Austria/Germany/Czechoslovakia/Hungary- 1987

I’m writing this story in March, 2017, thirty years after we had taken this trip, using a one hour video I took of the trip for reference.

In 1987 we traded our house in San Rafael for one in Zwentendorf, Austria, a small town on the Danube River about forty miles from Vienna.  We found the house through a home exchange company in Marin, made contact with the owners, made the exchange for a three week period and it included our cars.

Misti, me and our two sons, David and Mike, first flew to Paris to visit with David’s friend from San Diego State, Francois, who lives in Paris.  We stayed at his apartment in Creteil and his sister Sylvie drove us all over the city showing us the sights.  We also visited with the parents of two French exchange students, Laurence and Alex, who had lived with us the previous year. This was our first time in the City of Light and it was great to be hosted and shown the sights by these friends; a wonderful introduction to Paris.  Over the next thirty years we returned to Paris many times, but this first experience remains the best.

David had planned to go to Madrid to spend a year in school and visit with friends, so after lunch our last afternoon in Paris, he hoisted his backpack and tennis racket, bid us adieu, and took a train to Madrid.  Misti, Mike and I resumed our journey without David.

On our last night in Paris Alex’s parents took us for dinner and after many glasses of excellent French wine drove us to the Gare de Est train station and poured us on our overnight train to Vienna. It was the same line previously used for the posh Orient Express to Istanbul, but our train wasn’t the fancy one.

We were met in Vienna by Eric, the eldest son of the family whose house we were trading.  He drove us the roughly forty minutes to their house in Zwentendorf, giving us lessons in German as he drove.  He and his girlfriend had prepared a wonderful Austrian spread of cheese and salami which we feasted on, a good introduction to Austrian food.  He showed us the house, gave us the keys to his father’s Audi and introduced us to some neighbors who spoke a little English. 

In 1987 Zwentendorf was a sleepy Southern Austrian village with only one restaurant, called a gasthaus, and menu choices were limited to a few schnitzel dishes.  The town didn’t have much to offer tourists other than beautiful scenery and paths along the Danube River.  Its claim to fame was a nuclear power plant, built in the early 1970’s at a cost of more than a billion dollars, which was never put into service because after it was completed Austria passed a law banning the use of nuclear plants. 

We learned that everything in the town and surrounding area closed at 5 pm, which was OK since we had planned to travel into adjacent countries and only use the house as a base. The father was the mayor of the town as well as a member of parliament, so as we drove around the village in his car, neighbors wondered who we were and would try to talk with us in German much to their frustration and ours.  But everyone was very friendly and several neighbors invited us for dinner and drinks in their weinstube (wine cellar).

Our plan was to drive into Bavaria (Germany), then Hungary and finally Czechoslovakia, spending several days in each country. 

We first spent two days in Vienna, Austria’s capital, enjoying that delightful city with its cultural history including Mozart, Beethoven and Sigmund Freud.  We strolled the central squares and of course gorged ourselves on the ubiquitous Viennese pastries accompanied by Viennese coffee.  We visited several of the Imperial palaces including the magnificent Habsburg’s summer residence, Shonbrunn.  Most memorable was the Imperial crypt or Kaisergruft at Capuchin church near Hofburg Palace where 145 members of the Habsburg royalty are interred.  It was a moving experience to see the many massive and intricate sarcophagi covering the years from the start of the Hapsburg dynasty in 1276 through its end in 1918.

We left Vienna and drove about 200 miles to Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart and the setting for the musical “Sound of Music”, where we spent two nights.  On the way we stopped at Hellbrunn Palace, known for its water features and trick fountains.  Lots of fun to navigate the paths and avoid being squirted by hidden fountains, and watch as others got soaked.  The elaborate palace was built by an archbishop in the 1600’s who was a trickster with lots of time and money.

From Salzburg we headed toward Munich but along the way saw signs for Hitler’s Eagles Nest (Kehisteinhaus) in Berchtesgaden near the Austrian/German border.   We thought we’d give it a look since it was famous during WWII as Hitler’s retreat and the southern headquarters of the Nazi party.  We were taken by bus up the winding road with magnificent views of the snowcapped Alps.  The concrete bunker was massive and it was creepy to think we were in the same spot where Hitler made many of his decisions that plunged and kept the world in a terrible war for six years. 

We crossed the border into Germany, the first time we had been to that country, and headed for Munich where we spent two nights.  Munich is Bavaria’s capital, the third largest city in Germany and famous for it’s annual Oktoberfest beer festival.  It wasn’t October but that didn’t stop us from sampling one of the city’s oldest and largest beer halls with excellent German beer and the sexy women in their traditional dirndls.

From Munich we headed east toward Budapest, a distance of about 400 miles, but first spent another day in Vienna to get a visa for Czechoslovakia which we planned to visit after Hungary.  Misti found the Hilton Budapest Hotel which is set in a former 13th century church in Budapest’s Castle District overlooking the Danube river and we stayed there for two nights while exploring the city.  Budapest is divided into two parts, Buda on the eastern side of the Danube and Pest on the western side.

In 1987 both Hungary and Czechoslovakia were part of the Soviet Union but the USSR influence in these countries was being challenged and change was in the air.  Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were happening which led to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.  At that time Hungary had a much less repressive Communist government than Czechoslovakia and we didn’t need a visa to cross from Austria into Hungary.  That was not the case with Czechoslovakia.

In Vienna we had gone to the Czech embassy to get our visas and there we got our first taste of Communist nastiness, USSR style.  Waiting in endless lines, filling out lengthy applications and being caught up in Communist inefficiency caused me to suggest to Misti that perhaps we should reconsider Czechoslovakia.  But with lots of patience she persisted and it’s good she did since it was a special experience to visit Prague and Czechoslovakia well before they were discovered by the tourist hordes.  Going across the border from Hungary into Czechoslovakia our car was searched, mirrors were put underneath to make sure we weren’t smuggling anything or anyone and we had to change $100 US dollars into Czech Kurona for each day we planned to stay.  We spent our first day in Ceske Budejovice where we toured the Budvar Brewery where Budweiser Budvar, the best selling imported beer in Germany and England, is sold.  The brewery was founded in 1516 and since 1907 there has been an ongoing battle with American Budweiser over the name.

We got on the road headed for Prague and picked up Gabriela, a young woman who was hitchhiking.  Shortly after she got in the car we were stopped for speeding and I did my usual “I only speak English” routine.  The cop wrote on his hand how many kilometers an hour we were going, I gave him the usual bribe and we were on our way.  Gabriela said she would like to show us the sights of Prague and we spent the first afternoon with her touring the city.  The hand of the Soviet Union was much heavier in Prague than in Budapest and the city was dark and quiet, statues were covered with netting, many historic buildings were being worked on, shop windows with just a few canned goods, there were few tourists and it had a medieval feel, but there was still a certain magic about the place.

We took a room in the Three Swans hotel under the Charles Bridge and the owner said he would reduce the rate if we would pay in US dollars, which we did.  That evening we took Gabriela and her boyfriend to a nice restaurant in Prague and over dinner she told us how her father and family had been persecuted, since he was a professor and was out of favor with the Czech regime, and how that limited her chances of going to school and getting employment. She asked us if we would take the two of them across the border into Austria.  Knowing that border checks in these countries can be serious, we said we’d take them up to the border but couldn’t take them into Austria since they didn’t have the necessary papers. 

Prices in Prague were ridiculously cheap and there were all sorts of items to be bought such as crystal, books, antiques and pewter ware.  We knew we weren’t supposed to bring any of this out of the country but decided if necessary we could probably just bribe the border guards.  As it turned out, when we crossed the border into Austria the guards seemed only interested in people smuggling and said nothing about our purchases.

On our last day in Prague I decided I needed a haircut and it was time to shave off the beard I had been growing for the past ten years since it was beginning to go grey.  I found a nearby barber shop and using a bit of German and hand signs told the barber I wanted her to remove my beard, which she did.  The price was two dollars and I gave her a five which made her day, and the beard has been gone ever since that day thirty years ago.

We left Prague driving back into Austria, dropped Gabriella and her boyfriend off at the border, drove back to Zwentendorf where we spent two more days, then left their car, took a train to Vienna and flew home the next day.  Thus ended our first Eastern European adventure.

Art Faibisch, March 13, 2017