B and I took the subway into the 3rd District to meet M at the hospital where she works as consultant for the kidney department.
First thing I noticed: while this ain't the finest of Vienna's hospitals, according to both B and M, I must say I find it a very civilized culture when the hospital cafeteria offers WINE along with the various other beverages. Imagine that in a US hospital. Then imagine what they'd try to charge you for a glass.
M took us upstairs to meet some of her colleagues and take a tour. We saw the rooms where the patients were undergoing dialysis. This takes about four hours, and each bed has a flat-screen TV angled downward so the patient can occupy themselves during the blood cleansing. All the patients, approximately twenty of them, were together in three large adjacent rooms.
There was a private room where a patient was hooked up to a machine. M explained that this patient had hepatitis, and though it isn't neccesary to segregate these patients from the others for any medical reasons, officials in the ministry of health decreed that they had to be segregated. M walked in and started showing us how everything worked, pointing out which tube carried blood FROM the patient, into the machine, and which tube led from the machine carrying the cleansed blood BACK INTO the patient. I tried to look at the machine more than the patient, an elderly woman who took this intrusion calmly but who probably would have preferred we'd stay the fuck out of her room.
Then M took us to the 15th floor so I could get a few panoramic shots of Vienna, like this:
If you click on the pic to enlarge it, you'll notice snowy patches in the hills in the far background. These are the vineyards just north of where B lives, where we were walking my first day here. And as I mentioned, you can imagine the view you'd have of Vienna from those hills, particularly at night, the city lit up and spread before you.
M slipped out of her doc clothes into street clothes and we hit the highway, heading for Krems, a beautiful little town located in the Wachau. I encourage you to click on the links and scroll down to see how beautiful this area and this 1000-year-old town are.
We were here mainly to visit the "Sculptures of the American Dream" exhibit at Kunsthalle Krems, the local art museum. More on that in a moment.
There was another bit of fun, though: It turns out we were arriving just in time for the start of Faschingsumzug, a parade having something to do with the culmination of carnival, or the end of Lent, or some kind of religious bullshit I can't seem to wrap my mind around. But the celebration itself, the fun of it, the costumes the people wore, the overall good feeling, was something even this pagan could enjoy.
People lined the narrow cobblestone street and watched the parade participants walk or ride by. There were all kinds of costumes, and the participants threw candy toward the crowd, blew huge clouds of feathers and confetti on us, and---my favorite part---would occasionally stop for a few moments to pour shots of schapps or Most for us to drink! Most is a kind of wine-like alcoholic beverage made from apples or pears, but it isn't sweet. Me likes!
BELOW: Here's a dramatic pic of a parade participant contributing to the deliquency of an old man by offering him a glass of Most.
BELOW: A pretty little Austrian girl dressed up in Japanese regalia.
BELOW: Stilt Boy. This dude was a good juggler; he and another guy, not on stilts, juggled three pins, then one by one tossed the pins to the other guy, who then juggled them, then back and forth like that.
BELOW: This was one of my favorites. While not the most colorful parade display, click on the pic to enlarge it and you will see that the person is portraying Obama in the White House. You can barely make out the US flag at the top of the cardboard "White House," and the sign on the left says "Obama Moves Into the White House." Some people were chanting "Yes We Can!" and encouraging their children to chant along with them.
The sign on the right says: Bye Bye Bush.
Black people are hard to come by in the Wachau, so we can forgive this person her heartfelt "blackface" imitation of Obama.
As a side note: I am no fan of politicians of any party. For the most part I find them despicable liars, or at the very least masterful bullshitters. I am neither Republican nor Democrat nor anything else but independent, but I have to say Bush fucked up royally. Bush is a guy I might actually enjoy having a beer with, assuming he'd DRINK a motherfucking beer, and he might actually be likeable, kind of, if he was just sitting around talking about cows or baseball, or something.
Obama has so many inheirited problems to cope with it will be a miracle if he isn't ultimately seen as a horrible failure, but probably so would anyone coming into office at this point in US history. I happen to like the fact that the guy has a damned BRAIN and doesn't feel the need to pretend he's not an Ivy-Leaguer, unlike Bush who is the very motherfucking DEFINITION of an "elitist" but somehow managed to bullshit his fans into thinking he was a good 'ol boy. Really? Daddy was head of CIA, vice president, president, ultra-wealthy, from a connected family, Bush attended Yale---and he's a good 'ol boy? Horseshit. I've spent most of my life around Joe Sixpack chuckleheads and let me tell you: Bush isn't one of them. Well, maybe the chucklehead part.
Now onto the art exhibit.
Duane Hanson was an incredibly talented US artist who made hyperrealistic sculptures of ordinary human beings. I'd seen his works in photos but never before in person. In this exhibit in Krems I got a chance to see the real thing and let me tell you, some of these sculptures were indistinguishable from a real human being. Hanson spent an incredible amount of time and trouble manufacturing, dressing, and painting these sculptures.
Hanson made it a point to offer up social commentary in his work. I'm not going to try to describe it or explain it, but I encourage you to click on the links and Google his work and see for yourself. I don't think Hanson was trying to be holier-than-thou or make fun of the types of people he portrayed---instead, I get the idea he thought it was kind of sad that people would just settle for a life of spiritual and intellectual death. There's nothing wrong with being ordinary, or having an ordinary job. But there's nothing that says the janitor (for instance) can't also have a taste for opera or architecture or literature. There's nothing that says the fat guy sipping a beer while riding his lawn mower can't also be politically astute, or have an interest in fashion. They are not neccesarily mutually exclusive.
If you look at Hanson's sculptures, you'll see the so-called "ordinary" person. If he or she is ordinary, it's not because he or she failed to become rich or famous or have friends who possess those qualities, but rather because the person believed he had to follow some kind of bullshit SCRIPT that required compliance. I've spent a lifetime around people of the kind Hanson sculpted, and most of them are decent and fairly likeable people. But they aren't too often very THOUGHTFUL or REFLECTIVE or CONTEMPLATIVE people, and that's the tragedy----not that they're overweight or have bad diets or are unattractive or don't get invited to cocktail parties. No---the real tragedy is that they typecast themselves.
