The State Department’s Information Resource Management Bureau, which my job falls under, has a regional conference overseas every two years. This year the conference was in Vienna, Austria, the same place it was held two years ago. It had a slightly larger attendance since this year it was combined with our Embassies in Africa and the Middle East as well as Europe. This conference is only for Information Management Officers, which I am, and our management from Washington, DC come to brief us on the status of ongoing projects and future technology we can expect. Mainly it is a chance to get together and network for those with aspirations for specific posts or jobs. Since I will be doing my last posting in Athens soon I didn’t fit either of those categories.
Rita and I flew from Brussels early Monday morning, April 26. The conference registration began at noon while the slide shows and presentations started Tuesday. The conference was held at the SAS Radisson Hotel near the city center and it was where they put us up as well. It is a nice hotel as it was once a minor palace in days gone by. Vienna is full of these. Breakfast, lunch and dinner was provided by the State Department but most people, except those skinflints who were saving every penny they could, went out for dinner in the evenings.
We checked into our hotel room and I went to register and say howdy to a few friends from Washington. Then we headed out the door and walked to St. Stephens cathedral and the Kärntner Strasse pedestrian walkway. We stopped at the Sacher Hotel and had a good, light lunch on a terrace with a view of the Opera House across the street. We split a nice chocolate dessert but it wasn’t their famous Sacher torte. In truth, neither Rita nor I care that much for the Sacher torte as we find it a bit dry and I don’t really care for apricot jam. But they had a dessert trolley full of great desserts.
Thus fortified, we walked a good distance to see the Hundertwasser Haus for the first time. We have visited Vienna twice before but this was the first visit here. The Hundertwasser Haus is government housing designed by Friedesreich Hundertwasser in the 1980s. He was an artist and designed buildings in strange, modernistic designs that I can only call unconventional. The guidebook says, “They represent his theories of building construction in harmony with human and natural requirements”. You have to see it yourself. I think he was a hippie with a government grant.
The first night there was a get-together dinner to meet everyone so I attended, as did most everyone. The food was good and it was fun to get together with many old friends. The weeks before we had visitors, John and Zoe Ann Liepins, from the Boston area. They rented a car and headed out through Germany, Switzerland and Austria until they arrived in Vienna the same night we did. So Rita met them and had dinner at a recommended coffee house called Diglas. After my dinner I met joined Rita and the Liepins for a drink and conversation at their Marriott Hotel next door to our hotel. We have known John and Zoe Ann since we worked together in Hawaii back in 1969 and have kept in touch all these years so it was good to rehash the good old days.
Tuesday I attended the conference all day while Rita took John and Zoe Ann around Vienna sightseeing. They saw the Spanish Riding School practice session, St. Stephens cathedral, and the Hofburg Palace. The Opera House didn’t have tours this day so they went shopping in the afternoon for souvenirs and stopped at the Sacher Hotel for coffee and desserts. In the evening the four of us went out to dinner with Mac and Karen McKeever. Mac worked for me in Brussels and went to Athens last summer so we will work together once more. We all went to Figlmüllers for dinner where the schnitzel is bigger than the plate. They really hang over the plate.
Wednesday morning the Liepins headed back to Brussels and on to Boston. Rita went sightseeing and shopping with Karen McKeever while I attended the conference once more. In the evening we had a nice dinner at a small restaurant called Hedrich with old friends Tony Muse and John Boulanger, whom we know from Canberra.
Before we left Brussels, rain was in the forecast for Vienna but it never happened while we were there. We experienced great weather with sunshine and temperatures in the upper 70s. On Wednesday Rita went to a Rembrandt exhibit at the Albertina Museum during the day. In the evening we dined alone at one of our Vienna favorites, the Central Café. It is an art deco coffeehouse with live music and good food. I had tafelspitz, which tastes better than it sounds – boiled beef served with rosti potatoes and an applesauce and horseradish mix. They say that Emperor Franz Joseph ate it every day. It was a pleasant evening and we just walked the beautiful pedestrian walkways in town and the streets around the Volks Garden, the Hofburg Palace and the Burg Garden.
Friday our conference was ahead of schedule and ended at noon. So after lunch, Rita and I walked to the Opera House where we took an English language tour. This beautiful building was built in the 1860s but badly damaged during World War II. Some of the original building still stands but most of it was nicely rebuilt. It was a beautiful day and we walked a good distance through the Volks and Burg gardens once more and had a coffee on the terrace at Café Landtmann. We continued on to the Liechtenstein Museum, which only reopened in March. It used to be the country palace of the Liechtenstein family and has been nicely restored into an art museum. Highlights were several paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. We walked back to the hotel and went to dinner with Mac and Karen plus their friend Al, who works at the Embassy in Djibouti. We had a nice meal at Griechenbeisl, where an inn has existed for over 500 years. Again we walked around the city center before we headed back to the hotel and repacked.
Saturday we rose fairly early, had breakfast, and left a large suitcase in care of the hotel before we caught a taxi to the Westbahnhof. We caught our 10:00 am train to Budapest where the country of Hungary was celebrating both May Day (May 1) and their entrance into the European Union. Our last visit to Hungary was on our camping trip in 1977. It has changed a lot since the Berlin Wall came down and capitalism took over. I noticed modern, new motorways that sometimes ran near the railway and occasionally saw new McDonald restaurants that looked identical to ones in the USA. There were also Shell and Esso gasoline stations that didn’t exist under communism.
In Budapest we arrived at the Keleti train station, which doesn’t look as if it has changed much over all its many years. We took a taxi to the Marriott Hotel and later discovered he was a gypsy taxi that charged us twice the regular fare – but still reasonable at that. Our hotel was actually called the Millennium Apartments and was for long-term stay. It was owned by Marriott and resembled their Residence Inns in the USA. It had a small kitchen, living room and separate bedroom and was very nice. After checking in and unpacking we hit the pavement.
Our hotel was right by the famous pedestrian walkway called Vaci Street. We walked up Vaci Street to Vorosmarty Square and on to Vigado Square where we had a filling, if not great, lunch. As we found in many other Hungarian restaurants, service was awfully slow and not especially friendly. But we finally had sausage with sauerkraut, mustard, potatoes and a local beer. The area along the Danube River was packed with people. There was a carnival associated with their entrance into the EU and the weather was sunny and warm so thousands of people came into town for the day. We strolled along the Danube (not blue anymore) to Roosevelt Square and the Chain Bridge. We turned towards St. Stephen’s Basilica where we saw the Holy Right Hand, the mummified forearm of King Istvan (Steven). The Basilica is beautiful and attracts hundreds of tourists.
Next we walked along Andrassy Boulevard, a wide street with many old stately buildings. We went to the Opera House but it wasn’t open today so we walked through the old Jewish quarter of Budapest. Our hotel was in the part of the city that used to be Pest. Buda was on the other side of the Danube. They were combined into one city only in 1873. Actually, the union was between three separate towns – Buda, Obuda and Pest. Back in the Jewish quarter, we were surprised to find out that the Great Synagogue in Budapest is the largest in all Europe. We saw the Great Synagogue from a distance. Its Byzantine-Moorish style makes it look more like a Mosque than a synagogue.
From here we walked to the Klotild Palaces, which are commercial offices today, and the Inner City Parish Church. We went inside this church, which is the oldest building in Pest. As with most churches in Budapest, it was converted into a mosque when the Turks ruled Budapest and still has a Turkish prayer niche today which points toward Mecca.
We went back to our hotel and rested our feet as Rita’s pedometer registered us as having walked over eight miles so far. We walked to the Central Kavehaz for dinner. Kave is coffee, haz is house, and so kavehaz is coffeehouse. We really like Central Kavehaz as it had art deco lamps and stained windows with lots of atmosphere. The food was great. Rita started with a mixed green salad while I had a salad with grilled ewe’s cheese and bacon over greens and, naturally, lots of peppers. In Hungarian the word paprika is peppers – it can be ground up or whole peppers. For her main course Rita had veal paprika, which was a red sauce but not all that spicy. It came with buttered, heavy noodles resembling gnocchi. I had a dish I would repeat several times over, a pancake,
more like a crepe, filled with ground beef and with a creamy paprika sauce. It was a bit spicier than Rita’s sauce. The dish is called hortobagyi palacsinta in Hungarian. For dessert I had a Panama cake, which had coffee and chocolate while Rita had a dish of both apple and cherry strudels with a vanilla, cinnamon sauce. Both were yummy. We had good coffee after and were quite pleased with our meal.
Sunday morning we slept in but not too late. We had breakfast in our hotel and started walking again. We headed back to Roosevelt Square and walked across the beautiful Chain Bridge to the Buda side of the city. We took a funicular to the Royal Palace on top of the hill. We walked through the ornamental gateway to the statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy and had great views of Pest across the river. We walked past the pretty Matyas Fountain, through the Lion Gate and into the pretty rear courtyard. Rita bought a hand-embroidered tablecloth from two ladies selling their goods there. Next we walked into Old Town to Holy Trinity Square and the Fisherman’s Bastion. We had a cheap, but tasty, lunch at Onkiszolgalo self-serve restaurant. We were lucky that there was a nice Hungarian lady who spoke good English and was happy to help us with the wall menu. This restaurant was out of the way and looked like a communist restaurant from the 60s. After we ate we talked to the lady and she was amazed that the restaurant was in our guidebook and wanted to see our guidebook herself. The restaurant was full of locals, mostly pensioners who go there for a great bargain. Rita had jokai bableves, a traditional Hungarian thick bean soup. I had gigantic mushrooms stuffed with cheese and deep-fried but served cold.
Next we walked some of the scenic streets of Old Town and did a tour of Matyas Church or the parish church of Our Lady Mary. It was built from the 13th to the 15th centuries and is one of the highlights of Budapest. We rushed down hill past the pretty Calvinist Church and briefly looked into the Baroque St. Anne’s Church to the Hev train station. Here we caught a small train that resembles a tram, which took us about 16 miles north to the small village of Szentendre. En route, the train passed an area called Aquincum, remains of a Roman town founded at the beginning of the 2nd century AD. We could see much of the Roman ruins from the train.
In Szentendre we walked into the old town square filled with shops selling artwork and other souvenirs. Szentendre was inhabited by a succession of Serbian refugees, many of them artists. Today it could be called a quaint artist colony. Rita found a shop she was looking for called Kovacs where she purchased several yards of indigo blue material that is dyed by the Kovacs family.
We caught our train back into Budapest and had to walk a long distance back to the hotel where we rested our feet once more before dinner. We ate at the Szazeves, or 100 years, restaurant, the oldest restaurant in Budapest, which first opened in 1831. It is in a beautiful Baroque building furnished with genuine antiques. We barely made it into the restaurant when a tremendous thunderstorm started with heavy lightning and thunder. I enjoy a good thunderstorm. We had a good meal and I started with the ground beef stuffed pancakes again while Rita started off with spicy goulash soup. Rita had chicken breast in a creamy paprika sauce with noodles and I had goose breast with roasted potatoes and red cabbage. We had a bottle of Hungarian Cabernet Frank red wine, which was very good. Once again, service was not very good. By the time we finished the storm stopped and we walked down Vaci Street to Café Anna for coffee and chocolate cake.
Monday we slept in again and, after breakfast, walked along the Danube River to the Parliament Building built between 1884 and 1902. The central part, which we saw on an English tour, was really beautiful. We saw the highlights of the main staircase, the dome and domed hall, the lobby and the National Assembly Hall where Hungary’s parliament sits in session.
After our tour we walked through Liberty Square and past the US Embassy to the Opera House. We were too early for the tour so we decided to walk to New York Kavehaz for lunch. It was a long walk and I was thoroughly disappointed to find it closed for renovations. Next time I guess. So we consulted our guidebook and found a recommended restaurant nearby. Walking down Akacfa Street the neighborhood looked pretty run down and when we came across the Kispipa restaurant it looked more like a bar from the outside. We looked inside and to our surprise found a very pretty, clean restaurant. The food was excellent and, contrary to prior experiences, the service was good. In fact, I think our waiter had worked there for the last 50 years or more. I had chicken breast with an almond crust deep-fried and stuffed with apples and cinnamon. It was very good. Rita’s broiled chicken with Greek salad was good too.
We walked back to the Opera House and had a nice English-language tour of that beautiful building. Built in 1884, it was smaller than most opera houses but with a very ornate interior. We walked across the street to the Muvesz Cukraszda café and had nice frappes outside on their terrace. We had heard about a new covered mall so we walked to the Westend Mall and gave it a quick once over. It is indeed huge and mall shoppers in the USA would feel right at home here. From there we walked past the Danube Fountain to the Lutheran Church, built in 1799, which is very stark compared to most European churches.
We rested our feet for a while (we walked over 10 miles today) before starting down part of Vaci Street we hadn’t covered before. We walked south to see where the Central Market was located and then had dinner at the Karolyi restaurant located in the quiet courtyard of the Karolyi Palace. It was one of the most pleasant settings for a restaurant I can remember. The courtyard was large and contained many trees with chirping birds trying to settle down for the night. While eating we were entertained by a good piano player inside. A full moon rose as twilight came about and we had good food to boot. Rita started with cold raspberry soup, which seemed more like dessert. For mains we both had large potato pancakes stuffed with ground veal and a creamy paprika sauce. As is usual in Hungary, there were sliced peppers on the plate. Usually they are mild but I bit into one slice that was as spicy as a jalapeno pepper. We had a nice local red wine with the meal. For dessert I had gundel palacsinta, which is crepes filled with nuts and covered in chocolate sauce. Rita had a plum parfait and we were happy with everything.
Tuesday we had time before our train left at 1:00 pm so we walked to the Central Market. This very large market is full of stalls selling sausages, cold cuts, produce and peppers of all sorts. There were also souvenir stalls and Rita bought a few small items before we left. We saw paprika dried, ground, and stacked fresh from the field. We saw the largest red radishes I ever saw – as big as apples. We walked a bit more around Vaci Street and looked into a few stores before checking out of our hotel and taking a taxi (legitimate this time) to the train station. We arrive well before our scheduled departure so we went to one more recommended restaurant in the train station called Baross Terem. Rita had strips of pork grilled with onions and peppers served over potatoes while I had one more last pancake filled with ground veal in a paprika sauce. Our train left on time at 1:00 pm and we arrived in Vienna about 4:00 pm. We took a taxi to the Radisson Hotel where we picked up our stored luggage and continued to the airport for our flight back home to Brussels.
Once more we had a great trip helped with excellent weather, nice sights to see and good food and drink.
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