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.