Capsa House in Bucharest, Romania

In downtown Bucharest it seems there is a plaque on every second building, indicating some semi-interesting historical information to be shared in Romanian, English and French. Unable to resist the printed word in any form, I looked at the plaque on Capsa House, and discovered that its claim to fame was a recital given there in 1846 by Franz Liszt.
Well, there was more history to it than that, but it was the mention of Liszt that stood out for me.

I have a suspicion that my generation was the last one to be given any sort of grounding in classical music, so I know Liszt was a nineteenth century Hungarian pianist and composer of some renown. My mind is whispering to me “waltzes, he did lots of waltzes,” though I don’t always trust my memory on these things. (A subsequent examination of his career courtesy of Google indicates that my memory was deficient this time. Though he did spend some time in Vienna, which is probably where I got the waltz idea.) Those of my peers who don’t know Liszt the composer probably remember Roger Daltrey of The Who playing him in the film Lisztomania, which I must confess I haven’t seen and probably should watch one of these days.

Maybe European education is better than North American. I’d be willing to entertain that possibility, but probably not too many Europeans today know who Liszt was, except perhaps for the Hungarians. There’s always more stuff to learn and remember. And you can’t squeeze much onto a small plaque when you have three languages to cover.

This is one of the major irritants of being on vacation: I can never learn all that I want in the limited time I have.
We covered five countries in July, or at least selected locations in those countries. We made it a point of search out the local museums in each place, and invariably I was frustrated by how much there was to absorb, In the time we had I couldn’t possibly take it all in. If the guidebook says you can get through the museum in an hour, I take two and leave still wanting more. I want to read every caption on every artifact; I don’t want to miss anything. That can be rather limiting when you are on a schedule, and I am thankful we almost always travel alone, not as part of a tour group. I have seen the busloads of tourists at monuments, museums and historical sites, and they always seem more concerned about what is coming next than enjoying where they are at the present.

This thirst for information means that how much we can see on any given trip is limited, but there is a great advantage to that: if you like somewhere  and don’t see all the attractions then you have a really good reason to return. In 2009 I visited Ypres, Belgium, on my own for a day while Vivian was with family in Germany. One day was just enough to realize that I needed more time in this historic town and the surrounding area. This year we visited for three nights. As well as doing some of the activities I had missed in 2009, we repeated things such as walking along the city ramparts and visiting the In Flanders Fields Museum (not only were there some new displays but I absorbed more on this second visit).

In Bucharest this time around I didn’t take the time to go inside Capsa House and see where Franz Liszt played. In fact there were a lot of places in that city that I didn’t get to explore  due to time constraints. I guess that is a good reason to plan a return.

The view from the ramparts, walking along the old city wall of Ypres.