Wienerona

The Long Shadow of Wiener World

Our Presidents Day weekend began on a crowded train with a nasal oompah band.  The flu is raging through Austria, according to the press, as are varieties of colds.  So far we have been able to escape both ailments.  At first we were unable to find seats together on the train; two rows away from Linda, I found a place opposite a small, elderly woman with a bright red suitcase.  I hoped she would be getting off soon and that Linda could move into her seat, but when I checked the reservation sign I saw that she would be encamped there until Jenbach, the stop just before Innsbruck, some 3 hours away.  I had to wait only until a few passengers exited at the next stop and vacated adjacent seats for us; meanwhile, the little lady blew her nose like a tuba as the train marched on through the gray-white landscape.

And so we went, over the river and through the woods--and then over the Alps at the Brenner Pass--arriving in Verona, Italy, soon after the sun, like so much of the Hapsburg empire, had receded into the darkness.  When we left Vienna that morning for Innsbruck, where we changed trains, flurries and chill air had turned to blowing snow and ice.  Once we had crossed the Brenner Pass and begun the descent into Italy, the snow layer thinned and then vanished, and the air warmed appreciably.  The food and wine got better, too, but in some ways we never quite left the empire behind. 

We got continual reminders of the century of Hapsburg rule that this region of Italy had suffered or enjoyed (much the same verb for many Austrians, especially dentists).  The Germanic influence is apparent sometimes in the menus (pork and potatoes) as well as in signs for the towns--with Italian and Hapsburg names--that the train passed through...Bolzano/Bolzen.  And Germanic influence showed up in the local spoken language as well.  The Italian spoken in Verona has intonation quite similar to German and is often spoken with shortened vowels like those in German--all sounding so unlike the melodies of Rome.  The affable people we met in Verona were also of a sunnier disposition than Austrians generally, whom we usually find polite but cool, as on Friday night we moved from dark to light.  Within a few minutes of our arrival in Verona, our friends from Rome, Cheryl and Michael, also arrived, and together we took a taxi to the hotel.  After checking in, together we wandered the black, wet cobblestone streets searching for a restaurant to our liking; indecision ruled and, because of fatigue and a cold wind, we made our way to the brightly lit dining room of a pizza restaurant next door to our hotel, resolving to do a better job of finding a great meal the next night.  There, over pizza and a Valpolicella house red, our voluble waiter--definitely not the buttoned-down Austrian variety--demanded to know where we were from.  He nodded as each of us replied, and he continued to insist that I was German, not American; indeed, during our return visit for a glass of wine on Sunday afternoon, he broke out into a German drinking song, proclaiming that it was in my honor.  Perhaps my Teutonic demeanor--polite but cool--has blossomed like a cabbage in autumn during our time in Vienna.    

Yonder Winder

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."

The sun rarely managed to make its presence known through the damp gray weekend.  Our hotel, the Giulietta e Romeo, was presumably named to attract tourists who give credence to the apocryphal love story that Shakespeare set in Verona.  I had expected to find here much of faux romance and mythological sentimentality, but there was only a veneer of that theme.  And that, of course, had to be explored, especially since we could do so at no extra charge:  one of the many places that our 15-euro "Venice Card" gave us access to was "Juliet's House," and I would never have paid to go in, knowing the story is all made up.  There we joined the crowds and ascended wooden stairs to wooden floors and a series of bare rooms, until we reached a set of opened windows and stepped out onto "Juliet's Balcony"--apparently the only feature of the structure that tourists cared about.  The four of us took in the view of the crowded, littered courtyard below, and Linda, my sun, remained there on the balcony, just outside yonder winder, doing her best to look romantic, pensive, and wistful, while the rest of us descended to the courtyard and took her picture.

Apart from the Romeo and Juliet theme, plenty remains in Verona that is authentic and enjoyable--Roman, Gothic, and Venetian architecture; elaborate fountains and squares with statues; colorful markets with local produce, meats, cheeses, honey, candy, refrigerator magnets, masks, candles, whistles, and linen towels printed with bright red and blue maps of the city.  Across the Piazza Erbe a cheerful, bouncy children's song blared in Italian "we need onions, we need trees..." listing every noun in the language.  The Roman theater and the medieval castle offered vistas of the river and the old city, softly inviting even in the light gray fog that left the sunlight wet on the red tile roofs.  We spent hazy Saturday and chilly, drippy Sunday touring the old city--enjoying the churches, wine shops, cafes, and restaurants.  One feature jarringly combined ancient times and modern:  a stone bridge over the Adige River, which loops around the old city, dates from the 1st century BC; it spans the river between the old city and a hill with a Roman theater.  Although it had been blown up by the Nazis near the end of the war, it was quickly reconstructed with the original stones.  The century of Hapsburg occupation--a period not even long enough to ruin the local diet--had been so much kinder to Verona than the last two weeks of Nazi occupation.

Sunday afternoon we said goodbye to Cheryl and Michael, and Monday morning we awoke to a slow, steady rain that kept us from taking a leisurely walk through the old city gate and on to the train station.   We said goodbye to Verona through a rain-streaked taxi window.  At Innsbruck we again changed trains.  At the very first stop after that, the very same little old lady with thick glasses boarded and took a seat opposite the two of us.  I helped her lift her bright red suitcase to the luggage rack above her head, and, tissue in hand, she honked us a Hapsburg march home to Vienna.

Filler

-- On a recent frozen Saturday we went downtown so that Linda could go skating in front of the city hall.  Two large rinks are set up in the park in front of the structure, and what are normally walking paths through the trees were flooded and frozen for skaters.  Since I spent much of my youth in South Texas, I never acquired skills in winter sports until recently, and then just one:  drinking mugs of mulled wine while watching others.  While Linda relived childhood times in the frozen wasteland of Pennsylvania, I headed for the much warmer environment of the national gallery, where I joined her in spirit by studying Bruegel's winter scenes, paying special attention to pictures with skaters.  It seems to me that sometimes Bruegel tilts the plane for some portions of his picture, making them seem closer to the viewer, while the rest of the scene remains in a separate perspective.  I picture Bruegel drinking mulled wine while he painted.

-- Krems.  Almost three weeks of very cold temperatures kept us indoors more than usual.  When a recent Sunday came along after three snow-free days, allowing area roads to be cleared, we were more determined than usual to get out of the city.  So with temperatures hovering around 15 degrees F. and a brisk wind, we decided to risk an hour's drive northwest to visit Krems' "old city."  We had driven by the town many times on our way to the Wachau Valley and thought it unattractive, with its riverside a mass of sprawling industrial sites and heavy barge traffic.  The Danube at this time was frozen solid--a flat white expanse with large wrinkles and jagged points and jumbles of snow-layered ice.  This time we followed signs to the town center and soon found ourselves--and a very few other people--in a medieval quarter with cobblestone lanes, centuries-old buildings with sloping walls and ornate, arched wooden doorways, and old black iron signs like ancient cookie cutters above the shop entrances.  Charming.  Quaint.  Although most of the shops and cafes were closed, we were still able to find a pleasant little restaurant for a light lunch.  After that, bundled against the frosty wind, we strolled a little before heading back to the car.  Along the way, we were accosted by a staggering drunk who, we think, wanted money, or perhaps a potato.  His words were slurred--as well as being in German.  Using hand gestures and very bad grammar and a strong American accent, I gave him to understand that he should apply to the Austrian Society for the Bewildered for assistance.  His jaw dropped a bit and his glassy eyes bulged a bit, and he stared at me for a couple of seconds before he lurched quickly off like a drunken ice-skater.  We like Krems.  It is another entry on our list of places to visit when the weather is warm.

-- Austerlitz.  All is not pork, starch ball, and cabbage in the Czech Republic.  Just a couple of hours' drive north of Vienna is the Austerlitz battlefield, near Brno.  Although there is little of the battleground itself to see--farm fields and sometimes signs in incomprehensible Czech--the little town that gave the battle its name offers charmingly seedy streets with centuries-old houses and shops in fading pastels and flaking façades. And all of them were closed during our visit yesterday.  The chateau in which the Tsar and the Emperor of Austria stayed before the battle, and in which Napoleon stayed after the battle, sits impressively on a hill near the center of town.  After strolling the town, we spent the night on the edge of much larger Brno in a small, family-operated hotel, which we found down some twists and turns off a main road--a place we would not have reached without our GPS.  For dinner we got a recommendation from the hotel clerk to "Cola Transport," a restaurant that was located even farther back from the main road, down a dark, muddy, bumpy narrow road that twisted and turned like a cabbage worm.  There we were fortunate to obtain English menus and pointed to our choices, which the waiter recorded in Czech:  chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and fresh asparagus, and venison in cranberry sauce.  Delicious.  As we drove home this morning, reading the Czech road signs aloud to each other's delight, we realized that neither of us can comprehend how anyone can understand Czech; we have no explanation for how Czechs communicate with each other but suspect that they are highly intuitive and ascertain meaning from facial expressions, pointing, and intonation.

-- "Potsdam, Germany.  The official delegation honoring Frederick the Great's 300th birthday had just finished laying a laurel wreath and a grand cross of white flowers at his grave here on Tuesday when a 70-year-old retiree quietly slipped in behind them and placed a small potato on the tray slab of stone that marks the monarch's resting place."  International Herald Tribune, 26 January 2012

Cesky Krumlov, CZ World

Last Saturday morning we headed north to Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic.  It was like entering frozen fairytale country, with vestiges of communism and Hitler along the way providing the ogres.  We had watched the weather carefully before opting for the car instead of the train and saw that the snow in north-central Austria and the southern Czech Republic had ended at midweek, so we were certain that the roads would be clear of ice, if not of goblins, gnomes, and trucks carrying potatoes. 

Gray Gateway in the Tangled Wood

We headed northwest through rolling, rural Austria to the border and entered the Czech Republic on a small, 2-lane highway that cut through scrawny pine trees that looked malnourished in the late-morning shadows.  Despite the limited, sparse traffic on this rural highway, the border crossing--like the others we have passed when driving into the former Communist bloc--was extensive:  a variety of facilities and structures that included 2- and 3-story concrete buildings resembling prisons, and large lots with multiple lanes for cars to be stopped and searched.  Abandoned once the republic joined the European Union, this and other former East Bloc border control points we have seen are now weedy and overgrown, ghost towns populated by cold shadows of tediousness and rudeness, suspicion and officiousness.  Now one simply drives past them dismissively, and they disappear from the mind like a vague, unpleasant dream at the moment of waking.

Just past the border we came upon three or four brightly colored stores marketing liquor and cigarettes--flowers in the recently planted garden of capitalism--and a short while later we arrived at a service station, where I was able to purchase a Czech vignette, the highway tax sticker, to keep us legally on Czech roads for the next couple of days.  (I am happy to report that I did not add another doorway notch to my scalp as a souvenir.)  I think of the vignettes as much like the refrigerator magnets that impress random passersby in our kitchen.  We no longer get souvenir visa stamps in our passports at these crossings, and luggage stickers became passe many decades ago; however, the assemblage of these highway tax stickers along the edges of our windshield--Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Czech--gives the Prius a special panache, as the scars on my head do for me personally, allowing us to motor past locals everywhere with an air of international insouciance. 

When I was reading about traffic laws in the Czech Republic before we left, I found that they have zero tolerance for alcohol and driving:  any amount of alcohol, even if it is minuscule, can mean a DUI.  I also noticed that the country has one of the highest highway fatality rates in Europe, double that of the UK, in fact.  As we continued down the highway, feeling quite safe from drunks, I began to understand the reasons for the fatality rates.  Posted speed limits are taken as, at most, whimsical suggestions, and I seemed to be the only driver observing them.  Passing on hills and curves shows manly courage, and tailgating reflects effective time management, particularly when it also involves talking on a cell phone.  Fortunately, there were few Czech cars on the road as we made our way through a succession of seedy, slightly crumbling small towns, economies as malnourished as the pines along the road.  We reached Ceske Budojevice, a middle-size, modern city, and then cut southwest to Cesky Krumlov. 

We arrived at our hotel a bit before check-in time and found the doors locked.  We waited 20 minutes in the car, during which the temperature must have dropped from about 70 to the high 50s, and I began to think of writing my goodbyes to the kids on the back of an envelope; instead, I got out of the car and rang the doorbell, and we were admitted.  Schedule was not the only thing about the hotel that seemed rigid, but that was not all bad.  Signs on the door and inside warned that smoking in the facility meant a fine of about $50, and they further stated that rooms were checked daily for evidence of smoking.  We got our room, dropped our bags, got out our town map, and headed off on foot, crunching along on the thin-packed snow until, moments later, we had crossed the river and were in the magic world of the old town.

Fantasy Land

Cesky Krumlov sits astride a bend of the Vlatva River, the same river that runs through Prague, and that is not the town's only similarity with the capital.  Both have a magic quality, with centuries-old pastel buildings, hilly cobbled streets, quaint and colorful shops and cafes with black iron silhouette signs swinging above their doorways, imposing Gothic churches, and a castle on a hill above the river.   Narrow cobblestone lanes wound us around to a large town square, where, we read, witches once were burned and Hitler once harangued a crowd on the occasion his annexing Sudetenland.  But there was for us now no trace of anger or evil--rather, an expectation that Jiminy Cricket or Pinocchio or Geppetto would pop out of a side street at any moment.  Many of the buildings are, like the lanes, irregularly shaped, with slightly canted white and pastel walls and steeply angled red tile roofs.  Large stone bollards, which once protected entryways and corners from iron carriage and cart wheels, are plentiful and bear the scratches and scars of centuries past.  With the temperature in the 20s, the humid air felt fresh, not like the miserably desiccating winds of Budapest from a couple of weekends earlier.  Small, family-owned hotels appeared about every 50 feet, a testimony to what the tourist traffic must be like during balmier seasons.  Much of the time, it was as if we had the town to ourselves:  aside from a loosely organized, straggling Chinese tour group, we saw just a few couples and occasionally a family in the cold streets, including one with well-bundled toddlers in rainbow colored hats, bobbling along on the icy cobblestones like little upholstered drunks.  Not yet old enough to appreciate the magic of the town, the children were helping to create it.

Our first stop was a huge medieval church, with Gothic spires and arches, and windows that reached from the ground to three stories high.  The shops were all local--not a franchise among them.  Best were the stores with elaborate, handmade wooden toys--from hunters and woodcutters to merry-go-rounds, from spinning tops to full-length trains, and a menagerie besides.  I thought again of Geppetto.  We climbed the hill to the castle--closed for the season--and took pictures of the town below.  A dusting of snow clung to the steeply sloping roofs, making white and red surfaces that the wind was gradually turning all red.  The river twisted along, a dark and dirty green, and I recalled reading how it was heavily polluted during the decades of communism, foamy from a paper mill that, rather than tourism, was then the life of the town.

After descending from the castle grounds and returning to the town square, we stopped in a cafe for beer for me and cappuccino for Linda.  Like great puffed onions, we shed our layers--hats, gloves, and coats--and let our fingers and toes warm up.  We finished our drinks, reassembled our layers, and, as winter dark settled over the town, we strolled off to check out restaurants, pausing outside them to read their menus, many of which were scrawled in Czech on blackboards in a charming tangle of chalked colors--magic runes that would have been unreadable for us in any language.  We settled on a Rick Steves' recommendation:  Cinkaska Jizba, a gypsy tavern, and a holdover from the days when the city had a large population of gypsies.

Everything about the tavern looked handcarved.  The narrow, pumpkin-colored diningroom was arched, like half a huge old barrel, with plain furniture, framed pencil drawings of faces, and, hanging above and alongside them on the walls, a pair of wooden shoes and a variety of antique farm implements.  We sat at a small plank table on sturdy wooden chairs, each of which looked as if it had been made by hand, and, judging from the scratches and worn, patchy surfaces. made many decades ago.  Our waiter, a large, swarthy man who looked like Stromboli in Walt Disney's Pinocchio, spoke marginally more English than I spoke Czech.  (I know the words for "beer" and "good night.")  We resorted to the time-honored practice of pointing to the menu items we wanted, grateful for the printed translations in German and English.  Our dinners of pork and turkey were savory and the proportions of good size--all a welcome change from Austrian cuisine.  This charming town has its own brewery as well.  The dark beer was wonderful--similar to Guinness but not so chewy.  Happily sated and fully rehydrated, we made our way back to our well-lighted hotel through dark, deserted streets, and on to our warm, comfortable room.

And Home Again

The next morning we enjoyed a fine breakfast buffet--pastries and cereal, yogurt and fruit, coffee and juice--shunning the usual regional morning fare of cold sliced sausage, cheese, tomatoes, and bread.  We started home to Vienna via a southern route, which took us near the former concentration camp of Mauthausen and the industrial city of Linz, where Hitler attended high school.  The sun was out, the sky was clean and winter blue, and receding behind us in time and in memory, like our childhoods, were the bright colors and the fantasy cityscape--and the shadows and the ogres of years past.  At Melk, where an imposing abbey sits atop a hill by the Danube, we turned off the Autobahn and onto our favorite Austrian highway, Route 3, following it through the beautiful Wachau Valley, and let the Danube lead us home to Grinzing.