And I thought it was my idea. No, really. Someone already on the continent who is keen to see some well-known capitals of Europe that are not the usual London, Paris, Berlin, et al. Let’s get out a map … Hey, wait! Budapest, Vienna and Prague are arranged more or less on a straight line […]

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If you hope to dine like a local, in central Europe, you start by accepting one condition: You must order a beer with your meal. Or else you are an even bigger poseur than most of the rest of the tourists visiting the region. Which has led me to drink beer for nine consecutive days […]

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We liked Budapest. Quite a bit. We wish we were staying longer. But a couple of basic issues pertaining to Hungary and its capital city threatened to trip us up every time we left the apartment. Talking about money … and talking about talk.

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We spent most of the day on a train. From Prague to Brno (in the Czech Republic) to Bratislava (in Slovakia) to the marvelously named Szob (in Hungary) to Vac to Budapest. It was fairly direct. Not a “crow flies” kinda straight line but one that takes into account that people might actually want to […]

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Much can be said for Prague. It is a jewel of a city, small enough that most of the most popular bits of it can be seen in a single day, on foot, by the energetic visitor. It offers castles, museums, dramatic vistas from hilltop perches, a wide river, shopping from one end of the […]

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So, here we are in Prague, and we have no idea what anyone is saying. The locals, in the Czech Republic, speak Czech. Fair enough. It is a Slavic language spoken by about 10 million people, though it probably is closer to 6 million if 5 million speakers of Slovakian (mutually intelligible but not quite […]

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Not much time today in the Czech capital, given that we flew out of the south of France in mid-afternoon, changed planes in Paris and landed in Prague at about 8:30. (Where the airport is perhaps best known for being named after a poet, Vaclav Havel, who was president of the Czech Republic after the […]

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