One recent Monday I had the privilege of visiting the Hungarian border city Sopron. Two other friends and I took the hour-long train ride from Vienna to that city on the edge of the Neusiedlersee--the large, shallow border lake--and met up with another long-ago friend from work, Jules, who had grown up in Sopron and fled Hungary with his family in the anti-Communist revolt of 1956. Jules walked us through the city, beginning with the church he had attended as a child. Just old enough to remember the events of late 1944 and 1945, Jules showed us where he had been playing outside his apartment building when he first heard an air raid siren. A German soldier, he said, grabbed him up and rushed him into a bomb shelter. He also showed us a place on a nearby sidewalk where after an air raid he had seen a dead child and the street in which he had seen dead horses. The war is still much in physical evidence in Sopron. The old city area has buildings and partial structures from the Middle Ages to the present; buildings from much earlier times stand next to modern structures--as in Vienna's inner city, the new structures are evidence of where bombs once fell. In the afternoon we drove along back roads and through a Communist-era border crossing--old watch towers, stone markers, and barricade bars still stand. Austria took in thousands of Hungarian refugees in 1956, including Jules and his family, who eventually made their way to the U.S.
Gaby, our kind and generous German teacher at the Embassy, who grew up in post-war Vienna, remarked that she and many other Austrians have a distaste for traveling in the former Soviet Bloc countries and have a hard time understanding Americans who do like to visit them. During the Cold War years, in particular, she said, she met many Americans who wanted to travel to Austria's borders to see the physical manifestations of the Iron Curtain. She recounted a car trip to Prague in the 1980s with her mother, grandmother, and two children, and how the border crossings were ordeals. They were detained for 2 hours while they were questioned and the car was searched and partially dismantled; border guards went through their luggage, purses, and pockets, even counting their money. Such experiences, she said, are why many Austrians still dislike the thought of traveling to Eastern Europe.
Filler
-- Our afternoon drive across the Hungarian border back into Austria took us to Rust, a village famous for its population of storks, which build their nests on metal rings set up on house roofs. During our visit, we saw storks feeding their chicks. Regurgitated potatoes, I am guessing. (See the last two pictures in the Sopron photos below.)
-- On the Monday holiday (Whitsuntide), Linda and I walked along the Danube from the center of Vienna a few miles east toward Bratislava--heading out along the south side of the river and returning on the north side. The day was bright and warm, and when we got back to the city center we plopped down on a bench at a busy pedestrian square, Schwedenplatz, to rest up, cool off, rehydrate with Ottakringer, and people-watch. Throngs of people with somewhere to go were striding and milling through the square, bringing their own kind of coldness. An Embassy friend of ours got "bumped into" here the week before and had his wallet lifted. Pigeons moseyed across the concrete checking seams and cracks for crumbs, alert to the peril of being stepped on. On a bench across from us, resting in the shade, sat a very old woman, assisted by a man who was probably her son. They looked as if they had come in from the country on a holiday outing. She wore trachten: a long green skirt and green vest over a white blouse, and sturdy black shoes; from behind thick lenses her huge blue eyes smiled into the distance, all the way back to childhood, I thought, as she licked a vanilla ice cream cone--sweet and cold.
-- Recently, accompanied by our guests from Texas, Greg and Marilyn, we drove southwest of Vienna to Mirazell, a small ski-resort town in the Alps and the site of a "pilgrimage church," where a statue of Mary is certified to have produced a miracle. The church, whose interior is exceptionally ornate, is far larger than the little parish itself would seem to warrant. Stretching from the church square and out along the streets are kiosks selling religious gewgaws--wall plaques, candles, beads, figurines, and "miracle" elixirs. We saw an EMT squad tending to a man who had fallen on some stone steps and whose face was bleeding--all the religious remedies were ignored. Hotels and restaurants for skiers and pilgrims abound. The real miracle, however, is the area around the town. Much of the mountain scenery that we have come across in Austria is, I think, at least as striking as the Amalfi coast or Cinque Terre in Italy, but it seems to have been discovered only by the Austrians.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Snow Mountain
Last Saturday we drove an hour and a half southwest of Vienna into the Alps. Schneeberg (Snow Mountain) has some of the most dramatic, imposing scenery we have seen here. Puchberg, a small town nearby, seems largely geared to skiers, and we saw many a chair lift on slopes that we drove past. One narrow, winding road led us under a cliff crawling with rock climbers. The little road was cut into the cliff, and there were climbers directly above us as we drove through. Flashing through my mind was the memory of our dining room in Okinawa, where geckos made their way upside down across the ceiling, sometimes during our dinner hour; careless teenage geckos would occasionally lose their footing and drop onto the dining table. We were pleased to make it past the rock without a such an incident. The pictures below are of the Schneeberg area and Puchberg.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
"Sailing to Byzantium" (on Turkish Airlines)
Memorial Day weekend found us in Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul--different names for the city's different incarnations over the centuries--and it felt as if we experienced all three.
"Hello, Excuse Me!"
Like Cairo and Rome--but much more like Cairo--the residents of Istanbul have spent a couple of thousand years honing their sales skills. Would-be guides, tour vendors, ice cream vendors, water vendors, tea vendors, pretzel vendors, shoeshine vendors, chewing gum vendors, facial tissue vendors, cookie vendors, roasted chestnut vendors, roasted corn vendors...all work the crowds along with the pickpockets. Some hawked their wares from stands; others, plying carts or carrying their wares in large wooden trays, snaked through the tourists and local shoppers, shouting, cajoling, importuning, whining, moving slowly against the flow of the throng.
From our hotel we walked up a steep, short hill to reach the three most important sites in the old city: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and Topkapi palace. Huge white tour buses and yellow and white taxis by the dozen plied the narrow lane; when the buses would meet, one would have to back up, either up or down the hill to an intersection, until the other could wheeze past; men in blue shirts with arm bands whistled, waved, and shouted, directing the tangle of vehicles. Small and large bands of tourists--including the two of us--weaved in and out of the crawling traffic to get to the hill top, where we were beset by another kind of traffic: tour guides. Every 10 yards we would be accosted with "Hello! Excuse me!" "Where are you from?" One man followed this with "Are you from the States? I'm not selling anything!" This, as we became aware, would turn into a ploy to get a tourist to go to a carpet shop. When we would see a tourist stop and answer, we would next hear "I have a cousin there." The more the hawker felt he had established rapport, the harder, it seemed, the target would find it to get away. One evening, sitting in a restaurant, we watched one man who had stalked us pin down another couple for several minutes.
Two Cultures
Like the Bosphorus Straits, but through its history rather than geography, the Hagia Sophia joins Europe and Asia. For a thousand years a Christian church, and from 1453 a mosque, it dominates the city's skyline. The minarets around it, looking like missile launchers, visually echo the religious clashes that the city has seen over the centuries. The building's interior looks every bit a mosque: in the former chancel, a frame points the direction to Mecca, and tiles and shields with Koranic verses adorn the walls; the huge, dark interior is uninterrupted by transepts, side chapels, or altars. A few fragmentary frescoes are about all that remain from the Christian era. Low-hanging chandeliers provide circles of dim illumination, like so many halos for the vanished saints.
In sharp contrast to the decoration in the interior of the Hagia Sophia is the nearby Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built in the early 17th century on the site of the palaces of the Byzantine emperors and facing the Hagia Sophia. It is also known as the Blue Mosque, resplendent with blue tile--hence its name--and laid with rich carpets. It is beautiful; and (for my Pennsylvania readers) it is packed more tightly than Beaver Stadium at Homecoming.
Flying Corncobs
On a couple of occasions we sat on a bench to rest and people-watch in a small park adjacent to the Blue Mosque. At the center was a circular fountain with benches around it. Ice-cream vendors, roast-corn vendors, tourists, and locals strolled by--lots of children in strollers, women with their hair tightly wrapped in scarves, burqa-clad passersby in pairs, workmen heading home, families from the US and Europe, and flying water bottles and corncobs. The latter two elements of the spectacle were regularly launched over our heads into the fountain by little boys standing in the grass behind the benches. The invisible current on the fountain surface (caused by a drain?) gradually swirled the debris together into a gently rocking assemblage of blue-ringed plastic waterbottles and half-submerged, well-gnawed corncobs--rather like one of the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. Black and gray crowlike jackdaws patrolled the lawn, as bobble-headed pigeons did the walks, avian agents of the Istanbul Sanitation Department. Many Europeans and Americans--and every Turkish and Asian couple or family--strolling by the fountain paused to step over the little iron fence by the Keep Off the Grass sign to pose for a photo in front of the spouting water.
Palace, Mackerel, Sucking Face
Topkapi Palace is a sprawling compound. We visited it late on Saturday, and by that time I was foot-sore and leg-weary, mainly just wanting to be handed a gallon-bottle of beer with a straw and pushed in a stroller along with the thousands of infants and toddlers in the family groups that milled around us. I will mention only that, besides the tile work, architecture, and sea views, I enjoyed seeing the Muslim relics, especially the vials holding hairs from the Beard of the Prophet, and the bejeweled dagger featured in the 1964 movie Topkapi.
We crossed the Golden Horn two or three times by walking over the Galata Bridge. For the most part, the weekend was gray and breezy, and on the bridge it seemed even grayer and breezier. Hundreds of fishermen lined both sides of the bridge, long black poles bristling over the sides, wiggling and waving like the legs of a millipede. The bridge walkway was cluttered with the fishermen's lunch wrappers, paper cups and plastic bottles--and buckets, some half filled with water and swimming mackerel, others half filled only with shiny, twitching, gasping, bright-eyed mackerel who wished they were swimming. A walkway on the underside of the bridge was lined with fish restaurants, their most prominent offering being grilled mackerel on a bun. Appropriately enough, on the far side of the bridge we found dozens of shops selling plumbing supplies, displayed on banks as if it were the Spice Market, with chrome faucets and fixtures gleaming in the sun.
The Grand Bazaar was a maelstrom of humanity, and we were wholly entertained by it--almost like being drawn by a magnet. With some 4,000 stalls, the market is filled with sales chants and shouts, with dust, tobacco smoke, and the scents of spices and perfume. The crowds were noise and color in motion, and the wares, brightly lit, were even more colorful than the crowds. The nearby Spice Market sells a good deal besides that commodity, including a wide variety of clothing, candles, lamps, and on and on and on. Just outside the Spice Market are a few lanes where pets are sold: from goldfish to puppies to rabbits, but, cutest of all, leeches. They swim in half-filled, 5-gallon glass jars; they are about 2" long, black and wiggly--and just a bit creepy--with signs marketing them for "cosmetic purposes"--for facial wrinkles--though I am sure they make fine pets and, like most fish, are good listeners.
No Country for Old Men
For William Butler Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium," Istanbul is a metaphor for what transcends the mortal world--"no country for old men." Visiting the city is a chance to be in timelessness--to be lost in 2,000 years of history. At moments it was like standing at the juncture of the cultural tectonic plates of Europe and Asia; and at other moments it was like being a mackerel in a bucket--with my hand twitching tightly around my wallet.
Filler
-- On Sunday we had lunch at the restaurant in Istanbul's 19th-century train station, the terminus for the Orient Express from Paris, which ceased operation only a few years ago. The modern terminal is a recent adjunct to the old station, and far smaller. Both were oddly deserted. The old station, with its Palladian windows, stained glass, and wood and brass furnishings, was quiet and peaceful, like a museum after closing hours...not 2,000 years old, but timeless nonetheless.
-- We were not even safe from sales pitches in the lobby of our hotel. When we first checked in, the clerk spent about 20 minutes showing us brochures for everything from belly dancing to boat rides, from whirling dervish ceremonies to Turkish bath rituals. Each day when we would leave, the desk clerk would ask what we had planned and then offer to get us a guide or tour for that activity, none of which we accepted. On Sunday night we mentioned that we planned to spend Monday morning, before our flight, strolling the Grand Bazaar; the night clerk told us to tell the morning clerk to call a friend of his to take us around the market--even though, he generously noted, the guide "speaks only Turkish and perhaps a bit of French." On Saturday afternoon we took a 90-minute boat tour of the Bosphorus--with the same company as in the hotel brochure--and paid about $8 a ticket at the dock; the hotel price would have been about $45.
-- Sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a wall, a girl of perhaps 5, alone, played a toy keyboard, with a paper cup for donations.
"Hello, Excuse Me!"
Like Cairo and Rome--but much more like Cairo--the residents of Istanbul have spent a couple of thousand years honing their sales skills. Would-be guides, tour vendors, ice cream vendors, water vendors, tea vendors, pretzel vendors, shoeshine vendors, chewing gum vendors, facial tissue vendors, cookie vendors, roasted chestnut vendors, roasted corn vendors...all work the crowds along with the pickpockets. Some hawked their wares from stands; others, plying carts or carrying their wares in large wooden trays, snaked through the tourists and local shoppers, shouting, cajoling, importuning, whining, moving slowly against the flow of the throng.
From our hotel we walked up a steep, short hill to reach the three most important sites in the old city: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and Topkapi palace. Huge white tour buses and yellow and white taxis by the dozen plied the narrow lane; when the buses would meet, one would have to back up, either up or down the hill to an intersection, until the other could wheeze past; men in blue shirts with arm bands whistled, waved, and shouted, directing the tangle of vehicles. Small and large bands of tourists--including the two of us--weaved in and out of the crawling traffic to get to the hill top, where we were beset by another kind of traffic: tour guides. Every 10 yards we would be accosted with "Hello! Excuse me!" "Where are you from?" One man followed this with "Are you from the States? I'm not selling anything!" This, as we became aware, would turn into a ploy to get a tourist to go to a carpet shop. When we would see a tourist stop and answer, we would next hear "I have a cousin there." The more the hawker felt he had established rapport, the harder, it seemed, the target would find it to get away. One evening, sitting in a restaurant, we watched one man who had stalked us pin down another couple for several minutes.
Two Cultures
Like the Bosphorus Straits, but through its history rather than geography, the Hagia Sophia joins Europe and Asia. For a thousand years a Christian church, and from 1453 a mosque, it dominates the city's skyline. The minarets around it, looking like missile launchers, visually echo the religious clashes that the city has seen over the centuries. The building's interior looks every bit a mosque: in the former chancel, a frame points the direction to Mecca, and tiles and shields with Koranic verses adorn the walls; the huge, dark interior is uninterrupted by transepts, side chapels, or altars. A few fragmentary frescoes are about all that remain from the Christian era. Low-hanging chandeliers provide circles of dim illumination, like so many halos for the vanished saints.
In sharp contrast to the decoration in the interior of the Hagia Sophia is the nearby Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built in the early 17th century on the site of the palaces of the Byzantine emperors and facing the Hagia Sophia. It is also known as the Blue Mosque, resplendent with blue tile--hence its name--and laid with rich carpets. It is beautiful; and (for my Pennsylvania readers) it is packed more tightly than Beaver Stadium at Homecoming.
Flying Corncobs
On a couple of occasions we sat on a bench to rest and people-watch in a small park adjacent to the Blue Mosque. At the center was a circular fountain with benches around it. Ice-cream vendors, roast-corn vendors, tourists, and locals strolled by--lots of children in strollers, women with their hair tightly wrapped in scarves, burqa-clad passersby in pairs, workmen heading home, families from the US and Europe, and flying water bottles and corncobs. The latter two elements of the spectacle were regularly launched over our heads into the fountain by little boys standing in the grass behind the benches. The invisible current on the fountain surface (caused by a drain?) gradually swirled the debris together into a gently rocking assemblage of blue-ringed plastic waterbottles and half-submerged, well-gnawed corncobs--rather like one of the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. Black and gray crowlike jackdaws patrolled the lawn, as bobble-headed pigeons did the walks, avian agents of the Istanbul Sanitation Department. Many Europeans and Americans--and every Turkish and Asian couple or family--strolling by the fountain paused to step over the little iron fence by the Keep Off the Grass sign to pose for a photo in front of the spouting water.
Palace, Mackerel, Sucking Face
Topkapi Palace is a sprawling compound. We visited it late on Saturday, and by that time I was foot-sore and leg-weary, mainly just wanting to be handed a gallon-bottle of beer with a straw and pushed in a stroller along with the thousands of infants and toddlers in the family groups that milled around us. I will mention only that, besides the tile work, architecture, and sea views, I enjoyed seeing the Muslim relics, especially the vials holding hairs from the Beard of the Prophet, and the bejeweled dagger featured in the 1964 movie Topkapi.
We crossed the Golden Horn two or three times by walking over the Galata Bridge. For the most part, the weekend was gray and breezy, and on the bridge it seemed even grayer and breezier. Hundreds of fishermen lined both sides of the bridge, long black poles bristling over the sides, wiggling and waving like the legs of a millipede. The bridge walkway was cluttered with the fishermen's lunch wrappers, paper cups and plastic bottles--and buckets, some half filled with water and swimming mackerel, others half filled only with shiny, twitching, gasping, bright-eyed mackerel who wished they were swimming. A walkway on the underside of the bridge was lined with fish restaurants, their most prominent offering being grilled mackerel on a bun. Appropriately enough, on the far side of the bridge we found dozens of shops selling plumbing supplies, displayed on banks as if it were the Spice Market, with chrome faucets and fixtures gleaming in the sun.
The Grand Bazaar was a maelstrom of humanity, and we were wholly entertained by it--almost like being drawn by a magnet. With some 4,000 stalls, the market is filled with sales chants and shouts, with dust, tobacco smoke, and the scents of spices and perfume. The crowds were noise and color in motion, and the wares, brightly lit, were even more colorful than the crowds. The nearby Spice Market sells a good deal besides that commodity, including a wide variety of clothing, candles, lamps, and on and on and on. Just outside the Spice Market are a few lanes where pets are sold: from goldfish to puppies to rabbits, but, cutest of all, leeches. They swim in half-filled, 5-gallon glass jars; they are about 2" long, black and wiggly--and just a bit creepy--with signs marketing them for "cosmetic purposes"--for facial wrinkles--though I am sure they make fine pets and, like most fish, are good listeners.
No Country for Old Men
For William Butler Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium," Istanbul is a metaphor for what transcends the mortal world--"no country for old men." Visiting the city is a chance to be in timelessness--to be lost in 2,000 years of history. At moments it was like standing at the juncture of the cultural tectonic plates of Europe and Asia; and at other moments it was like being a mackerel in a bucket--with my hand twitching tightly around my wallet.
Filler
-- On Sunday we had lunch at the restaurant in Istanbul's 19th-century train station, the terminus for the Orient Express from Paris, which ceased operation only a few years ago. The modern terminal is a recent adjunct to the old station, and far smaller. Both were oddly deserted. The old station, with its Palladian windows, stained glass, and wood and brass furnishings, was quiet and peaceful, like a museum after closing hours...not 2,000 years old, but timeless nonetheless.
-- We were not even safe from sales pitches in the lobby of our hotel. When we first checked in, the clerk spent about 20 minutes showing us brochures for everything from belly dancing to boat rides, from whirling dervish ceremonies to Turkish bath rituals. Each day when we would leave, the desk clerk would ask what we had planned and then offer to get us a guide or tour for that activity, none of which we accepted. On Sunday night we mentioned that we planned to spend Monday morning, before our flight, strolling the Grand Bazaar; the night clerk told us to tell the morning clerk to call a friend of his to take us around the market--even though, he generously noted, the guide "speaks only Turkish and perhaps a bit of French." On Saturday afternoon we took a 90-minute boat tour of the Bosphorus--with the same company as in the hotel brochure--and paid about $8 a ticket at the dock; the hotel price would have been about $45.
-- Sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a wall, a girl of perhaps 5, alone, played a toy keyboard, with a paper cup for donations.
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