Mozart and Mazes

aka Whirlwind tour of capital cities in eastern europe (WTOCCEE)

After a few days in Hungary trying (and failing) to master "hello", "goodbye" and "thank you" in Hungarian and looking for some good wines (luckily succeeding), we met our friends Jennifer and Wendy in Budapest. We like Budapest! It is big enough so that it doesn't feel overrun with tourists and has truly beautiful vistas across the river. The perfect theme music (even though it was written in Vienna) is Strauss' Blue Danube. It works for the traffic around the big round-about and the people swimming in the whirlpool at the Turkish baths.

The only problem with our trip to Budapest was its correspondence with the weekend. Like in much of northeastern europe, lots of things close at 1:00 Saturday afternoon and don't reopen until Monday morning. But thanks to Jennifer and Wendy's superior planning (they had prepared a down-to-the minute itinerary, complete with subway stops and opening hours... don't laugh, it actually worked!), we managed to see lots of sights, including the part tacky/part arty/part scary labyrinth near the old castle.

When we got to the cathedral we wanted to see though, it was closed.

But then it happened. Something we've been waiting for this whole trip.

The cathedral was closed, but Craig noticed there was a performance of Mozart's Requiem later in the evening. We asked the guard where to get the tickets and he said "Oh, they're free." So three hours later we were inside the cathedral listening to a fabulous choral concert!

Then we went to Vienna, where we saw a crowd-pleasing sort of "Best of Mozart" show and successfully navigated the maze at the Schonbrunner Schlosspark (don't you love German?!) and quickly left for Prague...

... which we hated at first (Jen and Wendy having an icky hotel experience and all of us feeling crowed by mobs of tourists and general seediness), but warmed up to after escaping the crowds in the mirror maze in the big park near the castle. We did not see a Mozart concert in Prague, but we had a very interesting experience trying to get to a certain restaurant, where we had to walk around a sort of DMZ and past armed guards to the entrance. (Turns out it is in the same building as Radio Free Europe, which the Czechs think could be a terrorist target.)

Photos: Cathedral in Budapest, Maze in Vienna, Crowds (old town square, Prague)

-SK