Dog-gone-it - a reactivation for Staff Day

Hi everyone - welcome to WG's Staff Day extravaganza. I have been asked to be a guest blogger for today's blockbuster social media segment. So here goes...
Sandra

After a long day in transit I arrived in Wales on Wednesday night. It has been lovely seeing the Celtic rellies again. I have been sleeping in until 9.00am each morning which is great after 3 weeks of getting up at 6.30-7.00am each day. We drove out to Hay on Wye yesterday afternoon through beautiful green Welsh countryside. I visited several bookshops and managed to get four Chalet School titles - I now just have 2 to go to complete my full (unabridged) collection. We are all going out to dinner this evening and I am going to Bristol to stay with my cousin for a few days. She is on holidays and has suggested we do a few local trips around Bristol. I feel a bit touristed out after the cruise so that sounds wonderful.

Prague

After a long 8 hour bus trip to Prague, most of us were tired out and it was not really the way I would choose to spend my birthday. I would prefer to fly! Prague is a very beautiful city but I felt it didn't quite match Budapest. We had a lovely hotel room which did help but we probably didn't make the best of our time there. We did a trip out to the Terezin Concentration Camp about an hour out of Prague. The Camp has been very well preserved and our excellent guide showed us through the buildings where you could see the kind of dreadful life the people interred there led. It was very sobering viewing. Then we were taken to the Terezin Museum where there was a fabulous exhibition showing the Terezin Jewish Ghetto. The Nazis decided to make Terezin a Jewish ghetto and expelled all the residents of Terezin to make it happen. During the war, over 135,000 people lived in the ghetto and were gradually sent away to be exterminated. A room displaying the poetry and art of the children of the ghetto was very moving.

The cruise

Yes a thousand apologies butI am now in Wales! The Internet on the ship seemed to be fully booked all the time and quite frankly I wanted to look at the scenery rather than be on the Internet. The cruise director kept kicking my travelling companion off the Internet telling her to go and look at another castle! We had a wonderful time - I particularly enjoyed Wurzburg where we toured an amazing Prince Bishop's palace - the stucco ceilings, marble floors and Mirror Gallery were amazing. Passau was a lovel little Austrian town with a magnificent Baroque Cathedral. In Vienna, I visited the Hofburg Palace - this contains three museums. The Silver Museum contained the silverware, glassware and porcelain of the Hapsburgs who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire - it was mind boggling with porcelain from across Europe. Then there was an exhibition on the life of Sisi, Elisabeth of Bavaria, who led a somewhat adventuress life having married the Duke at age 16. She was assassinated in 1898 in Geneva. And then there were the Imperial Rooms which were just sumptuous. I naturally did a little shopping at Swaroski. We went through a total of 68 locks during the 15 days - these were works of art. Some of the locks were 25 metres and it could take an hour or so to go through. Our 68th lock slowed our arrival into Budapest due to a huge storm. The waves on the Danube were so high they kept coming in over the lock wall and filling it with water again. We arrived late into Budapest and had a shortened city tour but what a view from Fisherman's Wharf over the river to the city and the magnificent Parliament buildings. We had a night cruise after dinner which showed the city lights off to great affect.

Beginning our Cruise

We joined our ship the MS Sound of Music (and yes it does have photos of Julie et al on the wall) late Saturday afternoon and enjoyed a Captain's cocktail hour before a Welcome dinner. The Captain gave us the emergency briefing - he is hungarian with very poor English and no one must understood much. We had dinner with a couple who of course know a librarian we both know - the world is a very small place. Dinner was rather slow taking 3 hours to have six sumptuous courses. Then we lost another hour to daylight savings so ended up going to bed at 11.15pm.

Van Gogh Museum

I was extremely tired by the time I fronted up to the Van Gogh Museum at 6.00pm on Friday night. The Museum is open until 10.00pm on Fridays and it sure was jumping. There is a special Picasso exhibition on at the moment - he is not one of my favourites, I have to confess, so I skipped him. There are four floors of Van Gogh paintings and drawings as well as paintings by his contemporaries and influences. He painted an amazing 800 paintings, over 100 drawings and sketches in a short painting life - he was just 35 when he suicided. The story of his life and work is tragic as the story of genius so often is. My favourite paintings were of course the daisies and a collection of spring blossom paintings which were just beautiful. We had fun in the fabulous museum shop afterwards.
Tomorrow we join the cruise in the afternoon. We were planning a Delft DOK visit but I am so tired and leg weary that I am going to stay in the city and visit the Riksmuseum where the art of the Dutch masters presides and have an easy day.

Anne Frank House

I visited the Anne Frank House later in the afternoon. I was so glad I prepurchased my ticket as the queue was around the corner with a wait of 1-2 hours. I was able to go straight in at my appointed time. The house is situated on a canal and from the front you could never tell that there is a two story annexe at the back of the building. The steps in Dutch buildings are vertically challenging - I could put my hands on a step six up from where my feet were! Oto frank's business was run from the front of the house and then a bookcase hid the secret steps into the annexe where 8 people including the four Franks hid from the Nazis for over 2 years. Several of Otto's workers assisted with food, etc. Anne's room which she shared with a gentleman is extremely small - the pictures of the Dutch and British Royal Family and her cinema stars are where she pasted them onto the wall. The story of the hiding and their capture and what happened to the family was very sobering but not in the end depressing. There was a sense of celebrating a young life that was snuffed out too soon but who lives on through her diary. Visiting the Anne Frank House is an Amsterdam must do.