Mark's Europe Trip 2002

Emails to Home

Greetings from Geneva!
Tue, 08 Jan 2002 14:01

Dear all,

Just a quick message to let you all know that we have safely arrived in Geneva, and hobbled into the hotel just on 32 hours and four flights after departing Melbourne on Saturday evening. A highlight was our final leg from Zurich to Geneva as we flew past the Swiss Alps, plus the personal video screens on Lauda Air (that allowed you to play games, watch movies, monitor our progress via external cameras on the plane, and make phone calls!).

Most of the group has been ensconced in the Dalcroze Institute over the past 24 hours learning how to teach music through body movements (or something like that), while we tourists (well, me and Philip anyway) have been taking in the sights and checking out the shopping (very expensive: 40 Swiss francs just for a regular CD - about 50 AUD, about 12AUD for a Macca's cheeseburger meal!). It is certainly pretty chilly: hovering around 0C and quite overcast, obscuring the views of Mont Blanc and the other Alps.
Off tomorrow by plane to Vienna, then connecting to a train to Salzburg for a few days there, which I'm very much looking forward to.
Rebecca and I are both well, over the jet lag, and enjoying rugging up in our warm gear.

Regards to all and more later,
Mark

Greetings to all from the fair city of Vienna. And apologies to those Bigpond users amongst you, from whom my mail from Geneva bounced back.

We arrived yesterday in Vienna after a couple of days in the magnificently scenic and historic Austrian town of Salzburg. The highlight was definitely taking in the panoramic views of the town and surrounding alps from the fortress atop the hill that overlooks the town. We also visited the birthplace of Mozart, bought some of the exquisite chocolate liquer named in his honour - the white being the best - and sampled some potato Euros at McDonald's! Temperatures were well below 0C a lot of the time, with a white blanket of snow covering everything.

We are now in Vienna, which is probably only a degree or two warmer, but no snow. Off to a concert by the Camerata Salzburg tonight, Vienna Boys Choir tomorrow morning, then off to Kecskemet in Hungary tomorrow afternoon. I hope to update you all again from there.

Thanks, Adrian, for the cricket update - how did the Aussies possibly manage to lose against NZ?
Best wishes to all,
Mark

We won't go hungry in Hungary!
Mon, 14 Jan 2002 15:16

"Sia" from the Hungarian town of Kecskemet! After witnessing an excellent concert by the Camerata Salzburg (with works by Haydn and Mozart) at the Vienna Konzerthaus on Saturday evening, we spent Sunday morning in Vienna seeing the Vienna Boys Choir perform at a church service at the Imperial Chapel, followed by a visit to the huge Kunsthistoriches (Art History) Museum, where we took in an Egyptian exhibition plus stacks of magnificent artworks.

Early Sunday afternoon we boarded a train to Budapest. Once there, we had to take two very grotty subway trains to a similarly grotty station for our connection to Kecskemet, which we unfortunately missed by five minutes. We waited an hour for the next train and then some of us had to stand for the whole 90 minute journey - luckily we had some schnapps with which we passed away the time!

Our hotel here is quite comfortable, and the food at the various restaurants we have sampled thus far has been excellently prepared and priced. Just AUD4.00 today for a pizza lunch, AUD10 (sorry, can't find the dollar sign on this keyboard!) last night for a local specialty of spicy beef/mutton/pork croquettes plus raw onions, whole chillies and a fiery blended sauce of paprika and chilli, washed down with half a litre of beer. Pity poor Rebecca for having to share a room with me after that lot!

The majority of the group is stuck in classes at the Kodaly Institute here for the next five days, while Philip and I attempt to explore all that Kecskemet has to offer (which as we have discovered thus far, is not particularly much! No wonder it's located on the Great Hungarian Plain!). We hope to get out of town for some day trips later in the week, if we can navigate our way through the daunting language barrier (Hungarian has no similarity whatsoever to English apart from the fact that it is a language - it is related to Finnish and that's about it!).

As you may guess, Internet use is considerably cheaper in Hungary, hence my longer email, but as I have no other news of any consequence at this moment, I shall finish up and catch you all later in the week.

Thanks to those of you who have sent me messages. I look forward to hearing more news from home.
"Vislat" for now!
Mark

Hello all,
And belated birthday greetings to Bruce, Skye and Scott. Hope you all had good ones.

Since my last email last week from the rather dull Hungarian town of Kecskemet, things have improved considerably in a number of ways. We finally managed to escape the delights of the aforementioned town for a day trip to Szeged, the home of Hungary's best salami and paprika. I discovered my new favourite European beer, Dreher Bak - a Hungarian dark beer full of body (like many of the women). We met up with an Australian fellow and his friends from other English-speaking territories who were either studying or working in Kecskemet, and enjoyed a few drinks with them at the local English Pub. The Aussie guy's American girlfriend Gretchen actually did some teaching at Caulfield Grammar and knows Bernie Hickey from Pep Band - it's a small world! He also went to uni with one of the girls in our tour group.

Saturday saw us move on to the grandeur of the Hungarian capital, from where I am sending this email. We have journeyed out to the fascinating Statue Park, where all the 'heroic' statues of the former Communist regime are now hidden. We spent some time in the City Park, complete with its castle, frozen lake, zoo, amusement park, circus, and thermal baths, which are housed in a very grand building more suited to parliament. We walked up to Castle Hill in the Buda part of the city to take in the splendid views across the Danube to the Parliament Building (which does not actually house any thermal baths). On Saturday night we went to a 'Tanchaz' dance club where we learnt traditional Hungarian dancing and singing! Last night we saw a Puccini opera (Manon Lescaut) at the spectacular Budapest Opera House, and today paid a visit to a Hungarian Folk Music School in an old part of the city very close to the original Roman ruins of the first settlement here.

Budapest has proved to be a very easy city to get around, with an excellent underground train system. Indeed, the line we travel on most regularly is in fact the oldest underground stretch of railway in Europe, having been established in 1896.

The meals continue to be mostly excellent, although a little more expensive here than in regional Hungary. Today we finally found a KFC! I was also delighted to find a very dodgily-produced pirate version of a U2 CD - and at a good price. Most of the other CDs I've found retail for A$35-$40.

The weather has been warmer here, hovering closer to the 5C mark most of the time. There has been no sign of snow here either, unlike last week when walking home from dinner with Rebecca in a light fall of snow became a common yet not unpleasant occurrence. Overall this trip has been considerably colder with more snow than the corresponding trip two years ago.

We move on to Vienna tomorrow for our final few days in Europe before flying out for Australia on Friday.
Probably more from me later in the week.
Regards,
Mark

A final email to let you all know that we're back from Europe. My apologies for not sending an email during our final few days in Vienna. We were kept busy with a number of activities, including the following:
· a visit to the new, highly impressive, informative and interactive Haus der Musik, which covers music from the point of view of the very essence of sound through to interactive displays that allow you to rearrange Mozart's music or conduct the Vienna Philharmonic; a well-stocked souvenir shop featured some tuba socks that I was compelled to purchase!
· Rebecca and I replicated our very first date two years ago with an authentic Wiener Schnitzel, followed by a drink at Vienna's Aussie Pub, and a movie at the Burg Kino (where, fortunately, they show the original English language versions of movies).
· An exhausting ascent of St.Stephan's cathedral steeple (with restricted views of the city thanks to scaffolded renovations), rewarded by the finest ice cream in Austria from the 'Eis' shop a block away
· Front row seats (one of our group got sweated on by the conductor!) in the Grand Hall of the spectacular Musikverein to see the Swedish Radio Orchestra perform the Rite of Spring and an interesting interpretation of the Mozart Requiem.
· An excursion out of town the next day by Rebecca and me to locate Mozart's resting place, which is actually just a field (he was buried in a mass paupers' grave) within a small cemetery surrounded by highways, freeways and overpasses; there is a small memorial there that was cobbled together by grave diggers after it had been determined that Mozart was indeed buried there. We then travelled further out to the huge Zentral Friedhof (Central Cemetery, surrounded by the 'yards' of entrepreneurial stonemasons) to find graves of the Strauss family and 'memorial' graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Schonberg.

The beauty of snow-covered Salzburg probably remains my highlight of our short but busy three weeks in Europe. Views of the Swiss and Austrian Alps from Geneva, Salzburg, and on the Zurich-Geneva and Geneva-Vienna flights will also be a fond memory. Renewing my battle with the linguistic diversity of Europe was good fun, and it was especially satisfying being able to communicate (albeit at a very basic level) in the highly non-transparent Hungarian tongue. Hungarian food was also very enjoyable, as long as you were happy to have lots of spice, chicken, turkey, pork and frozen vegetables; the alcoholic beverages were all excellent with the exception of the vile national liquer Unicum - as participants in the trip two years ago will recall, it is much more fun to burn than to drink! The Statue Park out of Budapest with all of its hoped-to-be-forgotten communist statues was an interesting attraction, though the queues for tours of the Budapest Parliament building made one believe that communism may in fact be alive and well!

Amongst the considerably fewer lowlights were the fact that we didn't get the opportunity to return to my favourite two places on our trip two years ago, Berlin and Prague. I was also looking forward to the opportunity of getting across to Bavaria (Munich, Augsburg, Innsbruck, etc) to take in some of the real drinking music culture to which I was exposed in a Bavarian band some years ago; unfortunately, we didn't have time to squeeze this in - maybe next time. The limitations of our tour group (a few dawdlers, a bit too much monoculturalism) prevented us seeing as much as we could have; Rebecca and I were certainly far happier to sightsee independently of the group whenever the chance arose, knowing that we would get to see a lot more.

Though the meals on the Lauda Air flights were surprisingly good (though they had nothing on the Euro potatoes in Austrian McDonald's!!), the air travel was again heavy going. After a 20-hour flight home with no sleep, arriving home in 35C on Saturday night, I was feeling less than comfortable. I am in fact still suffering from jet lag (hence my sleepless state at this late hour), but hope that I have made enough sense for this email to be at least mildly interesting and entertaining. I look forward to catching up with everyone over the coming weeks.