Sat 30.Jun.2018
IT, CZ, and SK
It has been almost two months since I've posted one of these.
Here is a scattershot page of places from those weeks. More pages
will be coming, now that I have settled in to one place for a while.
Southern Italy
If you watch game shows, you know that Italy consists of three places.
"Congratulations, you've won a trip to Italy! Rome, Florence, and Venice!"
First-timers can be forgiven for concentrating on the names they have heard
of. I did it myself.
It hit me this year that I have only once been south of Rome - a few days in
a lovely tourist favorite called Sorrento. Surely there is more down that way?
Maratea, Basilicata
A chance photo on Facebook, of Matera, Basilicata looked neat.
Never having been there, I confused Matera with Maratea, and ended up
by blind luck in a laid-back cluster of mountainside villages on a
sparsely-populated stretch of Italian coast.
Matera will have to wait.
Maratea is getting undeservedly short shrift on today's page, with a measly
two pictures. We'll see more of it later if I don't get distracted.
The Amalfi Coast
In Italian, "La Divina Costiera"! Deservedly so.
I based myself in the convenient city of Salerno for day trips by boat to
the unbelievably
picturesque little towns that hang along the cliffs here. The easy to reach ones,
like Amalfi and Positano, are charming despite being up to their nalgas in well...
people like me. A twenty-minute walk from Amalfi brings you to its more relaxed
neighbor Atrani.
Positano
Prague, Czechia
After a month of Italy, flying to Prague is a pretty abrupt change, but not at
all unpleasant. I don't remember why I found myself in the main train station
my first day there, but I love the old main hall. Inn'it purty?
My two different digs in Prague both had me on the fifth floor! (Sixth by
American counting - you know how this works.)
This made them the second and
third of four consecutive fifth-floor lodgings for me. I'll confess I used the
elevators a lot, especially going up. (For exercise, I usually use the stairs
for anything up through third floor.)
I deliberately went looking for this air shaft from a cold-war-era bomb
shelter, in a park between the neighborhoods of Vinohrady and Nusle.
Cute!
A grand old hotel on Wenceslas Square.
The main Prague synagogue. A dazzligly artistic building.
Bratislava, Slovakia
After a few days of temporary lodgings, I am settling back in to my
regular apartment here.
Happily, these slugs have returned to the little plaza near my apartment!
I do not know why they were gone last year. I missed them. Do slugs
migrate?
Main Square on a hot day.
Vienna, Austria
A day trip from Bratislava, on the excuse of stocking up on blood sugar test
strips and alcohol wipes, both of which are harder to get in Bratislava.
As if I'd need an excuse to visit Vienna!
Bratislava's Apollo Bridge, still in its familiar place.
That is more than I can say of Bratislava's main bus station. The return bus
to Bratislava from Vienna caught me by surprise. First, it failed to stop
at the New Bridge, where I intended to get off. Well OK, I know my way
home from the main bus station.
Lo and behold, said bus station had changed
completely inside! And outside, I could not orient myself at all!
Long story short, the city has a new temporary bus station, about
a half-km from where the old one was. The station I thought I was in is already
a bi-ig hole in the ground, with construction going on all around. An office tower
is going up. The big hole will be filled with a monster shopping mall,
with a shiny new bus station included!
Thank goodness I found articles in English
about all this. And, in the process of googling, I found that a local paper has an
English-language edition!