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Mary Anne -Prague, Czech Republic Last two days of our three week tour of four countries. We took the train from Vienna to Prague and found that our hotel accommodations were just a little bit less then perfect. After being picked up from the train station by bus we were taken to our hotel in a questionable neighborhood. Our room was the attic of the hotel. There were no wall windows only ceiling windows. I felt like maybe I was Anne Frank. It was the 4th floor and that means not 4 sets of stairs but 8 sets. They say what [View Full Entry]

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Jim Write Up 8 Again, I will just post pictures. We are now in Prague and going on a tour from 10 AM to 7 PM and then having a party this evening. The pictures include: 1. Summer Palace 2. Music Hall 3. Going away party with Hosts and Ambassadors Our daughter Kate e-mailed me from Washington State this AM and a Canadian friend that we meet in China is touring Prague today, hopefully we will be able to hook up. Our next post and probably the last one will be from Prague. [View Full Entry]

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Jim - Write Up 7 Mary Anne did a great job of writing up everything on Vienna. I thought I would just add some pictures today. They include: 1. Monastery near our host’s house. It is Augustine and dates from the 13th century 2. House of Irmgard & Gunter 3. Irmgard’s son Dietmar and their house (all glass). The daughter in law Andrea gave us a ride to the train station. Andrea is a dress designer and teaches at a University. Dietmar is in IT and does CAD/CAM. Their 2 kids are beautiful, sorry I did not get a picture of [View Full Entry]

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Jim - Sunday - Write 6 I am sorry about not putting the blog on the internet but we have not had internet access since we got to Vienna. We did not start off our home stay in Vienna too well. We got off the train one station too early. It was still in Vienna but on the east side rather than the west side. This was not one of our finer moments, we all were rather proud of how well things went before this blunder. Of course, we all had the station we were suppose to get off at on [View Full Entry]

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Jim - Write up 5 -5/11 We arrived at in Bratislava at 4 PM and took the bus to the hotel. It was warm, almost hot, and our tour leader, Ben (Carol) Szyplinski discovered we did not have Air Conditioning in the hotel rooms. This was something she specified with our travel agent. We now refer to Ben as our “Polish unguided missile”. It was not pretty. Needless to say, we moved to the Executive suites which have AC, Refrigerators, Digital TV and post Soviet Furniture. The only thing we don’t have is in-room internet access. Yesterday afternoon I walked down [View Full Entry]

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Jim-Write up 4 - 5/10 After our Friendship Force Group arrived we left the flat and moved to a Hotel in the old Jewish Quarter of Budapest. We truly loved the location of our flat down by the “Old Market”. After the FF crew had a night of sleep, we took a boat tour and also a general tour of the city on the bus. Our guide was terrific. I have enclosed a picture. One thing he mentioned about the weather was that 20 years ago in the winter, Budapest would have heavy snows. Often a meter or two (1 [View Full Entry]

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Jim 5/7/09 Yesterday and today was our big adventure in getting around Hungary on public transportation. Mary Anne and I are feeling pretty satisfied with our ability to navigate and use the trolley, the metro and the railroad to travel to Lake Balaton (probably about 130 miles). We know we owe Gene Weisner a big thank you for guiding us and also looking up the train schedule on the computer. There may also have been a bit of dumb (Irish) luck involved but we will ignore that fact. Yesterday we got up about 6:15 AM and caught the trolley and then [View Full Entry]

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Jim -Friday - 6/5/09 Yesterday was sort of a relaxing day. We sleep in late and then had a nice breakfast in the flat. About noon we decided to take one of the “Hop On-Hop Off” sightseeing buses. They travel a defined route to 12-14 attractions and you can get off anytime and go exploring. You can then catch another one at the same stop you got off each half hour. They also have a sound system with headsets and you can choice one of 18 languages. So it is a pretty comfortable, easy & inexpensive way to take a nice [View Full Entry]

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Thursday AM 6/4/2009 Well we arrived in Budapest. We flew from the Twin Cities to Amsterdam and everything was on time and comfortable. The flight was about 8 hours. We than had about a 3 hour layover and a 1 hour and 40 min. flight to Budapest. Got a cab into Budapest and made it to our flat. They seem to have about 50% of the streets dug up in Budapest so a 20 min. taxi ride can take twice as long. Our flat is on Pest side of the side of the river. It is about 2 blocks to the [View Full Entry]

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