Yurtdışında Yaşam

I’m not the only person who has recently traveled to Mariánské Lázně: this article recently appeared in the New York Times travel section. The author’s experience was very similar to mine.

I was really amazed when I came to Europe and found that every restaurant and cafe and even most pubs have these hand-held credit card scanners. It’s such a logical device: rather than a waiter taking your credit card away, and running the risk that (at best) it will be accidentally returned to another customer, the waiter brings the reader to you. Apparently, they’re just now starting to catch on in the US, at least according to this article from the New York Times.

There was a flurry of snow this afternoon. It didn’t last long, and it mostly melted as soon as it hit the pavement, but it was enough to dust Náměstí Míru and the Advent Market.


I feel so sorry for the merchants in those drafty little stalls!

The snow resumed this evening, and has been going off and on for the past couple of hours.

Incidentally, for those of you who may be wondering, yes, I have been wearing my coat. And frequently my hat and gloves. Sometimes even a scarf ’round my throat.

Well, it’s not quite Advent, but the Advent Market at Náměstí Míru has already started:

The most popular stalls are the ones selling hot wine and sausages:

I’m not seeing a lot of buying going on; most people seem content just to look, at least for now.

The big Advent Market will be at Old Town Square, but that isn’t set up yet.

In September, it had been three months since I arrived in Prague, so I needed to leave the country to "reboot" my tourist visa, and I took a little day trip to Dresden.

This is a sufficiently common trip that there are five trains a day between Prague and Dresden. After the Czech Republic joins the Schengen agreement at the end of December, I expect the popularity of trips to Dresden will fall off, since a trip to Germany will no longer suffice for non-EU citizens to restart the clock on their visas.

I found it interesting that, on the Czech side of the border, all announcements on the train were made in Czech, German and English, while on the German side of the border, announcements were made only in German and English!

Dresden is a very pretty city, although I think I’ve been jaded by Prague! Nothing really struck me as all that noteworthy. I did visit the (Lutheran) Frauenkirche:

There was a mime out front entertaining tourists waiting to enter the church:

There’s also a statue of Martin Luther in the square:

The Opera House is striking:

I also liked the Zwinger: unfortunately, since it was just a day trip, I didn’t have time to actually go inside and look at the collections:

Mostly, though, I just wandered around kind of aimlessly, taking in the sights: