The Best of Eastern Europe

Before the rest of the day, a walk out onto Museum Island, the cluster of grand nineteenth-century museums set on an island in the Spree. We took most of them in from outside, and stepped into one.

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With a free day before the tour, a self-guided morning at the Deutsches Technikmuseum, aircraft, locomotives, and hands-on exhibits across its sprawling halls.

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Berlin's Museum of Natural History, home to the world's tallest mounted dinosaur skeleton. It didn't quite win us over, though, hence only a couple of photos.

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Met the Tour Director and traveling companions over a welcome dinner at the hotel.

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A guided walk through Berlin's twentieth-century history, roughly in this order: a marker tracing the line of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Topographie des Terrors beside a surviving stretch of the Wall, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That memorial sits directly across from the deliberately unmarked site of the Führerbunker, said to be a quiet, pointed slight against Hitler. From there to the Brandenburg Gate, and finally the Kurfürstendamm. The Reichstag stayed out of reach behind a city event, and the State Opera House slipped past without a photo.

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Out to Potsdam: the House of the Wannsee Conference, the gardens of Sanssouci Palace, the Dutch Quarter and the Alexandrowka Russian colony, and the Glienicke Brücke, the Cold War 'Bridge of Spies.'

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A break in Poznań, one of Poland's oldest cities, to wander the colourful Old Market Square, where the Town Hall clock's mechanical goats butt heads at noon.

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A guided walk through the rebuilt medieval Stare Miasto and the Cathedral of St. John, on into the New Town and past the city's great memorials to the Warsaw Uprising and the Ghetto Heroes.

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An evening Chopin recital by Prof. Maciej Poliszewski at the Fryderyk Concert Hall, a program running from the G minor Ballade and the Op. 41 Mazurkas to the “Heroic” Polonaise.

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On the drive south from Warsaw, a stop at the Jasna Góra monastery, Poland's great pilgrimage site, home to the Black Madonna.

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Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camps. Between 1940 and 1945 at least 1.3 million people were deported here and roughly 1.1 million were murdered, about nine in ten of them Jews, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. Coming here is not sightseeing. It is a place to stand with the people who were taken here, and to hold on to what it asks of anyone who comes: that this was carried out by a modern state and ordinary people, within living memory, and that remembering it honestly is part of how it is kept from happening again. Visiting was one of the reasons I chose this route. It was the most important day of the trip, and the hardest. A note on the photographs that follow: some are hard to look at. Inside several of the buildings we were asked not to take pictures, out of respect for the dead, and those rooms are not shown here.

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Down 136 metres into a UNESCO-listed labyrinth carved entirely from salt, tunnels, a subterranean lake, and the astonishing Chapel of St. Kinga, salt from chandelier to altarpiece.

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A guided walk through the old town. The extreme heat that day trimmed the route: the planned walk through Kazimierz, Kraków's old Jewish quarter, was dropped. We spent the time instead in St. Mary's Basilica on the Main Market Square, under its blue star-painted vault and before the great carved altarpiece of Veit Stoss, with a stop across the river at the Ghetto Heroes Square in Podgórze.

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An optional evening out at a country tavern: a Polish dinner of hearty traditional dishes and wine, with a costumed troupe playing folk and polka tunes and dancing between the courses.

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An evening cruise down the Danube with a Hungarian buffet, past Margaret Island, the Parliament, Castle Hill with Fishermen's Bastion, the Royal Palace, and the Citadel on Gellért Hill.

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The planned city drive was meant to take in Heroes' Square and Fishermen's Bastion, but the city was packed with events that week and the tour went a bit off script. We could not stop at either and came away without photos from the drive itself. The one picture here, of the Shoes on the Danube Bank, was taken by another member of our group.

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A taste of Unicum, Hungary's celebrated herbal liqueur, straight from the barrel at the House of Unicum.

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After the day's touring, Mom and I went to a chamber music concert at St. Michael's Church on Váci utca, an evening of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and other classics.

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A morning drive along the grand Ringstrasse, then into the old town on foot for St. Stephen's Cathedral. The day was blazingly hot, so most of what I came away with is the cathedral itself. We passed the Hofburg and Heldenplatz as well, but the heat meant I did not stop to photograph them.

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The tour offered an optional day trip to Bratislava, but we spent our free day at Schönbrunn instead, the Habsburgs' summer palace. It reminded us of Versailles: room after gilded room inside, and vast formal gardens outside. It was one of the hottest days of the trip, around 41°C, and we still walked about half the grounds, close to five miles. After the state rooms we came down the Great Parterre to the Neptune Fountain, over to the Japanese garden, the Palm House and the Desert House, and finally the imperial carriage museum, the Wagenburg, before lunch at the Fürstenkarussell bistro (bratwurst for both of us).

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Dinner at the Marchfelderhof, a gloriously over-the-top country restaurant crammed to the rafters with antiques and curios, then a Vienna concert of arias, waltzes and polkas by Strauss, Lehár and Mozart. The concert was a treat, and we had front row seats.

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A light lunch on the UNESCO-listed triangular market square of Telč, amid pastel Renaissance and Baroque townhouses, on the scenic drive through Moravia and Bohemia.

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An evening on foot from the castle heights down to the river. We started up by Strahov Monastery, stopped for a Czech beer at a tavern, then wound down through the Lesser Town to Charles Bridge as dusk settled and the lights came on.

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A guided walk through the Hradčany castle district and down into the Old Town, taking in Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral, the river, and the Astronomical Clock.

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A guided culinary walk through three local eateries, savory to sweet, finishing with a traditional kolache.

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On the final leg back to Berlin, a morning in Dresden to walk the rebuilt Baroque centre: the Fürstenzug (the porcelain Procession of Princes), the Hofkirche and Residenzschloss, the Semperoper, and the Zwinger. Then the drive on to a farewell dinner in the city where it all began.

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The tour ended after breakfast, auf Wiedersehen, Berlin.