If you remember back, this is a picture of us acting out a painting in the museum last week. That's Professor Waldman in front of me.

Friday June 8, 2007
In love with Austrian Koalas

Greetings friends!

Wednesday was a pretty busy day, which turned out to be the best thing to rid me of the tiny nagging bit of homesickness I’ve had. We didn’t have class after German, so I took advantage and went and got several things knocked off my “to see” list.

My day started at 6 when I woke up to the sound of a yes, a jackhammer through our open windows. Apparently they are restructuring the cobblestone down our street, and they like to do that at 6 a.m. I will never complain about weedwackers in the US again. It was the loudest, most annoying sound to wake up to, but luckily that was the worst part of my day.

After German I came back and had a peanut butter sandwich. I’m starting my budget plan this week so I can spend my money elsewhere. Today I went to the Hofburg, the winter palace and main location for the Habsburgs when conducting state business. They have several museums in that area, many of which I get in for free with my Museum Pass from the program. First I went into the exhibit that contains the entire collection of china, silver, and table settings for all state functions from the past several hundred years. They had these finely detailed gold candelabras and all sorts of painted plates and unique utensils for types of food I didn’t even know existed. Apparently the Habsburgs and now heads of state have a secret napkin fold that only two people in all of Austria know how to do and the tradition is only passed down by word of mouth. If you ask me, it was kind of a lame design and I say give the setting for five minutes to Martha Stewart and it won’t be a secret anymore. Not that hard.

I also toured the Imperial Apartments and Sisi Museum. Sisi, or Empress Elisabeth, who lived in the late 19th century, has a legendary status here in Vienna. I have concluded she is like the Princess Diana of Austria. Sisi was a renown beauty, and there is a famous painting of her (that I saw today) with diamond stars in her hair that appears all over Vienna. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to read a little history, but I think Sisi is fascinating. Her life ended up very tragic but to this day she holds this entrancing power over the city. Emperor Franz Joseph (her cousin) fell helplessly in love with her and married her at the age of 16 when he was about 23. Sisi had an unbounded personality, and felt suffocated by the court ceremonies. She had unusual passions for traveling, the outdoors, foreign languages, and exercise. For all of Franz’s talk of being so in love with her, he was a workaholic and often left her to her own devices and in my opinion probably just loved her so much because she was a tragic beauty. Sisi was obsessed with her appearance and was borderline anorexic because she sometimes ate as little as an orange a day and obsessively worked out. Her first daughter died at the age of two, and her only son later committed a scandalous double suicide with his mistress, which put Sisi in a depression for the rest of her life, along with the fact that she held great remorse for allowing her mother in law to take control of raising her children. I loved going through her apartments, and it is very apparent by the way she decorated and the items she commissioned she was very progressive (yet had many faults) and did not fit in with the rest of Habsburgs. In the end Sisi was assassinated during her travels by an Italian lunatic who was trying to make a political statement. I’ll probably talk more about Sisi later, but you should see the cult following and obsession people have with her, she’s everywhere!

After that I headed over to Michaelerkirche (St. Michael’s Church), where all the well to do court followers went for mass since it is right across the street from the Hofburg. I went of the tour of their crypt below the church. Many of the bodies were naturally mummified due to unusually cool and dry conditions. When we went down for the tour (which was giving in both German and English) it felt like a meat locker, and everything was highly preserved considering the mummies and coffins were from the late 1700’s. The pictures on the coffins were preserved and you could still see the silk clothing, wigs (on the guys, think Mozart) and embroidered shoes on the mummies. For the coffins that had collapsed they stacked the bones up along the walls, so the whole thing was very Edgar Allen Poe.

After that I went to the Imperial Treasury. It should be called “bling bling extraordinaire.” I got to see many of the Hofburg jewels and robes, etc.

After that I hit up the Lipizzaner Museum at the winter riding school, which was also neat. I will not be going to watch the Lipizzaner horses because tickets just to watch their morning practices are like 70 euros, which means about 100 US dollars. I’d rather go to 50 operas for that money, or just eat like 20 apple strudels…I think I’ll do that.

After that I decided I wanted to hit up a café. I tried the Café Demel, which according to my guidebook is supposed to have interiors decorated like a really expensive circus, but that didn’t exist and it was just really expensive without the ambience, so I left and decided to go find another place that had been highlighted in my guidebook. I am sooooooo glad I did. I went to Café Central. Wow. It had beautiful interiors, a traditional Austrian menu, waiters in tuxes, and a piano player. I got an Einspänner, which is a glass of strong coffee with whipped cream on top and of course with apple strudel (one of their specialties.) I sat there and read one of the books I need to for Oxford and they didn’t bother me at all, which they aren’t supposed to but we’ve found that many of the touristy places try to hurry you along. There weren’t that many people there, and the piano player played classic romance songs including a song from Phantom of the Opera and older songs like Moonriver.

Thursday was a Catholic holiday, which means all the stores closed, so after that I had to go get more food before it closed. It was a zoo, and I really hate grocery shopping here. You don’t know what you are exactly getting, everything is laid out weird, and the entire custom of leaving a deposit to use a shopping cart gets really annoying. I think it is one of my least favorite things here, because you wonder around like 10 minutes trying to find peanut butter and 15 minutes at the milk counter trying to find skim unsuccessfully. But apparently they have .9% milk here, because that makes sense totally.

I spent the evening in after that chilling out and planning more of the things I want to do while I’m here.

So Thursday. Had German class, which I’m really starting to despise but we only have four more days left. I feel like they are trying to cram in random parts of German grammar, which is dumb because it would be way more helpful if they taught us things like what they call skim milk here. :)

I went to the zoo at Schonbrunn, which is actually a really nice zoo because they have all types of animals including pandas. I feel in love with this koala I saw there. You really just want to go give animals like that a big hug. We all had a fun time acting like kids again at the zoo. For the record, I still hate monkeys. Their cages smelled like urine, indicative of the disgusting animal. The big cats, wolves, even the groundhogs managed to keep themselves clean.

It got really hot again yesterday, so we came back and cooled off a bit, then got ready for the opera. I went to see Verdi’s La Traviata, which was an inspiration for Moulin Rouge, one of my all time favorite movies. It was soooooo good. Unfortunately the Volksoper (different from the Staatsoper where I went before) is more local and doesn’t have English subtitles. I read about it on Wikipedia before I left, which helped a lot, but wiki lied, it does NOT end with her dying in his arms of consumption, it ends with him getting married to someone else and her dying ALONE of consumption.
Something else, I had to dry my hair with the floor fan we have in our room before the opera. I would never do that at home, but I do here.

Well today was my sleep in day and I’ve been taking the morning easy. I’ll probably hit up a few museums today, and then tonight our class is going to see Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, or the Magic Flute at the Volksoper.

Nobody worry, I’m not doing anything crazy here, but one of my roommates did end up getting her nose pierced. lol





Also, I’ll leave you with the picture that hangs above my bed. It’s by Jack Vettriano, who I didn’t realize it but also painted one of my other favorite pictures, The Singing Butler. This picture reminds me a lot of how I feel sometimes here in Vienna, and it really looks like she’s looking outside the windows here in our apartment to buildings that look like the ones we see.

Affectionately Yours,
Elaine





One more thought: these are the stairs of agony I climb EVERYDAY. I will be remembering this trip in terms of stairs, the 128 up the apartment, the stairs to the U-Bahn, the stairs to hell, everywhere.