SWMBO and I are tossing around the idea of spending 10-12 days or so in Prague, Vienna, and maybe Salzburg or Budapest the middle of December. See a bunch of concerts, do some Christmas shopping, drink a lot of hot mulled wine, etc..
Ya'll are a worldly, cosmopolitan bunch; any suggestions on places to stay, places to eat, things you have to see?
TTT
Well.....I for one have St. Petersburg, Russia on my bucket list.
gschrock, post: 448124, member: 556 wrote: October is the latest I've been to those places, but December should not be particularly miserable weather-wise. There is a kinda grey charm to the old architecture.
if you are skiers, Salzburg is near enough Innsbruck.... and near Salzurg is the (morbid but fascinating) Eagles Nest (but the perilous local bus that crawls to the top might be closed in Dec). The hidden attraction of "salt-Burg" are the salt mines (you have to slide down wooden rails and take boats through the tunnels reaching far back into the mountains).
Vienna is huge and traffic snarled, but if you are into the palaces and museums is amazing. Smaller wards north of the river have neat little guest houses and micro-hotels frozen in time, but a fun stay., A side trip is over to Bratislava (pardon my bias.. I have Slovak roots). like a smaller version of Prague, and with that bizarre cold-war era monstrosity of a skewed-tower bridge (had a cafe at the top last time there). The slow train line (on the east side) that winds in and out of Slovakia and Austria to Budapest was a lot of fun before the end of the cold war (the checkpoints had particular fun with an American).
Budapest is also a lot like Prague and Bratislava; nice castles on the hill, scenic bridges, cool little wards, amazing food. the lake is not much in the fall/winter.
While Prague is completely overrun with tourists, I am sure you would enjoy a visit to the Josefov district and some of Kafka's haunts. A day trip is over to Pilsn if you can arrange a brewery tour (come to think of it, that was the last time I had a beer decades ago) and seeing the industrial remnants of the cold war (the Skoda plant looks like it was CGI'd for a dystopian movie).
I did not see the program until after I had visited these places, but Rick Steve's does a really good job on them.
Thanks.
My 'If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium days" of trying to see everything are behind me; I'm thinking the three "C"s...cathedrals, cafes & concerts. We were in London, Paris & Dublin last year between Christmas and Epiphany and my wife really liked the more, let say, restrained and noncommercial, holiday atmosphere so we thought we'd try a few weeks before Christmas. Plus flights and hotels are dirt cheap that time of year and I don't really mind cold/damp/possible snow (I cut quite a dashing figure in a Barbour jacket & scarf, if I do say so myself). Bad weather is just an excuse to pop in into a cafe to warm up.
The music season traditionally starts in the fall and from what I've been seeing, concert tickets (especially in Prague and Budapest) are pennies on the dollar compared to DC or going up to NYC for the weekend. The same seats that would run $350+ at the Met and $250 at the Kennedy Center are $45 at the Czech Opera and $27 at the Hungarian State Opera. The most expensive tickets to the see the Czech Philharmonic Advent Concert are $12.
That's the one part of Europe I've never gotten around to seeing with all the time I've spent across the pond. I was telling a friend who's the political opposite of me the other day that I don't have a problem with a pan-European political body crossing national lines like the EU in theory; like any reactionary I'd just prefer that, rather than Brussels, it was based in Vienna and administered by the House of Habsburg 😉
If you're going to Salzburg, perhaps you could get some skiing time in. There's plenty of places to ski nearby. Berchtesgaden, Tirol, Innsbruck aren't too far away. The good thing is that some of those places have gasthauses half way up the slope. You can always stop in on the way up and have a couple of shots of schnapps to stay warm... and on the way down...
