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.