Christmas Miscellany

We have greatly enjoyed spending this season in Vienna, although we have both missed our families. All to be expected....

Music Week

-- We have not heard recorded Christmas music in the markets or stores in the run-up to Christmas. As a result, no doubt we'll enjoy a certain freshness to the strains of "Jingle Bell Rock" in two more Christmases, when we again ply the aisles of the Rte 29 Food Lion with a shopping cart, admiring the festive pyramids of snacks with cheeselike substances and standing paralyzed by choice in front of a bin of frozen turkeys. Yet Vienna has ample compensation for this loss: church choirs abound in the public squares, here as in Salzburg, and brass bands as well. Hearing familiar carols in German, moreover, lends them a freshness. "Stille Nacht," which was written near Salzburg, sounds even lovelier than "Silent Night." This country is so much about music, and they do it so well.

-- Last Sunday evening found us at the Musikverein, a lovely, palatial 19th-century concert hall, to hear Mozart and Bruckner. The orchestra was wonderful; the acoustics were wonderful; the experience was transporting. At the end of the performance, we made our way to Landtmann's cafe, which has been in business since the 19th century. It sits on the Ring, a wide road that circles what was medieval Vienna; the road stands where once stood the medieval walls of the city, which were torn down in the 19th century. A small history printed in the back of the cafe menu notes that every important politician in Austria over the past century has visited the cafe, and the management makes no distinction about customers because of their political views. At the end of World War II, Russian soldiers looted Landtmann's and shot out its grand mirrors, but the cafe was renovated soon after and back in business. The dining area the night we were there was packed, though we did not have a long wait for the table, and the view would nevertheless have been worth a long wait. Outside our glass-enclosed dining area stood an 18-foot Christmas tree, decorated with colored lights twinkling through the snow flurries, and across the Ring Road stood the Rathaus, with its Gothic arches and towers brightly illuminated in flood lights, and below it Vienna's largest Christmas market, crowded with shoppers, lit with a million lights.

-- The next night found us with other Embassy couples at the home of an American professor who teaches opera in one of Vienna's universities. He gave a clear, basic presentation on opera and focused his remarks in particular on Mozart's Don Giovanni, showing scenes from it, with music, on a DVD. He explained how the score and certain instruments reflected and enhanced emotions and traits of various of the characters as they moved through the narrative. This background was an invaluable contribution to our ability to enjoy the performance when, two nights later, we saw it at the State Opera House.

Christmas Eve--at home with champagne flutes on the coffee table and concert music on the television as we opened our gifts for each other.

Christmas Day--we hosted a friend of Linda's from work. Having a guest gave us the incentive to go all out with the dinner: turkey and all the works. The meal, at least, did a good job of replicating the usual experience at home...though we still missed the hugs and love and good wishes of our families.

Filler

-- Directions on my "Waving Cat" Christmas toy:

o One NO. 5 battery for praviding the power, enabling to automatically beckon the hand for months, setting it at any position, never to be offected by the lights.

o When it is in the initiative operation, please insert the battery into the bottom of the treasure-beckoning cat according to the inscribed polaritities. Then it can work immediately. The hand beckoning will automatically enter the stable condition for several minutes.

o Inside attaching poly luck-beckoning lyrics, sticking them for immediate realizations.

o Inside attaching several self-filled out creative and catchy phrases' lable paper.

o If finding that the hand-beckoning stops swinging, please change the same battery with type number.

Sad Postscript on the Week

Earl, our once fat, happy white Persian, is dying from a kidney ailment; since he is willful as cats are wont to be, he will get to exit on his terms and on his own calendar, with an assist only if there is chronic pain. He had been uncharacteristically reclusive one day last week, and the next day I resolved to get him examined. I selected the clinic from a list provided by the Embassy that identifies medical offices that claim to speak English "fluently." I called for an appointment, and the person who answered spoke no English; I understood to bring Earl in at 9:30 a.m. I pulled him from his comfy nest in a lower shelf of the tv cabinet and put him in his carrier--which, judging from his low growl, he recognized from the flight here in July. We stepped into the icy wind for the tram ride to the vet clinic a couple of miles away.

Located in the basement of a large house in a residential neighborhood, the clinic has two vets, both women, who occupy the floors above and advertise 24-hour care. I entered and was hit with a cold blast of German at the desk (where English is spoken "fluently"), finally figuring out that the attendant wanted my name and address, followed by information on Earl. Tier? Katze. Farbe? Weiss. One of the vets, the extremely large Dr Elizabeth, loomed from behind a doorway behind the desk and said, "Take a short seat." With Earl in his carrier, I stepped through another doorway to a waiting room with hard wooden chairs along the wall and a saggy old sofa with pillows encased in dog pictures; a cold tile floor sloped to a drain in the center of the room. I thought I might be sitting in an abbatoir, chairs arranged for spectators. Two large bulletin boards decorated one wall: a disorderly jumble of pictures--a missing orange tabby, black cats with yellow eyes, labs, retrievers, schnauzers...pets found after being abandoned, pets for whom homes were needed, pets whose lives were to be sold or given away...pet-sitting services for rent-a-care. Separation...belonging...birth and death...the universe we all share. On another wall was a painting, perhaps by a child, of a moonlit black cat against a starry night sky. Earl is white. He likes sitting at the glass doors, in the warmth of our livingroom, and watching snowflakes slip slowly to the surface of the stone terrace, losing their identity in the quiet cold whiteness of the snows that preceded them. My chair was hard, and I stayed bundled up. Across the room from me was a lone white door with a shiny brass plaque in elegant script reading "Ordinance." Below it another sign in German: "Enter please only when ordered." After a 20-minute wait, with Earl remaining uncharacteristically quiet in his carrier the whole time, we were ordered.

The vet, Dr Elizabeth, got a growl out of Earl in fluent English when she palpated his tummy. Two x-rays ("Zwei is for the Kontrol"), blood tests, urine tests, and a scan later, she told me he had diseased kidneys, one being 80 percent gone. "This spot in the x-ray is not the kidney stone. Let me get my wordbook to tell you the English. Ah ja, it is the cal-ci-fi-cation." Earl was soon hooked to an IV with magic yellow fluid. After that procedure, I was handed a bag with a variety of special-diet food "for him to try what pleases best" (turns out he hates it all) and four kinds of medicine to be given each evening. Then an instructive staccato commentary: "This is for the kidney." "This and this is for the Gaster." "This is against the vomit." I secured the carrier and headed for the reception desk as she said, "Does he make the stool?" "After this, then the liver goes and there is more treatment." "Bring him to Monday for lab work." "That is 330 euro." No receipt. A trip home through the black wind, and Earl climbed into the gold reading chair to nap next to his brother Walter.

We have had additional visits to the vet, with mixed results. Earl is declining gradually, but he may yet level off and maintain a modestly decent quality of life for days, weeks, or more. We head into 2011 with the gift that comes with the imminent passing of a pet: a sense of compassion and a renewed awareness of mortality--and a consequent desire to value what we have while we have it.

Trip to Salt Mountain

Last Saturday morning we headed for Salzburg in northwestern Austria on the Budapest-to-Zurich"Railjet" train, which sailed along at 160 kph. At noon, we disembarked as the train stopped for one whole minute at the Salzburg station. Leaving the warm, well-lit car and stepping onto the windy station platform was like getting out of a comfy bed, awaking to a cold room, and putting bare feet on a stone floor. The mountains that the city nestles against were wholly obscured by clouds, and all we could see at street level was urban jungle: snow-dirty taxis and buses splashing through puddly streets, crowded parking lots, a rundown strip mall, and hotels, apartments, and banks--modern buildings rising from a few to several stories high. Bundled and hunched against the wind, we must have looked like a couple of cloth-clad gorillas, released to territory unfamiliar to them, staring, wandering, looking up, turning slowly in partial circles. We knew the hotel was close to the station, so we wandered the shiny wet streets, stepping around puddles and icy slush while stinging droplets of rain blew into our faces. At last we saw the sign for the Radison, our tree home for the night. We trundled up and shuffled through the revolving door into a bright, warm lobby. Check-in was a simple affair thanks to the good English skills of the head clerk--the first one, with a "trainee" badge, was enjoying a prolonged attack of hiccups, audible across the cavernous lobby. She was quite obviously embarrassed about it, especially in front of her boss, which made it all the more difficult for us to suppress smiles--along with a wish to ask her whether she was welcoming us with an Austrian folk song. Soon we had information on the public transit system and a map of the city. Amazing how at last becoming oriented in an unfamiliar place did much to let us ignore the weather, too, and ready us for exploring.

It was about a mile walk to the old city. Along the way we passed seedy casinos and a sado-masochism toy shop, which had a marvelous window display that included videos, pink fur handcuffs, 6"-stilleto heels, leather straps, men's and women's undergarments that beggar description in this a family blog, and a variety of scented oils and unguents probably to be applied after a customer is injured by various of the other instruments sold here. In a few blocks more we passed a booth marketing "Sound of Music Tours"--a movie, we have read, that the Austrians ignore or dislike, reportedly because it is so anti-Nazi. In the spring, however, we'll return to Salzburg with plans to take that tour; we are told that tour guides on the bus sometimes lead tour groups in singing "Edelweiss," "The Hills Are Alive," and "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" We are both most eager for this experience. We have read, too, that despite the belief of many Americans that "Edelweiss" is the Austrian national anthem, most Austrians are wholly unfamiliar with it. The movie, when it opened, had at least month-long plays all across Europe, except for Austria, where the lone Vienna theater showing it closed it after a week. Still, I have to admire the Austrians for cashing in on the story nonetheless. We soon stopped for lunch at a restaurant featuring the usual unimaginative Austrian and faux Italian cuisine, and in a few more blocks we were at the river. Crossing the bridge was like going through a wind tunnel with fine, Arctic rain. Then we passed through a stone archway, and the old city, crowded with Christmas shoppers, opened before us. The change in atmosphere was like stepping from the street into the bright, warm hotel lobby an hour before.

If there can be such a thing as a modern medieval city, it is Salzburg. Heavily bombed in World War II, the old city nevertheless retains its narrow, winding, cobblestone streets. Fragments of centuries-old buildings survive in walls, and a few structures from earlier centuries, such as the 18th-century house where Mozart was born, remain intact. Much of the character of the city, however, comes from the shops, which are filled with German and Austrian crafts: cuckoo clocks; Austrian-made hats, shoes, boots, and jackets; furs; water-color scenes of the city; handmade glass ornaments painted with local scenes inside and out; candles, creches, and wreaths; chocolates and breads and cakes of many designs and shapes; and an abundance of shops selling pretzels the size of dinner plates. Black iron signs that are icons for the stores--as can also be seen at times in Vienna--are suspended over their entrances: roosters, chimney sweeps, elephants, birds, and more. Green garlands and strings of lights crisscross above the narrow streets. On a mountain above the city rests the Fortress, a huge white castle (which, we have read, has served as the setting for various American movies); our walk up the mountain provided a fine view of the city below, though clouds continued to obscure the mountains throughout our stay.

Late in the afternoon, we made the mistake of returning to our hotel rather than finding a restaurant downtown. Although there was probably something edible in the S&M shop, our hotel's neighborhood offered little. Our query at the reception desk produced recommendations with little promise: the overpriced and pretentious hotel coffee shop, a Chinese restaurant, and what would have been a top-notch Austrian restaurant, though it was full and required reservations. We ended up a block or two from the hotel in a simple neighborhood joint, which turned out to be delightful. Stiegl's was tiny and crowded with families and groups of friends, with wooden chairs that scraped on the floor and tables whose scarred tops that had seen many a meal; a bar humming with customers abutted the dining area. It was light, warm, and noisy--a happy place, with a waitress who had a smile for every person at every table, and who seemed to enjoy our mixing English and German with her.

Sunday morning found us back in the old city at the Christmas markets and staring into beautiful, brightly lit shop windows. Linda returned with wreaths and ornaments--and bought me an Austrian hat. I looked stunning in it even though my ears were turning black from frostbite. After lunch, we were back on the train--and blessedly, uneventfully, home by evening.

Christmas: Traditions and Contrasts

Christmas is not so hectic here as at home. The season may be cold, but it is well lit, in part because so many people visit the mulled wine stands in the Christmas markets. We have not sensed the usual grasping hurry and competitive shopping pressure at the Christmas markets or in the stores, and all are free of the blare of Christmas music. Sometimes, though, we have been treated to live choirs. White lights--but no colored ones--are in abundance, hanging high above streets and festooning entries, doorways, and windows of apartment buildings and stores, but not homes. There was no rush by retailers, either, to start the season: Christmas tree lots have just begun to open. A 5-foot-high tree--nothing special--at one lot I passed on my morning walk costs 75 euros, or about $100.

Although the atmosphere is not so loud with the season as it is at home, the volume is definitely higher once Advent arrives. There are more people in the streets, on the trams, and in the shops, and the whole scene is busier: shoppers, though they tend to amble, are more purposeful and crowds are pervasive, on the trams and even in the art galleries and usually half-empty squares, many of which are now lined with the green structures of open markets. Things green are arrayed in front of florist shops--wreaths, evergreen boughs, and sprigs decorated with candles, bells, and tree ornaments. More tree lots, we are told, will show up the week before Christmas.

Parents normally decorate the tree on Christmas Eve--while the children are out at a special church service or being distracted by grandparents--at which time presents are also set out. Gifts simply have the recipient's name on them; there are no to/from cards. Gifts are all opened that evening. Perhaps 30-40 lighted candles decorate the tree, and they are extinguished not long after the gifts have been opened. Sparklers--the kind we have on the 4th of July--may be tied to the bottom of the tree. Gift-giving, from what I have been given to understand, is not the material orgy it is in the States, with children here receiving a sane, modest selection of toys.

The sun rises after 7:30 a.m. now and sets by 4 p.m. It is not until 9 in the morning that its rays get above the trees and begin to hit the snow, frozen slush, and icy walks. Alongside many buildings red and white poles are propped, angled out to the sidewalk to remind pedestrians to keep alert to snow and ice that may fall off the steep roof line three and more stories above. Some walks are still icy from last week's snow, and the ice films and clumpy layers of frozen slush are littered with gravelly grit, which, after a thaw, must be swept up and then deposited in one of numerous sidewalk receptacles for recycling. Daytime high temperatures recently have hovered just around the freezing mark; the high humidity makes the cold penetrate, most especially when the wind is up. The cold, however, does not seem to deter people from going out. I often pass parents with strollers, infants encased in thick plastic windows; on the tram they are sometimes taken out to sit on a parent's knee, bright wide eyes peeking out at the world from fat, down-filled, pastel snowballs of clothing. No matter how cold it gets, people are out walking their dogs and, for the most part, are assiduous about cleaning up after them; all but the largest breeds have on doggy sweaters.

Santas are in little evidence, only occasionally serving as a prop in a shop window or on an evergreen wreath. There are none on the sidewalks next to black kettles ringing bells. The young man who stood outside our grocery store for months selling magazines and soliciting coins has disappeared. We have not seen him for two weeks, and we hope he has found a larger, busier store and is getting more donations. The week after Christmas, school children go door to door singing and collecting for charities.

The Austrians are a jolly people. In early December we witnessed the enactment of another Austrian tradition--Krampus and Nikolo--in a street play near our neighborhood. Krampus is a pre-Christian figure who appears with fire-breathers and sundry devils in clouds of red and blue smoke. According to our German teacher, in rural villages Krampus has been known to stage faux kidnapings of small children, tossing them into a wooden crib on his back, while roaring at other children. Of course, the kidnap victims are returned to their families at some point, or so she says. After Krampus departs, the figure of Nikolo, dressed as a Catholic bishop, comes into the home. He brings along a big ledger book and reads out a list of the bad things that the household children have done during the year, although with children who have generally been good, Nikolo mentions one good thing. He then hands the children candy, or possibly a potato. Additional positive reinforcement risks spoiling the kids. Besides being good practice for Judgment Day, this is all extremely amusing in a Teutonic sort of way, and I understand better now the appeal of Grimm's Fairy Tales, with stories such as that of Hansel and Gretel, abandoned by parents and nearly consumed by a cannibal because of wanting candy. The Krampus figure, like the tales collected by the Grimm brothers, is wonderfully instructive as well as hilarious, and I also understand better now why there is a psychiatrist's office on nearly every block of the city.

Vienna, we are told, will shut down from mid-day on Christmas Eve and remain so for the two days after. Christmas Day is for family gatherings, and dinners featuring roast goose. Vienna is about music, and concerts are abundant; many of them between now and New Year's have long been sold out. After New Year's Day, the ball season--unfortunately, not the kind with spring training--starts.

Madding Crowds

Blogging about Venice, followed by Thanksgiving weekend guests, has put me behind on other topics. I'll use this post for highlights of our local adventures since our return from Venice. Instead of the usual tortured narrative and turgid filler, I'll just offer a few prose ornaments--some prettier than others--to hang here on the blog tree.

The Christmas markets we have visited are alive with lights and glitter, the scent of hot mulled wine, and shuffling crowds bundled against the cold. Our favorite is the one at Schonbrunn Palace, on the outskirts of the city, which offers nearly all locally made crafts. The largest--and prettiest--in Vienna is the one in front of city hall, the Rathaus, and its wares range from cotton candy to fine crystal. Many of the items here are also made by Austrian craftsmen, though many more are Chinese imports. There are toys, candles, soaps, winter wear, wine, liqueurs, and local foods. Abundant stands sell hot mulled wine, served in mugs to warm the hands while the alcohol, sugar, and spices warm the interior. At night the Rathaus grounds are magic: huge balls hang in high trees, like Chinese lanterns, illuminated in reds and pinks; arches at the entrances are entwined with brightly lit stars; inside, dark green wooden booths are encircled in lights, with glass ornaments, candy, toys and other wares brightly illuminated. This all sits before the imposing, gigantic neo-Gothic structure, the Rathaus, and behind it the night sky.

Belvedere Faces. In addition to the magnificent room of Klimt paintings, the Belvedere Palace offers a rich selection of 19th and early 20th-century art, including paintings of imagined scenes from local history, such as the 1683 Turkish invasion. (The palace, in fact, was built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, who helped save the city and drive out the Turks.) Besides the Klimt room, another room we found delightful is full of sculpted faces on free-standing pedestals, each depicting a different feeling or sensation, and visitors walk among them--the room is like a little garden of stone saplings with heads atop them. Our favorite was one with a wrinkled nose, closed eyes, and a furrowed brow; it was labeled "It Stinks!" We could see from the expressions on the faces of other visitors to the gallery that they, like we, were trying to suppress an impulse to mimic each face while examining it--very like wanting to moo when going past a field of cows. The sculptures reminded me of "figures" such as Overbury's Characters, written about the same time--the 18th century--that these faces were executed. In the 18th century, the phrase "it figures" applied to a person or a situation that fit a stereotype. Overbury's characters depicted social roles; my favorite is "The Fair and Happy Milkmaid"; her only care was to die in the springtime so that she might have flowers for her winding sheet. We plan to return to see the palace grounds in the springtime, gawking as stereotypical tourists, when the fountains are flowing in the three-tiered 18th-century gardens, and the snow-covers on the statues are removed, and the flowers are in bloom...a sculpted meadow.


The Augustine Church. Recently we attended a service at the Augustinerkirche to be treated to a Mozart mass performed by a choir and orchestra; such music is available every Sunday, and we'll be back for more. We arrived for the 11 a.m. service at 10:20 and sat near the back; by 10:40 it was standing-room-only. The Augustinerkirche is a 14th-century Gothic structure with rows of very bright electrically-lit chandeliers that seem out of place in their medieval setting: vaulted, high arches; a cold, uneven floor of gray flagstone and mortar; and simple wooden pews, planks dark with age, with pinhole-size pitting and cracks, looking very much like the weathered face of the woman who sat in front of me. As in a great many churches in Europe, the Augustinerkirche is unheated, so we remained bundled up for the whole service, our feet turning to lead and ice by the end of the mass--warmed on the inside by the wine of lively bright lights and even brighter music.

In Rome, the Augustine church is resplendent with gold and marble Baroque decor, with a Cosmatesque floor of multicolored bits of marble geometrically arranged; its side chapels are decorated with graceful statues and paintings by Caravaggio and others, and two of its supporting pillars display murals by Raphael; the music was often plain chant. In Vienna, the stone and wood setting of the Augustine church is, by comparison, plain; it is the music that provides the Raphael, the Caravaggio.

The Nasch Markt, the Mozart mass of open-air food markets, centuries old, stretches for more than 2 blocks near the edge of Vienna's old city center. That it is a popular place for pickpockets only adds to the color and energy. On Saturdays a mob of shoppers meanders and shuffles between the banks and stalls, many of which are run by Turks or Slavs. Shoppers and browsers are young and old, tourists with cameras and locals with shopping bags, some in furs and some in work clothes. Signs in various Slavic languages and in German identify wares and prices. At the first stall, the first sight to greet me was an octopus in a glass case. On display were squid tentacles, swordfish steaks, prawns, monkfish filets, tiny sepia that look like baby squid, salmon steaks, and more; the butchers' counters have all cuts of lamb, pork, beef, turkey, goose, duck, and chicken; earless skinned rabbits, which we thought at first were dachshund puppies, lie ramrod straight on skewers arrayed in rows, looking like pale pink baguettes. For those in search of a sheep's head, the Nasch Markt offers a good selection. Cheese of every variety was out, some of it in huge wheels, and banks and banks of spices, whole and ground. Pumpkin seed oil, apricot oil, olive oil, oil from almonds, peanuts, pecans--some bottled, some awaiting the crush of a hand-operated steel press. Figs, dates, olives, apples, oranges, pomegranites. Candy stands with spun sugar and fine chocolate, cookies and candy-coated nuts. Multicolored aromas...fish, spices, cheeses, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, vinegar, oranges...twined themselves around us like the tentacles of a gentle octopus.

Kahlenberg--stumbling on history bits. On a gray, windy Sunday morning in early November, we took the car out for exercise and meandered up the switchbacks above Grinzing, through the Vienna Woods, until we reached Kahlenberg, a mountain top with little to it but a church, a small cafe with a fine view of the Danube Valley, and a jarringly modern, steel and glass, small private college with a hotel. We parked and strolled around, continuing the meander on foot. Just beyond those buildings--up a steep walk on a mud path covered in yellow leaves--we came upon a red brick military observation tower dedicated to Crown Princess Stephanie, wife to the faithless Crown Prince Rudolf, who committed suicide in 1889 after killing his mistress. In the lot at the foot of the trail, near the cafe, is an old rail car of the horse-drawn variety; inside it are photos of the royals visiting the mountain top at the dedication of the watch tower. Also adjacent to the lot sits the church, which was burned down during the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and was rebuilt the same year, as happened with our village of Grinzing. Attached to the cafe is a small souvenir shop. We stepped in to get out of the cold wind for a moment. In the shop, three middle-aged Chinese men carefully eyed and ran their fingers through three woolen knit caps for children, bright with multicolored stripes and with ear flaps and chin ties...possibly made in China. They tried them on, too small for their heads, and then purchased them and, chin straps tightly affixed, and walked out into the November chill, their capped heads gently bouncing like ornaments on a bough in the breeze.

Venice Post Scripts

St Mark's. Especially because of the gold mosaics that cover its ceiling, the church is opulence and splendor. Any sense of mystery, however, came across fragmented, and then re-formed, and fragmented again with each moment, as masses of tourists moved through the aisles, elbowing, pausing to stare, shuffling along in baby steps, chattering about lunch and what to see next, and taking flash photographs, though they are forbidden. The mosaics, the architectural lines, the gold altar screen, the decorative stone inlay floors--we enjoyed St Mark's in spite of the manifold distractions. The Square, for some reason, was sadly lacking in pigeons, who normally make the area look like a carpet of bubbling, hopping feather balls and swarm on anyone holding food like fruit flies on an over-ripe pear.

Murano...jaded...a canal runs through it. The tiny island of Murano is nothing but glass factories and shops selling glassware. Perhaps because we came way at the end of the tourist season, many of the shopkeepers, like the glass-blowing expert who gave us a demonstration, seemed bored. Maybe they are always like that. After we alighted from the water bus, we walked along the edge of the island in the noon sun; the unusually warm day added to the feeling of torpor. Although my camera lens failed to capture the scene well, I took a picture of a dog lying in the sun next to a wall, happy with a long, bent stem of yellowed grass, eyes half shut, oblivious to passersby, simply focused on the repetitive motion of chewing on the blade. Just beyond the pup we saw a sign inviting visitors to watch a demonstration of glass blowing. The demonstration was in a deteriorating building that had a large doorway cut into it, above which was embedded an arch of colored glass bits, a jeweled tiara for the drab entry. Beyond the doorway were the glowing hot maws of two open kiln doors. Other tourists from the water bus had caught up with us; a young man, who identified himself as an apprentice glass-blower, ushered us to a small set of wooden bleachers. A middle-aged man, looking as if he had led a very sedentary life, walked out and picked up a 6'-long pipe, one end of which he repeatedly spun in a bucket of special sand and placed in the furnace until he had built up a wad of molten glass, like a big Q-Tip. He blew through one end of the pipe to create a large bubble, and, as the material grew cooler, he would put it back in the furnace, and then bring it out and work with it some more, sometimes blowing, sometimes using a crimping tool to cut and shape it. He never made eye contact with us and looked quite bored the whole time as he went through the process of making a vase and then a unicorn, looking for all the world like the dog outside chewing grass.

After the demonstration, we were ushered to the factory store--long clear-glass shelves, all quite brightly lit, showed off all manner of tableware, jewelry, lampshades, and multicolored glass objects such as clowns, cats, ducks, fish, cars, and...you name it. We strolled through the aisles as if we were at an art gallery, admiring the work but not at all tempted to buy any of it. We spent the next 2 hours strolling the Murano canal and visiting the other shops. The window displays were often stunning; unfortunately, so were the prices, and we had little space to pack anything home in any case. Eventually, we also got jaded. Going in and out of the shops became our blade of grass.

How to tell when you are being treated like an American--I. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes of Mr Bixby, the steam boat pilot who trained Twain himself to be a pilot. Twain describes Bixby as having a temper like a pot of water on a stove. When he would notice a mistake, Bixby would simmer and from moment to moment boil over, rattling the pot lid and sending up expletives like clouds of steam as overflowing water hit the hot metal surface. We found Mr Bixby's descendants had made their way to Austria, and one of them was wearing the uniform of a train conductor. When we left the bus in Villach and boarded the train for Vienna, we were relaxed and relieved to be on the final leg of our trip, and on schedule. And then the conductor approached. He was imposing--a tall man whose red cheeks suggested the simmering choler within, and whose girth suggested he had devoured many a passenger. Linda handed him our last ticket, this for the fourth leg of our trip, and we could see a growl of impatience making his little red mustache twitch. Then he angrily exclaimed that it was not a ticket. "WHERE is the ticket?!" I saw my beloved's pupils enlarge. Every head in the car turned to witness the dramatic discovery of two people trying to thieve a ride from Austrian Rail. With the three of us mixing German and English--all quite loud--we asked for time to dig out the three portions of our ticket that we had already used, in the hope that he would believe the accumulated paper proved we had paid our fare. He announced to all the car that he would be back. Linda scrambled hurriedly through a piece of luggage and produced the other three portions of our ticket, which we handed (submitted?) to the conductor moments later. He agreed that we had paid. He looked disappointed. All our other interactions with Austrian Rail personnel transpired with them showing kindness and helpfulness.

How to tell when you are being treated like an American--II. Although we did very well, on the whole, with our dining out in Venice, one evening we tried another of the restaurants recommended by our B&B: La Mura. Unlike the other establishments we had visited, which had more the feel of neighborhood clientele and long years in the local business, La Mura looked sleek and new, with large plate-glass windows and much chrome and brass; the others had been small, with worn wooden floors, dark paneling, and wooden tables and chairs that had seen a lot of service. The prices at La Mura were about 25 percent higher than at the other restaurants we had visited. The house wine tasted thin, as if it had been watered. Linda and I each opted for a pizza, those being more modestly overpriced than the other entrees. The pizza was okay--unremarkable, but no complaints. Then the waitress pressed a particular dessert choice on us: homemade apple strudel topped with cream. I chose it, though Linda opted for another item. When my dessert arrived, its pastry crust was cool and leathery, and its interior was bubbling hot; it had obviously been microwaved, and microwaved too long. I doubt it had been fatto a casa, and I suspect it had seen more than one sunrise. Just before it was brought to our table, I had noticed two waitresses at a side counter hovering over a plate (which they soon served to me). One had a can of Redi-Whip (or the European equivalent) and had no idea how to use it, since, I presume, they normally serve real whipped cream. She and her colleague took turns shaking the can, looked at it quizzically, turned it upside-down and sideways and upside-down again, shook it again, twisted the top, and then finally figured out that they had to bend the nozzle to dispense the white chemical froth. When they saw it come out, they looked delighted, with big smiles and little squeals--as if they were having an erotic experience. I have not determined whether the chemical substitute was made purely out of cheapness or whether they thought that they were doing me a favor, believing Americans were likely to prefer the ersatz version to the real thing.

Water World: Trip to Venice

Yesterday we visited the Belvedere Palace in Vienna to see, among other things, the collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt. "The Kiss" is gloriously bright, in oil and gold and silver leaf. The embracing figures first appear as a unified mass of gold, and then the woman's face and the man's head become discernible, and then the figures are finally apparent: a man's face over the woman's, kissing, their robes blending them into a single form before the eye can sort them out. Awesome. Truly. On Sunday we returned from Venice. The canals, the boats, the bright lights, the rows of buildings, the streams of humanity, and the sky--all blend into one wonderful form before the eye begins to sort them out. Awesome. Truly.

How nice it was to be back in the land of good bread, good wine, good sauces, good...all food. Venice, unfortunately, is known for its mediocre (by Italian standards) and expensive restaurants. The B&B we stayed at gave us recommendations to five local restaurants, and we tried three of them. Only one was disappointing, with thin house wine and microwaved desserts; the best, a hostaria, had a fine house red and pasta as good as what we normally found in Rome. I still remember with fondness the lasagne stuffed with cheese and shrimp. Details--a few, at least--will be in a subsequent post. And, because I am overwhelmed at the thought of recounting our visits to St Mark's and the other prominent sites of the city, I will just offer a few accounts (for my dear friend and reader Joyce, vinaigrettes) of some of what shaped our experience of the visit.

Getting to Venice

The Austrian rail system--efficiency in motion--took us through landscape that could not be in greater contrast to the cityscape of our destination. Last Wednesday morning we rolled out of bed early and caught the 7 a.m., #38 tram. After one more city transit connection, we were at Meidling Station, where we joined schools of morning commuters swimming through turnstiles and up and down stairs and escalators; finally we emerged on the platform near our track, and then onto the train--which departed on the minute--on our way across Austria. Four hours later, at the town of Villach, we boarded a large, comfortable bus for the remaining 3 hours of the trip. Although we could have taken the night train directly to Venice and dispensed with the bus leg, we opted for the daytime travel in order to see the countryside: snow-edged gray crags and ridges, dark fir and pine trees mixed with yellow-leaved birches, steep and stark rock mountainsides, waterfalls, mountain streams colored pale jade and cream from the calcium they carried, farms, well-balanced cows on sharply sloping meadows, and villages with spiked church steeples and orange-roofed houses. We crossed the border into Italy without slowing down. Once we reached the industrial city of Udine, the vista turned to unrelenting flat and farms--all looking very much like lakebed.

After crossing a long causeway, we arrived on the edge of Venice at Piazzale di Roma, a euphemism for acres of buses--private tour buses by the score, double-decked and with bright lettering, and dozens more local buses, yellow and arrayed in parallel slanted parking lanes, and others lumbering and grunting their way in and out of the lot, puffing black diesel smoke. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and pale yellow-orange street lights were beginning to come on around the square in the deepening gray. We collected our bags and headed past a dozen dirty, tumble-down kiosks with suspended naked, bright lightbulbs illuminating t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, glass pendants and dishes, and other small, junky curios, over a pedestrian bridge and to the edge of the Grand Canal. Although it had been more than 7 years since I was in Venice, the city still filled me with wonder. At first sight it magically rises out of the water to be embraced and wrapped by the sky, like the robe on a Klimt figure. As we waited for the water-bus, the lilting motion of the floating pier that we stood on might have enhanced the magic, though that dissipated as a jam of tourists awkwardly wielding suitcases pushed and elbowed to improve their position for boarding.

After a 10-minute ride on a very crowded water-bus, we disembarked at San Silvestro, a small stop with little to recommend it but deteriorating, ancient brick walls and a mysterious alleyway leading into a dark stone tunnel. We leaned our bags and our tired selves against one of the walls and called the B&B where we had reservations. Its practice, fortunately, is to send someone to greet guests at the water-bus stop and lead them to the establishment; there is no way, otherwise, that anyone unfamiliar with the neighborhood could find it. Ten minutes after our call, Mario, proprietor of the B&B, emerged from the tunnel, shook our hands, took Linda's bag, and led us through dark alleys, over small, arched stone bridges that spanned rios, or narrow canals, and around blind corners, until we reached our residence for the next four nights.

La Bella Citta

I have usually found only in natural scenery the enjoyment I find in Venice. For me, much of what makes the city inviting to the eye is not just the variety and manifest age of the structures but the color and motion of the crowds: the lights from boats and restaurants and shops ripple over the water, and the great numbers of people are in motion day and night, gliding like watercraft, on and over the bridges, looking in shop windows, working their way on the walks to St Mark's, to the Doge's Palace, to the Accademia, to the Rialto, to the restaurants and hotels and stores.

Venice at Night

Friday night, from the Rialto bridge--itself lined with shops--we eyed the brightly lit restaurants with outdoor tables stretching along the sides of the Grand Canal, and the dozens of kiosks and shops that illuminated gold and silver masks and Murano glass, the crystal clear and the brightly colored. The bridge was lined as well with tourists looking out on the Canal and the city, and sporadic camera flashes from the bridge returned the camera flashes from the gondolas and water buses that passed below. We left this vibrant scene for a long walk to locate the Accademia, the city's main gallery, which we planned to visit on Saturday morning. Having found our destination, we headed back--we thought--toward the Rialto on the opposite side of the Canal, the area through which we had just come. Venice is small, and I did not think it was possible to get lost for very long, but we soon began to feel that we were in a gondola without an oar; we kept turning toward what we thought was the direction of the Grand Canal, but the concrete walks grew darker and darker, and soon we saw nothing but huge apartment blocks, no people, no shops, no lights except dim ones behind window shades and shutters. We finally came across a tiny grocery with a light on, and a very kind clerk pointed the way to us--the opposite of the way we were headed--and perhaps 4 miles later, winding back to the Canal and then along well-lit walks to the Rialto and beyond, we were back at our B&B.

Churches. Unlike in Rome and much of the rest of Italy, the churches of northern Italy (and Austria, for that matter) are for the most part marked by spires and spikes, not by domes, and seem more masculine than Rome's churches, more, perhaps, like the military fortress Luther may have had in mind when he wrote his best-known hymn. Venice is no exception. There is less emphasis on the Virgin and the Santo Bambino, and more on male saints. At night the churches of Venice (though I exclude St Mark's from my observations since I was not in it after dark) are cold places. Each that we went in lost its warmth and richness in the shadows. Each was illuminated by two or three bright spotlights, usually placed high on the nave walls; they created blindness, deepening the dark areas with shadows whose edges were as sharp as the weapons of the Crusaders who stole back the body of Santa Lucia and the bronze horses and the relics of St Mark variously from Constantinople and Cairo.

In the early evening, the churches provide, by their very presence, an important social service: they are built with facing piazzas, designed so that crowds could congregate. These stone squares--there is very little green to be seen in the city--provide much-needed play space for children. During the late afternoon hours, we saw skate-boards and soccer games underway. In one piazza not far from our B&B, there was but one tree, and nearly all its yellow leaves had fallen from its branches to the stone below. In that square, children would play not just through the hours of dusk but well into the dark, kicking a soccer ball around until its white shape was only a rolling shadow. We saw no playgrounds. As in Rome, the land is, I presume, just too expensive to turn over to children.

Venice in the Morning

Each morning as we left the B&B, the odor of sewer gas assaulted us. Mario, the proprietor, told us that sewage washes into the canals after each high tide because some building owners have failed to install appropriate valves and sewerage pipes. When he was a child, he said, the water was blue, and he and his friends could swim in the canals. It was expensive for him, he said, to bring his building up to code, and it is a law that irresponsible homeowners can evade relatively easily. Effluent from their structures turns some of the canals green for much of the day, and the smell lingers into the early afternoon. The gewgaw sheds, the t-shirt kiosks, the glass and mask and candy shops do not begin to waken until 9:30 a.m. at the earliest, when the rising metal shutters send clattering echoes through the narrow stone streets.

Venice Immersed

"Acqua alta"--high water--tends to wash over much of St Mark's Square at high tide, and occasionally the water becomes an inch or more deep in the church itself. The two mornings we visited that area, large puddles would have washed the feet of pilgrims as they entered the narthex but for the raised platform walks that were erected in the trouble spots. As the buildings, walks, bridges, and canals of Venice may eventually give way to rising waters, its skilled artisans and its dialect are also slowly disappearing. On the nearby island of Burano, a once thriving lace-making industry has been wholly replaced by products from China. The glass-blowers of Murano are threatened as well. Throughout the city are glassware shops proclaiming "50% off!" Two shopkeepers told us, as did our B&B host, that those are the shops selling fake Murano wares from China, and signs in many store windows in Venice protest the theft of the local artisans' reputation and livelihood. The language, too, is being immersed in standard Italian. Mario at the B&B and our tour guide at the Doge's Palace both mentioned that the Venetian dialect is eroding quickly. Children from Venice's schools have difficulty when they get to Italy's universities because they cannot distinguish certain phonemes, such as double consonants, and their spelling and other features of standard Italian literacy are also affected.

Getting Home

Throughout the city maze of narrow, often dead-end streets and alleys, yellow and black metal signs affixed high on intersection walls point the way to one or more popular destinations--the train station, Piazzale di Roma, the Rialto bridge, St Mark's. Sometimes, however, the signs are ambiguous or missing. Sunday morning we chose to walk to the train station--having done more than one reconnaissance trip to it already--rather than rely on the water-bus. After losing our way a few times--only briefly each time--we made it to Piazzale di Roma and sat on a stone wall until the bus showed up. And it did. And so did the Villach-Vienna train. The trip home went off on schedule. More details in a subsequent post.

Filler

-- Each time we went to and from our B&B, we passed a small restaurant that had sloppy, hand-lettered sheets of paper in clear plastic envelopes posted next to the door, saying that any question about how to get to the Rialto or the train station would be answered for 2.50 euros (about $3.75). Another hand-lettered sheet said that the business of the establishment was not about giving out information and not to bother them with questions.

-- One early morning in Venice, in a narrow stone passage, we passed a very old man with a tall walking cane cuffed around his right forearm. He was walking a small dog, a terrier mix with long white fur with brown patches, high furry ears, and an erect fluffy tail. The man's right leg was severely bent, and it swayed in almost enough to touch his left shoe as he stepped, his effort made all the more difficult by having to manage his dog on its leash. The dog, clearly eager to investigate each scent as they moved along, paused every couple of seconds to look back at the man's face and gauge his motion, never stretching the leash taut.

-- Sam the Pet-Sitter was recommended to us by others here at the Embassy. Sam told me he is an American Indian who was born in Montana and adopted as an infant from an orphanage by a Greek Jewish couple, who soon moved with him to Mexico. He has lived in many places since, including Israel, and has been in Vienna for 6 years. Sam said he is fluent in English, German, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. He is middle-aged, about 5'5", with a barrel chest and a thick gray head of hair that falls over his red-brown face. Over multiple layers of thin, long-sleeved t-shirts, on that chilly day, Sam wore a short-sleeved t-shirt with Israel Defense Forces emblazoned on it. Sam pet-sits for a living. He seems exceptionally humble and deferential. When he came to pick up the key, he entered our apartment slowly and tentatively, as Earl and Walter approached, tails erect in greeting. Sam looked at the cats as I would expect of someone who loved animals, with eyes of warmth and an invitation to friendship. We entrusted our key to him. When we came home, all was in perfect order. Sam came the day after we were back to collect his pay and return our key. When I paid him, he seemed embarrassed to take the money. He never looked at the cash I handed him; as he looked at the floor, he folded the bills into a small square and put them in his pocket. He told me he wanted to leave Austria 2 years ago, but he is still here. I gathered that he likes best caring for the pets that were adopted from shelters. He loves Israel...a country for many who were once homeless.

Halloweener World

To get in the proper frame of mind for Halloween, this chilly, sunny October morning I made my way to the Grinzing Friedhof. Friedhof, which means "place of peace" (cemetery), is one of the few euphemisms I have come across in German. This culture strikes me as matter-of-fact in so many ways, particularly when it comes to nudity or death or other subjects that make Americans shy, uneasy, or circumspect. (The word for mortuary, for example, translates as "corpse house.") The Grinzing cemetery sits at the edge of the village, on a hilltop--a good place, as hilltops are where heaven and earth meet. The composer Gustav Mahler, I have read, is buried here. I used a quest for his grave as my reason to thrash along the sidewalks through the dead leaves and up the slope.

There is a practicality about the business of burial here. Adjacent to the entrance gate are a pair of florist shops, and next to one of them is the entry to a stonemason's yard. The florists offer all manner of evergreen twigs and branches, along with chrysanthemums, pansies, and other flowers that are resistant to cold weather. These florists' business, it appears, is to assist with grave decoration rather than to provide displays for funerals. Neither the florists nor the stonemason hides discreetly in the shadows or seeks at all to be unobtrusive. Out front, like a menu board for a cafe, the mason has placed a sign with your three basic tombstone prices, ranging from roughly $1000 to $3000. Your basic one is your plain granite and comes in at 950 euros, and your high-end one at 2,200 euros is your black marble, polishing included free gratis. I looked into the graveled yard expecting to see a mock-up sample, with (in German, of course) "Your Name Here"--and perhaps a dash below it sandwiched by question marks--to whet the appetite of buyers, or at least to put passersby in a suitable frame of mind before entering the gates.

The cemetery has more the feel of a farm than of a garden. Just inside the gate is a modest little building, a bit shabby, reminding me of an adjunct to a barn. Its doors were open, and inside was a small chapel, rough and plain, with nine wooden folding chairs set in three rows on a stone floor, a lectern, and a bier on wheels, very like a shopping cart at a Home Depot garden center, though higher, and covered with ratty green felt. On the gravel paths I saw workmen in coveralls raking up leaves and other natural debris. At the ends of some of the rows of graves are concrete bins where grave decorations--flowers, boughs, and other vegetation--are tossed by the workmen as unceremoniously as children discarding candy wrappers on Halloween night. Three or four times during my stroll I had to step aside for these dusty, jeans-clad lieutenants of Death, who rolled through on garden tractors towing wooden-bed carts suitable for hauling a coffin or a pile of dead branches. They looked with annoyance at me and, I thought, at all us visitors, the solitary as well as the family groups, passing us like obese shoppers on scooters in a rush to get to the paint sale in Aisle 6. Because of a mild allergy to autumn leaf mold, I occasionally dabbed at tears under my eyes, hoping they would mistake it for grief and soften a bit as they rumbled past, but they remained as oblivious as a Vienna taxi driver to a crippled pedestrian in a crosswalk.

The cemetery blankets perhaps 5 acres. Along its edges, behind tumble-down wooden fences, are sheds for backhoes and other motorized, miniature farm equipment, along with shovels, piles of brown dirt, and a variety of gardening tools. Many of the marble vaults are decorated with flowers, but real, not plastic ones. There are no balloons, no pinwheels, and none of the tacky decoration that shows up in cemeteries in the States. Not many trees rise in the tract, and those that do look sad. Along with a few birch are traditional evergreens, cypress and pine; like the pine, the birch have been pruned high, presumably so their branches would not interfere with the backhoe operator's work. The cypress are particularly ragged, with wide gaps in their foliage, as if other trees had toppled into them, revealing wide and dark, brown, tangled interiors. These trees rose above a forest of mostly black marble slate, stones sometimes several feet high to accommodate the names of three or more generations, as families are interred in vertical stacks.

Here the old is embedded in the new. I did not find any dates before mid-19th century in the lists above the vaults, and most of the stones dated from the last 50 years. It occurred to me that the reason I saw so few old, weathered stones is that they are replaced--and updated, literally--each time a member of the most recent generation is interred. Still, I know that Grinzing has been here for several hundred years and must assume there is yet another cemetery, or perhaps those who died in the early 19th century and before are interred under church floors if not in other yards.

Contributing to the matter-of-fact feel here is that most of the stones are minimally informative--nothing but names and dates of birth and death. There are no Bible verses or Biblical images such as angels or stone lambs, though crosses are in abundance. Only a very few show signs of whimsicality. I saw two marble crosses with "Wiedersehen!" engraved on the transept, and another with "Unvergesslich!" (Unforgettable!); one black stone had a picture of a dog, perhaps a rottweiler, etched into it, and just below were the words, "I am here, I wait for you." I did notice that the World War II years, especially 1943-45, showed up frequently. Some of these were on stones of persons middle-aged and older, who died in Vienna, as that of a husband and wife with the same date of death, but some had died in their teens and 20s. In many cases, their professions had been military, designated by the Maltese cross next to the name. One of these young men is noted as having belonged to the Luftwaffe. Another says "Our Only Son"; he died on the Russian front in the winter ("Gefallt Donez 1943") at the age of 18 and is buried below his parents, who lived into the 1960s. How unnatural it seemed to think of combatants in Hitler's forces as having also been human, of their ends as having been sad, of their short lives as having been unfulfilled, and even of their having left behind parents, parents who grieved.

Some cemeteries are well-tended gardens, but I most appreciate the ones that are tended just imperfectly enough to reflect the passage of time. Rome would not be so calming to the spirit if it had no ruins. I appreciate a few clumps of overgrown grass and a few weeds, a burial yard in which the stones are weathered in different stages, with the oldest illegible from lichen and erosion by winds and rain over centuries. I never did locate the grave of Gustav Mahler.


Filler

A number of the wine gardens and inns in lower Grinzing have signs on their exteriors saying that they have been in business since 1683--the date of the last Turkish siege, in which Grinzing was burned to the ground.

I have seen no Halloween decorations here other than a child-sized scarecrow that sits out front of a flower shop and is taken in each night. Pumpkins, however, are now popular on menus: pumpkin-seed oil salad dressing, baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup.... And geese are abundant on restaurant menus and in grocery stores.

Under Wiener World

The deep texture of Vienna's architecture makes many of its streets a pleasure to experience, but it can be a struggle to get from it a linear sense of history in the city. Unlike Rome, where history is often discernible by its layers, surface Vienna is a deceptive melange: classical, medieval, and Renaissance styles appear in abundance, often adjacent to each other or to modern structures; it is not immediately apparent whether a Gothic church dates from the Middle Ages or from the 19th century, and portions of some churches date from both. It is not just the architecture that imparts that jumbled sense of time. During our touring the past couple of weeks, we have found that, like the Danube, history runs through the city in different channels and sometimes seems to meander, pool, and eddy as it makes its way to the sea.

Beneath the Stone

Near the heart of downtown is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Roman settlement, known as "Vindobona" from the 1st to the 4th century A.D. The desk attendant, a grizzled, dark, and dour figure, was a modern Charon, requiring obols for the boat ride across the Styx, down his staircase. We paid and headed for the underworld. A 20' descent takes a visitor to the street level of 2000 years ago and an excavation of the foundation outlines, walls, and other elements of the structures that remain from a Roman fort and various living quarters. Allied bombs the last week of World War II uncovered coins and other artifacts from more than one temple from the Roman era. (Elsewhere in the city, and even out as far as Grinzing, there are other, though more meager, remnants of Roman buildings.) All in all, however, the evidence of the Roman world felt sparse. While we were in the excavation, we could hear the clip-clop of fiacres, the horse-drawn carriages, on the street above. It was as if the street noise itself was from another time--the 19th rather than the 21st century--while we gazed on remnants of the 2d century.

Beneath the Bronze

The Capucchin church in the city center hosts the crypt of the Habsburgs. There are many boxes, nearly all bronze and most of them ornate, holding the rulers and their families, except for the daughters who were married off to create political alliances and who are interred in other lands.

Once visitors have entered through large glass doors like those of a modern department store, there is a voyage into bare, gray, timeless sturdiness. From the doorway it is just a few steps to a toll booth, which sits at the top of stairs leading down to yet another underworld, one of several centuries. The glorious Habsburg past contrasts with a modern, Spartan setting. The crypt rooms and floors are gray concrete. The walls are bare, and the rooms are cold. Each room has geometrically arranged, ornate bronze boxes, some on concrete pedestals; the lids are covered with designs of family crests and weapons and skulls and crossed bones. The higher the rank, the more elaborate the decoration and the more likely the box is to be in the center of the room; lesser royalty are placed in rows along the walls--as if honor, or position, after death were something outside time.

Here lie my favorite Habsburgs, all from the 19th century, and all misplaced in various ways, including their century. The first, Emperor Franz Josef (died in 1916), most likely wished he could have ruled in an earlier time, or at least before the revolutions in 1848 spread so much democratic sentiment; the second, his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, wished he could have lived in a post-monarchy era; the third, Franz Josef's reluctant wife, Empress Elisabeth (whom I referred to in an earlier posting as Sisi), apparently wished she were living in a time when all women were liberated. If the dead could have opinions about where they ended up, Franz Josef is probably the only one of those three who would be pleased. His body rests in the center of a room, between those of his wife and only son, and slightly elevated above them. (I thought of Arlington Cemetery, where flag-rank officers are buried high on the hillsides so that they have better views of the Potomac than the lower ranking officers and enlisted do.) Franz Josef's son, Rudolph, struggled under his society's and his father's constraints until, despondent over the choking artificiality of the monarchical system and his inability to bring about democratic reform, he shot his mistress and put a bullet in his own head. Because of the nature of his death, a great deal of civil and ecumenical manipulation of the rules was required to inter him on holy ground. His wish to be buried next to his mistress was ignored, and Rudolf wound up for eternity next to and below his father, in an arrangement that leaves him paternally dominated--visually, at least--for the ages, and many miles from the grave of his beloved. And poor Sisi. She hated the monarchy and she hated Vienna even more. The Empress spent nearly all her final years away from the city, loathing its court society and complaining often and bitterly of Vienna's winters. The bronze sarcophagus keeps her not just in a subordinate position to the emperor, but in the city she loathed, where for the remaining winters of eternity she will be "rolled round the earth's diurnal course."

Behind the Brass

We recently had a tour of the history of the Jewish community in Vienna. There is little physical evidence of it, mostly as a result of events during the Hitler era. Instead there are 1950s structures built on sites where once stood beautiful, centuries-old synagogues that were burned down by mobs, and other modern buildings atop bombed-out, one-time Gestapo and SS offices. Mostly the tour was a chilly walk from one somber brass plaque to another...signs of the times.

Filler

-- Response from the state rail system in regard to an email query:

"Dear Quentin Gehle!

This are your wished timetable:"

-- Car stuff. The process of getting the car made legal seems to be endless. We are through with the safety inspection, and this morning I dropped the car at the Toyota dealership to have our turn-signal light lenses changed to EU specifications and to have snow tires mounted. (There is a hefty fine for driving without snow tires after November 1.) Yet to be scheduled is the "technical inspection," which seems to involve a team of mechanics dismantling the vehicle and sniffing and licking each part after examining each with a jeweler's loupe. Since both of us has have good distance-vision, there is one regulation we can ignore: a driver who needs glasses is required to carry a spare pair in the vehicle. Yesterday we purchased the required orange caution triangle, first-aid kit, and four safety vests (for the driver and as many passengers as the car might hold). All this for a country with the second-highest accident rate in the EU. Having finally gotten around to buying our 2-month highway-use decal, we did a reconnaissance drive to the airport on Sunday morning, and once on the autobahn were passed regularly by cars going 100 mph and more.

-- The Potato Again. On Saturday. as we strolled through a crowd in the pedestrian shopping district of the inner city. we passed a man standing over a large black metal vessel with a bed of white-hot charcoal, slicing a potato, which he was grilling and selling to passersby.

"BLOPP! Stage Pass"

On Monday, as I was contemplating What Columbus Means to Me and feeling gratitude and warmth toward the American Congress for funding this particular holiday, we took a tour of Vienna's Ottakringer Brewery. To identify us as paying visitors, the brewery gave us each a lanyard with a yellow card reading "BLOPP! Stage Pass." I don't know what it means, but I do like the sound, which makes me think of spilled beer hitting the floor.

The brewery is a brick and wooden bridge from the days of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Sisi to the present. For the revolutionaries of 1848, the residences of the Habsburgs most likely spoke of a society that, in many ways, fit Faulkner's paradigm of the American South--the palaces here are versions of Southern plantations, relics of a caste system, built by the impoverished for the pretty porcelain elite. And today palace tourist audioguides speak of an idealized past--as they recreate what never was. The Ottakringer Brewery, on the other hand, is a functional, living monument to the past that was. Built in 1837, the brewery grounds contain a lovely old red-brick, blue-collar palace, which produced a golden palliative for a grimy existence with 12-hour workdays; currently the beverage it produces washes down many a sausage and potato on the tables of Wiener World, as well as my Sunday-night pizza at Nino's of Grinzing. Ottakringer remains a low-rent district, an area that has been occupied mainly by workers since the Industrial Revolution, and, before that, hosted a Turkish encampment during the 1683 siege of Vienna. (To this day are the Viennese are grateful for the kebap stands that the Turks were forced to leave behind. These stands also sell Ottakringer beer.) One historian referred to the Ottakringer district as a "grim industrial neighborhood" at the time of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. During the years of occupation after the war, the brewery survived in the Russian zone of the city, which ensured continued impoverishment, though it has grown more prosperous since Austria's independence in 1955.

Our back-stage tour had the brewery's gift shop for a staging area. Organized by one of the Embassy's offices, our group of more than 30 massed at noon in that plain and simple space lined with metal shelves and with a concrete floor--and the panache of a high school locker room. The shelves displayed different kinds of Ottakringer beer--though not many different kinds--and yellow-and-black T-shirts and beer glasses. We tourists milled about and chit-chatted in small groups, eying the closely-cropped heads and shiny black suits of the Ambassador's security detail, and trying to discern the outline of weapons under their coats. We hoped for no drama.

Soon a young man in jeans and a baseball cap with an Ottakringer logo led us off through a double door and into a parking lot to hear the history of the brewery, essentially a narrative identifying a succession of proprietors; he passed quickly over the business being seized from its Jewish owners during the Nazi years, and growing prosperous after the war. Up and down staircases we went, redolent of sweet yeast and bitter hops; we paused to look down at metal silos, huge cylinders, and fast-moving belts conveying cans, filled and unfilled, at very high or very low temperatures, through different stages of filling and pasteurization. Of the lecture on the brewing process itself, I recall only this: "The yeasts are tiny animals that fart CO2 and piss alcohol." As the guide said this, he looked directly at the Ambassador to determine whether that choice of English verbs amounted to a breach of decorum--with a tiny smirk suggesting his hope that it did. (The return gaze was, however, diplomatically impassive.) As the tour concluded, we were led up more stairs to the "party room."

We closed with a cast party, ourselves the players, in a fire trap in an attic--disguised as beer hall. The floors were of wood, as were rows of picnic tables; the ceiling was made of planks held up by rough-cut beams that I am guessing (from the cut marks) were made more than a hundred years ago. At one end of the room stood a bar and two sets of taps. Although our BLOPP cards had little tabs to be torn off and deposited for up to four sample glasses of different kinds of beer, no one was counting. Soon a large basket of large, fresh, warm pretzels appeared on a table top, and the tour closed on a social hour.

The last act involved trying to find our way out. We first tried to leave the room the way we had come in, but we were stopped by an employee and directed toward another exit. We found our way down a wooden hall and some wooden stairs into an uncharted parking lot. For the next 10-15 minutes we bobbed about the premises, like little ships at sea, randomly passing and re-passing other groups of four-to-six people who also were unable to navigate back to the street. Every turn brought us to a high fence or building wall, and we imagined we were from time to time passing ships from tours of years past. Finally we found a truck gate and exited, exultant at seeing the outside world again. We went full circle, making our way back to the gift shop to pick up souvenir glasses and T-shirts, much as I imagine Columbus to have done at a Carib Indian gift shop before his return voyage, to prove he had been there.

The Beautiful Gray-Green Danube

On Sunday we took a river cruise from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia. The 75-minute trip down the Danube began at Schwedenplatz, where Vienna's city center touches the river. The boat, a sleek, white vessel, held perhaps 150 passengers, in a cabin that was windows all around. Although there may have been commuters in the crowd, most passengers appeared to be tourists, and among them were several families with small children, many of whom rolled aboard in strollers. The boat seemed an ideal way for families with little ones to travel because of the freedom to move around. The kids could get up and stretch their legs, and many took advantage of it. As the river slid past, some set aside their fruit juice, rice cakes, and apples to add graffiti to the fogged lower sections of the windows, from stick figures to tic-tac-toe grids, readily erased with a coat sleeve once filled in. The ride was smooth, like a water slide, and relaxing. It made me want to have a rice cake and some juice and take a nap, but I chose to stay awake so that I would not miss anything.

Although I have long understood that the surface of water changes color according to the sky, the Danube has always looked army green to me on even the brightest day. At Schwedenplatz, the river is in one of four channels that divide it as it flows past Vienna, and so it is much narrower at that point than it is outside the city. Although we have seldom noticed graffiti in Vienna, the narrow channel that we were in for several hundred yards was lined with concrete walls that made quite a fine easel, even better than the fogged boat windows. Far from being a tangle of black swirls, scratches, and scrawls, this graffiti is brightly colored witches, ghosts, and cartoon figures like the Incredible Hulk mixed with an occasional political slogan; they followed along beside us until the levee walls gave way to stone embankments and trees. Despite the moisture on some of the windows in the cabin, we could see quite well through most of the glass panels: low banks lined with trees and, occasionally, insubstantial wooden fishing lodges with decks leaning out toward the gray-green water roiling dizzily on its way to the Black Sea. No pleasure craft were in evidence on the way down, though we passed a few barges. The river, like the shore, appeared deserted for long stretches.

As we moved along the river, recordings in German, Slovak, and English barked a smattering of facts about the size of the boat and its engines, as well as about the river itself. We were informed, for example, that the river near Vienna is approximately 640 bratwurst wide and some 30 cucumbers deep. The mountains and castles, it seems, lie in the opposite direction of the one we were going in. The Danube Valley is wide east of Vienna; gentle, tree-covered slopes gave way only once to a small town on the south bank; finally we passed the one-time border of Austria and Slovakia, where a fortress with walls extended along a small hill sits crumbling. After a few more miles, we slipped under a bizarre Communist-era bridge--a big metal flying saucer, or perhaps a jellyfish, was suspended above one end of the bridge, holding up the rest of the span with its cable tendrils. And then we tied up at the quay in Bratislava.

Initially I thought the boat ride might be the high point of the trip. Although we had left the European Union, there was no customs control to pass through at Bratislava. The exit path from the boat led us along the pier and then up a concrete ramp and then a wooden one, which took us into an old wooden structure that served as the Welcoming Portal to Slovakia. In the tobacco-smoky haze were tourist gewgaws, a bar, and a "WC," which was guarded by a tiny, snarling, dried leaf of a woman, whose wild, frizzy red-gray hair was arranged to cover both her heads. In scratchy Slovakian, I think, she croaked a demand for 40 cents--as I judged from a sign--for the privilege of urinating in her kabinka. It flashed through my mind that I had just paid a fee to Cerberus to enter Hades. At last we emerged into a cold, gray breeze and onto a riverside walk adjacent to a busy street. Jacket collars turned up and zipped tight against the prying fingers of the wind, we crossed the street with uncertain steps, hoping we were heading toward the old city and making visual mental notes of landmarks to help us find our way back to the boat in the afternoon. At that moment, I was wishing it were already afternoon.

The experience got better quickly. Soon, strolling along, we found ourselves in a charming, flower-filled square before the national theater, and after a few cobblestone blocks more we were in the old center, with its leafy squares and curiously ornate structures and bright shops and businesses in a variety of pastel blues, yellows, oranges, and creams. It is like an architect's playground: even some of the humblest buildings have gargoyles, embedded turret towers, caryatids, Italian balconies, crenelated stone entablature above windows and roof lines, palladian windows, and mixed elements of Gothic, Roman, and Greek revival. Napoleon provided an additional historical touch to one building: embedded perhaps 20 feet up in the bright yellow wall of the city hall is a cannon ball fired by his army. As we ambled along, peeking in shops and churches, we saw also that scattered around the city are two kinds of bronze statues: secular saints--whose names to me are as unpronounceable as they are historically opaque--to remind local citizens of national ideals, and then fun, whimsical, life-sized figures, including a bronze man popping out of a manhole and a smiling Napoleon leaning over a park bench. They were brass mimes--and much preferable to real ones. We saw, too, a great amount of decay. Fenced, weedy lots bordered on the backs of crumbling medieval buildings. The old churches were sometimes in a sad state of repair, though others had been recently restored. Plain like the castle on the town hilltop, which was burned out and then rebuilt in 1953, there was little to recommend the churches except perhaps for worshipers, who appeared to pack the services. Under a stone arch we saw a seated beggar in bright pink pants. As we passed, he pulled back a sleeve to display and wiggle an arm stump (well healed)...himself a colorful, restored ruin.

Our thoughts began drifting to the return trip and being indoors. We stopped in for lunch at the Senate Cafe, which, like so many places in Vienna, offered a menu with lots of pork and goulash choices, but also a number of faux Italian dishes. Tempted though we were by "beef soupe with noddles," we opted for sandwiches. After lunch and another hour or so of strolling and browsing shops, we decided to take off the chill by stopping in a chocolate shop. I had a warm bowl of white chocolate, thick like cream, topped with ground hazelnut, and delicious. When Linda's chocolate fondue was set before her, she asked me if I would like to try one of the wafers and dip it in the sauce. Absorbed with my own selection, I first had a couple of spoonfuls of my own dish and then looked up, starting to reach over to get a wafer to dip to try hers. Too late. She had the bowl upended, with the bottom against her nose, licking out the last drop; the wafers were gone.

It was time, then, to make our way back to the boat. Like my white chocolate, our glide back up the river was sweet and gentle.

Filler

Austria's funniest home videos. Occasionally on a downtown street we see that half the sidewalk disappears: it becomes a stone staircase that drops one or two floors to a sidewalk below. There is no gate, no sign, no warning. It is a black hole, waiting to suck in pedestrians texting, talking on cell phones, or reading maps, and it surely provides hilarious instances of cracked heads and broken appendages.

German class. Teacher trying to get an American student to say her street address number correctly in German:

(All pronounced in German)
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: Perfect...let us move on....

Things medical and post-nasal. We have both noticed an abundance of brass plaques at building entrances advertising psychiatrists' offices. It still momentarily distracts me whenever I pass one that reads [type of practice] followed by Gesundheit [which means 'health'].

Each academic title is mentioned here when a doctor is addressed, as in "Dr. Dr." for a psychiatrist, who normally has a doctoral degree in medicine as well as in psychology.

More black socks. The Austrian national soccer team players wear black socks.

Television advertisement. Two young women sit under a tree, having a picnic in a green field on a sunny day; each forks up slices of potato from a bowl, chatting about the goodness of that homely tuber; the scene is followed by an endorsement for a brand of potatoes. I continue to wait for some tourist to stop me on the street and ask me where a person should go for a good potato.

Grinzing scene. A young man, perhaps Turkish, stands in front of the grocery where Linda and I shop a few times each week. He arrives on the tram and is at his post when the store opens at 7 a.m., and he leaves at 7 p.m. when the store closes. He has three or four German magazines about sports and other topics that he sells for 3 euros each, and sometimes he asks for an additional coin. He is there in the rain, in the wind, in the gray mist that is so common here, and by the end of the day he still has most of his magazines. In the mornings, when he sees a grocery clerk carrying empty boxes to a trash bin across the street, the young man runs to see whether any food is being discarded. Linda and I are starting to accumulate a pile of magazines that we cannot read.

At the Tooth Dentist

Like going to the hair schnittery for the first time, an initial visit to a dentist here conjured up fears of being maimed at great expense. Although I imagined going in for a cleaning and emerging with several teeth pulled and dozens of holes bored into others--and being charged 900 euros for the experience--it turned out to be exciting only because I made it so with my anticipation. The dental technology was more advanced than what I had in the States, and, typical for Vienna, the staff was polite, though not friendly, except for the dentist himself.

I phoned the dental clinic for an appointment, expecting I might have to wait a few weeks to get in, but I was given a time just two days away, first thing in the morning. My pulse increased slightly as I wondered why this dental office did not have more patients, and so, before leaving home for the appointment, I checked my bilingual dictionary and memorized translations for "the pain is intense," "no extractions," "no experimental surgery," and "Dear God, stop."

The building, perhaps designed to bring relaxation to an Austrian, was somber: large, gray, plain, and boxy, like a squat mausoleum, with its name over the door in another shade of gray. I entered a dark hallway, where a young woman in a white uniform, wearing a look of mild annoyance, approached me and directed me to the waiting room. It was huge, many times larger than any dental waiting room I have been in. And dark. And empty. The only light came from an aquarium in one corner. Piranha? Some other fish with strong, sharp, white teeth? I thought of the retired dentist in Lake Woebegone, who used to sit in his fishing boat, muttering "Open wide. This will only hurt a little bit." As I sank into a modern-style black vinyl chair and heard my keys and coins clink out from my pockets, I wondered whether my body would ever quit descending, and, if it did, whether I would ever emerge. The chair had arms as high as the back, and I knew I might have to pitch forward onto the floor if I was ever to rise from it. There were a dozen such chairs, all empty, lining the walls, and it occurred to me that there might be patients from years past submerged in them. Then a second young woman in white came in--formal, unsmiling. She led me to the front desk, where I gave my name and filled out a medical history form; then yet a different woman appeared and led me into a dark, round x-ray chamber like a Star Trek transporter. I donned a lead vest and stood in a magic circle, as I was directed, and then closed my mouth around a wire with a red light in the end; the technician disappeared, and I heard the chamber doors slide shut. The room was completely dark and quiet; I stood still. Next, a recorded voice in muffled English said, "Close your eyes" and several other things; I did not understand these additional directions, but I thought they might not matter too much since I am not planning on fathering any more children. A whirring noise commenced. The doors opened and soft white light entered. I followed the light. I was then taken to the dentist.

The examination room was also huge, with a lone dental chair in the center, with space for a dozen more. The dentist was a kind-looking young man though with an intense, wide-eyed stare, as if he were trying to drill into my mind. He invited me to sit and then directed my attention to a computer screen adjacent to the chair. On the screen was a moments-old panoramic x-ray of my teeth smiling down at me like the grin of a death's head. "Open, ja, ja." Using a tooth-cam, a light pen with a camera in it, he slowly moved across each tooth on the screen while he offered a narrative, describing in turn the status of each filling and crown. Although I was beginning to relax, I found myself wishing that, like the woman at the hair schnittery, he would offer me a beer. He noted two fillings that would eventually need to be replaced and said that, if I wished, he would send the x-rays to my dentist in the States or even give me a memory stick to take with me if I wanted to have the work done at home. He seemed to be trying to reassure me that he would not be exploiting my ignorance of the condition of my teeth for unnecessary dental work or expense. "I hope you enjoy your hygiene," he concluded, with lips drawn back in a well-maintained smile. Does anyone enjoy having pointy steel implements plunged below the gum line, I wondered? Was his verb choice a translation issue...or a scary cultural difference?

Yet another woman in white appeared and led me into another room. She was the hygienist--stiff, formal, no chit-chat, and all business. The cleaning was as thorough as any I've gotten before. When she finished, she led me to the business counter, where my bill, 104 euros, was less than what I would have paid at home.

Filler

-- Although Vienna lacks the thick odor of diesel and the heavy blue smell of the two-stroke motor scooter engines so prevalent in other European cities, there is enough exhaust combined with cigarette smoke to keep the city in a haze. The air in the Ring downtown can be overwhelmingly different, in part because of the large number of tourist buses but mainly because of the fiacres, the horse-drawn carriages that cart tourists around. These vehicles sometimes back up in numbers of a dozen or more at certain locations that are like taxi stands, and the acrid, pungent odor of horse urine can almost knock a person over. We refer to Michaelerplatz, one of the most popular squares in the historic center, as Horse Pee Platz.

-- Cigarette vending machines are widely in use here, the product is relatively cheap, and there seem to be no age restrictions on smoking, which is a widespread, popular habit. Since July restaurants, rules varying by size of seating area, have been required to declare themselves smoking or nonsmoking. Some larger ones can designate separate dining areas for smokers and nonsmokers, the one for the latter usually being far smaller than for the former.

-- At the head of the checkout line at the grocery store, among the small packages of candy and gum, are airline-size bottles of vodka and other liquor. Workmen who come in early for breakfast snack food and over the lunch hour to buy prepared sandwiches often pick up a bottle or two as they check out. We saw a sign in one restaurant/bar saying no alcohol sales to anyone under 16.

-- Fire hydrants are painted black. That, however, does not create a visibility problem: firemen could not see them anyway because there are no restrictions on parking in front of them.