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.