From Vienna to Prague

Day 8:
A long bus ride from Vienna to Prague. There are places to stop in between for lunch and breakfast.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant at a place called Melikana about an hour before reaching Prague.
It's a buffet style lunch with lots of buses arriving simultaneously making it a run around carrying platters. Food is OK. Coffee too but not as good as in Budapest. There are charging stations for smart phones and ATMS. They accept Euros or Czech currency. They have only pay toilets, better take Euros or Korunas.

We reached Prague late in the evening and had our group dinner at our hotel. Later went out without tour director who showed us how to work the Metro. The nearest Metro to our Hotel was Andel. You come across many shopping areas before you get to the metro, a 10 minutes’ walk. Metro is quite clean and Czech people value their assets, no defacing of the walls etc.

We walked around the old town and had the first look at the Astronomical Clock...

Here are some pictures of the day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtIyGsg-pDU

Visit to Český Krumlov near Prague

Český Krumlov is on the World Heritage list 1992. It is very beautiful with the castle, the monastery, and the gardens. A place you must visit if you are anywhere near Prague or Salzburg. Its early owners were Germans later acquired by Czechs.

You must see to believe how beautiful it is and the next best thing is to see its pictures on the Internet.

This one is a slide show of pictures taken with iPhone 6S and Lumia 950.

Andel and Mustek in Prague

There is a nice shopping center in Andel and many good eating places. Andel is well connected with many of the other places by Prague Metro which is clean and well run.

Mustek is part of Prague which has many churches, places of interest and other attractions. It has a lot of open air restaurants and side walk cafes. It is also a partying place. Foreign tourists crowd here to quench their thirst and hunger.

This is where we found the crystal and glassware vendor, Moser. Moser has two shops in Mustek.

Moser Glass Na Prikope 12, Old Town, Prague 1, Czech Republic

Tel: +420 224 211 293

Visit to Prague castle

Prague is a historic place with lots of church spires and Baroque architecture; a city cut in two by the Vltava river. Charles Bridge connects the two halves, the old town and the new. It is a truly beautiful city with ancient churches and history dating back to the Roman Empire. We had an optional tour to visit, a walking tour of Jewish Quarters. We missed it as we wanted to see more of the city.

Tour of Munich, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Salzburg - 6

Day 8
You may get to a place fast if you fly (in most cases), but traveling by bus is a great option as you can see the changing landscape, the rivers and valleys, the people and their costumes, etc. We traveled by bus and the ride was long but it was worthwhile. Our tour director took us out to introduce the city of Prague and show how to work the Metro. We stayed at the NH Prague Hotel near the metro station ANDEL (about 500 meters away).

One of the things that happens when you cross country boundaries is the currency related issues. At this point both Germany and Czech Republic accepted Euros but some of the Prague businesses used strictly Korunas [Czech crown (koruna), abbreviated as Kč, with the international abbreviation CZK].  Our tour director advised us to change as little as possible to Korunas as its usability in other European cities was limited.

I saw a number of shops selling alcohol and liqueurs and strangely Absinthe appears to be a popular drink as I saw a large number of shops displaying absinthe prominently.

Here is a video of our bus travel from Vienna to Prague, the Day 8 our tour.

Tour of Munich, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Salzburg - 1

Living in Honolulu, Hawaii, it is not easy to think about going to Europe. However, as we go even eastward to India, sometimes, it does not feel too tough to go to Europe. In order to visit Budapest, we had to go via San Francisco, Newark, and Munich.

We took off from Honolulu at 10:55 after our son, daughter-in-law and their dog Oliver dropped us at the airport, a mere 20 minutes from where we live. We reached San Francisco the morning of June 16 at 9:00 AM just in time for a breakfast at airport.

We hung around in the airport as our flight was in the evening at 8:00 PM. It was quite a wait. It so happened that our flight from San Francisco was delayed more than 2 hours and we barely made it to Newark. Newark airport has changed a lot with lots of new construction. We barely caught the shuttle to the departure terminal. We reached Munich somewhat late (around 11:00 AM) on June 17. The arrival/departure gates are such that it takes effort to board the plane as you need to change the terminal using the shuttle. We literally ran like crazy to board the shuttle. The escalators at Munich Airport are really steep and run fast like at other airports/subways in Europe compared to those in USA.

Again we hustled to board the plane from Munich to Budapest where our tour begins. We reached Budapest a little after mid-day and to our chagrin the suitcases did not accompany. We had to do some paper work and the girls at the Lufthansa kiosk attending the lost baggage were very efficient. Good show!

We were met by our tour director, a very friendly and outgoing guy. He seems to have had lots of experience as tour director in Europe as well as North America. He was presently living in Salzburg, Austria. He spoke fluent German and English but I am not sure how well he spoke Hungarian (a tough nut) and Czech. He being originally Czech, I am sure he spoke Czech like any other native.

We were going to stay (for the following three nights) at the Radisson Beke in Budapest and after check-in we attended the tour orientation for a short while with a glass of champagne and had dinner at the hotel. I assume either the food was good or folks were hungry, I could not tell. Being vegetarian it is not my place to make a comment. I did observe though that the waiters appeared to have been preoccupied. I later found that the Europeans were playing football and surely they had the game on their mind.

  Although we were dog tired, decided to take a short walk and followed some of our tour buddies.

The photos we took are in the video hosted on google docs slides.
Partially filled slide pictures were taken with iPhone 6S and the full screen pictures using Microsoft Lumia 950.

It is also on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecouB7XcjIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecouB7XcjIw