Three weeks to go

Guten Morgen meine Freunde


Prost!  Proost!  Salut!  Egészségedre?

"Cheers" is a word I like to learn when visiting new countries as it is a friendly word and easy to say - but Cheers in Hungarian?  Can you imagine trying to get your tongue around that one after a couple of heart starters?

With only three weeks to go, a friend freshly returned from her European river cruise, has offered me some hints and tips for my trip. 

“The train trip from Paris to Amsterdam is brilliant and the Mozart concert in Vienna is a must.   But do not take the coach from Budapest to Prague!  The stinking concrete road and the bang, bang, banging over 200km of expansion joints, make it the worst trip ever!”  

 “Monet’s garden and house outside Paris was an absolute highlight.  The tour guide was sensational and imparted her knowledge with such passion that she could have been Monet’s daughter herself.” 

She relates the comical tale of partaking in a guided walk through a German university town.  The young female guide escorted the slightly bewildered bunch of Aussies through the town, unaware and unfazed by the disturbance created by the annual Father’s Day celebrations.  In Germany, Father's Day is called Mannertag (Man’s Day), a day when men get as drunk as humanly possible whilst walking from village to village pulling beer-stuffed carts.

“Rowdy, intoxicated, boisterous, rude, inebriated and downright crazy” were just some of the words which sprung to my friend’s lips.  And the naïve young female tour guide just carried on with her script.  She did not deviate from the pre-planned route, where nervous middle-aged tourists mingled unwillingly with drunk, obese German men who seemed to spring raucously from every ancient cobblestone. Common sense should have told her to change course. Tunnel vision, however, meant she unflinchingly delivered them, unscathed but slightly unnerved, at their final destination.  The deafening, disorderly pub, overflowing with ill-mannered Manner in the centre of the town.  Prost!!!

Back in the safety of their riverboat that evening, the group calmed their nerves with some delicious German beer of their own, knowing they would never think of Father’s Day in quite the same way again.

Are there any innocent Aussies caught in the middle of this drunken throng?

What's with the balloons?