Day 10: Homeward Bound

"Nastrovje!"

After the organ concert at Saint Giles, Dear Husband and I returned to our hotel. We had packed between returning from Terezín and heading off to dinner with the group, so all that was left to do was to prop up our feet and turn on the telly. You see, we were in Europe while group play for the European Men's Soccer Championship being held in Poland and the Ukraine, so every evening there were two games on. If you've never watched television in Europe, they only show commercials at the ends of programs, not in the middle. Can you imagine a ref having to stop the play of a soccer match for a tv time out? Us, neither. Now, DH and I are not soccer hooligans, but we are general sports fans, and unlike most Americans, we appreciate a good Fussball match. I frequently seem to be in Germany during World Cup matches, so I associate abundant soccer with Europe, and the Euro 2012 is one of the things that made this trip so enjoyable for me.

Something else, which gave me Heimweh (homesickness) for my time living in Germany to do research, was sleeping with a Bettdecke (comforter). DH is not a fan, because he frequently gets too warm when he sleeps, and these were the real deal. I, however, find them comfortable and snuggly and just regulate my body temperature by increasing or decreasing the number of appendages exposed to the night air.

We turned in early that night, because we had to pick up our boxed breakfasts in time to get on the bus at 6am to ride to the airport for our flight to our flight to a bus back home. The boxed meal (really more of a lunch, with a cheese sandwich, a meat sandwich, fruit, and juice) couldn't hold a candle to the excellent breakfasts we enjoyed at our hotels. I was actually rather amused at the surprise and delight our trip-mates expressed when they saw the spreads at each new hotel. There was typical cold/European fare: breads and rolls, whole and chopped fruit, meats and cheeses, veggies, yogurt and muesli, hard- or soft-boiled eggs. And there was hot/American fare: scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon or sausage, hash browns, cereal with milk. We generally can't afford to stay at places with breakfasts as nice as these were--and I snub my nose at American hotels that call coffee, muffins, and some whole fruit a "Continental breakfast"--but I sure do enjoy them when we get the chance. The photo is from Prague, on a morning when I had orange juice, Bircher-Benner muesli with yogurt and rote Grütze (whole sweetened and preserved berries), pink grapefruit slices, and a piece of dark bread with spreadable cheese and a slice of ham. The roll, cucumbers, and salmon salad were for the bus ride to Terezín. DH generally had fruit and some kind of pastry or bread; he tried the pancakes one place and reported they weren't any good, unfortunately.

The other photos are from the evening of Day 8. After we got back from Ta Fantastica, in the lobby we met other group members planning their alternative day of touring (instead of the trip to Terezín). They had been interested in sampling the local liquors, and I just had to recommend sliwowice (slivovitz). DH and I shared a glass of this Czech plum brandy in honor of my paternal grandfather, whose voice we can both hear in our heads saying, "Nastrovje!" ("Cheers!") Oh, but it buuurns going down. (See before/after snapshots above.)

The journey home was pretty uneventful for us. We were able to find group members willing to trade seats so we could sit together, the plane was not unbearably hot, and no luggage was lost--although I did succumb to a nap between the airport and home. Nevertheless, I had no difficulty falling asleep that night, as I've always found coming back from Europe easier than going over. We've long since unpacked, done loads of laundry, cleaned the house, and moved on. Writing this blog posts was the last thing to do, to chronicle a really wonderful working-vacation.

In conclusion, thank you for reading! It was fun to relive our trip for you. Postings will definitely slow down now, as I'm trying to get a third dissertation chapter drafted by the time classes start in August. Or by Sept. 1. Or Labor Day... Please continue to share here or elsewhere how you and your family are doing. I love to keep in touch.

Tickling the Ivories

Look, Ma! No keys!

If irregularly timed and vegetable-less meals were one irritation of our choir trip through Central Europe, the other was generally poor instruments. Being a conservatory-trained musician, Dear Husband, DMA, was looking forward to sharing music inspired by the places we went and some of the famous composers who worked there. Alas, it was not to be. Every time we arrived at a venue (with the exception of Vienna), the question was, What can DH play? Is there a working organ? Will he be allowed to use it? How big will the keyboard and pedals be? How many stops will it have? Is there a piano? Or at least a keyboard?

In Budapest, DH could not use the recently refurbished antique organ, and there wasn't a piano, but both the modern organ and the keyboard were decent replacements. For our scheduled but informal concert in Eisenstadt (above), there was no instrument on the stage whatsoever, although DH had seen a grand piano in promotional images. Turns out it was locked on a lift behind the curtains, so that concert was a capella, and he sang with the group.

Things went well enough at the Karlskirche in Vienna, but the St. Nicholas church in Prague turned out to be a disappointment. They don't let outside groups use their beautiful, refurbished, antique organ (photo in the last post). No matter that DH has a doctoral degree (in piano) and decades of experience (on the organ): no exceptions. Instead, there was a weak electronic keyboard (the black rectangle in the background the photo, right) and a sorry excuse for an organ, a single electronic keyboard attached to a set of pedals. DH used it for the one song for which the audience really needed to hear the piano/organ part and the keyboard for everything else; there was no organ music on this concert.

Now, I can understand the organizers' hesitancy to allow just any Joe Shmoe off the street play the organ, especially after its refurbishment. But if I were an audience member, I would have been appalled to think the church promotes itself as a venue for concerts, brings in groups that (supposedly) have talent, and then I have to listen to such "machines," as the maestra calls them. As if to salt the wound, after the concert, the man running it presented the choir director with a CD...of a recital on the organ!

After we got back to that States, I happened to meet some doctoral students in composition, one of whom has had works premiered in Prague. I told him our story, and he agreed that the venue operators in the city and at St. Nicholas are protective of their instruments. So it wasn't just us.

Our tour guide must have felt sorry for DH, because he used his organization's connections to get DH a half hour of "play time" on the mechanical pipe organ from 1702 at St. Francis of Assisi, a beautiful baroque church at the foot of the Charles Bridge. The church belongs to the Order of the Knights of the Cross with a Red Star, the only knights order founded in Bohemia, and it wasn't destroyed by Hussites in the 15th century because of the order's charitable work with the poor and sick. The building's architecture is interesting, having a tall cupola with a fresco of "The Last Judgment" and underground chambers of the earlier, Gothic iteration of the church, visible through three "peek holes" in the floor.

To the right you can see the keyboard that Mozart himself supposedly once played, when he was in Prague for the opening(s) of his opera(s). DH joked he wasn't going to wash his hands anymore, lest he wash off what he was sure was oil from the fingertips of the genius himself. It wasn't a very big organ--like the one in the Karlskirche, not big enough to play most Bach organ works. But the designers did use a clever little trick to increase the lower range of the keyboard. Take a look at the photo to the right. You might have noticed that the white and black keys are reversed. DH says he doesn't know when the convention switched to lower keys being white and upper keys being black. Now, if you look just above his hands on the lower manual, and to the right on the upper manual, you can see a couple of "double-decker" white keys. They're for playing a short, broken octave with split keys. I would try to explain it to you but it would be a disaster, so just click on the link in the previous sentence and scroll down to "broken octave" if you're interested.

Directly above DH's hands are a couple of turned wooden knobs. (There's also one in the upper foreground of the shot.) Those are the stops. Pulling one of the fourteen stops engaged the mechanism that regulated air flow through the pipes. What was neat is that the part of the console above the manuals has a carved wooden screen in front of it instead of being solid. Every time DH hit a key, we could watch the thin wooden dowels shifting up and down, making a clickityclackety sound that probably wasn't loud enough to disturb listeners down on the floor.

If you can believe it, there was yet more music in store for us on Day 8, so keep reading!

Other Vienna Memories

Before we move on to Prague, here are some other memories from our quick stay in the capital of Austria, in no particular order.

The Albertina Museum*--we had plans to see the Austrian Theater Museum one afternoon, but my intel was out-of-date, and it turned out they are closed on Tuesdays now. So we went to the art museum down the street, where we had just missed a Klimt show. So we looked at modernist artwork with a strong interwar representation. Some of Picasso's early work obviously required thought and skill, but Dear Husband and I agreed that some of his later sculpture just looked like he wasn't trying anymore. Maybe that was the point, but it didn't appeal to us as much. The highlight of the visit was deciding to  check out the Prunkräume, rooms of the palace that maintained some of their original decorations and a few furnishings but that also contained works of art from Dürer onward. It's worth going to the website to check out the 360-degree virtual tours of the rooms.

*--Not to be confused with the Albertinum Museum in Dresden, named for a different Albert.

The Belvedere Palace/Museum--the morning had been rainy, but the afternoon was surprisingly beautiful, as the above picture attests, looking north toward the Ring and the center of town. Too bad we needed neither of the umbrellas I lugged around in my bag the whole time... Inside, we wandered through one wing of each floor, taking in Secessionist works like Klimt's _The Kiss_, an exhibit on the differences between Realism and Impressionism, and interwar modern art by the likes of Egon Schiele.

Credit: MAH

Right is "Tafelspitz," Kaiser Franz Josef's favorite meal: boiled beef, creamed spinach, and roasted potatoes.

Left is the "Riesenrad" in the Prater amusement park in Vienna. It was dedicated 105 years ago today, on 3 July 1897 for Kaiser Franz Josef's 50th Jubiläum. The ferris wheel was almost totally destroyed by bombing and fire during WWII and due to reasons of stability only rebuilt with 15 of the original 30 wagons. For a long time it served as a symbol of Austria's reconstruction after the war. Today there is also a museum. We did not get to ride on it this trip but now have something to do next time we're in Vienna. I hear the view from the top is great and also that the ride is slow, so you really get your money's worth.

There was a lot of art to look at in Vienna. The apartment of our hostess, Jutta, was full of paintings. Below, the group gives a short concert in her living room. Next, a select group of tenors, who had been holding secret rehearsals, sang the beautiful love song, "Annie Laurie," which one of them had dedicated to his girlfriend--and then he proposed! She accepted (i.e. "gave her promise true"), and there were few dry eyes. I couldn't actually see the proposal because of the crowd of people, so I marked up this "before" photo.

[Text on photo: He put a ring on it.]

What's For Lunch?

The group's trip was planned by Music Celebrations International to have a sumptuous Continental breakfast at the hotel, lunch on our own, and dinner with the group, either at the hotel or at a local restaurant. Because lunch (and sometimes dinner) had to be fitted in around our travel or sight-seeing schedule, irregular meal times was probably the most frustrating aspect of the trip. (Maybe this doesn't bother you, but Dear Husband and I enjoy ourselves more and are pleasanter to other people when we aren't hungry!) I have already told you how uniform the dinners were, so this is a post entirely about some of the different lunches we ate in the various places we visited.

double-fisting

Budapest, Day 2: Our lunch at the cute little restaurant next to our hotel on Day 1 had taken ridiculously long (when we were all starving after having gotten off the plane and then been taken for sightseeing until we could check into the hotel), so because lunch on the day we went to the spa had to be fast and cheap, we treated ourselves to street food: gelato cones from a vendor in the square by the Fishermen's Bastion and warm pastries from a hole-in-the-wall bakery recommended to us by the local guides, Dora and Nora. DH had a sweet one with cherry filling, while I chose a savory one with cream cheese and dill (left).

Vienna, Day 6: After playing with the Karlskirche organ, we asked our travel guide, Karel, for a recommendation of a cafe on the Ringstrasse. He recommended Cafe Schwarzenberg, the oldest cafe on the Ring (est. 1861). We ordered traditional Austrian foods: Wiener Schnitzel with boiled potatoes (and green salad) for him, Knödel mit Ei (and a house salad) for me. My dish was new to me and appeared to be made from a thick dough poured in a pan and then cooked/chopped with a scrambled egg. It was tasty and filling. Poor, DH, though--schnitzel was on the menu for dinner that night! (It's the photo with the parsley from the dinner post.) Still, he figured two schnitzels in more than twelve months isn't a bad record.

"Seriously? You're taking a photograph of me with our
food? I'm freaking hungry: just let me eat already!"

To drink, he asked for a Soda-Himbeer (mineral water with raspberry syrup), and I had a Soda-Zitrone (mineral water with freshly squeezed lemon juice). His was a Schorle--something he learned to like visiting me in Germany--and tasted sweet, like a fruit juice soda. Mine was a fizzy version of the hot drink, heisse Zitrone (hot lemon[ade]), that I first learned to like in Vienna--only without the sugar, so it had quite the pucker to it. I suppose I could have used the sugar on the table to sweeten it, but I decided to try it straight up. You can see how large the glasses were: they were very refreshing.

Travel, Day 7: The photo on the left shows Dear Husband and a traveling companion in front of the rest-stop cafeteria, called the Samoobslužná Restaurace, on our way from Vienna to Prague. I had hoped the name meant "smorgasbord restaurant," but no such luck; it means "self-service restaurant" in Czech. We each got a cup of vegetable beef soup and then shared a surprisingly tasty filet of salmon with white rice and steamed veggies and a Fanta from the fountain that--again surprisingly--was not watered down. I doubt the average American rest-stop cafeteria has food that good.

Prague, Day 8: The weather was cool and sometimes wet in the middle part of our trip, so on the day of the Prague concert, DH and I just wanted to get in from the drizzle someplace warm and eat something hot for lunch. Here I am just before enjoying a hot chocolate before a lunch of pizza and salad (veggies, had to have our veggies!). We shared a thin-crust, four-cheese pizza, but others made the mistake of each ordering a different pizza--there was no way they could eat it all themselves. Some members of our group went next door to a stand-up place, where they got to watch the chef knead and spin their dough for a cheaper "Italian pie."

I'm curious: do you have memories of food while traveling, whether in the US or abroad? It could be something particularly good, bad, or unusual about the place, food, circumstances, or your dining companions.

Day 6: Karlskirche

And David danced before the Lord with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod. ~ 2 Samuel 6:14

close-up of unique baroque architecture of
the Karlskirche, dedicated to a saint who
healed plague victims (built 1716-1737)

Tuesday evening The Chorale had a concert at St. Charles Church (Karlskirche), and our tour guide had managed to get Dear Husband more than an hour of practice time on the organ there. While there are different brands of piano (Yahama, Baldwin, Steinway) that have different actions and therefore play slightly differently than one another, they all have 52 white keys, 36 black keys, in the same pattern, everywhere. By contrast, each organ is a unique instrument. They differ in number of manuals, pipes, registers, stops--and in the case of the two old pipe organs DH played on our trip--in the number of keys and pedals. Organs can have different kinds of stops and combinations and therefore sound fairly different. The stops can be in different places on the console. So it's really hard to just sit down and play a new organ without getting some time to "test drive" it first. That's what DH and I did on the morning of Day 6.

This organ dates from some time in the nineteenth century and has two manuals, 30 stops, and a mere octave and a half in the pedals--which means you couldn't play most of J.S. Bach's organ works on it! We spent the first twenty minutes just figuring out which stops went to which manual, how they sounded, and what kinds of combinations he could make with them. I turned pages, took photographs, and tried to remember not to fall off the big step next to the organ. We were up in the organ loft, 75 steps and I don't know how many feet from ground level.

Dear Husband at the organ

The choir director had asked me on rather short notice whether I would like to choreograph a dance to go with one of the pieces, a slow, beautiful lament written after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. I figured it wouldn't hurt to try, and since I wasn't on the program, if it didn't come together I could bow out at the last minute, and the audience would be none the wiser. So on this morning DH played the piece so I could hear it (for the first time!); over lunch we dissected its structure; and in the plaza next to that afternoon's art museum, I began to compose a dance. I cannibalized a liturgical dance I had done at church a few months ago and added some new themes. The dress rehearsal after dinner was atrocious, as I still hadn't figured out the middle section. But I studied the piece some more after changing (into a borrowed shirt and skirt suitable for dancing, and a patterned shawl as a prop) and devised some "filler" moves in case there was more time before the next phrase--and somehow it did all come together. I processed down the aisle, danced to one side and the other, fluttered the shawl like a flame and like waves, and ended in a pose of supplication to the altar.

The reactions were mixed, but mostly openly positive. I admit I was a little hesitant to dance at all (in a Catholic! church!), which is why I borrowed the t-shirt to wear instead of a strappy tank top (which is more than being naked but less than a linen ephod). But all the movements were dignified and as emotional as I could make them. Apparently I made the tenor section choke up, although they were supposed to be looking at the choir director and not at me. How's that for a European liturgical dance debut? However, one of men noted that at least one audience member was not keen on the idea of my dancing in the House of the Lord, and he wrote the following poem about it.

 "Requiem" by Eliza Gilkeyson,
      arranged for choir 
      by Craig Hella Johnson,
      sung by The Chorale in Vienna

She had come to the church to worship God,
to hear a touring choir sing classics  with
some spirituals--she thought the choir was good.

The young liturgical dancer was lithe,
quite serious as she embodied grief
and bafflement at death from tsunami,
earthquake, and flood. 

                                     The choir prayed for relief,
for understanding from Mother Mary.

The worshiper, offended by the dance,
looked at the floor, her eyes narrow and hard,
her jaw was clenched, her lips were white and thin.

In choir and congregation there were tears
in sympathy with grieving mother, child...

To turn away from beauty is a sin. 

    A Sonnet by Steve Shoemaker
      June, 2012

view from the balcony with altar directly in front, modern artwork
hanging from ceiling above, and the elevator used in the renovations
that tourists can now pay to ride up in for a better view on the right

What's For Dinner? Part I

The photograph to your left was the inspiration for this post. The plate contains lasagna, chicken tetrazzini, some kind of gumbo? (rice with sausage), and scalloped potatoes. It was the entree at the home of a Viennese singer who very graciously hosted us; this was preceded by a soup and followed by a sweet dessert with a little buzz. All the food tasted very good...but that's all there was. Have you figured out yet what was missing? There were nothing green, no vegetables.

Several of us had noticed this patter to dinner: soup, meat + starch, dessert. If there were any vegetables, they served as garnish, as with the entree from Budapest below, of cheesy breaded chicken breast, french fries, white rice, a piece of lettuce, and a curly-Q of shaved carrot. (I ate everything but the fries. Dessert came with a scoop of vanilla ice cream; good thing I didn't have to sing right after that--I don't know how the rest of them did it without getting phlegmy!)


Now, I am familiar with this Central European menu, since it comes up in my dissertation research. The soup is to stimulate the appetite. The meat + starch are the main event (calories, protein, carbohydrates). According to at least one physiologist, the purpose of dessert is that the sugar helps with gastric motility and therefore digestion of the dinner just eaten. Fruits and vegetables are good for appearance  and variety, both of which stimulate appetite, but too many--especially raw--burden the digestive system with indigestible cellulose. The low nutritional worth of fruits, at least, can be increased by cooking them down with sugar into compote. This is, as you can see, a pre-vitamin paradigm.

I knew about this way of eating, and yet I was surprised to experience it consistently in Budapest and Vienna at our restaurant dinners. Granted, we were served hot meals in the evening of the kind that Central Europeans traditionally ate/eat in the middle of the day (~1pm). Fruits and vegetables are normal parts of the two cold meals at the beginning and end of the day, which generally consist of bread or rolls, meats, cheeses, bread-spreads, pickles, and maybe hard-boiled eggs. But when I mentioned this to my (American) mother-in-law, she told me that her (Austrian) mother-in-law had been of the opinion that a proper large meal of the kind our hostess served us should include three meats and a starch!*

Look, honey: parsley counts as a vegetable, right?
Wienerschnitzel and potatoes in Vienna

*--This must be a national formula, as while at a food conference in Preston a year ago, I learned about the British "meat and two veg" formula, both of which I suppose are analogous to the American Midwestern stereotype of "meat and potatoes."

Day 5: Architectural Tour of Vienna

Rhenish-Romanesque St. Francis of Assisi church (built 1898-1910) Dear Husband took from the bus window. Also known as the Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Jubiläumskirche to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef I's 50th anniversary on the throne, or more colloquially as "the Mexico church," as it's found on Mexico Plaza. Here's a better, street-level view.




The Neo-Gothic Rathaus (town hall, 1872-1883) lit up at dusk. It stands on the Ringstrasse, the semi-circular boulevard created where the the medieval city walls once stood. Like the Hausmannization of Paris (1850s), the idea here was to tear down the walls to ease the flow of traffic and commerce and to increase land for building. In Vienna, 1/3 of the Ringstrasse was supposed to be devoted to shops and residences, 1/3 to cultural installations (like museums and the opera), and 1/3 to green space. It was very popular with the up-and-coming bourgeoisie: they got big houses, refined past-times, and wide, green boulevards perfect for promenading but terrible for blockading (i.e. during a revolution). The Ringstrasse is only a semi-circle, because World War I interrupted the building orgy. 






Urania, the observatory, built in Art Nouveau style  at the confluence of the Vienna and Danube Rivers (1910). Now a public education institute with a restaurant overlooking the waters, its dome was badly damaged by bombing during World War II. It was reconstructed and re-opened in 1957.

UNO City--the O is for Office (1978)

Vienna is one of four headquarters of the United Nations. Trivia: do you know where the other three are?* It is also home to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

Trash incinerator/heating plant (1967-1971), designed by Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (1928-2000). It may look fairly tame, but the artist known as "Peaceful Realm-Rainy Day-Darkly Colorful-Hundred Waters" had a penchant for curved lines, uneven floors, and "tree tenants" growing on the roof and from windows. DH and I visited his museum (Kunsthauswien) the first time we were in Vienna; this time the group just went to the "Toilets of Modern Art" across the street.

At 51 stories, this is Austria's tallest building and Vienna's only skyscraper, the Millennium Tower (1999). It houses a cinema, office space, and a shopping center (Millennium-City), and it has its own internal telecommunications network. In the background you can see the Vienna woods, the foothills at the beginning (or the end) of the Alps. What? Can you hear that? It's the sound of music! Coming soon: post(s) about our performance(s) in Vienna.



* New York, Geneva, and Nairobi

Day 4: Central Cemetery, Vienna

Editor's note: we are pleased to announce that this is FrauDoktorDoctor's 100th post! 

Brahms

After Eisenstadt we were driven up to Vienna. Our first stop in the capital of Austria was at the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) in the southern part of the city, where numerous musical luminaries are buried all together under tall marble slabs carved with various images and symbols. That's a close-up of Johannes Brahm's gravestone at left; someone left him roses while he thinks deeply about his next composition. Below are photographs of Ludwig von Beethoven's obelisk (left) and Franz Schubert's bas relief (right). Johann Strauss (father and son) are also buried in the area. Nobody knows the location of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's grave, of course--only it's not because he was too poor to afford a grave plot and a proper funeral. Rather, it's because Emperor Josef was into Enlightened Absolutism and wanted to reform burial customs from irrational individual graves to space-saving mass graves. Funny, but it didn't catch on. However, there is a statue in the center of this area to that classical composer.

I also took photos of some of pretty or striking monuments in the area. So that this post doesn't take too long to load, I'll just include three others. Below left, a nymph waits under a tree that has been incorporated into the gravestone. Below right, a fairy from 1890.

The strangest monument was undoubtedly this one (left). I can only guess that the deceased was a sculptor who designed it before s/he died. The vertical part consists of a naked, headless woman wearing high heels embracing a skeleton (also headless). The horizontal part is a tortured, twisted body missing head and feet.

We could have wandered about and looked at more gravestones, but the onset of rain made sure we ended our pilgrimage on time! We hurried back to the bus and continued to our hotel, across the street from the Hapsburgs' summer home, Schönbrunn Palace. More from Vienna next post.

Ein deutschsprachiges Weihnachten

DH and I, with "the gang" (our Bible study group), after

decorating the house and Christmas tree

"A German-language Christmas," reads the title of this blog post. Now that I am back in the United States, it's easy to see that Christmas here is a lot like Christmas over there. You are probably aware that many of our cherished traditions have their roots in that Teutonic nation: decorated fir trees, braided Christmas bread, "Silent Night." For my Christmas Eve entry this year, here is a medley of Christmas celebrations from various places in Europe, ending in Deutschland:

The best of European Christmas:
http://www.viennaforbeginners.com/

This blog carries lovely photographs of Vienna, accompanied by nostalgic or quirky verse. (My favorite references US Poet Laureate Billy Collins.) Although I have spent only three days there, it makes me impatient to go back this summer!

The worst: In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) arrives on 5 December on a large ship, then transfers to a white horse. He is accompanied by Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), "a Moor," an actor in blackface.
Once a slave to Saint Nicholas, the many Peters (yes, he's been cloned) now each have a particular job to do: while one wraps presents, another bakes cookies; while one navigates, another still plays the fool to rouse the crowd while they wait for the Big Man. The Netherlands used be a great sea-faring nation, which included trade not just in spices but in people, too.

Fun fact to know and tell: when DH and I were in Chicago recently to attend the Lyric Opera and visit a few museums, we saw the 50 national Christmas trees in the Museum of Science and Industry. Each was decorated by members of a local heritage group to represent Christmas in Kenya, Egypt, Belize, Russia, Japan, and Scotland. Although the trees were spread out, it was easy to see that neighboring countries share some traditions, like the parades of children re-creating Mary and Joseph's search for room at an inn in Central and Latin America, or the emphasis on Epiphany in Eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Ukraine. One fun fact we learned is that in Hungary, finding a spider web in the house on Christmas Day brings good luck. DH has been teasing me about (not) cleaning the house, just in case!

It's Academic: Joe Perry, UIUC History PhD, Christmas in Germany: a cultural history
Finally, I share with you a brief summary of a first book, just published by someone who graduated from my department a few years ago. In Christmas in Germany: a cultural history, Joe Perry reconstructs two hundred years' worth of holiday rituals and celebrations, from the Christmas tree (der Weihnachtsbaum) to Father Christmas (der Weihnachtsmann) to "the Christmas spirit" (die Weihnachtsstimmung), in order to explore how these seemingly timeless and universal traditions were constructed in the early 1800s as a reaction to the tumultuous Napoleonic Era. Like many Europeans whose lives and countries had been rearranged by the ambitious Emperor of France, Germans turned inward toward the private sphere and created the modern Western ideal of (bourgeois) family life. Perry shows how Germans developed a national emotional culture around the combination of Western Christianity and pagan festivals; however, this common culture still allowed for differences in class, confession (Catholic vs. Protestant, Jews), and politics. Ancient faith in the birth of God's son combined with modern consumerism (Kauflust--the desire to buy) and medieval pagan emphasis on light during the darkest time of the year--strands we still find in our American Christmases. Moreover, Perry argues that "This book moves beyond public/private dichotomies to argue that Christmas, supposedly a private family celebration, was and is Germany's national holiday" (7). It is the private, "feminine" side of national belonging, which historians have tended to ascribe to the more obvious, masculine militarism of public German nationalism. For the last 200 years, it has been one thing most Germans had in common, as whomever claimed to speak for "the nation" (Social Democrats, National Socialists, Cold War liberals, Communists) tried to shape how private individuals did or did not celebrate it. Perry also tries to write the history of German Christmas "from below," showing how some Germans pushed back against the contemporary narrative of what Christmas was supposed to be. In other words, the "war on Christmas" began as soon as it was invented as we know it.

However you do (or do not) celebrate Christmas, I wish you Happy Holidays and a Joyous New Year!

Connect the Dots!

View European Travels 2010-2011 in a larger map


Travel is still on my mind, so while I sort photographs and write up posts about my various summer adventures, I thought for my first entry since returning to the United States, I would share this map of my European peregrinations. If you click on the link, you can see the entire map and also descriptions of what I was doing in each place. First stop: Copenhagen (September 2010). Last stop: Warsaw (August 2011).

A typical tourist itinerary, part 6 of 10

Monday:

            On this, our last day in the capital, we do too much, although not by design.  After finding out about this and that to do or see, our itinerary gets rather crowded.

What I had planned:

What we actually do:

·   “A Klimt Walk Through Vienna” ·   visit the Josephinum history of medicine museum ·   eat lunch ·   visit the Hundertwasserhaus and museum (Kunst Haus Wien) ·   eat dinner

·  take a photo of Succession Haus (closed on Mondays) ·  take photo of DH in front of the Mozart Haus ·  tour the catacombs at St. Stephan’s ·  see the exhibits (especially the wax anatomical models) at the Josephinum ·  eat lunch at Café Berg ·  buy a postcard for my Doktorvater at the Sigmund Freud Haus und Museum down the street ·  go across town to the Friedensreich Hundertwasser apartment building and visited his nearby museum (Kunst Haus Wien) ·  hoof it to the Belvedere in the hopes of getting our picture taken kissing in front of The Kiss (no luck, as the museum was open but the grounds were closed, so we couldn’t get in) ·  walk back to the hotel ·  (almost) fail at buying grapes at the Billa ·  eat cold leftovers for dinner in our room

This is the closest we come to Klimt and the Succession art movement while in Vienna.  The writing across the front of this Art Nouveau temple to the arts says "Der Zeit ihre Kunst der Kunst ihre Freiheit," which means, "Each age[has] its art, and art [should have] its freedom."  My photographs for this day all come out rather dark, as it is cloudy.

Meanwhile, back at the cathedral, the catacombs are pretty cool, especially the ossuaries.  To make more room in the graves, prisoners were sent down to collect the long bones (and sometimes the skulls), which were then stacked like firewood in separate chambers.  We see a mass plague burial pit and learn that Mozart’s “pauper’s burial” was not his adopted city devaluing his genius on account of his debts (cf. Amadeus) but rather part of the enlightened despot Joseph II’s (1741-1790) rational reforms: in addition to setting up a medico-surgical school at the eponymous Josephinum, he also prohibited burials within the city limits, on sanitary grounds.  Oh, but those clever wealthy townspeople: some wanted to be buried near the relics in the cathedral anyway, and if they couldn’t do it on St. Stephan’s Platz, they would do it under the Platz.  Hence, (more) catacombs.  Problem was, 400 rotting bodies per room x 30 rooms, proved too...odiferous (even walled up in their coffins), and after 40 years the stench was so bad that they couldn’t hold church services in the Dom anymore!  So the larger/newer portion of the catacombs under the Platz was abandoned, and only church officials are buried in the older but frequently renovated part under the church proper.

            2/3 of the Josephinum’s history of medicine exhibits is dedicated to old dead white guys and their books and instruments.  Even for me the appeal largely lies in recognizing this or that one.  The best part is, hands down, the wax anatomical models from the 1780s.  These consist of both body parts in various recognizable stages of dissection, and of entire bodies sculpted either laying down or standing up.  The laying-down ones include a so-called Medici Venus from Florence: a naked woman lies on a pillow in a glass coffin—er, case—her long hair flowing over her shoulders, a double strand of pearls around her neck, and her thorax and abdomen open to the searching (male?) gaze of the beholder.  I delight in pointing out various anatomical structures to DH.  [Ed.'s note: photography was not allowed, but you can see two images on the English version of the models' webpage.]

The afternoon we spend absorbing the art and architecture of Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (1928-2000), the famous Austrian designer and environmentalist whose adopted name translates as “Peaceful-Realm Rainy-Day Darkly-Colorful Hundred-Waters”.  He has to be famous: who else can design, construct, and dedicate an entire art museum to themselves, 15 years before they die?  Hundertwasser thought modern architecture with its straight lines was too constraining on humanity’s innate creativity, and that the spiral was the ultimate symbol of life and death.  He wanted to unite technology and nature—hence the “tree tenants” growing out of the windows of his apartment buildings.  To prevent one’s surroundings from fading into blah-ness, he used crooked lines, bright colors, and often made the floors uneven (they would not be ADA-compliant!).  He was also a pioneer of green-roof technology.  Hundertwasser's 3D work is a feast for the senses—perhaps too rich for some tastes.  His 2D work is not for everyone.  At his best, Hundertwasser entertains me.  Other times, it just looks like he’s tripping on something.  Maybe an uneven floorboard?

From the pew to the podium, part 5 of 10

Sunday:
Me: Sitting down: now there’s a concept.
DH: Yes, apparently human beings fold in the middle, so they can be stored in various positions, including sitting and lying down. They are not always found upright and in motion.

This exchange gives you a little taste of what our Sunday is like—and yet, it does not feel like we are trying to do too much. After getting up and showering, we wash some laundry in the bathroom sink. DH hasn’t managed to bring quite enough clothes to get through the whole two weeks, plus I need clean pajamas for when we visit his extended family later in the week. The hotel’s Continental breakfast is delightful, and then, somewhat behind schedule, we set off for mass in the St. Stephan’s Cathedral, very fast, and in the wrong direction. This becomes apparent after we walk for longer than necessary past unfamiliar shops. Finally we find a transit stop and manage to get to the Dom 15 minutes late, right in the middle of the singing of the Gospel lesson from the book of John. That is our favorite part of the service, not least because we know what is going on (geekily, we had been discussing John [and Isaiah] during lunch at the palace the day before). Unfortunately, the rest of the mass is mostly incomprehensible Catholic rites and a mumbled homily on St. Elizabeth and charity, so there is time to absorb the heavily decorated interior, with its statues of saints and bishops, its altars and paintings, and the candles and chandeliers. This church is important in Viennese history, and I suppose it is beautiful by old church standards, but it is a bit much for me.

The locals call this figure "Christ with a toothache"
(Zahnweh-Herrgott) because of his pained expression.

View from the Südturm

For lunch we meet a UofI Fulbright scholar and his girlfriend for Goulasch (goulash) and Zitrone (hot lemonade) at Café Alt Wien until the catacombs open. Back at the cathedral, while walking around the outside of the building, looking for the entrance to the underground tombs, we come across some documentation of the cleaning and restoration work, as well as some fabulous—and fabulously old—religious artwork around the outside of the church. When we

We climbed this high!

finally find the catacomb entrance (inside), we are turned away, because the sanctuary is being closed in preparation for a special mass that afternoon. Instead, we climb the 343 steps up to the lookout in the south tower. We get down in time to  witness the looong procession of the Austrian Catholic men’s association into the Dom; although that is kind of cool, it also means that we can’t see the catacombs that day after all. Schade.

The other stop on our agenda for Sunday is the Haus der Musik, a hands-on multimedia music history museum and sound-exploration center. We hear how the Vienna Philharmonic has a unique sound among orchestras; play with vowel sounds; mix a track of classical music/ street noise/ music of the spheres; take turns conducting a video-recording of the Vienna Philharmonic in Brahm’s “Hungarian Dance”; and enjoy exhibits on Vienna’s most well-known composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven [right], Schubert, Strauss, and Mahler).* Dinner is at the restaurant at the top of the museum. On the way home from the Haus der Musik we stumble upon a very large monument dedicated to all the Soviet soldiers who died while liberating Austria from fascist Germany in April 1945. What is perhaps more surprising than finding an enormous marble and bronze monument to dead Soviet soldiers in the middle of Vienna is the fact that it was dedicated in August 1945 already.

*--There is also a very small room with Schopenhauer and two other members of the Second Viennese School (of 12-tone composition)—DH notices they didn’t play any of their music on loudspeakers. For more on 12-tone music, look under "serialism" here.

Grüβ Gott!, part 4 of 10

Saturday:
Me: Who turned up the gravity?

The artful Roman Ruin (1778)

As we arrive in Vienna about half past six in the morning, the sun is rising.  We deposit our luggage in a locker and maneuver through the commuter rush at a bakery to have breakfast.  Then we set off for Schloβ Schönbrunn.  It lies a good ways away through a commercial district, but we still manage to arrive at this iconic Viennese summer palace before the crowds.  The rooms are gorgeously appointed and still representatively furnished (except the ones being renovated).  We eat an early lunch in the park, whose gravel paths are liberally dotted with joggers on this unseasonably warm autumn weekend, before hiking up the hill behind the most famous of the “beautiful fountains.”   From there we have a magnificent view of the city, which has grown out to meet this one-time hunting lodge.  After some hemming and hawing over the prices, we decide to skip the greenhouses and head to our hotel.   Lying across the bed, I utter the line above.  It isn’t sleepiness as much as a general exhaustive heaviness of the limbs that has settled upon us.  DH naps while I get on the internet and look for a place to eat dinner.  That evening we eat at the Balkan restaurant around the corner before hopping on the U-Bahn to the small Kammeroper, where we watch Josef Haydn’s one-act D’isola disinhabitata.  Programs apparently cost money, and neither of us knows the story, so we just watch and read the supertitles (auf Deutsch).  The company puts a post-modern twist on this love story with stage directions that undercut the hunky-dory ending, and we both enjoy it.

The Glorietta (1775) at the top of the hill

The glorious view in the other direction (2010)