Europe is fabulous

We returned recently from a trip to Europe. You probably didn’t notice as the articles kept being published. We went to as many countries as is possible in one month while still finding time to do some sightseeing. It was both a fantastic time and absolutely exhausting. I’ve found myself still recovering five days later. Travelling via train in Europe blows my mind. Crossing country borders so easily while still remaining on the same continent is not something that can ever happen in Australia. I won’t detail everything we did, nor every country. Travelling from Prague to Vienna we took a slight detour to Bratislava and I took far too many photos while there for about a half hour. Why did we do that? Because we could and with our Eurail ticket it cost no more. But I have thoughts.

We visited as many cemeteries as possible in that short time. I have managed to see the gravestone for my great-uncle who died in 1911 in Białystok, Poland. The stone is slightly broken and we didn’t have the time or resources to fix it, but I’ve got photos. Slightly means it’s in at least two pieces, but is still legible. There are so many gravestones which are in much worse condition, some because they were destroyed during the Holocaust and some are just so old they’ve deteriorated beyond recognition.

I must be fond of my thumb. It seems to be in far too many photos and I’ve not done that deliberately. We have seen many Stolpersteine across Europe. They’re little plaques built into the pavement to enable you to ‘stumble’ over them and stop and think about the person who once lived or worked there. Those people were persecuted by the Nazis, many were Jewish but some were not. Some died because of the Nazis while others fled to some other country and safety.

We saw our future in recycling. We saw recycling in every city we visited. Some of them even gave the ability to sort your glass by colour. In Białystok we saw a public seat with charging ports powered by solar panels. In fact, the number of solar panels we saw across Europe was fantastic. So many in Poland where they don’t get a lot of sunlight. One building in Złotów had a lot of panels on the side of the building facing north.

The buildings are so old. Some of them are five or six hundred years old. My family pointed out the old wall in Vienna, the base is eight hundred years old! All of this pre-dates written history in Australia by so many decades…sorry, centuries.

Gdańsk is amazing. We went to the Solidarity Museum and learned how the Trade Union movement started in one of the shipyards and then spread across the entirety of Poland. It eventually brought down Communism in Poland. If you visit Prague you need to see the museum and learn the story. If you like pretzels allocate about an hour to queue up and buy from the pretzel place. I’ve no memory of what the shop is called, but the queue speaks for itself.

I think it was Prague where I tried to learn about 1,000 years of Jewish history in one day. That didn’t go well because it was just too much. I used to know a lady who was born in Poland, but insisted she was Australian. Going through that exhibition gave me some understanding of why she denied her Polish heritage. You’ll find there were pogroms attacking Jews in 1905 and 1906, then the Holocaust hit Poland, then Jews were targetted in the decades following WWII. The pogroms were shown in the ever-popular film Fiddler on the Roof, my family would have lived through those pogroms, but then then got out. This lady was probably born some time after WWI and lived through much worse. She was grateful to find sanctuary in Australia.

Cobblestones. Every city had cobblestones. They are not easy to navigate if you have mobility issues, I took my stick and managed to get around ok. Our hotels were mostly within a kilometre of the train stations and we walked wheeling our luggage. Cobblestones do not make this easy. There were different types of cobblestones and it was interesting to see the big ones, the medium size ones and the small ones.

We did visit bookshops. Found a lovely little one in Złotów, I had to buy the copy of Strata by Terry Pratchett…in Polish and I’ll never read it. It was a gorgeous little shop, along a boardwalk raised from the road by about a dozen steps. The bookshop I went into in Prague was four floors, but I only saw two of them, apparently they had a good English section. Then there’s the antique bookshop I popped into in Vienna. I fell in love with a book published in 1930. It’s in German, and it’s poetry. The lady had good English and she laughed uproariously when I said ‘at least it’s not romance’. Later that afternoon someone with better German than me suggested it might be romantic poetry. But the book is gorgeous, and I had spent two days in my hotel room feeling ill and sorry for myself.

Anyway, that’s all my thoughts for tonight. I have various videos to upload to YouTube in due course. I took a number of videos of bicycle lanes which I might thread together and upload as one, or I might not. I will create a video showing off my book loot.