A Waltz through Vienna

It is spring in Geneva--there are buds on every tree, and sometimes even flowers. I know, because I have been inspecting. I took advantage of the sunshine yesterday to walk home from work, an idea I've been mulling over ever since it has stopped raining all week every week. About an hour long (when the bus route is 30-40 minutes, because there is no straight route by bus), the walk was wonderful, mostly through residential neighborhoods and along the borders of parks. I felt like I was discovering a new section of Geneva.

This morning, I have a few hours before my train leaves for Milan, where I will be staying the night on my way to Cinque Terre for a weekend of cliffs, sea, pesto, hiking, and hopefully sunshine. I am looking forward to a rather relaxing weekend as this week has been quite a busy one. A test, a paper, and getting tickets for my return to Europe (June 21--mark your calendars!) on top of normal classes and work have kept me quite occupied. That's all done now, thank goodness, and I can take advantage of this weekend with a clean conscience. So until my train leaves at 1:42 pm, I will write about last weekend in Vienna, because it is very bad form to go off on another adventure without recording the first one.

Christine, Clara, Matthew and I took a night train from Zurich (oh, Zurich) last Thursday evening. My first night train, and it seemed like an excellent way to travel for me. For once in my life, I was glad to be the shorter Magnuson sister; I think if I had been an inch taller, I would not have fit in the bunk properly. As it was, though, I was quite comfortable. Christine and I had the top bunks in a room of six--definitely the way to go, on our train at least. We had a huge shelf to keep our bags on, while the people below us basically had to sleep with theirs. I slept soundly through the night, true to type, not even waking up for the stops in Innsbruck or Salzburg. And when I woke up, they were serving me breakfast and I was almost in Vienna!

We spent the morning at Schonbrunn palace, the 1441-room summer palace of the Hapsburgs. I brushed up on my Hapsburg geneology and can now tell you exactly which Franz married Maria Theresa (Franz Stephan) and which daughter was Maria Theresa's favorite (Maria Christina, the only one allowed to marry for love--to Albert of Saxony--unlike poor Maria Antonia, commonly known as Marie Antoinette). We toured 40 rooms, marveling at their richness. There were mirrors hung everywhere, and as I walked past each one, I thought, 'Marie Antoinette saw herself in the very same mirror I am looking into.' It was an interesting brush with history.

By the time we made it to downtown Vienna, I was starving and very ready to eat. We found a sidewalk cafe on the main street, got a table in the sunshine (I strategically positioned myself to avoid sunburn), and ordered four different pizzas to share. Spinich and ricotta, four cheese, onion, and asparagus/corn/olive. This was excellent, because otherwise I would never have guessed that corn on pizza is actually delicious. As this was followed by pastries from a different cafe across the street, we were all full enough to not think of eating again until breakfast the next morning. (Except Matthew, who managed some late-night falafel.)

We wandered Vienna that afternoon--the cathedral, an interesting set of apartment buildings Matthew knew about that had trees growing out the sides, Staadtpark--until it was time for the ballet, Die Fledermaus! Standing room tickets in the parterre of the Vienna State Opera house are only 4 euros each. These were just about the only tickets left available--that had an actual view of the stage, anyway--so we did it. I felt like a starving Viennese student away from his garret for the night, sacrificing his feet in the name of art. We didn't arrive early enough to get spots by one of the railings placed throughout the standing room box, so we couldn't tie scarves to save our places and go sit somewhere else to save our feet. Instead, we stood at the front of the stairs as soon we got into the box, claiming our territory. Thankfully, the group at the very front left at intermission, and we were able to swoop in and snag their spots, as well as sit on the ground for a while. Probably three hours standing in total, but completely worth it, and we had a great view. I have missed ballet so much. I did arabesques and pas de chats alone in the luxurious bathroom of the Cafe Sacher across the street from the opera; we went there afterwards for coffee, tea and cake.

We spent Saturday morning in two of Vienna's cemeteries as a sort of musical pilgrimage to the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, and Brahms in one and Mozart in the other. I was very curious about how the first four all ended up next to each other in the Zentralfriedhof. Some internet research reveals that Beethoven was initially buried elsewhere, and that Schubert so admired him that he requested to be buried next to him. They were both moved to the central cemetery about 60 years later, and then Strauss and Brahms just followed the trend.

The other very interesting we noticed there was the difference between most of the cemetery, which is very well tended by families, and the Jewish section, where tombstones are falling over, ivy completely covers many of the graves, and the grass is growing long and wild. Almost none of the graves have been tended in over sixty years, it looked like to me, and we saw no flowers laid on any of them, in contrast to the rest of the cemetery. It is a very vivid legacy of the Holocaust in Austria.

After that slightly morbid morning, we decided to be a bit more lively for the afternoon; we rented bicycles in Prater Park and bicycled along the Danube. Christine and I did multiple full renditions of "Do-Re-Mi", re-enacting that scene in the Sound of Music where the Von Trapp children and Maria bicycle along the lake in their curtain clothes...We were pretty delighted with the whole experience.

One final trip to the opera house that night--now that we were experts on the process, we knew to line up at 4:30 for standing room tickets, because the performance was Das Rheingold, a Wagner opera. We were directly behind all the die-hard Wagner fans who had probably been sitting there since the morning, prepared with fold-up stools, crossword puzzles, and novels. Right after we arrived, hordes of people began lining up. We had excellent spots along the railing, saved with our scarves so we had an hour to run out to the street and eat Viennese sausage from a street vendor. (They even had ketchup. It was heavenly.) I loved the opera--such beautiful voices, and there were even subtle little screens along the railing spots which translated the lyrics from German to English, so we knew everything that was going on.

We only had to stand for 2.5 hours that time, but there was no intermission. Clara and I seized the opportunity of the three-minute set changes to sit on the floor and rest our feet. Christine refused to sit in principle, because as she pointed out, "If all these 70-year-old women around me can stand without even fidgeting, I certainly can too." I don't know how they did it. My personal opinion is that they would have sat down if they could, but they were a bit worried about getting back up again.

A final beer in a Viennese cafe in the midst of the post-opera crowd, and then back to Geneva by train the next morning, with fantastic views of the Austrian Alps.

Some photos of Vienna here--they are not nearly as picturesque as my Greece photos. We all decided that  Vienna looks much like most other major European cities. What made it different was the experiences, not what we saw.

BRIDGES articles from this week:
China, expecting trade deficit, calls yuan appreciation 'irrational'
EU-India FTA will not hurt generic drug makers: Minister
And from last week:
Study claims 'outsourcing' of rich country CO2 emissions
MEPs inch toward country-of-origin labelling requirements for food
Implementation of EU FTAs with Colombia, Peru could progress unevenly (translated from Spanish)