Further East

News No 2 

We spent 4 nights/3days in Prague.  It is, as those that know know, and as we had been told, a beautiful city.  All very walkable, and we did walk it – about 9 miles each day (measured, not guessed). 

These are some of the sights [apologies to those who have seen it for themselves] 

Wenceslas Square

 You may remember Jan Palach?

The Old Town Hall clock

The Railway Station – not bad just to catch a train!  We took the wrong tunnel on the way out and realised just what a huge station there is at Prague – this is just 5% - the old part

This wall was outside the French Embassy. 

Back in the Communist era people used to write on it, so the police (regular and others) used of spend a lot of time there trying to stop people.  The French didn’t want to object to the restriction on ‘free speech’, as they knew this would fall on deaf ears, so they complained that they felt their diplomatic freedom was being infringed by the presence of all these officials outside their embassy.  So the authorities decided that, to avoid a diplomatic incident (the truth being spread!), they would allow this one wall to be written on.  

And so it was until 1989, after which it was painted white by the new, free, government.  

If you look carefully you will see that ‘The Wall is over’ is written up, along with images of John Lennon.  This was a take on ‘The War is over’, and was (supposedly?) the first thing written on the newly white painted wall.  But the new government decided to let the Wall continue, and it does to this day – apparently the Wall received its last fresh coat of white paint about 3 months ago – along, no doubt, with the starter slogan and the John Lennon images!

St Vitus Cathedral has some wonderful stained glass windows – good enough to impress us – and we’ve seen a few!

A shopper in ‘Golden Lane’.  These houses were originally for the royal guards, but later became workshops for merchants, including goldsmiths.

Would you run 26 miles 385 yards for a piece of metal and a smile?

After Prague we went on to Kutna Hora, where they have a cathedral with either 3 spires or no spire or tower, depending on your point of view.  Either way, it’s different to anything we’ve seen elsewhere.

 This cathedral also had some exceptional windows:-

 Not only are they beautiful, but the truly exceptional thing is that they are not stained glass, they are painted – something else we had not come across before.

We travelled on to a campsite in South Moravia by an artificial lake.  A very lovely setting at only £7.00 a night including electricity – no wonder we go abroad!  No photos for this one.  Then into Austria for a free night beside the Danube

 and a nocturnal traffic jam of river cruise boats

Into Hungary, and we’ve found another lake to stay by

And this fellow to greet us in the morning!

 We are now at a site in the south of Hungary, ready to cross over into Romania tomorrow.  Like UK, Romania is not in the Schengen Agreement, so we will have to go through passport control at the border. 

This is a campsite like no other we have seen (and we haven’t seen that many!); but it is a better model that the sterile places that the British camping clubs offer us in exchange for a King’s ransom!

 We have been joined by a posse of German motorhomers who are headed the same way as us. 

Apart from Hungarians, most of the cars and lorries on the road as we got nearer the south of Hungary were Romanian, Serbian or Bulgarian. But there was also a fair spattering of German and Austrian cars too.  The reasons for that seem to be related to the history of Romania from the Middle Ages up until the immediate post-communist era.  Saxon villages, repression of one race by another - each in their turn, still going on in Ceausescu’s time is the story …..  Tomorrow we will start to see the legacy, which we think we be much better than having lived it!! 

When I left school I agreed with Henry Ford, who is attributed as saying ‘History is bunk’.  I now know that History is anything but; it does seem to me that at last, bearing in mind the lessons of history, we are beginning to write history, in much of Europe at least, which is based on a better model than anything which has gone before.  Pity about so many other parts of the world!!