Wednesday in Bucharest

It was a Spring Day we have few of in Atlanta, Warm in the sunshine, cold in the shade. Our tour guide Joseph and a group of 31 others began the walking tour in front of the Slovak National Gallery. Joseph kept the tour moving and taking pictures and making notes was frustrating because of the pace. Side note, I have been trying to get some of the new glasses that allow you to record and take pictures (and one even has a projected screen) but my prescription currently is so bad they can't make lenses for the new glasses, But, I digress

We learned about the codification of the Slavic language, and its use of Greek and Cyrillic letters. We saw the odd memorial celebrating the 1945 liberation of Bratislava by the Red Army (Soviets) from Nazi Germany. Only to place then under communist control. We passed the Slavic National Theater and then a odd little bronze statue of a worker coming out of a manhole, "Man at Work". His job was to keep an eye on all the people at the ritzy shops nearby. Then we heard the story of Ignacio and his statue in front of a restaurant that would give him food everyday.

After all that we were in the original main square and its 9 styles of Architecture. The old city hall had a remnant of a canon ball from the Napoleonic wars. One of 9 around the city.

There was the Mayor's offices, across from city hall and the Golden Griffin pharmacy, from 1578. We passed a couple of historic markers, one which says

"In 1820 in this building, Franz Liszt, as a nine-year old, gave a concert. With this concert, he began his triumphal journey", and then one from when Mozart gave a concert at 6 yrs old.

At St. Martin's Cathedral, also known as the Coronation Church we saw a Liszt memorial for when he composed the Hungarian Coronation Mass for the coronation of the emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria as king of Hungary. Liszt was not allowed into the church to conduct the composition, so the memorial has a small fence around it shaped like a musical staff with the first few notes of the mass,

We toured the inside of the church, which has no western entrance because of the original city walls and its moat.

At the base of the Church was the holocaust memorial and from there we saw the Black plague memorial before passing the US embassy and our starting point. I walked from there to the Blue Church and back to the ship. My 5 mile walk done for the day.

I had planned for this as it was lunch time and was going to spend the afternoon on deck reading one of the books I packed. Except I left the books on the coffee table at home.

Around 8PM that evening we came through the first lock during waking hours, dropped 20 meters and continued our journey.