Thoughts, Tips, Links, etc.

Here's a whole bunch of information that would maybe be helpful if you are planning on doing a trip like ours, or even just to one of the cities.

Best purchases for the trip:
Shoes.  I was really happy to have bought a pair of sneaker-style Rothy's.  Yes, expensive, but we walked a lot and the really held up comfortably.  Easy to travel in as well.

Clothespins.  We packed very light, so had to do some laundry along the way, and only had a dryer in one place.  These made it easier to hang up underwear, socks, etc. 

Laptop.  While it was a pain to lug around, it was really nice to be able to easily stream some TV during downtime, and it was way more convenient to buy tickets, etc on the computer than on our phones.

A good international plan.  We didn't have a ton of data available to each of us, but we had enough that we could turn on google maps, look up where we were going, and then turn off data roming again.  It was really helpful getting around, as the city maps we bought often weren't detailed enough to be of much use.

Luggage.  I think that Pete's suitcase was probably the best of the four.  Jax and I took our backpacking backpacks, which I didn't mind but he hated.  The combination of backpack+roller bag+built in carry-on was really great, although it was definitely snug.

Things we didn't need:
Travel pillow.  Yes, it made the plane ride marginally more comfortable, but then we had to lug them around the rest of the time.  Not worth it.

Places we stayed:
We used Airbnb in every city, and generally had good experiences.  The one thing that really got me was the total lack of fire safety in the apartment buildings.  We were never on the first floor and there was never a fire escape.  I am not normally paranoid about this kind of thing, but it's just something to be aware of. 

Getting around:
Pete booked all of our train trips, so I know very little about the logistics of that.  However, I do know that if you book in advance there are some really amazing deals (I think we got from Amsterdam to Paris for something like $30 each).  With one small, flukey exception, train travel was incredibly easy.  (Definitely be on time for your train.  If it says it's leaving at 8.32, it's pulling out of the station at 8.32).

We also exclusively took public transportation (three exceptions: our tour to Terezin started in Prague, our windmill tour started in Amsterdam, and we took a taxi to the airport in Paris).  Berlin's system was the most comprehensive and cost effective, but they were really all good.  In every system trains/trams/busses ran frequently and took us very close to where we wanted to go.  Amsterdam's was the least efficient, and Paris' had the most detours and the most warnings about pickpockets, but there was really no reason to get a car or use a taxi in any of the cities we went to.

But we don't speak German/Czech/Dutch/French:
Yeah, neither do we.  Pete learned a little German before we went, and we all learned how to say please and thank you in each of those languages.  However, in the tourist areas, everyone speaks English.  Even the menus were in English.  In some cases having greater fluency with German or French would have been helpful, but it really wasn't a problem. 

Tips for the best things we did:

Vienna: 
Get the ViennaPass.  It really covers just about everything that you want to do, and definitely saves money.

If you want to eat at Figlmueller, make a reservation.  We bypassed a line that was at least an hour long.

In Vienna our favorites were the Schonnbronn Palace/Grounds/Zoo, climbing the tower at St. Stephen's Cathedral, and Prater Park.

Prague:
We had a really good dinner at U Medviku, a traditional Czech place in Prague 1.  It's a little distance from the main tourist area, but definitely walkable and worth it.

If you want some Holocaust history without the emotional devastation of visiting Auschwicz, I recommend seeing Terezin.  We booked our tour through TripAdvisor, and thought that the 6 hour was just the right length. 

We had heard that Prague was going to be cheap, but I think that's a holdover from travel in the early 2000's.  We didn't find it more or less expensive than any of the other cities.  They don't use the Euro, however, so it does make converting the cost in your head a little trickier.

In Prague our favorites were the Prague Castle complex (it's worth climbing the tower) and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter.

Berlin:
Visiting the Reichstag Dome is free, but requires a reservation, which can be done online.  I highly recommend both making the reservation in advance and going here.

The public transportation system in Berlin is extremely comprehensive, easy to use and safe; there is really no reason to get around any other way.

In Berlin our favorites were the the East Side Gallery, the Spy Museum, paddle boating in Treptower Park, and lunch at KaDeWe.

Amsterdam:
Tickets for the Anne Frank house become available two months before the visit date, and the timeslots go quickly, so if you want to go, definitely book online in advance.  That said, it's still very crowded, so be prepared. 

There are a thousand possible canal cruises.  We did this one because it was open air and a smaller boat, and I would recommend it.

Definitely eat at Pancakes Amsterdam.

I cannot say enough good things about That Dam Guide's windmill tour.  It was my favorite day of the whole trip.  Just a wonderful wonderful adventure, and absolutely worth the money.

If you want to try traditional Dutch food, we had a delicious dinner at The Pantry; reservations are required.

The "escape room" at the Rijksmuseum was a really cool way to see the museum, and definitely kept the kids entertained.  We saw lots of families doing it, but plenty of adult couples doing it as well.  There's a limited number of spaces each day, so definitely book in advance.

Our favorites in Amsterdam were the Windmill Tour and the escape room.

Paris:
There are so many great places to eat and the city is so huge that it doesn't make a ton of sense to travel from one part of the city to another just to eat somewhere.  However, if you're already in one of these areas, we had excellent food experiences at
Cocorico, very close to the Musee d'Orsay/Tuileries Garden.  Get the roasted chicken.
Ice cream, in Montmartre
Chinese noodles, near Hotel De Ville
If you're near the Catacombs, stop by Moisan LeClerc for bread, specifically the brioche.  It's a small bakery and they don't even have a website, but it was the most amazing pastry we had the whole time we were in Paris. 

I cannot say this enough: get tickets in advance for everything in Paris.  We walked past so many lines and did not pay a cent more to get into Saint Chapelle, the Louvre, the Musee d' Orsay and the Catacombs.

If you want to see Versailles, absolutely, unequivocally, book a tour.  We were really happy with our choice to get a tour of the palace itself but we were free to explore the gardens on our own.  We did this one, but I'm sure there are others.  It was a little more expensive than just going on our own, but skipping the line alone made it worth it.  We didn't find it difficult to get to Versailles on our own, and it saved us a lot of money and gave us good flexibility (just triple check to make sure all of the train lines are up and running).  We found it worth the money and the wait in line to rent a golf cart to tour the grounds.

Do a food tour.  We'd heard really good things about Paris By Mouth, but they weren't running the days we were in town.  We did this one through With Locals and had a really great experience with Zoltan.  The price included tons of food for each of us. 

Our favorites in Paris were the Louvre (a real surprise to all of us), the Catacombs, the grounds at Versailles and, of course, eating.

I think that's it.  It's a little weird to be home and have this epic thing that I'd been planning for so long be behind us.  It was a wonderful experience.

Prague, the important part

Prague used to have a very sizeable Jewish community, but it was decimated by the Holocaust.  What remains are a few practicing Jews, and the old Jewish quarter.  Many people who go to Prague visit the Jewish quarter (it is right near the other tourist areas and easy to navigate), and we definitely wanted to see it.  We went in the afternoon after we visited Prague castle.

There is enough of a Jewish community that there are still kosher restaurants, so we stopped at one for lunch.  We were hoping for Matzah ball soup, but sadly it wasn't available until later in the day.  It was still good and we had some great hummus and falafel.

First clue that it's a kosher restaurant?

Unfortunately, while we were hoping to go to the Spanish Synagogue, it is closed for renovations.  However, there was still a lot to see.

We saw three synagogues.  First, we went to the Old-New Synagogue (so named because it was newer than ancient synagogues, but older than the others right around it).  It is small, but I believe services are sometimes still held there (it was hard to get that information).

We next went to the Pinchas Synagogue.  That one was tough.  It is no longer a working temple, but instead serves as a memorial to the approximately 80,000 Czech Jews murdered in the Holocaust.  All of their names, along with the date of their execution, are handwritten on the walls.  It was extremely powerful.

Row after row after row of names

It's really impossible to capture what 80,000 names feels like.  To try to extend it to 6,000,000 is mind-boggling.

We then walked through the old Jewish cemetery.  It is probably most famous for how crowded it is.  It was the only place in Prague where Jews were allowed to bury people for over 400 years.  What is important to know is that Jews are forbidden from moving a body once it is buried, so to compensate for the space issue they just buried people on top of one another, shifting over headstones and, in some cases, burying the headstones entirely.  It's actually a very big space, and just filled with row after row after row of grave markers.

A tiny portion of it, and the whole is this crowded.

Our last stop was the Klausova Synagogue, which is really beautiful and has basically been turned into a museum.  It was a little weird to see things that feel so normal to me described on little placards on the walls (for example, there was a small display about Shabbat dinner), but I realize that most people visiting have probably never met a practicing Jew.

We really covered a lot of ground that day (we had started by doing the castle in the morning) so we went back to the apartment (up the many stairs) and chilled out for a bit before grabbing Thai food at the place right across the street that had been recommended by our Airbnb host.  It tasted just like the thai food we get at home.

How convenient, for family portrait purposes.

The next day we got up and out early, because we had a tour to Terezin booked.  Terezin was an old Czech fort that was turned into a concentration camp for Jews and POWs during WWII.  It's about an hour outside of the city.  Honestly, I was pretty nervous about how sad this day trip was going to be.

The tour wasn't full; it was just us and one other couple from Canada, and our tour guide was very friendly.  We really got to see just about everything.  Terezin wasn't just a prison, it's really a whole town.  A couple thousand people actually still live there, which feels a little weird to me.

Occupied town.  There's apartments, a couple cafes, a drugstore, etc.

The main compound that was turned into bunkers to hold Jews.

It's now a museum, largely filled with art that was produced by residents of the camp.  This is a recreated women's dormitory.  Everything except the beds themselves are belonged to Czech Jews sent to the camp.

The smaller fort that had long been used for a political prison and continued in its role during WWII.

"Work Makes You Free"

This cell once held Gavirilo Princip, the guy who shot the guy that started WWI.

The new portion of the bunker.  When other camps were being emptied toward the end of the war, the prisoners were sent here.  600 people would sleep in this room (it is the same size on the other side)

Where Jewish prisoners who violated the rules would be executed.  Political prisoners were normally executed by firing squad, but they didn't want to waste bullets on Jews.

The crematorium that was built when it became impractical to bury so many bodies. 

4 of these going all day.  They could cremate 8 bodies per hour.  

(It's worth noting here that Terezin was _not_ a death camp, so there were no gas chambers.  In fact, Terezin was a "model camp" that was used to show the Red Cross that conditions in the camps were just fine.  The juxapostion between how the camp was presented to the international community and the reality of the camp was really driven home in a short movie that we watched there.  It showed people running around, playing soccer or cards, going to lectures, etc, while listing the transports of thousands of people to Auschwicz with the paltry numbers of survivors).

We also saw the cemetery where thousands of people, or their ashes, were buried.  Many died after the war ended of the typhus epidemic that ravaged the camp in April-May of 1945. 

After that we returned to Prague.  The day was sad, obviously.  I learned a few new things and had a bunch of things that I already knew fleshed out.  The kids did really well, both emotionally and with the length of the day. 

My last post talked about the rest of our day, so I won't repeat.  Long and short is that I think it is important that we went.  Our guide kept talking about the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and I kept thinking about what is happening on our southern border.  We say "never again," and truly, never again is now.  It doesn't take a lot to make people capable of unbelievable cruelty.  We need to do better.

Last Day in Vienna, and summary.

Our last day in Vienna was July 30th, which is possibly the only date from this whole trip that I will remember, because it was also my 40th birthday.

Our family tradition is to have cake for breakfast on birthdays, but we decided that was a bit much to coordinate in a foreign city, so we went with croissants instead.  They were delicious.  

There were no candles, but they sang, which was very nice.

After breakfast we head out to see upper and lower Belvedere.  It's a two-part palace, both of which have been somewhat preserved, but mostly turned into art museums.  Lower Belvedere (the less fancy of the two) houses more modern art

Twins, with and without skin

'Meric - wait.

while Upper Belvedere houses more mid-century Austrian classics, including a lot of Klimt, which I like a lot.

Klimt

Just like the family portrait hanging in our living room.

Oh, Napoleon.  So modest.

The buildings themselves and the grounds were really lovely as well.

In Lower Belvedere

Ceiling in Lower Belvedere. 

A series: Children humoring me

Pete and I making the face the kids make when we ask them to take a picture.

View of the gardens and Lower Belvedere from Upper Belvedere

We wanted to get back to Naschmarket to get lunch and snacks for our train ride to Prague, so we went back and had lunch and did some more poking around.  While food shopping, Jax thought that he might want to try eating some marinated baby octopus.  Upon purchase of said octopus, he changed his mind, however.

Baby Octopus

Maybe...

Nope.

We had already walked quite a bit, so we went back to the apartment to pack up (since we left for Prague early the next day) and relax a bit before going to Prater Park that night.

Prater Park is an enormous park in and of itself (we saw tons of open space, baseball fields, off-roading space for BMX bikes, a skate park, some playground equipment, a pond, and soccer and field hockey turf, and we barely explored the park at all) PLUS it has a really famous amusement park with a really famous old ferris wheel.  Of course we wanted to hit that up while we were in town.

We did the ferris wheel first.

Hello!

View of Vienna from near the top.

After that, we decided to do some "real rides."  Each ride is paid for individually, which is a pain, but it also means that there are lots and lots of options.  Jax and I started on a super fun roller coaster, while Lea and Pete did a more "spinny" roller coaster right next to us.  Both super fun.

More rides followed, including a flume ride (thankfully Jax and I didn't get wet at all), and an absolute nightmare of a spinning ride that Jax and Pete went on.  

It was much more spinny than I anticipated.  I'm very excited I didn't puke.

We were still so full from our Naschmarket lunch that we just ended up grabbing a little dinner in the park - Jax and I just had ice cream, which I thought was acceptable because it was my birthday.

Two of my favorites being very goofy.

One more roller coaster before we head out, and then back to the apartment to get some sleep before our train to Prague, from where I write this post.

I did this one next.  I screamed a little.

All in all, Vienna was fun.  We probably needed one fewer days there, if I had to do it again.  If you're thinking about visiting, here are what I saw as the pros and cons.

Pros: it was extremely clean and quiet.  The public transportation system is extremely easy to navigate and very affordable.  Prices were not outrageous.  We got the ViennaPass and really feel like it was worth it.  We collectively speak about 6 words of German, but got by just fine.

Cons: things close _early_.  You really need to plan your trips to the grocery store/pharmacy/etc.  Even restaurants often aren't open on Saturday nights.  Unless your kids are super into impressionist art and/or classical music, it's not the most kid oriented travel destination.  Sights do a lot of "nickel and dime-ing" - one fee to get into the Schonbronn Palace, another for the maze, another for the zoo, another for the tram, another for the garden, etc.  I am not sure if this is the norm everywhere in Europe (Prague is suggesting that it is), but don't assume that your entry fee covers nearly everything (including the bathroom!).  

Anyway, now we're in Prague, which has a _very_ different feel.  We're here for the shortest amount of time, leaving on Saturday.  We'll enjoy it until then, and then on to Berlin!

Schonbronn Palace, Maze, Zoo, and some Schnitzel

Today was a good day.  

The plan was to spend it at the Schonbronn palace complex.  We were a little worried because we have the ViennaPass, which got us in to the palace, but didn't give us an assigned ticket time.  So we got up and out early so that we didn't have to wait for hours.  

The main palace.  Couldn't fit the wings in the frame.

Thankfully, the timing worked out perfectly so that we could spend a little time in the gardens beforehand, but didn't have an interminable wait for the palace itself.

In the private garden.

In the Orangerie

Beautiful child in a bush,

It's hard to mean mug in a Vienna tourist hat, but I think he managed to pull it off.

They don't let you take any pictures inside the palace itself, which is a real bummer.  But it was really super beautiful.  We saw a number of the rooms used by various royalty for various things.  We walked for about an hour and saw maybe 1/3 of the palace?  It was very impressive.

After that, we went to see more of the grounds.  Jax was especially excited about doing the labyrinth.  It looked easy, but was actually a challenge.  Pete and Jax did make it to the center viewing station before Lea and I did though.  

At the start of the maze

Shoot.  They beat us.

There were two other not-mazey labyrinths that we did after that.  Not quite as fun, but still pretty cool.

Mirror trickery in one of the mazes.

We then head to the zoo, which is the oldest zoo in the world, founded some time in the 1750s.  It was surprisingly large and very cool

Rhino

Pelican.

Lea (front right) and some buffalo

The original ROUS - the capybara

A snoring tapir.  Adorable.

Lions

Panda butt!

By this point we were all very very tired, having walked quite far, even though we were on the palace grounds the whole time.  However, I was still hoping to see the Gloriette, which was a "little" building set on a high hill that afforded a lovely view of the palace and much of Vienna.  So we hopped on a little tram thing that took us up (and thankfully back down).

Children Humoring Me: A Series

View of the palace from the Gloriette

The little building where one of the Hapsburg queens like to breakfast. 
Just like our breakfast nook at home.

By this point Jax's watch was indicating that he had walked 5.5 miles, and we were all ready for a break.  So back to the apartment for a little rest before heading to Figlmuller for dinner.  A touristy place for sure, but they advertised having served schnitzel since 1905.  Thankfully I had made a reservation, since when we arrived there was a line down the street.  

Schnitzel.  It was quite good.  And not small.

Jax went with steak.  He was happy with his choice.

I didn't get pictures of dessert, but the apple strudel and chocolate cake had for dessert by the children was excellent.  Then back again to get ready for our last day in Vienna.  Tomorrow is more palaces and an amusement park!