Saturday 2 July: Last day in Passau, so for an early morning activity, we crossed the bridge and raced up the hill to the castle, arriving before the museum and lookouts were open.
The castle is another one of those heavily fortified fortresses that would be impossible to attack successfully.From the castle we had a great view of Passau and the confluence of the 3 rivers – and our hotel.
We had decided to just get a coffee and pasty in a café instead of a full breakfast in the hotel, but couldn’t find anything open – the city is dead on a Sunday morning after the football.
Just when we were about to give up, we found an excellent little bakery who had pastries and coffee.
While there we ran into 3 Czech cyclists on a 500 km trip to Bratislava, who were incredibly social. Good fun.
To pass time before boarding the ship in the afternoon, we had a look at the Glass Museum which was in the same building as our hotel.It has lots of examples of manufactured glass, focusing on Bohemia and Silesia, some pieces form other parts of the world for comparison, and some quite recent pieces.
We thought it would take about 30 mins, but took forever. It started on the 5th floor, and wound down wards, with room after room of display cases filled with items.It felt like an Alice in Wonderland adventure. Although I found it interesting, it probably had some of the ugliest pieces of glassware I’d ever seen. I know it’s a matter of taste, but maybe I don’t have the right stuff.
Frances enjoyed it more than I did. I have to admit though, it would have to be the most comprehensive exhibition of glassware in the world, and certainly of this type. Eventually we exited through a virtually unmarked small metal door ground floor
I commented to the receptionist that it must take up a large proportion of the hotel, and she said 60%!
The owner of the hotel funded the museum, so essentially the hotel operation would fund the museum. It’s a large gesture when many of the display rooms have the best views in the hotel which could be turned into accommodation.
Apologies for the poor quality of the photos.
Some short final items from Passau: A bit desperate for some Asian food, we had a very expensive sushi in Passau with a Hacklberg wheat beer. It was worth it!There was a street exhibition of photographs of Passau from 1940 to 1990.
A number of the shops and homes in Passau have shutters made of riveted steel – very steam punk.
We boarded the cruise ship at Lindau, 3 km from Passau as there were not enough berths at the Passau docks - it’s now approaching peak tourist season.We thought that we’d buy some extra supplies, bottled, water, wine, etc for the 14 day trip as purchases on board are expensive.
Much to our surprise, although there were 2 supermarkets nearby, both were closed – it’s Sunday. We are so used to supermarkets being open every day. It was a similar story when we went for breakfast – most of the stores, apart from food outlets were closed!
The ship is fairly large and has a mix of German, French, English and Japanese passengers (they have their own interpreter). Unfortunately, not only is Frances probably the youngest passenger on board, I’m probably the second-youngest - they’re mostly pretty old. Although it’s a German ship, most of the crew are multi-lingual so language is no problem.
The ship left at 5pm, and dinner was at 7pm. We were allocated tables based on language, and we shared ours with 4 Americans. Dinner conversation was going well until I mentioned Barack Obama.
Well, talk about a red rag to a bull, they launched into a tirade about his failings, and had a go at Hillary Clinton as well. Whether it was that or not, but one guy developed a sudden nose-bleed which flooded his shirt.He was OK a little while later, but we may not discuss politics again on the trip – EVER.
Dinner was pretty good – I think this is part of the attraction, and so they make a big effort. I'll resist the temptation to include photos of the meals on the cruise.
Internet access on-board costs 8 € per day ($12 AU) or 35 € per week ($52 AU). We bought a 20 € ($30 AU) chip for the phone which gives 750MB of data per month, pretty low.I’ve set the phone to create a personal hotspot so that I can use it with the laptop to access the internet which seems to be working OK. Because we’re moving, connections drop in and out which is a bit frustrating. We’ll have to be careful with usage to make it last the 2 weeks though.