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.

East of Wiener World

In a scene in the movie Fargo, police in pursuit of a suspect through the Minnesota winter ask different people to describe their contact with a quixotic fugitive.  They invariably describe him as "funny looking."  When asked to elaborate, they can only repeat that he was "kind of funny looking"; the officers always nod in comprehension. 

I have found it a struggle to get beyond "funny-looking" to describe Budapest.  The Danube, the Castle Hill views, the bright shop windows, the cafes, the grandeur of ornate doorways and statuary on structures built in centuries past are the lights that make the city attractive.  Its Communist past, stern-looking police and guards in long coats and fur hats, the reported prevalence of pickpockets, notorious taxi drivers, grimy side streets and decaying facades--all are shadows that at times make the atmosphere unattractive.  Yet if light and shadow were music, Budapest would have an oddly appealing harmony.

Saturday morning we left on the train for a 2-and-a-half-hour ride through the Danube Valley across Hungary.  We arrived at Keleti train station, grimy but charming nonetheless with its 1904 art-deco style:  its huge arched canopy extends protectively over walks and tracks, graffiti-decorated local trains, and gray, dingy fast-food shops and money-exchange windows.  In Budapest the biggest thieves, we read, are the taxi drivers, and a clutch of them met passengers descending from each train car, hawking their services.  To avoid them, I had printed off a map of the way from the station to our hotel, and we found it easily, perhaps a half-mile walk in the refreshing winds of January.  We had chosen a large, modern hotel like the one we had had in Ljubljana, even though we usually prefer small, family-owned establishments that give us a feel for a culture, a town, or a city.  We felt, however, that we had little choice...a sample of descriptions of our alternatives presented in one guidebook:  "spartan but a great value"..."grimy, smelly, but safe"..."cheap and dumpy but beautifully located"..."big, cheap, musty rooms facing a dingy courtyard."

Once we had checked into the hotel, we had just two hours of wintry daylight remaining.  We bundled up well--ski masks would have been welcome because of the wind--and headed off to see Pest, the lower side of the city split by the Danube.  St Stephen's church, honoring the country's first Christian ruler, was our first stop.  It is a fine structure of columns and domes, with a dimly lit interior resplendent with varicolored faux marble.  Its chief attraction is a glass reliquary with the small, gnarled hand of Stephen himself, crusted in jewels, from the 11th century; it is the very hand that directed his heretic uncle to be quartered and the parts taken on a tour of Hungary to demonstrate what would happen to those who refused to accept the love of Jesus.  From there we walked past the gigantic Parliament and across Chain Bridge, and then rode the funicular up Castle Hill on the Buda side.  Although most of the area on the hill had been heavily bombed in World War II, it has been well restored.  On the hill are great views of the Danube and the sprawling city, but there is also a modern, glass-sided Hilton hotel smack in the middle of the medieval structures and fortifications.

By the time we had headed back across the river to the Pest side of the city, the wind had swept in the darkness, and we continued our tour via street lamps and lights from shop and cafe windows.  The city  streets and riverfront were lined with buildings dull and ornate.  Many of the government structures combine stone Gothic spires with curlicues and pointed arches, with a mix of red Romanesque domes that look as if they have been squeezed slightly out of round.  Many of the other buildings downtown are charmingly like those of 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna but are not always in as good repair.  Patches of cement, some quite large, have crumbled off some of the pastel exteriors, exposing flaking walls beneath, like gray acne on the face of the city.  Yet there are lovely streets, too, like Andrassy, with palace after palace with carved stonework and statuary; huge, arched doorways of rich and intricately worked wood; and Renaissance-style window pediments.  Finest of all is the city opera.  On the walk back to our hotel, we passed a beautiful, century-old synagogue--the image of what was not there, however, crowded out what was there.  It is said to be the second largest in the world, in a city that today has very few Jews...greatness and hollowness.Sunday morning we decided to reinforce our impressions of the best of the city and again strolled up  Andrassy street, admiring the beautiful old palaces in the daylight once more before leaving Budapest behind--cold, windy, and interesting...oddly appealing...kind of funny looking. 

Filler

-- New Year's Eve:  Silvester.  Although we had been warned by our former German teacher about the noise and the drinking downtown on New Year's Eve, here called Silvester, we knew we had to spend that night in the inner city just for the cultural experience.  Vienna is about music, and on New Year's Eve all kinds are available in parks and squares across the downtown area.  We visited three stages before we found one that we liked; it was playing German hits from the 1930s, ones I could imagine Adolf and Eva having danced to.  Among the singers were some quite good voices, and they were followed by a 16-member band dressed in Habsburg imperial uniforms.  All this sonority perfectly linked the most memorable eras of the past century to 2012. 

The streets in the inner city were closed off, even to taxis; it was all a giant pedestrian zone, and it was mobbed.  Many of the areas that had been Christmas markets were filled with stands selling good luck charms for the new year, but mostly wine and beer.  A person could buy not just a glass of sparkling wine but a whole bottle, and lots of people did.  Gaggles of drunken kids milled and staggered around wearing witch hats, goodluck pig hats, and dealyboppers with flashing colored lights. 

Coming home on the tram...it was a loud, drunken, standing-room only crush of mostly young people, lots of shouting and loud laughter, and a huge puddle of vomit just across the aisle from me, ebbing and flowing to the motion of the tram, like fingers of surf on the beach, under the feet of passengers.  Sitting just opposite me was a young lady, perhaps late teens, bleary-eyed and half blitzed, sprawled in the chair like a drunk on a park bench, occasionally swigging out of a half-full bottle of gray-green muscatel.  I wanted to cover her with a newspaper.  Carrying open containers of alcohol is unrestricted here, and nearly every passenger had one.  It occurred to me as we neared Grinzing that people were heading up the nearby Kahlingrad Mountain to watch the fireworks all over the city, which went on until well after midnight.

--  Yuk Part II.  A morning cooking show featuring chefs Andi and Alex, Freshly Cooked, recently presented a particularly heart-clogging recipe.  The chefs first placed three calf livers and a raw egg in a food processor and made a ruddy puree.  Meanwhile, three slabs of beef cut from a raw roast were sauteing in a frying pan.  The beef was removed from the pan and placed on a tray, and the puree was poured over each.  These beef slabs were then covered with thin, wide strips of lard and baked in the oven for 20 minutes.  The chefs took the pieces of meat out and ladled the melted fat and puree-runoff onto each with before serving them on a plate with boiled potatoes.

Wiener Wonderland

Dripping gray snow-free days have been the norm for December.  It feels really cold even though temperatures have mostly remained above freezing--in contrast to last December, when we had about two feet of snow.  On a few mornings we have seen on our balcony chairs a layer of tiny white balls half the size of BBs, which a local friend tells us is "frozen fog."  The noon sun--on most days a pale white ornament in an ever-gray sky--barely gets high enough on the horizon to clear the buildings in the inner city.  Without the dimness and damp chill, however, the Christmas markets would not seem so full of light and energy.

Vienna's Christmas markets this year must still look to children like wonderlands.  The huge one in front of the city hall has trees festooned with light strings and huge round red balls like Japanese lanterns; stand windows display brightly lit silver Christmas ornaments and colorful glass decorations.  The crowds are thick, as is the steam rising from the mugs of mulled wine for sale every 20 feet.  The best market that we have visited is the one at Grafenegg, a small town on the Danube west of Vienna.  All the wares are locally made, and many of the artisans make the items on site:  among them hand-blown glass, thick paper for water colors, woolen caps and throws, and etched and hand-painted ornaments.  Stands selling roasted chestnuts and potato puffers abound here, as they do at the other Christmas markets.  (A guide mentioned how excited Austrians get when the new crop of potatoes comes in every autumn.  No surprise.)  The shops and stalls are set up in a 12th-century castle, renovated in the 19th century in Tudor style--a curious and wonderful structure, a multiple anachronism. 

Our Christmas decor in the apartment is best described as expatriate makeshift, though Linda has purchased and packed away many Yuletide treasures that will be displayed next Christmas when we are home.  We have on the coffee table in the livingroom a cone-shaped composite of fir cuttings twisted and wired to look like a tree.  It stands 15" tall and rests on a red Christmas doily.  Beneath the coffee table sits a pile of travel guides, German language texts, and maps of Europe--the travel clarions of springtime.

Fahrting mit dem Auto

We love our weekend car trips and also enjoyed our long drive to Provence in October, but we have done little traveling in the car lately because of the potential for poor road conditions.  One recent Sunday we drove north of the Danube Valley through a number of picturesque towns and stopped for lunch in Tulln, to see its Christmas market, its 12th-century church, and the swans on the Danube.  It had been raining in Vienna and in the 40s that morning; however, when we got further north and left the main highway for a narrow country lane, we found ourselves on snowy, icy hills and curves.  We shall probably confine ourselves to train travel for the coming weeks and drive in Vienna a minimal amount until spring--just enough to keep the car battery charged. 

Even after more than a year here, I still do not especially enjoy driving in Vienna.  And it is not just that parking is expensive, confusing as to zone restrictions, and otherwise problematic.  When I navigate the main streets it still feels like I am in a video game of Frogger.  Cars and trucks and trams and buses variously lumber along or shoot out into my lane, and tailgating is the norm; Viennese pedestrians are the frogs who must hop across the streets without my running over them.  Most worrisome are the tram and bus stops, often without marked crosswalks; it is not always possible to tell whether a transit vehicle is stopped for passengers or for traffic reasons.  A few days ago Linda told me that we had received several Christmas boxes at the postal unit at her office.  I offered to drive her to work the next day at 7 a.m. and pick up the boxes.  We exited our stone cavern of an apartment garage in the drizzle, dark, and blurry headlights of oncoming cars, and we both stared intently at the road and its shoulders as we approached intersections, looking for dark gray shapes of winter-bundled pedestrians crossing the street or approaching marked crosswalks.  We made it to her office without killing anyone and loaded the boxes.  On the way home, however, I saw a bus stopped in a left-turn lane and proceeded blithely up to it as a man ("Idiot, get out of the way!") crossed the street directly in front of me and looked at me with disbelief and fear as I kept right on past the bus--and then passengers began to alight, turn green, and hop frantically to the sidewalk.  As it dawned on me what I had just done--relieved, embarrassed, and cursing myself for scaring those people--I quickly scanned the mirrors and streets and walks ahead for police, heartbeat quickening at the thought of Teutonic justice.  No one in a uniform with a drawn weapon was in sight, however, and I got home without being apprehended.  Both of us hold Vienna's excellent public transit system in high esteem--as long as we are riding on it and not driving behind it.

Filler

-- We have been to two excellent Christmas concerts in December.  The first was the Vienna Boys' Choir, which sang at a mass in the Hapsburg palace chapel.  The second was "Christmas in Vienna" at the city concert house; it featured a philharmonic orchestra, a 60-voice adult choir, and a 20-voice boys' choir.  From Haydn to hymns, it was one of the best concerts we have been to.  The only presentation that seemed a bit off was the rendition of "Feliz Navidad."  A German accent atop a Spanish Christmas carol is like sauerkraut on a taco.

-- For Austrians, it seems, there is no bad weather, just weather.  On the trams and on the sidewalks:  babies under quilts, wearing mittens and knit hats, reclined in strollers with canvas covers with clear plastic windows, big blue eyes staring up at the raindrops.  Near our apartment building I saw a woman in a motorized wheel chair scooting down the sidewalk in freezing rain, her chair covered in a purple boxy canvas rainshield with clear plastic windows--looking very much like a crinkly Popemobile or the engine on a kiddie train.

-- A few weekends ago, we availed ourselves of an English-language tour of the Austrian Radio and Television (ORF) facilities on the edge of the city.  We are fond of ORF, and not just because we like the sound of the acronym.  We often spend a portion of our evenings watching one of the three ORF channels, whose programming includes, along with cooking shows featuring potatoes and fried meat, travel shows on Tirol, Steier, and other Austrian regions; folk festivals with amazing hats, beer, and oompah bands; and classical music concerts.  For the live demonstration at the studio, the group that preceded us got to be taped dancing the Funky Chicken, led by a large man in a chicken suit.  Our group, however, sat on wooden stands and watched the cameraman and a producer have fun with the children from the tour group.  The blue-screen room allows separate cameras to merge a single televised image and can create magic with super-imposition of any number of recorded scenes--weathermen and forecast maps of frozen fog, children on flying carpets sailing over mulled wine stands at Christmas markets, potatoes shimmering in the breeze as they descend from trams and buses to be run over by a blue Prius.

Thanksgiving Over the Rainbow

We left Vienna the day before Thanksgiving for another visit to Rome, and, because of the holiday, the contrast between Vienna and Rome felt starker than ever.  Thanksgiving dinner this year was with our friend Cheryl at Popi Popi, a Trastevere restaurant decorated with bicycle paraphernalia and named for the sound of a squeeze horn--and famous for its pizza.  It was hard to picture a Thanksgiving more different from the traditional American holiday, and that was the point.  Since we could not be home with family, we did not especially want a dining experience that would put us in mind of what we were missing.

Earlier on that cold, damp Thanksgiving Day, we walked by Teatro Argentina, where Verdi's operas once debuted, and I was happy to see the same fiddling gypsy who played there when I lived nearby 10 years ago.  His hair had much more silver than the last time I saw him, and his face looked more lined.  The skritch-skreek-skrawk of "Over the Rainbow" cut like a dull saw through the exhaust-filled air.  Buses, trams, and taxis rolled past the ruins of the four temples of Torre Argentina, and Romans cocooned in winter coats bustled along the sidewalks and threaded the slow-moving traffic.  The gypsy's wife crouched on the walk next to him, bundled against the cold, shaking a castanet, and looked up with her large green eyes to thank me as I dropped a coin in the open violin case.  We did not stay for his other song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."  Both of them looked older; I look older; his repertoire, however, is the same.  Rome is the same.  It just gets older.

Ruins

Friday morning we headed out on a local, graffiti-covered commuter train to the ancient Roman port of Ostia Antica, silted up for almost 2,000 years.  Several of its imperial-era roads are still largely intact, running through an urban petrified forest:  stone stumps of houses and shops, storage buildings and public baths, fire houses and whore houses, an amphitheater, a fish market....  It reminded me of Pompeii, yet preserved not because of layers of volcanic ash but because of malaria-infested marshy lands, which limited the treasure-hunting and quarrying of the ruined town over the centuries.  When we returned to Rome at midafternoon, we stopped in another of our favorite spots, the Protestant Cemetery, an acre or two of expatriates, mostly Americans and British, who died in Rome over the past two centuries.  There is a kinship between ruins and cemeteries--both are suited to peaceful strolling and are gentle reminders of change...stone connections with the people and times that have gone before. 

Sulmona

On Saturday morning we drove with our friend Cheryl to Sulmona, a small town in the Apennines near Abruzzo National Park and birthplace of Roman poet Ovid.  The town's website mentioned Saturday as a market day, and we managed to arrive in time to see it.  Unfortunately, the market was primarily local produce and clothes made in China.  But the town had another attraction in addition to mountain views:  confetti shops.  These offered brightly colored displays of candied almonds arranged like floral bouquets, and browsing through them was like a tour of an arboretum.  And the dinners were wonderful, this being the season for sauces and dishes with truffle.

Filler

-- Most churches in Rome at this time of year put up presepe, or creches.  St John Lateran, one of the largest in the city, has a presepe with a 4'-high plush camel and a 3'-foot high plush cow.  Next to them are plaster human figures shorter than the cow.  Among the items next to the manger are three coffee grinders and three clothes irons.  There is no baby in the bed; it will complete the scene on Christmas day.

-- The Christmas markets in Vienna are up and thriving.  At one we saw for sale boiled potatoes rolled in marzipan.  Our favorite so far is the one by the military museum, which has a medieval theme.  The stands were full of local products and crafts--hats, ocarinas, honey-wine; crystal balls, ceramic skulls, cross-bows, quivers, swords, knives, maces, and armor of many varieties; hot mulled wine, berry wine; chestnuts and bratwurst on the open grill.  The vendors were all dressed in period costume.  It was a trip yoking today and a thousand years ago, and implements of violence with fun food and wine:   the spirit of Christmas meeting "Onward Christian Soldiers." 

-- In the Schönbrunn's crowded Christmas market, a boy of perhaps 12 months sat on his father's shoulders as we all stood in the cold listening to a group of carolers.  The child was dressed in a bright blue coat and matching wool cap, and, cheek resting atop his father's head, he slept soundly.  A young Chinese man standing in front of me stared at the scene for a moment and then framed it in his camera, angling to get the child in the foreground and the palace behind it.

-- A drive up the Danube Valley to Durnstein on a recent sunny Sunday brought us to sloping cobblestone streets winding between medieval buildings; they now house shops with local wines and liqueurs, candy, wool clothing, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, tote bags, and toys.  High above the town is the ruined fortress in which Richard Lionheart was imprisoned while the English gathered his ransom.  We climbed a path that seemed almost vertical to the skeletal remains of the 12th-century fortress, where we got some of the finest views of the Danube Valley to be had.

-- One recent Saturday we toured the pre-eminent Art Nouveau church in Europe, the Kirche am Steinhof, designed by Otto Wagner.  Vienna is also blessed with many metro stations in the Art Nouveau/Art Deco style, also designed by Wagner.  These wonderful structures are a trip back a hundred years--they are black and white movies come alive.

-- In early November we visited the lovely old wine village of  Heiligenkreuz and its Cistercian abbey and monastery before going on the Mayerling, scene of a 19th-century Hapsburg murder-suicide, the details and records of which are still under official state seal.  The poor dynasty.  How embarrassing.

Night Sweats at the Dental Klinik

Fear of the unknown takes on a new dimension when the prospect of pain trips over the language barrier in the dark.

On a recent Friday evening while chewing on an overcooked wedge of potato I felt a tooth split.  I called the number for the nearby emergency dental klinik and was told to be at their office at 8 p.m.  I arrived there a few minutes before the hour and found the entrance area as well as the building dark and locked; as I stood at the door and phoned the klinik again, the only light and warmth was the steam of my breath lit by a distant, dim street lamp.  I identified myself, and the person on the other end only said "Five minutes" and hung up; I wondered whether I had called a taxi dispatcher by mistake.  At precisely 8, however, a large white motorcycle rumbled up to the klinik, and two middle-aged men, one with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and the other noisily chomping gum, got off and approached me.  "We are the dentist," the one with the cigarette said, and, smiling, they offered their hands and then led me into the dark clinic.  Dr Cigarette handed me a slip of paper and said "Eighty-eight euro.  Sign Unterschrift.  You agree to pay."  I was led to an examination room.  Although they had largely exhausted their English vocabularies in greeting me, they were quick to understand the problem:  "Oooh, ja," Dr Gum said as he shined a light in my mouth and saw that a chunk of tooth angled out and slicing into my tongue.  Dr Cigarette took a look.  "Ja, ja." 

"Now Roentgen."  I saw the x-ray chamber and fear rose in my throat.  We entered.  Judging from their gesturing and animated talk with each other--I thought I could pick out the words for "mutation" and "death"--I suspect neither quite knew how to use the x-ray equipment.  After turning the equipment on and off repeatedly, and then removing, turning, and repositioning the lead apron on me several times, at last they got it figured out; the two men exited the star chamber.  The undoubtedly generous dose of roentgens that followed showed that a crown, not the tooth, had split, and soon Dr Gum put me back in the chair and glued the works back together.  They took my 88 euros and told me they were making an appointment for me to come in Monday at 9 a.m. to start the process of getting a new crown.  I walked home, in the cold and the dark, comfortable in the knowledge that the inside of my head, at least, was warm and well lit from radiation.

Dr Gel

Monday morning I was back--to more unknowns.  The receptionist had no record of my Friday night visit and no record of my having an appointment that morning.  When I told her about the night experience, she wanted another 88 euros.  Soon, however, she grasped the situation, and I was told to take a seat in the waiting room.  Half an hour later a third dentist appeared.  With a face wreathed and creased from exaggerated smiling, this new dentist sported long blond hair, shining with gel, slicked straight back until it curled onto his shoulders.  He stared at my return smile like someone who collected teeth, and I wondered whether he might have a fish bowl full of them, like some people keep wine bottle corks.  Soon I was seated in the examination room, and Dr Gel smiled at me like he was about to enjoy his work.  He told me in German that he could understand English if I spoke it to him but he could not speak it back to me.  It soon also became apparent that he assumed that I could understand all his German but could not speak it back to him.  He pulled rubber gloves over his nicotine-stained fingers and revved the drill like a motorcycle at a traffic light.  Then he uttered one sentence in the only English I heard from him that night:  "I like to work without anesthetic."  I am not making this up.  He then gave me to understand, however, that if the pain became unbearable, I should wave my arm and he would stop.  He then said something in German and let out a loud laugh, which was, I could only guess, to relax me and reassure me, perhaps a joke about making a lampshade out of gum tissue.  So I laughed too.  Soon he had the old crown drilled out and, to measure the space for a temporary crown, made multiple applications of blue rubbery goo in molds.  Again, a blur of German and a big laugh.  Perhaps a joke about almost breaking my jaw.  Again, I laughed.  When he had finished, with his tobacco-scented fingers he picked bits of blue clay out of my mustache.  I said, "Danke, ich bin schön."  He gave a hearty laugh.  Again, I laughed.

Because Dr Gel prefers to work at night, he scheduled me to return at 8 p.m. a week later.  This time the office was open and I was greeted by a young man at the reception desk:  "You pay now?"  He read the total:  "Euros 2,158.51."  I asked to see the itemized bill and noticed that it once again included an 88 euro charge for the first visit; he deducted it.  To hear--on a sum of that magnitude--"and 51 cents" was, I believe, aimed at making me believe that the pricing was arrived at with scientific precision, without the least bit of whimsical inflation.  I was ushered in to see Dr Gel.  He gave me a welcoming barrage of German, to which I offered a handshake, a smile, and vigorous nodding.  As I sank into the chair, head back, blinding light filtering through my eyelids, mouth agape, he remarked again about no anesthetic.  To buoy my spirits and keep things light, he next told me a joke from which I could pick out only the words "neighbor" and "wife," and then he winked and we both enjoyed a raucous laugh as I was quite certain the story was hilarious and I always like to please someone standing over me with dental implements. Soon, with his favorite pliers, he had tugged off the temporary crown and with his drill touched up the jagged remains of my tooth and perhaps put holes in a few of the neighboring teeth for fun, all the while softly singing what I believe was "We Are Marching Into North Africa."  He affixed the new crown.  With much smiling and several hearty handshakes he led me to the lobby.  Auf Wiedersehen!  I made my way into the dark street and soon was home, liberally applying bourbon anesthesia.

Provence: Rain, Light, and Lavender

"To Correctly Close the Door, Thanks to Slam It."  This sign was posted on the front door of our hotel our first night in Provence.  We did not need to slam any doors on this trip, and lots of friendly people opened doors for us.  Despite a bit of rain from time to time and occasional inefficiencies with finding our way, our trip to Provence the last week of October was one of the nicest experiences of our time here in Wiener World and Beyond.  If the distance between Vienna and Provence is best measured in graciousness, hospitality,  scenery, and cuisine, the trip was infinitely long. 

We first headed west for Salzburg and Innsbruck and then turned south, going through Tirol and the Brenner Pass into Italy, and then on to our first night's stop, Lake Garda, a glacial lake surrounded by steep mountains.  We approached from the north and drove along its west coast, past lemon trees and olive groves, through tiny villages mostly shuttered, with tourist season having passed.  At Gargnano we began the search for our hotel.  Relying on the booking site's directions, for the next 40 minutes we wound through every street in the town, finally realizing that our lodgings must be high on a mountain that edged the lake.  Twenty minutes and countless hairpin curves later we were at Ca Vecia, our hotel, rustic and clean, with an expansive view of the lake and mountains.  Early in the evening, however, fog set in, a great, thick pale blanket on the water bed, putting our view to sleep.  We consoled ourselves in the hotel restaurant with a liter of red wine, a large antepasto platter of cheeses, prosciutto, and salami, followed by tortellini in a delicate bolognese sauce, and, for dessert, cheese plates.

The next morning, Sunday, we were on the road early, heading south to Genoa, and then west along the Riviera.  The highway was cut into the side of the coastal hills, perforated with tunnels short and long, and we rolled through them in heavy traffic, stopping at toll booths about every 50 yards.  Cannes, Nice, and the Azure Coast cities--with hotels as numerous as the sand--spread white in the sunshine along the edge of the water.  At Marseilles we turned north again, into the gently rolling countryside. 

St Rémy de Provence

Late in the afternoon we arrived at the first of the three Provençal villages where we planned 2-day stays, St Rémy.  Again the printed directions from the booking website proved to be of little use, and we drove up and down the village lanes, finally stopping at a chateau that had been converted into a hotel.  As soon as I opened the door, two extraordinarily kind young ladies gave me directions in English, repeating and spelling out and drawing a little map, doing all they could to ensure that I felt comfortable and clear about where to head next.  As autumn darkness came on the town, we finally arrived at our destination, Le Castelet des Alpilles, where we were politely requested to slam the door.

The next morning was punctuated by strong breezes and light showers, the sun obscured from time to time by small, fleet blue clouds over the countryside, rugged and scrubby--but in a genteel way.  We walked just outside the village to Glanum, a Roman town, but the ruins were closed for the day, and got to see little more than the city gates, politely slammed before our arrival.  From there we ambled across the road to the psychiatric hospital, St Paul, where Vincent Van Gogh committed himself for a year just before his suicide, and where he painted more than a hundred works of starry nights and sunflowers and quintessential Provence.  The hospital is surrounded by lavender fields and olive groves; rugged, heavily eroded, gray Alpilles (little Alps) rise above the jumble of red-tiled roofs of the hospital and the houses of the town, the rocky outcroppings looking like so many deformed teeth from one of Van Gogh's nightmares.  Van Gogh, we read, loved the area for the quality of the sunlight, a matter not just of the latitude but also the proximity to the Mediterranean and the winds that scour the landscape.  Although the building with Van Gogh's room has become a museum, the mental hospital is still a functioning facility that operates in newer, nearby buildings.  Art remains a form of therapy in that institution, and in the museum gift shop a number of paintings by patients were displayed for sale--most of which looked as if they had been done by Van Gogh when he was 6.

We spent our next day strolling the town, investigating the small shops and restaurants.  In one narrow, cobblestone lane we came across a placard on a 16th-century dwelling identifying it as the birthplace of Nostradamus, originator of the vague prophecies that have so enriched the pseudo-historians of the History Channel.

St Rémy is known for its salads.  The flavors were remarkable, as if the vegetables had been harvested not more than an hour before, the textures and tastes as clear and crisp as the colors of the countryside in the Provençal sunlight.

Lourmarin

Tuesday morning, to get to our next village, Lourmarin, we drove north to Cavaillon, taking a route alleged by the map to be more scenic than going directly east from St Rémy.   Cavaillon was modern, ugly, and confusing--a town sprawled in dozens of randomly placed traffic circles, and streets with muddy shoulders, rundown bars, dirt-stained auto repair shops, and mud-puddle parking lots of nurseries and building supply houses.  At last we found our way out of Cavaillon and, through breezy light showers, made our way into the gentle hills of the Luberon area, where lavender and grain fields spread alongside the slow, winding country road. 

As we neared Lourmarin, the rain became heavy.  This time, however, we found our hotel, the Villa St Louis, right away.  We parked and approached the door as the rains continued.  An elderly lady--Mme Bernadette, our hostess-to-be--approached, wielding an umbrella against the dripping black sky and a cane against the wet black cobblestones.  With gray hair pulled back in a bun and a face like a tawny grape weathered in the Provençal sun and wind, Mme Bernadette introduced herself and welcomed us as her Austrian guests; she spoke no English and less German.  Through a conversational salad of French with English nouns sprinkled like croutons, Mme Bernadette ascertained that we were the guests she expected. And then she led us through the locked high brown doors into the 19th century. 

The entry was a dark and dusty cave.  The hallway was redolent of lavender, and, as our eyes became accustomed to the dimness, we noticed dried bunches of it on platters and in vases; we soon found that it was scattered throughout the rooms, on surfaces, in corners, and along the stairs.  In some rooms the walls were covered with fabric, the same from which the drapes were made.   As she led us up a winding stone staircase, we saw more bunches of lavender, on window sills and in bowls on furniture.   As Mme Bernadette labored in front of us up the stairs, aged silver-backed mirrors with flecked, crumbling faces struggled to reflect the thin light.  Along the walls were pen-and-ink drawings and prints--bar scenes, family dinner scenes, political meeting scenes, some in huge, ornate frames--from the 19th century.  Along the floor were antique wooden toys--a train, a tractor, animals, a farmer and his family.  She led us through a small kitchen and breakfast room and through another door to our room.  It, too, was a cave in the Villa St Louis time warp--antique bed, chairs, dresser, and mirrors.  Modern plumbing and a flat-screen tv, however, reminded us, thankfully, of the present.

The rain lifted, and we spent the afternoon strolling Lourmarin--narrow cobblestone streets, bistros, small restaurants, artist boutiques, and a medieval chateau, heavily restored.  Just outside town we found the cemetery and the grave of Albert Camus, who had died in an auto accident in 1960, two years after moving to Lourmarin, a location he favored because he loved the light, which, he said, reminded him of his childhood in Algeria....  I knelt by his grave and time-traveled back to my first acquaintance with him in my sophomore year in college.  Our hostess Mme Bernadette was, we later learned, a friend of Albert Camus' daughter, who was still living in her father's house, just down a medieval lane from our residence.  We noticed also a large number of Italian names in the cemetery; I was puzzled by that until I saw one marker with a map of Corsica etched on it and realized that that island had been their home or their ancestors'.  There were more hints of Napoleon than the destruction and despoiling of the churches.  We walked past lavender fields and olive groves to reenter the old city.

The next morning the sun was out again, and we headed for Aix-en-Provence.  Getting there was easy enough, just following the signs to the Center and locating a parking garage.  The newer part of downtown is geometrically laid out, streets with arcades of plane trees--looking much like American sycamores, but a hybrid of those and of Asian sycamores--bright yellow leaves, trunks and limbs white, tan, and gray, like a Jack Russell terrier, though [here insert pun on bark].  We'd had enough of this modern scenery after about 10 minutes, but soon we found ourselves in the old city--narrow, meandering streets, shops with North African and Turkish foods and clothing and other wares, and small cafes--and we were back where we wanted to be.  We came across the family home of Paul Cézanne, another Impressionist who loved the light of Provence.  After a simple lunch, we started back for Lourmarin.  Unlike Aix, Lourmarin is so small that it does not appear on our Michelin map of southern France, and we could find few signs, with or without highway numbers, to help us navigate.  So we headed back for the Autoroute, the equivalent of an Interstate highway, and made our way back to Lourmarin by, once again, following the signs for Cavaillon, driving about 40 miles out of the way and plunging back into the gnarled road pattern of that town, whose traffic circles seemed to have multiplied as randomly as mushrooms in the rain.

Grignan

At the end of our week in Provence, we headed north for Grignan, which sits on a rocky outcrop in the Luberon region.  Low mountains made a green backdrop for our stay, and here we had the best meals of the trip.  Our place of lodging this time, the Hotel Sévigné, was modern and comfortable--lacking the texture and history of the Villa St Louis...but so is every other hotel in the world.  The clerk was the first English-speaker we met in the course of our Provence accommodations.  English being the preferred language in Europe for any who do not speak a local tongue, the clerk assumed I had made the reservations in that language because I was an Austrian and did not expect her to know German.  As she was taking us to our room, she complimented me, "Your English is quite good."  The room was lovely:  modern and tasteful, with elegant furnishings.  The doorway to the bathroom, however, had been designed for Corsicans like Napoleon; this time I used the expedient of setting a chair or a wastebasket in front of the door to remind myself to duck before entering.

Our dinner that last night in Provence was a 3-hour affair, a "fixed menu."  We ordered an excellent bottle of a Luberon red, and soon we were served pastries with pate.  Those were followed by small clear glasses with oyster soup.  Next came the appetizers we had selected:  lettuce leaves and a small cup of thick, rich tomato soup; and strips of sweet peppers topped with concupiscent curds of whipped goat cheese.  Linda had trout, and I had lamb in a brown sauce flecked with rosemary, accompanied by risotto with bits of yellow and orange peppers.  Dessert for Linda was chocolate mousse and raspberries, and for me the "Autumn Plate":  chestnut ice cream topped by a huge, paper-thin chocolate wafer, with a serving of fresh raspberries and a 2-inch toadstool formed from chestnut meringue.

Like Lourmarin, Grignan was surrounded by lavender fields and farms.  Again, we spent our time wandering its narrow lanes and doing a bit of shopping, with a side trip to the chateau and the 15th-century church adjacent to it.  So many of the fine old structures--churches as well as chateaux--that we visited had been stripped of furnishings and ornament 200 years ago.  The chateau in Grignan, though restored, had also been nearly completely dismantled, the stone plundered for housing in the village.  There is a barrenness about all these structures--sometimes accented by the modernity of the restored elements--that is a reminder of the cultural devastation wreaked first by the Revolution and later throughout Europe by Napoleon and his mercenaries.

The next morning we were on the road again.  The route home took us past Lyon and across Switzerland into Bavaria.  The traffic was heavy, the highway tolls were heavier, and the scenery--mountains, meadows, cities--was intermittently worth it all.  Almost 8 hours after leaving Grignan, we reached our final overnight destination, a village just west of Munich and south of Memmingen, where Hitler sat in jail writing Mein Kampf.  Had his early efforts to be an artist been in the sweet light of Provence instead of Vienna....?

Back in the Potato, Pork, and Spätzel Belt

Our last stop, Der Schwarzer Adler (Black Eagle), was a guesthouse that appeared to be at least 200 years old, and plaques and memorabilia on the dining room walls indicate that it has been run by the same family for more than a hundred years.  We arrived late in the afternoon in a light, chilly breeze and a spraying, sputtering rain.  Since we were not sure we had found the right place, Linda waited in the car while I investigated.  Feeling tired and creaky from the drive, I stepped gingerly out of the car and through the guesthouse door.  Though I was not expecting lavender, I was not quite ready to be startled to alertness by the sweet stink of sauerkraut and three men sitting at a plank table drinking liter glasses of beer.  One, who looked like an oversize garden gnome with a huge beer belly, rose and approached me.  His red cheeks and bright blue eyes were circled by wild white hair, curly and standing out several inches from his scalp, completed by a white Santa beard and thick, tangled white moustache.  He spoke no English, and I could barely understand just a few words of his German, which was, I suppose, heavily accented Bavarian dialect.  He handed me a key, #2, and pointed to a doorway marked "W.C."  Soo..I was to do #2 in the WC?  I pushed open the door and, next to the toilet, I saw a staircase.  "Erste Stock," (first floor) he said, and I was on my way.  The room was quite simple, as if furnished in blond by IKEA, and clean, quiet, and pleasant.  I brought Linda in from the car and directed her to the WC door, telling her that was the way to our room.  Soon we had unloaded the car and gotten two bottles of very good beer to relax with before heading downstairs to dinner.  The menu was four pages listing nothing but meat and spätzel (noodles), with side dishes of sauerkraut and cheese.  So that's what we had.  And more beer.  Sunday morning we were up early, ready for the final leg of our trip.  Our host genially set out a breakfast of coffee, bread, preserves, and yogurt.  Soon we stepped out of the sauerkraut-scented Schwarzer Adler into Sunday morning:  church bells and barnyard smells, heavy dew and light fog, a brisk chill and a pale, ragged yellow bar of sunlight on the horizon, pushing out the last of the rain clouds.

We were home again in Wiener World by early afternoon, relieved to be back and ready to unpack, glad to be out of the Autobahn traffic, and wishing the memories of lavender scent, good food, lovely wine, mountains, lakes, red tile roofs, and time-warp villages would survive in strength--if not infinitely, at least awhile longer.  No need to slam the door on them.

Filler

-- Northern Italy, which is generally quite orderly and unlike the thieves' culture of the south, provided near Brescia its own instance of that nation's cultural unity:  when we stopped for gas, a man wearing a vest with the Agip oil company logo--and showing unusual eagerness--ran over to clean the windshield.  I saw him use thumb and forefinger to pop off part of a wiper blade; he then removed the wiper arm and held it up to me, demonstrating how the metal piece was going to scrape and ruin the windshield.  Fortunately, he said, he thought he had another blade in stock that he could sell me.  I said to him in Italian to please reattach the blade, and he did, and then, not the least embarrassed, hurried over to another car to run the same little scam.

-- Car break-ins are a big problem in much of Europe, including Provençe, and several places that we stopped had posted warning signs that echoed counsel in our guidebook:  leave no possessions visible in the car.  One of us stayed with the car whenever we stopped at service stations, and each time that we changed locations we took all our luggage and purchases out of the car to keep in our hotel room. 

-- Sign on a shop announcing that it had been necessary to close for the day:  "Thank you for your comprehension."