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.

Germany: A Round Trip

 

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."-- William Faulkner

While Linda was back in Pennsylvania and Virginia the first week in March visiting family, particularly intent on seeing her two angelic grandchildren, I planned a trip to points north and past.  I set out from Vienna by train for Dresden, where I rented a car for my onward journey to Goerlitz on the Polish border and other sites.  For the first part of the car trip, the strange roads and strange language proved at least as interesting the destination; for the second part, the travel was more through time than it was through Germany's often charming villages and countryside.

Bumping and Bumbling Along

The first day of my trip had a variety of bumps, but nothing too jarring.  The train north from Vienna passed through Prague and then, rattling, rocking, and squealing along. turned west to Germany.  I arrived in Dresden at the end of the day and the beginning of the rain, which was to continue for most of the next four days.  Because my plans involved additional stops in rural areas, I had arranged to pick up a rental car at the Dresden railway station.  Having in mind that I would be paying about $10/gallon for gasoline, I had requested an economy car.  The woman at the Europcar counter, however, informed me with great pleasure that I had been upgraded "at no extra cost" to a huge Opel wagon, the largest, heaviest automotive dumpling in their kitchen, a vehicle that would get an impressive 10-12 mpg.  The size of an ambulance (but without a light bar--which I could have used), it well deserved the German name Mietwagen (pronounced "meatwagon," literally, rental car).  I affixed the GPS system to the windshield and sped off the lot into Dresden's evening rush hour.  At the first major intersection, I had already nearly passed a line of cars sitting at the light in the left-turn lane when the GPS directed me to turn left.  Unfazed by the red light and the line of obedient drivers waiting their turn, I swung past them all into the middle of the intersection and executed a perfect left; soon I had found my way to the Autobahn, the A4.  I was heading east into heavy rain and fog, the very sort of weather, as I recall reading, that had confronted the Roman legions slaughtered by the Teutons when they entered Germania on the orders of Augustus. 

The last stretch of the drive was confusing and dangerous--but more for the Germans than for me.  After about an hour, I knew I was getting close to the exit for Goerlitz, and the GPS directed me to turn off the highway.  This, I thought, does not look like a decent road to exit on--the shortest route, perhaps, but not the fastest or safest.  Two turns later, still obedient to the electronic voice, I found myself on a narrow country lane with sharp bends and curves, progressing at about 20 mph.  At many a turn my headlights illuminated clutches of cows huddled against the weather.  I passed through several small villages, in each of which couples dressed in black were out in the rain walking their equally dark dachshunds in the middle of the road.  When at last I reached Goerlitz, the GPS directed me down a dead-end street and announced that I had reached my destination.  My hotel was nowhere in sight.  I decided to make a U-turn, park, and get out and look for it.  Because the street was narrow and my Panzerwagen had a large turning radius, I pulled to the curb and then tried to put the vehicle in reverse for the second stage of the U-turn.  It was not to be.  Several times I shoved the shift lever hard left and up; thinking I was in reverse, I would gradually let out the clutch.  Each time, however, the car surged forward a foot.  Soon I was up over the sidewalk, with the front wheels on the grass on the other side.  I could not find an interior light switch to examine the pattern on the shift knob, so I opened the car door; the interior light was too dim.  People were gathering in the mist, peering from under their umbrellas into the dark car that was preventing them from passing.  I heard voices and indistinct words, at first puzzled sounds like "Ha!" and then a loud, derisive laugh--which sounds much worse in German than in English.  Well experienced with public humiliation in foreign countries from a variety of misadventures at restaurants and other venues, I told myself not to get discouraged, that those were probably just the sadistic voices of some Austrian dentists on vacation.  I remembered that I had placed a small flashlight in the bag with my maps and soon located it.  I examined the gear shift and noticed a button on the back of the stick--a release.  I pressed it and then got the car into reverse, off the sidewalk and back into the street.  Soon I had parked, and after walking a bit I located my hotel for the next two nights, the Schwibbogen, a name that sounds most euphonious when pronounced with a mouth full of potatoes.  I was tired and hungry, eagerly anticipating a huge beer and a huge plate of Silesian cuisine.

English as She Is Spoke

I do not believe that many people travel to Germany to enjoy the food, but I do--in the same spirit that, in Italy, I had a quest for the worst-tasting digestivo liqueur.  And I often find the menus even more fun than the food.  Goerlitz is split into a German and a Polish section by the Neisse River, which serves much like the transition of the River Jordan.  Crumbling, drab, and uninviting shades of gray and brown--like so much of what I have dined on in this part of Europe--the Polish side is still recovering from decades of communism.  German Goerlitz, however, has quaint architecture and colorful houses and shops, and it draws from at least some guidebooks praise for its regional cuisine, Silesian.  Although I found it not much different from the pork, starch, and cabbage entrees I have consumed in Austria and elsewhere in Germany, I did see in German Goerlitz some of the most fun English-language menu items I have yet run across.  That evening and the next I ate in the Stadtwache (City Waking) Restaurant, a repository of linguistic and culinary treasures.  As soon as I saw the English menu, I got out my pen and a scrap of paper and began writing quickly and furtively, fearing the waiter would suspect I was trying to pirate their culinary creations for a rival restaurant.  Among its offerings:  "Herring salad lijing nit cerium after grandma's prescription," "Meat of the pig comb inserted in the darling drink," "Meat with homemade lumps," and "Blather in a homemade way."  At lunch the next day I found on a menu "Silesian white rat and sticky balls" (named, I hope, in a spirit of jocularity) and so had to order it; it turned out to be slices of pork roast, I think, but I like to believe it was a cut from a huge rodent.  The dumplings, the size and hue of golf balls, seemed to be lightly glued together.  They had the texture of nerf balls that had been soaked in oil; when I tried to cut into one with the edge of my fork, it gave slightly and then scooted across my plate.  Another Silesian menu item I saw, but did not try, was "sharp potty soup with many onions." 

Winsen

On Thursday morning I was back in my Panzermobile and the rain and fog, heading out from Goerlitz to the A4 and back toward Dresden, where I turned north for a half-day's drive to the Hannover region.  My paternal great-grandfather Wilhelm, a blacksmith, came from the village of Winsen an der Aller in Hannover, and it is he who emigrated to the U.S. soon after participating in a battle in 1866 against the Prussians in Langensalza, Thuringia, in central Germany.  I was curious to visit Winsen, and I cannot explain it as much more than that:  seeing the town was like visiting a grave of someone I did not know but knew of.  When I was studying English literature, I could never relate with much intensity to the themes of ubi sunt? and Ou sont les neiges d'antan?--profound longings for what no longer exists.  I did find, however, a vague sense of connection with the past, a sense of the naturalness of change--and a pleasing feeling of completing a circle.  Ur-grampy had never made it back from the American Midwest to see his home again, and perhaps I was returning there on his behalf. 

The fog on the ground was not the only fog in Winsen.  The town, which sits on a plain that looks a great deal like Illinois but with birch trees, is now little more than a busy crossroads lined with recently built houses and small strip malls--bakeries, florists, plumbing repair businesses, and perhaps thriving umbrella shops.  I could find little evidence of the past except for the Lutheran church, which dated from 1822, and the town hall, from the 18th century, heavily remodeled at times over the decades.  A stele next to the church was dedicated to the fallen in the unification wars of 1870-71, but that was it for memorials.  Surprisingly, I found no monument celebrating the enormous achievements of my family in the fields of Piety, Obedience, and Introversion.  For several minutes I strolled the town cemetery looking in the mists for family ghosts but could not turn up, so to speak, our surname; I was aware, however, that the custom of these pragmatic Teutons has long been to disinter bodies and reuse grave sites every 50 years.  Many of the grave markers wore green velvet shrouds of moss, and light blankets of crispy gray-brown autumn leaves lay on the ground above many of the sleepers.  Had I found a stone for Ur-Ur Grampy Ludwig, or any stone with our surname, I would have left a potato on it.

Closed Today, Come Back Yesterday

Friday morning I turned the Panzerwagen south for Bad Langensalza in Thuringia, site of a battle on June 27, 1866, and for which Ur-Grossvater Wilhelm received a service medal.  I presume his smithing skills made him useful in beating plowshares into swords, or perhaps he was of service to the horses of Hannover's cavalry.  The Hannover forces, allied with the Austrians, did battle against the Prussians just west of the Langensalza.  Although the Prussians lost the first engagement, they returned soon after with stronger forces and won the war.  Perhaps that conflict is what prompted Wilhelm to emigrate not long after, but his motives are lost in the fog.  The town itself is lovely--well restored and maintained shops and homes built centuries ago, often in bright pastels, and a thriving pedestrian area.  It is, however, one of the "baden" towns, and the two-lane highway that connects Langensalza to the rest of Germania is choked with traffic.  Very often it felt as if the military history of the past had lost the battle to spa tourism.  Aware that it was growing late in the day, I pressed on in my quest to reconnect with the ancients.  Although I suspect my spoken German in itself could qualify as a war crime, I employed it with the kind lady who tended the tourist information office and spoke not a syllable of English.  She directed me to the city museum, closed for the day, and gave me a map showing the location of the battlefield, blocked to traffic.  Soon I was on my way in my Panzerwagen to the battle site, now entirely farm fields, flat as a potato pancake, with new crop growth peeking up low and green as moss.  In the distance I could see three or four memorial stones--a good ways out on a narrow road that was open only to pedestrians and bicyclists--but, with no place to park my tank, inaccessible to me.

Exotic Thuringian Cuisine

I said my goodbyes to the ghosts of 1866 and headed on to Gotha, where I spent the night.  Gotha also has a charming old city, with includes a church boasting a statue of Luther built into the stone Gothic doorway, just as I have often seen St Peter on Catholic churches in Europe.  I love how, in Europe, history is present less often in stone monuments than in stone layers.  I was ready for a cultural diversion and thought I had found one:  a restaurant close to my hotel was Greek, and I looked forward to a change from the German diet.  When I received my entree, however, the purported lamb was in ground patties and highly salted.  It may well have been pork, or even white rat; next to it rested the rice, shaped in balls like dumplings. 

Elbe Was I

 
On Saturday morning, in the heaviest fog yet, I completed my auto loop-journey.  Shortly before noon I returned the Panzerwagen to Europcar, next to the train station in Dresden.  As I stepped out of the car, I felt like a soldier who had just taken off a heavy backpack after a long hike. 

Dresden sits on the Elbe River.  To cross it is to make the transition from the restored old city to the modern new town.  As soon as I saw a sign to the river, the Napoleonic palindrome, "Able was I ere I saw Elba," began looping through my head like a stuck song, and it remained there all day, annoying as tinnitus.  Hoping in vain to change the tune, I turned it into "Eble was I ere I saw Elbe."  I checked into the Kipping hotel, one of the few structures in the old city to have survived the Allied firebombing in 1945, and headed off on a walk to see old Dresden.  Many of the restored structures from the 18th-century palace complex are somewhat blackened by oxidation of the sandstone, something that gives them a kind of crispy look and makes them natural, durable reminders of the firebombing.  Beautiful though old Dresden is, I felt as if I had seen it all in about 15 minutes.  I had no desire to linger in it, and so I spent the next 3 hours in the city's wonderful gallery.  Raphael, the Venetian masters, the Dutch masters, Cranach, Canaletto--I loved it all.  There, too, I found a scene that has become a visual cliche in the U.S., one that is common on greeting cards and card-shop coffee mugs:  Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" portrays a large scene of Heaven; at the very bottom of the picture, two cherubs sit.  They look whimsical, resting their elbows on a "transition panel," a coffin lid, a demarcation of Heaven and Earth, the future and the past. 

Back to the Present

Sunday I completed the second, larger loop of my train trip, circling back to Wiener World.  It was the first morning that I had seen bright sunshine since I left home.  As I waited in the cold at the Dresden station for my train back to Vienna, my breath making the only fog that morning, I noticed another train stopped at an adjacent platform, about to depart.  A father was standing next to the car opposite me, and I could see the face of a little boy of about 4 peering out the train window.  The two of them waved to each other.  As the train began to pull out, the father jogged along beside the car, continuing to wave, and, as the train slowly picked up speed, he broke into a sprint, waving the whole time, running full out beside the car until he came to the end of the platform and the train drew into the distance.  He stopped, turned, and walked slowly past me toward the station exit, a soft smile on his face telling me he knew the little boy would be back.