Emergency Adventure (aka Kicking the s*** out of Option B)

My dear friend Melissa was planning to come visit us in Izmir in October. Plane ticket bought, schedules cleared, Google Doc in the early stages of planning... and then the news hits that the US and Turkey are no longer issuing tourist visas to each other's citizens.

We sit on this news for a week or two hoping it will sort itself out. I search [turkey visa] on Google News on a daily basis to see the latest. We're down to the last week--Melissa's supposed to be arriving on Friday and we need to make a call.

So we start looking at flights. Our friend Tristan had mentioned Budapest awhile back, and we decide to start there, since we can both get there fairly cheaply. We look at some maps and decide we'll do Budapest, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris. Paris was already planned for Earle's birthday the last weekend of Melissa's trip anyway -- plane tickets purchased out of Izmir already. But no matter. We'd get to Paris some other way. Maybe by train! Car! Air! Who knows? Europe was our oyster.

We've been updating Facebook pretty regularly so I'll just share a few highlights of the trip here. If you're planning to go to any of these places, let me know and I'll try to come up with some more tips.

Panorama of Budapest from the Buda side.

Budapest:

• We got the Budapest card. 29 euro or something for 48 hours. I don't know that it was a particularly great deal, but it gave some structure to our deeply unstructured trip. Specifically...
• Walking tours of both Buda and Pest (previously 2 separate cities separated by a river) - included with card. 
• Nighttime visit to the Lukacs Baths, a weird combination of spa, pool, sauna, and nightclub.
• A deep-fried flatbread called langos. So good. We split one and were not hungry for many hours later.

Langos with bolognese and cheese.

Then we went to Vienna by daytime train. Getting tickets was a mess. ÖBB is an Austrian rail company, and in Budapest they won't accept electronic tickets, which many people buy online. Their default workaround here is literally to have you log into your personal email account on a public computer so you can print them out. I rejected this and forwarded the PDF. From there the journey was quite pleasant.

Vienna:

• Sacher Torte competition. In the 50s and 60s there was a court case between Demel and Hotel Sacher to determine which sacher torte could call themselves the "original". Demel conceded in an out-of-court settlement, which seemed to both me and Melissa like a huge mistake. Hotel Sacher now does 10x the business. Then when we taste-tested, we decided we preferred Hotel Sacher's cake better. Demel was a better overall experience.
• Wiener schnitzel. Ok, technically we had the pork, not the veal. But I wanted to say "Wiener schnitzel" because this entry's #linguisticfunfact is that wiener just means "of Vienna". (Wiener dogs are German, not Viennese; their name comes from the fact that they look like viennese sausages, aka wieners, which in Vienna itself are referred to as frankfurters, because a guy from Frankfurt allegedly brought them there in 1805. All sources wikipedia.)
• Vienna Opera. You can get standing tickets for a few euros if you get there an hour early (or maybe a bit more for the best "seats"). Totally worth it for the non-opera-fan, since actual tickets can be over 100 euros, and then you're spending a whole night there. But if you want a taste of opera, get the standing tickets and decide after the first act if you want to say. Be prepared for an obstructed view, though.
• Schönbrunn, which would have been better if it hadn't been raining. Audio tour of the inside was neat, but I would have liked to have spent time wandering the grounds as well.

Vienna Opera. These were not our seats, but it's possible they could have been if we'd gotten there 90 minutes early.

We took an overnight train to Switzerland. We had other various ticket problems not worth explaining and my refund will be processed in 8-10 weeks (6-8 now). We were in a 6-person compartment with just 1 other person, so we were able to stretch out a little bit, but I think if I had to do an overnight train again, I would spring for the couchette. Either way, waking up in the Alps was amazing.

To start, here are the ways in which Zürich is like Disneyland:

• Everything is perfectly clean
• The architecture looks like the Small World ride (which technically alludes to architecture from all over the world, but overall, I'm calling the aesthetic Swiss. Especially the clock tower.)
• The trams are straight out of Tomorrowland. So smooth!
• EVERYTHING IS SUPER EXPENSIVE. I passed a poke bowl place over lunchtime and looked at the menu. $31 for the cheapest item. (1 Swiss franc is almost exactly $1 USD)

And here are the great things we did:

• Took the futuristic tram up to Uetliberg. Amazing view. Walked down.
• Got up to see the sunrise over the lake and the Alps. So worth it.

We didn't spend a lot of time in Zürich, but I hope to be back soon. Lucerne came highly recommended as well and is not far. (Though I am nervous taht I can't tell if people in various European accents are saying "Lucerne" or "Lausanne", which is in the southwest.)

Sunrise in Zürich over the water.

Then our grand plan was to drive through France to Paris where we'd be meeting Earle in 4 days. BUT one-way car rentals across country borders lines is expensive, so after approximately nineteen phone calls with Autoeurope, we took a bus across the border to Mulhouse to pick up the car. Unfortunately when we arrived at 12:40pm, the rental car place was closed for its 1pm-3pm break, and that was our first encounter of how relaxed France is about work--both that there was a 1pm-3pm break, and that the guy skipped out at least 20 minutes early and this didn't seem to faze anyone. So we bummed around in Mulhouse for awhile, wasted some time trying to figure out if we could rent a car from Avis instead, and then were on our way to our next stop.

Since I had such a good time traveling through random towns in Croatia, I decided we should just zoom out on approximately 1/3 of France on Airbnb and see what was available/cheap. This took us to Autun for a night, which was beautiful and picturesque and had some cool ruins, but basically nothing was open the whole time, which made finding food stressful/disappointing. Upon finding zero cafes serving any food in the morning (this seems crazy but maybe my ideas of France are deeply romanticized), we ended up getting cheese and bread from the grocery store (which were AMAZING) and picnicking at some Roman ruins. Salvaged!

Our incredibly picturesque backyard in Autun in the morning mist.

We drove on with a pitstop in Bourges and saw the Cathedral there. That's when Melissa and I decided we preferred medium-sized cities, which in retrospect was true of Croatia as well.

Fancy columns of Bourges Cathedral.

On Thursday we ended up at our dear friend Eve's father's house (chateau) (priory) (mansion). Right before our Emergency Adventure started, I posted on Facebook to ask for recommendations, and Eve asked if we would be in the Loire Valley, where her father lives. Well, we had no specific plans, so of course we could arrange our schedule to be there! And then we got to have the most wonderful time at Le Prieuré d’Orchaise, which I've documented on Facebook and you can read about the highlights there.

Panorama of Le Prieuré d’Orchaise from the gardens, with the house on the left and the church on the right. 

Saturday, on to Paris to meet up with Earle for his birthday! We'll go back to bullet-point highlights for this one:

• Dans Le Noir ? is the original restaurant where you eat in the pitch dark. The waitstaff is blind so this doesn't faze them. They don't tell you what you're eating so you're left to guess and explore (mostly with your fingers because no one's watching you!) and then they show you the menu after the meal is over. The food was excellent and they messed with textures just to confuse you. I paid so much more attention to my food and realized how much I taste with my eyes (just like how I hear with my eyes). 
• Other restaurants we enjoyed: Pierre Sang (another menu where they don't tell you what you're eating until after - but not in the dark), Benedict (for brunch), "Lot" of Wine (yes that is how it's stylized. You may know I'm not a wine drinker, but if you are, go there -- incredibly knowledgeable staff who talk to you about wine for a few minutes to get a sense of what you like and then pick out something super reasonably priced for you.) 
• We tried going to the Eiffel Tower but the lines were crazy. Next time, would look into time-specific tickets and/or go right when it opens.
• Popped into Sunday night mass at Notre Dame. I was actually blown away by the quality of the quartet they had singing. I don't know why I was surprised, I mean, it's Notre Dame, but this may have been the best one-on-a-part singing I've ever heard live.
• We made it to the Quartier Asiatique for soup dumplings, because I have no idea when the next time is that Earle & I are going to get soup dumplings (probably late January in NYC!). A restaurant called Tin Tin. Recommend.

I am sorry-not-sorry to say we didn't find any croissants that I liked as much as Arsicault Bakery in San Francisco. Is that terrible? THEY'RE SO GOOD.

This is how you get a selfie with the Eiffel Tower, right?

Headed home after 3 days in Paris. Security at ORY was totally insane, perhaps due to recent events in France, and the airline wouldn't let me check in or board without a printed copy of my Turkish e-visa (it's literally called an electronic visa). I guess I can appreciate that they wanted to make sure I wouldn't be stranded in the Istanbul airport, but making me print it out at a random unaffiliated service desk meant that it was a very good thing we'd gotten to the airport over two hours early.

In our layover in Istanbul, Earle was fine because of his residence card (mine is on its way!). I was fine, too, but the person behind the desk did have to ask his deskmate what was up...probably not a lot of Americans coming through on tourist visas these days. But it took all of ten seconds and then I felt like I'd made it home. Home! How fun is that? My Turkish is still pretty abysmal, but I took great comfort in hearing it spoken after 1.5 weeks of Hungarian, German, and French, and I was delighted to get some Turkish food for dinner that night.

Our full route.