Mary Lou Murray, 1925-2008, R.I.P.

My cousin, Mary Lou Murray, died on May 30. She was 12 years older than me, but very close to our entire family for her whole life. Until 1945, we all lived in a family compound in Bridgeport at the corner of North Avenue and James Street. There were three or four houses that contain my parents, my grandparents (on the Bown side), Mary Lou and her parents, Frossie, my mother's sister, and John Cull. My mother's aunt, Agnes Riley, live behind us in a house facing James Street. There were no fences between the houses, so we had a large open area as a backyard.

Mary Lou was very close to my mother, and acted as a babysitter for me. She was very glamorous, and went to the Yale Drama School for a while before marrying Tom Murray. She remained close to my mother and father all their lives, particularly in the last 30 years after her parents passed away. She and Tom have a large house in Weston, Connecticut, which was always the center of activities on holidays and for any family party.

Unfortunately, Mary Lou suffered a stroke or a heart attack a half dozen years ago that left her brain-damaged. It has been a very difficult time for both Mary Lou and Tom, as well as from her family. Tom has had live-in nursing assistance for her for several years.

I flew to Connecticut on June 3 for the funeral on June 4, which was a lovely event honoring her memory. Unfortunately, Mary Ellen had a severe allergic reaction, and could not make the trip. My condolences go to Tommy, and to their children, Josh, Mariliz, and Kate.

Berlin - Report 2

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

We took the S-Bahn to Potsdam today, and then a bus to the palace grounds. We first went to the Sans Souci Palace, which was created by Frederick the Great, starting in 1744. It was supposed to be a summer retreat, and was therefore only one story -- a lovely late Baroque palace.

We had to go back outside the gate at lunchtime to get a bratwurst from a vendor.

We then walked down the terraces to a fountain in the park below the palace, and then walked about a kilometer through the park to the Neue Palace, which was built in the 1760s. It was a very large and not particularly attractive building. We then returned to our hotel in Berlin via two buses and the S-Bahn.

We went out looking for a German restaurant for dinner, but couldn't find one that wasn't a smoky bar. We finally found a café on a side street that had Turkish and Italian food. We both had Italian -- Mary Ellen scampi and me lasagna -- and the food was outstanding.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

We didn't have a whole lot that we had to see today. In the morning, we went to the Gemäldegalerie, which is a very new building that now houses the entire collection of old masters from both West and East Berlin -- it was almost too much. We had lunch -- quiche Lorraine -- at the cafeteria in the museum. After lunch, we walked to the Potsdammer Platz and took the S-Bahn to the Charlottenburg Palace -- on the west side of Berlin. It was built around 1700. We toured the ground floor, which had the King’s and Queen’s apartments and formal rooms, but didn't bother with the first floor. We took two buses to get back to the hotel and are now packing to leave very early in the morning for our flight home.

Berlin - Report 1

Monday, May 19, 2008

We got a train at 11 o'clock from Dresden to Berlin (nonstop). We did not have a seat reservation because they had been useless from Prague to Dresden, and I ended up standing. The conductor finally came, and I pointed to the one empty seat where a woman told me it had been reserved. It wasn't reserved until the next light, so the conductor gave me the seat. It was a two hour train ride. Once you got a cab at the new Berlin railroad station, I made another mistake. I told the driver, who spoke excellent English, that the hotel was at 78 Kurferstendamstrasse, when it was really at 78 Kurfurstenstrasse -- about 4 km away. He was a nice guy and turned off the meter, which is already a $25. Our hotel, and Express Holiday Inn, was the cheapest we could find in Berlin -- we had an extremely small, but highly efficient, room.

We went for a walk in late afternoon to Potsdammer Platz, which was an enormous empty lot when we were here 12 years ago (it had not been developed because the Berlin Wall had run through it). Now it is full of modern buildings -- the Sony Center is a large enclosed space with restaurants etc. in a glass ceiling about 20 stories high. We walk through the nearby cultural District and saw the Neue Nationalgalerie, an Eero Sarineen building, on the way home. We had been at a reception there in 1981. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant next to the hotel, where the food is actually quite good. We even went back to it on our last night.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

We bought a three-day bus pass and took the bus to Museum Island, which is in the heart of East Berlin. We went to the Pergamon Museum, which we had also visited in 1996, and saw the Pergamon Temple which had been moved here from Turkey, and the Babylonian Gates of Ishtar. We have visited Pergamon on our trip to Turkey in 2004, and had seen the site from which the temple had been taken.

We had lunch near the museum and then walked to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, which had been the home of the German Parliament. It had been burned in 1933, shortly after the Nazis took over, and badly damaged in 1945. In the 1990s, it was rebuilt with an enormous glass dome on top and is now the major tourist attraction in Berlin. We and all the other tourists walked around on the roof, with views all over the city. One unfortunate sight was a fire with much smoke in the Philharmonie -- the Philharmonic Hall -- right near the Potsdammer Platz. That night we went to an Argentine steakhouse for dinner, which was a nice change -- and only 100 yards from the hotel.

Dresden - Report 1

Sunday, May 18

On Sunday, we took a cab into town and went to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the Zwinger Palace -- it has a wonderful collection of Ruebens, Vermeers, and other old masters, including the Sistine Madonna by Rafael. Mary Ellen wanted to go to the Albertinum, which had contained the modern art collection, but we found it was closed for two years for repairs.

She also wanted to go to the Frauenkirche, ("Church of Our Lady") (right) a high Baroque Lutheran church (which had been destroyed in the war and rebuilt), but it was closed for a concert. So we went to the concert, which consisted of organ music by Bach, an oratorio by Mozart, a symphony by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and another organ piece. It was actually a religious program with the sermon, but it was over in an hour.

The hotel restaurant was closed Sunday night, so we wandered around and found a nice restaurant a few blocks away. We sat in a glassed-in porch because it was pretty cold and gray outside.

Prague - Report 4

Friday, May 16, 2008

Today was free -- it was a scheduled tour of a suburb where Honza lived in the afternoon, but people were encouraged to finish up their shopping, sightseeing, etc.. We passed on the tour and instead shopped for toys for grandchildren and went to several places we have not had a chance to see -- the Cubist Museum, St. James Church, and the Tyn Church. We also went to the Bethlehem Chapel -- a reconstruction of the chapel where Jan Hus had preached in 1400. We had a light lunch under a tent in the middle of the Old Town Square, because we knew we were having a fancy closing dinner that evening.

It had been cloudy all day (for the first time on the tour) and when we left the Tyn Church, it poured. Fortunately we could wait under the arches of the square, and our hotel was only a block and a half from the church, so we struck out for the hotel when the rain lightened up, and did not get too wet.

That evening, we had the closing dinner of the tour at a restaurant called David, which was across the river, next to the American Embassy. We took trams to get over there, both walked across the Charles Bridge on the way back. The dinner was very pleasant -- Honza brought in some Czech musicians to entertain us before the meal. We sat with two retired flight attendants, so it was hard to make conversation. Mary Ellen had Nona, a Jewish woman from Philadelphia, next to her, and they worked hard trying to get the table involved in conversation. Nona and her husband, John, were very nice, and interested particularly in the tour of the Jewish synagogues. I ran into them when I was walking to the station to buy the train tickets for Germany, and they had been out searching for a synagogue that was not on the main part of the tour.

Saturday, May 17

The tour officially ended after breakfast, and we then took a cab to the Holovice Station and the train to Dresden. When we checked into our hotel, the Hotel Bayerishe Hof, we found that I had incorrectly made the reservation for May 15 -- 17, rather than May 17 -- 19. They had already sent me an e-mail asking why I had no-showed. Fortunately, they had a room available and did not charge us the cancellation fee.

Dresden did not have the beautiful weather that we had in Prague. We walked into the center of town (about three quarters of a mile) and grabbed seats at the first sidewalk restaurant we could find because it was threatening to rain (the restaurant was underneath a roof that extended over the sidewalk). We did not see much of the city Saturday night and took a cab back to the hotel, where we had a glass of wine in the lobby.

The picture at left is a part of the Zwinger Palace, which we walked through after dinner.

Prague - Report 3

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

On Wednesday we had a tour of the Jewish ghetto, which is very close to the Old Town Square. We visited several synagogues and the Jewish cemetery. We finished at noon, had a nice lunch, and took it easy in the afternoon.

In the evening, the group went to the National Theater to see a ballet, Eugene Onegin, performed by the Czech National Ballet. It was choreographed by John Cranko in 1973, and was an outstanding work. We had never heard of it being performed in the United States.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

We took a day trip to Kutna Hora, a town about 60 kilometers (one and a half hours) from Prague. Kutna Hora had silver mines in medieval time, and was wealthy enough to build the Cathedral -- St. Barbara's, which we toured. After a guided walk through town, we were on our own for lunch, and went to a wonderful restaurant, Dacicky (the name has Czech accents which I cannot reproduce) that the guide had pointed out, again with the MacKays from Seattle. We set a picnic tables in a shady courtyard, and I had wild game meatloaf.

In the afternoon, we went down in a silver mine -- down about 15 flights of stairs and then threw very narrow tunnels dripping with water. Fortunately, it came out on the side of a hill, so we did not have to climb back. It was not our favorite event of the tour. We had an equally disfavored stop on the way back -- a church near Kutna Hora with thousands of human skeletons and intricate displays of human skulls. This was designed to illustrate that "dust thou art, and to dust thou shall return". After the bus ride back to Prague, we just had dinner in the hotel.

Prague - Report 2

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

This was by far the most strenuous walking day of the tour. In the morning we started with the Powder Tower and the Black Madonna Cubist building we then walk through Old Town and took a tram across the river to the Lesser Town -- lesser because it is located below the Palace. We went to the Wallenstein Gardens, where we had been on Sunday, but it was more interesting with Honza as the guide. When we stopped for a break, he took water, soda, and a Czech liquor out of his backpack and serve the whole group; we then played the Rick Steve's team of standing around in a circle and repeating everybody's name. By the time the last person goes through the list of 24 names, you do remember at least 12 of them. Someone said this was an old Girl Scout game.

We then walked up towards the Palace through the lesser town. We went by St. Nicholas Church, but did not go into it. Rather than going directly onto the Charles Bridge to go home, we went around towards the side of into a neighborhood which had the Lennon Wall -- a wall of graffiti in honor of John Lennon. This was painted over by the Communists, and then re-created numerous times. We then walked across the Charles Bridge (which we had done on Sunday morning), and ended up at the Havelska Market -- a fairly wide street, with many booths selling food, toys, etc. in the middle. We had lunch with Dave and Mary Lou McKay from Seattle.

After resting for a while in the afternoon, we walked almost a half an hour to the National Theatre, where Honza started his tour of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. We started on a street corner where a student demonstration had turned into the national street, leading from the theater to Wenceslaus Square. Unfortunately, the street corner was one of the busiest in Prague, with trams going by in all four directions -- I have difficulty hearing his lecture. We then walked up the national street and into Wenceslaus Square, with Honza stopping for several other brief lectures. It was very interesting and obviously covered a major event in the history of the Czech Republic. After we ended in the square, we walked around 15 minutes uphill to a restaurant for dinner, and then took the tram back towards the hotel.

Wencelaus Square