I have been sadly remiss in my updates....and then the more time passes, the easier it is to put it off. Well, as they say here: Na ja. (This makes a change of pace from my usual "oh well.")
Toward the end of October we had our first visitors in Dresden: Pablo's parents. They bought their tickets to come visit us before we had even bought ours to get over here! :-) We met up with them in Prague and went from there to Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, and then went to Budapest instead of our plan to visit Poland. We had an amazing week with them and all 3 cities were well worth the visit. I think I was most impressed with Budapest, but in part that was because I hadn't looked at any information about the city prior to our arrival, and therefore, everything was an unexpected pleasure. The Parliament building and the Fisherman's Bastion were just amazing and in pristine condition. I'll post pictures once I get them off the camera... I think my favorite thing in Prague was going into St. Vitus' cathedral. I've never seen such beautiful stained glass windows, and I've dragged my family into a lot of cathedrals! We weren't able to enter the Church of St. Elisabeth in Bratislava, but I, of course, made sure we all appropriately admired it. Fortunately for the rest of the family, it was actually worth the walk to see it - it's all blue and art deco style.
It's been pretty amazing touring about the old Eastern bloc. One restaurant in Prague offered several Czech specialties and one entitled "Specialty from the 25 years of unpleasantness". In Budapest we took one of the bus tours and quite a bit of the taped information related to the years under Soviet domination. Several of the buildings there have intentionally been left with bullet holes from WWII and the 1956 uprising.
We also made our way up to Berlin to visit an old friend of mine. I was in Berlin in the spring of 1989 and after crossing over to the eastern side and seeing the incredibly stark contrast between East & West, I couldn't imagine how the wall would ever come down and the two sides ever reunited. Just goes to show that I clearly lack imagination. East Berlin is completely transformed and we needed the line on the map to see what section used to be east. It's quite something to see the remnants of the wall that are memorialized here and there. They also have some impressive museum/memorials to the time of the Nazis and the Holocaust. We haven't been to visit a concentration camp, but we did step inside an old boxcar that had been used to transport Jews during the war. Horrible, but it's better to remember than to forget what atrocities we humans are capable of. Vicente and Miguel are certainly getting a hands on education in differing political systems.
