"A picture is worth a thousand of our words"- Ron and Susan AntinoriPrague, Czech Republic:
Something old, something new: a Marks & Spencer Dept store next to a palace
View from the top of Old City Hall, Ron grew wings for this shot
Baroque, anyone?
The city of a thousand spires
Great street life in Praha..this neighborhood goes up to the castle and is the thickest of crowds we saw. In general there was no one there...the town felt subdued and quiet. Don't tell anyone
One of Prague's martyrs by fire Jan Hass, a liberal preacher. The governors burned those they didn't like, the people would throw their unpopular rulers out windows, it was called defenestrations.
Here he is again, in reality he was short and fat...it's a great statue, and a popular meeting up spot people and pigeons
The bubble wrap building houses offices of the National Theater
Whoops, someone let one of those modern architects in the gates...this is deliberate, and a lot of fun...Gehry at his most whimsical, it's called the Dancing Building
Budapest, Hungary
It was completely bombed by the Germans in the 40s, and then rebuilt exactly. Now it's several museums
Row, row, row your boat...does anyone know the words to the Blue Danube?
Roar...this handsome fellow is on the Chain bridge which crosses the Danube between Buda and Pest...now how many of you knew there were two towns here? Buda was once the prominent one, but now it's Pest
Ron's getting good at this picture thing, that's the House of Parliament in Pest, taken from Buda. You can get confused where you are.
From Buda, looking at Pest, that's the Chain Bridge, the oldest and grandest of bridges, also bombed by the Nazis and rebuilt using the original plans from 1800s
All the visiting dignitaries come here to lay a wreath on the nation's altar and it's devilish hard to get a good shot
Prague, The Czech Republic - While visiting Prague on their Ramble,
Mr. and Mrs. Ron Antinori accidentally discovered this hitherto unpublished poem believed
to be the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Mr. Antinori found the poem in the process of
checking out of their hotel room while he was performing his standard exhaustive procedure
of searching for articles of clothing and other items possibly left behind by Mrs.
Antinori. The poem was carved into the mattress slats. It is a known fact that
Mr. Poe slept here and tortured by visions of black cats, preferred to sleep on the floor
under the bed.
Once upon a morning early, while I Rambled, feeling surly, Oh so clearly I recall, having stepped into the hall, As I pulled my robe around me did I rip it off so soundly, Suddenly my resolve did peak when I heard a voice bespeak, The errant Gods of destiny, playing games deplorably, "Get thee gone" she drows’ly said, "My husband’s near me still
in bed" In the midst of this affair, arrived the concierge so debonair, Once again my hopes soared high, but when I caught his evil eye, The day of night absorbed the light, propelling me hence to fight, Now upon this morning glory, relating hence to you this story,
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Of all the cities we went to, Prague did the best job of
incorporating contemporary art and architecture into their ancient city. No idea
what this sculpture was about, but it was fascinating, the directions were in Czech...it's
next to a theater where Mozart hung out...
They wouldn't let Ron play, even after he went back to the
hotel for his ukulele...In the main square, anything goes and everyone went
As pretty as Paris...
Even, perhaps, prettier.
The famous astronomical clock All the tourists
gather below for the show on the hour, death turns over the hourglass, the Turk nods his
head, the apostles parade, it's quite a timely thing
Prague does a beautiful job of blending the old and new,
here's the old National Theater, the foundation of which was laid with a block from each
part of the country and those blocks came into the city behind a procession of 50,000
citizens. They love Art here...
Vlana river...smaller than the Danube, but just as
pretty...has a famous bridge called the Charles Bridge that everyone walks on, back and
forth, just to see and be seen.
We thought Denmark had beautiful cemeteries, but this one had an
art nouveau gothic church....for real! As well as an arcade lined with the tombs of the
famous dead, like Dvorak, way above the madding crowds on a hill above Praha
View from our hotel room...kept us awake at night, we couldn't
find the switch. That's the castle on Castle Hill in Buda.
Budapest may be Susan's ancestral home (she claims half blood)
but the people are such a melting pot, like America, starting with the Celts of all
people, then Romans, Turks, Italians, Germans, Austrians, and now Americans.
The Hapsburgs, thanks goodness, did the planning
Who's that...? Caught in the web? Is that Art Nouveau
or 
St Michael, the patron saint of Hungary...and first
king
We have no clue what this instrument is and he didn't speak
English and Hungarian is a ridiculous language, it's related to Finnish, of all things,
but the music sounded good...
Pest from Buda
Buda from Buda. This folly used to be the fish
market, now they charge the tourists to walk on it and the Hilton put up a cafe under it
There weren't any Operas being performed, but this is
where we would have gone...it's really splendid inside, but too dark for our camera
A bad patch job or a deliberate memory, the Nazi's were
here, they bombed 30,000 buildings. Along the Andressy Ut you can see the signs
really clearly
Picasso was here...he's everywhere
Hero's Square, beyond which is a gorgeous park where you
can actually lose the Americans and see mostly natives
Who is that tall man?