This Is A Lake - A travel blog

It's the start of a new adventure! For this new edition of This Is A Lake, we're going on our very own tour of the South of the United States, and the first port of call is New Orleans! The trip began, as all trips out of Paris must, with train troubles, when the RER B left me stranded in the middle of Southern Paris with no service until past Les Halles -I had to dash out into the street and find a metro station to take me to Gare du Nord... After that, thankfully, things went smoothly and I could meet up with Mom at the airport. We embarked on a 9h flight to Atlanta, Georgia, which honestly didn't feel that long. Harstfield-Jackson airport seemed huge; just our Terminal B alone could give Orly Ouest a run for its money, and there are 5 more terminals in ATL! I was kind of amazed by all the fast-food chains that I've never seen anywhere else in the US. I thought all American airports carried the same multinationals, but I guess things are different in the South! The ne...

Our last day in Vienna! Today we began by taking a quick peek at Naschmarket, a pleasant food market that happens to be just two blocks from our hotel. It's located in one long strip of pavement between rows of houses, so you can enter from one end of the street and just make your way to the other end. It looks small on first impression, because it's so narrow, but in fact there are a lot of stalls selling spices of all kinds, olives, cheese, meat, Greek and Turkish products, fruits and vegetables... It was packed with people, including lots of locals hanging out in the pub terraces merrily enjoying their half-litre jugs of beer at 10:30 in the morning. Was that breakfast or the apéro? I dread to think what they drink at 9PM if that's how they start their day... Food markets are nice to look at, but there's not a lot there for the passing traveller, so we left when we got to the next tube station and went to Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs' summer palace. Wh...

The culture is coming out of my ears! Today, for the very first time these holidays, the weather was cold and rainy, so we took refuge in the History Museum, which is located in the same building as the Nationalbibliothek and the Ethnographic Museum (now called the Weld Museum). The building itself is grandiose and imposing, all shiny white marble, staircases, columns and vaulted ceilings. The History Museum is a bit of an odd space with three wings: one is the Ephesos wing, with a few fragments of ancient Greek ruins (I'm sure they're archaeologically invaluable, but they aren't much to look at, especially if you've been to the Louvre and the British Museum), and then the two big wings: historical instruments, and arms and armour. The arms and armour exhibition boasts mostly ancient suits of armour, literally dozens, chiefly from Austria or the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also from the rest of Europe and even Turkey. They have 16th and 17th century armour...

I'm exhausted! This was just our first full day in Vienna and it already feels like we've done three tours of the city. After so many days of walking, I get tired sooner every day... For our first visit today we went to the Museumsquartier, a complex off Heldenplatz that houses several museums and galleries. We bought the 72h Vienna Card, which gives you unlimited access to all public transport, so we took the U-bahn there in order to leave as much walking as possible for the museum. From the different museums there, we chose The Leopold Museum, a huge building spanning 6 floors of exhibitions by Austrian painters. They have a really astounding collection of paintings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, among others. They were impressive, but I especially loved a small photographic gallery of portraits of Viennese stage actors and opera singers from the 1920s. Most of them were tiny photographs of the actors in costume or in character as Macbeth, Othello, Cleopatra, Cio-C...

Last night we bid farewell to Budapest in style, by having dinne at the New York Café, this gorgeous classical café where everything is gilded and basically just exactly the same as it was back when it was the meeting point of Budapest's literary elite. They even had a pianist at the hotel lobby that we could hear from our table. Today we took the train from Budapest Keleti station to Vienna Westbahnhof, a three-hour ride that got us to our next destination with a short delay. From there we took a taxi to our hotel -communication with our taxi driver was difficult as our German was as pitiful as his English... Except right at the end of the ride we found out he spoke Spanish. Sometimes I think we should wear lapel pins with the languages we speak, like hotel clerks! The weather's nice enough in Vienna, as it has been the last few days. We're staying at the Best Western Kaisenhof, a very nice hotel a few minutes away from the city centre with spacious and lumin...

Today's our last day in Budapest, and as such we spent most of the time tying up loose ends and checking items off our to-do list. Our first stop was the Great Synagogue, apparently the second biggest in the world (after New York's), a short walk away from our hotel. As luck would have it, we arrived there just minutes before a Spanish tour was scheduled to start, so we were able to join immediately. I had to don a kippah that wouldn't sit still on my spiky hair... The synagogue is an immense and surprisingly warm building, painted in pinks, reds and golds, while the exterior has clear Arabic elements. Its most curious feature is how much it looks like a church on the inside, with naves, an altar, an organ and even pulpits. Our guide told us that it had been described as "the prettiest Catholic synagogue in the world". It looks great, and yet as a mid-19th century construction it's survived both World Wars, even being the centre of the Jewish ghetto during the...

Okay, so very quickly: last night we discovered this little gem called Ladó Café, a small restaurant right next door to the hotel with live jazz music every night. We had a great dinner for 10€ each and the singer was great. Today our first item on the agenda was to book our train tickets to Vienna for Wednesday. There are several connections between Budapest and Vienna, but it looks like the fastest one -3h- is the one leaving from Keleti Station, so that's where we went. Foolishly, we thought it would be quick and easy (we even knew which particular train we wanted! What could go wrong?). As soon as we entered the International Ticket Office, though, we stepped into a different space-time continuum where nothing made sense anymore. For starters, there were 25-odd people already waiting there, and you had to pick a number, but the numbers they called made NO SENSE. They would call 197, then 732, then 230, then 195... And our number was 311, so what gives? It felt a bit like those ...