Searching for Gatorade

After months of planning, the Sutkers are here in Europe. I ended up meeting them for a night and a day in Budapest. I hung around long enough for a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Center, which is an excellent and extremely educational museum. I highly recommend it. After lunch at Cari Mama, a pretty good kosher pizza restaurant, I headed back to Bratislava on the afternoon train.

It's been a while since I've traveled with my in-laws, so I think I had forgotten some of their travel quirks. I'll mention two. To preface this, I know I have plenty of things I'm particular about, so I'm most definitely not judging. First of all, they like ice, and a whole lot of it. It's not the most widely available thing here at restaurants, so it takes a special request and some extra effort from the wait staff. Usually though, they are able to get it regardless of language barriers and any other obstacles put in front of them. There were a couple of times over the week where a waiter or waitress, in response to their request, brought an over-sized bucket with an obscene amount of ice. I couldn't tell if this was them making some kind of statement against Americans and our ice or if they were just trying to be nice. The other little travel thing is Gatorade withdrawal. My father-in-law, Allan, loves Gatorade. He works out a lot and drinks abnormally large amounts of it. I swear he must have lemon-lime green or bright orange blood running through his veins. Anyway, though when they go to foreign places, he and Sooze, my mother-in-law, know it's harder to find than the holy grail, but that doesn't stop them from stopping and looking at any and every convenience store or any other kind of store that may sell beverages. They are persistent and as I witnessed in Tel Aviv a couple of years ago, they usually find it. They were unsuccessful in Budapest, but I have no doubt if they would have spent less time visiting sites and more time focused on the Gatorade search, they would have found it.

It has been three weeks since I've been in Europe, so it was weird going back into the office. I was pretty frustrated to find that my desk chair had been taken when I arrived on Monday morning. I realize I'm not there often, but whoever took it has to know someone sits there and would eventually come back. I literally have no idea where it is and also haven't a clue how to get a new one. Honestly, who does that? Who borrows (steals) a desk chair in the office and doesn't return it? It didn't matter because I was in a training class for the entire week, so I wasn't sitting at my desk, but eventually I'll have to get this thing figured out.

The Sutkers arrived in Bratislava having seen most of what Budapest had to offer. They then spent the week taking day trips to Vienna with a jam packed itinerary. We were able to have dinner together a couple of nights during the week, but for the most part, Jenn and I were not able to spend as much time with them as we would have liked, but we both had very busy work weeks.

We spent this past weekend in Prague. Prague is a great walking city, but it's not so much fun when it is cold and raining, which is the weather we experienced the entire three days we were there. It was unfortunate, but it's one of a few things that simply cannot be planned or controlled no matter how hard one tries. If there was a way to do it, Susan Sutker would have figured it out by now, I'm sure of it. We stayed at the Hotel Josef, where Jenn had been wanting to stay at for years, since she first heard about it 5 years ago when we came to Prague for the first time. It's a modern hotel in the Josefov (Jewish) area of Prague with small, simple, clean, and nice rooms. It was everything Jenn hoped it would be.

On that first afternoon, after lunch at Bohemia Bagel, we had a guide walk us to and through Prague Castle. Jenn and I had been there a few times, but it has been 5 years since we actually went into the palace and past the preliminary entrance area of the Cathedral. It was a long tour, but we did get to see the site of the second defenestration. We also had never been through the Wallenstein Gardens, which were really nice. I'm not sure how we missed this with all of our visits to Prague Castle.

Dinner that evening was at the much hyped Allegro, at the Four Seasons Hotel. All of our food was good, but most interesting and exciting was the dessert, aptly named Chocolate Art. This is where the pastry chef came to our table, put a plastic table cloth down, and proceeded to dribble a little of this, toss a little of that, and then laid down a chocolate mousse, white cacao ice cream, and something else that I cannot remember. It was fun and tasty. I was shocked that Allan and Sooze were willing to eat off the table, but they had no issue with it.

I sat out day two, which included a visit to the concentration camp, Terazin, which Jenn and I toured once before, and a tour of the Jewish synagogues of Prague, which I had done twice previously. It was nice having the morning to myself, though I really didn't do anything. I slept late, had breakfast, and walked around a little. I'm constantly tired these days, so any time to relax is just fine with me. In the afternoon, I braved the rain and went up to the Strahov Monastery and viewed their beautiful library. There were two incredible halls filled with books and then some other strange collections of shells, sea creatures, etc. I then walked across the way to their very own brewery and sampled two out of the four beers. The amber wasn't bad, but the summer wheat wasn't for me. It tasted like a flat Sprite. There were some nice views from atop the hill where the monastery stands, so I got some nice pictures before I headed down for the long walk back to the hotel.

We ate dinner at the very delicious V Zatisi, which was mostly upscale continental cuisine, but had a few touches of Czech on the menu. The goat cheese appetizer was outstanding. My main course of duck was good, but not great. The chocolate mousse for dessert was good, but so rich I couldn't finish it.

We spent the final day walking around and doing some shopping, or browsing actually. We then headed out in the evening for our flight to Paris where we'll be leaving from for our week in Normandy. More to come with the France report, but wanted to get the blog up to date as I know there are some big Sutker fans out there who want to hear about Allan and Sooze's trip.

To view more pictures, click here.