Red Wine Express

After a month in Europe, long flights home and a decent night’s sleep, the CB and I are back in the land of the living. Here are a few final thoughts, in no particular order, to wrap things up.

In Nuremberg we had a look at the place where Hitler conducted his rallies and made those infamous fist waving speeches to the then adoring masses. It’s been preserved so we never forget what went on there. As a music lover I like the idea that it’s now used for rock concerts. I don’t know if Iron Maiden have performed there but seeing Bruce Dickinson in his redcoat tunic waving the Union Jack while singing The Trooper and leaping about in the spot where Hitler once stood appeals to my irony gene.

We saw numerous castles on our travels. I love castles. Inverlochy Castle in Scotland was used for protection back in the 13th century. This involves fighting. I am photographing the defensive capabilities of the castle – the moat, the battlements, the walls, the ingenious ways they had in those days to trap or kill attackers. The CB is photographing bluebells growing out of the walls.

I’ve previously reported in Widows and Walking Sticks and other previous posts that we have been travelling with a bunch who are about a generation removed from us – up, not down. And there are a lot of single ladies amongst them. So while Cuz1 and I have been focussed on getting the next round in, Cuz2 and the CB have been more concerned with who’s doing what to whom. A bit crude I know but when we are talking about an average age of about 80 it takes on a whole new dimension. They had the male and female tour guides sorted on day one despite a left-field intervention from another of my cousins in Vienna which I won’t outline here but some of the other “connections” were ……… I don’t know why I’m talking about this and will stop immediately.

We’ve encountered many, many famous people on our travels this past month ranging from Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome and philosopher extraordinaire to Ferenc Puskas, Hungary’s and one of the world’s most famous footballers who was given a cathedral burial. We saw Oscar Schindler and Ralph Wallenberg, Gothe and Richard the Lionheart. There was Zsa Zsa Gabor and Conrad Hilton and various Habsburg kings and queens. We caught up with Mozart, Beethoven, the various Strausses, Haydn and Schubert in Vienna and Richard Wagner in Germany. It seemed like every town, big or small, had a claim to fame usually involving a figure from the history books. And that’s a big reason why the CB and I love visiting Europe.

Of course getting from Aus to Europe can be a pain and readers of one of the earlier Rheinube episodes will be aware that British Airways fell rather dramatically in my estimation when they put the CB and I in the middle two seats of the four in a 2-4-2 configuration. They redeemed themselves by giving us an aisle seat and a middle seat with no one in the other middle seat coming back the other way. It was looking dodgy there for a while BA.

Then when we showed our boarding passes at the Qantas lounge in Singapore the nice Qantas gentleman said they had different boarding passes for us and went to consult with a colleague. They were different but not in the way I hoped and at this point expected. Rather than an upgrade, they were switched from paper to cardboard and the seat numbers didn’t change. Hoo-bloody-ray. Maybe Alan Joyce knows I think he’s a social justice warrior wanker who should confine himself to running an airline when wearing his Qantas hat. I’m a Qantas shareholder and he doesn’t speak for me when he says Qantas believes this or Qantas believes that (insert favourite lefty cause).

And finally we were very fortunate to have travelled with such fun loving, and booze loving companions in Cuz1 and Cuz2. When intentions (having a good time mainly) are perfectly aligned you can’t go wrong. Any hint of disunity prior to departure however will be magnified especially in the close confines of a boat or a coach as someone I know recently discovered. Not us. We had a blast and intend doing it again and if you hang around long enough and I don’t get sick of doing this you’ll read about it here first.

Well Budapest, what can I say? What a wonderful place. You are now my official favourite city. Take an insomnia pill New York. Wipe that sanctimonious smirk off your face Paris. Turn off that phone Hong Kong. There’s a new kid in town.

Vienna was inspiring with its beautiful palaces and it’s magical, musical past. But it’s flat and organised. A touch of dishevelment and hints of a more “colourful” past plus a few hills make for greater interest. Vienna certainly has interesting history being front and centre with Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed not long after by it’s capitulation to nazism. And it’s suburbs are as graffitied as any other city. But Budapest is coming out of something no city, no country, no people should be made to suffer and the transition is incomplete but the potential is obvious. Maybe the same can be said for Bucharest and Sofia and any number of places which experienced the same cold, dead-hand of totalitarianism, but today we are focussing on Budapest.

Budapest has the Danube. Many places have the Danube as it’s Europe’s second longest river behind the Volga which is entirely in Russia so doesn’t really count. And the best place to showcase a city from, in my humble opinion, is a river and if that river happens to be the Danube then all the better. Many of Budapest’s most outstanding landmarks are visible in all of their glory from the river. And there are plenty of them which you can read about in any number of books and blogs, but not this one.

Our tour guide advised us that the happiest day in Budapest’s long history (they celebrated 1000 years in 1896) was the day in 1991 when the Soviet army left. Then the hard work began because what hadn’t been trashed had been neglected to a criminal extent. Restoration work is proceeding apace but unfortunately the economy hasn’t progressed since the communists were kicked out, to the extent that sufficient funds are available to restore everything. So you get this strange phenomenon of a street of beautifully restored palaces and five story town houses interspersed with potentially and previously beautiful buildings sporting crumbling masonry, exposed bricks and collapsing facades. And they are filthy.

Now, the majority of restoration work is done as a condition of sale of the particular building. So if a hotel chain or a bank or any other business buys a run-down building, they are required to do the restoration themselves, in some cases it would appear, simply to make them habitable. How’s that, you millennial, socialist weenies? Capitalism is cleaning up the mess your communist fellow-travellers left when they scuttled back to their mythical land of fairness and equality where everyone lives happily ever after.

Meanwhile back in the real world you can still see bullet holes from World War 2 and more recently from the uprising of 1956 when the plucky Magyars tried to toss out the Soviets only to be crushed. A small part of this was reenacted in the pool at the Melbourne Olympics when Hungary played the Soviet Union in water polo – the “Blood in the Water” match won by Hungary 4-0.

These are the reasons why Budapest is such a wonderful place. It has a magnificent smorgasbord of attractions, it has reminders of its tragic past and it is demonstrating its determination to eradicate, but not forget that past.

Meal times have generally resembled reenactments of the Battle of Agincourt with sharpened elbows and strategically positioned hips replacing long bows and cavalry. Now that we are in a hotel in Vienna instead of on the boat it’s even more so. This hotel doesn’t seem to check or even care who comes in for breakfast. People just seem to wander in off the street. Consequently the buffet is an ugly free-for-all of epic proportions.

This is in complete contrast, I might add, to the incredible elegance of the city centre, the focus of architectural splendour and more statues than you can imagine. I’ve commented on this previously but it’s worth repeating. Comparing what the artisans of the Renaissance and Baroque and other creative periods of relatively recent history turned out, with the “art” our pampered luvvies produce isn’t chalk and cheese. It’s the Sistine Chapel and finger painting.

I’ve always been more sport than art but will give credit where credit’s due. I can appreciate talent and creativity and I kind of like the idea of a sculptor’s life work and centuries-lasting legacy being half a dozen statues adorning a gob-smackingly splendid palace.

Speaking of legacies, Vienna is like many European cities which have retained or rebuilt their historical legacy. Various wars, not least World War 2, have conspired to destroy it but the good burghers of Vienna and countless other places across Europe have toiled to faithfully rebuild and replicate what was destroyed with spectacularly successful results. If only that hard work, dedication and vision could be replicated in the management of …….. well, everything these days. Making sure the stones of St Stephen’s Cathedral were put back in the right order was a politically correct – free process I expect.

These days our competitive nature is channeled into sport and politics and diving for the last croissant. Centuries ago the peasantry were competing for clean water and life beyond the next bout of hand-to-hand combat. The aristocracy however were in the death-grip of a my palace is bigger than your palace construct-a-thon. Because of this we have good reason (amongst others) to visit Vienna and Budapest and Paris and St Petersburg and London. Spending your money on buildings rather than swords allowed the people to eat and the men to not die even more prematurely and that’s got to be a good thing even if more could have been spent on “elf” and “edumacation” as every good wealth redistributor will tell you.

We just crossed the border into Hungary. There’s a lot to admire about the Hungarians in the current open-border craziness that Frau Merkel and her EU co-conspirators have inflicted on all of continental Europe. And it appears there’s an element of rat cunning flowing through their stoic patriotism. We made a comfort stop at a services place on the highway to Budapest and discovered that it cost a euro to use the convenience. After the complaining subsided, I read the fine print on the ticket the machine spits out after you insert your money. Most people don’t even see this ticket emerge or ignore it but it is redeemable for one euro if you buy something in the shop. How is that? A toilet driven economy.

Sorry for the paucity of posts dear reader as we have been having too good a time and spare moments for this particular political animal have been taken up following the government shenanigans in Australia.

So far so good. We’ve walked much more than we’ve drunk which is often a good thing especially on a boat when drinks are free at certain times – lunch time and dinner time for us. This is fine except when it is necessary to debate the restaurant manager on the definition, specifically related to time, of lunch “time” and dinner “time”. This is only generally necessary when we are the last to leave which is most of the time.

While on the subject of drinking, I thought I’d heard it all and then I heard a tour guide at the Faust Brewery in Miltenberg, Germany say if you can’t manage steps you can stay in the sampling room and “help yourself”. I’d take that tour every afternoon.

There are more than 70 locks between Basel in Switzerland, where we started this cruise, and Budapest. When we go through them it’s like flying Indian Airlines through a cyclone. I know because I’ve had this rare pleasure. In most of the ones we have been through so far there has been about a foot to spare on both sides. So you can excuse the driver hitting the wall occasionally. But I’m at a loss to explain how a boat travelling at slow walking pace can hit a wall less than a foot away and throw you off the toilet. And it’s more severe at night. I’m not suggesting there are substances other than black coffee involved here but there is a chance the apprentice is given an opportunity to drive when we are pretty well straight-jacketed by high walls and almost no speed.

A comment here on the legendary German efficiency. We stopped for a couple of steins of Wurzberg’s finest at a quaint bar overlooking the old town square and struck the absolute antithesis of said efficiency. Our waitress had the attitude of a surly French waiter, the focus of a Fawlty Towers Manuel and the commitment of a Greek bureaucrat a week before retirement. I was beginning to think this legendary Teutonic planning is mythical. Prior to that we walked around this palace called The Residency and saw a gardener who managed to rake the same square foot of soil thirty or fourth times in the time it took us to walk past him. Maybe I’m confusing thoroughness with efficiency. But having three people to trim a tree was just too much. As best we could make out one of them was there to scowl at approaching tourists.