Home Is Where the Cat Is

Back from Wiener World for three months now, we are happy to be near family again.  Returning has been a mix of huge change and no change.  My big gold reading chair, finally arrived from Vienna after three months at sea, sits as before in its sunny corner by the low windows, with my stacks of books again accumulating beside it.  Walter the Cat, as was his habit before we moved to Vienna, perches in the afternoon sunshine on the overstuffed arm, his eyes half-closed in a prayer for the election campaign to end, bewildered that Vienna has disappeared, and comfortable and vaguely pleased to recognize the air of his native land.  Soon he will fall into a sound sleep, dreaming perhaps that he is living again in our apartment on Grinzinger Allee, lose his balance, and fall, raking the chair-side upholstery with his claws on his way down; he will land on a pillow that I have set on the floor for him, next to the chair, in anticipation, as these tumbles are almost a daily occurrence.  Although our landing at home has not been so abrupt, it has featured a similar reluctance to letting go.  The reentry experience, which remains a daily awakening, grows slightly gentler and softer each day.

Sleeping and Waking

Since we have returned, letting go of our life in Europe has conflated with much other letting go, sometimes wistfully so, yet always freeing.  Among other changes, the return to life here has featured readjustment to space, mental and physical, as we continue to merge what were for many years our separate households. Most of our possessions were kept in storage while we were in Vienna, and only now are we dealing with the duplication and excess.  The size of our present house has required us to discard the duplicates, the dated if not obsolete, and the cumbersome.  During the unpacking, I have picked up a great many books that, I realized, I am unlikely ever to wish to open again, nor, most likely, would whoever finally handles my estate.  And so they have by the dozens gone into boxes for donation to charity.  The books sometimes take me back to college years or later times when I first acquired or read them; other objects have returned me to childhood, and those have been more difficult to let go of.  Many of the items that we have donated and discarded had histories as the only reason for their survival; some traveled with me for move after move over the decades, though their utility turned to dust years ago.  I am reminded of an awful painting by Andrea del Sarto that probably still hangs in the Corsini Gallery in Rome:  with a shifting, inconsistent perspective, a dull-eyed baby Jesus with a nose bridge as wide as a goat's and arms and head freakishly out of proportion, stares into space, and Mary's stultifying gaze invites the viewer to fall into a coma. The Corsini cannot consign it to the landfill or the Goodwill store not just because it is by a well-known artist, but also--and mostly, I suspect--because it is old.

My father treasured a few humble items that belonged to his parents:  a razor strop, a shaving cup, a wooden pestle.  I still have them, put away in a box, where they are likely to stay.  For me, the links to his childhood can be only vicarious; it is as if I would be disappointing him or dishonoring his memory were I to discard those items.  For many years I have hauled along with me a small table made of pine. When I was a child, it stood in our kitchen, and I had many a family supper of roast, boiled potatoes, and overcooked vegetables on it. The legs became wobbly and had been braced anew twice over the years, and I could have repaired the table yet again.  The time had come to euthanize the memories.  I thought of a deconsecrated church in my old neighborhood in Rome that was being used as storage for a nearby household furnishings store.  This holy relic of my childhood was now just taking up space, I thought. The first step in letting go of it was to deconsecrate it--repeating to myself that it was a decrepit wooden table, the utility of which was, like my childhood family, no more.  A few days later I set it at the curb for trash pickup, and a tousle-haired man in dirty white coveralls tossed the pine bones into a huge white County Waste Disposal truck, Death's winged chariot.  And I am glad to have the space.

Another feature of our readjustment has meant purchasing a few pieces of new furniture to replace what was too worn or not the best fit.  Along with storage cabinets and shelves in the garage to hold some of the kitchen overflow neither of us is yet ready to toss or donate, we have acquired a set of shelves for our kitchen, a headboard for our bed, and a curio cabinet for our diningroom--all from the same furniture store. Each time we have visited the store, the same salesman, CB, has emerged from a grotto of desks, computer monitors, and furniture catalogs.  We like CB.  He is the main reason we go back to the store.  He is about my age and similarly coiffed:  he has no hair on top; there are closely shaved white sidewalls with matching forehead dimples from a forceps delivery, as if his entry into the world, like our return from Vienna, was a bit reluctant.  His bright blue eyes bulge slightly, his chin juts just a bit, and his ever-present, extra-wide smile shows large, even teeth as white as his closely cropped mustache.  His smile, stretching past the incisors to the molars, says "Welcome.  I just tore the skin off some fried chicken with my teeth, and it was delicious."  As CB shows us the store's selections in the kind of item we want, he drawls about the past--the history and demise of American furniture makers--and about the acquisitive habits of his wife, who, he alleges, owns 12 cabinets exactly like the one we are considering buying.  A number of the items that he shows us, he notes, were made by a company in "Chicargo."  CB sprinkles his speech with the compensatory 'r'.  Dimly aware that he omits that sound where it does belong, he generously supplies it elsewhere like Gothic phonological ornament.  We will fill the cabinet with relics from our two years in Vienna, knowing that someday our children will deconsecrate most of them, and, like my books, they will find their way to the landfill or an estate sale, their histories and identities lost in what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the uncatalogued library of Oblivion.  Perhaps the cherry curio cabinet will last longer than my pine table.

Glad to be back, and yet...

Here the landscape seems to change rapidly, and Americans' inclination to preserve often has more to do with natural tracts than with our history and civilization.  US cultural extraversion, though at times loud, oversized, and enervating, is also embracing in a comfortable, secure way if only because it is familiar.  And we are back with grandchildren's soccer games, pumpkins on our porch, college football, family dinners, community theater, concerts, ethnic restaurants, and the anticipation of Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families.  There is so much to love about being home, I say to myself, as I begin planning our trip to Europe in the spring...fully aware that, at its conclusion, I'll be clawing the upholstery on the way down.

Auf Wienersehen

Like an Italian Renaissance artist--perhaps a third-rate one--unwittingly filling in the Tuscan countryside as the background for a scene from the life of Jesus, after two years here I see more clearly the extent to which I brought my own context for the reality of this city.  In general, the picture now is quite different, and brighter and richer.  Still, we are eager to be home...and we hate to leave.

"...the icy Pannonian wind scattered the barren leaves of the faded year across the paving-stones; they found no more peace here than the poor souls in the storms of hell; no hat was safe on my head....

 -- Reinhold Schneider on winter in Vienna, as quoted in Blue Guide Austria

It is the winter, miserably cold, that brings out so much of what is enjoyable, even admirable, about Wiener World.  Perhaps my strongest memory of Vienna will be its gray-canopy November-March sky and the long black nights, the noon sun so low that my shadow on the sidewalk seemed early-evening length.  Stepping from our apartment building onto the cobbled walk and into air like crackling blue-black ice was initially bracing, even enjoyable as it filled my lungs and tightened the skin and muscles of my face to the ceramic hardness of a Thuringian garden gnome.  I remember well how at first I could feel the cold penetrate my gloves and then my glove liners, and then my fingers, and next my feet would begin to feel like cold lead until I could get striding at a good pace and feel my body regain its warmth from the inside.  The winter cold and dark gave a stunning contrast to the gold and white lights and hum of the Christmas markets and an appreciation for warming up with hot glühwein, enough so that I thought being an alcoholic in this climate would clearly have its advantages.  Yet the damp cold and the winds that explode into eddies of snowflakes do little to slow social life here, indoors or out.  Linda and I both experienced frozen bone marrow our first January as we stood at the edge of the ice-solid Neusiedlersee watching parents strapping training skates on well-upholstered toddlers.  In the background the sails of ice boats and bright kites moved in rainbow colors on the gray-white horizon.  Winter here is the bright and colorful ball season, and it is the season of music, with one exquisite concert waltzing along after another almost before the first one's notes have faded.

We Could Be Wieners

For many reasons, we could happily stay here.  We arrived expecting a rigid society, but orderly is a better descriptor.  In general, the common-sense social behavior here results, it seems, from a will to get along more than from fear of authority.  The respect that the people here show for each other and for their city extends to the environment, evident above all from the ubiquitous recycling bins.  I find it fun to shove our empty wine bottles through the bin's rubber portals as hard as I can to hear the glass smash, but even people less inclined than I to such benign vandalism make routine use of these bins.  The seasonal markets and frequent village and regional festivals also contribute to the social cohesion:  green vests with white shirts, leather shorts, green felt hats with bling and huge inverted typewriter erasers in the bands; pink and green dirndls; yodeling, slap-dancing, whoo-hoos, and syncopated whipcracking; accordions, fiddles, tubas, trumpets; grilled potatoes, roasted chestnuts, smoked brats, thick beer, thin wine. 

Yet life here is not life in a modern Paradise.  Cigarette smoke rolls from restaurants' huge smoking sections into nonsmoking areas, and at our neighborhood grocery store it billows from the employee breakroom into the aisles.  More than once I have come home from grocery shopping reeking like I had been in a bar, without the fun of actually having been in one.  Crumpled packs and smoldering butts litter the sidewalk in front of the middle school I pass on my morning walk.  More than once I have seen a car speed through a pedestrian crossing while a mother and her stroller are in the lane, though most drivers are observant of the zone.  Drivers in the city seem particularly impatient, though on the autobahns with their traffic cameras and radar traps driving feels saner than it does on US interstates.  Although we have appreciated Austria's environmental concerns, they have, ironically, also led us to a new appreciation of the American chemical industry:  the absence or low level of preservatives or other additives in food means a lack of vitamin D in milk and a local population of elderly humpbacks; bleach is not available, and perhaps that is the reason Austrian men wear black socks only, even with shorts and sandals; dentists do not like to use anesthesia, though that may be for sadistic rather than environmental reasons, and they profit from the lack of fluoride in the drinking water; lawns, private and public, get little or no chemical treatment and have an abundance of dandelions, among other weeds, though no one seems to mind, and, truly, we don't either.

Gods and Goddesses:  the superlatively good

"...like whatever else is superlatively good--was perhaps better appreciated in the memory than by present consciousness."  --Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

The Garden of Eden from which Austrians are in exile lies not in a place but in a time, in the decades of Franz Josef, the days that preceded World War I and the dissolution of the empire.  Wiener World is full of reminders of that.  Numerous busts and commemorative plaques show a special affection for their last emperor, even though by the standards of history the people should perhaps be less proud.  Close-minded, anti-democratic, and conservative, Franzy led the nation into destructive alliances and unnecessary wars; to the minds of some historians, he bears a fair measure of responsibility for the onset of World War I.  His chief occupations seemed to be pedantic review of diplomatic communications and killing animals.  Biographer Brigitte Hamann documents that as a young man Franz Josef proudly wrote to his mum of having shot "72 herons and cormorants" one morning.  One of our guide books mentions the thousands of animal heads from Franz's kills mounted on the walls of his hunting lodge near Salzburg.  But hanging around for many years and being the last, in effect, to head the empire was enough for his status as a civil saint.  Augmenting his reputation was his marriage to the beautiful Bavarian princess Sisi, a relationship that has been romanticized in books and in numerous films that Austrian television has broadcast repeatedly during our two years here.  As Rome adores Mary, so does Vienna revere the vain, anorexic, melancholy Sisi, who spent millions on race horses while invalid veterans of Franz's wars begged in Vienna's streets.  Still, she is the incarnation of the glory days and inspiration for decoration on handbags and coffee mugs, posters, snowglobes, and (my favorite) "Sisi Pizza" on Nussdorfer Strasse, where I would have repaired had an attack of anorexia come upon me.  

...and superlatively bad

World War II was part of the background in the picture of Austria that I brought with me, and--visits to the dentist aside--this has in many ways remained a blank or a blur.  Despite the government's preservation of Mauthausen concentration camp, I have a sense that Austria has to a great extent paved over World War II and its Nazi past, literally and figuratively, or left it like a neglected cemetery in the social memory.  There are few signs of a once-vibrant Jewish community, and no signs of Hitler--a would-be god in a religion of the state--or of his life here.  Austrians, we suspect, would prefer that the world remember Hitler--born near Linz--as a German. 

Losses incurred as a result of the war are well in evidence, however.  Vienna's architecture still shows the war:  strips of modern buildings in old downtown define where American bombs fell, and a memorial sculpture rests atop a bomb shelter that became a tomb for the hundreds who died when it took a direct hit.  Every town that we have visited in Austria has a memorial at a church or town square listing names of "Gefallen"--from both world wars--from the community or the parish, and many a time we have seen family tombstones marked with the Maltese cross and dates from the war years, reminders that the men swept up in the conflict were, like their victims and their enemies, sons and fathers and brothers.  Hatred of the Russians persists:  guide books and tour guides mention the Russian occupying forces stripping the factories and looting estates and castles in their zone of control; more than one downtown restaurant menu offers in the front a history page noting Russian vandalism and looting of their establishment at the end of the war.  Russian occupation soldiers in Vienna were, it is noted, responsible for most of the street crime in the city.  No mention, however, is made of the millions of Russians who died in the war or, in particular, the thousands of Russian POWs who perished in Mauthausen.  St Georgen and other slave work sites and concentration camps have disappeared under parking lots and apartment houses, and tracts overgrown with trees and vines and clumps of weeds--like those on the Napoleonic battlefield and burial ground I visited at Wagram a year ago. 

While there is much to be said for remembering, there is much to be said for letting the vines and grass grow.  I am put in mind of the many grim Cold War scenes that took place at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin...and the adjacent McDonald's...and the urban version of vines and weeds--the amazing amount of litter, crumpled cups and wrappers and cigarette butts and flattened pink-black gum on the sidewalks.

Splendor in the Grass

Our favorite walk has been from Grinzing through the vineyards and Vienna Woods to Kahlenberg, a low mountain on which the Polish forces marshaled when they arrived just in time to save Vienna from the Turkish siege in 1683.  Near the top and off the trail lies a very small cemetery, heavily overgrown and more than a bit mossy.  Among the dozen or so graves in this neglected, out-of-the-way spot is that of Karoline Traunwieser.   According to 19th-century newspaper accounts, at 17 she was a lovely rose, acclaimed as the belle of Vienna's ball season; she reportedly fell in love with a French officer who died in the retreat of Napoleon's army during the Moscow winter in 1811.  Her brief life, 1794-1815, ended unpoetically from consumption rather than--as I had hoped--from an excess of romantic sensibility.  Though less well-known than Saint Sisi later became, Karoline, too, was for at least a short time a mythic local goddess embodying the theme that beauty and love are fleeting.  That she has been forgotten, as has her grave, rather drives home the point.

Winter to Summer and War to Peace

Another rose, commonly called the rose of this century, perhaps the greatest rose of all time, is 'Peace.'  It has no fragrance to speak of, it has huge flowers that should please anybody who has always longed to grow the largest turnip in the world, and it has good foliage indeed.  -- Henry Mitchell, Essential Earthman

The Wiener Schnitzel, much revered here, is the Peace Rose of Austria.  Hammered thin as a euro, breaded, and deep fried, it is as large as a dinner plate and always served with a potato, which goes with it like a yodel with an accordion.  As there is a uniformity to schnitzel in this city, there is a uniformity to the menus of Wiener World.  Yet we love the food here as long as we have to eat it only once in a great while--not just because the various forms of pig, salt, and starch ball become monotonous but also because of what this diet must do to a person's arteries.  Mostly, though, we have loved the settings for the Teutonic cuisine that we have indulged in--the little guesthouses, the beer halls, the Grinzing heuriger gardens.  Our favorite dining experience in Vienna, if I may speak for Linda, has involved finding a bench in Schwedenplatz on a sunny summer weekend afternoon after a long walk along the Danube canal, and then at a wurst stand ordering foot-long pepper sausages in buns with sweet mustard, and a half-liter can of Ottakringer for me and a Coke Zero for her.  Between bites we hum "The Radetzky Marsch" while bobble-headed pigeons and the denizens of Wiener World mill and eddy and flow past like the Danube, and the sun, golden as the Ottakringer, makes us present to the absence of chill December and to the privilege it has been to live in this city.

Auf Wiedersehen...

We shall both miss the pageantry at Schwedenplatz...and much else:

We have loved getting to know our American colleagues and many of the kind local people we have met--Sam Little Wolf, our Cheyenne cat sitter; Gaby, our generous and thoughtful German teacher; Freddy, who went to Herculean efforts to get our car through EU inspection; the kind, lovely, gentle Dr Saam, who came to our apartment that first bitter February to assist Earl the Cat into eternal sleep; and many another.  We have loved the art museums, the architecture, and the history.  We have loved the music, the folk festivals, and the balls.  We have loved the scenery, not just the dramatic mountains but the sweet drive through the Danube Valley vineyards and castle ruins along Route 3, the pastures and meadows and lakes, and the elegant storks alighting in the rooftop nests of Rust.  We have loved our travels throughout Austria--especially our weekend trips to each corner of this beautiful country--and our forays into Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France.  We have loved summer Sunday evenings in the garden of Nino's, a little Italian restaurant in Grinzing.  We have loved having company, every minute of it, and our only wish as we close out our time in Wiener World is that we had had more friends and relatives visit to share what has been for us two years of happy discovery.

"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

La Grande Reise: Alps, Castles, Elves, and Stomping the Grapes of French

On the last Saturday in May we left Grinzing early in the morning on a tour through the Austrian Alps, the Black Forest, Alsace-Lorraine, and Burgundy, with a final stop in central Germany.  If this trip were an oil painting, much of it would be blurry.  The first several days were a jumbled, conflated kaleidoscopic scene of alps, castles, quaint cities and cute towns of half-timbered houses, cathedrals, lush parks, windows with overflowing flower boxes, narrow lanes of cobblestones, and fast-moving rivers and lazy canals.  I regret that the blurry part includes some of the finer sites, particularly Freiburg, Colmar, and Strasbourg, in which we spent a half-day each.  It was not, however, until we reached Dijon and then Burgundy that I began to take in the details of the day-to-day.  Beaune, France, though not the loveliest nor the most historic of the places we visited, had the most color and texture for me, perhaps because our experiences in the town were so different from, and maybe also a little quirkier than, those on the rest of the trip. 

Among the quirks were fun language differences, and not just the translations.  We seem never to have incidents in German at all like the ones that we have in dealing with the French.  Some of our language experiences in Dijon and Beaune reminded me of the scene with Peter Sellers in one of the Pink Panther movies in which he grew intensely frustrated while asking for a rheeoom at a hotel.  A couple of times we saw an interlocutor's face color in exasperation to the shade of an Alsatian pinot noir.  Communication problems for the most part, I found, came up only when we failed to realize the French person was trying to communicate in English, though eventually the words emerged like after-notes in a sip of wine. 

Marmots, Mountains, and Castles

It is a testimony to the over-abundance of beautiful mountain views on the first leg of the trip that my clearest memory is not of the views, which have commingled, but of a marmot.  As our first Saturday was about scenery, we experienced the region primarily from inside the car, rather like going up and down on a magical merry-go-round, spinning slowly as the scenery passed.  A goal of ours for more than a year had been to drive the Gross Glockner Alpine Highway south of Salzburg, though we feared that, even if we drove there, we would not see much.  Until the day we left, the forecast indicated that we would see only rain, clouds, and fog on that road, which, we noted, had been closed for snow earlier in the week.  The sky itself--which we sometimes seemed to be driving in--turned out to be nearly as dramatic as the mountains.  When we got to the north entrance of the Alpine Highway, we found the countryside bathed in sunshine, and great white convection clouds burgeoning and billowing in a pure blue sky.  We wound along the highway past an amazing number of bicyclists wheezing up and flying down the inclines, each curve bringing a new vista.  We parked at the high point to take pictures, stepping out into the 40-degree sunshine and spectacular scenery.  Across the road, near a don't-feed-the-marmots sign, a marmot, the cold wind ruffling its deep brown fur, stood on its hind legs in a sunny parking strip surveying a clutch of German tourists a few feet away, while they eyed it with their cameras.  A man and a woman knelt down and offered the marmot a chunk of bread, and the marmot dropped to all fours, looking the offering over as it edged nearer to them and then abruptly ducked into the shadows under a car.  Oh No, I could imagine the marmot thinking, German cuisine again, and he would not come out until he saw a car with French plates pull in.

Saturday was a 10-hour driving day.  Descending the Alpine Highway, we wound our way on to the euphoniously named little town of Heiligenblut, whose remarkable church spire soars to compete with the mountain tops, and then south, into Italy, with its leisurely green countryside with magnificent mountains and tailgating idiot drivers; from there we headed north again through the Brenner Pass and back into Austria, where we spent the night in Reutte, on the border with German Bavaria.  Reutte itself, though not a particularly attractive village, sits in a particularly attractive setting.  It is a memory that has not blurred.  A river of opalescent green, laden with calcium, rushes through the town, and snow-capped stony peaks rise in the background.

Bavaria:  Fantasy Land

Our next stop was like going to see the Mona Lisa and having to peer through a horde of gallery visitors for a glimpse of it.  Sunday morning we headed to Neuschwanstein Castle, where tour buses gathered by the hundreds, and tourists gathered by the thousands.  After a long wait in line for timed-entry tickets to the fantasy land castle of Mad King Ludwig, we found that the earliest we could get in was more than 5 hours later.  We opted to skip the tour, and off we went on foot, climbing the slope to the castle compound, passing gasping, straggling groups of tourists who had also eschewed the ticket-center buses to the top, which were jammed like the Tokyo subway at rush hour.  Ludwig's castle was partially obscured by repair scaffolding, but we were able to tour the exterior and take in the views.  There was enough of the castle to see that was identifiable as the Disney inspiration for Fantasy Land, and the views were lovely--lakes, castles, red-roofed towns below, and green-gray sloped rocky peaks in rugged rows stretching to the horizon.  After we descended from the castle hill to the vast parking lots lined with shops, we headed for the Alpsee (Alp Lake), to sit on a bench and get our breath while watching the white sailboats ease across the flat blue water in the shadows of the mountains that edged the lake.  Like the marmot finding refuge under the car, we were for the moment out of the press of humanity.

Besides the crowds, there was a cultural-psychological block to our Bavarian experience.  Having rested, we strolled the crowded grounds and came on a form of crass entrepreneurship.  A large sign in English and Japanese announced a mega designer-store outlet.  Curious, we entered the large, boxy building:  we found a sea of Japanese shoppers, dozens of different high-end brands--Rolex...Gucci...Bulgari--an all-Japanese retail staff, and all the signs in Japanese only.  There was nothing we could see in the megastore that was remotely related to Neuschwanstein, Bavaria, or even Germany, but business was brisk.

The trip back to our hotel in Reutte, however, brought us back in touch with Bavaria.  We decided to take advantage of what is normally a problem with the GPS and let it lead us on a rural route rather than on the main roads.  We drove slowly through farms and narrow lanes and tiny villages with houses squeezing the road so tightly that in several stretches only one-way traffic was possible.  As we emerged from one village, we found our car surrounded by huge brown cows.  They milled around us, their immense heads bobbing past the car side windows like the mounts on a carousel.  We edged slowly through them, noticing that they were being herded by three men on bicycles, each holding a long stick.  The tour groups in Neuschwanstein, I thought, could have used these men, especially on the slope up to the castle and maybe even in the megastore.

Freiburg and the Black Forest

Monday morning we discovered that the GPS does not work without a fuse, and we were back to relying on paper, heading for our hotel in the town of Staufen, at the southern end of the Black Forest.  En route we toured Freiburg, which has no one particularly special site but is just a beautiful city with a fine Gothic cathedral; we wandered its old city with its tiny, shallow canals--inches-wide Buchle--coursing through sidewalks and squares, its cathedral, its half-timbered houses, and the old city market.  I thought we were now close enough to France that I could look forward to something other than another round of pork, starch ball, and sauerkraut--which comes disguised on German menus under hundreds of names.  In Staufen I had the best dinner of the trip:  cheese on winter melon, with lasagne.  I should have learned months ago that, when in Germany, order Italian food.  Tuesday morning we started out on a planned drive on a scenic north-south route through the Forest.  The route, however, was closed for construction, frustrating Linda's plans to buy a cuckoo clock in one of the Forest villages, and we contented ourselves with the rolling woods and farmlands of the southern portion alone.  Later in the afternoon, we crossed into France.

Alsace:  Teutonic Surprise

Once we were over the border, I was eager for the dinner hour to arrive.  Just south of the beautiful city of Colmar is the village of Eguisheim, where we had hotel reservations.  With its timbered houses in pastel colors and boxes of bright red and pink and white and yellow flowers lining its streets and in every window, the cuteness of Eguisheim could be no greater or it would be cloying.  Not so lovely was my dinner that night.  Because I generally like to try foods that are peculiar to a region, at a very nice restaurant for dinner I opted for the "Alsatian Regional Specialty."  Soon a warm china plate was set in front of me, and next to it an earthenware terrine.  I lifted its lid to find two small pork sausages atop a heap of sauerkraut, and next to the sausages a medium-sized boiled potato.  As Anticipation had been my appetizer, so Disappointment was my main course.  I was the marmot, looking for a car to duck under.   

Colmar and Strasbourg:  Conflated and Blurred

The following morning we drove to Colmar, parked the car, and strolled along the Rhine and through the market and parks and crooked, cobbled streets lined with timbered houses and flower boxes, where the river lazily wound along, and in the afternoon we took the train to Strasbourg.  Strasbourg was rain and sun and chilly breezes and a cathedral remarkable for its Gothic generosity and stunning height.  Both cities, I thought, deserve much more time, but our main goal on this trip was to experience the region broadly.

Dijon:  Gargoyles and Alf Leetair

After the loveliness of the Alps, Colmar, Strasbourg, and the villages we had stayed in, our first stop beyond Alsace was a spiral downward.  From our base in Eguisheim, we drove 2 hours southwest into Burgundy for a stay in Beaune, stopping along the way for a visit in Dijon.  Aside from the city's fame from its association with mustard, the color of many of its structures, it has little more than its gargoyles to recommend it.  Dijon received no mention in our guidebook to France, and to us it was clear why that was the case.  Apart from the Gothic cathedral with three rows of gargoyles across its facade, the most memorable thing about Dijon was the parking garage, home to the evil spirits frightened off by the gargoyles.  A dark, narrow, low-ceiling ramp curled tightly down to the parking levels deep in the underworld.  Grimy dark walls shaped lanes that were barely wide enough for the car to pass, and the garage ceiling was bare inches above the car roof.  Three levels down, just before we reached the River Styx for the crossing into Hell, we found a very narrow space to back into, and then we made our way up a foul staircase to street level, into mustard sunlight soiled by diesel fumes.  On crumbling sidewalks with litter gently drifting and tumbling along like dried leaves, we passed shops displaying trays of cellophane sleeves holding three or four jars each of flavored mustard at what seemed to be ridiculously high prices.  We spotted two cathedrals and made our way to them through narrow, traffic-congested streets.  Like so many of the churches we have seen in France, these also had suffered from the Revolution and Napoleon; their interiors were largely bare, but they had, at least, retained some of their stained glass and ornate Gothic stonework.  And the gargoyles, row after row across the facade, were magnificent.

Dijon also gave us our first sip of linguistic embarrassment, though a petite one.  I ordered water (de l'eau), and the waiter asked, Alf leetair?  I thought this might be a brand and asked him to repeat, which he did.  I then asked whether he spoke English.  He looked exasperated, reddened and repeated Alf leetair again, and I realized he was saying "half liter."  Ah, oui, and we all looked relieved.

Beaune:  Wine and Roses

From Dijon we drove on to Beaune, and for the first time on the trip we got a good rest from being in the car.  So much of the trip to that point had felt like just seeing things without stopping long enough really to experience the locality; Beaune let us simply relax and absorb local life.

A city of some 20,000, Beaune is in the heart of Burgundy, surrounded by vineyards and wineries.  With crooked cobbled streets and ample flower boxes, it has the charm of Eguisheim, but on a larger scale, and rose bushes in prolific bloom run through the heart of the boulevard that rings Beaune, just as they do for miles and miles in the median strip of the modern Autoroute that leads into the city.  Much of the medieval wall circling the old city is still intact, and one morning we strolled its length, pausing from time to time in small grassy parks lined with huge, ancient plane trees and rose bushes.  On our second morning, we strolled along a stream and then through a sprawling, rose-filled park on the edge of town, where a lake offered a home to a variety of ducks, geese, and swans, which we found also in huge nests on a small island in the lake.  Country lanes led through gently sloping vineyards just beyond the park, and those invited us for a walk as well. 

Stomping the Grapes of French.  In the afternoon we visited a multi-room wine shop, one recommended by our guidebook, where a local expert offered us advice.  A tall, thin man with a moustache bleached white by years of being dipped in alcohol, he seemed to be a gentle man, schooled by painful experience with uncultured palates, ignorance, and pretentiousness.  In heavily accented English, he explained that the best whites in the world come from Burgundy.  I looked politely skeptical, having recently read an article in the Herald Tribune on Austria's Wachau Valley whites.  Noting my expression, he said that we not need take his word:  So and So also said Burgundy whites were the best.  We had, of course, heard of So and So?  We both lied, nodding to him (and feeling wholly ashamed).   He poured a small sample of what he said was an excellent white and handed it to me.  It tasted like licorice with a touch of vinegar.  I told him I was not inclined favorably by the sample; he said it was, perhaps, an acquired taste, and arched an eyebrow ever so slightly, struggling, I am certain, not to let his face betray the dismay he felt as, behind his eyes, his annoyance was reddening and swelling like a ripe purple grape after an autumn rain.  I took pity on him, thinking he must have felt like Monet trying to tell a doodling child how to paint a water lily, or more a tragic character, Sisyphus, for eternity pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down.  Finally, because he sounded so wonderfully authoritative and had such a thick accent--and had done a creditable job of trying to contain his dismay at my ignorance--we could do no less than purchase five reds and a white to bring home and drink with delight or displeasure, as our Philistine tastes dictated.

Another Petite Linguistic Adventure.  Late on our first afternoon in Beaune we sat our tired selves  down at a sidewalk cafe for a cold beer before heading on to explore the town further.  I ordered in French two large draft beers, and the waiter appeared to understand me easily.  He replied, "Eenakah" or "African"?  Linda and I looked at each other in confusion.  We made him repeat that question a couple of more times, and then Linda asked him whether he spoke English.  His face reddened in exasperation, and then it dawned on me that he was asking whether we wanted Heineken or another brand, which we determined later to be Affligem.  He brought us two small drafts of Eenakah and charged us for two large ones.

Getting Pumped.  On our second afternoon, we toured a medieval palais converted by its noble owners (trying to get right with God before their deaths) that had served Beaune as a hospital from the middle ages until the mid-20th century.  It had even held wounded French troops during World War II and was for a time policed by Nazi soldiers.  Among the centuries-old apothecary jars and surgical instruments, the most interesting items displayed, I thought, were the enema syringes, huge nozzles affixed to pumps that could have inflated a basketball, including a self-administering enema on which a person sat while working the pump by hand...potentially hours of entertainment.  We left the shadowy rooms and halls of medical history for the glorious outdoors. 

Dejeuner et Diner.  The sun was out and the day was too lovely for us to sit inside.  Because the outdoor cafes were crowded, we got sandwiches and soft drinks at a shop and plopped ourselves down on a bench next to a carousel to people-watch.  We shopped a bit more and strolled a lot more, and late in the afternoon, as we waited for our chosen restaurant to open for dinner, we returned to the park with the carousel.  Tots, some grinning broadly, some lost in wonder--and one little girl whose eyes ran with tears of fear--went slowly around while tunes from Disney movie soundtracks floated by us and mingled in the full-bloomed roses in the park.  For a moment, we were back in Fantasy Land.  And even Fantasy Land, we noted, had its rules.  Attached to the carousel were four signs, including one in English:  "Prohibition of Up or Down After the Bell of Departure."

On our second night in Beaune, we found ourselves in a restaurant that offered, at least, a proprietor with very good English.  Our waitress, who looked to be in her late teens and starting her first job, willingly struggled for us in halting English and was clearly eager to please--and not quite as frightened as the child on the merry-go-round.  The proprietor, elfin, oily, and officious, was all smiles to us yet cold and abrupt with the waitress, yipping criticism at her as the two of them scurried among the tables.  A different points in the evening he stopped to chat, telling us about his years managing a restaurant in Washington, and making remarks about cheese and gas that he himself seemed to find quite witty.  Perhaps he, too, had seen the display of medieval enema equipment and it was on his mind.  Then, like a terrier, he hurried away and bit his new waitress in the ankle, so to speak, by admonishing her for setting out the wrong size spoon for our dessert plates.  

Rothenburg ob der Tauber:  Elf Land

Our time was getting short.  Saturday we left Beaune and drove to melodious Rothenburg ob der Tauber--named by someone with clogged sinuses--in central Germany, leaving us just one more driving leg to Vienna.  Except for the astonishing crowd of German tourists, Rothenburg reminded me of colorful illustrations in children's books of a village that Santa Claus, elves, and garden gnomes might have dwelt in.  Its shops offered acres of Christmas ornaments, including ones labeled "Made in Williamsburg, Va, USA."  The town still looks, I imagine, much like the village it was in medieval times.  Our hotel, the Golden Griffen, was the home of the 15th-century town mayor; much of the structure, furnished with ancient wood chests and other antiques, with rich dark plank floors and stairs, had doorways that were perfect for elves but that imperiled anyone taller than 5'6".  (I made it through our stay, nonetheless, without adding a souvenir scar to my scalp.)  Here Linda was able to buy a cuckoo clock--from a very large selection--a purchase she had planned to make in our drive through the Black Forest, aborted because of the closed highway.

Und Zuruck

Sunday morning found us on the road home.  The Bell of Departure had rung.  We were back in Grinzing by mid-afternoon, our carousel ride over.  A relieved Walter the Cat greeted us at the door, and we were ready for a cold Eenakah.

The Music of Wiener Neverworld

"Peter is ever so old, but he is really always the same age, so that does not matter in the least."  J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

On a sunny but chilly Friday afternoon in early May we toured the Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir.  This opportunity, seldom available, had been arranged by one of the teachers in the Embassy's German language training program.  I thought of the disciplined ranks of the children in the choir, whom we had seen in two concerts in recent months.  The Choir has had mythic status for me since I was a child.  My mother loved choirs of children above all others, and from time to time she would express a wish to attend a concert by the Vienna Boys Choir someday, though she never did.  The Choir was something I would occasionally hear on the radio and later in recordings.  It had always seemed to me to be the same entity, a group persona, like a mask behind which little boys came and went over the centuries.  Until this visit to the Augarten, they were never really children to me, but voices of some eternally young singers.

Order and Disorder 

We joined a group of other students from the language program at a metro stop downtown, and we loitered at a busy street corner while we waited for laggards to join us.  As we bunched in threes and fours to allow local pedestrian traffic to work its way through, chit-chatting and blinking into the sun, the #2 tram rolled past, and cars and delivery vans clogged and crept through the noisy, grimy intersection.  The German teachers stood opposite us, grouped like a clique of foreigners in their own country, while the instructor who had arranged the tour worked her cell phone to determine whether the absent were still coming, and when.  Once the last straggler appeared, we shuffled off down the sidewalk in small groups, like 20-30 cows moseying along an alpine hillside.  In a few short blocks we arrived at the 400-year-old Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir.  

Boarding School

The Palace, enlarged during the reign of Maria Theresa and heavily restored after the bombing of World War II, was a self-contained boarding school:  a dormitory, cafeteria, classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and music practice rooms.  Our tour guide, an affable former member of the Choir, mentioned that the organization is operating in the red, and the opening of the Choir residence to tours was intended to give the group further publicity about the organization and its financial needs.  The Choir, he noted, had served the Hapsburg monarchy for several centuries and continues to sing at the court chapel in Vienna on Sundays.  There are, we learned, four choir groups of about 20 children each that rotate touring in Europe, the US, and Asia, with concerts and services in Vienna.  Although some questions caused the guide to launch into riffs that at times went on until the melody was not even a distant echo, there were some that I was glad were asked.  Chief of those:  How does a boy get to be a member of the choir?  The children apply from all over the world, he said, and the chief requirement for acceptance is not quality of voice but rather simply a love of singing.  If a child loves to sing, our host said, the rest can be learned--and they spend at least 4 hours a day singing.  Some of the boys are as young as 7 or 8.  They live at the school and sometimes have family visits on weekends, but when they are on tour they may go 8 weeks without seeing family.  For some few of those accepted, they find that this is not the life they want, and they drop out.  Most, however, remain until about age 14.  Like the military, the boys put on uniforms for a fixed number of years to denote the roles they are assuming, and then they must put off the uniforms and return to civilian life.  The choice of sailor suits for a group that represents a land-locked country was not entirely clear to me, and I saw nothing of a nautical theme anywhere in the Augarten, but I understood the uniform choice to be related to legal prohibitions concerning army uniforms after World War I.  A badge with the Habsburg eagle, the national symbol, decorates each, and recalls the Choir's service to the monarchy from the time of the late Middle Ages.

The few times before that I had seen the Choir boys they were in regimented rows, dressed all alike in their sailor suits, like well-drilled military units singing with clarity and precision.  Here, however, they were little boys, and some raced past us on their way to kick soccer balls on the playground, weaving through our group, as small boys will do, to get past us as we moved through the hallways.  I thought back to our own disorderly procession along the sidewalk earlier in the afternoon.  The dining hall, too, was noisy with children's voices, and their classroom desks and floors were cluttered with books, papers, cell phones, notebooks, backpacks, and shoes.  After a stroll through the residential rooms--all much like a college dormitory--we were led to the practice room, where one group was doing its final rehearsal before our afternoon concert.  Here the discipline returned, and our host asked that we be perfectly quiet as we watched.  The director first led the boys through a set of facial exercises in which they uniformly contorted their features as only children could do, looking like 20 chimpanzees yawning and smiling and baring their teeth in hopes of bananas, then through a vocal range, and then into musical passages, sometimes repeated, and then into entire songs.  After we were dismissed following the first several minutes of the practice, our guide led us to a hallway and thanked us for our visit.  Our group wandered out various exits with even less a sense of order than we had come in with.  The sun was still out, the wind had died down, and it felt warmer.

Linda and I and a friend went from the Augarten to the sidewalk tables of the Schwarzenberg Cafe for a drink before heading to the nearby Musikverein, the hall where, less than an hour later, we would attend a concert by the Choir.  We watched the people going past in the afternoon sunshine, some strolling, some striding rapidly--and it was like watching time passing, each person a clock running at its own pace.  The first half of the performance was a mix of religious and folk music; the second, in which the Choir was joined by the Vienna Chamber Music Orchestra, was Haydn and Mozart and other timeless pieces.  At the concert, the boys seemed more than a choir; they were children--the ones I'd seen hurrying through the hallways and laughing over their lunch trays.  And the voices were so very old, yet always the same age.

Filler

We were sad to see our final set of visitors to our place here in Wiener World depart on May 9.  I'm so glad I had the chance to get to know Katie and Mike better and to help show them some of our favorite spots--Mariazell, Rust with its storks, Kahlenberg, Schonbrunn with its gardens, the old city...and the 38 Tram, Nino's, Figls, Schwedenplatz beer and brats, the Grinzing kebap wagon....  And Jonathan...we miss his happy energy and his ready smile. 

Springtime and Guests

Spring has been ambling in on little fat feet with an unsteady gait, on a path of wind and rain, bringing family visits and blossoms and renewal in many forms--along with often unpleasant walking conditions.  The lilacs are starting to pop, and the chestnut trees that shade the garden-restaurant tables are almost in full leaf.  The Wieners, not trusting Nature to bring up her tulips on a uniform schedule, have sent vegetation squads in orange trucks to plant tulips in full bloom on boulevards and allees and in parks.  This year's color scheme is purple and pink.  Outdoor tables again invite customers at Grinzing's restaurants, and when the rain takes a day off the people sit in dark winter jackets nursing coffee while the chill breeze carries last year's leaves past their feet and along the cobbled sidewalk.  Omnipresent cigarette smoke blows from the tables into Himmelstrasse and up the hill to Cobenzl, where it helps to cloud the view of Vienna that rests in the haze below the vineyards.  Now and again the sun comes out to light the purple and pink tulip beds, warm and soft like a luxurious robe after a cold shower.

Since our trip to Berlin in March, we have stayed around home--not because of the weather but for the best of all possible reasons:  visiting family.  Between the first two sets of guests (the third set arrives this week), on Easter Sunday Linda and I attended a Haydn mass at the Augustiner Kirche.  On Easter Monday we drove to the lakeside village of Rust to have lunch--and to bring home wine from the Elfenhof restaurant.  The storks in Rust are back in their rooftop nests preparing to have their own version of Easter eggs. 

Scene Selection:

-- Bruce and Beth, and Helen and Eve arrived at the very end of March.  We all walked the long path through the Vienna Woods and the vineyards up to Kahlenberg on one of the few sunny days while they were here.  The Saturday after their arrival we all went to the Prater amusement park, where, among other activities, we all rode the ancient ferris wheel, a century-old landmark of Vienna with its red box-car cabins, to look out on a cityscape mottled with haze and sunshine. 

-- At the Easter market in Freying square, the girls got a pretzel and hot chocolate while the adults browsed the market stalls.  Linda in particular loved the vast array of fragile, hand-painted eggs and examined each one.  I persuaded her to buy one with a picture of Empress Sisi on it. 

-- All got reacquainted with the empress on a tour later of Schonbrunn palace, followed by a ramble in the maze and a performance of The Magic Flute at the marionette theater.

-- At Durnstein in the Danube Valley, the girls climbed and scampered fearlessly on the ruins of the fortress that had once imprisoned Richard the Lionheart. 

-- After the visitors returned from a side-trip to Salzburg, we spent a day at museums downtown, including the Sisi Museum and the Treasury.  We ended the afternoon with a visit to the national art gallery.  In the last room we visited, I looked over to see Helen sitting on the solitary chair in the center of the room, with Eve on her lap.  Two tired girls...and the best of friends.

Our next set of visitors arrived a few days later:  Ben and Kristin.  It is wonderful to get a hug from someone the first time I meet them, and I got a nice one from Kristin, a charmer and a great guest, as was Ben.  The hug fixed a great memory, too, of greeting the two of them coming smiling through the doors into the arrival hall at the Vienna airport. 

-- Our first activity was a walk up the hill from Grinzing to Cobenzl, where we looked down through the wet haze at what should have been Vienna.

-- The rainy, cool weather seemed appropriate for our visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp a day later. 

-- The Steiermark festival at the Rathaus grounds featured beer and oompah bands, along with a circle of young men slap-dancing--flat-handed pounding of feet, thighs, arms, and each other to the rhythm of accordion music. 

-- And we had cold, wet walks to Grinzing restaurants and downtown and around Schonbrunn, which was largely a wash-out.

-- In the early evenings as we sat in the livingroom during happy hour with a glass of beer or wine, Ben and Kristin would chat with us in great animation; each of them would occasionally stop to look down and flick fingertips and type tweets on their iPads, staying connected throughout the visit with their network of family and friends halfway around the world. 

It was sad to see the guests depart.  It felt as if so much of the energy in our place left with them.  But more are coming, prolonging the best of spring. 

Empress Sisi's bathrobe, I have noticed in the press, is about to auctioned at the Dorotheum in Vienna and is expected to bring nearly $10,000.  She is, for Vienna, a goddess of eternal youth and beauty.  I imagine her robe to be purple and pink.

Berlin: Wall World

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
    --Frost, "Mending Wall"

Berlin seemed like a weedy vacant lot that someone is trying to garden.  Along with the modern hotels, comfortable neighborhoods, and world-class galleries are areas that look as if damage from World War II was carted away only yesterday.  The walls now are of wood, and they are around endless construction sites.  So often in Europe's cities I feel in touch with centuries past, but in Berlin it is decades.  It is a cemetery of bad memories that is being built over, and it is an eclectic hodgepodge.  In Berlin it seemed perfectly normal to see old churches with rooster-shaped weather vanes atop the steeples.  The city's mix of history--very recent history--and ideology, as well as of ethnicity, seemed like no other. 

We could not have asked for more generous hosts or more knowledgeable tour guides.  After a 9-hour train ride from Vienna, we arrived at Berlin's Sudkreuz Bahnhof and were met by my college friend Russ and his partner Hubertus.  An S-Bahn ride and a busride later we arrived at the apartment they generously gave us to use for the next three days.  Our hosts, it seemed, knew the history of every block and every large building, and Berlin's 20th-century history as well as its singular mix of ethnicity soon became apparent--here there are no walls.  On our first evening, our hosts treated us to dinner in a Greek restaurant across the street from our apartment; afterward, they retired to their other lodgings, and we slept peacefully in ours, in this quiet urban neighborhood.  Up before Linda the next morning, I headed for the Habanero coffee shop next to our building.  There a 60ish Cuban man, whose thick Spanish accent turned German's gentle gutterals to slush, took my order.  As he prepared my coffee to-go, he offered to sell me as well some fresh rolls, made by his wife, who was most likely a resident of East Germany when that state was one of the few friends of Fidel Castro.  Above the coffee shop counter, telling more than just the current time, a large clock with a red face and the stenciled visage of Che Guevara gazed out, perhaps at the past--and onto the limoncello bottles across the aisle.  The next night, at another restaurant across the street, I chatted in Italian with a waiter from Naples.

Although we greatly enjoyed the national gallery, the scenic walk along the Spree River, and much of the restored old architecture, the echoes of Hitler at the Bundestag and the Brandenburg Gate brought another kind of depth to the history of the city.  However, because so much that was Berlin in 1945 has been destroyed and never rebuilt, the Cold War seemed more in evidence than the Hitler era and World War II. 

No-Man's Land

Checkpoint Charlie and the memorialized path of the Wall were for us the essence of the Cold War history.  The stuff of spy novels and prisoner exchanges as well as of escape attempts, Checkpoint Charlie is as unassuming as a newspaper kiosk--a small white frame structure in the middle of a crowded, littered street.  The past dignifies it; the present exploits it.  It is a stroll through an East European flea market set in a cemetery. 

The checkpoint is a magnet for beggars and con men, for pickpockets and hawkers of cheap souvenirs.  Lots of languages were in the air; I could detect Russian and other Slavic tongues as well as German, Italian, English, and French.  Shops needing a coat of paint on their doorways offered keychains, magnets, T-shirts, and military insignia and caps from different countries.  In front of the checkpoint itself, facing east, two young men stood, one dressed in a US Army uniform and the other in a Soviet uniform; behind them on a stack of sandbags were piled perhaps 20 hats with bands and insignia from different military forces and nations.  Tourists ventured up from the crowd and chose from among the hats, put them on, and then were photographed between the two men. 

A double row of bricks runs through the area to mark where the Wall once stood near the checkpoint.  On that marker, a small group of men clustered around another man who was running a shell game.  McDonald's golden arches rose on the opposite side of the street.  A bottle-collector in a wheel chair slowly rolled past dirty, unshaven young men slouching against store fronts; a gypsy woman in an ankle-length dirty gown, hooded by a colorful headscarf, slumped past holding out a paper cup, singing her beggar's plaint.  In the mass of shuffling feet on the sidewalk were paper wrappers, half-crushed plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and dark spit stains.  Lining the sidewalks are fences with posters recounting the often sad stories of those who sought to cross the Wall.  In their time these attempts--each inspirational in its own way--commanded global attention.  Amid the sidewalk bustle, I turned to see three teenage girls, laughing loudly, holding onto each other by their extended arms.  Simultaneously they jumped over the double-brick row--the Wall--while a fourth took their picture.  The Wall is still there, I thought, but now it is between generations.

Filler

-- Since I am wont to comment from time to time on Teutonic cuisine featuring pig, starch, and cabbage, it is only fair that I mention as well the excellent lunch we had at a restaurant in Berlin operated by Sarah Wiener, who prepares French and Italian as well as specifically German and Austrian dishes.  Last fall we watched on Austrian tv a season of her Reisen und Speisen (Travel and Dining) series and were pleased to have an opportunity to try her establishment.  I had a savory risotto with mushrooms, and hot apple strudel with vanilla sauce for dessert.  Linda had sausages and ice cream.  Delightful.

-- As I have mentioned before, my favorite local cooking show, which I watch in the mornings when I am at the fitness center, is Freshly Cooked.  I find it fascinating that people will actually eat some of the recipes and appear to enjoy them.  Last week chefs Alex and Andi prepared a pizza with large slices of potato for the topping; then, before popping the pizza in the oven, they liberally sprinkled on two more of Teutonia's favorite vegetables:  grated cheese and salt.

Of Pumpkins, Potatoes, and Springtime

Some time ago my Italian teacher was helping me translate a text and I came across the word spunta, which was unfamiliar to me.  He explained it is a verb referring to something peeking out, like the tip of a handkerchief from a pocket, or the first hues of morning sunlight.  It felt this past weekend like the right word for change now slowly in motion in Wiener World--the tip of the sausage of springtime peeking out from the bun of winter.  We were noticing the first forsythia buds, the first pollen, the first sneeze, and then on the rims of my eyes the first red tinge, deep and delicate as the new purple-red growth on the tea rose canes in the Volksgarten.

At the Prom

Winter is ball season in Vienna, and on Friday night we closed out our winter, if not the calendar's, at the Hofburg Palace with the annual ball held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.  Some months ago we reserved a room at a very nice hotel in the inner city for this occasion, and at the end of this warm, sunny Friday we took a taxi downtown to our luxury quarters, where we enjoyed a bottle of wine as Linda put on her glass slippers and I my princely regalia, and we prepared to hail a pumpkin for the short trip to the Hofburg.  When we arrived at the palace, our taxi joined a queue of other taxis at the grand doors.  As if moving to spring grazing lands, black-suited men and ladies in dark and pastel gowns streamed past; Austrian guards, like tin soldiers, stood at attention in ceremonial dress at the palace entrance.  With guests from more than 50 countries, we first made our way into an ornate ground-floor hall, accepting flutes of champagne catered by servers all in black, with gold ties.  As Linda's smiling eyes took in the whole scene, the introvert in me made my pulse quicken.  I concentrated on looking as if I had done this sort of thing so many times that I was close to experiencing ennui.  I looked around at the sea of people and thought nearly everyone was surging with social disorientation.  I edged closer to my companion.  Across the room I saw many sets of eyes watching the entering crowd, searching for someone they knew, trying to form connection, hoping to attain a sense of belonging that would end the need to mill about like wildebeests looking for their calves after crossing a river.  As the minutes passed, guests grouped in ragged circles and eventually began shuffling and baby-stepping, migrating up a huge marble staircase, past even more ceremonial guards, all of whom remained cool and dispassionate while happy, smiling couples posed next to them and camera flashes went off in their faces. 

After shuffling past two more vast marble halls with glittering crystal chandeliers, we found the dining hall designated for us and the table where we would join four other Embassy couples.  A long-ago memory of finding a seat in the high school cafeteria scuttled across my mind like a ghostcrab looking for a hole in the sand.  Were we going to be at the cool people's table, or seated with the losers?  It soon became clear that the former was the case.  My mind was at ease, my social status validated, and my sense of belonging reaffirmed; lively conversation began at our table, and the evening settled into comfortable elegance.  The dinner was a fine buffet; our wine glasses were kept filled with a quality red by an attentive wait staff.  The band kept the amplification reasonable, and we were able not just to have a great time dancing but even to have conversation at our table without having to shout.  The magic evening eased out like the tide; by 1 a.m. all but one other couple had slipped away from our table, and we made our way back to the palace portal.  The toy soldiers, we saw, had been put back in their boxes, and soon we were in a pumpkin heading back to the hotel--peaceful, sleepy, satisfied, feeling as if we had completed an important annual ritual.  We had wrapped up winter like a warm blanket we no longer needed and put it away with the toy soldiers, the glass slippers, and the princely regalia.  After one of the loveliest evenings we have had here, we were ready for sleep and waking to the new season. 

Primavera Passeggiata

Saturday was another warm, sunny day.  The ball felt like a distant memory, and in the early afternoon we set off on a walk along the Danube canal, so buoyed by the weather that we could dare the bicyclists whizzing by to crash into us.  Unlike so many large cities, Vienna has little graffiti.  The authorities, it seems, sanction it along the concrete levees of the canal and on bridge abutments, and the warm day had brought out the artists.  I imagined them having been asleep like tulip bulbs all winter, and now they were popping up to add color to the cityscape.  On one short stretch we passed five of them painting adjacent to each other.  The odor from cans of spray paint tinted the air as we walked by, and  anti-establishment pictorial messages were emerging like weird blossoms in a fantasy world:  cartoon monsters, red-eyed green and black skeletons reaching out bony fingers, brightly colored insulting messages to the police, and the zig-zagging thick black angular scrawls that seem universally characteristic of graffiti.  After four or five miles we reached Schwedenplatz, a busy downtown square.  Its benches were filled as they are on summer Sundays with singles, couples, and families.  Toddlers were licking ice-cream cones precariously tilted, bums were drowsing through hangovers, international tourists were studying city maps and resting tired feet, pigeons were dodging walkers while bobbing for crumbs from hotdog rolls, pickpockets were taking cigarette breaks, and, just as every spring, a goat-footed balloonman whistled far and wee.  We strolled back toward Schottentur station by way of St Stephen's Cathedral and shops filled with Easter candy and bright, fun decorations, and then made our way to the Volksgarten.  Many of its rose bushes, their burlap covers removed and put away, were already awake, welcoming the spring sunshine.

Wachau Easter

Sunday was again sunny and warm, and we headed up Route 3 into the Wachau Valley to stroll the medieval lanes of Weissenkirchen and Spitz.  Most of the shops and restaurants were closed and will remain so until April.  The church at Weissenkirchen is built on the ruins of an old fortress wall; inside we found Gothic architecture and stonework from later periods.  In the narthex, colorful rabbits, eggs, and chicks and other pagan fertility symbols were set next to a stack of Easter bulletin covers picturing the risen Jesus...layers of myth and religion mirroring the layers of stone and design from different ages.  Every house in Weissenkirchen that had a yard also had a few short rows of grapevines, and the steep hillsides surrounding this and the other towns in the Wachau are combed with gray lines of vineyards waiting for days of longer sunlight to turn green and later be used to make wine for subsequent ball seasons. 

In Spitz we noticed that bags of potatoes rested against several doors along some streets, as if the Potato Bunny had just made his rounds.  Although two of our favorite restaurants remained closed for the season, we found another along the river and sat at an outdoor table near the water, watching the early afternoon sunlight brighten the edges of the swirls and ripples on the Danube, as well as the pools of gravy covering our servings of roasted wild boar and the spatzel noodles that floated along the far banks of our plates.  Our transition weekend was ending, and we drove home to Vienna in time for the evening spunta, ready for the seasons to complete their changeover.

Filler

-- I gathered up Linda from the Vienna airport on a recent Wednesday morning and enjoyed a minor adventure when the parking lot pay-machine ate my credit card.  After I walked about 400 yards to locate an actual live attendant at an inside office and told him what had happened, he did find someone to assist me.  First, however, he loudly and repeatedly demanded to know why I did not use the call button at that lot to inform him.  I could only shrug and look chastened.  Behind the clerk, a cleaning woman stopped pushing her broom and looked up at me with an expression that said, "How you say in English, 'You Moron!'"  I turned my eyes to the floor and, shoulders slumped, pulled my cap bill low over my face.  I went slinking back to the car lot with a pretense of humiliation that should have satisfied any witnesses.  Someone soon arrived with a tool kit and--after pointedly ignoring my greeting--frowned at me as he popped my card loose from the pay machine and handed it to me.  When he left, I inspected the machine.  I could not find a call button.  This time I ignored the card slot and instead inserted a euro note into the cash slot, and off we went. 

-- On a recent windy, drizzly weekend, we took the tram into the city to scope out another Hapsburg museum, the Hofmobiliendepot, which served as the royal furniture warehouse for almost 300 years.  We expected a royal jumble--which we did find in one section with chairs, tables, and other items piled atop each other.  Much of the rest, however, was a well-lit collection of historical non-sequiturs attractively displayed.  Specially exhibited were original furnishings that had been lent for sets in movies that romanticized the story of Empress Sisi and Franz Josef.  The thousands of items from the royal families' daily lives included about 50 spittoons and some 30 chamber pots; thrones of a different sort, they were highly ornate and amply decorous for the effluents and deposits of kings and queens.  Two, 200-year-old stuffed Brazilian canaries that had belonged to Emperor Franz I still perched in their cage--their home from infancy to eternity--and the garden tools with which that same emperor had amused himself each spring hung from strings against a wall not far from the royal traveling chairs and traveling dinnerware.  Adjacent to the baby crib that Empress Sisi used for Crown Prince Rudolf stood--alpha and omega--the bed from the hunting lodge in Mayerling on which Rudolf shot himself and his mistress, probably in frustration at not being able to find a call button to get his carriage out of the lot.  On a catafalque not far from Empress Sisi's breakfast dishes sat the tin-lined box in which Emperor Maximilian's body was shipped home from Mexico in 1867 after his execution by the revolutionaries.  It was not always a bed of roses being an emperor.