Art & Culture various essays on, well, art and culture Bookbinding & Conservation lessons learned from this profession Humor ok, I'm not the guy from SNL, but I still have a sense of humor 'Jim Downey' Stories mostly true stories from my adolescence Personal Essays more "it's all about me" Politics I’m at -7.13/-7.33 on The Political Compass.  Where are you? Society observations on the human condition Travel Europe 1994       Kronach       Coburg       Vienna       Mödling       Vättis       Ramsgate       Chester Wales 1998 Wales 2003 Wales 2006 CCGA Vignettes

Vienna I didn't know that a Festiva would even do 120 mph.  But it wasn't topped out, and in fact the car felt like it was eager for more.  It was comfortable driving at that speed, no swaying, no feeling like I was on a skateboard with a rocket engine.  I think the speedometer went to 240 kph, some 30 mph faster than I dared to take it.  They must make the things differently for sale in Europe than they do here.           I don't generally like to drive fast, and got 100+ speeds out of my system when I was a crazed teenager.  But as we left the secondary roads coming out of Kronach, and got onto the autobahn, I knew that I had little choice but to resurrect and indulge the speed-demon in me.  Otherwise I would be run over.  So, as the rain cleared off to just an occasional mist, and we got onto the autobahn, I went native, and pushed that Ford further than I thought it could possibly go.  Since we were moving with the traffic (except for the occasional underpowered and overburdened truck we passed, and the Mercedes sedans which went by us with what can only be called a casual display of power), there really wasn't much of a sensation of speed.  Little wonder that the innkeeper had said it would only take about 40 minutes to drive to Bamberg, though it was a good 60 miles.  "Some time to get to the autobahn, and then pffft, you're there" he had said.  I had had my doubts.  Then we got on the autobahn, and they vanished.           Bamberg was a change.  We didn't see much of it, coming in off the autobahn near the US Military housing district, since that was the area where the Hertz rental place was located.  I didn't have a very good impression of the place.  Lots of standard '50's style apartment buildings, not in the best repair.  A strip with American fast-food places, pawn shops, used car dealers.  Grey skies, trash blowing in the streets, even some graffiti.  Depressingly like the things I don't care for in cities at home, and I felt sorry for the military personnel who thought that that was representative of Germany.  After locating the Hertz office (which was affiliated with a used car dealer, so they at least had a real building), I dropped Alix off at the train station, went back and turned in the car, and caught the bus to the station. Off of the train in Nurnberg, about noon, with a little time to explore.  We dumped the bags in another locker, went down a series of escalators into a full-fledged shopping mall built under the bahnhof and the central part of the city.  Up, and out into the daylight, coming to surface across a major street from the bahnhof, at the threshold of the old city walls.  That's the nice thing about the German rail system: the central station is always right in the heart of the town, being the center of the entire public transportation net, where you can catch a bus or a subway, a taxi or just walk to the nearby city center.  I guess that's the by-product of having your cities bombed into rubble . . . you get to redesign your transportation system the way you want it, no slum clearance projects needed.           Where the ramp came up was at the roots of the large old King's Tower, a massive gothic structure of red sandstone, black iron work, and timbers on roof and doors so dark it looked like slate.  From there we looked down one of the narrow streets of the old city, filled now with shoppers on their lunch hour.  Little sidewalk cafes on the cobblestones, kiosks selling a variety of 'bretzlen' (what we would call large soft pretzels) with several different toppings, and a number of stand-up pizza bars.  Banners promoting sales and announcing Corporate locations danced from the sides of the buildings.  A raw mix of old world & new, with some of the buildings straight out of the middle ages, the others bauhaus or newer, all chrome and glass.  Neon signs under gothic gateways.  Baroque cherubs supporting fancy signs for banks.  Cobblestone streets turned over completely to pedestrian traffic.  A thousand years of layers of human culture and commerce.  It was wonderful.  We headed further into downtown, thought maybe we would find someplace to get a bite to eat, perhaps something to drink.  I was eager to sample the local beer, maybe enjoy a couple of hot wursts, but everywhere that looked likely was also filled to overflowing, since it was the lunch hour, and we didn't have that much time.           Compromising on just stopping for a couple of sodas from a pushcart, we went on.  The delightful mural depicting the old city that we passed in the shopping area under the bahnhof indicated that there was some variety of cathedral not too far away, and we decided to head that direction.           The cathedral (Saint Martin's ??) was small, as such things go.  Located in the center of a platz there in the heart of the city, it didn't completely overpower everything else for miles, but fit in with the large business structures around it, though it had a calmer presence.  I think that it was older than many of the churches and cathedrals we explored, early gothic, short and squat compared to the soaring constructions of light that came later.  As with the King's tower, it had darkened with age, becoming in my memory now almost black.  After making a quick pass around the outside, we went in, working our way past the crowd of teenagers sitting and smoking on the steps outside.  The contrast between the outside, dark and almost forbidding, and the inside, filled with quiet light and openness, was pretty amazing.  Narrow windows of stained glass, clearly early in the development of the great walls of glass that become so popular with the advent of the grand cathedrals.  Echoes of whispered prayer, hints of forgotten psalms sung in childhood.  Tones of incantation, a touch of grace in a blessing almost remembered.  I was so taken with it all that a kindly old gentleman had to remind me to remove my hat, and my cheeks flush with embarrassment.  The church of my father, and a sense of respect that was more intense than the usual consideration I have for houses of worship of whatever faith came bubbling up inside me.  We didn't have long to explore, but it was the first cathedral I had seen with more educated and appreciative eyes, and it left a powerful impression on me.           We left the cathedral, wandered around a bit more in the plaza and side streets there, but then made our way quickly back to the train station.  Buying drinks for the journey from one of the travel stores, we fetched our bags, went and met our train. It was a fine day to ride, watching the country roll by our windows.  Six hours between Nurnberg and Wein.  The forests of Frankenwald were left behind.  South through the farmlands and hills of Bavaria, rich with crops just coming ready to harvest.  The land evolved as we watched, becoming broader between the hills, the rivers also wider and more graceful, few towns or villages along the way.  We munched our picnic lunch, read, chatted about the first couple of days of the trip, and just enjoyed the quiet scene before us.  It was marvelously relaxing.           Slowly the landscape started to change, become unfamiliar to me and more familiar to Alix.  The hills started to rise more prominently, with glimpses of granite showing through here and there.  The houses also started to shift somewhat, the eaves growing longer, more balconies and decks showing up than what was common in the north.  I had never been this far south, nor this far east.  Alix could see that the homes and landscape were taking on the alpine influence characteristic of Austria.  Hints of clouds scattered among the tops of the low mountains.  More sheep and cattle, fewer cultivated fields.  As we came closer to the frontier with Austria, cities and towns grew more common, clustered on the hills and along the rivers, until they grew together into one large metropolitan area as we closed in on Vienna. Even the comfort of first class travel on a 'EuroCity' train takes a toll.  We had been on that one train for about six hours, on another previous to that for over an hour, and prior to that was the adrenaline high of the autobahn.  We were both tired and a little cranky when we came into the huge, arching train station west of the 'First District'.  The throng of American high school students, complete with the vestiges of mall hair, leather jackets, and voices too loud and shrill, didn't help.  And those were the guys.  The teenage girls with them were worse.  Usually, I found it somewhat a comfort to hear American accents while we in Europe.  Not then.  Not at all.  Their accents and slang were harsh on the ear, piercing, almost whining, hard to listen to, harder to admit as being a version of my own tongue.  Of course, I also discovered that the Austrian brand of German was different enough that it was tough for me to understand initially, though Alix was more comfortable with it, thanks to having been a student there.  No high German here, instead the relaxed, softer influences of the Mediterranean which actually made the language a little more pleasant, less like a man choking to death.  We got in line to change more money into Austrian Shillings, slumping down our baggage, trying to ignore the students.           Our hotel was only a couple of blocks away, in easy walking distance.  It was warm and windy, and we enjoyed the walk, even having to cross a couple of main streets quickly so as to avoid the manic traffic which jammed up, then pulsed with little apparent regard for pedestrians.  It was my first hint that the Viennese drivers were even more aggressive and crazed than their German counterparts.  One of the travel videos we had watched prior to the trip had talked about the Viennese zest for life "with double (whipped) cream."  I didn't realize that this was due to the shorter life expectancy, but the truth of that was pretty basic as I dodged cars.  Even a mini Opel can sting a little when it runs into you, especially when it is accelerating to light speed.           The hotel was actually a YMCA.  Meaning that we had a climb up about fifteen flights of stairs, it smelled vaguely of a locker room, and we got to sleep in separate beds in a small, oddly shaped room that had a shower but no toilet.  I think Alix was the only woman in the building, and we had the whole 'married' floor to ourselves, which meant that the bathroom at the end of the hall was essentially ours, and I gave up even the pretense of worrying about dressing to go down to it in the middle of the night.  But it was a happy place, a 'happening' place straight out of the '60's, complete with slightly overweight, very serious looking graduate student types who wore berets, smoked a lot, and needed to shower.  On the long climb up the stairs we could hear a party going on in one of the meeting rooms, complete with guitars (and bongos? were those bongo drums I heard????).  From another came the sounds of something like a revival meeting, though I couldn't swear that it wasn't a poetry reading of the type I had been subjected to while working on my master's at Iowa.  The kind where people stilt their voices enough to penetrate walls . . . thick walls . . . and still be annoying.  And the walls in this YMCA were not thick.           We dropped off the bags, freshened up a bit, and went out searching for dinner.  One of the main shopping streets wasn't far from the YMCA, and seemed to be a good bet for finding food.  The shops really were impressive . . . most places were closed (it was about 9:00), but their window displays and the level of neon was a rival to any shopping district in any city in the States.  We selected a small, crowded, family-type restaurant, figuring if it was crowded at this time of night it was a good sign.  The schnitzel (this was Wien, after all) was marvelous, but I couldn't say the same for the beer.  I didn't know that the local taste for beer runs to the sour . . . sort of musty, like it hasn't been in the vat quite long enough, and still has that yeast cloudiness and tang to it.  As we ate dinner I watched a guy sitting at the end of the short little bar who kept feeding 1 Schilling coins into an ancient slot machine mounted there on the wall.  He was a young guy, wearing a sports jacket, and attractive enough to get the attention of one of the waitresses who stood around there chatting with the bartender.  These 1 AS coins are worth less than a dime, and he had to put dozens of 'em into the machine before it was loaded up enough to pull the handle.  He had a sack of these coins, and in the short time I watched, he went through those, bought another sack from the bartender, and ran through those, too.  He'd feed the machine a stack of coins, sip some on his beer, smoke vigorously on his cigarette, stare at the machine for a while until he felt that the time was right, or his level of excitement was high enough, and then pull the handle.  He never won anything, but just got a blast out of sitting there drinking, pumping coins into this machine.  He was still at it when we left.           We stopped back at the train station, popped into one of the convenience stores there and got some beer (German, so I could get that sour taste out of my mouth), juice for Alix, an English newspaper, and postcards to send to our friends of places in Vienna that we hadn't seen yet.  Went back to the room, opened all the windows (it was rather warm inside), and sat, chatting, drinking, writing cards, and looking at the paper until settling in for bed. The morning was bright, cheerful, amazingly clear.  A quick, but delightful, breakfast similar to those we enjoyed in Kronach down in one of the common rooms with the same cast of characters we had seen the night before.  Over to the train station, where we called the Hertz office, made sure the car was there, and let them know approximately when to expect us.  Got passes for the subway, and took it into the 'first district', the oldest part of the city, inside the Ring (a busy four lane road which has replaced the old city walls).  I think that it was the first time I had ever been on a subway, and I had my midwesterner's distrust of the idea.  But with the quality of the train system on the continent, and with Alix's encouragement, I figured it was better than walking the distance.  It was fine.  Fast, uncrowded, no graffiti or menacing youths.  We came to surface downtown, not too far from Steffansdom.           A marvelous structure, one of the truly great cathedrals in Europe.  Huge, beautiful on the outside with an ornate geometric pattern to the roof tiles which I think is unique in western Europe.  Inside, the space, light and glory stunned me from the first.  Bright gilding, high glittering windows that glowed with color and warmth which were even difficult for the inexperienced to look at for very long without becoming giddy.  Throughout the building was evidence of expert restoration work, fresh gilding and cleaned stone, bright murals, polished wood.  Clusters of people around guides here and there, languages from all over the continent and Asia, the guides gesturing wildly with their arms, infused with the expansive, overpowering spirit of the place.  It was so large that even the little 'private' worship areas off to the side would hold a hundred people and not feel crowded.  Binoculars were necessary to see the detail work on the supporting pillars just halfway up, and could only give a decent view of the gross structure of the tracery work of the stone supporting the ceiling.  A telescope (and several lifetimes) would have been necessary to appreciate it all.  The statues, usually from mid-chest up, of early 16th century people looking out from the walls and pillars were lifelike, all the way down to the detail of clothing, worn and tattered in places, and scars or warts on their faces, jagged-tooth smiles, or deep set lines of a frowns held for too many years.  Alix found particular sympathy in the likeness of the master architect of the cathedral, who was depicted at the base of one of the supports for the organ balcony, the whole weight of the building upon his shoulders, bending him over, seeming to crush him, his square and calipers in hand, but his vision still clear, head still up, to supervise the construction and maintenance of his creation.  The legend below it only had his initials, and the date of 1513, but with that watching face, there was no doubt who he was.           I took a seat in one of the pews, near a young Japanese couple who had their toddler son, and like them I just sat and stared, trying to take it all in, or at least get an impression of it worthy of the work and centuries of worship that had built this place.  Generations of men and women had opened their hearts here, had poured out all their hopes and fears for themselves and their children, filling the simple stone with their souls until no place on earth could hold it any more, and a bridge, a tunnel, a sharing with an other place was created.  I don't believe in heaven, but in that cathedral I could feel it pulsing around me.  The small cathedral in Nurnberg left me filled with respect for the church of my ancestors.  This cathedral left me in awe of the human spirit, and the soaring heights of vision and accomplishment that it was capable of.  I turned to the offertory candles there to the side.  I left a large enough donation for a score of candles, selected only one, small, well used already, but perhaps brighter than any I had ever lit.  Sometimes I am surprised by the depth of things I find.  It was a while before I was able to talk. Outside, walking on the large platz which gives Stephansdom enough room to breathe, we heard singing.  No accompaniment, just the sound of human voices, joined together.  But it wasn't connected with the cathedral, and as we wandered toward the sound, identity sunk in for me . . . choral yodeling.  Alix had recognized it almost immediately, of course, but I'm not quite so quick on the musical uptake.  Sitting in the shade of umbrellas at one of the sidewalk cafes, there was a group of friends, some of whom were yodeling.  It was apparently impromptu, and some of the spouses and friends who were with them seemed quite embarrassed that this little exercise had gotten started.  But it was wonderful!  Their voices - strong, deep, mature voices of men and women - dancing off the walls of the nearby buildings, echoing from across the plaza, playing in the side streets and valleys of the core of the first district.  A crowd quickly formed around their tables, but far enough back so that we weren't crowding them, nor containing that wonderful sound, and encouraged them to continue with clapping and delighted faces.  Just friends, clearly members of some choral group, deciding to play and entertain us between glasses of wine.           Down one of those urban valleys, the street narrow and confining after the expanse of the Cathedral, following the little guide map we had of the city, trying to identify the various landmark buildings and statues.  The first district is filled with buildings of historic, and sometimes architectural, import.  Churches around every corner, on every corner Greek & Roman influenced government buildings or banks, their Ionic columns out front supporting nothing but a facade.  Little plazas filled with wonderful Renaissance statuary, gilded breastplates and spear tips of the classical figures, Mozart as even he wouldn't have appeared in public, fountains bubbling and dominating the landscape.  So much baroque art and decoration that I was starting to worry that I would absorb some of it into my own aesthetic sense, and perhaps even start to like the stuff.  And about that time we came across something which made me feel at home, gave me an anchor to put things in perspective.  In the heart of the first district, the part of Vienna that is the most upper crust, there in a medium sized platz across from another massive Government building with statues and fountains everywhere, was a flea market.  Cars with trunks popped open, goods being sold out of the back.  Folding tables heaped with old records, magazines, photos, watches, jewelry, and just plain junk.  There were crates of treasures on the ground, blankets off to the side, kids running around, asking mommy to buy them this trinket or that.  It could have been in any American Legion hall in any small town I've ever lived in or travelled to, and it was great. We got out of the first district, and walked along the Ring toward the Hertz office, which was on the Ring.  The first district was jammed with buildings and art.  The Ring was jammed with cars.  And people.  And shops on both sides of the roadway wherever there wasn't a park, museum, or theatre.  And bicyclists who had their own path through the pedestrian walkways, and would run you over if you were in their way.  Underground pedestrian crossings, so the mayhem on the roads was a little reduced.  Kiosks selling newspapers, cigarettes, and beverages, along with "Hot Dogs," "French Fries," and "Ice Cream."  In a very short while I had my fill of it all, and we went back into the first district to try and find a restaurant or some other quiet place to sit down and eat lunch.  Just a half a block in, then down a side street, and there was this little winegarden for a large restaurant.  Green peace there among the hanging vines and high hedges, a little black iron table, good wine and better food.  We could have been 30 miles outside of the city, it was so relaxing and restful.           After lunch, we went the short distance to the Hertz office, got our car without incident, and got the hell out of Vienna.  Nice city, but there's too much 'city' to it for my tastes. 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