Travel

This should be the last one. These are some notes I took on the flight to New York.

• Looking around the departure lounge at the information boards for other flights, I really felt like we were rather “east” — there were flights to Pristina, Kiev, and Damascus in nearby gates.
• The area next to us was for a flight to Cairo. There was one Arab woman near us wearing a sweater and well-fitting camel-colored wool pants, and her son was named William. Most of the women for that flight wore head scarves.
• The airport bookstores have quite a bit of gay porn for sale — most stores would only have straight stuff, especially in America. They also all have special sections for books on the Nazi period. One tiny store had a fountain in the middle with fish.
• There were two female flight attendants – one a chubby latina and the other a black woman with a shaved head — pushing around the duty free cart. They were FABULOUS. I told them I loved them both, but I didn’t feel like buying anything. The latina suggested I buy the big box of chocolates, suitable for sharing with the crew. When I laughed, the black one asked me what I was laughing at. I said, “you laughed, so I did too.” Her response: “Good answer. It’s like the old Welcome Back Kotter show — I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you.”

• One of the rooms we visited in the Schoenbrunn in Vienna was the room used by Franz Josef II for his audiences. Any citizen of the empire had the right to an audience with the emperor, even peasants from the provinces. They were instructed to wear formal attire if they had it, or native costume if not. The descriptions from the time talk about farmers and country people wearing their native costumes, and today the waiting room before the audience room has mannequins wearing traditional garb from the various regions: Tirol, Carinthia, Galicia, etc.
• Empress Elizabeth, known as Sisi, the wife of Franz Josef II, was fanatical about her weight. She dieted and excersized for hours every day. One of the rooms in the palace still has exercise rings hanging in one doorway.
• One of the popular drinks at this time of year in Austria is Sturm — “young wine” — barely alcoholic grape juice.
• When we visited the Alte Pinakothek in Munich to see Breughel, etc., we bought t-shirts in the museum shop by Sean Scully, with the words “Starr/McCarthy: Two Great Americans”.
• I forgot to mention this, and it was important. The Melk exhibit on the town during the Nazi period which I mentioned earlier specifically mentioned homosexuals in the list of people sent to concentration camps. A lot of exhibits only talk about Jews, and maybe political prisoners, failing to mention homosexuals or gypsies.
• I highly recommend Hotel Austria, where we stayed in Vienna.
• When we visited the Wieskirche, there were areas of the church where people had left gifts of thanks, or votive offerings in hope of some holy intervention. There was card for a fireman named Tommy, lost on 9/11. There was also a letter of thanks from a man who had prayed there for God to send him a man, and he was thanking the church for his happiness after finding a wonderful mate. I guess the Church really is often better on a local level than at the archbishop-on-up level.
• I felt bombarded by news about Iraq while we were there. Every paper — German, Austrian, French, etc. — had Bush and Iraq on the front page every day except 9/11.

I’m trying to stay up until 10pm so that my sleep schedule will be somewhat back to normal. We got back (to home — the plane landed 2 hours before that) around 6 tonight.

I have notes on the last few days, so I’ll put that up soon. One tidbit to tide you over until then: The airport in Vienna has a cafe called Ikarus, complete with a mural of him falling from the sky. Yikes.

Last night we went to see Britten’s “Billy Budd” at the Vienna Staatsoper. The cast and music were great, but the design and production were lousy. Simon Keenlyside was a very attractive (and beautiful-sounding) Billy Budd, James Morris (Wotan in the Met’s Ring) was Claggart, and Michael Roider was an excellent Captain Vere. I think the Captain is the most interesting (and sympathetic) character in a pretty depressing opera. I had heard it on the radio before, but I had never seen it live. I hadn’t realized how blatant the homoerotic aspects of the opera are, and I’m amazed by what Britten got away with. At one point Claggart sings about his “depravity” while musing on the beauty of Billy Budd. The audience was much better-dressed than a Met audience, even the teenagers.

Afterward we went to the Palmenhaus, which is a restaurant in a Jugendstil greenhouse with at least 50′ ceilings. The food was excellent, but it was SO LOUD.

Oops, I forgot to mention that when we were at the Staatsoper to buy our Billy Budd tickets, we went to Arcadia, the opera CD store on the ground floor. I bought Malcom McLaren’s “Fans” album. It seemed appopriate.

We went to see the Vienna Secession building this morning and saw a beautiful work by Gustav Klimt called the Beethoven Frieze. It’s a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Klimt has never been one of my favorite artists of that era — I’m more partial to Egon Schiele — but this was fabulous. In the shop you could buy a snowglobe with the building in it.

Next we visited the Academy of Fine Arts to see the Bosch Last Judgement Tryptich, and then went on to the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg. I don’t normally do so much museum stuff on vacation, but there are so many important works here that I would never see in NYC. After lunch we saw the Imperial Apartments in the Hofburg. We had drinks afterward at Halle, a beautiful cafe/restaurant at the Kunsthalle filled with attractive people (including the waiters). We also walked around the new MQ (Museum Quartier), a collection of buildings near the Hofburg being changed into spaces to be used for temporary contemporary art projects.

We had dinner again tonight at Neu Wien — this time for me to have my first Wiener Schitzel in Vienna. It’s a really great restaurant, with slightly nouvelle cuisine, good wines and service, and a really attractive space.

All of the public squares and parks in Vienna have statues of famous artists who spent time in Vienna — composers, writers, poets, etc. New York should really do the same.

We went to Judenplatz (Jew Square) to see the Rachel Whiteread-created Holocaust Memorial. Then we went to the Judenplatz Museum, which has the excavated remains of this first synagogue in Vienna. Parts of it date from around 1240, and it was destroyed in 1421as part of a wave of anti-Semitic persecution. Parts of the synagogue were then used to build part of the University of Vienna.

We visited the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore before that. One of the things I spotted was a textbook called “American Civilization: An Introduction”. It had photographs of an American flag, fireworks over the U.S. Capitol, and Ricky Martin on the cover. They also had a series of books called the Xenophobe’s guide to… They were sold out of the American one — apparently it’s quite popular.

We then had lunch at Restaurant Gustl Bauer on Drahtgasse after the Judenplatz Museum. The good was great, with a good atmosphere. The table next to us was a group on a culinary tour. You can basically get any kind of tour in Vienna it seems. The one American turned out to be a chef at the Ritz Carlton in Maui.

In the morning we went to a big (and very good) exhibit, sponsored by the town, on Melk and Nazism, 1938-1945. There were specific names and addresses of Jews who had lived in the town, and their experiences — ranging from survival to death in a concentration camp. There were a lot of photos of the town in that period, including one of our hotel decorated with Nazi banners on May 1, 1938 — the Anschluss was in March of that year. The exhibit included posters made my children in the local school with photos and text. There were pieces of bomb shrapnel on display from when the town was bombed, front pages from local newspapers, official city notices, and photographs from the concentration camp at the edge of town plus nearby Mauthausen. They did an interesting job of also showing what happened at the end of the war — expulsion of Germans from points east such as Czechoslovakia, and the prosecutions and executions of pro-Nazi officials of the town at the end of the war.

Afterward we went to one of the great Baroque buildings of Europe, the Melk Abbey (Stift Melk). It is still a functioning Dominican, abbey, and I was really struck, particularly after the Nazi exhibit, by the element of battle present everywhere — angels battling, the battle of good vs. evil in the world, etc. It was recently restored, and many of the exhibits (including some religious propoganda) are pretty high-tech. The restoration was paid for from the proceeds of the sale of the abbey’s Gutenberg Bible to Harvard.

We then drove along the Wachau wine area toward Vienna, stopping at the Kirchenwirt Restaurant in Weissenkirchen for lunch. It was a great meal with good local wine in a very tasteful room — which isn’t always an easy thing to find in this part of the world.

Our arrival in Wien was a NIGHTMARE. It’s very hard to navigate (in a car) the streets of Vienna to a hotel on a small street without really knowing the proper route in advance.

I LOVE VIENNA. It’s a fabulous city, and feels much more like a real city than Munich. It also feels very un-American in a way. The people are pretty sophisticated, and make even New Yorkers look like we don’t care about our weight. As a city, it’s so “out of the way” in terms of its importance today, but it doesn’t seem to matter at all. It’s a very cosmopolitan and attractive city. We looked at restaurants on along a street near us called Baeckerstrasse, which has several interesting choices. We chose a very attractive restaurant called Neu Wien (New Vienna) that turned out to be excellent. We had a classic of Vienna — tafelspitz (boiled beef) with a great Vienna wine called Wiener Trilogie. On the walk back to the hotel we walked by a plaque on a building near our hotel stating that Robert Schumann had lived there for a bit.

We drove along the Donau (Danube) today. At one point we had to stop on a country road to allow several pheasants to pass. Yesterday it was some ducks. We could see evidence of last month’s floods, including broken windows in the little shrines that show up along the road in the countryside. We visited the abbey of St. Florian, because that’s where Bruckner lived for years, as the church organist. We saw the church, the organ, and his grave, but not the abbey itself because we weren’t part of a group of at least six. We had lunch at a restaurant down the hill — the Gasthof Erherzog Franz Ferdinand (the one whose assassination set of World War I).

We’re spending the night in Melk at Hotel Zur Post. They have historical photographs of the town in the hallways, and I commend them for having photos of a pro-Nazi rally in the town on May 1, 1938. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant. We ate wild duck, and it really was wild. There was a bit of grape shot left in it. At the end of the meal we had a homemade walnut schnapps that was excellent.

We just got back to the room from Sud, the “modern” restaurant near our hotel. After we asked, our big blonde waiter (with earring in right ear, which seems to work the same way here as in the USA), told us that it was his restaurant, open since December. It’s good, updated food, with a few classic German/Austrian dishes on the menu. The crowd was cool — a lot of young people, plus people travelling through the area. The kitchen had an electric eye-activated slidind door, through which we could see the chefs cleaning everything with cloths and spray bottles at the end of the evening.

I liked the fact that, when we were looking at an Austrian magazine, the waiter asked whether he could “translate anything for us”. The building was once a salt-processing building — this area has been rich from the existence of salt since the Iron Age. During World War II, artworks in the area were protected from Hitler, plus Allied bombing, in the salt caves in this area.

We had an amazing sort-of-dessert-wine called Isabella that is local to this area. Isabella seems to be the grape.

One of the things I like about the German-speaking world, by which I really mean Germany and Austria, is the sociability of restaurants. It is common practice to greet others upon entering a room in a restaurant, and to say “Auf wiedersehen” upon leaving the room for good.

One of the things I noticed today, that I didn’t mention in my earlier post, is that historical museums in this area often put contemporary art on display as well. The photo museum at Sissi’s Teehaus mixed historical photographs with a display of contemporary works. The Bad Ischl Stadt Museum had sculpture by an Italian artists. I’ve seen this in other towns as well. I can’t really imagine that in a small town museum in America.

I just saw a few minutes of Bush on CNN talking about the economy. I can’t believe he has any support in America, where the “common man” watches much more TV than I do. He’s a complete idiot, incapable of forming a decent sentence or explaining a simple concept. I feel horrified as an American when I watch him. Here in Europe, I search for some graceful way to let people know that not all Americans are warmongers, and that it’s OK to tell us that our President is an idiot. As I read the coverage of the Germany election, all I can think is that they’re just being polite. I’m sure that most European governments would love to say, “it’s scary that the man with his finger on the nuclear button is such an idiot with no advisers with any historical knowledge”.

We spent the day walking around Bad Ischl itself, on a rather cold and rainy day. I can hear the ducks on the river through the (slightly) open window of our hotel room, and watch a big flock of starlings. I’m not really uploading pictures right now, since I’m on a dialup.

We first visiting the Teehaus (Tee House) of Empress Elizabeth, popularly called “Sissi”. Apparently there is a trilogy of movies about her starring Romy Schneider, and she is very big as a romantic heroine in this part of the world. She was beautiful and intellectually curious, learning how to photograph soon after it was invented, and building a villa on Corfu for when she needed to “get away”. She was assassinated by an Italian anarchist while on a trip to Geneva in 1898.

We then saw the Kaiservilla, or the summer palace of Franz Josef I. It is a beautiful small Biedermeier palace, and It is still privately owned (and partially occupied) by a descendant of the family. The texts on the homepage say that the Kaiser allowed any subject of the empire to visit the interior, including his private apartments, when he was not in residence.

The thing that most struck me on the tour was when we saw the desk where he signed the declaration of war against Serbia, which began World War I. Looking at the desk, I remembered how many people died in that war (mostly young men), and I felt ill — similar to the way I felt when I have visited sites of Nazi horrors, such as Dachau. Every town in Europe has a memorial to its sons who died in that war.

Finally, after lunch, we visited the Museum der Stadt Bad Ischl — the town museum. We were both surprised by how good it was, and we actually ran out of time and were told it was time to leave. There are rooms on the history of the region, the city itself, the Imperial family, folk music, traditional costume, etc. There are a few neat rooms that are reconstructions of a peasant house, and one of a combined home/inn/tavern.

We drove through pretty countryside in Styria today, having lunch at a tasteful, attractive restaurant called Pilz Stub’n at the edge of Filzmoos There was a table of three older ladies in once corner, drinking coffee and trying their recently purchases chocolates from Salzburg (about an hour’s drive away). They also got into a discussion with the waiter on different types of coffee that the restaurant made — expresso vs. coffee vs. “kleiner Brauner”. I think the kleiner Brauner is just espresso served with a tiny pitcher of cream on the side. We had a traditional soup native to the area (and rarely found) called farfel-suppe. It’s a broth made by boiling smoked beef, plus dumplings with little bits of the beef. We talked to the waiter when he asked where we were were from, where we were travelling, etc. When we mentioned New York, he said it was a beautiful city, but it wasn’t for him, since he was a “Bergkind” (mountain child).

I’m amazed by how carefully resources are used here, compared to the USA. Over time, as the world starts to have conflicts over resource limits, this area of the world is going to work out things much better than our country. Clothes made of expensive wool or leather (like trachten — traditional clothing — epecially home-made) have different prices based on size. I also see recycling bins, for separating different types, everywhere — including gas stations.

There are so many details like this — clean bathrooms, well-maintained roads even in rural areas, public transit available even between villages with hundreds of people — that make Germany and Austria, and most of Europe, so attractive. I know many of my friends don’t really understand my Euro-philia, but I think the things one sees after travelling here regularly, especially if you have a little bit of money and don’t have to “backpack it”, make one realize what a rich, thoughtful society is capable of. I’m very frustrated that a country as rich as the USA manages its resources and public infrastructure so badly. The quality of life is so high here for people, even if they don’t have a lot of money.

I see on the news that Bush isn’t sending congratulations to Schroeder on being re-elected as Chancellor of Germany. Apparently it’s anti-American to disagree with the policies of an out of control president who wasn’t even elected with a majority of votes. I hope the rest of the world realizes that many Americans are horrified by Bush and this march to war.