chrischeung
04-18-2007, 08:10 AM
OK, I have finally gotten around to posting my pics on the web from our recent ED to Salzburg, Vienna, Berlin and Prague. You can find them located here: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=vwy5l61.aanlvbe5&x=0&y=emsiiq
My wife and I both added the captions, so please excuse the inconsistency in them. The photos tell the story, but if you want more details, read on…
<B>High and Lowlights</B>
Most interesting city: Berlin
Best restaurants tried: Wirsthaus zur Brezn, Munich; Hotel Restaurant zur Post, Melk (honorable mention); The chinese restaurant, Hohenau an der March (honorable mention)
Most overrated restaurant: Café Demel, Vienna. We had good cake and strudel, but were expecting overwhelming excellence
Best museum: Pergamon, Berlin
Best church: Melk Abbey, Melk
Most romantic moment: Prague castle at about 10pm, walking down to Charles Bridge.
Most interesting moment: Having to go to Hohenau an der March in Austria.
Worst hotel moment: None of the hotels have large flat screen TVs. But there is nothing to watch anyway. I think I get it – the attraction of Europe is not on TV.
Sights seen, but would miss if given the chance again: Prater Park, Vienna.
<B>Writeup</B>
This is our third ED, so we don’t have that many pics of the car or delivery center. Others also cover this well. Here follows a quick summary of our trip. I have also posted additional threads about tips and tricks, as well as some parking ideas.
<B>Day 1, 2:</B> Depart SFO in the evening, arriving Munich following night. We check in to the Marriott, and have dinner at Wirsthaus zur Brezn. They serve an excellent meal as always. Since my wife is pregnant, she forgoes the beer, and instead has non-alcoholic beer. I suggest you give that a miss. Diet Coke gives a better representation of Coke, if that’s a comparison.
<B>Day 3:</B> I wake up at about 4.30am due to jetlag. I take a swim in the pool at about 5.30am, which feels great. We buffet breakfast at the hotel, and head to the ED center. We request express service, get our lunch to go, and are on the road after about 45 minutes. At MADA, the website for booking is down, so Thomas has to manually type the paperwork. He makes a few mistakes, which I point out. My car made the boat, so I guess its fine. I can’t remember the last time I used a typewriter. Driving down to Salzburg, I hit about 120mph on the autobahn. I was passed whilst doing over 100mph by a VW combi business van – sobering feeling. I begin to miss the power of the 530i and gear selectability of the SMG. Arriving in Salzburg, I’m too late for the salt mine tour that I was trying to make, so I join my wife on the Sound of Music tour. We’ve been to Salzburg before, we’re a little tired, she’s pregnant, so the tour is a great choice for the afternoon. We stay at the Renaissance Salzburg.
<B>Day 4:</B> We take breakfast in the hotel (warning – they didn’t have capers for the smoked salmon!) and depart for Vienna. Most people drive about 80-90mph in the unmarked areas, which I believe are supposed to be limited at 72mph. We stop by Schonbrunn Palace, take the tour (no lines), and quickly visit the grounds. I would have liked to have spent more time on the grounds, perhaps on a bike, but my wife was getting tired. We check into the Renaissance Wien, she went to rest in the room, and I went to park the car at the P+R in Leising. After a short rest for me at the hotel, we head out at about 6.30pm, arrive at the Opera, and purchase some standing room tickets. Great value at E2.50 apiece. Since we are not Opera fans (they were performing Arabella in German), we stay for about 45 minutes, then head out for a late dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant. We stroll the Kartner area after that.
<B>Day 5:</B> If there is a tagline to describe Vienna, I would say it is the City of Arts. Exhibitions, concerts etc. are broadly promoted everywhere, not just to the tourists, and you see people carrying musical instruments on the metro. I look forward to bringing my kids back here to instill a little artistic culture into them. We ride the ring tram (No. 1 or 2), and visit the Treasury museum. Well worth it. After lunch, my wife and I split – she takes the Sisi museum, and I take the Armor, sculptures and musical instrument museum. No crowds for me, and the museum was average. My wife loved the Sisi, but there were some crowds to contend with. We meet back at the hotel, she decides to call it a night, and I head out to see Prater Park. Recalling scenes from the 007 movie “The Living Daylights”, I was expecting a well lit, loud, bustling place. It was the exact opposite. The rides were outdated, the place was almost vacant, other than for tourists from a bus, and there was no one on the Ferris Wheel. The wheel was also expensive at E8 per person. Being by myself, I gave it a miss. Perhaps it was the late time, around 9.30pm, the time of season, and being a weeknight? I then went out to the Nussdorfer Strasse area, which is also supposed to be hip. It was a little dead due to the time of week, I was a little old, not an English speaker, so it wasn’t exactly my scene. If I was young, single, and with a friend, it would be a nice place to have a drink and meet other folks. Plenty of bars to choose from.
<B>Day 6:</B> After breakfast, it started sprinkling, we borrowed an umbrella but didn’t need it. We went to the Opera, and walked up to St Stephens, and down Graben a little. Its cold and my wife purchased a pashmina scarf for E10. There still are bargains in Europe, but honestly, its probably not worth the effort to shop in Europe for the things you can get back home, even if they are a little cheaper. However, if you don’t think you will need something, don’t bring it – you can always buy it in Europe. We head back to the hotel, check out, and take our bags on the S-bahn to the P+R in Leising, and depart for Munich. I put in about E35 of gas in Vienna – its 30% cheaper than Munich. We stop at Melk, buy tickets for the 2pm tour of the Abbey, and have lunch in the town. Hotel Restaurant zur Post has a great set lunch, and my wife enjoyed her vegetarian dish. Melk Abbey is a must see if you are anywhere near Vienna. We head to Munich via Passau, pass the Flughafen, check our bags in, and drop the car off at MADA. I took the Passau route rather than the one through Salzburg, since this is what Mapquest recommended, I wanted to avoid any rush hour traffic, I wanted to check in first, and had never driven that route. It seems like the Salzburg route roads were better maintained, and seemed to flow at a higher speed - less trucking traffic as well. Whilst I’m dropping the car, she picks up some chocolates at Aldi. We bus and S-bahn it back to the airport for our flight to Berlin. We check into the Berlin Marriott at about 11.30pm. They know us by name. How many other Asians can there be checking in at that hour?
<B>Day 7:</B> This is the best Marriott we have ever stayed in. The lounge buffet breakfast is excellent, and there are a few computers with free high speed internet access. My wife takes the morning off for a rest, and I walk over to the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag. I return to the hotel, and we both walk over to the Reichstag. Using the handicapped access cuts out about an hour’s wait (I advise visiting early in the morning or late at night if you want to avoid waiting), and we have a magnificent view of Berlin from the dome. Berlin is an extremely interesting city, much more so than Munich. Munich has its attractions, but seems more homogeneous than Berlin. The history of the city, East/West, reunification, and re-development, seems to have energized the city. The most interesting parts are seeing the new construction (Unter den Linden, Friederichstrasse), and venturing into the East. At the Bugatti showroom, here is a Bugatti Veyron on display at Friederichstrasse, sharing floor space with a Bently Continental (VW Group). This really must piss off Bugatti owners - its like a Rolls Royce Phantom sharing floor space with a 328i. We walk down Unter den Linden, have dinner at an excellent pub Deponie3, and call it a night after checking email and web surfing. There are some things you just can’t resisit.
<B>Day 8:</B> Museum day. We ride the buses (route 100 I think), then we hit the Pergamon, which is probably the best museum for Islamic and Middle Eastern art. My wife likes it a lot better than the National museum in London, and the Athenian museums (I haven’t been to either). Its big, but not too big to be overwhelming (like the Louvre), and the exhibits are enormous. You feel as though you are back in time in the setting. We take a tram out to the Prenzlauer Berg area, which is very interesting in itself, wait in line and have excellent curry hotdogs at Knoppke’s Imbiss (in business over 70 years), and excellent Indonesian dinner. The district is sort of a mini Asian food area.
<B>Day 9:</B> We ride the train from Berlin to Prague from the new hauptbahnhof. Dresden looks very scenic out of the train and we make a note to see it the next time we visit the area. On the last leg between Germany and the Czech Republic, the Czech border police on the train question my wife’s travel permits. She holds a Chinese passport, and has a multiple entry Schengen Visa, which gives her rights to transit through CR for 5 days. However, as I wrongly interpreted, this does not mean she can go from Berlin-Prague-Berlin. This is not considered transiting. They allow her entry, on transit privileges, but if she returns to Berlin she is breaking the law and must pay a fine. The options are to continue to Austria, or break the law. We debate the multiple options, the costs, and finally decide that the best thing to do is for her to travel to Austria, and double back to Prague. This is legal. We didn’t know the fine, but didn’t want an immigration issue on her records, for the unlikely event that we want to live in Europe in the future. I get out at Prague at 1.30pm, and she continues to the first Austrian town across the border, Hohenau an der March – its about 3 hours away. I walk around Prague for the afternoon. At Hohenau, my wife gets off the train, the only one to do so, and is quizzed by the policeman who meets every train. He asks her purpose of visiting, she says sightseeing, and the policeman scrutinizes her passport. He then repeats questioning her purpose of visit twice, which she replies similarly. He cannot imagine why anyone would sightsee in Hohenau! Since she has 2 hours until her return train (its actually the same train she got off which returns from Vienna), and walks 1/3 mile into town. The place is small, perhaps about 500-1000 inhabitants, who all basically have no jobs anymore locally since the sugar refinery closed down. They all now commute to Vienna for work. This she learned from stopping at THE Chinese restaurant for dinner. She spoke Chinese with the owner, who proceeded to take the menu away from her (she said it was for locals), and asked her what she wanted to eat. They then proceeded to pick fresh vegetables from their garden and cooked for her an authentic excellent Chinese meal. Meanwhile, my wife is playing with the children, who are bemused to meet someone else who can speak Chinese. The cost – E5 – they said it was an insider’s price. Upon returning to the railway station, she saw the same policeman again, and 2 other officers. They were conversing about her, and she gathered that the previous policeman she’d met told the others that she was crazy, but she was legal, so she wasn’t bothered. She arrived back in Prague at 10.30pm. Word of advice – Prague has 2 main railway stations, and the staff don’t always know, from my experience, which train comes into which. It could also be the language barrier. I did a little station hopping to meet her train.
<B>Day 10:</B> We tour Prague castle, and the old town. Prague is a wonderfully preserved example of European architecture. We didn’t spend enough time there, and look forward to seeing more on a future visit. The service in restaurants is lacking, given its communist roots, but it is extremely cheap (as long as you don’t visit tourist traps), and a wonderful place to get lost in side streets. One interesting thing is that you will pay to enter churches, which is fine by me, if that’s what it takes to maintain them. You can avoid the lines at the main ticket office to Prague castle by finding another ticket office on the grounds – there are a few of them. After a short rest at the hotel (Movenpick at the Andel metro station), we have dinner at an Italian restaurant near the hotel. Surprisingly the food was more American Italian than authentic Italian, the whole meal costing us only US$20, with leftovers. We take the tram up to Prague castle, and walk the solitary grounds (it is well lit), and down to Charles bridge. There are only a handful of folks on the grounds, and it is definitely the most romantic moment of the trip. We walk down to Charles Bridge, cross it into the old town square, and its back to the hotel.
<B>Day 11:</B> We’re up before dawn, leave the hotel at 5.30am, and take the 6.30am train back to Berlin. Returning to Germany, my wife’s visa is scrutinized minutely with a portable eyepiece by the German border police on the train. The visa was expiring that day – the consulate only issues a visa for the time you enter then leave Europe. He then proceeded to ask her about her travel plans. He then wants proof of her travel from Berlin – Munich – San Fran. The e-tickets don’t satisfy him. Finally, the boarding pass stubs from the inbound flights satisfy him. We take the TXL bus from the hauptbahnhoff to the airport, we transfer flights, and are home. About 1.5 hours between each transfer – German efficiency, you can count on it and have to love it.
All in all, a wonderful and relaxing trip, even for my pregnant wife. The proof is that she was more relaxed after taking the trip, than before! Prague, Berlin we would definitely like to see again in the next few years. Vienna we would probably include as part of a stop on an extended itinerary, or wait until our children are older to appreciate as well.
Now to plan the next ED – Rothenburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Koln, Nurgburg…
My wife and I both added the captions, so please excuse the inconsistency in them. The photos tell the story, but if you want more details, read on…
<B>High and Lowlights</B>
Most interesting city: Berlin
Best restaurants tried: Wirsthaus zur Brezn, Munich; Hotel Restaurant zur Post, Melk (honorable mention); The chinese restaurant, Hohenau an der March (honorable mention)
Most overrated restaurant: Café Demel, Vienna. We had good cake and strudel, but were expecting overwhelming excellence
Best museum: Pergamon, Berlin
Best church: Melk Abbey, Melk
Most romantic moment: Prague castle at about 10pm, walking down to Charles Bridge.
Most interesting moment: Having to go to Hohenau an der March in Austria.
Worst hotel moment: None of the hotels have large flat screen TVs. But there is nothing to watch anyway. I think I get it – the attraction of Europe is not on TV.
Sights seen, but would miss if given the chance again: Prater Park, Vienna.
<B>Writeup</B>
This is our third ED, so we don’t have that many pics of the car or delivery center. Others also cover this well. Here follows a quick summary of our trip. I have also posted additional threads about tips and tricks, as well as some parking ideas.
<B>Day 1, 2:</B> Depart SFO in the evening, arriving Munich following night. We check in to the Marriott, and have dinner at Wirsthaus zur Brezn. They serve an excellent meal as always. Since my wife is pregnant, she forgoes the beer, and instead has non-alcoholic beer. I suggest you give that a miss. Diet Coke gives a better representation of Coke, if that’s a comparison.
<B>Day 3:</B> I wake up at about 4.30am due to jetlag. I take a swim in the pool at about 5.30am, which feels great. We buffet breakfast at the hotel, and head to the ED center. We request express service, get our lunch to go, and are on the road after about 45 minutes. At MADA, the website for booking is down, so Thomas has to manually type the paperwork. He makes a few mistakes, which I point out. My car made the boat, so I guess its fine. I can’t remember the last time I used a typewriter. Driving down to Salzburg, I hit about 120mph on the autobahn. I was passed whilst doing over 100mph by a VW combi business van – sobering feeling. I begin to miss the power of the 530i and gear selectability of the SMG. Arriving in Salzburg, I’m too late for the salt mine tour that I was trying to make, so I join my wife on the Sound of Music tour. We’ve been to Salzburg before, we’re a little tired, she’s pregnant, so the tour is a great choice for the afternoon. We stay at the Renaissance Salzburg.
<B>Day 4:</B> We take breakfast in the hotel (warning – they didn’t have capers for the smoked salmon!) and depart for Vienna. Most people drive about 80-90mph in the unmarked areas, which I believe are supposed to be limited at 72mph. We stop by Schonbrunn Palace, take the tour (no lines), and quickly visit the grounds. I would have liked to have spent more time on the grounds, perhaps on a bike, but my wife was getting tired. We check into the Renaissance Wien, she went to rest in the room, and I went to park the car at the P+R in Leising. After a short rest for me at the hotel, we head out at about 6.30pm, arrive at the Opera, and purchase some standing room tickets. Great value at E2.50 apiece. Since we are not Opera fans (they were performing Arabella in German), we stay for about 45 minutes, then head out for a late dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant. We stroll the Kartner area after that.
<B>Day 5:</B> If there is a tagline to describe Vienna, I would say it is the City of Arts. Exhibitions, concerts etc. are broadly promoted everywhere, not just to the tourists, and you see people carrying musical instruments on the metro. I look forward to bringing my kids back here to instill a little artistic culture into them. We ride the ring tram (No. 1 or 2), and visit the Treasury museum. Well worth it. After lunch, my wife and I split – she takes the Sisi museum, and I take the Armor, sculptures and musical instrument museum. No crowds for me, and the museum was average. My wife loved the Sisi, but there were some crowds to contend with. We meet back at the hotel, she decides to call it a night, and I head out to see Prater Park. Recalling scenes from the 007 movie “The Living Daylights”, I was expecting a well lit, loud, bustling place. It was the exact opposite. The rides were outdated, the place was almost vacant, other than for tourists from a bus, and there was no one on the Ferris Wheel. The wheel was also expensive at E8 per person. Being by myself, I gave it a miss. Perhaps it was the late time, around 9.30pm, the time of season, and being a weeknight? I then went out to the Nussdorfer Strasse area, which is also supposed to be hip. It was a little dead due to the time of week, I was a little old, not an English speaker, so it wasn’t exactly my scene. If I was young, single, and with a friend, it would be a nice place to have a drink and meet other folks. Plenty of bars to choose from.
<B>Day 6:</B> After breakfast, it started sprinkling, we borrowed an umbrella but didn’t need it. We went to the Opera, and walked up to St Stephens, and down Graben a little. Its cold and my wife purchased a pashmina scarf for E10. There still are bargains in Europe, but honestly, its probably not worth the effort to shop in Europe for the things you can get back home, even if they are a little cheaper. However, if you don’t think you will need something, don’t bring it – you can always buy it in Europe. We head back to the hotel, check out, and take our bags on the S-bahn to the P+R in Leising, and depart for Munich. I put in about E35 of gas in Vienna – its 30% cheaper than Munich. We stop at Melk, buy tickets for the 2pm tour of the Abbey, and have lunch in the town. Hotel Restaurant zur Post has a great set lunch, and my wife enjoyed her vegetarian dish. Melk Abbey is a must see if you are anywhere near Vienna. We head to Munich via Passau, pass the Flughafen, check our bags in, and drop the car off at MADA. I took the Passau route rather than the one through Salzburg, since this is what Mapquest recommended, I wanted to avoid any rush hour traffic, I wanted to check in first, and had never driven that route. It seems like the Salzburg route roads were better maintained, and seemed to flow at a higher speed - less trucking traffic as well. Whilst I’m dropping the car, she picks up some chocolates at Aldi. We bus and S-bahn it back to the airport for our flight to Berlin. We check into the Berlin Marriott at about 11.30pm. They know us by name. How many other Asians can there be checking in at that hour?
<B>Day 7:</B> This is the best Marriott we have ever stayed in. The lounge buffet breakfast is excellent, and there are a few computers with free high speed internet access. My wife takes the morning off for a rest, and I walk over to the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag. I return to the hotel, and we both walk over to the Reichstag. Using the handicapped access cuts out about an hour’s wait (I advise visiting early in the morning or late at night if you want to avoid waiting), and we have a magnificent view of Berlin from the dome. Berlin is an extremely interesting city, much more so than Munich. Munich has its attractions, but seems more homogeneous than Berlin. The history of the city, East/West, reunification, and re-development, seems to have energized the city. The most interesting parts are seeing the new construction (Unter den Linden, Friederichstrasse), and venturing into the East. At the Bugatti showroom, here is a Bugatti Veyron on display at Friederichstrasse, sharing floor space with a Bently Continental (VW Group). This really must piss off Bugatti owners - its like a Rolls Royce Phantom sharing floor space with a 328i. We walk down Unter den Linden, have dinner at an excellent pub Deponie3, and call it a night after checking email and web surfing. There are some things you just can’t resisit.
<B>Day 8:</B> Museum day. We ride the buses (route 100 I think), then we hit the Pergamon, which is probably the best museum for Islamic and Middle Eastern art. My wife likes it a lot better than the National museum in London, and the Athenian museums (I haven’t been to either). Its big, but not too big to be overwhelming (like the Louvre), and the exhibits are enormous. You feel as though you are back in time in the setting. We take a tram out to the Prenzlauer Berg area, which is very interesting in itself, wait in line and have excellent curry hotdogs at Knoppke’s Imbiss (in business over 70 years), and excellent Indonesian dinner. The district is sort of a mini Asian food area.
<B>Day 9:</B> We ride the train from Berlin to Prague from the new hauptbahnhof. Dresden looks very scenic out of the train and we make a note to see it the next time we visit the area. On the last leg between Germany and the Czech Republic, the Czech border police on the train question my wife’s travel permits. She holds a Chinese passport, and has a multiple entry Schengen Visa, which gives her rights to transit through CR for 5 days. However, as I wrongly interpreted, this does not mean she can go from Berlin-Prague-Berlin. This is not considered transiting. They allow her entry, on transit privileges, but if she returns to Berlin she is breaking the law and must pay a fine. The options are to continue to Austria, or break the law. We debate the multiple options, the costs, and finally decide that the best thing to do is for her to travel to Austria, and double back to Prague. This is legal. We didn’t know the fine, but didn’t want an immigration issue on her records, for the unlikely event that we want to live in Europe in the future. I get out at Prague at 1.30pm, and she continues to the first Austrian town across the border, Hohenau an der March – its about 3 hours away. I walk around Prague for the afternoon. At Hohenau, my wife gets off the train, the only one to do so, and is quizzed by the policeman who meets every train. He asks her purpose of visiting, she says sightseeing, and the policeman scrutinizes her passport. He then repeats questioning her purpose of visit twice, which she replies similarly. He cannot imagine why anyone would sightsee in Hohenau! Since she has 2 hours until her return train (its actually the same train she got off which returns from Vienna), and walks 1/3 mile into town. The place is small, perhaps about 500-1000 inhabitants, who all basically have no jobs anymore locally since the sugar refinery closed down. They all now commute to Vienna for work. This she learned from stopping at THE Chinese restaurant for dinner. She spoke Chinese with the owner, who proceeded to take the menu away from her (she said it was for locals), and asked her what she wanted to eat. They then proceeded to pick fresh vegetables from their garden and cooked for her an authentic excellent Chinese meal. Meanwhile, my wife is playing with the children, who are bemused to meet someone else who can speak Chinese. The cost – E5 – they said it was an insider’s price. Upon returning to the railway station, she saw the same policeman again, and 2 other officers. They were conversing about her, and she gathered that the previous policeman she’d met told the others that she was crazy, but she was legal, so she wasn’t bothered. She arrived back in Prague at 10.30pm. Word of advice – Prague has 2 main railway stations, and the staff don’t always know, from my experience, which train comes into which. It could also be the language barrier. I did a little station hopping to meet her train.
<B>Day 10:</B> We tour Prague castle, and the old town. Prague is a wonderfully preserved example of European architecture. We didn’t spend enough time there, and look forward to seeing more on a future visit. The service in restaurants is lacking, given its communist roots, but it is extremely cheap (as long as you don’t visit tourist traps), and a wonderful place to get lost in side streets. One interesting thing is that you will pay to enter churches, which is fine by me, if that’s what it takes to maintain them. You can avoid the lines at the main ticket office to Prague castle by finding another ticket office on the grounds – there are a few of them. After a short rest at the hotel (Movenpick at the Andel metro station), we have dinner at an Italian restaurant near the hotel. Surprisingly the food was more American Italian than authentic Italian, the whole meal costing us only US$20, with leftovers. We take the tram up to Prague castle, and walk the solitary grounds (it is well lit), and down to Charles bridge. There are only a handful of folks on the grounds, and it is definitely the most romantic moment of the trip. We walk down to Charles Bridge, cross it into the old town square, and its back to the hotel.
<B>Day 11:</B> We’re up before dawn, leave the hotel at 5.30am, and take the 6.30am train back to Berlin. Returning to Germany, my wife’s visa is scrutinized minutely with a portable eyepiece by the German border police on the train. The visa was expiring that day – the consulate only issues a visa for the time you enter then leave Europe. He then proceeded to ask her about her travel plans. He then wants proof of her travel from Berlin – Munich – San Fran. The e-tickets don’t satisfy him. Finally, the boarding pass stubs from the inbound flights satisfy him. We take the TXL bus from the hauptbahnhoff to the airport, we transfer flights, and are home. About 1.5 hours between each transfer – German efficiency, you can count on it and have to love it.
All in all, a wonderful and relaxing trip, even for my pregnant wife. The proof is that she was more relaxed after taking the trip, than before! Prague, Berlin we would definitely like to see again in the next few years. Vienna we would probably include as part of a stop on an extended itinerary, or wait until our children are older to appreciate as well.
Now to plan the next ED – Rothenburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Koln, Nurgburg…
