More to come at his blog
http://asilenttreatment.org/hitched/Thinking: Life, the act of living, is a cycle of states and moods. The spokes of it's wheel are infinite. Moving, the act of moving through space, say, from airport to airport- is binary. You're either awake and on or off and asleep. Moods, the ups and downs of life, are a delicious luxury. Being stuck in an airport Starbucks for the 11 hour interim between flights is nasty, but survivable. It was better than the time we slept in the International Terminal of Midway Airport because Security closed a scant 10 minutes before we arrived. Did you know security closed? I didn't either. Speaking of, airport security abroad is much nicer than domestic security. They apologized for throwing out our water, instead of implicitly threatening us with a 10 week stay in Guantanamo.
Dublin, or the Dublin Airport,had me a little spooked. Far from being foreign, it was familiar. A kind of palette swap, it held nothing you couldn't find in a hokey foreign film. The candy bars had different names and the Coke was made with sugar (!!!), but it felt fraudulent. I could hold conversations. The bathrooms were clearly labeled and the ATM dispensed Euros with a minimum of fuss. The wait was awful, but outside of the odd bit of Gaelic, it felt normal.
Vienna, then, is Mars. Most people can speak some modicum of English, but they seem to treat it as a last resort. Purchasing anything is a kind of logic puzzle. The Euro is easy enough, but paying the bill is like trying to catch a fastball. It might come to 4 Euro Twenty (4,20 and not 4.20 for some reason), but trying to make that total out from a garble of foreign language is fast unmöglich. I feel like I'm trying to talk Kant with the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. It's slightly infantalizing; Feeling a little nervous about ordering coffee (It takes three words to order black coffee in Vienna, even though I clearly saw a product named Kaffee earlier in the day) or asking for the bathroom (The word is toilette) is an old ghost, a feeling I used to get as a kid, a kind of helpless fear of the world and something I had hoped I'd gotten over for good.
But Vienna holds plenty of joyful amusements as well. The Naschmarkt reminds me of the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles. It's permenance is exciting. Dried fruit is big here and the Naschmarkt sells it cheap. Strawberries, ginger, pineapple even coconut and cranberry. There's a brand of Fair Trade, organic chocolate bars here that come in a seemingly endless array of weird flavors. I snagged a few for souvenirs and while they're almost interchangeable (A strange fascination with adding liquors and spirits to chocolate fillings dulls the natural flavors and gives everything a boozy, tasteless quality) the sheer enchantment of a chocolate bar filled with rose and basil or marzipan and pumpkin seeds is too much to bear.
Many, many flavors of chocolate
Art museums are art museums. These Albertina reminds me of MoMA, a kind of dull, "Didn't you know?" air hangs over the place. Where other museums are reverent, both MoMA and the Albertina seem to be bored with their collections, waiting for the next big thing to arrive. But the Alex Katz pieces were a nice surprise and Monet's Water Lilies continues to haunt me, precipitating my arrival at every museum over the last few years. The Belvedere is much more like the Met, both in collection (Things you see in a textbook) and architecture (Things you see in a textbook). Both the distinction lies in the fact that the Met was inspired by a building like the palace the Belvedere resides in. One is an imitation, the other is the inspiration. It is quite a thing to stand in a building that old and that actual. Frequently, the ceilings of the Belvedere were more interesting than the art inside, splashed with classic mural and beautiful carvings. I wish I'd been allowed to take pictures, but the No Camera! policy was strictly enforced. Highlight: Seeing Kilmt in person. It wasn't quite the revelation I expected, but the size of Der Kusse is unanticipated by any reproduction. It is enormous and seeing the scale of the painting stirred up something exciting in me. Klimt's work is frequently erotic, but often smaller in scale. Such an enormous testament to love and the physical actions of it was. It helps bring some things about that work into context. It's as loving and as holy as any relic.
A lax day now, just the Belvedere and more sitting around in a cafe (Better at ordering today. I studied my numbers last night and got the Euro portion of the bill right, if not the cents. Also, cappuccino is a valid word here as it is everywhere. Somehow, I still mixed up the wording, but Anna and Franzi untangled my mess. It's nice to have a native speaker to spare you the embarassment of chanting "Eins, nicht Zweis!" and hoping it makes sense). Anna and Franzi have a surprise this evening and it may be the Opera. We're not sure.
Tommorrow: An early awakening and a bus to Brno, CZ.
Things I notice immediately: The toilets flush via panel and many have 2 panels: One for #1, the other for #2. Also, the shower is an exagerated version of those pushable rest stop sinks, the ones that dispense just 30 seconds of water unless you press them again. It's a nice way to conserve water, but there's something nice about a shower that reliably dispenses water, civic duty be damned.
Also, Vienna is an old city, but it's subway is new. It's a sort of inverse of New York, which I keep referring to trying to conjure something familar out of a place so foreign.
Things I don't notice immediately: European cathedrals are enormous. Simply gigantic. Standing in front of one is a humbling experience, being inside is almost frightening. You can see the Stephansdom from the Belvedere and watching it tower over the city so casually is a reminder of how pious people used to be and how central the church must have been.
More pictures at:
http://flickr.com/photos/gillod/
