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.

Day 4: Eisenstadt

On our way from Budapest to Vienna, we stopped in Eisenstadt, a little town just on the other side of the border between Hungary and Austria. We had one reason (Josef Haydn) and two destinations (the Esterhazy Palace and the Haydn House). The town center was pretty quiet that Sunday afternoon as we ate lunch as quickly as we could at a little cafe. Then we hurried back to the palace for the tour before the scheduled afternoon concert. It turns out there was no need, as the tours started late, and neither guide seemed to know an abridged version of the palace tour. So we heard all about the family that had employed Josef Haydn, including their connections to the ruling Austrian Hapsburgs and their marital woes. The one happy marriage ended prematurely with the death of the wife at 35 (left). We also saw the baroque palace chapel, complete with preserved(?) body in a glass coffin, supposedly St. Constantine, the Roman legionnaire who converted to Christianity.

The Haydnsaal (Haydn Hall) is an ornate performance hall in the palace. The Chorale was scheduled to go on at 2:30pm, but I don't think the formal singing started until 3pm. Not that the audience minded, all 5 of them or so. And they were hurried off the stage 20 minutes later so some kids could play dress-up and make believe. Ah well. The acoustics were at least as good in the open-air courtyard below, where they sang "Nellie Bly" as a parting gesture to the palace.

Second stop: the Haydn house and museum, where we had cheerful guides with better English. For 12 of his 40 years in service to the Esterhazy family, the composer and his wife lived on one floor of a house just down the street from the palace. The prince even paid to have the house remodeled and expanded after two different fires. Like the Mozart house/museum in Salzburg, the museum contains portraits, some personal effects, and compositions. By the way, that marriage was also arranged and unhappy, and like many of the Esterhazys, they also took lovers. Poor Haydn: as my memento of his home, the only thing I took a picture of was his kitchen. You can see a photo of a piano-forte he used in the header on the museum's website.

Day 3: Fisherman's Bastion & Concert

After visiting Heroes' Square and St. Stephen's Basilica, we drove across the Danube to Buda and uuup the hill on which the castle sits. There we climbed the Fisherman's Bastion (left). The name comes from the Middle Ages, when that guild was responsible for defending that part of town, but the building (really mostly a facade) dates to the turn of the last century. Its seven towers represent the seven original Magyar tribes, and a statue of King/St. Stephen on a horse stands in the square between it and Matthias Church,which was used as a mosque when the Ottomans were in charge and was under renovation when we were there. There's a restaurant on the first floor, and the ramparts above are a popular vista point with tourists.

Across the river you can see the Parliament building (right). Constructed in a frilly, Gothic Revival style, it was the winner of a design contest, inaugurated the same time as Heroes' Square (1896), and completed in 1904. They liked the two runners-up so much, they built them, too (facing Lajos Kossuth Square on the other side). This is the largest building in Hungary and the second-largest Parliament building in Europe, after London's. Today it is rather out-sized for the single-chamber legislature, which only uses half the building.

Despite all that sightseeing, can you imagine that this day was only half over? Dear Husband and I ate a quick lunch before setting off on our own for a hour or two at the Gellert Spa. We had to meet the group at a nearby restaurant for an early dinner, because this evening they rehearsed and gave their first scheduled concert, in St. Matthew's Church back in Pest. DH accompanied them and played a few organ pieces; I organized his sheet music and turned pages. As you can see below, the venue was really beautiful. The concert was, too. I had several "musical moments," and I know the audience did as well, because they were very receptive and appreciative.