Located on the Danube – Slovakia is otherwise a landlocked country in Central Europe. (and if I had figured out that there was a map on wall in the main lounge, well, it wold have been the starting photo each day. Sorry about that. Sort of.

The history of the country and the capital is long and involved – the “young” economist who first provided a lecture then escorted us on a walking tour had a sense of humor while communicating the often challenging and tragic history of the country. When you are small and less populated that the countries around you – well let us just say that you can wake up one morning and find that rulers in far distant lands made decisions about your future without ever stepping foot in the county. As always – here is the Wiki link for Slovakia and also one for Bratislava.

The city in early morning.

and one of three major bridges. The “oldest bridge” which has under gone rebuilding and renaming now multiple times over the centuries is now actually the newest bridge. I am sparing you the picture of steel architecture covered with green paint.

then there is what we are all calling the UFO bridge.

which should be obvious.

All the rest of my photos are on my camera. The one with the older connector (mini not micro) so downloading photos will have to wait.

I added a few more stitches to Leo Rising.

Today was a two-fer, if you don’t mind the expression.

I was really brave (yeh, right) and headed out with all the others this morning to board the bus. 

First up was the Stift Melk, complete with tour guide.

(blog hint -if you click on the picture – you will get a larger pix and see both the Stift and the docking location for the river ships)

Practically speaking, the bus, because it is restricted to roads, took 15+ minutes to toodle up and around before arriving at the designated parking lot. We were dropped off with the announcement that the way back to the ship was our choice: come back here after the tour and board any shuttle with the correct sign in the windshield or head down through town and walk back.

After a significant wait, we were escorted through the Monastery/Museum. All the exhibit rooms were dark to protect the paintings and objects d’art. Along with really clear signs banning cameras, movie cameras, and phones taking photos. I think they were serious which means that the only internal photos I have are of the long, long corridors –

Our guide was good, clear, and knowledgeable. I certainly will give him that. But the rooms were crowded. Perhaps a quarter of our tour kept their masks on in spite of being told it was a good idea. Certainly no one in any other group was bothering. Of note – yesterday’s Austrian numbers were 40k active cases. The trend is down, but still…

Ok…. I don’t remember being here before. , but George has clear memories of herding kids along the foot path. Same as we took back to the ship. 

Lunch was meh – pretty but..

the two rolled pastry shells were stuffed with spinach. Service was a bit slow and it would have been nice to have had a hot lunch. 

I stayed on the ship for the afternoon, stitching and listening to a book. It just seemed like a better idea than chancing the rain. 

Tomorrow is Vienna.

Here in Prague apparently one calls them “towns” rather than quarters – so that there is Old Town, New Town (1400s), Jewish Town etc. At some point the latter became a classical Ghetto complete with walls, a gate, and a large key to lock the populous in at night.

Starting at 0900 this morning, there were seven of us (split between the Alumni groups and the Smithsonian group) who accompanied the local Czech Historian who served as our guide. Up front, his knowledge about European history, Czech history, and Church history was excellent. His knowledge of Judaism obviously came from books and some of his reference material wasn’t completely accurate. Just saying.

I have few photos – my camera is choosing at the moment not to communicate with my computer and I am too tired to deal with it. Something about running out of energy at the end of the day followed by waking at 0300.

Where was I? Oh, yes – four synagogues, ?or was it five? plus the cemetery. I will send you links once I sort out the photos.

What I can offer is also the most well known of clocks – the Prague Astronomical Clock (dating from 1410) which we saw right at 1700. The skeleton rings a bell and apparently those are apostles who rotate behind the upper closed windows. It really is most fascinating. I have the Nautilus Puzzle which actually provides an amazingly detailed look at the upper face.  The writing is obviously not visible from partway across the square.

The city- what I will call – logo –

Of three towers can be found on just about every large lamp post and a lot of other city property.

A bit more progress on Leshy

There are times when what seems like a more expensive alternative proves to be the most cost effective. Let me explain – George had booked an early flight to Prague this morning. Early meaning 0825. Now, that doesn’t seem all that early to someone who has flown out of OAK at 0630 or SFO at a similar time. But both of those trips involved being dropped at the airport by a family member or being able to take a Lyft to the airport as BART doesn’t run early enough to safely make those flights.

Heidelberg is an hour south of the Frankfurt Airport on a good day whether traveling via train or car. If we had attempted to take the 0530 shuttle bus (and nothing had gone wrong) it would have left us with less than two hours to navigate a particularly large and complex airport in order to catch our flight. If anything had gone wrong? Well, cheap flights can only be re-booked so many times…. And based on our extremely recent train experience, I wasn’t willing to attempt that either. Having to be up and about at 0330 in the morning sort of takes away any advantage to the cheaper hotel now doesn’t it?

Anyway, there we were, staying at the Hilton Garden Inn. Lovely, clean and shiny and part of the long distance train complex. It was a matter of just a few minutes to head down to the main concourse, across the overpass to Terminal A and get checked in. Cheap flights don’t include checked bags, even with significant airline status – so lesson learned on that one. In most circumstances, gate-check is fine but when they contain sharp & pointy objects? Not so much.

The security lines were horrible, worse than any US airport I have had the misfortune to experience in the last decade or so. It wasn’t that the lines didn’t move; this is Germany – they are organized, efficient and have serious upgraded technology. But when you have incredible levels of passenger flow, even the best system deliver enough bins to waiting passengers. Funny to think of bins as slowing everything down – but when you want everything placed in a bin – and electronics separate from suitcases, purses, carry-ons, and clothing it means that the average person uses at least three….

So, even staying within a 15 minutes walk and leaving the hotel early, there was still less than an hour before boarding time when we managed to find each other after security and head into the lounge for some much needed coffee.

The flight itself was only 45 minutes once we finally took off. It was interesting that, inspire of being a full flight, there was less in the overhead bins than on the average Southwest Airlines flight. Germans and Czechs actually take advantage of “check bags for free” offers. Go figure!

Bags picked up, we headed out of the terminal, picked up a taxi and headed to the hotel. Also discovered that the Czech Republic doesn’t use the Euro… which is something that I should have known/checked/figured out… We are staying at the Hotel Cosmopolitan right near the river. (Here is the link just in case you were interested. It is lovely and they were able to let us check in early which was much appreciated. Apparently not needing a room with two beds made the difference (? reservations made by the travel agency based on us having different last names?).

George went for a walk in the afternoon, I took a walk and stitched for a while. There are only 31 people total in the travel group including the river cruise (on a ship which probably accommodates ~ 150 if our past experiences are any indication). The travelers are from several alumni organizations and a Smithsonian tour. There are only two others, from the LA area, who booked through CAL).

So at the end of the day, we are in Prague. The hotel is great; there might just be some interesting people in the group. The lecturer furnished through the Smithsonian is actually from The Economist currently working out of Italy and the two “tour guides” are from Ireland and Bulgaria respectively.

Today was our chance to walk around the Aldstädt, visit a few friends, and otherwise relax. Completely ignoring how wiped out I was from the time zone changes, it was a lovely day.

We had lunch with a friend who had children in the same kindergarten as ours back in the 1993-1995 time frame. I met with a long standing friend from my knitting group (10+ years ago) and passed along some spinning fiber along with a couple of skeins of yarn. Walked around the city, occasionally looking up.

(sorry, for whatever reason photos are not loading to the server at the present).

George had a lovely evening with his Stamtisch – a group of mostly dads who started meeting when the kids were in kindergarten. A few have been lost over the years (we are all getting older) and there have been additions.

I packed up those things which need to go out in DHL in the morning, watched the UCSF Medicine Grand Rounds and crashed.

Why United Airlines uses this particular name for its Business Class lounge is beyond me. Have I commented on this before? It would have been a long time ago, perhaps several years given COVID and all of that.

Anyway – Polaris is a snowmobile, or the company that makes them, along with motorcycles, ATVs, and
“neighborhood electric vehicles,” Do you suppose that last one means garden mobiles and golf carts? The name was first tacked on to a particular star in the northern hemisphere constellation of Ursa Minor (bear here) and can be referred to as the North Star or Northern Pole Star.

What this has to do with United Airlines which isn’t base North, has nothing to do with being a shining star and doesn’t run extremely strong A/C is beyond me. But anyway – the Lounge here at SFO is the Polaris Lounge.

It has power points, reasonably comfortable chairs, food, drink, restrooms, and the other amenities one would expect. Besides United, it serves the other members of the Star Alliance (perhaps a source of the name) here at SFO.  We (George & I) are hanging out here because we arrived at the airport a reasonable amount of time prior to our flight’s scheduled departure. Said departure being delayed almost two hours which we think is related to a delayed arrival time from Frankfurt. Guess is based on George getting an SMS at 0300 or so in the morning which would line up with 9 hours time change and a delayed take off.

In any case, the plane looks to be a 747 and we are seated in the upper deck. Ought to be interesting. I figured out what to pack, finished organizing this morning and need to download a couple more audiobooks for the flight, just so I have a choice….

Today California – tomorrow Germany….

It isn’t just the tree line is low, there was still snow clearly visible on the mountain peaks.

This is typical of  what I saw most off the port side for most of this morning’s cruise to Juneau.

Capitals

Often the capital of one of the US states is neither the largest nor the most impressive city in the state. Take, for example, Albany – the capital of New York. Closer to home is Sacramento, which is a reasonably sized sprawling city at the norther end of California’s Central Valley. It is not exciting and certainly not LA or San Francisco. Or, for that matter, as interesting as St Paul where I lived for six years. Being, besides the state capital, the poorer and more working class sibling of Minneapolis. No sports teams, no shiny, not fancy but with amazing river views.  Major industries included the St Paul stockyards where the major winter sport was broom-ball.  Back in the day when the county hospital was called Ramsey County Hospital more than one of us learned our suturing skills on the lacerated scalps of more than one totally drunk player. 

Juneau, as the capital of Alaska (Wiki article here) is one of the older cities but certainly not the largest (Fairbanks and Anchorage are both larger). Especially not when you consider that the town’s population can  increase by 6000 or more on a summer day’s when several cruise ship’s dock.  These past two years have been really rough on the economy as a large share of the population makes a living mostly in the summer and off the tourists. 

Douglas Island lies to the west and is bridge connected to Juneau on the mainland via bridge.

It certainly seemed true this afternoon as I wandered through a few stores in town on a very short run off ship. I stopped at the fudge store, the quilt store, the toy store, and a general store. The last had the feeling of a small town store where there were tourist goods, but also a hardware section (hammers, nails, screwdrivers etc), some knitting supplies, sewing supplies, toys.  It is early afternoon, mid-week,  and the shoppers were just about all tourists. And we are the only ship in port and with a  ship’s passenger count below 40%.

I managed to avoid being too much of a tourist as far as the few purchases I made

(except for the small stuffed sea otter)
and was back on the ship long before it stopped raining. I did mention the rain? No?  Well, it was raining which is extremely common except when it is a bit colder, then it snows. We were lucky today, the temperature stayed over 5*C… Talking to a few people who went to the Mendenhall Glacier – they didn’t see much due to low hanging clouds…

and then there is Death before Decaf…

which is now at 70%