Guided by uniformed employees of Viking Tours through the transfers at Heathrow in London and at Budapest we arrived at the Viking Gullveig in time for late afternoon lunch buffet, nap and dinner.

Entering the dining room we noticed four jolly looking folks sitting together, one sporting a bald head and an impressive lumberjack beard, and sat down at their table. Ice was broken with the discovery that they were Canadians–residents of the Maritime province of New Brunswick but familiar with our second hometown in British Columbia.  They all were or had been involved in secondary education, one about to celebrate retirement, his wife still teaching, another a high school principal, and her husband, a former teacher who became a nuclear power plant operator and spent time at Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo.  We shared many onboard meals with these people and a couple more who joined the table.

The boat itself was sleek, elegant and comfortable, graced with well appointed lounges, restaurants and outdoor deck space in high style Scandinavian taste,

decorated with visually arresting, and aesthetically pleasing prints and paintings,

The most notable was the wall size painting at the top of the main stairway portraying the ship’s namesake, Gullveig, a goddess associated with the love of gold, with magic and sorcery, and with the ability to return to life after being burned to death three times. This figure in Norse mythology seemed appropriate to the Viking company and to the city of Passau we visited, home of a German literary version of those stories, The Nibelungenlied.

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A year ago we had to cancel “Romantic Danube,” the Viking Tour Company’s River Cruise because we came down with Covid a month before departure.  With the travel insurance money, we went on our own to England, Holland, France and Germany, our journey chronicled here.

That experience motivated us to try again to squeeze a trip into the two-week interval between Jan’s City Council meetings.  An injury to her “good” knee  during a December workout at Gymnazo required her to walk with a cane, which made the prospect of a cruise especially appealing.  But we agreed to spend a week following the river trip on our own in Salzburg and Munich.  Before departure we reserved lodging and concert tickets and read in books about the river and its cities, including Carl Shorske’s Fin de Siecle Vienna, Politics and Culture, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, The Danube, A Cultural History, by Andrew Beattie, Mozart, A Life by Paul Johnson.  And we watched films set in central Europe, including The Third Man and Museum Hours

The weeks before departure concluded several open-ended involvements: the sale of Knoll House–our Canadian property since 1995–to Tai and Theo, our ten year tenants and lifelong friends,  our grandson Ian’s passing his qualifying exams as Airline Technician, our grandson Lucas’ acceptance in the five-month  Grizzly Academy boot camp, our daughter Claire’s promotion to full-time employee at the Cal Poly Food Service, Jan’s organization of. her campaign committee after a long-pondered decision to run for re-election, and completion of my Prefumo Creek Restoration and Enhancement Project.

Our intention this morning was to stray from the cliche tourism of the Bateau Mouche and ride a City bus at the quai to the end of the line and back as we’d done in London.  We walked a new way toward the river and came upon a tiny corner sculpture park centered on a travertine marble box behind which a large red circle was painted on the blank wall of a building.

A sign indicated that the box was used as a base for temporary art installations, this one entitled “Pandora’s Box.” A young woman walked up to the pedestal and pressed  a button causing the plastic assemblage to revolve and look like a discharge of steam. (more…)

We traveled to the eastern edge of the Marais to attend “Eternal Mucha,” a show about the life and work of the early 20th designer whose posters are familiar icons of Art Nouveau.  A cycling 40-minute slideshow was presented on a huge screen with surround-sound music intended to overwhelm the  audience reclining on couch seats in a theatre housed in the modern opera house at the Place Bastille. But after the previous night’s experience in the Sainte Chappelle its effort to create a contemporary spiritual aesthetic experience fell flat.

After a tiring walk across the huge Place de Bastille, the site of the start of the Revolution in 1789, we recharged at a cafe with shots of espresso (more…)

We began the day with the practical task of doing laundry, which, not surprisingly, turned into a memorable adventure.  Morning sunshine reflected from the recently cleaned old buildings turned routine urban activities into paintings.

Ancient architectural monuments  adorned the way to  the laundromat up the block.

Apartment buildings appeared as architectural marvels. (more…)

On a walk around the neighborhood, before our scheduled train departure for Paris, we happened upon a building fronting a large square where booths, stages and grandstands left from previous days’ Pride celebrations were being dismantled.  It  was the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, originally built as a City Hall in 1655, later converted to a Royal Palace by the conqueror Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon in 1806 and eventually appropriated by the Dutch Royal Family who retain control of it today.

We arrived at the grandiose Paris Gare du Nord in the early afternoon (more…)

Next morning was rainy, and we decided to return to the Hermitage complex to explore some of the galleries we’d noticed the day before, none requiring reservations or as crowded the Rijksmuseum.  The City Museum provided a graphic history of the town which helped make sense of the  technological achievement of reclamation of swamp and seawater that started in the thirteenth century.  It provided a system of defensive moats, a transportation grid allowing easy movement of goods and people and access to river and ocean trade routes that led to the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. It also made the city, like Venice, an attraction for tourists.

Rather than glorifying the Dutch cultural heritage, most of the exhibits emphasized the brutality and injustice suffered by the victims of empire and their efforts to survive, witness and protest. (more…)

After breakfast we set out for another major museum, the Hermitage.  Located on the bank of the Amstel River, one of the city’s natural major arteries, the morning fog obscured the building’s name and nature, which only partially revealed itself in the course our visit.

Through a basement stairway we entered the old industrial brick compound into a sleek new interior occupied by independent galleries surrounding  courtyards and gardens and found the Rembrandt and Contemporaries exhibition visiting from New York. (more…)

Amsterdam is known as a city of museums, containing 75 of varying scope and size.  We were interested enough to purchase IAmsterdam cards in advance providing free entry and reservations, remembering the summer’s tourist invasion.  Our conservative preference for Rembrandt and other early modern Dutch and Flemish masters led us to the Rijksmuseum during the first morning.  It wasn’t surprising to see the rainbow flag displayed over the entrance as it was everywhere else celebrating the upcoming climax of this year’s Pride Week (or month).

The building itself, another late nineteenth century combination of Gothic and Renaissance Revival style, opened onto a grand plaza and park, unlike the other compressed spaces of the city, where only the waterways offered open vistas.

On the way to the Rembrandt galleries, I relished the raunchy canvases celebrating peasant delights in drinking and sex (more…)

August 2 turned out to be a welcome transition day after the intensity of the two previous ones.  We had planned to spend it in nearby Metz with a person whom we’d last seen 37 years ago, the best friend of our son in grade 4 while we lived in Claremont CA.  After reading a recent autobiography by his mom, we’d connected by email and learned that he’d moved to France and lived on an off-grid organic farm with his wife and two children.  We were eager to see each other, but shortly before the planned visit an unfortunate circumstance required its cancellation.

After a slow morning we arrived  by train in Metz stayed in the least expensive hotel near the railroad station we could find, and next day continued on  getting a taste of local transport by switching trains in Luxemborg and Brussels.

We arrived late in the afternoon at our destination, another vast nineteenth century monument to the railroad, Amsterdam Central Station.

Crossing the bridge over the wide canal crowded with boat traffic that fronted it, we found the hotel that Jan had selected online, a small-scale tribute to the rail transportation system that continued to thrill me. (more…)