The famous Palace of Culture in Warsaw is hated by many Poles who see it as a sign of Soviet oppression.
After all, it was indeed built as a sign of Soviet oppression.
Other Poles regard it as a famous landmark. It is the most famous building in Poland, although the Poles have now built a taller building, probably just to stop the Palace of Culture being listed as the tallest building in Poland.
The Palace of Culture would be demolished , except that it does pull in a lot of money.
It's in the general style of Chicago's great 1920s Art Deco skyscrapers on the Chicago River, but is much huger. Trump built his super tall hotel right across the river from the old skyscrapers. He did something really smart with his hotel. Instead of putting his big restaurant on the 98th floor, he put it on the 23rd floor so it's level with the wonderful spires and ornaments on top of the art deco buildings across the river.
Someone I used to know in the Czartoryski family calls it the whore with a ferret. But only in jest I am sure. The ermine apparently being symbolic of that profession.
The ermine reference was multi-layered. Traditionally the ermine was a symbol of purity. It was also a pun on the Lady's family name, and finally it referred to the lady's lover, Ludovico Sforza, the de facto Duke of Milan who had been bestowed the Order of the Ermine. As for calling her a whore, it was uncharitable but founded on some truth. The lady, Cecilia Gallerani, was certainly compromised, having left her family for Sforza and bore him a child out of wedlock while he was betrothed to another. But she was quite young, 15 when she became Sforza's mistress, about 16 when Leonardo painted her.
Princess Czartoryski, patriotically inspired by Poland's reform of its notoriously unwieldy constitution that gave every single noble a veto of legislation, started her national museum in the 1790s. As a gift for his mother's new collection, in 1800 her son in Paris buys Leonardo's "Lady With an Ermine" because dear old mom's new museum ought to have a Leonardo that's better than "The Mona Lisa."
Had you added a couple more cities, you could have visited Bratislava (60 miles East of Vienna), and Budapest, but only as additional days, not instead of your fine choices.
I was definitely tempted to go to Bratislava and Budapest. But at age 66, my rule is that I will spend at least two nights in each city, so I can sleep in at least one night. So I picked out a rather unambitious agenda of two nights in Berlin, four at the conference outside Berlin, three in Prague, three in Vienna, two in Krakow, and two in Warsaw. By that point I was running out of money (not that these cities are hugely expensive, but that I felt like treating myself to nice places in the center of town), so it was time to go home.
Most of the train trips were a pleasure, so one night in a city would have usually worked out. But Vienna to Krakow turned out to be a mess once the train got to Poland, so I didn't get to the lodging in Krakow until about 11pm. And then it turned out I was staying in Poland's Party Central.
But with two nights in Krakow, I could sleep in.
So, hopefully, I will get to Bratislava and Budapest another time.
I want to thank everybody who offered suggestions on where to go in the comments about a month ago. I found them highly helpful. For example, I wouldn't have gone to Krakow if numerous commenters hadn't suggest it, and that turned out to be delightful.
Mrs C and I also visited Prague and Krakow on the same trip, and slightly preferred the latter, due to its supreme walkability, and perhaps our preference for Polish over Czech food. When we were there, it was a bit less crowded also. But Prague is tremendous, too.
When you were in Krakow, did you go out to the Wieliczka Salt Mine?
BTW, I noticed you didn't spend too many pixels on your visit to Berlin. It left me cold, too. It didn't even seem very German, although that was surely my Teutonic stereotype filter obscuring the city's intense hipness and coolness (which several people had assured me of). I enjoyed nearby Potsdam much more.
I only spent one full day in Berlin, wandering around the downtown area between the central train station, the Reichstag, and Checkpoint Charlie McDonalds. It seemed quite fine by the standards of American downtowns, but once I'd been to Prague ...
For example, the open space in front of the Reichstag (or perhaps the Bundestag, I forget which) is random scrub brush. Presumably, the Berlin City Parents have some long term plan for what to do with this acreage. But the more patriotic cities I subsequently visited would have done something beautiful with the space by now, 80 years after 1945.
My guess is that I didn't get to the most interesting parts of Berlin. Also, that Berlin isn't a particularly rich town compared to Frankfurt and other hypercapitalist southwestern German cities. The downtown people appear to be largely government employees making adequate but still modest salaries.
Still, I had a good time in Berlin. It's only compared to other leading central European tourist cities that it lags.
Berlin seems not to believe it deserves to be a terrific city, the way Prague, Krakow, and Warsaw believe they deserve to be great, and Vienna is a little skittish but would prefer to recall all of its impressive history except for 1938-1945.
I started to make a running joke out of the extravagant snack bars in Vienna, such as the one inside the triumphal arch overlooking the Schonbrunn Summer Palace and the one under the 175' tall Baroque dome in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.
Munich exceeded my expectations even more than Berlin fell short. It's great.
In the late 90s we did a car trip from Heidelberg down the Romantic Road, through Bavaria, finishing up in Munich. Very fun and memorable, although I don't know how well the places along the way have held up over that time.
So far so good. However, we don't yet know the long term effects of the MENA migrant influx and the US tolls. But yes, Bavaria could become the Alpine redoubt of "white" supremacy. Switzerland and Austria are not doing that well either. Antisemitism in the latter two is stronger, for example.
I thought Berlin felt a bit like Europe's LA, in one way -- it's surprisingly spread out and roomy, for lack of a better word, because of course it got bombed into dust in WWII, so it lacks a lot of Nice Old Stuff.
But I know exactly what you mean about the Germans just not getting around to beautifying even obvious spaces like that huge field in front of the Reichstag (it is indeed the Reichstag). You'd think they'd have done something about that by now . . . .
My friends who recommended Berlin also loved its 'edgier' vibe, which seemed to me to be just a lot of graffiti and some assorted litter, but then I'm probably being hopelessly Disneyesque in my naive midwestern small-town boy's lust for prettiness, or something.
Just surface impressions, but Czech food seemed unusually stodgy. We had some very tasty meat dishes (including beef, pork, and especially duck), but they were accompanied by massive bread-like or potato 'dumplings', and lots of gravy. The dumplings were enormous, and had nothing in them. They were initially fine for accompanying the meat and mopping up the gravy, but they were so dense and large we found them unfinishable for most meals. Vegetables served ranged from cabbage to sauerkraut back to cabbage.
We found Polish food to have more range and freshness, especially in terms of using fresh vegetables and salads. We absolutely loved a kind of Polish beet soup (https://www.polonist.com/polish-cold-beet-soup-chlodnik/) served ice cold with sour cream. It was so good we worked out our own recipe for it at home, and now eat it frequently in summers. Polish cuisine also of course has pierogi, i.e. dumplings that have interesting fillings, which we also took to be an advantage over the Czech ones. It also featured a lot of sour + savory flavor combos that I really like.
But as I said, these are the impressions of just one trip. I'd love to be corrected by any aficionados of Czech cuisine out there . . . .
Czech food seems pretty indistinct. Czechia overall is the westernmost Slavic country (Slovenia, which I'd like to visit, is second). So it tends to be really good at being a generic European country, which is a good thing to be. But not that distinct.
Similarly, Prague's architecture seems like a European Greatest Hits museum, but I didn't get much of a sense of a unique Czech style.
Prague might be the ideal first city to visit on a trip to Europe because it is so European, but it might not be a good last city to visit after you've gotten the hang of Europe.
Yes, interesting take. Quite a few Slavic countries, rather infamously, lack easy-to-defend borders, so their cuisines and general styles maybe aren't quite so distinct from their neighbors.
Croatia is another good example of this. It's Slavic, but there's a lot of (generally laudable, in my book) osmosis from Italy. Historically, what's now Croatia was part of the Roman empire for a long time (so you get lesser-known but utterly spectacular remains like Diocletian's palace in Split), places like Hvar in the Croatian islands were outposts of the Venetians for hundreds of years, and so on, so the ties go way back.
It's a place where you can get Roman ruins, gorgeous cities of stone buildings with terra cotta roofs, good Italian food, and that la dolce vita vibe in combo with another very interesting history and culture.
You should. Croatia is now a mainstream tourist destination, and isn't as cheap as it used to be, but we had a fantastic time there. It's also very easy to cross over to Serbia, Montenegro (e.g. Kotor, which is tremendous), Bosnia, and so on. We took some day tours guided by locals who were only too happy to expound upon the strengths and weaknesses, historically and currently, of their former-Yugoslavian neighbors.
I can't wait to go back. I'd love to go to Slovenia and North Macedonia, and maybe give Romania a try, too.
Croatia wasn’t part of the Roman Empire - Illyria was. The southern Slavs weren’t even in the Balkans at the time of the Roman Empire. Diocletian was an Illyrian as were other Roman emperors. The modern day Illyrian’s are Albanian, not Croatian.
That’s a lot to cities to pack into one trip! Many cups of expensive coffee.
As a cranky old guy, I’m usually noticing how comfortable my own home is about day #8.
I do like the way European cities are “finished” versus American cities constant state of reconstruction. They’ve decided where the curbs should be and made them out of granite and don’t rip them apart every few years.
Did you find the number of tourists uncomfortably large? I found the mobs of tourists with earphones following tour guides annoying; but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m easily annoyed.
In Krakow, I'm guessing the majority of tourists are Poles. The Polish economy is booming and Poles from the countryside now have money to spend, so they go to their old capital of Krakow.
Stood in line to eat pastry at the arched Central Cafe in Vienna where Trotsky played chess practically every day from 1907-1913, Freud was a frequent guest, and Hitler and Stalin were said to have dropped by.
Turkey is the hair transplant capital of the world. People travel to Istanbul for a week and the travel, hotel and transplant is still a bargain compared to LA. I know that isn't responding to your statement but it's all I have to contribute.
I went to a conference in Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera in Asia, so I spent one night in Constantinople in Europe on the way back. It's definitely a 3 night city, though.
Constantinople/Istanbul is one of the world's great cities for history, obviously. We went there earlier this year, and were impressed. Cappadocia is also fantastic; layers and layers of history, in a mind-blowing landscape. Turkey also has some better Roman ruins than Rome itself, e.g. in Ephesus and Hieropolis.
I just missed being a Youtube Classic when I went to the Ephesus Library in 2009 and started walking down the main staircase, where the marble steps are buffed to slipperiness by 2000 years of tourists' footsteps. Just as an entire busload of German was walking toward me, I slipped and bounced down the entire ancient staircase. A few years later, some German would have videoed my spectacular pratfall and put it online.
That Germans flattened Warsaw in August-October 1944 was simple. Hitler believed in the WW1 Dolchstoss-Legend right to the end. So he didn't take it that Germany was utterly doomed just by the Allied landing in Normandie and Soviets destroying Heeresgruppe Mitte in Operation Bagration. Plus he just survived the Wallküre-Putsch in July 1944. So he thought he finally got rid of the traitors, and now the prospects will brighten.
Yes, despite the manifest fact that the Nazis had been in constant retreat for a year or more, there was a norm, enforced from the top, that this was all just a temporary setback—a "rationalization of the front"—and would be put right as soon as ... something or other (Wunderwaffen, end of traitors, Gott mit uns, whatever).
This was recognized as the fiction that it was among many mid-ranking Wehrmacht officers, but they weren't calling the shots, so the ones who did call the shots foolishly ended up doing Stalin's dirty work for him.
I don't know whether Dolchstoss-belief was essential to this. The same sort of refusal to let go of obvious falsehoods, no matter how self-destructive, can be seen in the many suicidally woke regimes of the West today, for example. It may just be a standard feature of post-viable ideological regimes.
Dolchstoss was THE essential component. That and Henry Ford's publications of course. Adolf Hitler "revered" Ford, saying "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany". And he did.
Almost all of what Adolf did in his policy was the direct internalization of concepts circulating in nationalist media post-WW1, based on German, White Russian and US sources. He was simply a true believer.
So there were like 30k executions re "Wehrkraftzersetzung" in the German army and many more with the civilians. Just another example: as nationalist media aggrandized the role of Islam in toughening up the fighting spirit of the Turks vis-a-vis the British at Gallipoli, he believed it. No matter that the Iraqi revolt in 1941 collapsed within days.
Mid-ranking Wehrmacht officers were obviously totally irrelevant. At his inner circle however, Himmler started to go wobbly on him after Normandie. But usually, if one is in a bubble, reappraisals of a situation are not that common.
All well and good, but there have been plenty of gratuitous repressions in history without any Dolchstoss legend in the background. There is no evidence to suggest the Dolchstoss legend was determinative in Warsaw.
Gratuitous repression is just something that tyrannies do. No legends necessary.
In general, yes, but in the case of an empire retreating before an onrushing foe, not only can they afford to ignore a revolt, it is a value-add to their own side to toss the problem into the laps of the oncoming enemy empire: a savings to the Nazis and a cost to the Soviets. But the Nazis foolishly shouldered the cost themselves thereby granting the savings to the Soviets.
Both the Nazi and Soviet empires exerted totalitarian control over communications, so it's not like Warsaw would have been an example to other fractious subjects during the brief interval between the Nazi retreat and the Soviet advance. It would just have been a footnote in some of the longer postwar histories if the Nazis hadn't indulged their sadomasochism there.
You are thinking much too "rationally" and with a 20/20 hindsight benefit. Germans were very realistically afraid of Polish revenge. Poles already took a lot of land from Germany after WW1 that was 50:50 German/Polish. They were afraid it will repeat itself. Besides, the Katyn discovery didn't sway Polish government in exile to change sides.
And yes, the Dolchstoss legend caused many Germans beyond Adolf not to wobble. True believers all. People generally underestimate the impact of true beliefs.
Japan, with no Dolchstoss legend, hung on even longer than Germany.
As mentioned, there are plenty of stubborn lost-causers in history who refused to surrender, no Dolchstoss legend necessary.
You claim to know everyone's beliefs 80 years ago in a foreign country, yet I've read many German war memoirs, and I don't recall a single one mentioning the "Dolchstoss", though they record other unflattering information. Some did mention the Morgenthau Plan though.
Some of the Confederacy thought that Robert E. Lee could not be forced to surrender. Thirty thousand half-starved barefoots couldn't hold out against Grant's 125,000 army of well-fed, well-shod, well-armed men.
Robert E. Lee was too rational. When his position became hopeless, he surrendered. What made him wait was the possibility that maybe Britain could come to the side of confederacy for geopolitical reasons.
The Morgenthau Plan received wide circulation in Germany during the war. It was Henry Morgenthau’s plan to completely destroy German industry and society and leave it as an agricultural zone. Wiser heads obviously prevailed, but many in Germany didn’t feel they had anything to lose by resisting the allied armies in the west.
Hitler professed a belief that the internal tensions in the alliance would lead to an eventual split. The split happened of course, but not in time for Adolph.
Heinlein said, "being right too soon is socially unacceptable," which is true of course, but in geopolitics it's actually a little worse than socially unacceptable. Or, said a different way, the consequences of social unacceptability are far worse.
Actually, Germans were happy to be able to surrender to the US&British after putting up a modicum of a fight. Not on the beaches of Normandie already, but thereafter.
Morgenthau's plan was more for internal consumption, to boost US fighting moral. Once the fight was over and Japan vanquished too, it was abandoned.
I disagree. No one would characterize the German post-Normandy resistance as “a modicum of a fight.” Arnhem, Aachen, the Hurtgen Forest, the Bulge, the defense of the Scheldt estuary; all of these were extremely hard-fought battles that weee certainly not marked by easy surrender.
George Marshall himself complained to Morgenthau about the effect of his plan on German resistance.
I’ve never read anything stating that the Morgenthau plan was published in order to raise home front morale, nor do I see how it would have had such an effect.
Why was Scott Baio so flush? He was a side character for a few late seasons of Happy Days, then Joanie Loves Chachi got canceled pretty quickly. His phone was likely cellular, 1982 was about when cell phones came to America and I would guess New York and LA were early adopters.
I miss the walkability of NYC and Cambridge MA. I have a wacko plan in my head--LA should build a large number of elevated bike paths to criss cross the city. It astounds me how CA cities, with the best weather in the US, are so car oriented. Winter is what stops most towns from giving up cars. If we had isolated bike paths that went everywhere, within a few years everyone would use them. Even out of shape people could use e-bikes.
There are probably flaws I've missed and I understand the great progressive state doesn't actually do big public works projects (except to funnel money to supporters-- I meant actually build them)
I suspect that the lack of isolated bike paths in LA is because of demographic reasons IYKWIMAITTYD.
But I second your Scott Baio question. Guy was third-rate hack. Probably a glitch in the agent matrix got him an advance on some momentarily auspicious but ultimately failed project.
It's possible that all Scott Baio's wealth was in that supercar wrapped around the lamppost, hence his agitation.
It also occurs to me that I was perhaps unduly critical of Mr. Baio, as I now realize that I've never seen him, acting or otherwise. I was confusing him with fellow Brooklyn-born B-lister Tony Danza, who only plays low-IQ characters named "Tony", or so legend has it.
Scott Baio had started starring in the Happy Days spinoff sitcom "Joanie Loves Chachi" a few weeks before, so he was richer than he'd ever been, and went out and bought a Lamborghini or something like that. I believe it had paper plates. Keep in mind though that I've retold this anecdote a number of times, and in my experience, when I can find something on the Internet about some incident in my life, I usually find that my memory is pretty accurate, but I've often streamlined and improved some of the details to make a punchier story. E.g., it's funnier if it was a Lamborghini with paper plates rather than, say, a Porsche with metal plates.
I imagine that Lamborghini dealers in LA are used to selling then repossessing from people who go from no credit to TV star to obscurity. I've always had trouble picturing "wrapped his car around a tree/telephone pole/lamp post". Wrapping with the car sideways makes the most sense from a final state POV but it's hard to imagine how the crash occurred in that position. The alternative I guess is slamming into the post so hard that it's driven a couple feet into the engine compartment and the front bumper bends around it until the corners meet.
I get that it's literary hyperbole, but it always confuses me. Not your problem, of course.
My vague recollection is the car must have spun out on this sharp turn on Sunset Boulevard (nobody knows for sure where Jan & Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" is, but this was as good a candidate as there is),
hopped the curve and slammed the passenger door sideways into the streetlight pole, with the sportscar bending into a v-shape around it. Scott Baio was the only person in the car, so he could exit out his driver side and stomp around on the grass while talking into his (then rare) mobile phone.
Of the five cities you visited, Krakow was perhaps my favorite... manageable size, interesting sights (the salt mine tour was interesting, if a bit long...), inexpensive, good food, AND the people seemed welcoming to Americans. I hope Poland (and the Czech republic) doesn't (don't) eventually go the way of many western European countries...
I assume the Soviets rebuilt the old palaces to remind their subjects of Romanov/Hapsburg/Hohenzollern oppression, but I wonder if it had the opposite effect.
Steven, since you mentioned American students studying abroad in nice places. Many students make the mistake of doing a semester abroad in a fun metro area for a tourist to be in such as London Paris, Rome, Vienna. However, that semester abroad is not going to help on most LinkedIn pages or resumes due to so many students doing exactly the same thing. That gives the advantage to the students who do a semester abroad outside of very white Europe.
Study Abroad mostly looks like a fun way for affluent NYU and USC students to party with each other in a romantic Old World atmosphere. It's probably not a good way to take the Organic Chemistry course you must ace to get into med school.
Study abroad is almost mandatory for international business majors, international relations, anthropology, art history, and majors such as Latin American studies or Russian studies. It is not as much of a requirement for political science or history majors. And there is no point for a STEM major to study abroad other than to be a tourist.
> Hence, don’t expect me to offer on-the-spot insights into the great issues of the time, such as immigration. <
Pretty much the *only* issue of our time.
> I mostly stuck to the expensive old towns that arose within the medieval walls.<
The greatness of Europe and European civilization has nothing to do with having a lot of old buildings around. What is truly precious is the genes of European people and the culture and achievements that they allowed us to build.
And that is precisely what is under--vicious--attack. The sheer horror of what is being perpetrated--the sheer evil of the "immigration!" propagandists and the incredible cowardice and treason of our elites would literally be "beyond belief" ... except for the fact that this genocide is actually undeniably happening.
Anything--anything--would be preferrable to what is going on. Europe would be better off with a nuclear war killing half its population and leveling its Disneyland cities than with the inundation, conquest, strangulation and extinction of its nations, its peoples. We can rebuild--rebuild the glory of our past--if we keep our nations. Once they are gone, the abyss.
What value will be in these Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque or Neoclassical remnants when the peoples who created them are extinguished? Even if not just destroyed, they really will be just Disney style entertainment--with Cinderella replaced by Princess Jasmine anyway.
Fortunately, in Europe there are--at least viewed from here in the US--signs of actual growing resistance, of nationalist ferment, of people starting to assert that their nations in fact belong to them, even the start of serious discuss of remigration. There is at least a smidgen of hope, however bleak the current view.
I'm just saying that because I stuck to the touristy Old Towns, I didn't come away with seeing a representative sample of the quantity and quality of immigration in these places, which, I believe, are mostly off the main immigration beaten path.
And it was hard to tell who was a Muslim immigrant from who was a tourist from Islamic countries.
The McDonald's near St. Stephen's in the heart of Vienna was probably the most Third World spot in my travels.
Poland, which is booming, probably has a lot of immigrants working in tourism services. But but a huge fraction of Poland's immigrants are Ukrainians, whom I'm ill-equipped to distinguish from Poles, so virtually virtually everybody in Poland looked more or less Polish to me. My guess is that the Polish blue collar and farming class is now enjoying enough prosperity to be frequent internal tourists in their own country.
There were also mostly Poles (and/or Ukrainians) on my flight home to L.A. It looked like many of them were on one of their first flights ever. When we landed in L.A., most passengers immediately stood up, shoved their way into the aisles, and then were puzzled by why they didn't immediately get to disembark the way they would on a train.
Anyway, it was pretty charming to see Poles getting to enjoy First World lifestyles after decades of Second World living.
Next: Trieste, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, or Sofiya? Not that there’s a compelling reason for that itinerary – it just sounds good! And the cities are all worth a look. They vary widely in comfort and just barely have a unifying theme. I don’t know...Alt-Slav? Peri-Yugo?
I regret failing to check out the Chinese embassy to Serbia, when I passed through in 2010. Could’ve been interesting. As for Bulgaria, possibly all of it was. I remain to this day puzzled by an immigration official growling, in Turkish, at someone in the next compartment on the train as it approached Sofiya. She said <i>istemiyorum…</i>, which means “I don’t want…” I shudder to think what the traveler had offered, presumably by way of faulty documentation. Slavic lands are all pretty benign now but Bulgaria retained some menace. It still looked Communist.
My son took an all expense paid week-long trip to Bulgaria in 2011 including airfare, hotel, and meals for $400. Now that's a deal!
On the other hand, Bulgaria is lacking in the kind of tourist attractions, like Santa Sophia, that you accumulate by taxing the surround hinterlands the way Constantinople long taxed Bulgaria.
In Stalin's phrase, "Who? Whom?" Bulgaria has generally been the Whom over the last few thousand years, so it doesn't have as many spectacular old buildings as the surrounding imperial capitals it paid taxes to.
> I'm just saying that because I stuck to the touristy Old Towns, I didn't come away with seeing a representative sample of the quantity and quality of immigration in these places, which, I believe, are mostly off the main immigration beaten path. <
Glad your Central Europe trip rolled off well Steve--and apparently was still European.
This is not the case other places. We did an AnotherFamily trip to Italy--used Turkish so three nights in Istanbul and a night on the Black Sea as well--last year. Along with the crowds, it was annoying to see blacks--and other randos--popping up everywhere.
Especially remember it in Pisa. Got off the train from Florence and start walking north toward the Tower and there was a quite noticeable smattering of blacks around. Not annoying American tourists like ourselves, but "locals"--well people living there. I'm thinking "What are they doing here? This isn't America. This place is supposed to be full of Italians, not Africans." And Italy doesn't even have a real imperial history like Britain or France--imperial ego, outweighing common sense. Just ugly and depressing. The Great Replacement underway.
This is not something that a *free* people would allow. If able to act, I'm sure the fair citizens would have repelled or expelled these invaders, as people routinely did with troublemakers in the before time.
Yet another case, where the super-state, rather than being an expression of the will of the nation--as a rightful government should be--instead acts only to suppress the nation's people from defending their own interests.
The famous Palace of Culture in Warsaw is hated by many Poles who see it as a sign of Soviet oppression.
After all, it was indeed built as a sign of Soviet oppression.
Other Poles regard it as a famous landmark. It is the most famous building in Poland, although the Poles have now built a taller building, probably just to stop the Palace of Culture being listed as the tallest building in Poland.
The Palace of Culture would be demolished , except that it does pull in a lot of money.
It's in the general style of Chicago's great 1920s Art Deco skyscrapers on the Chicago River, but is much huger. Trump built his super tall hotel right across the river from the old skyscrapers. He did something really smart with his hotel. Instead of putting his big restaurant on the 98th floor, he put it on the 23rd floor so it's level with the wonderful spires and ornaments on top of the art deco buildings across the river.
Astonishingly, there are only 2 Metro (subway? Underground?) lines in the whole of Poland and both are in Warsaw.
So places like Krakow can get bad traffic jams.
Vienna has, IIRC, six subway lines, a whole bunch of electric tram lines, and lots of buses. Plus trains.
Plus traffic jams.
Warsaw is not a big city - 2m. they used to say the 2nd biggest Polish speaking conglomeration is Chicago. All other Polish cities are 800k or less
What Warsaw does have is a suburban train network which is comparable to a Metro and partially underground, and massive Tram and Bus networks.
I love the Place of Culture and worked right by it for about 10 years.
But the main issue is that it is the same design as 7 other buildings in Moscow and so seen as the 8th sister
Russian academics are really proud, not unreasonably, of Moscow State University.
Wasn't it called "Khuy Stalina", pardon my French?
Regarding ''Lady with an Ermine": Pets and their owners really do come to resemble each other.
Someone I used to know in the Czartoryski family calls it the whore with a ferret. But only in jest I am sure. The ermine apparently being symbolic of that profession.
The ermine reference was multi-layered. Traditionally the ermine was a symbol of purity. It was also a pun on the Lady's family name, and finally it referred to the lady's lover, Ludovico Sforza, the de facto Duke of Milan who had been bestowed the Order of the Ermine. As for calling her a whore, it was uncharitable but founded on some truth. The lady, Cecilia Gallerani, was certainly compromised, having left her family for Sforza and bore him a child out of wedlock while he was betrothed to another. But she was quite young, 15 when she became Sforza's mistress, about 16 when Leonardo painted her.
Ken
Thanks.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks.
Princess Czartoryski, patriotically inspired by Poland's reform of its notoriously unwieldy constitution that gave every single noble a veto of legislation, started her national museum in the 1790s. As a gift for his mother's new collection, in 1800 her son in Paris buys Leonardo's "Lady With an Ermine" because dear old mom's new museum ought to have a Leonardo that's better than "The Mona Lisa."
Interesting.
Had you added a couple more cities, you could have visited Bratislava (60 miles East of Vienna), and Budapest, but only as additional days, not instead of your fine choices.
I was definitely tempted to go to Bratislava and Budapest. But at age 66, my rule is that I will spend at least two nights in each city, so I can sleep in at least one night. So I picked out a rather unambitious agenda of two nights in Berlin, four at the conference outside Berlin, three in Prague, three in Vienna, two in Krakow, and two in Warsaw. By that point I was running out of money (not that these cities are hugely expensive, but that I felt like treating myself to nice places in the center of town), so it was time to go home.
Most of the train trips were a pleasure, so one night in a city would have usually worked out. But Vienna to Krakow turned out to be a mess once the train got to Poland, so I didn't get to the lodging in Krakow until about 11pm. And then it turned out I was staying in Poland's Party Central.
But with two nights in Krakow, I could sleep in.
So, hopefully, I will get to Bratislava and Budapest another time.
I want to thank everybody who offered suggestions on where to go in the comments about a month ago. I found them highly helpful. For example, I wouldn't have gone to Krakow if numerous commenters hadn't suggest it, and that turned out to be delightful.
Sounds like a great trip, Steve.
Mrs C and I also visited Prague and Krakow on the same trip, and slightly preferred the latter, due to its supreme walkability, and perhaps our preference for Polish over Czech food. When we were there, it was a bit less crowded also. But Prague is tremendous, too.
When you were in Krakow, did you go out to the Wieliczka Salt Mine?
BTW, I noticed you didn't spend too many pixels on your visit to Berlin. It left me cold, too. It didn't even seem very German, although that was surely my Teutonic stereotype filter obscuring the city's intense hipness and coolness (which several people had assured me of). I enjoyed nearby Potsdam much more.
I only spent one full day in Berlin, wandering around the downtown area between the central train station, the Reichstag, and Checkpoint Charlie McDonalds. It seemed quite fine by the standards of American downtowns, but once I'd been to Prague ...
For example, the open space in front of the Reichstag (or perhaps the Bundestag, I forget which) is random scrub brush. Presumably, the Berlin City Parents have some long term plan for what to do with this acreage. But the more patriotic cities I subsequently visited would have done something beautiful with the space by now, 80 years after 1945.
My guess is that I didn't get to the most interesting parts of Berlin. Also, that Berlin isn't a particularly rich town compared to Frankfurt and other hypercapitalist southwestern German cities. The downtown people appear to be largely government employees making adequate but still modest salaries.
Still, I had a good time in Berlin. It's only compared to other leading central European tourist cities that it lags.
Berlin seems not to believe it deserves to be a terrific city, the way Prague, Krakow, and Warsaw believe they deserve to be great, and Vienna is a little skittish but would prefer to recall all of its impressive history except for 1938-1945.
I love Vienna as a tourist. It just looks the way an imperial city should look.
I started to make a running joke out of the extravagant snack bars in Vienna, such as the one inside the triumphal arch overlooking the Schonbrunn Summer Palace and the one under the 175' tall Baroque dome in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.
West-Berlin was quite nice and very liveable before the reunification in 1990. If you want to go to a really rich German city, that is Munich.
Bavaria is pretty awesome.
Munich exceeded my expectations even more than Berlin fell short. It's great.
In the late 90s we did a car trip from Heidelberg down the Romantic Road, through Bavaria, finishing up in Munich. Very fun and memorable, although I don't know how well the places along the way have held up over that time.
So far so good. However, we don't yet know the long term effects of the MENA migrant influx and the US tolls. But yes, Bavaria could become the Alpine redoubt of "white" supremacy. Switzerland and Austria are not doing that well either. Antisemitism in the latter two is stronger, for example.
I thought Berlin felt a bit like Europe's LA, in one way -- it's surprisingly spread out and roomy, for lack of a better word, because of course it got bombed into dust in WWII, so it lacks a lot of Nice Old Stuff.
But I know exactly what you mean about the Germans just not getting around to beautifying even obvious spaces like that huge field in front of the Reichstag (it is indeed the Reichstag). You'd think they'd have done something about that by now . . . .
My friends who recommended Berlin also loved its 'edgier' vibe, which seemed to me to be just a lot of graffiti and some assorted litter, but then I'm probably being hopelessly Disneyesque in my naive midwestern small-town boy's lust for prettiness, or something.
There's a lot of graffiti in central Europe.
Did you see the Hitler burn site?
Could you elaborate on why you liked Polish food more than Czech? Thx.
Just surface impressions, but Czech food seemed unusually stodgy. We had some very tasty meat dishes (including beef, pork, and especially duck), but they were accompanied by massive bread-like or potato 'dumplings', and lots of gravy. The dumplings were enormous, and had nothing in them. They were initially fine for accompanying the meat and mopping up the gravy, but they were so dense and large we found them unfinishable for most meals. Vegetables served ranged from cabbage to sauerkraut back to cabbage.
We found Polish food to have more range and freshness, especially in terms of using fresh vegetables and salads. We absolutely loved a kind of Polish beet soup (https://www.polonist.com/polish-cold-beet-soup-chlodnik/) served ice cold with sour cream. It was so good we worked out our own recipe for it at home, and now eat it frequently in summers. Polish cuisine also of course has pierogi, i.e. dumplings that have interesting fillings, which we also took to be an advantage over the Czech ones. It also featured a lot of sour + savory flavor combos that I really like.
But as I said, these are the impressions of just one trip. I'd love to be corrected by any aficionados of Czech cuisine out there . . . .
Czech food seems pretty indistinct. Czechia overall is the westernmost Slavic country (Slovenia, which I'd like to visit, is second). So it tends to be really good at being a generic European country, which is a good thing to be. But not that distinct.
Similarly, Prague's architecture seems like a European Greatest Hits museum, but I didn't get much of a sense of a unique Czech style.
Prague might be the ideal first city to visit on a trip to Europe because it is so European, but it might not be a good last city to visit after you've gotten the hang of Europe.
Yes, interesting take. Quite a few Slavic countries, rather infamously, lack easy-to-defend borders, so their cuisines and general styles maybe aren't quite so distinct from their neighbors.
Croatia is another good example of this. It's Slavic, but there's a lot of (generally laudable, in my book) osmosis from Italy. Historically, what's now Croatia was part of the Roman empire for a long time (so you get lesser-known but utterly spectacular remains like Diocletian's palace in Split), places like Hvar in the Croatian islands were outposts of the Venetians for hundreds of years, and so on, so the ties go way back.
It's a place where you can get Roman ruins, gorgeous cities of stone buildings with terra cotta roofs, good Italian food, and that la dolce vita vibe in combo with another very interesting history and culture.
I'd like to go to the Balkans.
You should. Croatia is now a mainstream tourist destination, and isn't as cheap as it used to be, but we had a fantastic time there. It's also very easy to cross over to Serbia, Montenegro (e.g. Kotor, which is tremendous), Bosnia, and so on. We took some day tours guided by locals who were only too happy to expound upon the strengths and weaknesses, historically and currently, of their former-Yugoslavian neighbors.
I can't wait to go back. I'd love to go to Slovenia and North Macedonia, and maybe give Romania a try, too.
Croatia wasn’t part of the Roman Empire - Illyria was. The southern Slavs weren’t even in the Balkans at the time of the Roman Empire. Diocletian was an Illyrian as were other Roman emperors. The modern day Illyrian’s are Albanian, not Croatian.
That’s a lot to cities to pack into one trip! Many cups of expensive coffee.
As a cranky old guy, I’m usually noticing how comfortable my own home is about day #8.
I do like the way European cities are “finished” versus American cities constant state of reconstruction. They’ve decided where the curbs should be and made them out of granite and don’t rip them apart every few years.
Did you find the number of tourists uncomfortably large? I found the mobs of tourists with earphones following tour guides annoying; but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m easily annoyed.
American towns once had granite curbstones, too. They're probably all in landfills now, not landscapes.
In Krakow, I'm guessing the majority of tourists are Poles. The Polish economy is booming and Poles from the countryside now have money to spend, so they go to their old capital of Krakow.
> I do like the way European cities are “finished” versus American cities constant state of reconstruction.
That's actually a bad sign for Europe. It signals a lack of dynamism.
"Many cups of expensive coffee."
Stood in line to eat pastry at the arched Central Cafe in Vienna where Trotsky played chess practically every day from 1907-1913, Freud was a frequent guest, and Hitler and Stalin were said to have dropped by.
"Did you find the number of tourists uncomfortably large?"
I was happy for Central Europeans that after a rough 20th Century, they seem to be enjoying a nice 21st Century.
I suspect that the tourist overload isn't quite as overwhelming as in southern Europe or northwestern Europe.
Who goes to Turkey for a single day? You should be on a watch list.
Turkey is the hair transplant capital of the world. People travel to Istanbul for a week and the travel, hotel and transplant is still a bargain compared to LA. I know that isn't responding to your statement but it's all I have to contribute.
I think I read that somewhere, yes. Good vacation idea altogether
James Bond spent time there and became friends with a Soviet woman spy.
I went to a conference in Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera in Asia, so I spent one night in Constantinople in Europe on the way back. It's definitely a 3 night city, though.
Constantinople/Istanbul is one of the world's great cities for history, obviously. We went there earlier this year, and were impressed. Cappadocia is also fantastic; layers and layers of history, in a mind-blowing landscape. Turkey also has some better Roman ruins than Rome itself, e.g. in Ephesus and Hieropolis.
I just missed being a Youtube Classic when I went to the Ephesus Library in 2009 and started walking down the main staircase, where the marble steps are buffed to slipperiness by 2000 years of tourists' footsteps. Just as an entire busload of German was walking toward me, I slipped and bounced down the entire ancient staircase. A few years later, some German would have videoed my spectacular pratfall and put it online.
That Germans flattened Warsaw in August-October 1944 was simple. Hitler believed in the WW1 Dolchstoss-Legend right to the end. So he didn't take it that Germany was utterly doomed just by the Allied landing in Normandie and Soviets destroying Heeresgruppe Mitte in Operation Bagration. Plus he just survived the Wallküre-Putsch in July 1944. So he thought he finally got rid of the traitors, and now the prospects will brighten.
Yes, despite the manifest fact that the Nazis had been in constant retreat for a year or more, there was a norm, enforced from the top, that this was all just a temporary setback—a "rationalization of the front"—and would be put right as soon as ... something or other (Wunderwaffen, end of traitors, Gott mit uns, whatever).
This was recognized as the fiction that it was among many mid-ranking Wehrmacht officers, but they weren't calling the shots, so the ones who did call the shots foolishly ended up doing Stalin's dirty work for him.
I don't know whether Dolchstoss-belief was essential to this. The same sort of refusal to let go of obvious falsehoods, no matter how self-destructive, can be seen in the many suicidally woke regimes of the West today, for example. It may just be a standard feature of post-viable ideological regimes.
Dolchstoss was THE essential component. That and Henry Ford's publications of course. Adolf Hitler "revered" Ford, saying "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany". And he did.
Almost all of what Adolf did in his policy was the direct internalization of concepts circulating in nationalist media post-WW1, based on German, White Russian and US sources. He was simply a true believer.
So there were like 30k executions re "Wehrkraftzersetzung" in the German army and many more with the civilians. Just another example: as nationalist media aggrandized the role of Islam in toughening up the fighting spirit of the Turks vis-a-vis the British at Gallipoli, he believed it. No matter that the Iraqi revolt in 1941 collapsed within days.
Mid-ranking Wehrmacht officers were obviously totally irrelevant. At his inner circle however, Himmler started to go wobbly on him after Normandie. But usually, if one is in a bubble, reappraisals of a situation are not that common.
All well and good, but there have been plenty of gratuitous repressions in history without any Dolchstoss legend in the background. There is no evidence to suggest the Dolchstoss legend was determinative in Warsaw.
Gratuitous repression is just something that tyrannies do. No legends necessary.
Imperialists can't afford to let a revolt continue in even one place. That would encourage others.
In general, yes, but in the case of an empire retreating before an onrushing foe, not only can they afford to ignore a revolt, it is a value-add to their own side to toss the problem into the laps of the oncoming enemy empire: a savings to the Nazis and a cost to the Soviets. But the Nazis foolishly shouldered the cost themselves thereby granting the savings to the Soviets.
Both the Nazi and Soviet empires exerted totalitarian control over communications, so it's not like Warsaw would have been an example to other fractious subjects during the brief interval between the Nazi retreat and the Soviet advance. It would just have been a footnote in some of the longer postwar histories if the Nazis hadn't indulged their sadomasochism there.
You are thinking much too "rationally" and with a 20/20 hindsight benefit. Germans were very realistically afraid of Polish revenge. Poles already took a lot of land from Germany after WW1 that was 50:50 German/Polish. They were afraid it will repeat itself. Besides, the Katyn discovery didn't sway Polish government in exile to change sides.
And yes, the Dolchstoss legend caused many Germans beyond Adolf not to wobble. True believers all. People generally underestimate the impact of true beliefs.
Japan, with no Dolchstoss legend, hung on even longer than Germany.
As mentioned, there are plenty of stubborn lost-causers in history who refused to surrender, no Dolchstoss legend necessary.
You claim to know everyone's beliefs 80 years ago in a foreign country, yet I've read many German war memoirs, and I don't recall a single one mentioning the "Dolchstoss", though they record other unflattering information. Some did mention the Morgenthau Plan though.
Some of the Confederacy thought that Robert E. Lee could not be forced to surrender. Thirty thousand half-starved barefoots couldn't hold out against Grant's 125,000 army of well-fed, well-shod, well-armed men.
Robert E. Lee was too rational. When his position became hopeless, he surrendered. What made him wait was the possibility that maybe Britain could come to the side of confederacy for geopolitical reasons.
The Morgenthau Plan received wide circulation in Germany during the war. It was Henry Morgenthau’s plan to completely destroy German industry and society and leave it as an agricultural zone. Wiser heads obviously prevailed, but many in Germany didn’t feel they had anything to lose by resisting the allied armies in the west.
Hitler professed a belief that the internal tensions in the alliance would lead to an eventual split. The split happened of course, but not in time for Adolph.
Heinlein said, "being right too soon is socially unacceptable," which is true of course, but in geopolitics it's actually a little worse than socially unacceptable. Or, said a different way, the consequences of social unacceptability are far worse.
It's not clear to me if and when wiser heads really did prevail, except perhaps in abandoning the name of the Morgenthau Plan.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-post-war-france-and-post-war-germany/#p_1_29:17-56
Actually, Germans were happy to be able to surrender to the US&British after putting up a modicum of a fight. Not on the beaches of Normandie already, but thereafter.
Morgenthau's plan was more for internal consumption, to boost US fighting moral. Once the fight was over and Japan vanquished too, it was abandoned.
I disagree. No one would characterize the German post-Normandy resistance as “a modicum of a fight.” Arnhem, Aachen, the Hurtgen Forest, the Bulge, the defense of the Scheldt estuary; all of these were extremely hard-fought battles that weee certainly not marked by easy surrender.
George Marshall himself complained to Morgenthau about the effect of his plan on German resistance.
I’ve never read anything stating that the Morgenthau plan was published in order to raise home front morale, nor do I see how it would have had such an effect.
Why was Scott Baio so flush? He was a side character for a few late seasons of Happy Days, then Joanie Loves Chachi got canceled pretty quickly. His phone was likely cellular, 1982 was about when cell phones came to America and I would guess New York and LA were early adopters.
I miss the walkability of NYC and Cambridge MA. I have a wacko plan in my head--LA should build a large number of elevated bike paths to criss cross the city. It astounds me how CA cities, with the best weather in the US, are so car oriented. Winter is what stops most towns from giving up cars. If we had isolated bike paths that went everywhere, within a few years everyone would use them. Even out of shape people could use e-bikes.
There are probably flaws I've missed and I understand the great progressive state doesn't actually do big public works projects (except to funnel money to supporters-- I meant actually build them)
I suspect that the lack of isolated bike paths in LA is because of demographic reasons IYKWIMAITTYD.
But I second your Scott Baio question. Guy was third-rate hack. Probably a glitch in the agent matrix got him an advance on some momentarily auspicious but ultimately failed project.
Scott Baio became rich and Erin Moran ended living in a trailer park. How did that happen?
It's possible that all Scott Baio's wealth was in that supercar wrapped around the lamppost, hence his agitation.
It also occurs to me that I was perhaps unduly critical of Mr. Baio, as I now realize that I've never seen him, acting or otherwise. I was confusing him with fellow Brooklyn-born B-lister Tony Danza, who only plays low-IQ characters named "Tony", or so legend has it.
Baio had at least one more successful show "Charles in Charge".
Baio gave a speech endorsing Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
He was a popular character on "Arrested Development" as family attorney Bob Loblaw, author of Bob Loblaw's Law Blog.
Scott Baio had started starring in the Happy Days spinoff sitcom "Joanie Loves Chachi" a few weeks before, so he was richer than he'd ever been, and went out and bought a Lamborghini or something like that. I believe it had paper plates. Keep in mind though that I've retold this anecdote a number of times, and in my experience, when I can find something on the Internet about some incident in my life, I usually find that my memory is pretty accurate, but I've often streamlined and improved some of the details to make a punchier story. E.g., it's funnier if it was a Lamborghini with paper plates rather than, say, a Porsche with metal plates.
I imagine that Lamborghini dealers in LA are used to selling then repossessing from people who go from no credit to TV star to obscurity. I've always had trouble picturing "wrapped his car around a tree/telephone pole/lamp post". Wrapping with the car sideways makes the most sense from a final state POV but it's hard to imagine how the crash occurred in that position. The alternative I guess is slamming into the post so hard that it's driven a couple feet into the engine compartment and the front bumper bends around it until the corners meet.
I get that it's literary hyperbole, but it always confuses me. Not your problem, of course.
My vague recollection is the car must have spun out on this sharp turn on Sunset Boulevard (nobody knows for sure where Jan & Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" is, but this was as good a candidate as there is),
https://www.google.com/search?num=10&sca_esv=dbbcd87e5f308596&sxsrf=AE3TifMmlsJcX2oCmtOWz-nVAriBG-lKqw:1754031502592&udm=7&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeoJTKjrFjVxydQWqI2NcOhYPURIv2wPgv_w_sE_0Sc6QogS5TvEDp7UpbJYBVowPixqwW1m3RxusXeC54mlaBukI-u11T8A4p_RoeB8Zd5XkUrSSuQd1RmntXpoeT5OCau1r5sZxcabp8_wMX507cRuTxRAAlmoUaYXhQYLDPQWL9DB5tQ&q=jan+dean+dead+man%27s+curve&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwiA-YvFhOmOAxUdJEQIHcTKFuEQtKgLegQIHxAB&biw=1396&bih=660&dpr=2.2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:5be6f022,vid:2anGjB0d8Sw,st:0
hopped the curve and slammed the passenger door sideways into the streetlight pole, with the sportscar bending into a v-shape around it. Scott Baio was the only person in the car, so he could exit out his driver side and stomp around on the grass while talking into his (then rare) mobile phone.
That's great! It's gratifying to learn that the image in my head actually happens.
Of the five cities you visited, Krakow was perhaps my favorite... manageable size, interesting sights (the salt mine tour was interesting, if a bit long...), inexpensive, good food, AND the people seemed welcoming to Americans. I hope Poland (and the Czech republic) doesn't (don't) eventually go the way of many western European countries...
I assume the Soviets rebuilt the old palaces to remind their subjects of Romanov/Hapsburg/Hohenzollern oppression, but I wonder if it had the opposite effect.
Steven, since you mentioned American students studying abroad in nice places. Many students make the mistake of doing a semester abroad in a fun metro area for a tourist to be in such as London Paris, Rome, Vienna. However, that semester abroad is not going to help on most LinkedIn pages or resumes due to so many students doing exactly the same thing. That gives the advantage to the students who do a semester abroad outside of very white Europe.
Study Abroad mostly looks like a fun way for affluent NYU and USC students to party with each other in a romantic Old World atmosphere. It's probably not a good way to take the Organic Chemistry course you must ace to get into med school.
Study abroad is almost mandatory for international business majors, international relations, anthropology, art history, and majors such as Latin American studies or Russian studies. It is not as much of a requirement for political science or history majors. And there is no point for a STEM major to study abroad other than to be a tourist.
> Hence, don’t expect me to offer on-the-spot insights into the great issues of the time, such as immigration. <
Pretty much the *only* issue of our time.
> I mostly stuck to the expensive old towns that arose within the medieval walls.<
The greatness of Europe and European civilization has nothing to do with having a lot of old buildings around. What is truly precious is the genes of European people and the culture and achievements that they allowed us to build.
And that is precisely what is under--vicious--attack. The sheer horror of what is being perpetrated--the sheer evil of the "immigration!" propagandists and the incredible cowardice and treason of our elites would literally be "beyond belief" ... except for the fact that this genocide is actually undeniably happening.
Anything--anything--would be preferrable to what is going on. Europe would be better off with a nuclear war killing half its population and leveling its Disneyland cities than with the inundation, conquest, strangulation and extinction of its nations, its peoples. We can rebuild--rebuild the glory of our past--if we keep our nations. Once they are gone, the abyss.
What value will be in these Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque or Neoclassical remnants when the peoples who created them are extinguished? Even if not just destroyed, they really will be just Disney style entertainment--with Cinderella replaced by Princess Jasmine anyway.
Fortunately, in Europe there are--at least viewed from here in the US--signs of actual growing resistance, of nationalist ferment, of people starting to assert that their nations in fact belong to them, even the start of serious discuss of remigration. There is at least a smidgen of hope, however bleak the current view.
Sure.
I'm just saying that because I stuck to the touristy Old Towns, I didn't come away with seeing a representative sample of the quantity and quality of immigration in these places, which, I believe, are mostly off the main immigration beaten path.
And it was hard to tell who was a Muslim immigrant from who was a tourist from Islamic countries.
The McDonald's near St. Stephen's in the heart of Vienna was probably the most Third World spot in my travels.
Poland, which is booming, probably has a lot of immigrants working in tourism services. But but a huge fraction of Poland's immigrants are Ukrainians, whom I'm ill-equipped to distinguish from Poles, so virtually virtually everybody in Poland looked more or less Polish to me. My guess is that the Polish blue collar and farming class is now enjoying enough prosperity to be frequent internal tourists in their own country.
There were also mostly Poles (and/or Ukrainians) on my flight home to L.A. It looked like many of them were on one of their first flights ever. When we landed in L.A., most passengers immediately stood up, shoved their way into the aisles, and then were puzzled by why they didn't immediately get to disembark the way they would on a train.
Anyway, it was pretty charming to see Poles getting to enjoy First World lifestyles after decades of Second World living.
The last sentence about Berlin was interesting, but then the article just ends. Is there a part two?
Articles just ending is Steve Sailer trademark.
Next: Trieste, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, or Sofiya? Not that there’s a compelling reason for that itinerary – it just sounds good! And the cities are all worth a look. They vary widely in comfort and just barely have a unifying theme. I don’t know...Alt-Slav? Peri-Yugo?
I regret failing to check out the Chinese embassy to Serbia, when I passed through in 2010. Could’ve been interesting. As for Bulgaria, possibly all of it was. I remain to this day puzzled by an immigration official growling, in Turkish, at someone in the next compartment on the train as it approached Sofiya. She said <i>istemiyorum…</i>, which means “I don’t want…” I shudder to think what the traveler had offered, presumably by way of faulty documentation. Slavic lands are all pretty benign now but Bulgaria retained some menace. It still looked Communist.
My son took an all expense paid week-long trip to Bulgaria in 2011 including airfare, hotel, and meals for $400. Now that's a deal!
On the other hand, Bulgaria is lacking in the kind of tourist attractions, like Santa Sophia, that you accumulate by taxing the surround hinterlands the way Constantinople long taxed Bulgaria.
In Stalin's phrase, "Who? Whom?" Bulgaria has generally been the Whom over the last few thousand years, so it doesn't have as many spectacular old buildings as the surrounding imperial capitals it paid taxes to.
> I'm just saying that because I stuck to the touristy Old Towns, I didn't come away with seeing a representative sample of the quantity and quality of immigration in these places, which, I believe, are mostly off the main immigration beaten path. <
Glad your Central Europe trip rolled off well Steve--and apparently was still European.
This is not the case other places. We did an AnotherFamily trip to Italy--used Turkish so three nights in Istanbul and a night on the Black Sea as well--last year. Along with the crowds, it was annoying to see blacks--and other randos--popping up everywhere.
Especially remember it in Pisa. Got off the train from Florence and start walking north toward the Tower and there was a quite noticeable smattering of blacks around. Not annoying American tourists like ourselves, but "locals"--well people living there. I'm thinking "What are they doing here? This isn't America. This place is supposed to be full of Italians, not Africans." And Italy doesn't even have a real imperial history like Britain or France--imperial ego, outweighing common sense. Just ugly and depressing. The Great Replacement underway.
This is not something that a *free* people would allow. If able to act, I'm sure the fair citizens would have repelled or expelled these invaders, as people routinely did with troublemakers in the before time.
Yet another case, where the super-state, rather than being an expression of the will of the nation--as a rightful government should be--instead acts only to suppress the nation's people from defending their own interests.
Vienna! https://millerandybeth.substack.com/p/a-love-letter-to-vienna