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.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Saturday on the Town
On Saturday we headed downtown just at dark to attend a concert at the Hofburg, the town palace of the Habsburgs. When we strolled from the tram station to the palace, we found a national harvest festival underway on the grounds. There was a tent the size of a soccer field, and booths representing different regions of Austria lined the sides. They were selling beer, wine, and sausages and other food to a mass of people occupying picnic tables that filled the center of the tent. At one end of this canvas hall was a stage on which three men in lederhosen and funny Alpine hats sang out rollicking tunes, accompanying themselves with an accordion and guitars, with the amplifiers cranked up. In front of the stage a man and three small children circled rapidly, a combination Vienna waltz with ring-around-the-rosie. We hated to leave, but the concert hall doors were about to open.
When we finally got into the palace, we expected to see an ornate Neoclassical hall; instead, we were seated in a modern room, with huge, orange-splashed canvases with nonrepresentational, modern designs covering the walls as well as the ceiling. That was a bit of a disappointment. We both had hoped the setting would transport us to the 18th or 19th century so that we could experience the music in that context. (We read later that the original hall had been destroyed fairly recently by a fire and rebuilt in its present fashion.) The program was mostly Mozart and Schubert and included arias from several operas. In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain remarks on how pleased one of his fellow travelers was when, after much shopping and haggling over paintings, he finally bought one with lots of people in it. He was mightily pleased with his purchase, considering it a bargain because he got "a great many figures for the money." At the concert, we got a great many soloists for the money.
I'll forgo a music review but mention another piece of the entertainment, which began the second we took our seats. The man directly in front of me kept my charming companion shaking with giggles for the 20 minutes before the performance began, and at one point she had to take the program out of my hands to hide her face. The man, looking 50ish, was nicely dressed in a dark suit and tie and wearing black running shoes. He sat with the posture of a French horn, his head turned around toward me, and under to the point that he might almost have tucked it upside down into his armpit. He stared at my program, which at first I held in my hands on my lap; he was straining mightily to read it. During this effort he continually poked two fingers against his widely gapped front teeth and gums or into his bristly, unkempt mustache, or sank his thumb up to the first knuckle in his neck wattle, as if he were fingering stops for a waltz playing in his head. Sometimes rolling his eyes as if trying to turn the program print--his music?--for easier reading, he did not turn around until the orchestra began to play. This strange fellow must be a regular: two of the soloists as well as the conductor stopped briefly to greet him as they exited after the final bows at the end of the performance.
Unrelated Filler
-- This morning I was at a medical lab to have blood drawn for a routine test. There were perhaps 20 people in the waiting room. At various times, as a person completed the procedure and was about to leave the building, he our she loudly said "Auf Wiedersehen" to the entire room, and many of the individuals still waiting loudly spoke the farewell back to the person.
-- When I got to the Embassy for my fitness-center workout after the lab visit, I stopped at the health unit--which had arranged my lab appointment--and mentioned that I had been short-changed 10 euros, judging from the receipt I was given for a lesser amount than I had paid. They called the lab and were told that I had left the money on the counter, and that I should stop by sometime and they would return it to me. And I did, and they did.
-- A couple of Sundays ago we stopped in a wine shop as we were about to leave downtown on the tram, and Linda bought a bottle of wine. We left and boarded our tram. Two stops later she realized that she had left behind a bag with an umbrella, a city map, and her camera. We got off and caught the next tram back to the terminal and walked to the wine shop. We entered and a smiling clerk handed her the bag, all contents intact.
When we finally got into the palace, we expected to see an ornate Neoclassical hall; instead, we were seated in a modern room, with huge, orange-splashed canvases with nonrepresentational, modern designs covering the walls as well as the ceiling. That was a bit of a disappointment. We both had hoped the setting would transport us to the 18th or 19th century so that we could experience the music in that context. (We read later that the original hall had been destroyed fairly recently by a fire and rebuilt in its present fashion.) The program was mostly Mozart and Schubert and included arias from several operas. In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain remarks on how pleased one of his fellow travelers was when, after much shopping and haggling over paintings, he finally bought one with lots of people in it. He was mightily pleased with his purchase, considering it a bargain because he got "a great many figures for the money." At the concert, we got a great many soloists for the money.
I'll forgo a music review but mention another piece of the entertainment, which began the second we took our seats. The man directly in front of me kept my charming companion shaking with giggles for the 20 minutes before the performance began, and at one point she had to take the program out of my hands to hide her face. The man, looking 50ish, was nicely dressed in a dark suit and tie and wearing black running shoes. He sat with the posture of a French horn, his head turned around toward me, and under to the point that he might almost have tucked it upside down into his armpit. He stared at my program, which at first I held in my hands on my lap; he was straining mightily to read it. During this effort he continually poked two fingers against his widely gapped front teeth and gums or into his bristly, unkempt mustache, or sank his thumb up to the first knuckle in his neck wattle, as if he were fingering stops for a waltz playing in his head. Sometimes rolling his eyes as if trying to turn the program print--his music?--for easier reading, he did not turn around until the orchestra began to play. This strange fellow must be a regular: two of the soloists as well as the conductor stopped briefly to greet him as they exited after the final bows at the end of the performance.
Unrelated Filler
-- This morning I was at a medical lab to have blood drawn for a routine test. There were perhaps 20 people in the waiting room. At various times, as a person completed the procedure and was about to leave the building, he our she loudly said "Auf Wiedersehen" to the entire room, and many of the individuals still waiting loudly spoke the farewell back to the person.
-- When I got to the Embassy for my fitness-center workout after the lab visit, I stopped at the health unit--which had arranged my lab appointment--and mentioned that I had been short-changed 10 euros, judging from the receipt I was given for a lesser amount than I had paid. They called the lab and were told that I had left the money on the counter, and that I should stop by sometime and they would return it to me. And I did, and they did.
-- A couple of Sundays ago we stopped in a wine shop as we were about to leave downtown on the tram, and Linda bought a bottle of wine. We left and boarded our tram. Two stops later she realized that she had left behind a bag with an umbrella, a city map, and her camera. We got off and caught the next tram back to the terminal and walked to the wine shop. We entered and a smiling clerk handed her the bag, all contents intact.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Miscellany: Food, Dogs, Traffic, and Urine
In one of Dylan Thomas's poems, "The Hunchback in the Park," a zoological garden is a void until its gates are opened in the early morning; at that point trees and fountains and animals rush magically into the emptiness to be in place as visitors enter. Our world here is still forming, flowing into the vacuum, without our making any conscious effort to make it happen. Although the detail and nuance are getting finer, there is so very much yet to fill in.
Downtown is less of a blur of concrete and pedestrians than it was for us at first. In churches otherwise modestly ornamented, we have found playful angels and monkeys and sassy faces intricately carved atop the pew ends; we have seen just off the Graben, a crowded modern pedestrian shopping area, more than one ornately carved Renaissance doorway and a centuries-old stone well in a quiet inner courtyard, with window boxes of red geraniums waiting patiently for a shaft of afternoon sun to call.
Dining out continues to lead us to experiences beyond beer, pork, and potatoes, though we like that menu, too--from time to time. We have learned that "heurigen," which I have called "beer gardens," are "wine gardens," though we rarely see any beverage served in them but beer. Brief conversations I have had with two locals suggest that Austrians consider themselves sophisticated wine drinkers, not beer drinkers. We shall nevertheless continue to treat the heurigen as beer gardens and order pork, potatoes, and beer when we visit them. We continue, however, to prefer the non-native cuisine. As we have found elsewhere in our travels, though, the dishes served in ethnic restaurants tend to be adapted to local tastes and can be noticeably dissimilar--usually blander--to what a diner would get in the country of origin.
-- Last weekend downtown we had lunch at a self-proclaimed "authentic" Australian pub (note the "L"). Sandwiches were about the only thing on the menu, and, continuing to look for beef rather than pork, I opted for a cheeseburger, though ostrich was also on the menu. The meat patty arrived on a roll and a bed of diced cucumbers, which I presumed to be a local adaptation. I could not imagine Australians garnishing their dingo and roo burgers in this way.
-- Italian restaurants we have sampled here offer pasta and pizza dishes that have less spice, fewer herbs, and more salt than the versions served in Italy. The menu dishes are often printed in Italian, which the waitresses cannot interpret or understand. Diners order using the German description below the listing, or, like us, pointing to the description.
-- Although we have not found a Turkish restaurant, "Kebap" stands, which look like carnival funnel-cake wagons, are abundant along the streets and in the tram stations; a few grocery stores also have kebap counters. Behind the counter, a huge slab of lamb turns continuously on a spit in front of a louvered metal oven, drying the meat until it has nearly the consistency of jerky; a Turk using a knife--would that it were a scimitar--more than a foot long slices the meat off in thin chips and stuffs it into a pita-like roll baked on the premises, with lettuce, tomato, pepper sauce, and sometimes, as in Grinzing, with slices of white Turkish cheese. For me it is one of the tastiest meals to be had here.
Further on Food
Recently on tv: A cultural program began by showing a man in a dark suit and tie, seated at an elegantly set table; he unfurled his napkin and placed it on his lap. A woman in a chef's uniform entered, carrying a silver, lidded tray. She lifted the top and slowly, carefully placed on his plate a single potato, the size of a billiard ball, still in its skin. With the delicacy of a surgeon, the man took up his fork and knife and separated a bit of the skin from the top of the potato; thin streams of vapor rose quietly from the delicacy. He took a tiny forkful of it and placed it in his mouth, and then smiled and nodded to the chef. This scene took place entirely in silence, which lent an even higher formality to the scene. I am not making this up.
Recently on the tram: Two women boarded together, each carrying two 5-kilo, plastic-mesh bags of potatoes.
Dogs
I have noticed that lots of women here are named after dachshunds that I knew during my years living in the States. I have not yet seen a Rottweiler or a Doberman, but lots of golden retrievers, German shepherds, and dachshunds of many varieties--wire-haired, long-haired, short-haired, standard, miniature--have been in evidence. And mutts, a fair number of mutts, and a few purse dogs. People here appear to be more conscientious than people in the US are about cleaning up after their dogs, which are only rarely off-leash when they are outdoors.
As he does in every country, the Dog Whisperer has work to do here: On a busy sidewalk, a medium-sized mutt that looked to be about 4-6 months old strained at its leash while a young woman yanked back, finally getting the dog close to her, at which point she began striking it repeatedly and then picked it up and squeezed its jaws from the sides. I thought of a time I was on the Metro in Washington, and a man slapped his child in the face so hard the sound filled the car.
Traffic and Transit
Sunday afternoon Linda and I had started across a street after getting off a tram, for which traffic is supposed to stop, and we were in a striped zone, for which traffic is supposed to stop. Suddenly she grabbed my arm to pull me back from the middle of the traffic lane, and an ambulance flashed past, sounding its two-tone horn only at the last second. In our Embassy briefing on driving on Wednesday we were informed that we need to be alert to flashing blue lights: emergency vehicles here rarely use their alarm horns and will happily run over you in silence.
Transit police, which we expected to see only rarely, have popped up three times now in my tram travels. They dress to look like any other passenger. The first was a woman of about 50, hair pulled back in a bun, wearing jeans and a jacket and carrying a shopping bag. At first I did not realize what was going on as she rose from her seat and began checking to see whether each passenger had a pass or a current ticket. Her credentials were in a wallet on her belt, which she flipped open to display as she moved through the car. The next time I was checked it was by a young man who looked like a college student. Wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, with tattoos on his arms, he also had on a back pack. He, too, flipped open his badge on his belt. Two young women sitting opposite me were carrying expired annual passes. At the next stop, he herded them off. I saw him pulling out his citation book as the tram sped away. The third experience was at a stop. As I approached, I saw a young woman with a sheepish expression on her face. She pulled two large-euro bills out of her wallet and, without a bleat, handed them to two young men standing next to her, both with badges on their belts, one holding a citation book.
The Body
At the downtown gym I visited before joining the one at the Embassy, a young woman member of the cleaning staff walked through the men's locker room emptying trash cans. She paid no attention to the naked men, nor they to her.
On the grounds in front of the Habsburg Palace downtown, tents and booths were set up for an outdoor music festival. On the edge of the lawn stood a round, green, plastic structure that looked like a large lazy susan. It was a four-man, open-air urinal. A middle-aged man stood in it, his back to the passing throng, relieving himself.
Downtown is less of a blur of concrete and pedestrians than it was for us at first. In churches otherwise modestly ornamented, we have found playful angels and monkeys and sassy faces intricately carved atop the pew ends; we have seen just off the Graben, a crowded modern pedestrian shopping area, more than one ornately carved Renaissance doorway and a centuries-old stone well in a quiet inner courtyard, with window boxes of red geraniums waiting patiently for a shaft of afternoon sun to call.
Dining out continues to lead us to experiences beyond beer, pork, and potatoes, though we like that menu, too--from time to time. We have learned that "heurigen," which I have called "beer gardens," are "wine gardens," though we rarely see any beverage served in them but beer. Brief conversations I have had with two locals suggest that Austrians consider themselves sophisticated wine drinkers, not beer drinkers. We shall nevertheless continue to treat the heurigen as beer gardens and order pork, potatoes, and beer when we visit them. We continue, however, to prefer the non-native cuisine. As we have found elsewhere in our travels, though, the dishes served in ethnic restaurants tend to be adapted to local tastes and can be noticeably dissimilar--usually blander--to what a diner would get in the country of origin.
-- Last weekend downtown we had lunch at a self-proclaimed "authentic" Australian pub (note the "L"). Sandwiches were about the only thing on the menu, and, continuing to look for beef rather than pork, I opted for a cheeseburger, though ostrich was also on the menu. The meat patty arrived on a roll and a bed of diced cucumbers, which I presumed to be a local adaptation. I could not imagine Australians garnishing their dingo and roo burgers in this way.
-- Italian restaurants we have sampled here offer pasta and pizza dishes that have less spice, fewer herbs, and more salt than the versions served in Italy. The menu dishes are often printed in Italian, which the waitresses cannot interpret or understand. Diners order using the German description below the listing, or, like us, pointing to the description.
-- Although we have not found a Turkish restaurant, "Kebap" stands, which look like carnival funnel-cake wagons, are abundant along the streets and in the tram stations; a few grocery stores also have kebap counters. Behind the counter, a huge slab of lamb turns continuously on a spit in front of a louvered metal oven, drying the meat until it has nearly the consistency of jerky; a Turk using a knife--would that it were a scimitar--more than a foot long slices the meat off in thin chips and stuffs it into a pita-like roll baked on the premises, with lettuce, tomato, pepper sauce, and sometimes, as in Grinzing, with slices of white Turkish cheese. For me it is one of the tastiest meals to be had here.
Further on Food
Recently on tv: A cultural program began by showing a man in a dark suit and tie, seated at an elegantly set table; he unfurled his napkin and placed it on his lap. A woman in a chef's uniform entered, carrying a silver, lidded tray. She lifted the top and slowly, carefully placed on his plate a single potato, the size of a billiard ball, still in its skin. With the delicacy of a surgeon, the man took up his fork and knife and separated a bit of the skin from the top of the potato; thin streams of vapor rose quietly from the delicacy. He took a tiny forkful of it and placed it in his mouth, and then smiled and nodded to the chef. This scene took place entirely in silence, which lent an even higher formality to the scene. I am not making this up.
Recently on the tram: Two women boarded together, each carrying two 5-kilo, plastic-mesh bags of potatoes.
Dogs
I have noticed that lots of women here are named after dachshunds that I knew during my years living in the States. I have not yet seen a Rottweiler or a Doberman, but lots of golden retrievers, German shepherds, and dachshunds of many varieties--wire-haired, long-haired, short-haired, standard, miniature--have been in evidence. And mutts, a fair number of mutts, and a few purse dogs. People here appear to be more conscientious than people in the US are about cleaning up after their dogs, which are only rarely off-leash when they are outdoors.
As he does in every country, the Dog Whisperer has work to do here: On a busy sidewalk, a medium-sized mutt that looked to be about 4-6 months old strained at its leash while a young woman yanked back, finally getting the dog close to her, at which point she began striking it repeatedly and then picked it up and squeezed its jaws from the sides. I thought of a time I was on the Metro in Washington, and a man slapped his child in the face so hard the sound filled the car.
Traffic and Transit
Sunday afternoon Linda and I had started across a street after getting off a tram, for which traffic is supposed to stop, and we were in a striped zone, for which traffic is supposed to stop. Suddenly she grabbed my arm to pull me back from the middle of the traffic lane, and an ambulance flashed past, sounding its two-tone horn only at the last second. In our Embassy briefing on driving on Wednesday we were informed that we need to be alert to flashing blue lights: emergency vehicles here rarely use their alarm horns and will happily run over you in silence.
Transit police, which we expected to see only rarely, have popped up three times now in my tram travels. They dress to look like any other passenger. The first was a woman of about 50, hair pulled back in a bun, wearing jeans and a jacket and carrying a shopping bag. At first I did not realize what was going on as she rose from her seat and began checking to see whether each passenger had a pass or a current ticket. Her credentials were in a wallet on her belt, which she flipped open to display as she moved through the car. The next time I was checked it was by a young man who looked like a college student. Wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, with tattoos on his arms, he also had on a back pack. He, too, flipped open his badge on his belt. Two young women sitting opposite me were carrying expired annual passes. At the next stop, he herded them off. I saw him pulling out his citation book as the tram sped away. The third experience was at a stop. As I approached, I saw a young woman with a sheepish expression on her face. She pulled two large-euro bills out of her wallet and, without a bleat, handed them to two young men standing next to her, both with badges on their belts, one holding a citation book.
The Body
At the downtown gym I visited before joining the one at the Embassy, a young woman member of the cleaning staff walked through the men's locker room emptying trash cans. She paid no attention to the naked men, nor they to her.
On the grounds in front of the Habsburg Palace downtown, tents and booths were set up for an outdoor music festival. On the edge of the lawn stood a round, green, plastic structure that looked like a large lazy susan. It was a four-man, open-air urinal. A middle-aged man stood in it, his back to the passing throng, relieving himself.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Children in Wiener World--A Sample
Random Mass Migrations
Schools opened last week. I do not yet have a grasp of the hours and find the students abroad in great numbers at different times throughout the morning and afternoon. This morning around 11:00 I was walking home from the Embassy fitness center. Quite a crowd of school children--preteen and early teen--was identifiable at a distance of several blocks owing to the cloud of cigarette smoke hanging above them. They had poured out of a "gymnasium" onto a narrow sidewalk next to a busy street and tram tracks, making the way impassable for all other pedestrians. I have not seen such a roiling mass of activity since feeding time at a Japanese carp farm. Across the street from them, a tram stopped, and, like the wildebeest migrating over the Uele, they plunged into the street, milling and churning in front of the stopped traffic, then bucked and scampered up the river bank, through the open tram doors. The doors closed, barely, and the tram groaned its way up the hill. Not two blocks further on, I saw two more trams going the opposite direction of the first and similarly packed with school children of the same age. These trams, I knew, were not dedicated school transports, because in the windows of each of the cars were visible the faces and upper bodies of a few elderly who had managed to occupy the seats specially reserved for the aged and disabled. One woman, winter coat buttoned to the neck, had her cheek pressed to the glass and her wool hat awry; other elderly were mashed to the sides of the tram, and I could see through the window twisted arms, a crutch, canes, and the curved handle of a walker protruding at odd angles above their heads. These were the faces on a vehicle that had plunged into a river, the passengers looking out the window for help that, they knew, could only come too late. Now and again in the remaining two miles of my walk, I would see small numbers of students descend from trams and amble along the sidewalk. When I got home, I dropped off my gym bag and picked up my grocery list and empty shopping bag, and I headed off to the store across the street from the tram terminal, where another 30-40 children were waiting to board the next cars for downtown, and dozens more were disembarking. These last, who had come home to Grinzing or to school in Grinzing, proved to be a blessing. When I had finished my grocery shopping, I did not have to do the usual peril-filled traffic dodge to cross the unmarked intersection: a very large man dressed in an ankle-length greenish yellow slicker and matching helmet held up a large red lollipop with "STOP" on it; the traffic indeed did, and I was able to cross under his aegis in the company of a half dozen small wildebeest.
Vignettes
Several mornings recently I have been in the Embassy fitness center at the same time as a mother and her little boy of perhaps 3, who is named Luke. While the mother exercises, Luke asks questions, or rather the same question repeatedly: "Why?' He wants to know why his mother pulls on a weight bar--to exercise--why she exercises--to feel healthy and strong--why she wants to feel healthy and strong--and on and on. His world outside himself is mostly a world of nouns, and he is in the process of deepening it, giving it predicates and adjectives and adverbs; giving it layers, giving it texture. Like Whitman's noiseless, patient spider, he is throwing out filaments to get himself connected to the rest of the universe. Like me...in Vienna.
Walking on the street downtown, a young father with a baby zipped up inside his jacket. Just the child's head was visible, apple cheeks and round blue eyes, peeking out like a curious kitten.
Schools opened last week. I do not yet have a grasp of the hours and find the students abroad in great numbers at different times throughout the morning and afternoon. This morning around 11:00 I was walking home from the Embassy fitness center. Quite a crowd of school children--preteen and early teen--was identifiable at a distance of several blocks owing to the cloud of cigarette smoke hanging above them. They had poured out of a "gymnasium" onto a narrow sidewalk next to a busy street and tram tracks, making the way impassable for all other pedestrians. I have not seen such a roiling mass of activity since feeding time at a Japanese carp farm. Across the street from them, a tram stopped, and, like the wildebeest migrating over the Uele, they plunged into the street, milling and churning in front of the stopped traffic, then bucked and scampered up the river bank, through the open tram doors. The doors closed, barely, and the tram groaned its way up the hill. Not two blocks further on, I saw two more trams going the opposite direction of the first and similarly packed with school children of the same age. These trams, I knew, were not dedicated school transports, because in the windows of each of the cars were visible the faces and upper bodies of a few elderly who had managed to occupy the seats specially reserved for the aged and disabled. One woman, winter coat buttoned to the neck, had her cheek pressed to the glass and her wool hat awry; other elderly were mashed to the sides of the tram, and I could see through the window twisted arms, a crutch, canes, and the curved handle of a walker protruding at odd angles above their heads. These were the faces on a vehicle that had plunged into a river, the passengers looking out the window for help that, they knew, could only come too late. Now and again in the remaining two miles of my walk, I would see small numbers of students descend from trams and amble along the sidewalk. When I got home, I dropped off my gym bag and picked up my grocery list and empty shopping bag, and I headed off to the store across the street from the tram terminal, where another 30-40 children were waiting to board the next cars for downtown, and dozens more were disembarking. These last, who had come home to Grinzing or to school in Grinzing, proved to be a blessing. When I had finished my grocery shopping, I did not have to do the usual peril-filled traffic dodge to cross the unmarked intersection: a very large man dressed in an ankle-length greenish yellow slicker and matching helmet held up a large red lollipop with "STOP" on it; the traffic indeed did, and I was able to cross under his aegis in the company of a half dozen small wildebeest.
Vignettes
Several mornings recently I have been in the Embassy fitness center at the same time as a mother and her little boy of perhaps 3, who is named Luke. While the mother exercises, Luke asks questions, or rather the same question repeatedly: "Why?' He wants to know why his mother pulls on a weight bar--to exercise--why she exercises--to feel healthy and strong--why she wants to feel healthy and strong--and on and on. His world outside himself is mostly a world of nouns, and he is in the process of deepening it, giving it predicates and adjectives and adverbs; giving it layers, giving it texture. Like Whitman's noiseless, patient spider, he is throwing out filaments to get himself connected to the rest of the universe. Like me...in Vienna.
Walking on the street downtown, a young father with a baby zipped up inside his jacket. Just the child's head was visible, apple cheeks and round blue eyes, peeking out like a curious kitten.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Picture Me at the Gallery
On any given day, I would rather spend my time with the paintings in the Kunsthistoriches Museum than at any other site in Vienna. I will say, nonetheless, that the two palaces we have visited--the Schonbrunn and the Hofberg Imperial Palace--and their associated sites and grounds are beautiful and inviting. The Ethnology Museum...not so much.
Recounted in the audio guides at both palaces is the slightly mawkish story of Empress Elizabeth, much adored in the latter half of 19th-century Vienna. Her biography has universal appeal and in particular is the stuff of country music: it confirms that rich people are unhappy. Born and brought up in a German principality, she was a beauty; at the age of 15 she was married to Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, who was many years her senior. She hated court life generally, according to her letters and accounts of her conversations, and grew in particular to hate her mother in law, who continually watched her and criticized her. Franz Josef, by all accounts, doted on her. They had several children, two of whom met early ends--one from illness and one from suicide. The splendid dinnerware on display in both palaces adorned a table at which she rarely dined, preferring to be traveling outside Austria or else keeping herself apart in her own suite. She let her hair grow to ankle length--a Rapunzel imprisoned in her tower--and spent her mornings reading verse and brooding while her coif was tended. Her writings and other records reveal that she felt herself a victim during all her years as empress; she saw herself as no more than chattel, having been sold for a political alliance, and a prisoner of imperial custom and convention. Nicknamed Sisi, she saw her life chronicled by an eager press and an interested public, as she spent years ignoring her royal duties, shunning family, and being withdrawn and melancholy, sometimes expressing a wish for the release that death would bring. And all that occurred here in the Cradle of Psychotherapy. At the age of 61, she was mortally stabbed in Geneva by an Italian anarchist--and then deified by the public, a tragic figurine among the porcelain royals of Europe. Knowing Sisi's story did much to improve my attention to the tapestries and portraits; the bed; the writing desk; the mirrors; her exercise bars and weights; the gold lavabo that, as the audioguide put it, "served for ceremonial ablutions"; and, most of all, her blue and white porcelain chamber pot, in the shape of a dolphin, where I imagined her sitting and humming "She Is Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage."
At the other end of the spectrum....
A couple of weekends ago we toured the Ethnology Museum. The term "ethnology," we speculated, was created by a court attendant who was told by his Habsburg masters that they desired to clean out the palace attic. They wished, it appears, to dispose of all manner of items acquired in their travels or received as gifts from potentates in distant lands, yet they thought it inappropriate to put them in the royal dumpster. Thus, the Ethnology Museum was created--dignified by its scientific rubric--to arrange and display these items in geographic order. After 10 minutes in this museum, my back and feet began to ache inexplicably, and we made fairly short work of seeing these exhibits.
A loosely related ramble...
A number of years ago I worked with an Indonesian gentleman, a medical doctor by training. One of the kindest, gentlest, most even-tempered people I have ever known, he brought to his work tasks and his workplace relationships an objectivity and the kind of benevolent detachment I would expect of a Zen master. During a lull in our work one day, Doc mentioned having received from the widow of a friend in Indonesia a beautiful musical instrument--a wind instrument that the man had mastered and, for many years, had played lovingly. When I asked Doc whether he was going to learn to play it, he was astonished. He told me he could never do such a thing because the man's spirit was inside the instrument. What at the time seemed to me a primitive superstition now has a plausibility that I do not have words for. More than once I have idled my way through a second-hand store, one that resells furniture and personal belongings acquired in lots at estate sales, and seen trays of eyeglasses, and umbrella stands filled with canes, and books inscribed as gifts and marginally annotated; they have left me with an ineffable sense that such items are so personal--our culture's way of sensing what Doc sensed--that they should be left unsold, undisturbed. Perhaps they should be boxed up and passed through successive estate sales until they disintegrate.
I would enjoy visiting Sisi's things again, though it is not their fineness or elegance that would draw me back. I feel that with her there is the same psychological syndrome operating that creates long-suffering virgins into saints in Rome and sports figures into minor deities in the States. The items in the Ethnology Museum, on the other hand, had no story, no human connection.... There were for me no spirits inhabiting them. We won't be going back.
Blog Filler: A Cartographic Curiosity
Stumbled upon while browsing around Mapquest Austria for daytrip possibilities....a popular honeymoon destination?
Recounted in the audio guides at both palaces is the slightly mawkish story of Empress Elizabeth, much adored in the latter half of 19th-century Vienna. Her biography has universal appeal and in particular is the stuff of country music: it confirms that rich people are unhappy. Born and brought up in a German principality, she was a beauty; at the age of 15 she was married to Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, who was many years her senior. She hated court life generally, according to her letters and accounts of her conversations, and grew in particular to hate her mother in law, who continually watched her and criticized her. Franz Josef, by all accounts, doted on her. They had several children, two of whom met early ends--one from illness and one from suicide. The splendid dinnerware on display in both palaces adorned a table at which she rarely dined, preferring to be traveling outside Austria or else keeping herself apart in her own suite. She let her hair grow to ankle length--a Rapunzel imprisoned in her tower--and spent her mornings reading verse and brooding while her coif was tended. Her writings and other records reveal that she felt herself a victim during all her years as empress; she saw herself as no more than chattel, having been sold for a political alliance, and a prisoner of imperial custom and convention. Nicknamed Sisi, she saw her life chronicled by an eager press and an interested public, as she spent years ignoring her royal duties, shunning family, and being withdrawn and melancholy, sometimes expressing a wish for the release that death would bring. And all that occurred here in the Cradle of Psychotherapy. At the age of 61, she was mortally stabbed in Geneva by an Italian anarchist--and then deified by the public, a tragic figurine among the porcelain royals of Europe. Knowing Sisi's story did much to improve my attention to the tapestries and portraits; the bed; the writing desk; the mirrors; her exercise bars and weights; the gold lavabo that, as the audioguide put it, "served for ceremonial ablutions"; and, most of all, her blue and white porcelain chamber pot, in the shape of a dolphin, where I imagined her sitting and humming "She Is Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage."
At the other end of the spectrum....
A couple of weekends ago we toured the Ethnology Museum. The term "ethnology," we speculated, was created by a court attendant who was told by his Habsburg masters that they desired to clean out the palace attic. They wished, it appears, to dispose of all manner of items acquired in their travels or received as gifts from potentates in distant lands, yet they thought it inappropriate to put them in the royal dumpster. Thus, the Ethnology Museum was created--dignified by its scientific rubric--to arrange and display these items in geographic order. After 10 minutes in this museum, my back and feet began to ache inexplicably, and we made fairly short work of seeing these exhibits.
A loosely related ramble...
A number of years ago I worked with an Indonesian gentleman, a medical doctor by training. One of the kindest, gentlest, most even-tempered people I have ever known, he brought to his work tasks and his workplace relationships an objectivity and the kind of benevolent detachment I would expect of a Zen master. During a lull in our work one day, Doc mentioned having received from the widow of a friend in Indonesia a beautiful musical instrument--a wind instrument that the man had mastered and, for many years, had played lovingly. When I asked Doc whether he was going to learn to play it, he was astonished. He told me he could never do such a thing because the man's spirit was inside the instrument. What at the time seemed to me a primitive superstition now has a plausibility that I do not have words for. More than once I have idled my way through a second-hand store, one that resells furniture and personal belongings acquired in lots at estate sales, and seen trays of eyeglasses, and umbrella stands filled with canes, and books inscribed as gifts and marginally annotated; they have left me with an ineffable sense that such items are so personal--our culture's way of sensing what Doc sensed--that they should be left unsold, undisturbed. Perhaps they should be boxed up and passed through successive estate sales until they disintegrate.
I would enjoy visiting Sisi's things again, though it is not their fineness or elegance that would draw me back. I feel that with her there is the same psychological syndrome operating that creates long-suffering virgins into saints in Rome and sports figures into minor deities in the States. The items in the Ethnology Museum, on the other hand, had no story, no human connection.... There were for me no spirits inhabiting them. We won't be going back.
Blog Filler: A Cartographic Curiosity
Stumbled upon while browsing around Mapquest Austria for daytrip possibilities....a popular honeymoon destination?
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Vienna, Wien, Wien, AT
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Fuckersberg, Oberosterreich, AT
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