Vienna - Prague

Not many photos today.   I think I mentioned Armando's suitcase wheel got hammered the day we arrived in Vienna, and today we were going to buy a new case, but the store was closed so he had to go with the one he had. Amazingly it did well, the wheel is bent, and Prague's streets are all cobblestones, but somehow the wheel is still functioning. We left Vienna about 12:30 on the train.

Forgot to mention, you Memphians know about the brass notes on Beale Street to commemorate important blues people. Well, in Vienna, there are stars here and there in the sidewalks commemorating classical musicians. Today we saw one for Leonard Bernstein.

The trains are so great... when they say they will leave at 12:33, they leave at 12:33. They are so smooth, not like the clack clack clack and bouncing it used to be. And here at the border they changed crews - we were bid farewell by our Austrian crew and hello by our Czech crew.

In fact the entire EU border thing is interesting.  We flew from Atlanta to Paris to Vienna. In Paris, they stamped our passports. Neither in Paris nor Vienna did they send us through customs. When we got to Vienna, we just got off the plane and left the airport, just as though we were residents. On the other hand, last year when we returned from Turkey, when we arrived in Memphis we went through passport control and customs, and then, in order to leave the airport, we had to go through a total security scanning. To leave the Memphis airport. Go figure!

We arrived in Prague about 5:30 p.m and easily found our hotel after a ride on the metro. We have a great little hotel, about a long block from the Charles Bridge, right in the middle of everything. It's spacious and with a little sitting area.

In Europe the rail system is totally different than the United States because they have passenger trains here too and have to have rails going both directions and coordinate the trains, plus you have trains from all over Europe going from one place to another. We really wish we had trains like this in the U.S.

Went to a little restaurant nearby for dinner - I had a goulash appetizer and Armando had chicken wings marinated in something wonderful.  It was a beer pub and restaurant, and they had a hanger with big pretzels to snack on - and they tasted much better than our bland pretzels.

As for our mystery structure in Salzburg... my brother Jeff came up with the answer I liked best - "It's no mystery to me. It encloses the cable car used by the staff to go to and from work, while the tourists, must climb the 278 stairs on the other side.  Or, maybe it's just a privy support."