Salzburg

I just want to state for the record that I now understand why Maria was traipsing around the hills of Salzburg singing.

Case in point:

(Also, doesn't Brett take nice pictures?)

We didn't have a lot of time to hang out in Salzburg, so we basically just wandered around the downtown area, checked out where they filmed parts of The Sound of Music, and we tried to go to the Eagle's Nest on our last day. Unfortunately you can't drive up to it and it was 15 Euros a piece to take the bus up there and that doesn't include the tour that you have to pay for if you want to go inside. Sure, we could have walked up to the building, but that would have been two hours of walking and although I'm in the best shape of my life right now, we didn't have time for that because we had to get our rental car back to Vienna. (Please tell me you know I was being sarcastic about the "best shape of my life" comment.) At least the view from up there was worth the drive.

Somehow I don't think Hitler ever sat back and enjoyed the view though...


Here is a picture of me and Brett by the river (and you can kind of see my baby bump).



Schloss Mirabel is where they filmed the Do, Re, Mi scene. So obviously I had to walk around the whole place singing the song... although as it turns out, having only seen the movie once I didn't really know all of the words. Is there more to it than the Do a deer, a female deer, Re a drop of golden sun, etc.? The world may never know.



We also visited the palace where they shot some of the exterior shots of the Von Trapp home. Here we discovered the "Sixteen going on Seventeen" gazebo from the movie, but Brett was too disappointed with it to take a picture. (Apparently all of the interior shots of the gazebo, including the dancing, was shot on a sound stage in California. And this particular gazebo is locked up because according to imdb, "the public had to be excluded from the interior because film fans who were considerably older than 'sixteen going on seventeen' were injuring themselves while trying to dance along the seats.") So here's just a random picture from the palace.



We also hiked up to what we thought was the stone theater they used in the movie. It didn't turn out to be THE stone theater from the movie but it was A stone theater...



Our trip was short, but it was beautiful. We'll be home in less than two weeks and we can't wait! I am pretty sure that I'm going to put on at least 10 pounds in the first week after we get home though. I'm so excited to eat everything I've been dreaming about. (I literally dreamed about food all night last night. I guess that's what happens when you look at cooking and baking websites and blogs for too long. I just get so hungry sometimes!)

In conclusion, I don't know what this guy was playing, but he sure was good.

Budapest

Firstly, and most importantly, Lindsey is doing well. She has not been vomiting, nor attempting to claw my eyes out, but we still have a few months of pregnancy to go. She will tell you that being away from American restaurants is excruciatingly difficult during this critical period of pregnancy. Unfortunately Chipotle, Cafe Rio, Pizza Hut, Rumbi and Little Caesar's are unavailable.

We had an ultrasound over a week ago and saw our baby. By analyzing the pulsing sounds and images of the little heart, we were able to confirm that our firstborn's heart indeed beats for America. So all is well and we found a very good doctor who speaks perfect English. She also worked in the US for quite a long time as an OB/GYN.

Now, what can be said about Budapest? It is located in Hungary, which is another one of those former Soviet states. It is the third former Soviet country that we have visited since our arrival in Europe over three months ago. Much like Slovakia, Hungary has some visible lasting affects from communism. Not least among these is the feeling that if someone sneezes too hard, several blocks of rickety old buildings will come tumbling to the ground.

One thing that was surprising to see was the people in Budapest - the actual Hungarians. We didn't really know what to expect to see once we arrived. We figured it would have been similar to Bratislava where we were greeted at the train station by a pregnant, gollum-esque woman who was enjoying what was probably one of many cigarettes during her day.

I had assumed all Hungarians were gnarled old women with scarves on their heads and whose knobby knuckles protruded as they clutched crooked walking sticks (needless to say we decided well in advance not to accept any shiny apples from strangers). But despite their super weird language, Hungarians are quite excellent and beautiful people as far as we can tell.

One quick interjection/observation before we continue with this thing. This one is about Europe in general. When we return from our little Euro excursions, people often ask what the place is like and what we saw when we were there. We have noticed that usually no matter what city we visited, our answer to this question is generally the same. It goes like this: "It was fun, there's really cool old architecture, we went to a castle, we saw a cathedral, and we ate (name of local cuisine) at the banks of the (name of river).

Now, don't misunderstand. Europe is not necessarily boring, but we have noticed that each city has the same basic category of sights to be taken in. Furthermore, if any city has been an exception (well, that's not exactly the right word... how about 'enhancement') to this, it has been London. London has all the aforementioned and much, much more. Anyway, that's just an observation. Back to Budapest.

The Andersons were with us on this excursion. They came to Vienna to visit us and to travel around a bit. They also came with peanut butter M&Ms and Costco trail mix. Lindsey and our little embryo were equally thrilled. We stayed at a luxury hotel on the banks of the Danube (courtesy of the Andersons) and took in every reasonable sight in the town. The highlights of which were, get ready, St Stephen's Cathedral, the castle district, and the architecture of the parliament building. All of which are pictured here:






We're glad to be back in Vienna and can't believe our time here is more than half way finished. There is still so much we want to see in the next 2.5 months. But if we can manage to see Paris and nothing else between now and when we go, we'll call it good.

Merry Old London

Lindsey here. Brett said he's done with his blogging duties for a while. So I guess you'll have to live with my less-funny, probably less frequent blogs from here on out. Sorry.

Here in Europe they actually take time off from work to celebrate Easter. So Brett had a Friday and Monday off of work, so obviously we decided he should also take the Wednesday and Thursday before that off so that we could go to London. The cheapest flights we found were out of Bratislava, if you're unfamiliar with the place, see our previous post. The airline is called Ryanair and it comes complete with no seating arrangements and some of the classiest Europeans you'll find. You know the types... just imagine that Europe had Wal Mart, that's where you'd find all of these people. You know they type... They're not intimidated by lines, because they don't stand in them. And they are not afraid to run or push you out of the way for a better deal, or in this case a better seat or to be one step ahead of you getting off the plane.

After a long and gross day of buses, planes, and "tubes" as they call them in London, we finally arrived at our hotel in London. After we got settled in, we went to check out the City and grab something to eat. We were fortunate to arrive on a very sunny day and this was literally the first thing we saw once we got into the city via Westminster station:



Then we went in search of food. London is a little pricy and we didn't know where anything was so we ended up eating at McDonald's. Before that, I honestly can't remember the last time I ate at a McDonald's. For some reason I think that a lot of American's who opt to not eat at McDonald's in the states end up eating it in foreign countries though, so whatever.

We covered a lot of ground that first day. Here are some pictures:


That night the wireless internet at our hotel wasn't working and I had a deadline and Brett had to get a hold of his friend (we were supposed to be meeting up with her the next day). So we took our little laptop and set out in search of an internet cafe. Now, first let me say that we were staying on the outskirts of town (much cheaper that way) and secondly, London is not as big on internet cafe's apparently. So after much searching and walking, we ended up at McDonald's for a second time. Who ever would have guessed we'd eat there twice in one day? Well, they were the only place with wireless internet, so we were grateful.

The next day we wandered around the city some more and then met up with Brett's friend, Nicola, for lunch. She's a Londoner who was attending the Monterey Institute and who also spent last summer in Syria. So this was actually the third country we've seen her in. After lunch we wandered around some more and checked out some shops. That was pretty much that day.

The next day we decided we were going to do our "Hop on/Hop off" tour. Basically they are these buses that drive around and make stops at all the popular tourist spots. So you can get on and off at any time. It's a pretty sweet deal. A favorite on this day was the Tower of London. It's a castle on the shores of the Thames. It's more famous as the place where greats like Ann Boleyn and William Wallace were executed. Speaking of that Boleyn girl, they had a Henry VIII exhibit going on at the time. Henry the 8th was an all around gross person. Here's a taste of the tower he once occupied:


While we were there, one of our objectives was for Brett to eat bangers and mash and fish & chips. Well, we at least accomplished half of that objective by getting him the fish & chips. And I ate all the salt & vinegar chips I could handle.

This blog is starting to get long, so I'll try to wrap things up...
Basically we saw all we could including Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery (complete with some actual Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Picasso paintings), the London Eye, the Imperial War Museum, Abbey Road, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, some of the beautiful parks, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things... But we walked till our feet hurt every day and I even talked Brett into seeing a show. Our last night there we went and saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It was actually really awesome and I think Brett even liked it. :)

You can a better feel for the whole experience by checking out our 150+ pictures here.

We left Sunday morning ridiculously early and took Monday to recuperate from the trip. In conclusion, it was awesome and I highly suggest going.

Tombstones and Bleeding Hearts for Bratislava

We wish to inform you that since our last post, the weather has taken an extreme turn for the awesome-er. This has exponentially increased our ability to be tourists. So our obvious first tourist stop when the weather started getting cheery - was the cemetery. The Vienna central cemetery boasts some of the most famous (and infamous) corpses of all time. The main reason we were interested in going was to reconnect with our classy roots by paying respect to Beethoven. Obviously the best way to show respect for the dead is to physically embrace their headstone.



This is actually Ludwig's second tomb. His body was moved there in 1888 along with composer Mr Franz Schubert. I'll bet they're really glad that they are homies 4 life, and 4 death. They now share a quiet little corner of the cemetery with other classical cats like Brahms and Falco. But somehow I don't feel like Falco belongs in this group. What do you think?



Other notables in the cemetery include basically every statesman from Austria, as well as the professor who rejected Hitler's art school application thus forcing America to use nuclear weapons against Japan (non sequitur stolen from a Brian Regan joke). All in all it was a fun day thanks to some German friends who invited us along for the afternoon. Ze Germans were especially helpful when a nice Austrian tour guide began pointing out (in his native language) the final resting places of interesting people. Two months in this country really has not done wonders for our German language ability. We were glad to have willing translators.

Our gloomy adventures continued yesterday when we visited the former Soviet land of Slovakia. Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is a mere 60km from Vienna. Even though we had already visited the former Soviet Union once (Czech Republic), this was the first time we really experienced the remnants of communism. The city is basically divided by the Danube river. On the west side of the river is the beautiful and historic city center as well as the old Bratislava castle. On the east side of the river is this:



It is Soviet bloc housing as far as the eye can see. You can get a better sense of what it looks like by opening the image in a new window and viewing it full size. It is interesting to think that a truly international city like Vienna was a mere 40 miles away from the edge of the iron curtain.

But to say that it was all gloom is inaccurate. It was actually a beautiful day outside and we spent time in the fun little historic district where people sell their crafts and play their accordions. What also made it a good time was the company. We went with a couple that we met here. Luckily one of them speaks fluent German. So between the four of us, nobody still had any idea how to read the Slovak street signs. You can see all the pictures from our Bratislava adventure here. Seeing these kinds of things really makes one glad to have been born into favorable conditions.

This week we are taking off for London! We hope to find out if Bob really is our uncle, and what the heck "bangers and mash" is. We were surprised to learn that, despite the general lack of religiosity in Europe, most countries here have a four-day weekend at Easter (Friday through Monday). So we are doing the American thing and turning that four-day weekend into a six-day one. We leave Wednesday for merry old London, return Easter Sunday, and then we'll obviously use Monday, the last day of our vacation, to blog our experiences and our feelings.

We're also taking suggestions on where to go next (after London), so send us a comment if you think you know what we should be seeing while we're here.

Finally, here is another random picture of Vienna:

Prague Blague

(Brett came up with that clever title)

Eight years ago, as part of an Orchestra tour, I visited Prague. This past weekend, I got to experience it again with Brett. This time around was definitely colder, but Prague is always amazing no matter what time of year you visit.

We actually drove with a couple who we know from Monterey. (They are also here for 6 months doing an internship. His mom lives in Germany, so he has a car here.) It seemed like a good idea at the time, but there were five of us in the car (her friend was also visiting from the U.S.), which obviously meant we were all a little squished in the back and I was sitting on the hump. Brett offered to sit on the hump, but we all know that would just be ridiculous.

We left on Friday around 5 and the guy we were with, Zak, wanted to stop at a town called Český Krumlov. It's a quaint little Czech town with a beautiful castle, as seen here at night:



We wandered around town a bit that night, walked up to the castle grounds, and also ate at a Restaurant called The Two Mary's. We ordered the traditional "Bohemian Feast," which was
delicious.




The next day, we woke up and wandered around some more and then hopped in the car to head to Prague. Once we got there, we found our hostel and got settled in... but not before taking a wrong turn and running into this chump:



I know you can only kind of see him, but that jerk of a cop is giving us a 1,000 CZK ticket which is about $40. While that may not be a lot of money, it's still ridiculous that he even gave us a ticket. We obviously didn't speak czech and we didn't see the tiny sign that apparently meant cars were not allowed down that street. At any rate, we were finally in Prague and once we dropped off our stuff, we headed into town. We wanted to see as much as possible so we did a lot of walking. We started by heading over the Charles Bridge:

And then headed towards the Prague castle and the Old Cathedral, which you may recognize from "A Knights Tale."


The rest of that day included us walking a lot, seeing plenty of other awesome things, and me trying to stop in every shop with bohemian crystal. It's just so sparkly I couldn't help myself.

We also found a falafel place to eat at that night, and Brett was excited to be able to communicate with someone in a common language, since the guy that owned it spoke Arabic. (A lot of people in Prague speak English, but you get what I mean.)

The next day, we went to the National Museum in Wenceslas Square. It was amazing. I don't think we appreciated it as much as we should have, since we were both so tired, but it was pretty awesome. Before and after the museum, we mostly just wandered around a lot. We wanted to take in as much of the city as possible because it really is beautiful.


We also ate a lot of delicious food while we were there including decadent chocolates, crepes, pastries, and a sausage or two. But, I didn't feel too bad about it considering how much walking we did... it all works out, right?

We left that evening at 5:30 via train. We decided not to ride back in the car for my back's sake. It took a little longer than we thought it would, but it was well worth it. No squishing and apparently our friends got stopped at the Czech border and accused of human trafficking. They eventually got through, but yikes.

So that pretty much wraps the trip up in a nutshell.


Oh and my parents are coming at the end of April and they want to go to Prague too... so Prague might be a three-peat for me. :)

So I guess that about sums up the trip. You can see all the Prague pics here

Franz And The Gang

Week three in Vienna, Austria in the year of our Lord two thousand and whatever.

Three words best describe these last weeks - Snow, Snow, Snore.

The snore because I have apparently found my new favorite late night activity. To be fair, snore should be extended to include talk, laugh and kick. Snoring actually happens a lot less than the other three, but all of them serve to keep Lindsey awake.

And snow because it has been snowing non-stop for the last 7 days. It's the kind of snow that flies at you sideways - not the happy, soft kind. Also, no matter what direction you are facing in this city, the snow is blowing directly into your eyeballs.

This is our street tonight


We did manage to get down to the Viennese Ice Dream. It is a huge ice skating rink set up in front of the castle-esque Vienna parliament building downtown. Of course, we couldn't bring ourselves to go skating in the 22 degree weather, but at least we got some hot chocolate and a tasty crepe.



Today (Saturday) I woke up, braved the cold, and purchased Lindsey's happiness - a heating pad. Back problems have been a real downer, so having a heating pad has become a real necessity. Also, I brought home some Vanilla donuts... which are awesome. These donuts called "krapfen" have raised the bar in a way that threatens to end my love affair with American donuts.

Have a taste:


Also, we've noticed that we go through a period of America-withdrawal a couple of weeks or so after we get to a new country. Today it came on pretty strong for me. So to nurse myself back to sanity, I took an extra-strength dose of David Allan Coe - king of outlaw country. Whenever I hear the rugged twang of DAC, blue and white start coursing through my veins to match the red of my pure American blood. Just look at his picture. And don't worry, he is as talented as he is beautiful.



But the big event for the day was our visit to the Military History Museum. It is weird to think about, but Austria has been involved a LOT of wars. I always assumed that whenever they were under threat of attack, they just sent Arnold Schwarzenegger to the front line to crack some skulls, flex some thighs, and it was game-over. Apparently I have been living under a complete misapprehension. There is tons of non-Arnold gear at this place. But by far the coolest thing among all the awesome things that the museum houses is the vehicle Archduke Franz Ferdinand was riding in when he and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo back in 1914. Also available for your viewing pleasure is the Archduke's uniform he was wearing when it happened - blood stains and all. It's crazy to think that we saw the actual blood that started World War I.

Check out these babies:


You can check out all the pictures from today by clicking here. I apologize in advance for the quality of the pictures. Our camera is... having troubles.

I'd love to write more, but there's a lot of American cola that I should be drinking right now. We hope you're warm wherever you are, and that you enjoy having your own vehicles to drive to the places that you want to go to, when you want to go to them.

Aqaba, the 4th of July, and everything gross in between

I personally think it was a nice change of pace for Brett to be doing the blog writing, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before he made me do it again. At any rate, here is what we've been up to lately...

A couple weekends ago we went to Aqaba...

We didn't actually take this picture. In fact, we only took one picture the whole time we were there and it wasn't even a picture at the beach. Sorry. (We just didn't want to take our camera down to the beach and leave it sitting there on the public beach.) We headed down there via the public bus on a Friday with a bunch of BYU kids. We had planned on staying at a place called the Bedouin Gardens. It came highly recommended by one of the people we were with, so we figured we would give it a shot. The original plan was to just pay to stay in a tent and then sleep on the beach. But, once we got there, Brett and I decided to get a room with air conditioning because sleeping in that heat would have been near impossible, even with the breeze. So while Brett and I slept in a room, the five other people we were with attempted to sleep outside. Around 3 a.m. something went awry for everyone in our group. Brett and I were awakened by some stomach problems with explosive results and the outside people were awakened by some uninvited guests. Gnats are apparently at their best in the middle of the night... So three of the people got a room around 4 a.m. and two of the other outside sleepers tried to win a loosing battle with the gnat-stys. We later found out that they had even tried sleeping in the pool to get away from the bugs, but it was to no avail.

The next morning all of us were tired and some were worse off than others. Brett and I felt like someone had poured acid in our stomachs and then proceeded to punch us over and over again and the two people that didn't sleep were pretty much delirious and on the verge of insanity. One of them even had intermittent fits of laughing/crying. It was funny, and yet oh so sad. Determined to try to enjoy some of our trip, we all rented snorkel gear and headed out to the beach. Of course, before actually getting the gear we had to convince the Arabs renting it to us that we had used snorkel gear before and knew what it was supposed to work like. (They thought that the leaky goggles were our misuse of them…) The water was a little cold for my liking, but most things are. The coral was really beautiful and we saw a lot of cool fish including a little puffer fish. After a good while of snorkeling, we decided to head into town because we didn't want to stay at the Bedouin Gardens again. (Brett has declared the Bedouin Gardens to be the worst gardens ever.) Here is that one and only picture I mentioned:

Saturday night we got a hotel in town and it was a much appreciated change of pace. From there on, we took it pretty easy and just tried to survive the stomach problems that plagued the rest of our trip. We headed back to Amman on Sunday and just when we thought our troubles were over, we found that they had just changed from internal to external...

You see, for a while now we've been dealing with this family of pigeons living in our ceiling. I don't know what they did up there, but it was super loud and kept us up at all hours of the night. We told our landlord about the problem and he went up there and took care of the problem by killing them. We thought that this was great and that our troubled sleep was no more. What we didn't count on was the pigeons coming at us from beyond the grave. With the pigeons gone, their little lice friends needed new hosts, so they came wandering into our apartment. We, or rather I, came home one day to find them all over our walls and all over my suitcase with all of my clothing. It was one of the grossest things I have ever seen. We quickly got some raid and went to work. Brett even went up into the attic/roof area to spray where the pigeons used to live. We haven't found any in a few days now, so I think we are in the clear.

The 4th of July was pretty mellow. We went to church then we went to Fuddruckers. (An American classic, right?) When we were at Fuddruckers Brett made us go around the table and read our favorite amendment from a pocket edition of the constitution and say what we love about America the most. After that we were invited over to a member's house where they fed us again (gluttony is also very American, right?) and Brett got to shed some guitar American style. Then we headed over to a small "married people" get together. This was the first time that Brett and I had ever hung out with just married people. It was interesting. We did get to see some fireworks on the way over, so that was good. I would have made Lee Greenwood proud with my singing of “I’m Proud to be an American” while we watched those few fireworks go off. So, that’s pretty much that. This last weekend we took it easy, but made sure to keep the American theme going. We watched the Hulk, Hancock, and ate at TGI Fridays. We're alive and doing well now and to try to make this blog a little more interesting, we've included a video of our living room... I'm not sure how that will make things more interesting, but just enjoy. Don't sass me.

The Citadel

Hello again. I appear to be blogging for a second time. The above picture is the temple of hercules on Citadel hill (القلعة) in central Amman where we visited last weekend. It was a great time to say the least. This city is full of ancient history, especially from the Roman empire. The Romans were pros at choosing naturally strategic places to set up shop. In times of war this citadel would only be accessible from one side because of the steep inclines on the other sides. That, however, didn't dissuade modern Jordanians from building super narrow roads with dangerously tight switchbacks around the rest of the hill. But the greatest part of visiting ruins in Jordan is that you get to climb and prance all over them with impunity, err... as long as you paid your 2 bucks at the door, that is. For example, this:

Me after declaring myself mayor of this ancient city

Here is Lindsey bringing back history, one block at a time

After this, we went to a restaurant downtown. We're going to have to publish some pics of downtown. It looks like a disaster, and I love it. Anyway, I was bemused to see that the Al-Qahira (Arabic for Cairo) restaurant made it a point to inform their customers that they no longer have any type of relations with Denmark. This is in retaliation for a Danish newspaper's publishing of the Mohammed cartoons. Man! Amid a global credit crunch, energy and food crisis, I don't know how the Danish are going to fare this embargo! The food was great, though. Maybe from now on we'll demand all our meals be served Dane-free.

To see the whole batch of Citadel photos, they're on Flickr

Lastly, we found a radioshack and got ourselves a power converter. Now we'll be able to play Mario Kart on our Nintendo DS all summer long!