Travel

We went driving around to some of the beautiful towns in this area of Austria, the Salzkammergut — including St. Wolfgang and Hallstadt. We had a late lunch at the Cafe Zauner here in Bad Ischl. It is the oldest pastry vendor/cafe in Austria, and historically was a supplier to the Emperor and the aristocracy. At one time it was said that the way to learn what was going on in the empire was to listen to gossip at the tables. As it was crowded, we shared a table with a really handsome older couple. She looked like good peasant stock — her hands were bigger than any men I know, and he looked like Bruckner.

We had dinner tonight at the hotel restaurant, since many places in this town aren’t open for dinner on Sunday night. Our handsome, lederhosen-wearing waiter reminded me of a younger, tall and skinny Bill Arning.

There are public internet terminals with webcams scattered about in public places in small towns here in Austria. Last night we were walking around Bad Ischl around 9pm, and we saw two teenage guys in front of one of them. They must have had the webcam on, because one was dancing around in front of the terminal.

I hurt my back for no apparent reason, so I don’t feel up to writing more right now. We’re occasionally watching the BBC World News for the German election results.

We found a hotel, The Goldenes Schiff (The Golden Ship) — in Bad Ischl. It was the summer capital of the Austro-Hungarian for at least 60 years. The Crawford, Texas of Emperor Franz Joseph, but with culture and pretty buildings and great pastries.

On the drive here from Munich we were slowed down at one point by young men wearing traditional clothing — wool hats, lederhosen, etc. — herding cows across the road.

We had lunch on the way at Hotel Gasthof Mauthaeusl in southern Bavaria. They were having a tournament of the card game Scharfkopf (sharp head), which James‘s family in Wisconsin, who came from northern Bavaria to the U.S. 150 years ago, also plays.

Last night in Munich, things were already starting to get rowdy one day before the official beginning of Oktoberfest. For the first time I saw drunk, loud, people in the streets. Along the lines of icky people, there was also a CDU/CSU rally (the Christian conservative parties) in Marienplatz, the main square of the historic center.

While watching TV tonight in the hotel room, I saw some performances of pop stars on German TV shows. I was really struck by how “controlled” and choreographed British and American music stars are at this point. The Germans looked so amateurish compared to how our pop stars now look on TV. I’m not saying the music’s any better or worse, just that the production values are so different.

We had dinner at a restaurant visible across the narrow Traun river from our hotel room. It’s called the Weinhaus Attwenger, and we absolutely had to go there once we read that it was a place where Anton Bruckner dined many times when he stayed here in the summers. There is a plaque near the entrance with a relief of his head in profile and a text telling us this fact.

An office building near our hotel has a cool neon sculpture on the ground floor. Photo courtesy of James.

I was harsher than I had to be, and some would say shallow, in my previous post about the appearance of my fellow geeks. I guess it’s not that bad, but part of my overreaction is that I find smart people (men and women) sexy. An average-looking person with a good mind is HOT, in a way that a well-toned body housing an incurious mind is not. The other problem is the astounding lack of social skills in a lot of geeks. I realize that’s not exactly breaking news, but the reason I’ve found myself in the technical world over the last decade is precisely because one can now find interesting people in the tech world who are interested in something other than science fiction and Monty Python.

One of the weird things I see here is people keeping their computers on during a presentation — writing email, reading slashdot, even writing code. I’m sure they believe that they’re multi-tasking, but at times even people sitting in the front row do it, and then ask questions that show they haven’t been paying attention. They even did it during the talk by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl.

I’m trying to write a little bit before I fall asleep. My geek conference started yesterday. Except for a few fabulous exceptions, such as this Dutch guy:

this group makes all of the financial conventions I’ve attended look like a supermodel gathering. Loads of pasty, out of shape guys with long hair and beards — not as a fashion statement, but for low maintenance. Not that I have much of an excuse on the beard-while-traveling front right now.

The exceptions are generally from Europe. The guys from Copenhagen are in a class all their own, as are a few of the German ones.

For the Mac fans — Macs make up a majority of the computers here at the conference.

I was pleased to see my fellow Americans making fun of Bush. I feel like wearing a big “I’m not one of those bad Americans” button while I’m here. It’s horrifying to see the U.S. and Iraq on the front page of every paper here each morning.

Today was a phenomenal day on the food front. We had lunch at Pfistermuehle (Pfisterstrasse 4). Wow! It was incredible. I had a trio of soups for my appetizer: venison broth with a pistachio dumpling, foamed cream of chestnet mushrooms, and a creamed fennel and celery root soup. That was followed by homemade ravioli filled with freshwater crayfish — yes they have those here — on a bed of Savoy cabbage. It was accompanied by a bottle of Austrian Gruener Veltliner.

We went to the Alte Pinakothek for three hours tonight — it’s open until 10pm on Thursdays. I always knew they had an amazing collection, but I saw so many paintings tonight that I have loved for years, but only knew from books. They have a huge number of Breughels (8 rooms!), Duerers, Cranachs, Rembrandts, Titians, etc. I finally got to see the Rembrandt self-portrait I’ve always loved:

The museum building was damaged by bombing in WW II, and it’s interesting to see that they’ve chosen to make it obvious in places that they’ve only partially restored the building. There are areas that were once more decorative that have been left plain.

We had dinner afterward (at 10pm) at an Italian restaurant in a passage called Amalianpassage between our hotel’s street (Amalienstrasse) and Turkenstrasse. The restaurant, Il Baretto, was pretty authentically Italian. The older woman waiting on us said she had lived in Germany for 40 years, but she was still Italian. She was from Naples, my favorite city in Italy. We all three spoke in a mixture of German, Italian and English. I told her that my simple (and perfect) pasta dish couldn’t be made in NYC today, and she said that was because they were all American there now, instead of Italian.

When she found out we were from New York, she went, “Ooooh”, and frowned. I told her, “It’s OK”, and she said something like “the world just goes on”. We also told her we really hated Bush, that he was terrible. She responded, “like Berlusconi”.

Universities are much more cool these days. There is an open wireless network here at the site of the conference, so that I can use my notebook anywhere to connect.

At breakfast there was guy sitting at the other end of our table who I was convinced was an American geek headed for the same conference — he was wearing a Basics t-shirt after all. He turned out to be a French journalist here to cover a big motorcycle show. We apologized for thinking he might be American.

The Wittelsbachs weren’t prudes when it came to art. This is a picture of a satyr in one of the interior courtards of the Residenz — one of the royal palaces:

I like the uniforms worn by workmen doing street work here in Germany:

I got the high-speed wireless networking at my hotel here in Munich working. Yeah! No more ghastly earthlink international dialup at 28.8 kbps.

Today we went to the brand spanking new Pinakothek der Moderne on its opening day. It’s a new modern/contemporary art museum. How often do I get a chance to go to a new museum on its first day? The building itself doesn’t seem all that distinguished in terms of architecture, but it works for showing the work, and it’s designed to allow lots of ways to see the other people in the museum.

          

After I registered for my geek conference, we had a fabulous late lunch at Cafe Greco, a Greek/Mediterranean restaurant in the Neue Pinakothek, or more accurately, outside of it.

After walking around the gay area of Munich a bit, we had dinner at a beautiful restaurant called Faun at Hans-Sachs-Strasse 17. The staff was all gay, and the crowd was an amazing mix — elderly couples from the neighborhood, gay guys and the women who love them, a few cycling/hiker types, etc. They even had wild hare on the menu!

On the way to the University for my registration, we walked by St Markus Kirche. They had an exhibit by Beate Passow on the pillars of the inner sanctuary, in which she put images in light boxes of famous crucifixion paintings (Cranach, Rubens, Dali, etc.) where the Christ figure had been erased. The title of the exhibit came from a Raymond Pettibon quote: “As long as he suffers there is hope”. The bulletin board of the church, at the entrance, had the most amazing collection of items: a graph of apartment availability in Munich (it’s an expensive city with affordable housing problems), a map of Afghanistan accompanied by a photo from Schroeder’s visit there, and a map of the Nazi’s plan for transforming Munich.

On a happier note, we walked around the Englischer Garten and had lunch at the outside tables near the Chinese Pagoda. There was a film crew of young, cute Germans eating near us, including this fine specimen, with a Brownsville(!) t-shirt:

One of the things that amazes me about this part of the world is that they use glass everywhere. They don’t give you plastic when you have a beer at an outside area on picnic tables — you get sturdy china plates and glass beer or wine glasses. Even at an Esso (Exxon) gas station, you can drink coffee in a real cup and saucer.

We visited the Geschwister Scholl Platz today. They were a brother and sister who were killed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the Ludwig Maximilian University. The memorial is very good — there are ceramic versions of the leaflets on the pavement near the windows from which they were thrown.