As we visited the various countries Katka spoke frequently about communism and we learned that some people had a difficult time after the Iron Curtain was lifted.  Older people especially found security in having so much of life taken care of by the State - they had jobs they didn't have to work very hard at, health care and pensions.  Because life was bare and basic families spent a lot of time together; that was their entertainment and they relied on one another. There were no homeless people.   When all this disappeared many of them struggled with their new freedom.  Young people, on the other hand yearned for freedom and many of them left their homelands, to work and travel and experience life in ways they had never known.  There were "grades" of communism among the countries we visited - some had stricter leaders and suffered more oppression than others.


We saw many memorable sites in Prague but one of my favorites was a walk to the Strahov Monastery where we has a tasty lunch (cheese and meat board) and the best beer of the trip - a dark beer that was unexpectantly different from what we know as dark beer.

It was fitting that we ended our visit to Prague  with yet another fruitless search as we became lost and never found the famed Monastery Gardens!

Happy Travels Again

Jim and I made our first trip to Germany in 1976 when the Berlin Wall stood and the Cold War raged. As young travel novices I remember that we considered a visit to Berlin, but only briefly.  I wanted to go but I remember the uncertainty about being so close to an area than I knew was communist when I still harbored very real fears about communism from my 1950s upbringing.  Instead from Vienna we opted for a night train trip across Germany to the Netherlands where we joined hordes of tourists at the Alkmaar cheese festival.  (But that's a story for another time!)

I never forgot my desire to visit Berlin and ever since the Wall came down in 1989 I have been curious about how this city survived and now thrives despite all it endured.  I was further intrigued to visit by a book I recently read "My Berlin Kitchen"  in which the author  recounts her Berlin childhood and her days as a young married woman after the wall came down. When we decided to take the Rick Steves tour of Eastern European countries this provided the perfect opportunity to start in Berlin.  We arrived via Paris on Wednesday, May 20 and enjoyed a few days both immersed in history and awed by the sight of a city that has truly risen from ashes.

We started as we usually do, in a  big and unfamiliar city by doing a  "hop on, hop off circle bus tour" and then we used a very helpful self-guided walking RIck Steves audio tour.   We stayed in the Prenzlauer Berg area, formerly in East Berlin but now revitalized by trendy hotels, restaurants and bars with multiple cranes looming over the streets  - a testimony to the continual rebuilding.  It was conveniently located close to Alexanderplatz  and the city's wonderful public transit system.  Each evening we found amazing restaurants right in our neighborhood and enjoyed the great foods and beer we remember from our previous trips to Germany in 1976 and 1978.

In our recent trips to Europe we have learned to not try to do it all, but to chose a few places we want to explore more thoroughly and after getting a good overview of the city's historical sites, we chose to spend time in the German History Museum and the Jewish History Museum.  The first tells the story of not just Berlin but of all of Germany and helps you to understand the fateful turn this country took in the early part of the 20th century.  The second is considered one of Europe's best Jewish sights.  With the help of an excellent audio guide the  exhibits come alive and you begin to understand the complex relationship the Germans and Jews have had since medieval times. Before experiencing the exhibits you will marvel at the architecture of the museum itself.  It was designed by the American architect David Libeskind who is the master planner for the redesigned World Trade Center in New  York. It is a zinc walled building with voids which represent the world culture missing as a result of the Holocaust.  One of the most haunting experiences of this trip (which included a visit to Auschwitz) was standing alone in the empty concrete tower where only a sliver of light entered the room at the top.  The is the Axis of the Holocaust.

In the maze

By far the most moving site of our Berlin visit was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It consists of 2,711 gravestone like pillars which are made of hollow concrete and are set in a sunken area.  You can enter anywhere and you are soon lost among the maze, alone with your own thoughts about what this all means.

Part  of any visit to Berlin is seeing the Hitler/Nazi sites and most remaining artifacts are thoughtfully presented in historical context with little sensationalism.  Most museums like the German Resistence Museum which we visited rely heavily on text explanations  and have few artifacts. Where they are seen, Hitler's portraits are small.  The spot of his underground bunker where he committed suicide on April 30, 1945 is barely noted - no one wishes this to be a major tourist site.

In addition to the cranes another thing that struck me was  the number of bicyclists everywhere.  We quickly learned to watch out for them as they whizzed by, almost more a threat to pedestrians than car traffic. Walking around I also noted something else I haven't seen before - small fleece blankets on the back of outdoor restaurant chairs!  Perhaps I don't get out often enough, or maybe because the Twin Cities climate isn't exactly conducive to outdoor eating but I don't remember seeing this at home. It's a nice touch for spring and fall outdoor dining.

And speaking of dining - we weren't disappointed!   We were told that Berliners don't go out for German food and that international cuisine (Indian, Italian, Asian) is more popular with the locals.  We bypassed this advice and sought out sauerkraut, potatoes, sausages at every meal.  Jim tried curry wurst a popular street food invented after WWII and found it quite tasty.  Our last evening in Berlin we dined at Prater Restaurant, enjoying their own microbrew and traditional Biergarten cuisine.  A perfect ending to 4 great days in Berlin.  It was worth the long wait.

Fassbender and Rausch- claims to be Europe's biggest chocolate store

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church - bombed out ruins left as a reminder of the destruction of Berlin in WWII

Fragments of the Berlin Wall

TV Tower - built in 1969 for the 20th anniversary of the communist government