Tuesday: October 8
Melk / Krems (Austria), A Nice Walk
In the morning we went up to the
Melk Abbey.
It was a very ornate
Baroque abbey. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow pictures inside. Apparently the
policy used to be no flash pictures, but people kept taking flash pictures, so
they said no pictures.
One room had an interesting ceiling fresco. There were painted
columns at the corners of the ceiling. From the center of the room, they looked
straight, vertical, and normal. But if you walked to the edge of the room and
looked at the columns, they were tipped at funny angles and looked rather
strange.
In the church, they had descriptions of the frescos and such. I
was reading them rather quickly, and I made an interesting mistake. It said
that there was a flying squirrels waiting for this person’s soul, and I could
not find anything that looked like a squirrel. It was an unusual thing to see
in a church, so I was quite curious. In hindsight, I had read “flying ____el”,
and my brain had filled in “squirrel”. The actual text, which made a lot more
sense, talked about a “flying angel”.
After the real tour and looking through the church and visiting
the observation tower, Amy and I went to check out the gardens. Amy was more
interested in that than I was.
Afterwards, rather than taking the bus back, we
opted to walk back. It ended up being shorter than I expected. It took us a
half hour, and that was with copious stops to take pictures. We thought it was
definitely the preferable way to go. We took
some stairs
that dropped us into a
quaint little pedestrian shopping area.
As we walked towards the river, we got
varying glimpses of the abbey above us. Then we crossed a small bridge and
walked “though the forest”. This was essentially a road rather than a trail.
That popped us out by the boats.
I wore my heavy shirt and red jacket. That was about right. It
was overcast, but we’re supposed to get a little sun in the afternoon.
They wanted us back by 1:45, and by 2:00 we were sailing
downstream. This is supposed to be a very scenic part of the cruise, sort of
like the Rhine Castle section.
—
Amy and I went to the sun deck. I wore my down vest, red fleece
jacket, and knit hat. It was rather breezy and chilly up there. A popular spot
was just behind the Plexiglas wind breaks. The sun came out more and more, and
the wind dropped, and it seemed to warm up.
Just before we reached Krems, we passed under a
medium low bridge.
They retracted the pilot house, and dropped the supports for the
awnings, but they left the railings and stuff up. This wasn’t as low as the one
the previous day. I don’t think I could have touched it as we went under.
Then we docked at Krems. Some people were going off on a wine
tasting excursion, but for the rest of us, we just had free time. They ran a
shuttle bus from the boat to the center of town, but it was only a 30 minute
walk (at least for Amy and myself).
One of the officers had to throw a weighted line some distance
from the boat to the shore to pull over the mooring lines. His technique was
interesting. He measured out a distance from the weight and tied an overhand
knot to mark the spot. Then he carefully coiled the rope. I was wondering how
he was going to fling the weight. I was picturing underhanded, side-armed, or
overhead, but he did none of these. He turned his back to the shore, spread his
legs, swung the weight between his legs, and then jerked it forward and up,
over his head, and sailing in a high arc behind him, which is where the shore
was. If I had known he was going to do that, I would have taken a video of it,
but before I realized what he was doing, it was over.
We took the first shuttle bus in, which was pretty full. We got
left off near a park with a fountain. We decided to explore the shopping area
first, and visit the fountain on the way back (which was a mistake). We
wandered through the pedestrian shopping area for a while, then we took a left
turn to visit an interesting church. It was Baroque. The inside was a bit dark,
but they had something I have never seen before. You could put some coins in
something vaguely like a vending machine, and this would put the lights on for
a period of time.
When we left there, we saw that there was another church up the
hill from us. This one was in the Gothic style. To get to the church, we had to
go up a
long covered stairway.
I seem to have over-used my right thigh, as it seems
a bit unhappy with going up and down stairs.
The church had an interesting abbreviated
Stations of the Cross
on the outside of the church. Each panel filled one bay between two buttresses.
There was a life-sized statue and painted background.
After we finished with this church, we wandered downhill until we
found our way back to the pedestrian shopping area. We went back to the bus
stop, and then went over to the park. We were disappointed to find that the
fountain was turned off for the day.
We proceeded to walk back to the boat. We ran across some
particularly interesting mushrooms,
as well as some sort of art museum, I
think, that was shaped in a particularly interesting
curvy way.
We got back to the boat after a 30-minute walk. We checked out the
swing in a nearby playground,
and then we reboarded. I went up to the lounge,
and wrote up the day’s events.
During the Port Talk, he mentioned that tomorrow,
in addition to the normal
“panoramic tour”, there was also an optional free tour that avoided the bus ride
and which did more walking. They could only take 28 people, so I raced down to
sign up. Not surprisingly, we were the first to sign up.
—
Dinner ran a bit long. The evening entertainment
was a
pair of ballet dancers
giving us a waltz demonstration, and a very basic Viennese Waltz
workshop. It was supposed to start at 8:45, but at 8:40, we still hadn’t gotten
dessert. We got our dessert, scarfed it down, and hurried up, expecting to find
them doing a demo for 3 people.
It turns out that they delayed the dance demo. We were up,
sitting in the front row, well before 9, but they didn’t start until well past
9. The first portion was a mixture of dance demonstrations and some history of
the development of the waltz. Then they started the workshop portion. They
asked for a male volunteer, and just before I tried to volunteer, the dancer
picked another man to be the “volunteer”, so I missed my chance.
Amy and I have some experience dancing, but the best I can say is
that our efforts in the workshop were not a complete train wreck. The Viennese waltz is a very
different creature than the basic English waltz, which is what we’re used to. I
think we could do a decent job, but we would need more than 10 minutes of
direction/practice, a lot more practice, and more space to avoid playing bumper
cars.
We noticed that the boat was docked, and we correctly surmised
that this was to put off the dancers. As soon as they were finished and changed
into more normal clothes, they left the ship, and we set sail. We should be
arriving in Vienna around breakfast tomorrow.
There are only three days left in the trip: two days in Vienna
and then one in Budapest, and then it will “exit to reality”.
