Tuesday, August 30, 2011
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.
Friday, August 12, 2011
The Heers Are Arrive...
A year ago in the spring, whenever we would mention that we were moving to Austria, more often than not the reaction would be a few bars of "The hills are alive...." Salzburg, the setting for much of The Sound of Music, was our destination last weekend, primarily for the tour of the musical, as part of our mission to Embrace the Tourist Cliches. When we visited that city last December for the Christmas market, we saw little above the roof lines as the temperature hovered around the freezing mark, and rain alternated with light snow in foggy breezes. On this visit, it was sunny and rosy, and we got to appreciate the natural setting as well as the city for its history and for the musical mythology that Americans in particular have attached to it.
On Friday, after leaving Vienna, we headed for Salzburg with a detour southwest through Bad Ischl and the mountain lakes of the Salzkammer region--smooth turquoise surfaces bounded by stark, steep, jagged, dramatic walls of stone sometimes clothed with rich green meadows and forests. I knew now from whence came those Sunday church bulletin covers that I remembered from childhood--the Alpine peak with the words from Psalms: "I will lift up mine eyes...." It was, at some level, like looking up a long church aisle to a beautiful altar. If scenery itself can be uplifting, this was it, and I suspect that it was a huge part of the success of the movie. Once we reached the city, we found that we could not drive up to our hotel, a 15th-century structure, which was in an area protected from vehicular traffic. We found our way to a parking garage and got directions from the lot attendant--who appeared at first like a grumpy ogre but who turned out to be quite helpful. We asked him whether he spoke English. "Nein." So the three of us turned to German, and our attendant turned out to be gracious and helpful, even mentioning how we could get a discount through the hotel on the parking charges. We congratulated ourselves for functioning all in German in a conversation with lots of details--an unfamiliar world for us.
Salzburg has attractions besides its mountain setting: the huge white castle, the Mirabell Gardens, Mozart's birthplace, old churches and cemeteries, cloisters and abbeys, and spectacular views from shady walks high above the old city. Across the Salzach River from the old city, Steingasse (Stone Street), which is a portion of the medieval road from Venice to Salzburg, remains undiscovered by tourists, and it, too, made quite a pleasant walk. The street is a charming reality with no aura of tourist-trap about it--no teddy bears singing "Edelweiss" were for sale here. Paved with cobblestones, it is narrow, winding, and lined with low, arched doorways; stone window sills and exterior stone staircases present pots of color--geraniums and other flowers. The Maison de Plaisir, a centuries' old brothel, has a sign indicating it still is open (midnight to 4), and there is a gouge in a nearby wall that resulted from an American soldier trying to get his tank down the street to reach the house. By one door we saw ancient doorbells--a set of rusty metal rods attached to wires running to different windows on the building above. The music of centuries past.
Taking the Sound of Music tour was like looking at the past through a telescope with several sets of lenses. We were watching a tour guide talk about a movie based on a Broadway musical based on a book based on a family biography derived from actual lives. The Sound of Music itself concerned mythic events--music and play transforming a distant father to a doting father, the bringing of a new mother to motherless children, escape from Nazi ogres, and a powerful sense of the family as refuge. It is a pretty story, inspirational, with memorable songs and a magnificent setting, and it puts a beautiful body on the bones of the true narrative of the Trapp family. The reality behind the fairy tale was a mother with an explosive temper and a family with rivalries and contention. To see the setting decades after the events took place and decades after the 1964 musical brought another kind of fog from that of the Salzburg Christmas market--this one a rose-colored mist.
More than half of the people who boarded the tour bus with us were chattering in Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, and they were of all ages: couples traveling with an aged parent or two, young couples, and teens; many seemed to have rather limited English. The tour leader, who told us that she had been born in England but spoke with a German accent, was bright and cheerful, and, in some measure, she seemed to adopt the persona of Maria in the film. At different points she played a CD with the movie sound track and bounced and sang, urging the group to join her, though only a very few voices did, perhaps because they did not recognize the lyrics in English. From an elderly Asian woman seated behind me, I could make out in thin, flutey tones, "The heers are arrive...."
After we drove by a number of sites in the city where filming had taken place, we made our way to the lake district that Linda and I had driven through the previous afternoon. The last stop on the tour was at Mondsee (Moon Lake), with a village of the same name. The tour group disbanded for an hour, and we were free to roam the village on our own, so Linda and I passed the gewgaw shops and went first to the beautiful, bright yellow, twin-spired, Baroque church, St Michael; here the wedding scene of Maria and Baron von Trapp was filmed. The interior is stunning--richly decorated, with a very long aisle through the nave leading up to steps in front of the altar. Above the altar, seated in a large, gilt-edged glass box, is Konrad, a saint who was martyred in the 12th century. Most such relics in Europe are recumbent and richly clothed, but Konrad is seated like Old King Cole as pictured in my childhood book of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, calling for his pipe, his bowl, and his fiddlers three, except his robe is draped loosely around him and all his bones are displayed. They are encrusted with jewels, and the smiling skull has a bright gold halo; two blue stones gleam from his eye sockets, and he sits with a sceptre held jauntily in one hand, the end resting on the floor between his feet. An almost full set of teeth gives him a happy grin, and I could imagine him putting wedded couples in mind of the rapture.
Sunday night when we had returned to Vienna, Linda popped the DVD of the movie in, and we refreshed ourselves on the scenes that we had visited. Even with the rose-colored mist, we were able to discern Konrad in his box above the altar as the chorus broke into "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" Sometimes it is best not to get out the telescope.
On Friday, after leaving Vienna, we headed for Salzburg with a detour southwest through Bad Ischl and the mountain lakes of the Salzkammer region--smooth turquoise surfaces bounded by stark, steep, jagged, dramatic walls of stone sometimes clothed with rich green meadows and forests. I knew now from whence came those Sunday church bulletin covers that I remembered from childhood--the Alpine peak with the words from Psalms: "I will lift up mine eyes...." It was, at some level, like looking up a long church aisle to a beautiful altar. If scenery itself can be uplifting, this was it, and I suspect that it was a huge part of the success of the movie. Once we reached the city, we found that we could not drive up to our hotel, a 15th-century structure, which was in an area protected from vehicular traffic. We found our way to a parking garage and got directions from the lot attendant--who appeared at first like a grumpy ogre but who turned out to be quite helpful. We asked him whether he spoke English. "Nein." So the three of us turned to German, and our attendant turned out to be gracious and helpful, even mentioning how we could get a discount through the hotel on the parking charges. We congratulated ourselves for functioning all in German in a conversation with lots of details--an unfamiliar world for us.
Salzburg has attractions besides its mountain setting: the huge white castle, the Mirabell Gardens, Mozart's birthplace, old churches and cemeteries, cloisters and abbeys, and spectacular views from shady walks high above the old city. Across the Salzach River from the old city, Steingasse (Stone Street), which is a portion of the medieval road from Venice to Salzburg, remains undiscovered by tourists, and it, too, made quite a pleasant walk. The street is a charming reality with no aura of tourist-trap about it--no teddy bears singing "Edelweiss" were for sale here. Paved with cobblestones, it is narrow, winding, and lined with low, arched doorways; stone window sills and exterior stone staircases present pots of color--geraniums and other flowers. The Maison de Plaisir, a centuries' old brothel, has a sign indicating it still is open (midnight to 4), and there is a gouge in a nearby wall that resulted from an American soldier trying to get his tank down the street to reach the house. By one door we saw ancient doorbells--a set of rusty metal rods attached to wires running to different windows on the building above. The music of centuries past.
Taking the Sound of Music tour was like looking at the past through a telescope with several sets of lenses. We were watching a tour guide talk about a movie based on a Broadway musical based on a book based on a family biography derived from actual lives. The Sound of Music itself concerned mythic events--music and play transforming a distant father to a doting father, the bringing of a new mother to motherless children, escape from Nazi ogres, and a powerful sense of the family as refuge. It is a pretty story, inspirational, with memorable songs and a magnificent setting, and it puts a beautiful body on the bones of the true narrative of the Trapp family. The reality behind the fairy tale was a mother with an explosive temper and a family with rivalries and contention. To see the setting decades after the events took place and decades after the 1964 musical brought another kind of fog from that of the Salzburg Christmas market--this one a rose-colored mist.
More than half of the people who boarded the tour bus with us were chattering in Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, and they were of all ages: couples traveling with an aged parent or two, young couples, and teens; many seemed to have rather limited English. The tour leader, who told us that she had been born in England but spoke with a German accent, was bright and cheerful, and, in some measure, she seemed to adopt the persona of Maria in the film. At different points she played a CD with the movie sound track and bounced and sang, urging the group to join her, though only a very few voices did, perhaps because they did not recognize the lyrics in English. From an elderly Asian woman seated behind me, I could make out in thin, flutey tones, "The heers are arrive...."
After we drove by a number of sites in the city where filming had taken place, we made our way to the lake district that Linda and I had driven through the previous afternoon. The last stop on the tour was at Mondsee (Moon Lake), with a village of the same name. The tour group disbanded for an hour, and we were free to roam the village on our own, so Linda and I passed the gewgaw shops and went first to the beautiful, bright yellow, twin-spired, Baroque church, St Michael; here the wedding scene of Maria and Baron von Trapp was filmed. The interior is stunning--richly decorated, with a very long aisle through the nave leading up to steps in front of the altar. Above the altar, seated in a large, gilt-edged glass box, is Konrad, a saint who was martyred in the 12th century. Most such relics in Europe are recumbent and richly clothed, but Konrad is seated like Old King Cole as pictured in my childhood book of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, calling for his pipe, his bowl, and his fiddlers three, except his robe is draped loosely around him and all his bones are displayed. They are encrusted with jewels, and the smiling skull has a bright gold halo; two blue stones gleam from his eye sockets, and he sits with a sceptre held jauntily in one hand, the end resting on the floor between his feet. An almost full set of teeth gives him a happy grin, and I could imagine him putting wedded couples in mind of the rapture.
Sunday night when we had returned to Vienna, Linda popped the DVD of the movie in, and we refreshed ourselves on the scenes that we had visited. Even with the rose-colored mist, we were able to discern Konrad in his box above the altar as the chorus broke into "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" Sometimes it is best not to get out the telescope.
Filler
-- Bicycle paths run for miles along the upper Danube. While having lunch in Spitz at a terrace restaurant overlooking the Danube on our return home from Salzburg, we watched a ferry transporting dozens of cyclists to the opposite shore, then loading up another group for the return trip.
-- Here in our neighborhood, four policemen in lime-green vests were standing at a low-speed zone opposite a school along a narrow street at 11 a.m., one holding a radar gun and the other three standing by to write tickets. School has been closed for a month and will not resume until September.
-- A tiny, elderly woman all in black, in a grassy area by the sidewalk, cleaning up after an old, white-faced terrier mix, next to a sign portraying a dog and its pile, and the words "Is this your wurst? €36 fine."
-- An overweight, disheveled, glassy-eyed, unshaven man with a cane lurching along the sidewalk downtown--leather shorts, black socks, beat-up and untied workshoes, and a brilliant red t-shirt reading "Bugs and Lola Bunny."
-- In our little grocery here in Grinzing, I was pushing my cart through the narrow aisle and waited patiently to pass a couple engaged in a passionate embrace and kissing while their three children loudly scrambled around picking items off shelves. We all arrived at the same time at the check-out counter, and I could hear them speaking Italian.
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