Zary--then and now

As I promised in this post:

Back in Business

Yesterday I came home from school, threw my bag on the ground, pulled my computer out and flipped it on to start on some homework. Little did I know the excitement that awaited. Between opening up Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (I hardly know how to use a spreadsheet, so don't ask what I was thinking by trying), it took a minute or two for me to notice..... Were those 4 green bars in the bottom right hand corner of my screen, or were my eyes deceiving me? Yes...no...yes! Sure enough, a wireless connection was coming through, just like the good old days before the neighbor's open connection disappeared a month or so ago.

Somehow I've survived the last 4 or 5 weeks without an internet connection in my apartment...I know, rough life. However, the days of deprivation are over! Woo hoo!

Grandpa Weed

A few weeks ago, on October 18, my Grandpa Weed passed away. I was in London when I heard the news via e-mail. I wasn't able to go back to Utah for the funeral, although I wanted nothing more than to be there to celebrate his wonderful life with the rest of my family. For the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about him and his life and influence.

I appreciated reading what was said about him by other family members at these links: Kristen's blog, Amy's blog, Dave and Julie's blog, Deseret News obituary. I stole the pictures here from these blogs :) I just want to echo what each of them said and add my own tribute here.

Not only was Grandpa incredibly smart (don't challenge him when it comes to crossword puzzles or Rubik's cubes!), athletic (BYU football quarterback), meticulous (have you ever mowed his lawn...or pruned his trees!?), hard working (everything was always in tip-top shape), resourceful (everything could be fixed with duct tape!), musical (I loved hearing Grandpa sing), and very handsome (just look at the pictures!), but he was one of the kindest men I have ever known. I'll admit that I was a little scared of him when I was younger--but I was painfully shy and scared of most people, so that isn't very reflective of the kind of person he was! I truly count it a great blessing in my life to have lived near him in Provo over the past 8 years. Despite his own pain, he lovingly and selflessly devoted his life to caring for my grandma. He magnified his callings and honored his priesthood. He loved his family. He showed dedication and patience far beyond what I could hope to have. All who knew him respected him. I have always looked up to him and always will--I hope to emulate the love and devotion he displayed through his life.

I was a little shocked when I heard the news of his passing, but I've since felt a great sense of peace. Of course, he will be missed, but I am so grateful for the time I was able to spend with him here on the earth and I love the truth that families can be together forever!

Man's Inhumanity to Man

I'm leaving tonight for Ireland, and I want to finish posting pictures from my trip with Mom and Dad before I go. Sorry it has taken me so long.

Last Saturday morning, before heading into Krakow, we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp of WWII, where an estimated 1.1 million + people were killed by the Nazis. The inhumanity recalled by a visit here is indescribable. I won't attempt to comment here, but will let these pictures speak for themselves.

Turning Hearts

*Warning: this is kind of long and may only be interesting to family members!*

Last Friday was one of the most memorable days of our little journey. Thursday night we'd reached Żary, Poland (formerly the German town of Sorau in Prussia) and found one of probably only 2 or 3 hotels in town. After spending an afternoon on small country roads with potholes and poor patch jobs stretching mile after mile through beautiful farmland and dark woods--complete with illness recovery and lack of confidence in map-reading skills--it was a relief to actually find the town, even if the hotel was straight out of the '60s, smoke and all. With darkness setting in by 5:00 pm and Thursday being an Eastern European holiday, nothing was open and we did not really want to go outside anyway, so we set in for a long night's sleep so we'd be ready to go the next day.

We'd come to Żary for a particular reason--to try to "discover" or feel a connection with some of our roots and, if possible, to fill in any genealogical gaps. My great grandmother (my dad's grandmother)--Hedwig Emma Barg--was born in this Prussian town in 1895, where her family met LDS missionaries and joined the LDS Church, moving to SLC in 1900.

All we really had to go off of was one photograph of Grandma Hedwig as a young girl, holding a watering can, standing on a street in front of a shop. (Most of our family has probably seen this picture--I wanted to scan it in, but I don't have a copy--if I get one, I'll post it) The back of the picture was labeled something like: "Hedwig as a child. Sorau, Prussia Freibusser Strasse. The family lived above this store." I'll admit that I wasn't too hopeful.

At the beginning of the day, things didn't seem to promising. It drizzled the entire day, and we could not find one person in the entire town that spoke English. The street name we had was the old German name--the area we were in had been given to Poland after WWII; everything German was stripped down and replaced with Polish, and it seems that most German people must have left. Dad and I finally found a map of Żary in a bookstore after searching for awhile, but it was all in Polish.

We wandered (rather aimlessly) for quite a while before coming across a large-ish town square with some city municipal offices. I waited outside; Mom and Dad didn't reemerge for about 30 minutes; they'd had some luck. They found a history office (or something?) where there were 2 girls that kind of spoke English. They gave us a list of all the street names with their corresponding old German names. Freibusserstrasse was nowhere to be found. However, we had another lead to check--the two girls had given us the address of the city history museum and the name of a person to talk to there.

We found the city museum, only to discover that it was locked. Fearing it was closed for the holiday weekend, we rang the bell next to the door anyway. A man promptly came to the door, and when Dad showed him the name of the person he was looking for, the man made it clear (not so much by speaking English!) that he was our guy. Progress! He looked at our picture and the street name and nothing rang a bell. He left to a back room for about 15 minutes and came back with a map telling us--with a mixture of German, Polish, and English--where the street was. We thanked him and stepped outside, grouping to look at the map more carefully before setting off. While we were still huddled out front, the man (I wish I could give him a name, but I don't remember it) ran outside and basically said (in my English translation of his hodgepodge of languages): "Stop! Wait! Let me see the map again; I told you the wrong thing." He'd had a moment of inspiration after we left and realized that the street we were looking for was not "Freibusserstrasse," but "Priebuserstrasse." (He had originally directed us to Busserstrasse) As he pointed us in that direction, he warned us that the building we were looking for might not be there any longer; we set out again, all the time on foot.

Finding Priebuserstrasse, now Ul. Stefana Okrzei, was fairly easy, as it was a pretty main thoroughfare heading out from the train station. We walked up the 2/3 mile road looking carefully at each building, repeatedly holding up our old picture to compare shapes and proportions. Nothing looked like it. We found one sort of similar building, but knew that it wasn't the same. After we reached the end of the street, we turned around and headed back. When we got back to the building that we had thought looked similar, we were going to just take a picture of it and call it good. However, as we approached, I started looking closely at the building 2 down from our target; I couldn't imagine that we would have missed it the first time, but it did look similar. I told Dad to pull out the picture again and we sat across the street excitedly comparing window size, cornice shapes, and brick numbers. We'd found it! It really was pretty exciting--maybe not like finding the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, but we did kind of feel like Indiana Jones. We had found the very house where Grandma Hedwig lived--and was probably born--and it was still standing there. A door had been turned into a window and the trees in front were gone, but there it was--1/2 a world away from the place where I remember meeting her when I was a young girl. I really did, strangely, feel closer to her and her family. I also really feel like she and Grandpa Mark helped us find it.

Our last stop was to go by the cemetery and see what we could find. Because of the holiday in Poland, literally every single grave was covered with lots and lots of flowers. It was beautiful. Sadly, however, we were told that an elementary school was built on top of the old town cemetery--all the graves in the "new" cemetery were too recent to be of interest to our family. We saw another little cemetery on the map that looked nearer to the house we had found, so we stopped there on the way out of town. There, too, any old gravestones had long since been removed or faded away.

While we may not have found everything we wanted, the trip was well worth its time and distance. I really do have a renewed interest in family history and feel that walking those streets helped to "turn my heart" back again to my ancestors and to eternal things.

Here are a few pictures of the Żary experience:

This was the only road sign picture I got (obviously out the car window), but I kind of like the blurriness of it--it seems to portray well how surreal the experience was:


Our really cool 1960s peach colored hotel room:


An old Żary street. Dad kept making us put our umbrellas down because he didn't want them in the pictures--I had assumed (wrongly, obviously!) that he was cutting the umbrellas out of the pictures!


Mom and Dad at the little town history museum where we got the final breakthrough clue:


The find! We tried to take a picture from the same angle as the old picture we had--I really need to get a copy of the old one and put them side by side. The peach-y building on the right is the building that Grandma lived in. That window and archway used to be a door (which threw us off the first time around) to a store. Grandma's family lived on the floors above.


Another view of the upstairs living quarters:


View down the street--back in the old days there were trees where this sidewalk is:


Priebuserstrasse today:


I just threw this in...this was a typical site on the trip--us trying to figure out what in the world we were doing:

Poisoning in Prague

Our last night in Prague (Wednesday night) we ate dinner at what appeared to be a great Pizzeria/Pasta Restaurant down the street from our hotel. We had a great meal and left the place raving about how great the food was--I think we even said it was the best we'd had in Prague.

Ask us again about 5 hours later...Mom was the worst hit, so we're assuming it was something in her food. I'll skip the details, but if you've ever had your average food poisoning, you know how it goes and how terrible it is. There really is not too much worse than being sick away from home. The next day we didn't get moving until around 10:30 and then had a pretty miserable car ride up into Poland (more details to come)...

I only got the 25% version of what Mom got, and Dad was better off than both of us. I'm not sure whether I was sick because of what I ate of just simply because Mom was sick. Ever since I was little, my family made fun of me because whenever anyone else was sick, I was "sick", too. I think they thought I was always faking, but I was not! The thought of other people being sick literally makes me sick. It works pretty much the same way with any kind of pain--if someone stubs his toe, my toe hurts; if they cut their finger, my finger hurts, etc. And to think I ever wanted to be a nurse...

Prague

As noted in the previous post, we drove to Prague yesterday. Today we did a whirlwind tour of the city, walking somewhere between 5 and 10 miles (one of us estimated 5 miles, another 10...). The weather was chilly, but at least the sun peeked out for awhile. Here are some pictures (out of order) of some of the things we did and saw:

Mom and Dad on the Vltava River with the old town in the back:


At the Old Jewish Cemetery. I don't think you are supposed to take pictures here, but Dad was able to snap a few "under the jacket" type shots. I think that this is probably the most fascinating place in Prague--I remembered it well from my last visit 7 years ago. You can't get a ticket to just see the cemetery, but you have to buy the combination ticket to see all the synagogues and museums in the Jewish Quarter, but it is well worth it to be able to see the cemetery (and I'll note that the ticketing system is quite the smart and profitable business scheme, since most people just want to see the graves!). The cemetery is really old and the quintessential (I think that is the 2nd time I've used that word on my blog this week) idea of an "old and creepy cemetery." Apparently between the mid-1300s and the mid 1700s, this cemetery was the only land given to the Jews in Prague to bury their dead. Since they believe that the dead should not be moved from their resting place, they just kept burying people on top of the old graves until it became this overcrowded mound seen today.


With Mom in the main square in the old town. Behind us is the Tyn Church--I think it looks like it belongs in Gotham City:


Mom and Dad in Wenceslas Square:

This was a common site as Mom and I took turns throughout the day in reading the guide book out loud. We were working out of Mom and Dad's "Steve Ricks' Best of Eastern Europe" and my collosal "Let's Go Europe." Steve Ricks has proved to be pretty reliable, so we mostly used that.

With Dad on the Charles Bridge:

Hiking up the hill in the Castle District:

This is a picture from the top of the church tower on the Castle Hill--to get there you had to climb 287 narrow, poorly lit, winding steps with traffic going both ways, no handrail, and tons of people, at least half of whom where presumably suffering from fatigue, vertigo, clautrophobia, or some combination. I couldn't help but picture the domino effect that would be caused from one person slipping! I also wondered how the paramedics would ever get to some of the less fit people who were huffing after the first 50 steps! Anyway, the view was worth it and we got this really cool picture of a cloudy day in Prague :)

Driving to Prague

Here's an excerpt from an e-mail my Dad sent to Jeff that contains some highlights of our journey from Budapest to Prague:

"We got to Budapest, Hungary on Sunday afternoon. Ashley was at the eairport to meet us and we took a taxi to her apartment. After seeing the sights there on Monday we rented a small car and drove here to Prague. It was a true adventure. The language is a total barrier and we had to cross a few borders. Hungary-Slovakia-Czech Republic. At the first crossing I was trying to drive away from the booth where the guard checks your passports and I wasn't that familiar with the stick shift on the Skoda (never heard of it!) that we had rented. I accidently got it into reverse and started to go backward. Then I got it into 3rd and kind of lugged down. Then I finally got it into 1st and chirped as I laid a patch of rubber. This all took 2 seconds and it sounded kind of bad. Mom and Ashes were laughing so hard I thought they would pass out. Hey, at least I didn't stall! The day started out with Mom stepping in some dog doo and tracking it into the car. We hadn't even left yet. So, we had to use our ingenuity to get that all cleaned off so we could have a smell-free trip. So, here we are. Don't you wish you could be here with us?! Never a dull moment."

I'll add a few of my own tidbits...the rental car is a little red Skoda Fabia. I rode in the back seat--where the leg room adds up to about 4 inches, I might add--on the 6 hour trip from Budapest to Prague. The lack of leg room wasn't really a problem since I could just spread out across the seat. Dad described some of the mishaps of the trip pretty well--I should also add that in the little check-point accidental reverse incident, he was also about 4 feet away from the curb, making it nearly impossible to hand the man our passports (although he waved us through without even looking at the passports)! Overall, though, Dad has done an excellent job driving, as usual. Everything went pretty well, after we got through the mishaps, until we got to Prague. The hotel should have been easy to find, but we missed a turn and had no map. I think we accentuated the problem by not stopping to get money out of the ATM, not buying a map, and having not yet eaten a real lunch or dinner although it was after 6 p.m. Since I was the one who reserved the hotel and got the directions, I felt responsible for the frustrations, but after about 30 or 45 minutes of a few wrong turns and stopping for directions twice, we eventually were directed to the right place through some effective charades. Can't have a family vacation without getting lost at least once, right?

Visit from Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad flew in on Sunday afternoon for a visit. It has been fun to have them here. I finished my last final on Monday morning, so I've been able to spend a good amount of time with them. My roommate was in Italy for the weekend, so they stayed at my apartment with me for the first two nights. I'm not used to tagging around Budapest with other people, so it's been fun for me (and possibly frustrating for them!). I've enjoyed their company and also not having to take all the pictures! So far the weather has somewhat cooperated, although rain threatens daily. I tried to make them think it was worse than it was (told them to bring hats, scarfs, gloves, etc.) so that they would be pleasantly surprised when it wasn't sub-freezing. (can something be sub-freezing, or is there just "not freezing" and "freezing"? I guess what I mean is sub-zero) Here are some pictures of Sunday and Monday in Budapest.

With Mom on Castle Hill:


Mom and Dad at Heroes' Square:


Mom and Dad at the indoor market:


With Mom at the City Park:

Londontown

Here's some pictures from my trip to London as I promised.

The obligatory picture in the London phone booth.


We went on a great walking tour of London that was really fun and informative. Best of all it was free and then you can just tip the tour guide at the end whatever you feel the tour was worth. I thought it was a great system. The same company/organization does similar tours in other major European cities and I would definitely recommend it...of course it would be easier to find out about if I could remember the name... [5 minutes later: okay, I took the initiative and went and found the site...it's called New Europe Tours]


Daniel, Adam, and Travis paying rapt attention to the tour guide :)


On the Thames:


The original temple of the Knights Templar...for Da Vinci Code fans:


I felt like I should be interested in the Royal Courts of Justice, so I took the token picture. However, in current events, this is where Paul McCartney is going through his divorce proceedings which may end in him shelling out around $100 million:

The Harry Potter Clock...for HP fans:


And Diagon Alley...if you don't know what this is then you're obviously not a fan. The couple on the right are living in London right now and we stayed with them. They were so great to share their apartment, show us around, etc. They made it a great time.


View from Buckingham Palace up the Mall:


Portobello Road. This is maybe one of my favorite neighborhoods in London, although there are so many great places that it's hard to choose:

Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens...another favorite place. I think I like this place so much because it is just really calm space and I used to come here every morning when I was studying abroad in London in 2002:

Sign that American sports are really taking over the world. This was in the middle of Trafalgar Square...I think the Dolphins are playing an exhibition game in London and they were trying to do some promotion:


This is one of my favorite pictures...this guy just started climbing up on the lion, got stuck and quite desperately reached out his hand for help:


The things people call art...this is one of the newest "exhibits" at the Tate Modern. Yes, it is a crack in the floor. But isn't that an artistic angle they put on that fork?:


And, last of all, the quintessential London:

Back from London

I've been a little absent lately, but I'm back for a while. Last week was the end of my Module II classes (basically a block of classes) and then I took off on Thursday afternoon for London, so I was pretty busy. I just got back yesterday afternoon and I had my first final this morning. I have 4 finals left--one Thursday, one Friday, one Saturday, and one Monday--then I start Module III.
I had a great time in London. Getting there and back was an adventure. Since I decided to go pretty last minute (about a week and a half before going), the flights out of Budapest were kind of expensive. I happened to find a flight out of Bratislava, however, that was less than 1/2 as much, so I decided to take it. Bratislava, Slovakia, is about a 2.5 hour train ride from Budapest. I took the train to Bratislava on Thursday afternoon, stayed in a hostel there and flew to London on Friday morning. It is only about a 2-2.5 hour flight. Coming back on Tuesday, I left London at 6 a.m. and planned on spending the day in Bratislava, but it was pouring rain and freezing cold when I arrived, so I just took the next train and got back to Budapest in the early afternoon. Anyway, I'll post some pictures of London later today.

Szentendre

On Saturday I wanted to get up and go to this little town called Holloko where they still live old-fashioned, etc., but you have to take a bus there and there is only one bus/day, which I missed. So I opted to go, instead, to this town about 20 miles or so north of Budapest called Szentendre. It is a really old town with quaint cobblestone streets, etc. A few hundred years ago a lot of Serbian refugees went there (I'm not guaranteeing the accuracy of that fact), so a lot of the stuff there is Serbian Orthodox. The weather was beautiful and I had a great time exploring for a few hours. I noticed when I got back that I hadn't taken too many interesting photos, but here are a few:

View of the Danube from the town:














The main square:



















Dead wreath on a church gate...














The graffiti tunnel that inevitably greets you at bus stations in eastern Europe:














Serbian Orthodox Church...there was no one here and I walked around the back and found a kid smoking pot--scared him pretty bad.



















A lot of the walls and buildings seemed in need of a makeover:














The only picture I took of myself there (don't be jealous of my cool outfit, Kristen!):