People often ask us with apparent puzzlement, "Why did you choose ___?" where ___ is the destination of our vacation in any given year. That is somewhat like the archetypal Jewish mother who gives her son two neckties for his birthday. When he puts on the first one, she asks in a voice of practiced suffering, "You didn't like the other one?" There are many countries, and we have but one vacation a year. So choices must be made. And this year, it is Eastern Europe.
It seems a good time to go. More than a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain -- time enough for hotels, cuisine, and travel services to reflect the values of the free world, but not time enough for the former Soviet "clients" to become homogenized into Euroculture. We hoped to find still a whiff of the exotic, the forbidden, a distant echo of Graham Greene or le Carre. But washed down with good Austrian beer and well served by T-Mobile.
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