Why do I want to go on an eight-day Emerald Waterways river cruise through Europe?
Art, music, food, wine, finding my "roots"- Lots of reasons!
My
husband is a chef, and I’m his resident “foodie”, and we are both history buffs
and “culture vultures” of the first stripe, so a river cruise through Europe,
with the opportunity to see and learn about the culture and history of our
ports, as well as enjoy fine food and wine, has long been on our “bucket list”
of dream trips! The eight-day “Danube Delights” cruise offered by Emerald Waterways is incredibly appealing to both of us,
for while we both spent time studying, living, and working in Europe many years
ago, the ports on this cruise, especially Bratislava
and Budapest, are places we haven’t
been to and have always wanted to visit, especially as my father’s family is
Hungarian, and the town his family was from is in Slovakia! (The one Hungarian
expression he taught me is Egészségedre! (Papa pronounced it “Eggesheggereh!”)
which means Cheers! or To Your Health!, and hopefully I’d get to use it a lot on
this cruise!) I am Jewish, and my father’s family was from Michalovce; Nagymihaly
in Hungarian, which my father pronounced “Nutmehi”. It is in eastern Slovakia,
about 200 miles from Bratislava, and it would be amazing to finally see where I’m
from! My father’s immediate family immigrated to the USA many years before WWII,
but family members who remained there were murdered by the Nazis; the deportations of Jews from Michalovce to the extermination camps began in 1942, and in 1944, 3500 Jews of Michalovce were deported. The fact that this cruise includes both a home-hosted tea with a
Slovakian family, and the time to go to the Holocaust Memorial and Museum of
Jewish Culture in Bratislava would be deeply precious to me. The other reason we’d
love so much to do this cruise is for the music: the Bavarian Oompah Band and Hungarian
folk music evenings both sound delightful to us, and the chance to attend a
concert in Vienna sounds totally wonderful! A very personal reason for so wanting
to do this cruise is because I’m a pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrator, and
it would be grand if I could do some sketches in the towns we visit, like I did
when I studied painting in Italy “way back when”… My fondest memories of Europe
are the hours I spent simply sitting in cafes, drinking endless cups of coffee,
watching life go on around me, and sketching. I think the chance to do that
again would be, perhaps, the best part of this cruise…
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| My European travel illustrations... would SO love to do this again! |
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