Back to the Salt Mines

Travel by air has to be a vision of hell for we sinners. It doesn't matter the airline - you, along with 500 other sinners, are stuffed into what the airline calls a seat, they serve something barely edible, the airline personnel apparently have private incomes as they don't seem overly interested in serving the passenger, they torture you with movies you avoid on the ground. However, it does improve your health, as you usually have to walk a mile or so between gates and alcoholic drinks are free on the plane.

The trip was good, although I was surprised that a sail down the "Beautiful Blue Danube" was, in fact, nowhere near as beautiful or interesting as trips down the Rhine and the Rhone. The image that most struck me did not take place on the river. At a Boston Pops-like concert in Vienna a pretty good soprano performed an Austrian folk song while dressed as a peasant. She sang a story no one in the hall knew. It must have been an odd story as the last few lines were delivered in the same strong voice while she was standing on her head. I've never seen something like that at Symphony Hall in Boston.

Another strong impression - we here in the U.S. are very lucky in an economic sense. Prague apparently does not have enough money to clean the statues on the famed Charles Bridge and at other tourist attractions. I don't think that there are too many countries that display statues so black you would think they had been painted that color instead of having faded with the years. The economic struggle in Budapest and Bratislava was not as evident, but it was still palpable. Things seemed good in Vienna and Salzburg.

I also saw a phenomenon that I had seen only once before. When you drive from Vermont into Canada, the landscape changes almost instantly; within a mile the tall trees are gone, things look darker and drearier. A reverse situation occurs when going from the Czech Republic to Austria. It's really amazing to me. I could understand if the changes took place over a few miles, but it is noticeable almost as soon as you cross the border.

And what can I say about the language? Whether written or spoken it's beyond me. You see a lot of the letters K and Z . We played a game of Scrabble on the boat; aficionados will be surprised to see 2 Ks, Z with a value of 3 and Y 10, and two forms of U, one with a value of 6, the other 1.

Overall, it was a good trip even though we had snow that last two days. Budapest and Vienna are beautiful cities. In Salzburg we ate in a building that was a monastery in 803 and had been a restaurant for a couple of hundred years. It was really a vacation from the world. But you never escape reality and still remain what passes for sane.

So, it's back to the real world and renewed contemplation of the catastrophes in which we are embedded.