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.