In Budapest

I'm in Budapest tonight, having arrived here this afternoon from Vienna by train. I'll be staying the next couple of days with friends of mine here whom I've known since my Milwaukee days back in the early '90's when they were studying linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Hungarian is a nearly incomprehensible language to foreigners, so I am fortunate that both Gyöngyi and Marton, being accomplished linguists and translators, speak excellent English! It's fun to catch up with them after not having seen them for 9 years since I last was in Hungary.

My travels since last I wrote have taken me to Salzburg and the Salzkammergut lake district of Austria,
Salzburg, Austria

Halstatt, Austria

Cesky Krumlov and Prague in the Czech Republic,

Cesky Krumlov in southern Bohemia

Prague, Charles Bridge by night

Dresden in Germany,

The reconstructed Frauenkirche

Some young street musicians in Dresden

and to Slovakia last Thursday, 10/15, to visit an orphanage supported by a Viennese church group called "Project Centipede." We distributed boxes of toys and supplies to the 20 or so children who are staying there in a church sponsored orphanage in the village of Jelko, mostly because of domestic abuse and neglect in their homes.

Some of the boys, receiving the gifts we brought



It was interesting to see the contrast between Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which has new malls and all kinds of economic development springing up, and Jelko, 25 miles to the east, which looks like a town time forgot, out in the middle of the Slovak farm country. It was a pretty forlorn scene, particularly as it was snowing that day, the earliest on record in 25 years (not unlike Minnesota!), and our van nearly got stuck in a muddy road that we'd taken a wrong turn down by mistake on our way there.



Lest you think that I've been doing too much church-like work on this sabbatical, which is meant to be time away from church-related endeavors, I will close this with some photos taken from the last two days I spent in Austria, seeing castles and palaces, etc.,

Burg Forchtenstein in Austria's easternmost province, Burgenland

visiting the graves of great composers,

Beethoven's grave in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof

and having a "Jause" (high tea) in a Viennese cafe (Dommayer's) where Johann Strauss got his start playing in his father's orchestra. It was a very "gemütlich" atmosphere, sipping "cafe melange" and eating a piece of raspberry torte there on a rainy Saturday afternoon!

At Dommayer's Cafe in Vienna's Hietzing neighborhood

So I leave Vienna after six weeks of being based there, having had the chance to absorb not only coffee and pastries, but a lot of the sights of Central Europe as well as some spiritual insights about life, which I look forward to sharing with you when I get back to St. Paul in the middle of November. Vienna is a mellow place with a slightly melancholy sense of timelessness and eternity about it that I thought this last photo of a man walking with his hands clasped European-style behind his back in the Schönbrunn Palace park expresses.