This was what I saw this morning while letting the dogs pee…
It’s not so uncommon to see hot air balloons in these parts…
It sure beats the everloving hell out of a view of Interstate 35, which is what we had in San Antonio.
We are off to Vienna tomorrow until Monday, so hopefully I will soon be back with honest to God travel posts. I think we may try to take a trip to Bratislava, too. It’s not far at all.
After two nights in Nice, Bill and I hopped a flight to Frankfurt. We flew from Nice on Niki, an Austrian budget airline that collaborates with Air Berlin. Bill and I flew on Air Berlin in 2009, when we took our Scandinavian cruise. Let me just say, European carriers are a hell of a lot nicer than American carriers are. You go on the plane and they offer you a newspaper. You get a drink and a sandwich that is actually edible. The seats are somewhat comfortable, too. I would definitely “fly Niki” again if we ever get back to Europe and have the opportunity.
The flight attendants were kind of oddly dressed on Niki. The top half of their uniforms were very formal and businesslike, with a blazer, blouse, and perfect makeup and hair. The bottom half was jeans… nice jeans, but still jeans. It was like the fashion equivalent of a mullet– business up top and party on the bottom.
Flying over Vienna…
Our flight routed us through Vienna, another city that was on my 1997 European tour. I have yet to visit Vienna with Bill. I hope someday we’ll get there together. As we were getting on the flights, I was all wound up about the term “dependapotamus”, a slang expression used by certain people in the military who bash family members… aka “dependents”. There was a young guy sitting in front of us on the plane who must have overheard me and I think, told his two female companions about it. They reminded me of a reincarnation of ABBA, minus Bjorn.
Upon entering Frankfurt, we approached a guy who appeared to work for the airport. We were trying to find the train station in the massive airport. The guy was obviously American and spoke German with a heavy accent. He directed us to the right place and we arranged for a train to get us to Landstuhl, where I had booked us a room in a cute, family run hotel in town.
It was quite an ordeal to get to Landstuhl, though, because we had to change trains three times to get there and it happened to be rush hour. We got on the first one, a high speed ICE train, for a twenty minute ride to Mannheim. The train was packed and I was grumpy about it, as usual…
Waiting for train tickets at Frankfurt’s airport…
We stood near the bathroom between cars and Bill then very gallantly decided to get me a snack at the onboard bistro. He came back with a beer and a container of curry wurst, which was basically a sausage with a curry sauce. It smelled good and was piping hot, but I couldn’t eat it and balance at the same time. I appreciated the gesture, but told Bill he should have gotten me something less labor intensive.
At one point, the train lurched and both Bill and I lost our balance. I was holding the currywurst and it almost tipped on me. Thankfully, a very kind German lady noticed and saved it before it spilled. I said “Thanks”, but it probably came off sounding annoyed rather than grateful. I’m sorry about that.
While we waited for the next train, Bill and I shared the curry wurst. I started to feel less grouchy as my blood sugar came up a bit. We got a seat on the train from Mannheim to Kaiserslautern, but it was also pretty crowded. I remember one guy in our car was a cop and he seemed like a nice person. When he got off the train, he said “Auf wiedersehen.”
On the third train, a local s-bahn from Kaiserslautern to Landstuhl, we were in a car with a large German family with several kids. Then an American woman with her four kids and mother in tow got on the train. She said, “Ramstein?”
Bill told her she had the right train, so she and her family took a seat and struck up a conversation. They had just gotten back to Germany after a trip to Paris. They’d gone on a military tour, then broke away to take the kids to Euro Disney. The young mother’s husband was posted at Grafenwoehr, which is an Army post in Bavaria. They had parked their car at Ramstein. The trains were apparently a new experience for them. Bill and I explained about how the trains worked, then told them how lucky they were to live in Germany.
Grandma asked us where we were from. I told her I’m from Virginia and Bill is from Texas (more or less). She looked surprised. I told her that we met when I lived in South Carolina and he lived in Kansas. I guess she has never heard of the Internet and how people can meet that way. I said I’d love to move back to Germany and Grandma said, “Yeah, but how do you raise a family there?”
I said, “It’s just us and two dogs.”
Grandma looked utterly shocked that we don’t have kids. I posted this story on my other blog as part of a rant. Here, I will just say that it’s apparently unusual to run into military couples who don’t have kids. Fortunately, our stop at Landstuhl came up before we had time to talk more.
Bill and I got off the train and walked to our hotel. It was obvious that the proprietor had been waiting specifically for us, since the place was pretty much locked up when we arrived. He quickly showed us to our room and beat it. Our very full day of traveling left me ready to relax and wind down, which I proceeded to do. Bill went to a Turkish place and got us a couple of Wiener schnitzels with fries and some beer.
I distinctly recall the Bratislava train station circa 1997. Although Bratislava, Slovakia is very close to Vienna, Austria, at that time, they were worlds apart in terms of efficiency. I exchanged some cash and ended up with what I later learned was an ungodly amount of cash. Like Armenia circa 1997, the Slovak Republic was still a very cheap place to visit.
I bought a train ticket to Zilina, where my Irish friend Chris had an internship that was ending. His girlfriend, now wife, Dawn, had come from America to see him and start a semester studying in Spain. We were going to meet up in Zilina and travel through Europe together for a couple of weeks.
The trip to Zilina took awhile. I remember sitting on the train, watching the countryside pass. I distinctly remember passing Trencin, a charming looking city on the Van River, not too far from the Czech Republic. Trencin Castle is visible from the train and I remember wanting to get off and explore the city.
When we landed in Zilina, I found the bus my friend told me to take to the university where he was staying. I was struck by how similar everything was to the other formerly communist countries I had seen, lots of cookie cutter buildings and old, serviceable buses that belched smoke and fumes and still carried the masses along the dirty streets. I spoke to the front desk person a the university and he told me where Chris’s room was. I waited there for a little while, until Chris and Dawn showed up.
Zilina turned out to be a cute town. Chris and his friends, who came from all over Europe, went out that night to a bar. I don’t remember much about the outing, except that it was a nice looking place… until I went to the bathroom. Someone had puked all over the toilet seat and left it there.
I slept in Chris’s bed with his cheerful French Asian roommate, Jeremy, while Chris and Dawn borrowed a friend’s room so they could have some private time. The next day, I met more of Chris’s friends, including a guy from Switzerland, whose name escapes me, a Spanish guy named Xavier, and some blonde chick from Finland whom everyone seemed to think was annoying. I didn’t have an opinion of her. I think I was just glad that for once, someone else besides me was thought of as irritating.
Everybody played basketball in a very parochial looking gym. I didn’t play. I took some pictures instead.
After two nights in Zilina, it was time for us to move on. Chris, Dawn, and I, along with some of Chris’s friends, boarded a train to Vienna. There, we got rooms at a university dormitory that Dawn had found in a Let’s Go Europe guide book. I remember the dorm room looking a lot like they do in the United States. And I remember the subway stop– Taubstummengasse– because the Vienna U-Bahn system had this horrible male voice that made that word sound just awful!
We walked around Vienna, which is a very grand city… and wandered around the palace gardens, and eventually visited a museum. I remember seeing a lot of cool exhibits, but my eyes were bothering me, as if I had scratched them with my contact lenses. Actually, I probably did, since in those days I wore the same pair of contacts for a year or more at a time! The sun irritated my eyes and I was having trouble keeping them open. I ended up going back to the university and renting a dorm room for a couple of hours so I could take a nap.
Vienna (courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna_Panorama_at_Night.jpg)
Vienna was pricey, though, despite the cheap digs. By that night, we were on a train headed to Venice, Italy. Little did I know, that would be Princess Diana’s last night alive.
You must be logged in to post a comment.