Europe By Train: Last Stop: Edinburgh: Old Town Wanderings

For our last stop, we chose Old Town Chambers, a comfortable and elegant apartment-hotel. It was nice to grocery shop and cook at "home."

Down the street from Castle Rock, this was a perfect base of exploration. Here is the view from one of our windows.

The next day we set off up the Royal Mile, which runs between Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace, the Scottish residence of the British monarch. We turned down Lady Stairs Close (alleyway) to the Writers' Museum.

The Lady's house is now a tribute to three Scottish writers, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. As a girl I loved Scott's epic, Ivanhoe, one of the novels that set me dreaming of distant lands.

We climbed winding stairs designed to keep burglars out.

I imagined what treasures might lie in the locked attic.

I was especially drawn to Robert Lewis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The celebrity writer led a grand, adventurous life, traveling the world. After visiting the US, he settled in Samoa with his family, eventually dying there. He was known as Tusitala, Teller of Tales.

It was a blustery day, Edinburgh Castle stark and forbidding.

From here we could see the harbor and imagine ships coming to call from distant ports.

The clouds passed as we headed back down toward St. Giles Cathedral. 

Inside was a memorial to lives lost defending the Empire in 19C India.

The next day I wandered around our hilly neighborhood, enthralled by the magical setting, which no doubt informed the world of J. K. Rowling.

Mysterious angles beckoned at every corner, promising secrets to unfold.

Peering through Advocate's Close, I viewed the Victorian monument to Sir Walter Scott, the world's largest monument to a writer.

What a town! On this short visit, I was left wanting...More Edinburgh! More Scotland! The Festival calls me and the far mysterious northlands. But for now, it was time to connect through Heathrow and fly home.

Coming next week: A recap of Europe By Train 2016

Coming January 2017: Sri Lanka and southern India

Europe by Train: Over the Alps to Zurich

We’d gone to Italy for the soul and were now heading to Zurich for friendship—to visit one of my very oldest friends, married to a Swiss. After leaving Bologna, we connected through Milano, the station just as you would expect for this fashionable city, grand and elegant.

I haven’t mentioned yet the Man in Seat Sixty-One, www.seat61.com. This website has proved invaluable over several train (and ferry) trips, and I can’t recommend it enough. Based on his advice, I buy the tickets online and have never had a problem…only great adventures.

Milan is near the border and soon we crossed into Switzerland…and began climbing, our glued to the window. This is picture-postcard land, little need for words.

We continued our scenery-watching in the dining car, complete with white tablecloths and even bigger windows. Perfect for sipping espresso and watching the mountain villages and lakes pass by.

My friend met us at the Zurich railway station, spacious and orderly, and drove us to her home overlooking the lake. Carol’s village was a steep walk uphill so later we piled back in the car to visit it and her office, from which she publishes the monthly Historic Motor Racing News. She is quite a woman, but that is another story (perhaps for one of my books)! 

The next day we visited the Old Town and had a fabulous lunch at LaZoupa, where her husband, the company’s founder, arranged a delicious tasting menu out of their international range of offerings. He met us there, arriving by electric bicycle.

Like Bologna, Old Town is pedestrian only, divided by the Limmat River, which flows into Lake Zurich. This side is hilly and vibrant, known for being “edgier” than the left bank with its designer boutiques. Crossing the bridge, we were enthralled with the crisscrossing ferries and boats, the peaky Swiss spires.

I wished we’d had time to visit the illustrious old Opera House. 

I wished we’d had time for more explorations of the city and the magnificent countryside, but I was focused on my friend, catching up and getting to know her husband better. They are a great couple and we parted sadly, cherishing a connection that has taken us through many lives—and that’s only in this one.

Carol put us on the local train that would take us to the central station, promising that it would arrive exactly on time. It did.

Downtown, we boarded the TGV, the Train à Grande Vitesse. By an anomaly of online booking, our first class tickets on the Zurich-Paris line, Lyria, cost little more than second class—lunch and wine included! We were off for Paris and the Van Gogh Trail.

A bientôt. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2016_06_01_archive.html

Europe By Train #8: Vienna: Moving On

Imagine you lived in a 600-year-old kingdom, Austria-Hungary, which ruled a vast swath of central Europe, its own world of high culture, literature, art, and music. And then one day at the end of the Great War, you awoke to see your grand imperial city, Vienna, reduced to the capital of a small, powerless state.

This is the story of Austria in the last century. It would have been a bitter moment that nourished the dreams of at least one Austrian, Adolf Hitler, to ally with another great people and reclaim past glory.  

Located at a crossroads of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Vienna is now a UN center - where peoples of every culture come to debate, decide, mingle, and shop. Its brand-names and boulevards draw legions of Islamic women in an array of hijab from black veils and gloves to chic turbans, tunics, and leggings. Men in cargo shorts cross paths with ones in lederhosen. And everyone eats gelato.

The great Kunst Historisches Museum offers a sampling of the fabulous Hapsburg treasures in a sumptuous palace of Western art built only twenty years before their fall. The richness of the building almost overshadows the art, but Vermeer, Brueghel, Rubens and Rembrandt manage to hold their own.  

I discover the 16C Italian Mannerist painter, Arcimboldo, whose work has a bit of a psychedelic quality. This is Flora. After she was impregnated by the wind god, Zephyr, the world burst into blossom. When you look closely at the portrait, you will see that she is composed of all flowers.

In contrast with the museum's baroque splendor, the city's modern aesthetic is simple and elegant, from her markets' pristine food arrays to our stylish small hotel, Holmann Beletage, where we feel like house guests of a witty host. 

One evening, we enjoy a screening of The Third Man, set in post-WW2 Vienna. 

From our Old Town base, our wanderings take us from the Danube canal through streets that all meet at St. Stephan's...

To Albertina Museum, featuring an exhibit on Antoniono's classic film, Blowup. 

To more personal displays of street art...

To winding back lanes where I love to lose myself.

Then once again, we have a train to catch. 

Next stop: Venice. http://dianarchambers.blogspot.com/2014/08/europe-by-train-9-venice-through-her.html