Day in Vienna - part 1

Vienna at Christmastime is just as lovely as it sounds.  Letze Samtag sind wir nach Wien gegangen - last Saturday we went to Vienna for the day, to meet friends from SB who were home for the holidays.  We drove the 2 hours northeast (mostly north) with a colleague of T's who was heading that direction, and as we watched the snow swirl on the road and the dashboard reading of the outside temperature vary from -8.5 to -10 C as we drove, we worried that maybe it wasn't the best day to explore a city.  But this was our only chance to enjoy the Christkindlmarkts and holiday lights.

And Vienna is famous for its coffeehouses, with their atmosphere, good coffee, and wonderful cakes and pastries.  Sachertorte, Esterhazytorte...  Coffeehouse-hopping didn't sound like a bad idea!

And that's exactly what we did.

We met up with our friends in front of the Opera at 10 am, and proceeded to Demel, near the Hofburg Palace, where patrons have been marveling at their confectionery creations since the mid-1800s.  Going upstairs you pass by the artists at work and some of the recent creations on display.  Someone was decorating a cake shaped like a mountain, which was a blank white mound when we came in,  and forested, with alpine meadows, by the time we left.  We had a very nice light breakfast - T and I shared a plate of bread, cheese, prosciutto, butter, jam, honey, 2 softboiled eggs, and yogurt with granola.  The cafe latte was excellent, and the hot chocolate was crazy decadent - essentially melted chocolate, thick and creamy.  Wow.

We had watched the snow start to fall from our cozy table, which had 2 chairs and a loveseat, and after an ooh-ahh whirl through the Demel shop on the way out we bundled up and ventured back out into the cold.  Down the block we did some sightseeing in the very high end grocery store, taking the glittering glass elevator up to the cheeses and meats and generally gawking at the variety of foods as well as the enormity of the prices.  The closest comparison is Whole Foods, but this is like what Whole Foods aspires to in its wildest dreams.  What I really admire in the grocery stores I've been in here, though, even the normal ones, is the reference to the country of origin by little flag icons on the shelf tags.  Wanting to be true to our location and go for all things Austrian, it's easy just to look out for the flag and there you go.  Although, the packaging tends to advertise Austrian origins in fairly salient ways already.  A friend told us the other day that Austrians are very particular about high quality food.  Of course, you can find a lot of junk as you can anywhere, but I think it's true that we have been eating very very good, fresh foods, from meats and cheeses to fruit and veggies.  Hooray for a foodie country!

Back to the story - so we headed for some Weihnachtsmarkts, which are pretty much in every -platz or square.  The one in front of the Rathaus (city hall) is one of the bigger and more famous ones, and the Rathaus itself is the best advent calendar I've ever seen - check out the photo (you'll want to click on it to see it large).

From there we shuffled through the snow to the market at the hospital, which unfortunately wasn't open until the afternoon, so we continued on to marvel at the nearby Votive Church, Votivkirche.  It was beautiful inside, but cold - not as cold as outside but enough to see your breath, and I thought about how cold it would be sitting through a service.  Yikes.  But how can you possibly heat such a huge, huge, tall, tall space?

The only photo I have from here is of this interesting pair of vending machines at the entrance.  (Inside the heavenly one are booklets and CDs about the church and museum).

We were cold.  Time for the next cafe.  Destination: the Palm House, the imperial greenhouse from the 1880s at Schoenbrunn Palace.  A couple of subway stops, then walk through Maria-Theresien-Platz, which, being a -platz of course had a big Christmas market, situated between the art and natural history museums around the statue of Maria-Therese.

We luckily got a table in the non-smoking section (there are a LOT of smokers here compared to CA), right at the window, looking out onto part of the palace park, the snow coming down and the evening falling.  Pumpkin cream soup, with the ever-present pumpkin seed oil (something Graz is actually known for, so most salad there comes with pumpkin seed oil and vinegar dressing - it's very good, but I think it's also the season now, so this stuff is everywhere), and grilled carp with vegetables.  Mmm...

to be continued in part 2...

Day in Vienna - part 2

continued from part 1...

Once it got dark (around 3:30), the lights came on and Vienna got even prettier.  For dessert, another coffee house!  And some sights along the way, like St. Stevens Cathedral, Stephansdom, with the Christmas tree in front.

Still snowing, still very, very, very cold!  But not windy, at least, which makes a huge difference.  Eating our way around Vienna was turning out to be a great plan, though.  Just before we would ever get completely frozen, time for a nice cozy coffeehouse.

We made our way to Cafe Central, where Freud liked to hang out.  Everyone else had the same idea though - it was crowded and completely full, so we walked to another place a couple of blocks away, Cafe Griensteidl.

I couldn't come to Vienna and not have Sachertorte, so of course, that's what I ordered, along with a cafe latte.  The Sachertorte is a somewhat dry, not-too-sweet chocolate cake, with apricot jam and a thin chocolate ganache.  It was invented in 1832 by Franz Sacher when he was 16, an apprentice confectioner, and has been famous ever since.  On this one, the jam was just under the frosting (a variation I understand - the Hotel Sacher's, the 'original', has the jam between 2 layers of cake.

After thawing and relaxing, T and I left our friends and headed for the 7 pm train back to Graz. Below are more photos of the winter wonderland Vienna evening...

The Hofburg Imperial Palace

 

see how the snow has piled up?

 

sehr sehr schoen...

Baby, It's Cold Outside

It's really been snowing over the past week; it snowed weekend before last, then the temp dropped and after 3 days of right around freezing the ground (mud) was frozen, and the small lake at the bottom of the hill was frozen. Over the weekend the temperature dropped some more - to minus 10 C, which is 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and we had a handful of inches of more snow. To remind those of you in moderate climes who never get to this point, freezing is 0 C and 32 F. You know how salt melts ice? I read on Wikipedia that the 0 mark for Fahrenheit was based on the point of cold where the salt doesn't melt the ice any more. So yeah, it's COLD. Luckily we have good heat, and the trams are usually heated, and we layer up a bunch and wear wool socks and cover head and face as much as possible.

Needless to day, our winter wonderland is beautiful, and we are enjoying having a taste of real winter. I'm a bit trepidatious however (and also trepidatious that's that not a real form of the word, but I like it) that lower temps are still to come over the next couple of months, like -20 C. Or, in Fahrenheit, that's Julie-does-not-leave-the-house degrees. For you east coasters, I know I'm not getting a lot of sympathy here what with the storms you've been having.

The first time it snowed though - giant, clumpy amazing snowflakes. We went for a walk and as I was madly shrieking 'they are so beautiful!' over and over and scaring the joggers on the forest road, these are the best photos I could manage of these incredible snowflakes. I mean completely, 6-pointedly, amazingly amazing! Maybe it was their extraordinary size, or maybe it's been too long since I've seen a snowflake, but I was very much awestruck.

I swung on the swings in the nearby park, which was also remarkably joy inspiring, and we walked away from town until we got quite cold, then ducked into a Chinese restaurant to warm up inside and out.

Speaking of duck... really good soup and crispy duck. The spring roll was all but a roll (it was flat and rectangular), the stir-fried dishes weren't that different from US Chinese food, and the fried bananas were yummy (this was a fixed menu for 2; we took leftovers home).

The hills are alive...

So I have a short stack of Austria-related books accompanying us on sabbatical, and one I just finished is Maria von Trapp's memoir from 1949, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. I really enjoyed it; the story of The Sound of Music is within the first hundred of the 312 pages (and was remarkably close to the real story, I was surprised), and the rest includes the family's saga as refugees in America, touring as a singing family, and finding and building their home (and more!) in Stowe, Vermont.

Today, with the story on my mind and all the holiday spirit in the air, I had a hankering to watch the movie. What to do when TV in Austria, in which the story is set, doesn't have it playing every other day during the Christmas season as in the US? In fact, I'm not sure they ever play it - you're pretty hard pressed to find an Austrian or German who has actually seen the movie (or the play/musical) unless they have lived in the US for several years. Anyway - what to do! YouTube to the rescue, of course.

And while browsing, I found this pretty darn awesome video from Korea:

And browsing further, I include this flash mob video for my tap friends. :-)


(For more on flash mobs: wikipedia, and watch your heart out on youtube - I love the dance ones)

Saturday in the City

On all the Saturdays in Advent the Tram is free, so last Sat we took advantage and hopped on to go to the Innere Stadt, the city center, for some Christmas shopping and sightseeing. For our niecies in Germany, who are 8 and 10, we really hadn't a clue to what to get, not knowing what's hot and what's not for the elementary school set, not knowing what they already have, and not wanting to pander to trends anyway. So, I got to thinking about books as a gift, even though they are a very literary family already, and the books I loved around that age. It was actually really fun to dredge up from memory & from Amazon the titles of books I haven't thought about in years (and then check amazon.de to see if there's a German translation). From a long list we chose: Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell), since it takes place off the coast of CA and the main character is buried at the SB mission; Charlotte's Web (EB White); The BFG (Roald Dahl), which is called Sophiechen und die Riese, and is only available right now in audio book (a reprint is soon to be out); Sid Fleischman's The 13th Floor, A Ghost Story; and The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever (Robinson), whose German title translates to, Help, the Herdmans are Coming. Sid Fleischman's Mr. Mysterious & Co. is out of print, which is really really sad - that's one of my favorite favorite books.

So we took the Tram to Jakominiplatz, and wandered through the market as it was wrapping up. This is a huge farmers market that happens everyday, but is biggest on Saturday. The usual veggies and breads, but also lots of meat - home cured, dried, as well as sausages, aspics, etc.  There are lots of small-scale, family farms in the area (including wineries - this is a big grape-growing region).  Also at the market lots of holiday stuff - ready made advent wreaths and mini Christmas trees, pine boughs and something like mistletoe to make your own decorations, and then a few places to get a snack, including a fish stand that looked really good (nothing like fresh fried fish on a frosty day, eh?).

But we wandered to the main (shopping) street, Herrengasse, and went in to the bookstore to look for our American classics. We found them all, except for having to order The 13th Floor. T hadn't heard of the Best Christmas Pageant ever, and started reading it in line to pay. He was already laughing on the second page.

The next priority was some lunch, and somewhere in the city a Doener was calling our name. Ducking down a narrow alley we came upon a tiny doener shop, luckily with a couple of tables and a couple of seats at a bar inside to get out of the cold (along with the usual standing tables outside, of course). YUM! A Doener is like a gyro but way way better. And this place even made their own pita, and their yogurt garlic sauce was minty and super yummy. Mmmm, so good! It looked like a family enterprise - a father with his 2 daughters running the shop.

Then some more wandering, through the Christkindlmarkts, through the giant department store with the humongous toy department - there was a carousel, a cookie baking/decorating station, and all kinds of toy demo stations - play with the race car track, trains, legos, etc. And that was in a room adjacent to the main floor, which featured a puppet theater. What fun.

In not too long T reached his shopping tolerance, so back out to the Herrengasse to find a nice cafe in which to rejuvenate and read the books we bought! Happily the next one we came upon was the Palais Hotel Erzherzog Johann Cafe, a very large, beautiful, Viennese style cafe - perfect. We managed to get a table in the front, which had a little more character than in the back, and were tucked into our own corner at the window.

I sampled the house specialty cake along with a chai latte, and T happened to have a bar of drinking chocolate in his coat from the day before, and so stirred that into into a glass of steamed milk. Yum! T proceeded to finish the story of the Herdmans, laughing every 5 pages or so, and careful not to crease the binding. I played ipod apps.

As evening fell it actually got more and more crowded in the Altstadt, as people came out for Gluehwein (mulled wine; that's my Gluehwein mug in the photo at the top, you can either return the mug for 2 euro or keep it as a memento) and Maroni (roasted chestnuts).
We managed a little more shopping in the Christkindlmarkts, and then stayed around for the Glockenspiel 'performance' at 6 pm, in Glockenspielplatz. Two figures, a woman and a man, come twirling out of doors to a folk tune, twirl around for a minute or so, then twirl back inside. Here's a short video; I'll spare you the longer one:

Notice all the pealing bells in the background after the Glockenspeiel stops. It was very cold, and snow was just beginning to start to flurry. We headed for the Tram for home, the bells ringing all around.

Snow!

Snow!!
We woke up this Sunday to winter wonderland - big white snowflakes floating down outside. It's 30 F/-1 C, no wind. That's one thing I LOVE about Graz - no wind. The temperature has been around 5-8 C (which is in the 40s F), but with no wind it doesn't feel nearly as cold as it could.

This is the first snow since we got here! Time for a cup of tea and some holiday music and a nice cozy day inside. On Sundays everything is pretty much closed, so today we're doing laundry and catching up with things.

Chocolate, chocolate, oh and chocolate

Friday was the big holiday party of the dept T is visiting. A chocolate factory tour and wine tasting/dinner were on the agenda, and wow, we were not disappointed! After an hour bus ride heading east, we stepped out into the fresh air delicately scented with chocolate. Mmmm! Inside - stronger smell of chocolate! And for the next hour we were to learn all about the organic fair trade chocolate-making process, eating our way through the factory, all the chocolate you could sample and more!

Audio guides on ears, we started with the pure stuff (not so exciting), and moved on to comparing different percentages, both in solid and liquid form. Each person was given a ceramic 'kissing spoon' to use to taste, and warned not to go too crazy as more chocolate was ahead.

And they weren't kidding. How about a long corridor with maybe 50 different chocolate bars to sample? As you made your way along, looking down on to the factory floor where they were wrapping the bars, you would pull a lever to cut a small sliver of chocolate off a bar and it would fall into a tray where you would retrieve it with small tongs. From various percentages (ranging from 40-100%) from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua, Brazil, to blends with different fruit, roses, or yogurt and fruit, all of their offerings were there. And you just had to try very nearly every one! My favorite was the 60% Peruvian.

Ok, just when you think you're at your limit, you go up some stairs to a sleek, modern chocolate bar for the drinking chocolate. Get your hot milk, select an exciting flavor from the baskets cruising by, suspended from the hanging cable conveyor system, and drop it in and mix it up. I selected honey-cinnamon; T tried the one laced with chili. (You can see how excited I am - part of that is a sugar high) Wow. So good.


Proceed to the next building, through the cauldron corridor, where small brass side-spinning cauldrons build up little nuggets of goodness layer by layer. I only had a couple here, as I was beginning to max out. The last segment before the shop was a sampling of the layered bars, which got pretty inventive and even outrageous. Peanut butter and ketchup. Speck (ham). Olio e limone. Fish (didn't try that one). The caramel was good, as was the strawberry basil.

And that was the end of the tour, just when you couldn't eat one more bit of chocolate, you found yourself in the chocolate shop. We bought lots to bring home..!

Willkommen in Graz

It’s a rainy day in Graz; it’s been overcast since we got here 5 days ago ('Hochnebel': high fog, which means that you can go to the top of the local mountain and find sun, but check the webcam first) and finally it’s raining. Well, drizzling. It’s been a warm fall - no snow really to speak of yet, so many of the ski resorts weren’t able to open at the beginning of the month.


We arrived last Thursday, and settled into the Villa, the former mayor's house-turned-guesthouse in the woods. Our apartment of roughly 400 sq ft has a living room, bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom, and entry hall. It's very nice, and very, very quiet. We're in the middle of the woods up a hill, but the tram stop & grocery is 5 min. walk, and there are joggers and bikers from time to time, even into the night, on the dirt road that winds up the hill.

To the right is a photo of our living room/dining room/office (the dining room side). This is the day after our party with T's colleagues from the dept (hence the wine bottles, and beer in the window. We have a very small fridge, so between the windows makes a nice refrigerator annex.)

There is the coolest ropes course in the trees on the way to the tram stop; sadly it's closed until March...

Jezt ein bisschen auf Deutsch...
Heute es regnet... Seit 5 Tage haben wir Hochnebel, und finally, Regnen. Wir haben Donnerstag angekommen, und have settled in in die Gastehaus Villa Wohnung. Es ist klein aber sehr bequem, und sehr ruhig.