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.   

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.