An authentic Austrian lunch at the Restaurant zur Post. Matt's tired of being depicted always with a beer so this time Suz posed for me.
Debb posed instead with a tractor (!)
We also saw a bike that had been yarn-bombed.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Posted with Blogsy
Melk, Austria
The boat docks in Austria this morning at the town of Melk. You may not know, but the Danube (among other rivers) experienced terrible flooding a month ago, and this restaurant near the dock puts dates on its outer wall to mark past floods -- and had to add another date. Looks like they were 10 feet under water.
Melk's claim to fame is the Melk Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that's over a thousand years old, and is done in the Baroque style, which means lots of fanciness and gold. This photo shows the abbey way up on the hill perched over the town. In addition to the church itself it has many rows of rooms -- kind of looks like a massive penitentiary.
Suz and I amused ourselves by posing with the artifacts.
Selfie!!
The interior of the chapel. You get a sense how gilded and ornate it is.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Passau
We've reached, Passau, Germany, a pretty town at the confluence of three rivers: the Danube, the Inn and the Ilz. Just beyond Passau lies Austria; after sailing for over a week in Germany we're about to enter a new country.
We just had time for a little shopping in the morning (who knew Debb would take to hats?) before the rains came. So we've in fact spent much of the day aboard the ship.
After trying on a couple of hats, Debb comes to her senses.
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Dachau
Yes, many of you know this name -- a suburb of Munich, but also famous as the site of one of the Nazi concentration camps in WWII. In 1985 my dad took me to see Dachau, and it made a lasting impression on me. Well, this morning I looked at a map (we're in Regensburg) and I realized we were about 100 miles from Dachau. So I decided to take Matt down there to see one of the sites of the Holocaust. We left the ship, went to the train station, caught a train to Munich, caught another train to Dachau, and caught the 726 bus to the site. Spent several hours there and came away stunned, just as I was 28 years earlier. As one shipmate said to me this morning, "I've been to Dachau and don't want to go back, but everyone should go once."
I apologize if this is heavy, but it should be shared.
The entrance gate to the concentration camp.
The words in the gate say "Work Makes You Free." Gulp.
The moat and the barbed wire fence.
The barracks.
The barracks back then.
Most of the barracks are now gone. Only stone foundations remain.
A crematorium.
Matt leaving the gas chamber.
A memorial sculpture.
The most moving part of the day was witnessing a mother explaining this to a 10 year old, and watching the girl staring at her mother in befuddlement as she realized her mother was crying.
"Never forget."
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
The Main-Danube Canal
Think Erie Canal, or maybe Panama Canal ... This man-made waterway connects the Main River and the Danube. The former flows west, the latter east, and thus this canal crosses Europe's Continental Divide. Not quite the Rocky Mountains, but cool in theory. Also very peaceful and bucolic.
Coming up to the entrance of a lock, whose purpose is to raise the boat to a higher level.
Once inside it's like being inside a giant bathtub, that needs to be filled. Surprisingly it fills pretty fast.
Very exciting!!
Nuremberg
A trip to Nuremberg, famous to us as the site of the Nazi War Crimes trial after WWII, but during the Reich it was where Hitler staged mass rallies of over 1M people. Today the Zeppelin Field, above, and the Coliseum, below (never finished) are next to the Documentation Museum that preserves the history of Nazi Germany for everyone from local schoolchildren to foreign tourists.
After a sobering, rainy morning, Matt & I walked through the center square of Nuremberg to have an authentic German lunch of sausages, potatoes and beer. Matt pronounced it "Der Gut!"
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Bamberg
Maybe I'm just tired of more churches .... We spent the day in Bamberg, a very picturesque city in Bavaria, seeing the old cathedral and walking along the cobblestone streets as we looked at nice shops and pubs. To be honest, I'm a bit churched out. I feel like I've got the southern Germany story down cold. But what makes it worthwhile is the beer tasting after the walking tour!
We stop in to this fine establishment, whose name I couldn't pronounce when sober, except to say it was established in 1380. Their claim to fame is "smoky beer" -- which does, indeed, taste smoky but really tastes like ham. But good! Der gut! as the Germans would say.
Matt drank prodigious quantities. Any pretense to further parenting is long gone by now <grin>.
Group photo on the town square!
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