Giant Ferris Wheel, Dinner

Monday 30.8.2010

The last day of the program! My morning had to be occupied with business. I went to Westbahnhof to get a timetable for trains from Vienna to Olomouc, my first destination in my post-program travels. Olomouc is a university town in Moravia, that is to say the southeastern Czech Republic. It used to be the capital of Moravia, before it got swallowed up by the Habsburg empire, and after a number of different leaderships, is today joined with Bohemia as the Czech Republic.
After Westbahnhof I was walking around trying to find a suitable café. There was one that Dom Ambros told me had the best Apfelstrudel in the city, and I know it started with a G, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember where it was. I also kept an eye out for Café Hawelka, reputed to be a good one, but unfortunately I hadn’t brought my guide book and didn’t find that either. I walked by Cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, but didn’t want to pay for their overpriced coffee. I did however find a stein I liked. It was in that little archway by of the Hofburg, across from the two symmetrical museum buildings. There was a little tourist shop with a stein that said Wien and Österreich in German. Most of the ones I found only had English on them. This one, I’ll admit, has Vienna and Austria in English on the other side, but I’ll just drink with the German side facing me. whatever, I’ve got a STEIN, bitches! Anyway, it was also about the cheapest price I’d seen for a stein of that size, which is kind of surprising considering the place’s location. Anyway on impulse I bought it, and the lady got it out of the window for me and wrapped it in bubble wrap and tissue paper. I walked around with it in my backpack. Let us hope that it survives two weeks of taking the trains around Europe. I hope the handle doesn’t break off.
So after that I got a few bread items from cheap street chain bakeries on my way to Praterstern. Our class met to take the giant Ferris wheel around and look at the city. I found out that the giant beautiful church, which I did not get to visit, what was pointed out by Dr. O on the bus tour our first week is called the Franz von Assisi Kirche, that is the St. Francis of Assisi Church. Dr. O doesn’t like it because it is not old enough (under 200 years old! It’s a baby among Viennese churches), but I thought it was big and beautiful and that it’s unfortunate I didn’t get to go inside.

After the wheel Kathy led us on the quest to find our restaurant. We didn’t exactly know where it was, and we didn’t exactly take the most direct route. However, after a few phone calls we managed to find the place. It was called Three Centimeters or something like that and is a pretty cool place. We reserved the entire basement floor, so we were kind of in a cellar place. Richard and I got to try dark wheat beers (dunkle Weißbiere), which Kathy had previously told us were really good. It took us a while to get them because the poor waitress had so many orders to fill. She was good-natured about it though. Also she’d keep bringing the drinks we ordered to the end of the table nearest the entrance, and the guys down there would be like, “Beers? Sure!” and take our drinks, so I had to go get them back a couple of times. In any case the beers were achieved. Our food were these swords with schnitzels and chicken breasts and large spicy peppers impaled upon them. And when I say swords, I mean SWORDS. Like a kind of medieval replica with a hilt and a crosspiece and a blade, with food on it. It was basically the greatest thing ever. Needless to say (keep in mind we’re all California undergraduates) we ended cleaning all the food off of the swords and fighting with them, or posing holding them and having our pictures taken.

After dinner people went off to the Ride Club, a group favorite, or the Siebenstern Brewery, also a group favorite, but I decided to just head back to the apartment since I had to get up early and pack the next day.

Also, this is kind of the end of the official graded blog, but I wanted to document my travels as much as possible, so if the blog continues it will just be brief kind of skimmings to save time. I’m not going to say thanks for reading because let’s face it, it’s not my fault if you waste hours of your life staring at a computer screen.

More cafes, heurige

Sunday 29.8.2010

Today my mates were planning on going to mass in Karlskirche. They ended up going elsewhere, but in any case I overslept. I was talking to Marielle on Facebook and we were both getting kind of hungry. I convinced her to accompany me to Café Möbel, a place I’d wanted to visit since reading about it in the guidebook before I left for Europe. Möbel is German for furniture, and all of the tables, chairs, etc in the café are handmade by local artists. So they all look really cool and nothing is boring mass produced furniture. Apparently it’s all for sale, too. The light fixtures are also really cool. They had a few that were made out of plastic buckets. It was overall a really cool place, and we totally loved it. We thought it had a kind of San Francisco vibe. It seemed to be friendly to young liberals, I thought, and we also got the distinct vibe that it was very gay-friendly. Based on the previous description of furniture, it was also obviously very artist-friendly. I got the impression it was a gathering place for young, hip artist, poets, and intellectuals. Like I said we really loved it and wished we’d discovered it early in the month so we could have visited a few times. There was also free wi-fi and outlets in the walls, so it would have been perfect to get work done. We discovered that downtown is totally within walking distance of the apartment. We walked to Möbel, which is in our district but on the edge, near the Innere Stadt. After the café we ended up walking to the Museumsquartier, which is really really close to the café. Anyway, regarding food. Marielle tried to order a coffee (melange) but the waitress misunderstood and brought us Bananenschnitte instead. At first we were really confused. We realized that we had misordered, and wondered if we should send the Bananenschnitte back, but upon closer inspection, it looked really tasty. We decided to eat it. It turned out to be AMAZING. Best mistake we’ve ever made. It was this kind of multilayered cake with bananas and chocolate. It was one of the most delicious things we’ve had in Vienna. Totally lucky stroke that we were brought it by accident. Also when we were looking at the menu there was a word I didn’t understand, so I pulled out my pocket German-English dictionary. The guy working there noticed and kindly asked us if we wanted English menus. They didn’t seem to mind at all that we weren’t tourists. Also, going back to the liberal, San Franciscan vibe: I asked the lady what was good, and described the quiche. She was totally recommending the vegetarian quiche, but I ordered the ham and afterwards felt guilty for disappointing her. The way she was describing vegetarian versus ham, Marielle and I were both pretty certain that she was vegetarian herself. Also the salad my quiche was served with was completely delicious, which really good, juicy tomatoes. It was hands down the best salad I’ve had in Europe. Very delicious. Anyway so the café Möbel is also very vegetarian-friendly, which traditionally is a liberal thing. Anyway we totally loved the place.

After Möbel we took public transit to the western edge of Vienna to visit the Otto Wagner Spital (hospital), a kind of complex for the care of the mentally handicapped designed by Viennese Jugendstil architect Otto Wagner. It features a church he built, which looks very much different from the classic churches in Vienna, but I think is still very beautiful. The church was designed with the care of the mentally handicapped in mind, and has a bunch of features meant to accommodate them.

 The exterior of the Otto Wagner church.

 The altarpiece.

What I assume is a light-producing chandalier-thing. I liked these a lot.

I went to Café Griensteidl to read the International Herald Tribune and drink a Fiaker – espresso with cherry liqueur and whipped cream, with a few chocolate sprinkles on top. Needless to say it was delicious. Unfortunately I was uncertain of the espresso to whipped cream ratio and when I first tried to drink it I FAILED and kind of spilled a bit of it all over the table. But, the mess wasn’t big, I didn’t waste much of it, and I don’t think very many people noticed. I continued to drink my Fiaker and read my paper with as much dignity as I could muster.

Notes on Café Griensteidl: it used to be, under a different name, the meeting place of Vienna’s intellectuals: artists, musicians, professors, and the like. It is located on Michaelerplatz, which is adjacent to the Hofburg. Habsburg emperors used to always exit their imperial residence on the Michaelerplatz until the Loos-Haus, the “building without eyebrows,” was built and Franz Joseph declared it too ugly for his imperial eyes to look upon, and began using a different exit. Anyway, Griensteidl was the favorite coffee house of Vienna’s intellectual and artistic elite until it was closed, and they moved down the street to Café Central. Griensteidl was later reopened under a new name and caters now mostly to tourists. However, it is a traditional Viennese coffee house, famous and near the Hofburg, with waiters in vests and newspapers on wooden reader things and expensive, albeit delicious coffee. Café Central was also eventually closed and reopened in the 1980s as a tourist trap. I do not know where Vienna’s intellectuals currently meet.
Anyway, I whiled away the hours at Griensteidl, then made my way back to the apartment, where I checked my email and discovered I was half an hour late to the Heurige. I got directions and got on the U-Bahn and bus, and finally arrived at the Heurige about 90 minutes late. However, I managed to chase away this bee that was enamored of the ham, and get some bread with goose fat and other disgusting-sounding but actually delicious spreads, along with some great authentic Austrian Heurige wine. We also had some stimulating discussion. As soon as I entered the Heurige, before I’d sat down, I was asked whether I’d ever consumed marijuana. This information went into the class statistic, which apparently was fueling a discussion about the upcoming 2010 California ballot, and whether sale of marijuana should be legalized. All in all a good summer night for a university student.

Klosterneuburg, another coffee house

Saturday 28.8.2010

This morning five of us went to Klosterneuburg to watch their kind of festival mass, where canons took their vows to continue serving for a few years, and where the big festival organ was played, as well as some choir/orchestral music. The mass was very long, about two and a half hours, and all in German. The organ music was nice though. There were lots of people there. After mass there was a free luncheon, but there weren’t enough seats for us, most of them being reserved for the guests for the canons. So we went to a little café and got quiche and banana shakes. The shakes were definitely different than in the States. They were very thin and not too cold; they contained a single floating ice cube. But they weren’t that bad, and the quiche was very good.
After the café we strove to find our way home. At the bus stop we met these little old ladies who were also going back to Vienna where they lived. They were adorable and I had a German conversation with them. With the passage of time, we suspected more and more that sitting at this bus stop would not result in our being transported back to Vienna, so we asked directions from a Polizei and eventually found the correct stop and got back to Vienna. Sidney and Diane decided to go shopping, and I accompanied them because they promised to go to their favorite coffee house afterwards. However, the clothing store promised to take a great amount of time and prove incredibly boring, so I elected to do my own shopping: looking around for a suitable beer stein. I ended up not finding one that was in German and cheap. At my favorite Würstelstand, the one by the classroom, I ordered a Bratwurst mit Brot und Senf (with bread and mustard). I think it must have been a touristy thing to order, because he asked in English if I wanted anything to drink, even though I’d ordered in German. In the States “bratwurst” means a particularly thick sausage, or at least that’s how I’ve always tried it. In any case bratwurst are sold at most grocery stores in the States, next to the hot dogs. So I had to try the Austrian bratwurst at this fantastic stand. The bratwurst proved to be okay, but very thin. It was much thinner than the other sausages at the stand. Kind of funny that bratwurst means opposite things in Europe and America. Oh well.
After this I returned to the clothing shop and found it to be closed. So I went to the tourist office and asked in my most polite German if the man working there could direct me to Café Oberlass. It turned out to be very nice. My Einspänner had far more whipped cream than coffee, which is delicious if not entirely healthy, and I ordered Esterházyschnitte (you may recall that the Esterházys own Eisenstadt and employed Joseph Haydn). It was a delicious multilayered cake. I loved it.

Final Lecture, Karlskirche, Pratersdom

Friday 27.8.2010

Our final lecture. Kathy brought us up to current from World War II. We talked a great deal about post WWII Europe, especially the occupation by the Russians. Turned out the Russians were sometimes worse than the Germans. Obviously they didn’t persecute individual groups such as Jews, but they raped the women and plundered the men wherever they occupied. Many Austrians and Germans tried their best to flee to the side of the country occupied by Americans. We were much nicer, I guess. Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four quadrants, each policed by the US, UK, France, or the Soviet Union. Kathy also told us some of the stories that her mother had told her about growing up in post-WWII Berlin. Her mother and grandmother lived in the Russian quarter, which was treated just as horribly as the Soviet-occupied quarter in Vienna. Kathy’s mother narrowly escaped rape a few times. Some of the stories were scary. Some were also funny, like the time a Russian soldier came to her house leading a cow on a rope. He knocked on the door, held out the rope to Kathy’s grandmother, and said, “Vodka.” He was trying to trade the cow, which he’d probably stolen from some peasant in the countryside, for vodka. But Kathy’s grandmother had no vodka, so the Russian went away to try the next house.
After lecture my friends were going to visit the Kaisergruft, the crypt containing the sarcophagi of the imperial family. As related above (or below I guess, since the blog site does it that way), I’ve already visited the Gruft and received the tutelage of Dom Ambros, so I elected to do the Karlskirche instead.
Karlskirche, which can be translated “St. Charles’s Church,” was commissioned in 1713 after Vienna’s last plague epidemic. The name serves a dual purpose. The church is dedicated to Charles of Borromeo, one of the plague saints, in thanks for Vienna surviving the plague and to ward off more, I guess. It was commissioned by Emperor Karl VI, who probably chose Charles of Borromeo out of the many, many plague saints because they shared a name; thus the magnificent structure bears Karl VI’s name as well. It was built by the famous Austrian architects, the Fischer von Erlachs, father and son. The distinctive characteristics of the church are the two Roman columns in front, which spiraling friezes going around them and telling a story. They recall the similar columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome. After one pays one’s €4 student admission fee, you can view the magnificent church, which is very nice and baroque inside. Apparently you can get in for free during Sunday mass, but I overslept when my group was going to go and I think they decided to go elsewhere anyway. But, they’ve got a lift and elevator with which you can go to the very top of Karlkirche, up at the top of the dome, where you are very high and can view the city. Unfortunately hey have this latticed screen thing outside the windows, so it’s very difficult to get good photos. However, it was nice and I stayed up there for a good while before returning to the streets.

After Karlskirche I tried to find the statue of Kulczycki, who opened the first Viennese coffee house, “Hof zur Blauen Flasche” (House of the Blue Bottle) after the Turks invaded and left and the Viennese discovered coffee and its uses. Kathy said there’s reputed to be a statue of the man on Kolschitzkygasse. I went to this street and searched and searched but could not find the statue. After this I went to Café Landtmann, which was recommended to me by Dom Ambros. I tried a “Türkischer,” a coffee which is made with the grounds in it and not strained at all. It was interesting. I won’t order it again, but I’m glad I tried it. When you drink it you can definitely taste that it’s not all liquid, but has some grounds too. So it’s very thick, and at the bottom of the cup there is a kind of sludge of wet coffee grounds. It was served with a piece of Turkish delight.

The class went to see The Third Man, a film about post-WWII Vienna and the quadruple occupation, but I got there too late and didn’t see it. Later that night we went back to Praterdom, the huge club to which I’d been once before. My friend Richard, who for the record is the nicest, most polite person I’ve ever met, was at first not admitted by the security. We had to go rescue him. Apparently the shirt he was wearing was misinterpreted as neo-Nazi. I guess the cut of the shirt, which was a nice white polo, was associated with neo-Nazis, as well as this kind of leaf symbol that was on the breast. That was just the company logo though. In any case, Richard is definitely not a neo-Nazi. The shirt is an expensive designer item in the States. It is pure coincidence that it shared characteristics with something often worn by neo-Nazis. An interesting experience. In any case I’m glad that the Viennese don’t take kindly to neo-Nazis. In the club there was this farm-themed dance floor where we danced to “Cotton-eye Joe.” You know, “where do you come from, where do you go, where do you come from, Cotton-eye Joe?” Definitely not what you’d expect from a Viennese club!
We stayed out ‘til 2 in the morning, and the U-Bahn only runs until midnight, so we got a cab home. After much scouting around at all the taxi drivers and their prices, one guy agreed to take us home for a flat rate of €15. That was the best we’d found after 10 or so taxis, so we took him up. On the way he was playing a radio station with some American music. I had a conversation with him, in German I’m proud to say, about music in Vienna. He said all the new, popular music that they play on the radio in Vienna (and I suspect everywhere else in Europe, based on my experiences in other cities and countries) is English-language, even when the artists that sing them aren’t necessarily native English speakers. All the new artists sing in English. I guess it’s the new international language in Europe, which is why whenever a sign is in two languages in Europe, one of them is almost always English. I think the music thing is both caused by and contributes to young Europeans learning English. I think they’re mostly required to learn English in school, but I also think they want to because things like all the new hip young people music being sung in English. Lots of advertisements and things like that that I’ve seen which were directed at young people used English phrases, though. Though I will say that after Cotton-eye Joe, they played a song in German. I didn’t catch it all, but it was something about the cares of the world passing you by, I think. In any case all the Austrians in the room went NUTS when it started playing, and they all sang along and started dancing jubilantly. Whatever it was, it’s a really popular song there, and it seems to have pleased the Austrians more than the English language, mostly American songs.

United Nations, Beer Garden, Brewery

Thursday 26.8.2010

Today we went to the UN center in Vienna. I believe it’s one of four, the others being in New York, Montreal, and Tokyo. I could be wrong though. I thought one of the really interesting parts of the UN was when they were telling us about the translators. As you can imagine, when important people gather from all corners of the world to discuss the fate of nations, translators are crucial. The six official languages of the UN are English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic and Chinese. I think they said translators had to be fluent in at least two or three of them in addition to their mother tongue. They also said the translations in the UN were only about 2-3 seconds behind the conversation, which is amazing if you think about it. Translators are only allowed to work for half an hour at a time because the work is so exhausting. They can get the conversation translated into any language, to accommodate delegates from all over the world. Our guide told us a funny story. One Russian delegate was speaking to an international crowd, and most of them were listening to the translation. The Russian was of course speaking in Russian, and he made a joke that was funny in Russian, but would not translate well to another language. The translator said, “The Russian delegate is trying to make a joke. Please laugh politely.” The audience laughed and the Russian was pleased.

We had a presentation from a representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was formed in the 50s and tries to keep tabs on all of the atomic energy being used around the globe. They can give nations advice regarding the thousands of peaceful uses of atomic energy. Of course they also try to make sure that no nations are converting fissile material is not diverted from peaceful purposes and used to make weapons of mass destruction. They really can’t police the world though. If they’re inspecting a nuclear facility and the local government forbids them to enter a certain building, they can’t enter it, and therefore can’t officially declare that nuclear weapons are being made illegally. So our speaker told me that though there are many suspicions, the only nations that have officially been found to be diverting nuclear material from peaceful purposes to WMD production are South Africa and North Korea, though South Africa dismantled its nuclear weapons program in the 70s, the only nation to have done so. The IAEA considered it a great accomplishment.
We broke for lunch, which we had in the UN cafeteria and which was super cheap. The food was all tax free and also subsidized by the UN, so we all enjoyed the cheapest meals we’d had since arriving. They were good, too. I think I remember a similar situation in the Congressional cafeteria in Washington, D.C. Apparently there’s also a grocery store with ridiculously cheap prices, but only delegates are allowed to shop there, not the interns and not us. The interns, by the way, can be from anywhere but I think were mostly Austrian, since they don’t have to worry about finding housing far from home or anything, which is helpful because the internship is unpaid. The guy I talked to was Austrian but not Viennese, and was doing the internship during his summer break from university.
After lunch was a human trafficking lecture from another UN organization. The speaker was far less charismatic than the IAEA speaker, she simply read the slides word for word. However, I did learn a great deal about human trafficking. It does not simply refer to prostitution, but can involve forced labor, black market organ harvesting, and other things.
After the UN I went home and ate, and then prepared to go find the statue of the founder of the first Viennese coffee house, to whom I owe great happiness. However, outside the apartment I met Kathy, Josh and Stephanie and was persuaded to accompany them to a beer garden in Ottakring. It was very good. Ironically, the large brewery in Ottakring, Ottakringer, which is sold in grocery stores and bars all over Austria, produces terrible, weak, not good beer. That brand is bad. But the small little beer gardens in Ottakring produce wonderful beer. I think our beer garden might have even been owned by the yucky brewery. Anyway good beer and Stephanie ordered this pumpkin seed dip, which was a surprising green color. I naively expected it to be orange. We also only got three pieces of bread for a large amount of tip, so we spread it pretty thickly. It turned out to be cheese-based and poor Stephanie is severely lactose intolerant, so Kathy paid for it and we ate it. The waiter misinterpreted an interaction with Josh, and twice they tried to bring him another beer and he sent it away.
After the beer garden we went to Siebenstern Brewery. It’s within walking distance of the apartment and produces its own good beer, so our group has been there several times. My favorite is the Rauchbier, or smoke beer. I ordered a liter of it.

Mauthausen Discussion, Vienna Jewish Museum, Stephansdom crypt, Mozarthaus, Cafe Central

Wednesday 25.8.2010

The morning lecture involved a discussion of Klüger and our Mauthausen experiences. I mentioned my opinions in the previous post. After class we ate at the Naschmarkt, always a fun, interesting experience. Then we hit the Jewish Museum. There were a lot of works of Jewish art, religious instruments, an exhibit on an Austrian Jewish composer named Ernst Toch who fled to the United States during WWII and composed Hollywood music, and some other things. I’ve always found Jewish culture, like Jewish food, to be a bit bland. But, to each his own. I’m glad I went to the museum.
After that we went to Stephansdom to tour the crypt. They have the hearts of the Habsburgs stored there. Some of the containers, for instance the one holding the heart of Maria Theresia, began leaking and had to be patched up and put in larger containers. Most interesting, I thought, were the mass graves from Vienna’s plague epidemics. One could peer in at rooms that were, literally, full of bones. Full of real human bones. It was quite creepy. In one little outlet The bones were all nicely stacked to conserve space, with the skulls staring deadly out from a wall of joints. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed photography, so I only got one bad picture that I snapped hastily when the guide wasn’t looking. Anyway, never been that close to that many real human bones before. Piles and hills of them. Vienna plague years. We can thank them for Karlskirche, I guess.
We then went to a Billa by Stephansplatz to get snacks. It had an escalator running between floors. That is the first time I have seen an escalator in a grocery store. Or a multiple-storey grocery store, for that matter.
After food we went to Mozarthaus. We debated whether to spend €7 on what was almost certain to be a cheesy tourist experience, but finally decided that we couldn’t face our friends when we told them we’d gone to Vienna but skipped the Mozarthaus. So we shelled out the Euros and went through what was indeed a cheesy tourist experience. We did however get to stand in the very room where he composed Le Nozze di Figaro, though, so there’s that. I also once again experienced a museum where they gave me the student price even though I didn’t have my student ID, probably because I could say “ich bin Student” and my similarly-aged friends had theirs. Viennese can be nice.
After the Mozarthaus we headed to the historic Café Central, where Leon Trotsky was reputed to have played chess with Lenin on a regular basis. So one might say the U.S.S.R. was born in that very room. Also I believe Freud and several other famous personages frequented the café. It was the gathering spot of Vienna’s intellectual elite, especially around 1900, I guess. Viennese coffee houses were referred to as “the penny university” because one could go there for coffee and learn from professors and intellectuals who held conversations about science and high culture there while getting a caffeine rush. Café Central was closed, however, and all of the intellectuals moved. It was reopened in the 80s and now serves mostly tourists. However, I find Viennese coffee houses to be beneficial for learning even today because not only is the coffee freaking delicious, but they have free daily newspapers. So one can go in and order a delicious coffee and read that day’s edition of a number of German, Austrian, and even American newspapers. There are also some Italian and French papers, I think, depending on where you go. The two English-language papers that are to be found in most coffee-houses in Vienna are the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times (when you go to nytimes.com in Austria, it automatically redirects you to the IHT website and you have to click a link to get the U.S. edition), and the Financial Times. I haven’t yet tried the FT because it sounds boring and economical and conservative and probably contains a lot about stocks. I’ve found my favorite Viennese paper to be Der Standard, the leftist paper. I’m going to follow it online to try to keep up my German.

Mauthausen

Tuesday 24.8.2010

Today was our Mauthausen tour. Mauthausen was the largest concentration camp in Austria during the second World War. We had a pretty neat tour guide who took us around the camp. It is really more of a memorial than something you think of as an ex-concentration camp. If they didn’t have Holocaust monument everywhere and you took me to Mauthausen today and asked me to tell you what it was, I’d probably say it was an army barracks or a boy scout retreat or a KOA or something. It is nothing like a concentration camp. As Ruth Klüger mentions in her book, during the Holocaust the concentration camps smelled like death and were filled with violence, emaciated prisoners, blood all over the ground, and things like that. So it is impossible to know what the concentration camps were really like by visiting one. In Mauthausen most of the original buildings are gone, and the remaining ones are greatly changed. For instance our guide led us to a barracks room. She said there would be 50 beds in that little room. Today there are only 6, to make room for the tourists. When the Nazis fled Mauthausen, they took out the pipes and things that they’d used to gas the victims of the gas chamber. The “Stairs of Death,” while still grueling, have been made more manageable for visitors to Mauthausen. Perhaps the most glaring change from the war days are all the monuments and memorials to the victims everywhere. There is one for every country from which Mauthausen victims came, also a lot of other groups, and even a bunch of memorial plaques to individual victims put up by their families. So Mauthausen is great as a memorial site, but does not even come close to giving you a feel for what actually went on in the camps. I think I was able to identify more with the wartime camps and what occurred there by reading up on it, survivor stories and the like, than I was by physically being there. However, I know that many of my fellow had powerful emotional experiences and were literally moved to tears by being there.
After Mauthausen we went to the charming down of Waidhofen to learn about the town’s history, explore a bit, and go to dinner with some of Kathy’s old friends. The town is truly very nice and pleasant. Dinner was a three-course meal with soup, chicken or ravioli, and apple strudel. I had a German conversation with Kathy’s friends. They are very cool. On the bus on the way back we all sang old songs that we knew. Towards the end there was a lot of Disney involved. Kathy says that every year that she’s done Mauthausen, the group has ended up singing on the bus on the way back. She thinks it might be a form of release from the emotional trauma of visiting the camp. I think it’s not uncommon for groups of young people to sing songs they all know on buses, especially after they had a big meal with unlimited free beer. However, she may be right. I think the pleasantness of Waidhofen and the meal served as a kind of emotional bandage after Mauthausen.

Leopold Museum, Walking Tour, Meeting with Dom Ambros

Monday 23.8.2010

At 10 in the morning we had a tour of the Leopold Museum with Dr. O. Leopold was a physician and private art collector. During his life he amassed quite a collection and became something of a celebrity in the art world; for instance, at art auctions his presence created a stir and people paid careful attention to what he purchased. He had a knack for buying paintings done buy artists who later because quite famous. As a result his collection is quite valuable. Vienna, that bastion of high culture, built an expensive modern museum for his art collection, and he in turn allowed the city to display his collection to the public.
To begin, allow me to say that Leopold and I had quite opposite tastes in art and that I hated the Leopold museum. It has a lot of Klimt and Schiele, and other similar painters. I hate impressionism and expressionism. A lot. I also hate rampant sexualization and eroticization in art. Klimt and Schiele were known womanizers and expressionists. Their art just looks like a jumble of colors, in which can be seen the forms of naked women. That about sums up Klimt, who made money on the Ringstraße and was always wealthy and happy. Schiele is worse; he was a tortured soul, had a ****ty childhood and spent a lot of his life poor and unhappy. As a result his art shows his pain. He feels his mother restricted his talent, and lots of his paintings depict blind mothers surrounded by little children. Schiele thought his mother was metaphorically blind. I hate art and poet that has more emotion that skill. Schiele is an artist and a poet whose work is perfectly described by that phrase. I hate Schiele. Dr. O says he was a master of something, I think lines or something like that. I prefer the Renaissance. I disliked all of the paintings in that museum, but the I hated the least is a Schiele called The Hermits. When Leopold finally finished his studies (I guess he was at the university for a while because European education is essentially free), his parents were going to get him a VW Bug as a graduation gift. Leopold said that would rather have a painting of about the same value that he knew to be on sale in London. He traveled to London to buy Schiele’s The Hermits. It’s a pretty large painting that is based on triangles. It shows Klimt and Schiele in dark monk’s habits. Schiele is in the foreground, leaning on Klimt who is in the background. The point is that Klimt supported Schiele’s career (Klimt was Schiele’s mentor) but that the Viennese art scene was changing and Schiele and his peers were now the dominant artists, and their expressionist style was at the “foreground” of Austrian art.

Dr. O told us that once the Leopold Museum had an exhibit of paintings displaying nude figures. As an advertising campaign, they declared that anyone who showed up to the ticket counter naked could get in for free. It worked; people would wear a trenchcoat or something to the museum, walk up to the counter and let it drop. They got in for free and for the length of the exhibit the Leopold Museum was full of butt naked people looking at paintings of butt naked people. It’s a situation that has the potential for sexiness, I guess. Oh, Vienna.
After the museum tour I went to the in-museum café. The coffee was ok, but I ordered this dip (because it was cheap and I wasn’t super hungry). It came with like three tiny pieces of bread and a ton of hummus and other dips. I had way more dip than bread. The same thing happened at a beer garden a few days later where we got lots of dip and only three slices of bread, albeit the slices were normal-sized. But at the Leopold Museum the bread was ridiculously small.
We had a two-hour lunch break during which I got some money from an ATM, and then Kathy led us on a walking tour of the Innere Stadt. We saw the famous Anker Clock, which apparently has a quite significant display at noon. Unfortunately I did not manage to get there at noon, but perhaps I will when I fly out of Vienna. We also went to the Judenplatz and talked about Vienna and the Jews. In the Judenplatz is a plaque commemorating a certain particularly bloody pogrom of the Middle Ages (Austria used to be really, really anti-Semitic). Also in the square is Vienna’s Holocaust memorial. The Viennese decided to leave the pogrom plaque up since it was near the Holocaust memorial and showed how far the Viennese had come as a people, and how they had reversed their anti-Semitism. The Holocaust memorial is a building made of books. All of the books are facing with the pages outward, so the spine (and the title) is concealed. They represent all of the Jewish lives that were cut short; their titles will now never be read. There are also a set of doors which don’t open and have no knobs (so they can never be opened) which also represents the loss the Jews experienced. Once can never enter the inside of the memorial, where the titles would be seen. Around the structure are the names of all of the concentration camps where Austrian Jews perished during the Shoah.

After the walking tour I went to Café Diglas, a great old traditional Viennese coffee house, to read the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times, which is in English and which all the coffee houses in Vienna carry; I’m becoming quite fond of it) and drink some coffee. This was to pass the time until meeting Dom Ambros, which I did after the café.

The restaurant to which he had wanted to take me was closed, as was the next one we checked, and we ended up going to a Thai place. Ambros likes Thai food. It was very interesting watching him order. Ambros, an American, and the Thai lady, who was born in Asia, both conversing in fluent German, though it was not either’s native language. Oh, Vienna. After dinner we smoked cigars (Ambros, who lived the life of the very wealthy before committing his life to the Church, is well-versed in the ways of fine living). He taught me the proper way to smoke a cigar (always remove the label, all gentlemen know to do this) and pronounced that a good meal always ends with a cigar. I must say I agree, smoking a cigar after dinner was a very pleasant activity indeed. We strolled through the park around Karlskirche until he had to catch a taxi home (the canons have to wake up quite early for prayer services). We had some very very interesting conversation, but due to the personal nature of it I cannot relate it here. Suffice it so say Ambros is the most interesting person to whom I’ve ever spoken and I fully intend to remain in touch with him, though he did not and will not convert me to Catholicism.

More exploration of Budapest, Good Beer, Semi-Adventurous train back to Vienna

Sunday 22.8.2010

We attended 8:30 mass in this cave-like church in the side of the mountain beneath the leaf-lady. The mass was in Hungarian and I am not Catholic, but it was an interesting church. Though it was in a mountain, it was clear that the walls had artificially been made to look cave-like. Martha told us that one little corner was dedicated to Poles (the writing, saints, and symbols were all Polish). After mass we found a bakery and bought espresso and pastries. I do not recommend the poppy seed strudel. The girls got postcards and scarves. In general, Hungarians are much friendlier than Viennese. We returned to the hostel. Three of the girls went to the baths. I (idiotically) failed to bring a bathing suit. Feeling that they would not appreciate staring at my penis for four hours, I did not accompany them. Martha and I went to a place advertising “more than 100 different types of beer!” Though it had a bit less than that, the selection was good, and I had a good Czech and then a Hungarian beer. Martha went to get a haircut (it was the equivalent of about $15 U.S. and she was pleased) and I stayed to write the last few pages on paper, with a pencil. I’m about to pay and leave, and then I think I’ll try to find St. Stephan’s for a look at the inside. Martha complemented me on my cursive handwriting! I’m to meet Sidney, Christina, and Sheena at the spy museum at 4:00 p.m. Then we’ll probably try to catch the 5:10 or 6:10 train back to Vienna.

Czech beer.

St. Stephen’s turned out to be quite beautiful. I really enjoyed the red marble and the Francis of Assisi things. He’s got that animal thing going on. I just think he’s a cool bloke, haven’t really researched him though. They also had something called “The Chapel of the Holy Right Hand” or something like that. It is the right hand of King Saint Stephen, an early ruler of Budapest and later canonized. They’ve got his right hand in there as a relic. They make you pay 200 Ft. to light it up though. That’s about $1 U.S., but I didn’t have the right types of coins and don’t really like the idea of paying to see a relic. Anyway there were pictures of it. There were also signs everywhere saying “Tourist stop!” where they didn’t want to you go. Apparently the most troublesome tourists speak English.

I really liked this marble.

I think went to the spy museum (a number they’ve dubbed The House of Terror) but the girls didn’t show, so I looked at the map and walked up the street to this castle. It was this sort of public park with some museums I didn’t enter, a monumental square dedicated to Hungarian military heroes and with lots of statues, a lake, and this castle-like area that was charming. Being ignorant of Hungarian, I do not know the full story, but I saw a restaurant and some other stuff named after one “Anonymus.” There was also a statue of that title depicted a cloaked, hooded figure sitting in a chair. Children were climbing all over it, so I didn’t get a good look, but it was very cloak-and-dagger and awesome. I’ll bet there’s a really cool Hungarian folk story about a heroic stranger behind it. Okay, I just looked him/her up on Wikipedia, and apparently it refers to the anonymous author of The Deeds of the Hungarians (an historical chronicle) around 1200. This explains why the statue was holding a pen. So a badass writer. Awesome.

Anyway I headed to the train station hoping for the 18:10 one, but the signs were confusing and I didn’t find the info desk and ended up just missing it. So I went to a nearby sports bar to wait for the next train to Vienna (in an hour), where I drank some really light beer and read Ruth Klüger while a few Hungarians yelled at a football game between I know not which teams. I think it ended up being a tie. The dude charged me 350 forints, and the manner in which he said it made me think he ripped me off because I was wearing a backpack and didn’t speak Hungarian (therefore clearly a tourist), but in any case 350 forints is really not much money (much cheaper than a beer in Vienna or the States) and I used his bathroom (the train station charged 100 forints) so I’m not bitter about it.
I caught the 19:05, but they have this interesting system where a bunch of the seats are reserved, so I ended up waiting in the hallway (there were little 6-seat rooms with closing doors, Hogwarts-style, with a hallway running down one side) sitting on the floor. This proved to be fortuitous, however, as I met some really cool people. There was this English guy from Essex who’d just finished his studies in history (he was telling me about a Caucasian minority tribe in Japan, with an odd role-reversal situation in which the Asians ended up forcing the Caucasians to adapt to Western culture) and was interrailing. His next stop was Croatia by way of Salzburg (apparently he couldn’t get a very direct route). He had “teamed up with some Germans” who were cool and friendly and fluent in English. Eventually we decided to find some empty seats, and ended up sitting across from three Americans from Kansas, who had spent a couple months in Vienna for a language-intensive German program and were about to go to Germany for a year to study architecture (in German). They were also very nice. Got to Vienna without problems and went home.

Exploration of Budapest

Saturday 21.8.2010

We got up and solved our hostel problems, then went in search of coffee. “Coffee Heaven,” a local chain, was kind of pricey,. In one likely place, we asked for coffee and the server said flatly, “It’s eleven,” as if we were mental to request coffee at so late an hour. But at this Italian-owned touristy place, the lady said, “Of course!” and we got cappuccinos for €1, or the equivalent in forints. In Budapest, all the restaurants have people standing outside them on the street, holding menus and trying to sell their establishment to passers-by.

After cappuccinos we crossed the river to Buda and hiked up a large hill (small mountain? I’m not learned in geology) to check out this statue that is visible from the river. It is of a woman holding a leaf above her head. Smaller statues, one of a man running with a torch and another of a man beating the tar out of a hydra creature, surround her.

All the inscriptions were in Hungarian (a kind of indecipherable mix of German and Slavic, with umlauts and accents everywhere), so I have no idea to what the monument was dedicated. Behind it was something called the Citadell or Citadella. Everything atop the mountain catered to tourists, so there was enough English for me to discern that the Citadell contains a wax museum, but it was hot and it cost 12.500 Ft., so we headed back down the mountain. We returned to the hostel, but our friends from the program had not arrived, so we left them a note and headed back out. In trying to find St. Stephen’s basilica, we ended up at Parliament, a magnificent building with flying buttresses and a green adjacent park. Martha climbed a tree and I lay down beneath it and we spent a long while relaxing and taking silly pictures.

Eventually we got up and succeeded in finding St. Stephen’s, a grand basilica covered in sculptures of saints. Beautiful. I assume this is the same St. Stephen we have to thank for the festival the previous night. It seems the grandest church in the city; perhaps St. Stephen is the patron saint of Budapest. We couldn’t enter the structure because a wedding was taking place; we saw a long white limousine pull up and the wedding party emerge. What a magnificent (and probably expensive) church in which to be married!
After this we returned to the hostel and found our friends: Sidney, Christina, and Sheena. We got pizza, then went down to the Danube. The banks by the bridge seem to be the most happening place in the city. They had some sand on one bank, though it clearly had not arrived there by natural means. We had a view of one of the magnificent bridges. The back of the 200 Ft. coin has the exact same view. Perhaps the artist sat in the same spot as us when s/he created the image! We watched the evening fade into night. Budapest, all its great buildings lit up, is magnificent in the dark. The best part of the evening for me was the live band that was playing (the preceding Hungarian folk dances were charmant, but not exciting). It was upbeat and wonderful, with violins, a viola, cello, double bass, trombone (!) and drums. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Our late-coming friends had spent the previous night clubbing in Vienna, and we returned to the hostel. They went to bed. Martha and I, still full of energy, went in search of fun and drinking. To our surprise, we found that Budapest does not have much of a nightlife. The people were generally older, and the establishments more like restaurants than bars/clubs. We might have searched farther from the Danube, but Martha’s feet hurt and the atmosphere boded no guarantee of success, so we simply sat and talked for a while. We noticed one young woman who seemed to be a prostitute. She was kind of sluttily dressed and approached an unattractive middle-aged man (perhaps to proposition him?) for a short while before leaving. At 1:00 in the morning the lights on the famous bridge went out (Budapest nights really do end early! Vienna is bumpin’ until daylight) and we headed home. More homeless (sleeping on the street) and buskers. We saw one young guy with aviator glasses who we’d noticed the night before, now playing with a different group. A professional busker?
Another thing I forgot to mention about Budapest. At busy street intersections, they have places to cross underground. Stairs at the sidewalk corners lead down to underground rooms, and you can then cross the underground room to the opposite street corner without waiting for traffic. Also traffic doesn’t have to halt while pedestrians cross. I hadn’t seen this before and think it’s a stroke of genius. Pedestrians don’t wait for traffic and traffic doesn’t wait for pedestrians. I wish all cities had these in their busiest intersections. Sometimes one can find little stands at the bigger of these underground pedestrian crossings, and almost all have beggars/buskers in them, as it is (naturally, being underground) in the shade and cooler than above ground in the summer. Also lots of people are constantly using them, so it’s a strategic spot for begging, I guess. Anyway, Budapest is currently the only place I’ve seen these things, and I think they’re awesome. Props, Hungarians.