NOTES ON THE WARSAW, BUDAPEST, VIENNA AND PRAGUE TOUR
NOTES ON THE WARSAW, BUDAPEST, VIENNA AND PRAGUE TOUR
We began our tour on September 18th after arriving one day early.
We chose to take a Polish Cookery class and Vodka tasting on the morning of our early arrival day. We found the class on Viatour and it turned out to be really fun. There were 16 in the class and it was very well organized. It was held in a building near the university. Clear instructions were provided to us on how to find the room, we entered the building and a receptionist who could not speak English held up written instructions on how to find the room.
We made apple pancakes, then ate them along with a beautifully presented selection of meats and cheeses and so on along with our first taste of 7 or 8 vodkas. Then we made pierogis in two styles, Russian....potato, onion, spices and cheese and then pork meat and onions ones. We cooked and ate them and tried more vodkas. The class was about four hours long. We had time to rest before we met our tour group, numbering 36 with our very experienced tour director, Mark.
All hotels were of a very high standard, we used the swimming pool in two of the hotels, the Warsaw hotel and the Ritz Carlton, both excellent, we never even had time to even see if any of the other hotels had pools. The hotels were centrally located and had every amenity in the room you could wish for. All the bathrooms had excellent lighting and magnified mirrors and good hairdryers, note you cannot use hairdryers in some of the bathrooms. It is not allowed, you have to find an outlet in the bedroom. Bathrobes and slippers provided. Tea and coffees in all, but the Vienna hotel, in this case you called down for the drinks and staff brought them up gratis. My only negative was the bed at the Ritz Carlton, it was very very very (!!!!) soft, it was like sleeping inside a sink hole and then having great difficulty trying to turn over because you had sunk so low, I tried to see if there was some kind of topper I could remove but then I also discovered the reason we were so hot was because just under the sheet was the sort of plastic mattress covering you might put on the bed if you had a severe incontinence problem. We were by no means the only people who had issues with the beds.
There was less need to dress up than indicated in the brochure, at least two times I had thought we would require to be better dressed like the piano concert and the dinner river cruise, the tour director specifically said there was no need to dress up, come as you are and they were just for our Tauck group. Our Welcome dinner had all kinds of dress from some men with jackets to a delightful couple who were in full on Safari gear but more colorful, no not us! The Farewell dinner yielded more men in jackets and the women wore a variety of clothes, some dressy, some not. Our delightful Safari couple wore their Safari clothing and that was fine too. All in all, I could have taken a smaller suitcase if I had not felt a bit of pressure from reading on these forums, because it's a while since we did a European tour with Tauck apart from Puglia most recently, we have generally taken Tauck adventure type tours.
The temperatures were much lower than usual for this time of year, they only reverted to 'average normal' on about the last four days. One day was continuous heavy rain. We were one of the few people who braved that day and took our planned 'free day' activities, never mind my hotel umbrella was stolen from a restaurant doorway and we continued without it, walking several quick miles in the process.
Comfortable and waterproof and supportive shoes are essential on this tour, almost all of it is on cobbled streets of all shapes and sizes. There is sometimes no alternative but to use staircases.
We enjoyed all the planned activities and food.
Some of the extra things we did were.....
dinner at the very fancy Baraka restaurant in Budapest, worth every penny! On the Buda side, we visited the Hospital in the Rocks, which was fascinating.
The Belvedere museum in Vienna, which has paintings by Otto Klimt....remember the movie called Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren, the true story of the fight to get her Klimt painting back after it was stolen by the Nazis in the Second World War.
We visited the Sisi museum, a must if you like Porcelain china and table settings in particular, I do, and saw more of it on display than I have ever seen in my life. You also get to see the Palace and furnishings.
We went to the Rick Steves recommended coffee shop called Demels and it was very disappointing. Another day we went to local Tour guide recommended Diglas and had a great lunch there, much more pleasant than Rick's place.
In Prague we visited the UNESCO site, Vrtbovska Zahrda (garden) Not to be missed, go through the archway, keep going because you might think you are not going the right way, you will come to a small ticket office, get your tickets and then climb the stairs to a hidden but beautiful area of gardens, you climb up a lot of steps but are rewarded with the best views of Prague and what's more, it is peaceful and quiet and if you are lucky you will be the only ones there, awesome. Another place we did not find out about until our last day, so we went on the extra day, is the Dancing house, a building designed by Frank Gehry, it is partly the Fred and Ginger hotel and houses a small, movie, TV museum, then you can go to the top of the hotel and see the views over the river and city, tip here, if you go to the Fred and Ginger bar just below the very top, you can sit on the terrace outside and avoid the tourists and get a better view. Order a coffee and share the Gastro Punk dessert, it's fun!
All the cites were very very crowded. We never wear expensive jewelry or sometimes any, but many of our traveling companions were fully decked out in diamonds and Rolexes. If I could only get Mr B to stop wearing a baseball cap to protect his face from the sun, I might feel we blended in with the locals a little more, or at least looked like we weren't worth pick pocketing.
Shopping, regular readers know I am not allowed to spend lots of time shopping, I decide what I would like and buy fast. Apparently the best place to buy Amber is Krakow, a quick walk through the craft market hall was not impressive, several women thought that, me too. I bought an amber item at a store opposite the church that has the man playing the bugle out of the window, sorry can't remember the name of the church. I felt that store had more quality items. In Vienna, if you want to buy the Mozart chocolates, there is a Spar supermarket across the Street from the Bristol, cross the street in the underground tunnel where the subway is, come up the other side and the Spar is just past the corner, lots of choices and I think better prices than the gift stores, plus you can take them straight back to your room.
In Prague, it's crystal and garnets, no, did not buy! The Charles Bridge has lots of stalls selling paintings and jewelry, no did not buy.
I highly recommend this tour, the architecture makes Italy seem so so.
I think that's it!
We began our tour on September 18th after arriving one day early.
We chose to take a Polish Cookery class and Vodka tasting on the morning of our early arrival day. We found the class on Viatour and it turned out to be really fun. There were 16 in the class and it was very well organized. It was held in a building near the university. Clear instructions were provided to us on how to find the room, we entered the building and a receptionist who could not speak English held up written instructions on how to find the room.
We made apple pancakes, then ate them along with a beautifully presented selection of meats and cheeses and so on along with our first taste of 7 or 8 vodkas. Then we made pierogis in two styles, Russian....potato, onion, spices and cheese and then pork meat and onions ones. We cooked and ate them and tried more vodkas. The class was about four hours long. We had time to rest before we met our tour group, numbering 36 with our very experienced tour director, Mark.
All hotels were of a very high standard, we used the swimming pool in two of the hotels, the Warsaw hotel and the Ritz Carlton, both excellent, we never even had time to even see if any of the other hotels had pools. The hotels were centrally located and had every amenity in the room you could wish for. All the bathrooms had excellent lighting and magnified mirrors and good hairdryers, note you cannot use hairdryers in some of the bathrooms. It is not allowed, you have to find an outlet in the bedroom. Bathrobes and slippers provided. Tea and coffees in all, but the Vienna hotel, in this case you called down for the drinks and staff brought them up gratis. My only negative was the bed at the Ritz Carlton, it was very very very (!!!!) soft, it was like sleeping inside a sink hole and then having great difficulty trying to turn over because you had sunk so low, I tried to see if there was some kind of topper I could remove but then I also discovered the reason we were so hot was because just under the sheet was the sort of plastic mattress covering you might put on the bed if you had a severe incontinence problem. We were by no means the only people who had issues with the beds.
There was less need to dress up than indicated in the brochure, at least two times I had thought we would require to be better dressed like the piano concert and the dinner river cruise, the tour director specifically said there was no need to dress up, come as you are and they were just for our Tauck group. Our Welcome dinner had all kinds of dress from some men with jackets to a delightful couple who were in full on Safari gear but more colorful, no not us! The Farewell dinner yielded more men in jackets and the women wore a variety of clothes, some dressy, some not. Our delightful Safari couple wore their Safari clothing and that was fine too. All in all, I could have taken a smaller suitcase if I had not felt a bit of pressure from reading on these forums, because it's a while since we did a European tour with Tauck apart from Puglia most recently, we have generally taken Tauck adventure type tours.
The temperatures were much lower than usual for this time of year, they only reverted to 'average normal' on about the last four days. One day was continuous heavy rain. We were one of the few people who braved that day and took our planned 'free day' activities, never mind my hotel umbrella was stolen from a restaurant doorway and we continued without it, walking several quick miles in the process.
Comfortable and waterproof and supportive shoes are essential on this tour, almost all of it is on cobbled streets of all shapes and sizes. There is sometimes no alternative but to use staircases.
We enjoyed all the planned activities and food.
Some of the extra things we did were.....
dinner at the very fancy Baraka restaurant in Budapest, worth every penny! On the Buda side, we visited the Hospital in the Rocks, which was fascinating.
The Belvedere museum in Vienna, which has paintings by Otto Klimt....remember the movie called Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren, the true story of the fight to get her Klimt painting back after it was stolen by the Nazis in the Second World War.
We visited the Sisi museum, a must if you like Porcelain china and table settings in particular, I do, and saw more of it on display than I have ever seen in my life. You also get to see the Palace and furnishings.
We went to the Rick Steves recommended coffee shop called Demels and it was very disappointing. Another day we went to local Tour guide recommended Diglas and had a great lunch there, much more pleasant than Rick's place.
In Prague we visited the UNESCO site, Vrtbovska Zahrda (garden) Not to be missed, go through the archway, keep going because you might think you are not going the right way, you will come to a small ticket office, get your tickets and then climb the stairs to a hidden but beautiful area of gardens, you climb up a lot of steps but are rewarded with the best views of Prague and what's more, it is peaceful and quiet and if you are lucky you will be the only ones there, awesome. Another place we did not find out about until our last day, so we went on the extra day, is the Dancing house, a building designed by Frank Gehry, it is partly the Fred and Ginger hotel and houses a small, movie, TV museum, then you can go to the top of the hotel and see the views over the river and city, tip here, if you go to the Fred and Ginger bar just below the very top, you can sit on the terrace outside and avoid the tourists and get a better view. Order a coffee and share the Gastro Punk dessert, it's fun!
All the cites were very very crowded. We never wear expensive jewelry or sometimes any, but many of our traveling companions were fully decked out in diamonds and Rolexes. If I could only get Mr B to stop wearing a baseball cap to protect his face from the sun, I might feel we blended in with the locals a little more, or at least looked like we weren't worth pick pocketing.
Shopping, regular readers know I am not allowed to spend lots of time shopping, I decide what I would like and buy fast. Apparently the best place to buy Amber is Krakow, a quick walk through the craft market hall was not impressive, several women thought that, me too. I bought an amber item at a store opposite the church that has the man playing the bugle out of the window, sorry can't remember the name of the church. I felt that store had more quality items. In Vienna, if you want to buy the Mozart chocolates, there is a Spar supermarket across the Street from the Bristol, cross the street in the underground tunnel where the subway is, come up the other side and the Spar is just past the corner, lots of choices and I think better prices than the gift stores, plus you can take them straight back to your room.
In Prague, it's crystal and garnets, no, did not buy! The Charles Bridge has lots of stalls selling paintings and jewelry, no did not buy.
I highly recommend this tour, the architecture makes Italy seem so so.
I think that's it!
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Comments
I am writing because you raised an excellent point that I don't think much has been written about on the Forum, and that is the jewelry issue.
When we first started traveling, many years ago, I broke out the "major jewelry" for our first trip. However, it didn't take long for me to figure that that only attracted attention and actually made me quite nervous as I was worried the entire time about attracting the wrong kind of atttention! Since then, I too, only bring costume jewelry and never wear any extra jewelry for any of our more intrepid adventures. Someone on one of our past trips was quite pleased that she had huge cubic zirconia (?) earring studs that were meant to give the impression of being diamonds. I didn't want to burst her bubble, but my immediate thought was if the possible person wanting to take them off her was going to inquire if they were real or fake before he ripped them out of her ears!!
I have a friend who was strolling along a Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and a guy came up behind her, put two fingers between her wrist and her scarab bracelet ( not even all that expensive, but sentimental), popped the bracelet off and took off leaving her with a pretty bruised wrist and no bracelet! It happened in a flash!
I guess my reminder would be...MEN and WOMEN, since you are spending a good amount of money for a trip with Tauck, we figure you have some very nice jewelry, so no need to bring it along to make a statement! And, if you want to keep it, leave it home when you travel, particularly to places high in tourist traffic!
and judy 05 thanks for the tip about the gloves !!