On Palm Sunday we ventured into the old town a second time. Poland is not the land of palm trees, although Charles De Gaulle square has a huge plastic palm tree. (It is a work of art. Before the war … Continue reading Warsaw, Palm Sunday, 2013
To visit the German Bundestag housed in the Reichstag building you need an invitation. We applied, sending our passport information and addresses, on line. I got our PDF invitation letter just before we left for Warsaw. Our appointment was 9:30 Monday evening. We got off our train grabbed a cab, dropped our stuff at the hotel and went on to the Reichstag. The building was burned as Hitler came to power. Hitler blamed it on the Communists. Others blame it on Hitler as an excuse to grab more power. The building was largely unused just on the western side of … Continue reading Reichstag, Berlin, 2013
Note, many of the photos for this post are contained in the posts “Shadows of the Wall,” “East Side Gallery.” and “Bernauer Str.” Pictures on this post are general Berlin tourism shots. March 22, 2013 Berlin, Germany Dear Friends, In … Continue reading Berlin, March, 2013
Text for these pictures is on the post “Berlin, March, 2013” These are pictures from the area of the old wall. Panels of the wall have been re-erected near “Checkpoint Charlie” and feature dictators still waiting for falling. The man … Continue reading Shadows of the Wall, Berlin 2013
The text for these pictures is in the post “Berlin, March 2013.” The East Side Gallery is the longest stretch of the wall still standing. One side has been painted by famous artists. The other side is a “free … Continue reading East Side Gallery, Berlin, 2013
This is Bernauer Str. The Wall used to run along this street, not it is a memorial to the wall and there is a park where Berlin has its Sunday flea market. The Text for this letter is in the … Continue reading Berlin 2013, Bernauer Str.
March, 21, 2013 This week Suzi and I attended Radio Days Europe and got to tour some different radio stations. A highlight of the sessions was the tour of Haus des Rundfunks, or Radio House. The Funkhaus was designed in 1929 in the Bauhaus style and went on-air in 1931. It claims to be the oldest purpose built radio station building in the world. The Funkhaus is the home of Radio Berlin and Brandenburg (RBB), which operates 6 radio services. While it was built as a national headquarters, right now it serves Berlin’s local public radio. The building is a … Continue reading Rundfunks Berlin
March 3, 2013, Tbilisi, Georgia Historically travel has always been arduous. But for a brief period, for a certain social class, travel was glamorous. “Getting there is half the fun” Cunard crowed in mid-century ads. Flying, jet setting had a certain cache. Super Graphics from the airports in early 70’s had fashionable young people in shades and Italian designer cloths smiling as they walked to planes. Today, at SeaTac there is the graphic of a cartoon character, sweating, lugging a suitcase, looking completely harried. It’s an honest, and funny, presentation of flying today and brought more than a few chuckles. … Continue reading Travel from Sitka to Tbilisi.
We have been to Telc several times. It has a nice outlet store for Bohemian crystal, even though it is in Moravia. Each time it was overshadowed, in the letter, by other places or, in one case, by a traffic accident. A Lada hit me while I was stopped an intersection, no one hurt. So the pictures will have to tell the story. The first time we were there in 1990 it was rundown but you could see the beauty under the dust and in spite of the faded paint. The last time we visited in 2002 it was gloriously … Continue reading Telc, Moravia, Czech Republic
April 27, 2002 Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic Dear Friends, We’re spending the night in Ceske Krumlov on a drive between Bratislava and Zagreb. Ceske Krumlov is nowhere near the direct route from Bratislava to Zagreb. Suzi and I have not often taken direct routes and we are the richer for it. Ceske Krumlov is a fortified city protected by a meander in the Vlatava (Moldau) River. We were last here in spring 1990 during the election that legitimized the Velvet Revolution. The city was not yet a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That came in 1992 along with some restoration funds. In … Continue reading Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic
October 1, 2011 Belgrade, Serbia Dear Friends, A week ago in Rovinji, Croatia, I went to sleep and woke up to the sounds of waves lapping at the sea wall three floors below our apartment window. As the morning progressed I could hear gulls calling, flocking around the boats that had been seining all night for sardines, now coming into port, their wakes made the slap against the sea wall more pronounced. At 7 AM the church bells at St. Eufemia called the city to wake. If you go to the window, just then, you can see the sun rise … Continue reading Rovinj, Croatia
Note, Vukovar was the first major victim in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It is a border town on the Danube, in Croatia but, before the wars, with a slight Serbian majority. The Serbs finally took the town over but after the Dayton Accords the town was administered by the UN before being turned over to the Croats, 13 days before we arrived. Our job was to work with the Serbian radio stations in the region to make sure they got licenses from the Croatian government and to help assure that the rights of the Serbian, Roma and Hungarian … Continue reading Vukovar, Croatia
This is from 1997. I threw in the picture of the necktie shop in this tranche of photos, just because it seemed to go with the uniforms. May 11, 1997 Zagreb, Croatia Dear Friends, We’re in our eleventh week of wandering Europe after the evacuation. We had planned to be gone two. We’ll be in Zagreb another week before traveling to Vienna to get visas and then to Serbia as IREX plans our alternative lives for us. I still enjoy being awakened by church bells at 6:00 AM. Since it’s summer they seem louder with the windows open. Earlier in … Continue reading Zagreb, 1997, Operetta at the Presidential Palace
This letter included my first impressions of Zagreb. I took the pictures in this post in 2001 and 2011. We had been evacuated from Tirana and had been traveling for two months on only the carryon bags we got out with. We were working TDY jobs for our IREX as needed. We had just come from Prague. Zagreb, Croatia April 25, 1997 Dear Friends, Sometimes something you learn in the first hours visiting a place can prejudice you against it before you have a chance to really get to appreciate it. That could have happened to me in Croatia. According … Continue reading Zagreb, Croatia
May 23, 2004 Mali Ston, Croatia, Dear Friends, Mali Ston is on a cove, not spectacularly beautiful, but restfully pretty. Mali Ston is not distinctive compared with other historic towns along the coast. The reason to go to Mali Stone is to eat. Big busses bring eating tours to Mali Ston. This weekend a busload of French Tourists came to sample local seafood and wines. The cove has oysters and mussels and the local wine is from the next valley. The town makes much of its income from seafood wedding feasts. I’m allergic to seafood but everyone assured me that … Continue reading Mali Ston and Ston, Croatia
In May 1997 Suzi and I returned to Dubrovnik after 25 years. This was the first of many trips we would make. When we were posted in Montenegro there was no US Embassy or USAID office to serve Yugoslavia so … Continue reading Dubrovnik, Croatia
Some of my Croat friends will take exception with putting Croatia in the Balkans. Driving to Zagreb from Slovakia I once said to a friend “It is good to be back in the Balkans.” He scowled and said, Zagreb is not in the Balkans, the Balkans are south of the Sava. He than thought a minute and said “So Zagreb’s airport is in the Balkans, but Zagreb isn’t.” Metternich is supposed to have said: “The Balkans begin at the Rennweg.” More commonly the Viennese aphorism is “The Balkans begin in the third district.” I will take Metternich’s definition. We have … Continue reading Croatia
St. Stephens Basilica is the main church on the Pest side of the river. It is a great venue for organ recitals. Continue reading Saint Stephen’s Basilica, Budapest
August 20, 2000 Budapest, Hungary Dear Friends, One thousand years ago today Hungary was established when King Stephen was granted the crown by Pope Sylvester. Today there’s a party going on. One week ago Suzi and I were sitting on the beach at Milocar in Montenegro, with no idea we would be here. Since then I’ve been in Bosnia, Croatia, and Italy. Today Suzi goes back to Podgorica while tomorrow I go to Bosnia, Austria and Romania. Don’t ask. At the end of the week I was feeling pretty punk. When I got back from a meeting with an ambassador … Continue reading 1000 years of Hungary
These are paragraphs from a 2003 letter: In Hungary the Internationale is best represented in Szabor (or Statue) park, a collection of Socialist Realism artifacts outside Budapest. While the park is not difficult to get to it’s sometimes difficult to find. I asked the Concierge to mark it on a map. She couldn’t find it and wondered why it was not in the center of town. I said; “Well, I don’t suppose you would put it in the middle of Hero’s Square,” which is where some of the original work really did sit. She laughed. Finding the road is not … Continue reading Szabor (Statue) Park, Budapest
This is an excerpt from a 2003 letter. Budapest has always been a “comfort city.” The first place hit after our first sojourn in Albania was Budapest and it seemed like Disneyland, even though it was only four years out of Communism itself. We had water, we had heat. We put them together and had long hot showers. During Milosevic it is the place we went to for refuge when things got too hot in Montenegro. We maintained a flat here for four months, and that was a comfort. But the food was the real part of the comfort. The … Continue reading Budapest
Suzi and I had a flat in Budapest for, perhaps, 100 days in 2000. We had a flat there because that is where USAID was coordinating aid to Serbian independent media and civil society during the election that unseated Milosevic. I spent only 22 nights in that flat, Suzi a few more. During that time I was using Budapest airport to travel between Kosovo, Montenegro, Romania, Bosnia and who knows where else. Suzi was traveling too. At several points one of us arranged to get to the airport early because that was the best way for us to see each … Continue reading Hungary
This is from a May 2004 lettet. Suzi was not sure she wanted to go back to Sarajevo. We had been there before the war and had pleasant memories. I’ve been back since but Suzi has not. It didn’t help that two weeks ago a woman we both know who had been in Sarajevo before the war and who recently went back says she cried for three days. But I had been to Sarajevo several times in 2000. Things were not so bad. The war in Bosnia has been over almost nine years. You can tell there has been a … Continue reading Sarajevo, BiH
Suzi and I first visited Sarajevo in 1972. Suzi found some old faded photos that she scanned for this page. At the time it seemed like the most exotic place we had ever been. We still have the Turkish coffee set we bought from that tinsmith. Continue reading Sarajevo 1972