Wiener Wonderland

Dripping gray snow-free days have been the norm for December.  It feels really cold even though temperatures have mostly remained above freezing--in contrast to last December, when we had about two feet of snow.  On a few mornings we have seen on our balcony chairs a layer of tiny white balls half the size of BBs, which a local friend tells us is "frozen fog."  The noon sun--on most days a pale white ornament in an ever-gray sky--barely gets high enough on the horizon to clear the buildings in the inner city.  Without the dimness and damp chill, however, the Christmas markets would not seem so full of light and energy.

Vienna's Christmas markets this year must still look to children like wonderlands.  The huge one in front of the city hall has trees festooned with light strings and huge round red balls like Japanese lanterns; stand windows display brightly lit silver Christmas ornaments and colorful glass decorations.  The crowds are thick, as is the steam rising from the mugs of mulled wine for sale every 20 feet.  The best market that we have visited is the one at Grafenegg, a small town on the Danube west of Vienna.  All the wares are locally made, and many of the artisans make the items on site:  among them hand-blown glass, thick paper for water colors, woolen caps and throws, and etched and hand-painted ornaments.  Stands selling roasted chestnuts and potato puffers abound here, as they do at the other Christmas markets.  (A guide mentioned how excited Austrians get when the new crop of potatoes comes in every autumn.  No surprise.)  The shops and stalls are set up in a 12th-century castle, renovated in the 19th century in Tudor style--a curious and wonderful structure, a multiple anachronism. 

Our Christmas decor in the apartment is best described as expatriate makeshift, though Linda has purchased and packed away many Yuletide treasures that will be displayed next Christmas when we are home.  We have on the coffee table in the livingroom a cone-shaped composite of fir cuttings twisted and wired to look like a tree.  It stands 15" tall and rests on a red Christmas doily.  Beneath the coffee table sits a pile of travel guides, German language texts, and maps of Europe--the travel clarions of springtime.

Fahrting mit dem Auto

We love our weekend car trips and also enjoyed our long drive to Provence in October, but we have done little traveling in the car lately because of the potential for poor road conditions.  One recent Sunday we drove north of the Danube Valley through a number of picturesque towns and stopped for lunch in Tulln, to see its Christmas market, its 12th-century church, and the swans on the Danube.  It had been raining in Vienna and in the 40s that morning; however, when we got further north and left the main highway for a narrow country lane, we found ourselves on snowy, icy hills and curves.  We shall probably confine ourselves to train travel for the coming weeks and drive in Vienna a minimal amount until spring--just enough to keep the car battery charged. 

Even after more than a year here, I still do not especially enjoy driving in Vienna.  And it is not just that parking is expensive, confusing as to zone restrictions, and otherwise problematic.  When I navigate the main streets it still feels like I am in a video game of Frogger.  Cars and trucks and trams and buses variously lumber along or shoot out into my lane, and tailgating is the norm; Viennese pedestrians are the frogs who must hop across the streets without my running over them.  Most worrisome are the tram and bus stops, often without marked crosswalks; it is not always possible to tell whether a transit vehicle is stopped for passengers or for traffic reasons.  A few days ago Linda told me that we had received several Christmas boxes at the postal unit at her office.  I offered to drive her to work the next day at 7 a.m. and pick up the boxes.  We exited our stone cavern of an apartment garage in the drizzle, dark, and blurry headlights of oncoming cars, and we both stared intently at the road and its shoulders as we approached intersections, looking for dark gray shapes of winter-bundled pedestrians crossing the street or approaching marked crosswalks.  We made it to her office without killing anyone and loaded the boxes.  On the way home, however, I saw a bus stopped in a left-turn lane and proceeded blithely up to it as a man ("Idiot, get out of the way!") crossed the street directly in front of me and looked at me with disbelief and fear as I kept right on past the bus--and then passengers began to alight, turn green, and hop frantically to the sidewalk.  As it dawned on me what I had just done--relieved, embarrassed, and cursing myself for scaring those people--I quickly scanned the mirrors and streets and walks ahead for police, heartbeat quickening at the thought of Teutonic justice.  No one in a uniform with a drawn weapon was in sight, however, and I got home without being apprehended.  Both of us hold Vienna's excellent public transit system in high esteem--as long as we are riding on it and not driving behind it.

Filler

-- We have been to two excellent Christmas concerts in December.  The first was the Vienna Boys' Choir, which sang at a mass in the Hapsburg palace chapel.  The second was "Christmas in Vienna" at the city concert house; it featured a philharmonic orchestra, a 60-voice adult choir, and a 20-voice boys' choir.  From Haydn to hymns, it was one of the best concerts we have been to.  The only presentation that seemed a bit off was the rendition of "Feliz Navidad."  A German accent atop a Spanish Christmas carol is like sauerkraut on a taco.

-- For Austrians, it seems, there is no bad weather, just weather.  On the trams and on the sidewalks:  babies under quilts, wearing mittens and knit hats, reclined in strollers with canvas covers with clear plastic windows, big blue eyes staring up at the raindrops.  Near our apartment building I saw a woman in a motorized wheel chair scooting down the sidewalk in freezing rain, her chair covered in a purple boxy canvas rainshield with clear plastic windows--looking very much like a crinkly Popemobile or the engine on a kiddie train.

-- A few weekends ago, we availed ourselves of an English-language tour of the Austrian Radio and Television (ORF) facilities on the edge of the city.  We are fond of ORF, and not just because we like the sound of the acronym.  We often spend a portion of our evenings watching one of the three ORF channels, whose programming includes, along with cooking shows featuring potatoes and fried meat, travel shows on Tirol, Steier, and other Austrian regions; folk festivals with amazing hats, beer, and oompah bands; and classical music concerts.  For the live demonstration at the studio, the group that preceded us got to be taped dancing the Funky Chicken, led by a large man in a chicken suit.  Our group, however, sat on wooden stands and watched the cameraman and a producer have fun with the children from the tour group.  The blue-screen room allows separate cameras to merge a single televised image and can create magic with super-imposition of any number of recorded scenes--weathermen and forecast maps of frozen fog, children on flying carpets sailing over mulled wine stands at Christmas markets, potatoes shimmering in the breeze as they descend from trams and buses to be run over by a blue Prius.

Thanksgiving Over the Rainbow

We left Vienna the day before Thanksgiving for another visit to Rome, and, because of the holiday, the contrast between Vienna and Rome felt starker than ever.  Thanksgiving dinner this year was with our friend Cheryl at Popi Popi, a Trastevere restaurant decorated with bicycle paraphernalia and named for the sound of a squeeze horn--and famous for its pizza.  It was hard to picture a Thanksgiving more different from the traditional American holiday, and that was the point.  Since we could not be home with family, we did not especially want a dining experience that would put us in mind of what we were missing.

Earlier on that cold, damp Thanksgiving Day, we walked by Teatro Argentina, where Verdi's operas once debuted, and I was happy to see the same fiddling gypsy who played there when I lived nearby 10 years ago.  His hair had much more silver than the last time I saw him, and his face looked more lined.  The skritch-skreek-skrawk of "Over the Rainbow" cut like a dull saw through the exhaust-filled air.  Buses, trams, and taxis rolled past the ruins of the four temples of Torre Argentina, and Romans cocooned in winter coats bustled along the sidewalks and threaded the slow-moving traffic.  The gypsy's wife crouched on the walk next to him, bundled against the cold, shaking a castanet, and looked up with her large green eyes to thank me as I dropped a coin in the open violin case.  We did not stay for his other song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."  Both of them looked older; I look older; his repertoire, however, is the same.  Rome is the same.  It just gets older.

Ruins

Friday morning we headed out on a local, graffiti-covered commuter train to the ancient Roman port of Ostia Antica, silted up for almost 2,000 years.  Several of its imperial-era roads are still largely intact, running through an urban petrified forest:  stone stumps of houses and shops, storage buildings and public baths, fire houses and whore houses, an amphitheater, a fish market....  It reminded me of Pompeii, yet preserved not because of layers of volcanic ash but because of malaria-infested marshy lands, which limited the treasure-hunting and quarrying of the ruined town over the centuries.  When we returned to Rome at midafternoon, we stopped in another of our favorite spots, the Protestant Cemetery, an acre or two of expatriates, mostly Americans and British, who died in Rome over the past two centuries.  There is a kinship between ruins and cemeteries--both are suited to peaceful strolling and are gentle reminders of change...stone connections with the people and times that have gone before. 

Sulmona

On Saturday morning we drove with our friend Cheryl to Sulmona, a small town in the Apennines near Abruzzo National Park and birthplace of Roman poet Ovid.  The town's website mentioned Saturday as a market day, and we managed to arrive in time to see it.  Unfortunately, the market was primarily local produce and clothes made in China.  But the town had another attraction in addition to mountain views:  confetti shops.  These offered brightly colored displays of candied almonds arranged like floral bouquets, and browsing through them was like a tour of an arboretum.  And the dinners were wonderful, this being the season for sauces and dishes with truffle.

Filler

-- Most churches in Rome at this time of year put up presepe, or creches.  St John Lateran, one of the largest in the city, has a presepe with a 4'-high plush camel and a 3'-foot high plush cow.  Next to them are plaster human figures shorter than the cow.  Among the items next to the manger are three coffee grinders and three clothes irons.  There is no baby in the bed; it will complete the scene on Christmas day.

-- The Christmas markets in Vienna are up and thriving.  At one we saw for sale boiled potatoes rolled in marzipan.  Our favorite so far is the one by the military museum, which has a medieval theme.  The stands were full of local products and crafts--hats, ocarinas, honey-wine; crystal balls, ceramic skulls, cross-bows, quivers, swords, knives, maces, and armor of many varieties; hot mulled wine, berry wine; chestnuts and bratwurst on the open grill.  The vendors were all dressed in period costume.  It was a trip yoking today and a thousand years ago, and implements of violence with fun food and wine:   the spirit of Christmas meeting "Onward Christian Soldiers." 

-- In the Schönbrunn's crowded Christmas market, a boy of perhaps 12 months sat on his father's shoulders as we all stood in the cold listening to a group of carolers.  The child was dressed in a bright blue coat and matching wool cap, and, cheek resting atop his father's head, he slept soundly.  A young Chinese man standing in front of me stared at the scene for a moment and then framed it in his camera, angling to get the child in the foreground and the palace behind it.

-- A drive up the Danube Valley to Durnstein on a recent sunny Sunday brought us to sloping cobblestone streets winding between medieval buildings; they now house shops with local wines and liqueurs, candy, wool clothing, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, tote bags, and toys.  High above the town is the ruined fortress in which Richard Lionheart was imprisoned while the English gathered his ransom.  We climbed a path that seemed almost vertical to the skeletal remains of the 12th-century fortress, where we got some of the finest views of the Danube Valley to be had.

-- One recent Saturday we toured the pre-eminent Art Nouveau church in Europe, the Kirche am Steinhof, designed by Otto Wagner.  Vienna is also blessed with many metro stations in the Art Nouveau/Art Deco style, also designed by Wagner.  These wonderful structures are a trip back a hundred years--they are black and white movies come alive.

-- In early November we visited the lovely old wine village of  Heiligenkreuz and its Cistercian abbey and monastery before going on the Mayerling, scene of a 19th-century Hapsburg murder-suicide, the details and records of which are still under official state seal.  The poor dynasty.  How embarrassing.

Night Sweats at the Dental Klinik

Fear of the unknown takes on a new dimension when the prospect of pain trips over the language barrier in the dark.

On a recent Friday evening while chewing on an overcooked wedge of potato I felt a tooth split.  I called the number for the nearby emergency dental klinik and was told to be at their office at 8 p.m.  I arrived there a few minutes before the hour and found the entrance area as well as the building dark and locked; as I stood at the door and phoned the klinik again, the only light and warmth was the steam of my breath lit by a distant, dim street lamp.  I identified myself, and the person on the other end only said "Five minutes" and hung up; I wondered whether I had called a taxi dispatcher by mistake.  At precisely 8, however, a large white motorcycle rumbled up to the klinik, and two middle-aged men, one with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and the other noisily chomping gum, got off and approached me.  "We are the dentist," the one with the cigarette said, and, smiling, they offered their hands and then led me into the dark clinic.  Dr Cigarette handed me a slip of paper and said "Eighty-eight euro.  Sign Unterschrift.  You agree to pay."  I was led to an examination room.  Although they had largely exhausted their English vocabularies in greeting me, they were quick to understand the problem:  "Oooh, ja," Dr Gum said as he shined a light in my mouth and saw that a chunk of tooth angled out and slicing into my tongue.  Dr Cigarette took a look.  "Ja, ja." 

"Now Roentgen."  I saw the x-ray chamber and fear rose in my throat.  We entered.  Judging from their gesturing and animated talk with each other--I thought I could pick out the words for "mutation" and "death"--I suspect neither quite knew how to use the x-ray equipment.  After turning the equipment on and off repeatedly, and then removing, turning, and repositioning the lead apron on me several times, at last they got it figured out; the two men exited the star chamber.  The undoubtedly generous dose of roentgens that followed showed that a crown, not the tooth, had split, and soon Dr Gum put me back in the chair and glued the works back together.  They took my 88 euros and told me they were making an appointment for me to come in Monday at 9 a.m. to start the process of getting a new crown.  I walked home, in the cold and the dark, comfortable in the knowledge that the inside of my head, at least, was warm and well lit from radiation.

Dr Gel

Monday morning I was back--to more unknowns.  The receptionist had no record of my Friday night visit and no record of my having an appointment that morning.  When I told her about the night experience, she wanted another 88 euros.  Soon, however, she grasped the situation, and I was told to take a seat in the waiting room.  Half an hour later a third dentist appeared.  With a face wreathed and creased from exaggerated smiling, this new dentist sported long blond hair, shining with gel, slicked straight back until it curled onto his shoulders.  He stared at my return smile like someone who collected teeth, and I wondered whether he might have a fish bowl full of them, like some people keep wine bottle corks.  Soon I was seated in the examination room, and Dr Gel smiled at me like he was about to enjoy his work.  He told me in German that he could understand English if I spoke it to him but he could not speak it back to me.  It soon also became apparent that he assumed that I could understand all his German but could not speak it back to him.  He pulled rubber gloves over his nicotine-stained fingers and revved the drill like a motorcycle at a traffic light.  Then he uttered one sentence in the only English I heard from him that night:  "I like to work without anesthetic."  I am not making this up.  He then gave me to understand, however, that if the pain became unbearable, I should wave my arm and he would stop.  He then said something in German and let out a loud laugh, which was, I could only guess, to relax me and reassure me, perhaps a joke about making a lampshade out of gum tissue.  So I laughed too.  Soon he had the old crown drilled out and, to measure the space for a temporary crown, made multiple applications of blue rubbery goo in molds.  Again, a blur of German and a big laugh.  Perhaps a joke about almost breaking my jaw.  Again, I laughed.  When he had finished, with his tobacco-scented fingers he picked bits of blue clay out of my mustache.  I said, "Danke, ich bin schön."  He gave a hearty laugh.  Again, I laughed.

Because Dr Gel prefers to work at night, he scheduled me to return at 8 p.m. a week later.  This time the office was open and I was greeted by a young man at the reception desk:  "You pay now?"  He read the total:  "Euros 2,158.51."  I asked to see the itemized bill and noticed that it once again included an 88 euro charge for the first visit; he deducted it.  To hear--on a sum of that magnitude--"and 51 cents" was, I believe, aimed at making me believe that the pricing was arrived at with scientific precision, without the least bit of whimsical inflation.  I was ushered in to see Dr Gel.  He gave me a welcoming barrage of German, to which I offered a handshake, a smile, and vigorous nodding.  As I sank into the chair, head back, blinding light filtering through my eyelids, mouth agape, he remarked again about no anesthetic.  To buoy my spirits and keep things light, he next told me a joke from which I could pick out only the words "neighbor" and "wife," and then he winked and we both enjoyed a raucous laugh as I was quite certain the story was hilarious and I always like to please someone standing over me with dental implements. Soon, with his favorite pliers, he had tugged off the temporary crown and with his drill touched up the jagged remains of my tooth and perhaps put holes in a few of the neighboring teeth for fun, all the while softly singing what I believe was "We Are Marching Into North Africa."  He affixed the new crown.  With much smiling and several hearty handshakes he led me to the lobby.  Auf Wiedersehen!  I made my way into the dark street and soon was home, liberally applying bourbon anesthesia.

Provence: Rain, Light, and Lavender

"To Correctly Close the Door, Thanks to Slam It."  This sign was posted on the front door of our hotel our first night in Provence.  We did not need to slam any doors on this trip, and lots of friendly people opened doors for us.  Despite a bit of rain from time to time and occasional inefficiencies with finding our way, our trip to Provence the last week of October was one of the nicest experiences of our time here in Wiener World and Beyond.  If the distance between Vienna and Provence is best measured in graciousness, hospitality,  scenery, and cuisine, the trip was infinitely long. 

We first headed west for Salzburg and Innsbruck and then turned south, going through Tirol and the Brenner Pass into Italy, and then on to our first night's stop, Lake Garda, a glacial lake surrounded by steep mountains.  We approached from the north and drove along its west coast, past lemon trees and olive groves, through tiny villages mostly shuttered, with tourist season having passed.  At Gargnano we began the search for our hotel.  Relying on the booking site's directions, for the next 40 minutes we wound through every street in the town, finally realizing that our lodgings must be high on a mountain that edged the lake.  Twenty minutes and countless hairpin curves later we were at Ca Vecia, our hotel, rustic and clean, with an expansive view of the lake and mountains.  Early in the evening, however, fog set in, a great, thick pale blanket on the water bed, putting our view to sleep.  We consoled ourselves in the hotel restaurant with a liter of red wine, a large antepasto platter of cheeses, prosciutto, and salami, followed by tortellini in a delicate bolognese sauce, and, for dessert, cheese plates.

The next morning, Sunday, we were on the road early, heading south to Genoa, and then west along the Riviera.  The highway was cut into the side of the coastal hills, perforated with tunnels short and long, and we rolled through them in heavy traffic, stopping at toll booths about every 50 yards.  Cannes, Nice, and the Azure Coast cities--with hotels as numerous as the sand--spread white in the sunshine along the edge of the water.  At Marseilles we turned north again, into the gently rolling countryside. 

St Rémy de Provence

Late in the afternoon we arrived at the first of the three Provençal villages where we planned 2-day stays, St Rémy.  Again the printed directions from the booking website proved to be of little use, and we drove up and down the village lanes, finally stopping at a chateau that had been converted into a hotel.  As soon as I opened the door, two extraordinarily kind young ladies gave me directions in English, repeating and spelling out and drawing a little map, doing all they could to ensure that I felt comfortable and clear about where to head next.  As autumn darkness came on the town, we finally arrived at our destination, Le Castelet des Alpilles, where we were politely requested to slam the door.

The next morning was punctuated by strong breezes and light showers, the sun obscured from time to time by small, fleet blue clouds over the countryside, rugged and scrubby--but in a genteel way.  We walked just outside the village to Glanum, a Roman town, but the ruins were closed for the day, and got to see little more than the city gates, politely slammed before our arrival.  From there we ambled across the road to the psychiatric hospital, St Paul, where Vincent Van Gogh committed himself for a year just before his suicide, and where he painted more than a hundred works of starry nights and sunflowers and quintessential Provence.  The hospital is surrounded by lavender fields and olive groves; rugged, heavily eroded, gray Alpilles (little Alps) rise above the jumble of red-tiled roofs of the hospital and the houses of the town, the rocky outcroppings looking like so many deformed teeth from one of Van Gogh's nightmares.  Van Gogh, we read, loved the area for the quality of the sunlight, a matter not just of the latitude but also the proximity to the Mediterranean and the winds that scour the landscape.  Although the building with Van Gogh's room has become a museum, the mental hospital is still a functioning facility that operates in newer, nearby buildings.  Art remains a form of therapy in that institution, and in the museum gift shop a number of paintings by patients were displayed for sale--most of which looked as if they had been done by Van Gogh when he was 6.

We spent our next day strolling the town, investigating the small shops and restaurants.  In one narrow, cobblestone lane we came across a placard on a 16th-century dwelling identifying it as the birthplace of Nostradamus, originator of the vague prophecies that have so enriched the pseudo-historians of the History Channel.

St Rémy is known for its salads.  The flavors were remarkable, as if the vegetables had been harvested not more than an hour before, the textures and tastes as clear and crisp as the colors of the countryside in the Provençal sunlight.

Lourmarin

Tuesday morning, to get to our next village, Lourmarin, we drove north to Cavaillon, taking a route alleged by the map to be more scenic than going directly east from St Rémy.   Cavaillon was modern, ugly, and confusing--a town sprawled in dozens of randomly placed traffic circles, and streets with muddy shoulders, rundown bars, dirt-stained auto repair shops, and mud-puddle parking lots of nurseries and building supply houses.  At last we found our way out of Cavaillon and, through breezy light showers, made our way into the gentle hills of the Luberon area, where lavender and grain fields spread alongside the slow, winding country road. 

As we neared Lourmarin, the rain became heavy.  This time, however, we found our hotel, the Villa St Louis, right away.  We parked and approached the door as the rains continued.  An elderly lady--Mme Bernadette, our hostess-to-be--approached, wielding an umbrella against the dripping black sky and a cane against the wet black cobblestones.  With gray hair pulled back in a bun and a face like a tawny grape weathered in the Provençal sun and wind, Mme Bernadette introduced herself and welcomed us as her Austrian guests; she spoke no English and less German.  Through a conversational salad of French with English nouns sprinkled like croutons, Mme Bernadette ascertained that we were the guests she expected. And then she led us through the locked high brown doors into the 19th century. 

The entry was a dark and dusty cave.  The hallway was redolent of lavender, and, as our eyes became accustomed to the dimness, we noticed dried bunches of it on platters and in vases; we soon found that it was scattered throughout the rooms, on surfaces, in corners, and along the stairs.  In some rooms the walls were covered with fabric, the same from which the drapes were made.   As she led us up a winding stone staircase, we saw more bunches of lavender, on window sills and in bowls on furniture.   As Mme Bernadette labored in front of us up the stairs, aged silver-backed mirrors with flecked, crumbling faces struggled to reflect the thin light.  Along the walls were pen-and-ink drawings and prints--bar scenes, family dinner scenes, political meeting scenes, some in huge, ornate frames--from the 19th century.  Along the floor were antique wooden toys--a train, a tractor, animals, a farmer and his family.  She led us through a small kitchen and breakfast room and through another door to our room.  It, too, was a cave in the Villa St Louis time warp--antique bed, chairs, dresser, and mirrors.  Modern plumbing and a flat-screen tv, however, reminded us, thankfully, of the present.

The rain lifted, and we spent the afternoon strolling Lourmarin--narrow cobblestone streets, bistros, small restaurants, artist boutiques, and a medieval chateau, heavily restored.  Just outside town we found the cemetery and the grave of Albert Camus, who had died in an auto accident in 1960, two years after moving to Lourmarin, a location he favored because he loved the light, which, he said, reminded him of his childhood in Algeria....  I knelt by his grave and time-traveled back to my first acquaintance with him in my sophomore year in college.  Our hostess Mme Bernadette was, we later learned, a friend of Albert Camus' daughter, who was still living in her father's house, just down a medieval lane from our residence.  We noticed also a large number of Italian names in the cemetery; I was puzzled by that until I saw one marker with a map of Corsica etched on it and realized that that island had been their home or their ancestors'.  There were more hints of Napoleon than the destruction and despoiling of the churches.  We walked past lavender fields and olive groves to reenter the old city.

The next morning the sun was out again, and we headed for Aix-en-Provence.  Getting there was easy enough, just following the signs to the Center and locating a parking garage.  The newer part of downtown is geometrically laid out, streets with arcades of plane trees--looking much like American sycamores, but a hybrid of those and of Asian sycamores--bright yellow leaves, trunks and limbs white, tan, and gray, like a Jack Russell terrier, though [here insert pun on bark].  We'd had enough of this modern scenery after about 10 minutes, but soon we found ourselves in the old city--narrow, meandering streets, shops with North African and Turkish foods and clothing and other wares, and small cafes--and we were back where we wanted to be.  We came across the family home of Paul Cézanne, another Impressionist who loved the light of Provence.  After a simple lunch, we started back for Lourmarin.  Unlike Aix, Lourmarin is so small that it does not appear on our Michelin map of southern France, and we could find few signs, with or without highway numbers, to help us navigate.  So we headed back for the Autoroute, the equivalent of an Interstate highway, and made our way back to Lourmarin by, once again, following the signs for Cavaillon, driving about 40 miles out of the way and plunging back into the gnarled road pattern of that town, whose traffic circles seemed to have multiplied as randomly as mushrooms in the rain.

Grignan

At the end of our week in Provence, we headed north for Grignan, which sits on a rocky outcrop in the Luberon region.  Low mountains made a green backdrop for our stay, and here we had the best meals of the trip.  Our place of lodging this time, the Hotel Sévigné, was modern and comfortable--lacking the texture and history of the Villa St Louis...but so is every other hotel in the world.  The clerk was the first English-speaker we met in the course of our Provence accommodations.  English being the preferred language in Europe for any who do not speak a local tongue, the clerk assumed I had made the reservations in that language because I was an Austrian and did not expect her to know German.  As she was taking us to our room, she complimented me, "Your English is quite good."  The room was lovely:  modern and tasteful, with elegant furnishings.  The doorway to the bathroom, however, had been designed for Corsicans like Napoleon; this time I used the expedient of setting a chair or a wastebasket in front of the door to remind myself to duck before entering.

Our dinner that last night in Provence was a 3-hour affair, a "fixed menu."  We ordered an excellent bottle of a Luberon red, and soon we were served pastries with pate.  Those were followed by small clear glasses with oyster soup.  Next came the appetizers we had selected:  lettuce leaves and a small cup of thick, rich tomato soup; and strips of sweet peppers topped with concupiscent curds of whipped goat cheese.  Linda had trout, and I had lamb in a brown sauce flecked with rosemary, accompanied by risotto with bits of yellow and orange peppers.  Dessert for Linda was chocolate mousse and raspberries, and for me the "Autumn Plate":  chestnut ice cream topped by a huge, paper-thin chocolate wafer, with a serving of fresh raspberries and a 2-inch toadstool formed from chestnut meringue.

Like Lourmarin, Grignan was surrounded by lavender fields and farms.  Again, we spent our time wandering its narrow lanes and doing a bit of shopping, with a side trip to the chateau and the 15th-century church adjacent to it.  So many of the fine old structures--churches as well as chateaux--that we visited had been stripped of furnishings and ornament 200 years ago.  The chateau in Grignan, though restored, had also been nearly completely dismantled, the stone plundered for housing in the village.  There is a barrenness about all these structures--sometimes accented by the modernity of the restored elements--that is a reminder of the cultural devastation wreaked first by the Revolution and later throughout Europe by Napoleon and his mercenaries.

The next morning we were on the road again.  The route home took us past Lyon and across Switzerland into Bavaria.  The traffic was heavy, the highway tolls were heavier, and the scenery--mountains, meadows, cities--was intermittently worth it all.  Almost 8 hours after leaving Grignan, we reached our final overnight destination, a village just west of Munich and south of Memmingen, where Hitler sat in jail writing Mein Kampf.  Had his early efforts to be an artist been in the sweet light of Provence instead of Vienna....?

Back in the Potato, Pork, and Spätzel Belt

Our last stop, Der Schwarzer Adler (Black Eagle), was a guesthouse that appeared to be at least 200 years old, and plaques and memorabilia on the dining room walls indicate that it has been run by the same family for more than a hundred years.  We arrived late in the afternoon in a light, chilly breeze and a spraying, sputtering rain.  Since we were not sure we had found the right place, Linda waited in the car while I investigated.  Feeling tired and creaky from the drive, I stepped gingerly out of the car and through the guesthouse door.  Though I was not expecting lavender, I was not quite ready to be startled to alertness by the sweet stink of sauerkraut and three men sitting at a plank table drinking liter glasses of beer.  One, who looked like an oversize garden gnome with a huge beer belly, rose and approached me.  His red cheeks and bright blue eyes were circled by wild white hair, curly and standing out several inches from his scalp, completed by a white Santa beard and thick, tangled white moustache.  He spoke no English, and I could barely understand just a few words of his German, which was, I suppose, heavily accented Bavarian dialect.  He handed me a key, #2, and pointed to a doorway marked "W.C."  Soo..I was to do #2 in the WC?  I pushed open the door and, next to the toilet, I saw a staircase.  "Erste Stock," (first floor) he said, and I was on my way.  The room was quite simple, as if furnished in blond by IKEA, and clean, quiet, and pleasant.  I brought Linda in from the car and directed her to the WC door, telling her that was the way to our room.  Soon we had unloaded the car and gotten two bottles of very good beer to relax with before heading downstairs to dinner.  The menu was four pages listing nothing but meat and spätzel (noodles), with side dishes of sauerkraut and cheese.  So that's what we had.  And more beer.  Sunday morning we were up early, ready for the final leg of our trip.  Our host genially set out a breakfast of coffee, bread, preserves, and yogurt.  Soon we stepped out of the sauerkraut-scented Schwarzer Adler into Sunday morning:  church bells and barnyard smells, heavy dew and light fog, a brisk chill and a pale, ragged yellow bar of sunlight on the horizon, pushing out the last of the rain clouds.

We were home again in Wiener World by early afternoon, relieved to be back and ready to unpack, glad to be out of the Autobahn traffic, and wishing the memories of lavender scent, good food, lovely wine, mountains, lakes, red tile roofs, and time-warp villages would survive in strength--if not infinitely, at least awhile longer.  No need to slam the door on them.

Filler

-- Northern Italy, which is generally quite orderly and unlike the thieves' culture of the south, provided near Brescia its own instance of that nation's cultural unity:  when we stopped for gas, a man wearing a vest with the Agip oil company logo--and showing unusual eagerness--ran over to clean the windshield.  I saw him use thumb and forefinger to pop off part of a wiper blade; he then removed the wiper arm and held it up to me, demonstrating how the metal piece was going to scrape and ruin the windshield.  Fortunately, he said, he thought he had another blade in stock that he could sell me.  I said to him in Italian to please reattach the blade, and he did, and then, not the least embarrassed, hurried over to another car to run the same little scam.

-- Car break-ins are a big problem in much of Europe, including Provençe, and several places that we stopped had posted warning signs that echoed counsel in our guidebook:  leave no possessions visible in the car.  One of us stayed with the car whenever we stopped at service stations, and each time that we changed locations we took all our luggage and purchases out of the car to keep in our hotel room. 

-- Sign on a shop announcing that it had been necessary to close for the day:  "Thank you for your comprehension."

Ljubljana Worljd

Slovenia Drive

Crossing into countries that were for so much of my life behind the Iron Curtain still gives me pause--a momentary uneasiness and sense of isolation that comes with leaving the West behind.  These visits leave us totally dependent on the English-language skills of godless former Communists, sickle-wielding babushkas and zealot commissars.  The Slavic language barrier we have encountered in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia is certainly higher than is the German barrier for us; crossing into Hungary presented an even more formidable language challenge.  But those initial thoughts and feelings soon go below the surface. 

A few weekends ago we drove a stretch of highway between Maribor and Ljubljana, Slovenia, to see the Slovenian Alps, closing our day by crossing back into Austria.  We had bought a Slovenian highway tax sticker--the alternative to toll booths--for the car windshield just before we arrived at the border.  Soon after crossing, we saw several police checks for vehicles without stickers, including an officer standing in the highway median with a pair of binoculars.  We soon thereafter drove into a rest plaza and stopped in a large parking lot to have the lunch we had packed.  A moment later a van with a Polish license plate pulled up next to us, and seconds later we saw a young man and woman come around the side of the vehicle and tell the occupants--two young couples--to get out.  At that point we noticed the guns on the hips of the two who had approached the van and realized they were plain-clothes police.  While they sent the driver off to the service station to purchase a tax sticker, they searched the van, including the women's purses and all the luggage--untrammeled by such a triviality as a warrant.  They were, we presume, looking for drugs.  Nothing found, they fined the driver, who had returned, sticker in hand, and then they glanced at us, sitting in our car.  Thoughts of an imminent passport check, unintelligible interrogation before a commissar, and a body-cavity search took away my appetite.  But the police just ambled away.  Lunch over, we continued on; as the highway stretched into central Slovenia, the mountains became low and green, much like the scenery along the West Virginia Turnpike.  Life here felt a bit more familiar.

It was not long before we felt like we were home again, though in an idyllic setting unlike any in Grinzing.  Near Ljubljana we turned west for Austria, and the mountains became much higher and more rugged and dramatic--counterpointing the comfort of re-entering a country where, for another year, we belong.  We passed the night at a family-run guesthouse on the edge of the Klopeiner See, one of Austria's many glacial lakes.  Our room, rich in dark wood from floor to ceiling, looked made for a family vacation:  master bedroom, separate kids' bedroom with bunkbeds, and a large bathroom.  Our terrace, with its rail covered in cascading begonias, looked out on an acre of deep green meadow, a few horses, and lots of sleepy cows, most reclined on their knees in evening prayer.  We strolled to the edge of the lake, where the water looked pure and clear all 6-8' to the bottom.  The one restaurant in town that was open that evening was hosting a wedding and thus was closed to us.  After walking a good ways and then driving around for awhile and finding nothing, we pulled into a service station and bought a few candy bars.  Those, plus a few cookies and crackers left over from lunch and a bottle of wine we had brought along, made our dinner.  I thought of the cows and horses sleeping peacefully in the darkness below our window...and then oh so vaguely of meat recipes.  Up early Sunday morning, we enjoyed a big breakfast.  We were home in time for a large lunch.

Ljubljana

Two weeks after that drive, we took the train from Vienna to Ljubljana, much of the time galloping along beside the same highway we had driven previously, until we got to the capital city.  So many of the cities we have visited in this region have been wholly or partially rebuilt as a result of bombing in World War II.  Ljubljana, however, looks relatively modern, not from war's urban renewal but as a result of rebuilding after a major earthquake in the late 19th century--a seismic event that shook the vowels loose from the street signs and left only unpronounceable jumbles of consonants.  A 12th-century castle tower rises on a hill above the city, and our walk up to its base gave us views across to the Austrian border and its sheer stone Alps, their crests under a ragged blanket of snow.  The scene in its entirety--castle on a hill, river and city lying below--was a visual echo of many another picturesque setting we have visited in this part of the world, including Salzburg and Prague.

Our hotel could have been in any city in the States, but Ljubljana's menus...not so much.  The tourist literature on the city notes proudly the abundance of horse dishes--not on the dessert or drinks listings--and we saw everything from horse liver sausage to items like Bucket o' Pony.  We opted for pork entrees.  I had scanned hotel reviews, as usual, before selecting our place to stay; only one looked as if it would be quiet, clean, and comfortable:  the Slon.  The hotel in this lovely city turned out to be almost annoyingly modern, with a large, carpeted entry behind glass and brass doors, veneered walls, comfortable lobby seating areas, and sleek elevators that glided instead of clunked between floors, as elevators have been wont to do in most of our lodgings in Europe.  Except for the variety of languages we heard, we might have mistaken our quarters for a hotel in Indianapolis or Peoria.  Despite the hotel website's claims of quiet, our sleep was interrupted about hourly all through the night with groups of drunks strolling through the streets singing off-key and shouting, a reprise of our nights in Krakow. 

We spent Saturday afternoon sipping beer along the river and walking up the hill to the castle grounds for views of the city and the mountains.  Sunday morning, before it was time to head to the train station, we strolled by the shops and restaurants along the river.  The Ljubljanica is narrow, channeled through the heart of the city by high stone levees, along which are terrace after terrace of restaurants arrayed with flower boxes tumbling red-orange begonia blossoms.  That morning, however, there were also endless rows of vendor tables and stands; many were selling local crafts and wares:  jellies, glassware, honey, wine, wood carvings, candles, toys, clothing.  One stretch offered a flea market, with tables displaying the contents from Slovenia's attics and estate sales.  Along with old medicine bottles, rusty coffee grinders, clothing irons, huge old keys to castle dungeons and such, we found memorabilia from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia:  army hats and insignia and signs.  Mixed among them were reminders of the time before the Communist era--the occupation of Slovenia during World War II, first by Italy and then by Germany:  uniform buttons, swastika pins, and currency from that era.  But no commissars and no sickle-wielding babushkas, nor any jack-booted police checking for highway tax stickers and chomping pony burgers.

Filler

-- The highlight of the past month was a visit from Momnbob:  Mariazell, the Danube Valley, the Musikverein concert, the Sunday brunch at the art history museum....  The only low point, aside from a knee injury for Momnbob, was the dinner cruise on the Danube.  Dull, cheap buffet food (for example, two huge trays of pressed broccoli in gelatin), sway-belly musicians singing offkey, and bright interior lights that canceled the view of the shores from the dining area drove us to sit outside, on the back of the boat, in the smoking zone, where the lovely city shone along with the stars.

-- And, just completed, a visit from my old college roommate, Russ, who now lives in Berlin.  We had not seen each other for more than 40 years.  We spent most of three days just talking solid, with little touring of Vienna, since he had visited the city on a couple of other occasions.  He did insist on going back to the Sacher Hotel for its famous torte, since he'd told them 30 years ago--anticipating Arnold--that he would be back. 

-- We made a visit on a recent weekend with our English friend Scarlett to the 1st-century Roman settlement of Carnuntum in the countryside east of Vienna.  Well documented, well labeled, and well restored, the ruins are in sharp contrast to those I have seen in Italy.  Here it is almost as if the ruins themselves have been destroyed by reconstruction and restoration done for convenience of pedestrian tourists and the ready purveying of information.  We went from Carnuntum to Schlosshof, a country estate of Prince Eugen--who helped rescue Vienna from the Turks in 1683.  It is a minimally restored version of the Vienna Hofburg palace in a farm setting, with more flies.

-- The best hamburger in Vienna, we believe, is to be found at an outdoor cafe adjacent to the zoo at Schönbrunn:  the "Hapsburger."

-- In my walk to the fitness center at the Embassy I regularly pass a construction site; some of its pod offices and stacks of materials occasionally encroach on the sidewalk and even into the street.  One day a 6-foot-deep trench in the sidewalk left only about a 1-foot edge against a wall for pedestrians to pass.  There was no caution tape, and there were no bars or orange cones for warnings.  Another day, a huge crane swung a pallet of drywall sheets directly over the heads of pedestrians as it unloaded a truck.

-- On a hillside in the country, as we drove through southern Austria, a smiling elderly man pushed a wheel chair up a hill.  Sitting in the chair was a terrier mix--tongue out, eyes aglow--who also appeared to be smiling.

-- In downtown Vienna, in heavy traffic a young man on a bicycle meandered slowly along, his left arm and index finger fully extended at a driver in a BMW behind him.  The driver would repeatedly surge and brake, as if trying to make the bicyclist believe he was about to run him down.  This went on for about a block before I lost sight of them, and may still be going on.

-- A large yellow Ottakringer beer truck with a huge sign on the back reading "Fahrt Mit Beer" (Go with Beer).

-- With the return of chilly weather, the shorts, sandals, and black socks are back in Wien's dresser drawers until spring.  Vienna held its first Oktoberfest this year.  In a huge tent picnic tables were placed so close to each other that we had to step sideways between them to get seats in the thick cloud of cigarette smoke.  Beer came in liter mugs, and a succession of regional bands took turns on the stage, inviting rhythmic clapping, dancing on the tables, and singing along.  Uniformed officers with breathalyzers strolled through the crowd, with "Alkohol Kontrol" armbands, offering an intoxication check to anyone who wanted it.  A good time was had by us and Momnbob--all of us having drunk too much to want to bother with the Kontrol.  And we were not driving, anyway.

Paris Monde

So often a short stay in a European city devolves into a box-checking exercise.  Versailles felt like one such exercise.  Perhaps Schönbrunn in Wiener World, with its splendid palace and richer and lovelier gardens--even though smaller than those of Versailles--has jaded us to imperial grandeur.  We more enjoyed strolling through the Marais area, with its narrow, winding cobblestone streets, still in their medieval pattern, and Père Lachaise cemetery, with its quiet, sunny, dusty rock history.  And one of the smaller, quieter art galleries, the Marmottan, had more appeal for us than the crowded Louvre.  The Marmottan, famous for its wall of Monet paintings, is in a sleepy neighborhood, distant from the city center, and never crowded.  There we looked at the water lilies and let our minds do the work the painter left for us:  assembling the figures and blending the dots and dashes into light and shadow and color.  All rather like the way our impressions of Paris coalesced after four days.

L'Environs

We loved our quiet little hotel in the Rue Cler area, a neighborhood of restaurants, small shops, bakeries, and fruit stands, not far from the Eiffel Tower and the Musee d'Orsay.  Made to seem more spacious by decorator artifice, the walls and low ceiling sections were covered in mirrors--perhaps to put us in mind of Versailles--and with so many spotlights that we could have played doctor or even performed surgery.  Some portions of the ceiling were remarkably low, allowing me to add a Paris notch on my poor bald head, which is already a scar travelogue of my encounters with European doorways, arches, and ceilings.  (The oldest is from a hotel in Reading, England; the largest from a hotel in Pitlochry, Scotland; the set of five is from apartment building entrances in Rome; and, prior to this, the most recent came from the doorway at a border station that sold Hungarian highway tax stickers.)  We met no rudeness.  The afternoon we arrived, we stopped first for lunch, and the waitress returned my "Bon jour" with "Good afternoon."  She smiled and said "I knew from your accent that you speak English." 

The Paris Metro is to me a marvel of underground caverns.  With great acoustics, they are tiled like bathrooms, which they are sometimes used for; more, though, they are like well-lit catacombs with the bones still covered in flesh and in motion.  Crowds flow like notes in a symphony through the tunnels from one train to another, and the rush never seems to let up--down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, around a corner, down a flight of stairs, abruptly shifting direction while glancing at signs pointing to the various train lines and exit options.  Itinerant musicians sometimes sit, squat, or stand in the passages, instrument cases open to receive contributions.  At one point we saw a string orchestra--more than a dozen violins.

Musical Shells

Most of our dining experiences were unremarkable.  And only one of them was humiliating.  There is something about a snail's brief existence that makes me want to sit and meditate:  its womb is eventually its tomb--and sometimes its baking chamber.  The other few times that I have ordered snails in Paris, they came partially peeking out from shells almost the size of golf balls, steeped in red wine, delectable as filet mignon, and easily extracted.  This order, however, arrived in six shells half that size.  Rather than being partially emerged from their individual, home-grown caves and accessible to a pointy surgical implement, these meaty delicacies, bathed in oil and pesto, had shrunk deep into the shadows.  At first I had only a table fork to get them out, and as I tried, the tines hit the shell surface, metal clicking on rock, without touching the tiny bodies.  However, moments after my initial, frustrated efforts, the waitress reappeared with snail-eating implements:  a pair of tongs with a spring grip (squeeze to open) and a tiny, two-pronged fork.  She unhelpfully disappeared as quickly as she had come, like a comet leaving a trail of ice crystals and probably gas in its wake.  I stared--she might as well have handed me a screwdriver and told me to floss my teeth.  A waiter walked slowly by, pausing to watch me, brow furrowed in concern.  I picked up a shell with the tongs, and it slipped around until the shell hole with the hidden morsel was blocked by the metal; I squeezed the tongs to tighten my grip on the shell--a maneuver that simply opened them wider--and the snail clinked to my plate.  I tried again.  And again.  The click of tine on shell and then the clink of shell hitting plate took on a musical rhythm.  I looked up to see whether a crowd was gathering, thinking I might put out a dish to collect coins, yet aware the whole time that my image in front of my lovely spouse as a sophisticated international traveler was cooked, my ego shrinking rapidly into the dark shell of my mind.  Linda took the plate from me and patiently, delicately, using surgical skill, teased out each of the succulent brown balls in oily green, smiled sweetly, and set the plate back before me.  I love her so. 

Light My Fire:  Secular Saints

Far from the city center, the 200-hundred-year-old Père Lachaise cemetery holds some 70,000 residents and stretches over several acres.  The grounds hold a number of famous writers and artists, along with modern sculptures memorializing World Wars I and II, particularly the victims of Nazi concentration camps.  The one to Mauthausen, the large camp in Austria that we visited last winter, depicts the staircase from the quarry, from which prisoners were made to carry loads of stone and were beaten to death or shot when they stumbled.  We saw, among others, the graves of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, and the playwright Molière.  And the most popular of all:  Jim Morrison.  Tucked in a cluttered corner behind other graves, Morrison's memorial had half a dozen people standing near it, none of whom looked old enough to have been alive when Morrison was.  Wilting flowers and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels sat on the top of the memorial stone.   Next to it a young woman sat in the lotus position on the ground in the shade, eyes closed in meditation. 

Chez-Nous Again

As our return flight approached Vienna, the Air France pilot struggled with saying "Schwechat Airport," tripping three times over the words and finally getting out "Sayvaysha Airpohr."   How I loved hearing his phonetic struggle.  I wished he had said to me "Good afternoon."  I would have replied "Bon jour.  Je savais dès votre accent que vous parlez français."

Late Summer in Wiener World

Sleeping and Waking

Vienna is waking from its summer slumber.  Traffic is already picking up, and life will be back to frantic normality when school starts next week.  Lots of businesses have been closed, although grocery stores (half stocked), restaurants, and tourist sites have all remained open--and sometimes busy.  It has seemed odd to be on the 38 Tram to downtown and see so many vacant seats, and then to get into the heart of the city, particularly the museums and galleries, and find it crowded with tourists.

-- "Much art--much mythology, indeed--stems from exile.  Exile (from the Garden, from Zion) is a central myth in the Bible, perhaps in every religion.  Exile, of course--and perhaps, though hugely transformed, a sort of nostalgia... "  Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars 

In July, with the death of Otto von Habsburg, the direct imperial line went to its own final sleep.  Although some 800 Habsburgs survive, after World War I family members had to renounce claims to the monarchy or else have their property confiscated and go into exile.  A huge state funeral for Otto was held at Stephansdom downtown, and spectators by the thousands spilled out beyond the packed cathedral, a show of public nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the pre-Nazi past.  The downtown Habsburg palace, the Hofburg, and the summer palace, Schönbrunn, have been fossils for decades, furnished and refurbished for tourists, creating a dreamworld and mythology like antebellum Southern plantations do in the US.  For a few days in late summer, Vienna seemed to reach back past two world wars to the pretty days of the monarchy.

-- With a few exceptions, provincial festivals and folk events have been on vacation, and we will be glad to see the oompah bands, singers, and dancers reawaken as harvest days approach.  Recently we were in nearby Neustift, a village that, like Grinzing, has been incorporated into the Vienna suburbs.  Also like Grinzing, its main street is lined with heurigers (wine gardens), but this Sunday the scene was a street fair, with cotton candy, kiddy rides, and vendors selling locally produced wine, honey, and other goods, along with the diet staples of beer, sausages, and roasted potato slices.  Instead of an oompah band doing folk songs, the sole live music group was playing "Guantanamera" as we strolled by...it did not feel like Cuba, but it did not feel like Austria, either.

-- If the side roads are sleepy, the Autobahns are awake and the hills are alive with the sound of traffic.  Although plenty of Austrians have bad driving habits, most of the numerous drivers who tailgated us while we were at the speed limit had license plates from Germany and Italy, many of the former purposeful and aggressive, many of the latter paying no attention to drifting lazily out of their lanes or following too closely.  In mid-August we found the rest plaza parking areas overflowing with cars, the restaurants overflowing with diners, and the gas pumps with lines but not overflowing.

-- We again went to Puchburg, which we had visited in June, this time to ride the Salamander steam train to the top of Schneeberg (Snow Mountain).  Although the forecast was for a sunny day, when we arrived in Puchburg the mountain was in a blanket of clouds, but the town parking lots, including that at the train station, were jammed to capacity.  Deciding to skip the $100 train ride and thus miss seeing the interior of a fog pillow, we headed on to the town of Semmering.  The weather there was better, and we could see chairlifts conveying bicycles and their riders to a mountain top, from which they would ride down following the ski paths.  The main street was too modern for our tastes:  it is lined with hotels and guesthouses for skiiers, hikers, and bike riders.  On the edge of town, a tiny 19th-century church--paradoxically with a huge, ornate crucifix on its exterior and a small, simple one on its altar--rests among high hedges and long flower beds.

-- A couple of weekends ago we traveled the Styrian Wine Road in southeastern Austria--a winding route across the tops of green hills and mountains, in and out of valleys, past vineyards and forests.  Dinner in Heimschuh was a sleepy scene:  our table at an outdoor restaurant was adjacent to a pond well stocked (better than the grocery shelves in Grinzing).  Old men leaned back on benches drowsing off, sleeping with the fishes, and young fathers with little boys set up around the pond, engaged in a cycle of catch-and-release.  We subsequently noticed similar arrangements--fishing ponds next to restaurants--in other villages in the region.