Solipsism Gradient

Rainer Brockerhoff’s blog

Browsing Posts published in June, 2003

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Typing this in Budapest at the free Internet facility in the Arcor Mercure Buda Hotel. There are a few people waiting in line and only a single PC, so I’ll be brief… and it’s yet another strange keyboard, and the actual layout doesn’t fit the configuration. Z and Y are interchanged, for one thing. Oops, I meant Y and Z. 😆

Well, we ended up staying another day-and-a-half in Vienna before driving to Budapest, it was worth it. And we just saw a few of the many attractions. Budapest looks to be extremely interesting too, even more beautiful buildings than in Vienna, although not well kept.

More later…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m in another small Internet Café, on our second day in Vienna, Austria. Vienna is a large, old, fascinating and expensive city. We succeeded in finding a place at a relatively inexpensive pension near the historical center, and stashed the car away in a suburban all-day parking lot, so it’s bearable… most attractions are only 10 or 20 minutes away on foot.

Tomorrow we’re off to Budapest where we’ll either just drive around the city and come back in the evening, or stay for the night. Then it’s back to Austria and into the Czech Republic, we may stay a couple of days at Prague.

In the last couple of days, we’ve visited several extremely interesting tourist attractions, among them the huge Ice Cave in the Austrian Dachstein mountains and the old salt mine at Berchtesgaden. The drive eastwards to Vienna was an attraction by itself; the land is even more beautiful than the Canadian Rockies or the North California coast.

More as soon as possible…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
A small update from a very small Internet Café in Berchtesgaden (Germany).

Update: In München we also went to see the Körperwelten exhibition a the Olympiapark. This was extremely impressive and I’ll talk about it in detail after we get back…

In München we finally succeeded in straightening out our car rental. Despite my express specification that I would take the car into Eastern Europe, they gave me one without the necessary papers. After some discussion they decided to give me an upgrade to a larger car (a Ford Fiesta), unfortunately again without air conditioning. It seems that no rental company will allow rental VWs, BMWs or Mercedes to drive into Eastern Europe as they wouldn’t last more than a couple of days before being stolen. So only small Fords are available. Oh, well…

This took us most of the day, so we decided to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial which was only 20 Km away. Although we arrived after the official closing time, we were able to walk around the camp and visit some of the buildings. Most impressive and thought-provoking. As always, I’ll post photos aftter we get back.

We slept in Rosenheim, near the Austrian border, and the next day (yesterday) drove into Salzburg. Very interesting, nice parks, Mozart-this and Mozart-that everywhere. Traffic was very confusing and badly signed, having a map helped very little. I tried to drive up to the Rainer Museum but gave up after repeatedly running into dead ends and wrong-way streets.

Because of the heat we gave up on Salzburg and decided to go into the mountains, landing here in Berchtesgaden. We’ve scheduled a visit to the famous salt mines and later in the day will drive back into Austria to see the caves of the Dachstein region.

More later…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Well, here I am at a huge Internet Café in München, near the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station). Besides me is a sign saying “400 more PCs downstairs!” I’ve purchased nearly half an hour of credit (1 hour is Euro 1,80), so this’ll have to be a llittle briefer than I planned… and I’m just hating the German keyboard, Y and Z are interchanged and most punctuation is elsewhere. Grrh :X

The trip has been going quite smoothly, some minor glitches with the car rental excepted. More about that later. We’ve been lucky in getting excellent hotels at reasonable prices, despite the holidays, which we hadn’t previously been aware of. “Pfingsten” was last Sunday and Monday, and it seems to be followed by two weeks of school holydays, so everything’s crowded and more expensive.

Here’s a fast review of our week so far. We arrived in Frankfurt where my cousin Jürgen (the “jcwuesthoff” who posted below) met us, helped straigthen out our luggage which somehow had arrived earlier by a different airline and drove us to my aunt’s house in Ingelheim, where we spent two happy days eating and getting over the jetlag.

On Saturday, we got our rental car – a tiny Ford Ka – and drove to Stuttgart, where I looked in vain for some extra accessories for my Pentax. We then went on to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), having a very tough time finding a hotel – both because of the aforementioned holidays and because the nearby boarding school at Salemhad a biannual alumni reunion.

The hours spent driving around were worth it though, because we lucked into a very comfortable hotel in Heiligenberg. The next day we drove down to Salem, where we met our friends who live in a small castle which also is a gate into the school. More about that later.

Needless to say, I took hundreds of photos which I’ll probably be able to post only when I get back. I’m getting used to some quirks with the Pentax – the autofocusing system has a delay which isn’t suitable for action photos, so on the first days I took quite a few pictures of my feet, thinking the photo had already been taken at the beep, when in fact this meant that focusing had been done.

After two more days eating well and driving around the north bank of the Bodensee, we decided to press on to München. However, we took the opportunity to take the long way around (counterclockwise). going into Switzerland over the Rhine, driving south, then briefly into Bregenz (Austria), and back into Germany’s Allgäu province.

We slept in the nice little town of Füssen and the next day visited Neuschwanstein castle before going on to München, a bustling city of 1.5 people.

Re: niver!

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Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):

Heinar wrote:

rep barfdei tuiu

rep barfdei tuiu

rep barfdei diir Rainer

rep barfdei tuiu

icon_lol.gif Domo arigato gozaimashita, Heinar!

I found it !!

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Posted by jcwuesthoff:
hallo rainer –

nice to having you both with us – have a nice trip trough europe icon_lol.gif

niver!

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Posted by Heinar:
rep barfdei tuiu

rep barfdei tuiu

rep barfdei diir Rainer

rep barfdei tuiu

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Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m posting this at a friend’s house in Salem. which is near the Bodensee (Lake Constance). There seem to be few Internet Cafés in the region, so I’ll hold off reporting until Wednesday or so, when we’ll be driving through Munich… but everything’s going smoothly.

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