geh mal tanzen ja ja!

Another successful weekend of Get to Know Vienna.  Things I did, probably out of order:

Found the Kriminalmuseum, basically a large, graphic archive of Vienna's worst crimes and methods of punishments for them.  It began with the usual displays of torture instruments from the Middle Ages complete with complex German descriptions we could not understand (The Sacher Stuhl - we swear they made witches sit on the chair and then force-fed them Sachertorte).  But then it went on to the truly disgusting/morbidly fascinating collection of information and pictures about all the worst murders that have taken place here.  Why did so many crazy men own hatchets in the first place?  Also, why did so many people have completely creepy death masks made of family members?  Anyway, the museum was in a medieval buildings, which was pretty cool itself.

Saw Indiana Jones 4.  Assumed that Stephen Spielberg has not lost his talent, and therefore blamed George Lucas for all that was wrong with it.  ("Hey Stephen, your dialogue is looking a little too decent here, let me make a few edits.  Hey Stephen, we should create scenes that make it appear that Harrison Ford can't act anymore at all.  Also, Indy should fight ALIENS!")  Ugh.

Night at the Zwölf Apostelkeller, good as always.  Dealt reasonably well with a possibly-insane waiter.  

Night of Creative Writing Majors Talking About Things They Can't Talk About With Anyone Else Because No One Else will Understand was also great, and lasted for about 3 hours in a bar somewhere.

Yesterday Rob, Rachel and I went to a church from the Jugendstil, which was beautiful outside but costs to get into, so we just walked in circles around it.  It also happened to be on the edge of the Wienerwald, which we proceeded to romp through.  We found fields, tai chi, awkward old women, and ticks.  There was a cafe back at the edge of town where we dined on soup and wurst.  

I gathered with fellow American friends to be American and eat delicious sloppy joes (seriously Suzanne, how was that possible, I never even liked them before but they were so good), and watch kind of bad yet entertaining TV.  Eurovision, Europe's answer to American Idol, except not and way more legitimate since it's been on since the 1950s.  Every country enters one singing act to compete, and they only show the semifinals and the final.  I only saw the final, and concluded that Europe, on the whole, has horrible taste in music.  That Russian guy should not have won.  Greece should definitely not have come in anywhere near the top.  Bosnia and Spain were possibly actually good songs though, so of course no one liked that.  And what was not to like about Croatia, which featured old men dressed like the mafia singing old jazzy tunes, or Latvia, which had everyone dress as pirates?!  (Not to mention Finland, which was a screaming metal Finnish band).  But I was very entertained by the guy from Sweden trying to announce his country's results who was either just very drunk, couldn't speak English, or both.  And now I'm looking up that Bosnian song.  We spent an hour afterwards looking up early 90s German rap.

Rachel and I went to the crypt where Maria Theresia and crew are buried.  Basically all of the Hapsburgs are down there.  All the Franz Josephs and such.  Question: why did they use to make tombs so creepy?  What was with all the skulls?  We know they're dead!  But it was interesting to see all of that, especially Maria Theresia's enormous tomb, 20 billion times the size of everyone else's.

I saw Der Besuch der Alten Dame at Volkstheater, and understood it way better than when I had to read it in German class sophomore year.  It was so, so much more frightening onstage though.  I didn't understand that it was actually that scary.  But they did it with an amazing set, complete with a portrait that bled when chopped with an axe, and lots of lawnmowers to represent the collective mind.  And real gun shots, apparently.

Also saw a ballet at the Staatsoper.  Onegin from Tchaikovsky.  I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, and wished I could dance.  Also wished Onegin was not such a stupid man and felt sorry for all the characters.  And dealt with Italian tourists being far more obnoxious than us.

Today we were back in the Wald again, starting at the Lainzier Tiergarten, an old hunting ground for some rich guy who built a house for Sisi there, who, as predicted, hated it and continued to be stupid and spoiled.  There were rams and deer frequenting the place, but none of the promised wild boar (and we looked).  There were also many small children, including the bilingual family consisting of a very annoyed father, and Martin, who just would not get his shoes.  We ended up walking/hiking forever today, got up to the top of a foothill that overlooked all of Vienna, and went down the long way.  We covered a lot of ground.  Fortunately there was a cafe with some Spargelcremesuppe and Sachertorte to keep us all happy.  It is beautiful.  I want to live/camp in the Wienerwald.  

Wenn wir uns kennen...

Let's talk about Innsbruck/the best place I have ever been.

Friday morning Rob, Rachel S, Kevin, and I left on a train at 9:30 out of Wien Westbahnhof, headed for Innsbruck.  It was a crowded train, and mostly reserved, but after some searching we found four seats together.  It also became a boiling hot train as noon approached and there was no air.  But it was a beautiful ride through the countryside of Austria, with the hills getting bigger and bigger until they finally became mountains.  We hopped off at Salzburg to get some air for about five minutes, and just stood pointing at the mountains yelling "BERGEN!"  (Sometimes, when you know a word in Deutsch, you simply begin to loudly name everything around you, forgetting that everyone else there most likely has known that word for quite a long time).  We arrived in Innsbruck about five hours after we left.

Fortunately, walking with my backpack and bag in pants under the intense sun in Innsbruck was not too bad because the mountains visible around every corner were so beautiful.  Our hostel was fairly close to the train station, and probably the best place I have stayed yet while abroad.  It was more like a bed and breakfast, the only real difference being the hostel thing of you have to take care of yourself, which none of us minded.  The room was very nice, they gave us pasta to make for dinner, and we got an included breakfast in the cafe below every morning.  We probably annoyed the older Australian couple staying next door (there was hardly anyone else there) by singing loudly and I'm sure attractively late into the night, but oh well.

Friday evening was spent just wondering around town.  We found das goldenes Dachl, built in the early days of Tyrol.  We walked along the river as the sky was darkening.  We sat outside with ice creams, and made ourselves a nice feast for dinner back at the hostel.  Bizarrely-named cocktails at a bar later completed the evening.

The next day we got up (somewhat) early to go hiking.  We took a tram up into the mountains, into an outer village of Innsbruck that was in the fields.  It looked just like how I have always pictured Alpine culture and homes, and was gorgeous.  From there we took random paths, ending up running through fields below giant mountains, finding a lake that we couldn't really approach but could look at, and picnicking in the flowers.  We spent a lot of time traipsing around singing The Lord of the Rings theme because everything was so epic.  It was then unfortunately stuck in everybody's head the whole weekend, and if there were ever a few moments of silence, someone would inevitably begin to hum "da da dadada..."  I couldn't suppress the urge to run through the fields.  It was not possible to stand still.  I stared up at the mountains a lot, wondering about how they could possibly be snow-covered when it was so warm below, and wanting to be on a summit.  Ah well, for another trip.

We spent that evening again wandering around Innsbruck, and eventually sitting in the (admittedly lame and lacking-in-grass) Stadtpark, looking at the stars.  Everybody was tired and sore, and in my case a little sunburnt.

On Sunday we decided to hike up to the Bergisel, the giant ski jump used in the winter olympics in 1970-something.  It is pretty intimidating to look at, but very impressive to stand on top of.  The hike up took a lot of uphill, but was followed by a nice (although unnecessarily expensive) cable car up to the top.  We could see all of Innsbruck and all of the surrounding mountains.  

We found a path back down that began at a palace, inhabited apparently mostly by peacocks, which made strange noises at us and went into places labeled "private" like they owned the whole place.  Rob and I stopped there for a snack, and then we all continued back down.  The path we randomly chose was gorgeous, taking us along the river through the mountains for awhile, then back up over more hills to offer spectacular views.  I found a lot of places I wish I could have a house.  It began to rain a little, but unfortunately never got too bad, and really just made the forest smell good and the air a little cooler.  We found strange houses and dogs that appeared to bark at us, as well as a man in full business-clothes that seemed to be completely misplaced.  

Sunday evening we got standing-room (and then stealing-empty-seats-room) to The King and I in German at a local theatre.  I loved it, and was proud I could understand a good portion of it.  Again, some of the song translation were interesting.  "Getting to Know You" was more like "when we are all friends", or something.  The man who played the king was the best.  As per the theme of the weekend, we all noticed that it was very much The Sound of Music set in Bangkok.  

Speaking of the hills being alive, the next morning we found ourselves in Salzburg.  It was naturally also beautiful, but in a very different way from Innsbruck.  Salzburg looks very, very old and is full of palaces (but in a different style than those in Vienna).  We spent a lot of time figuring out where the movie was filmed and found the fountain, the steps, possibly the von Trapp house, and the mountain they escape on at the end.  The best/hottest part of the day was hiking up to a castle which we did not actually go in, but which was on a hill that offered views over all of Innsbruck and the mountains in the distance.  We came back down again on gorgeous wooded paths that lead through the backstreets by people's homes where I yet again wanted to live.  After dinner with an unhappy Italian waiter and time spent sitting by the banks of the river, we went back to the train station to go home.

And after a somewhat insane train ride on which we turned all the seats in our little compartments into beds and made everyone walking by uncomfortable, I am back in Vienna.  I miss the mountains.

He died on the road...

Feeling weird after seeing Into the Wild and now listening to sad guitarey-type songs, but today was probably the best day yet in Wien.

Yesterday was Arbeitertag, May Day to everyone else, and the Social Democrat Party through a celebration all over town, most of which my friends and I got up too late to see.  I did manage to hear the distant parade music while still being half-asleep in bed, and saw the remains of various socialist celebrations.  Everything was red.  We did indeed make it to the Fest at the Prater last night though.  We got there to a strange British country-rockish band playing, trying to say things to the audience in German, and messing up some grammar in their songs.  The Prater at night is insane.  The thrill rides that look questionable during the day look even more questionable lit up with neon lights in the night, making you wonder why human beings want to do some of these things to themselves.  I took approximately a hundred pictures of the Riesenrad at night, and they all came out lame.  It is beyond impressive when it just looks like a circle of floating lights.  We went on the smaller, more normal-sized ferris wheel, which still managed to freak me out with my fear of heights.  I don't know what it is.  Sometimes I am comfortable being up high, sometimes I am not.  But it was perfect timing, because the fireworks started while we were on it, so we saw them from up in the air.

We ended up staying at the Prater for awhile and sitting in a restaurant/Biergarten called Schweizerhaus, making ourselves feel gross with beer and fries.  But, a fun night.  We went home tiredly before the transportation stopped.

Today was a journey into the Wienerwald, or the Vienna Woods, the huge forest that begins to the east of Vienna and continues into the Alps.  I think it is the most gorgeous thing I have found since I've been abroad, and I was full of all the possible sappy pastoral sentiments all day long.  But I really do want to live in a field or a mountain or somewhere with lots of flowers.  We started out at the end of an U-Bahn line, took a bus up to the top of Kahlenberg (a foothill), and emerged at the top with a spectacular view, of which I took way too many photos.  We could see the mountains in the distance and all of Vienna laid out before us.  We picked a random path to hike back down through the woods, and were surrounded by trees for a good while until we emerged into a meadow and enjoyed watching a frantic dog run around for awhile.  A bit further down, we started to see the vineyards.  Vienna has its own vineyards and wineries on the edge of the city, and they were beautiful and reminded me of Italy.  I want to live there, maybe.  We eventually made it all the way back to the Donau (Danube) and then back into the city for an Austrian dinner of Knoblauchsuppe (my favorite Austrian food) and various types of Schnitzel.  

We saw Into the Wild tonight, so my day went from GREAT INSPIRING NATURE to INSPIRING THEN TERRIFYING NATURE.  My Lit and the Environment class talked about the story last year even though we didn't read it, so I knew most of what happened, but I apparently forgot the crucial, disturbing ending.  But I think I kind of loved the movie and am a big sucker for nature and spirituality and cliche lessons learned from being alone in the wilderness...things every nature writer of all time has written about.  I really want to read the book though, because Sean Penn seems to be an awkward director at times.

So,

FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS!  YAY!