Sitting Bull.Then--Sitting On Our Asses at Lux

Visited the Museum of Ethnology this afternoon to check out the Sitting Bull exhibit.

We were impressed with the scope of the exhibit. There were numerous photos, copies of drawings Sitting Bull made showing his many adventures (and which looked like a child's crayon drawings), artifacts from his time such as clothing, weapons, and everyday items, and many explanations in German and English about Sitting Bull's history and life.

The exhibit had a lot of visitors besides us. Generations of Europeans have grown up reading the books of Karl May, who is one of the bestselling German-language authors of all time---his books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide. May counted among his fans such guys as Einstein and Hermann Hesse.

May wrote a series of books about Native Americans. He got a lot of the details wrong but the books were very popular and showed Indians in a positive light---unlike, say, the TV shows I watched as a kid on American TV.

The entrance to the Sitting Bull exhibit at Vienna's Museum of Ethnology

There's the myth of the noble savage, and there's the myth of the "no-good Indian." My take on it is that the Indians reacted pretty much as any of us would---as most of us do---when we're suddenly swamped with hordes of outsiders...especially when those outsiders are stealing our land and fucking up our way of life. They fought. In the end they lost, and lost big. Ironically enough, I've heard that some of the Indian casinos are using their earnings to buy back a lot of land that originally belonged to them in the first place, using the white man's gambling losses. What goes around...
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After the exhibit we met some friends for dinner. Tried all the trendazoidal places attached to the museums in the MuseumsQuartier but they were jam-packed; couldn't get a table. Plus, they were noisy as hell.

So we ended up at Lux, a restaurant I really like.

Had a couple of beers and a bowl of soup, and good conversation with our friends.

Interior of Lux

But the most interesting talk came at the end, when I was paying the waiter. Somehow it came out that this young man was from Iran, and had come to Austria in 2003. His English seemed pretty good so I asked him: "Tell me---what's your impression of what's going on in Iran right now? How do you think it will turn out?"

This got the guy started. He asked me if he could switch to German to explain things. Having a world-class simultaneous interpreter with me (my girlfriend) I said: "Sure, German is fine."

So while the guy talked, B interpreted simultaneously. What he told us was:

1) As long as Iran has oil and gas, nothing much will change for the better for the Iranian people
2) There are two kinds of cops in Iran. The normal cops, and the elite cops. The elite cops have no problems gunning ordinary people down.
3) His brother was thrown into prison in Iran, so the kid had to leave when he was 16 or so...I guess because, once someone in your family gets persecuted, YOU get persecuted.
4) He has no intention of, or interest in, ever returning to Iran.
5) Compared to life in Iran, life in Austria as an immigrant is easy.

The young man went on for about ten minutes. I like talking to ordinary people about their lives and insights about things I know nothing about. B seemed to enjoy talking to him, as well. When it was over I said to him, in my rudimentary German: "I hope everything works out OK for the Iranian people." And I thanked him for sharing his ideas with us. He seemed happy that someone cared enough to ask. He shook my hand when we left.

What I Saw January 01, 2010

About 2 this afternoon, I left the house for a little walkabout.

Temperature wasn't bad for this time of year, but it was really overcast and misty...

First time I've ever seen anything like this in Vienna.

Not sure if they're renovating this or demolishing it.

Urania

 

 

 

 

 

St. Stephens cathedral, its tower in the mist

New Year's Day jibber-jabber at the coffeehouse

Happy New Year

Most years, it's just another day of the year to me, New Year's Eve. I just stay home.

Had I been in OKC, I would have attended Marcy's party; thanks for the invitation, Marcy!

As it turns out, things here in Vienna were a lot of fun and quite memorable. As I knew they'd be.
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There are traditions here. Me, being a guy not too interested in traditions and even less interested in following them, still found it kind of charming.

Speaking of charms---one of the traditions is, you buy good-luck charms for your friends and family. These fall into the category of EDIBLE or INEDIBLE. We chose to buy (and mostly received) the EDIBLE charms because that way, you don't have little trinkets filling up the house after several decades of charm-gettin' and givin'.

New Year's charms: pigs, chimney sweeps, clovers. Chocolate coins are also a favorite.

Another tradition usually occurs around Christmas, but for several reasons we didn't do it until yesterday. That is, you visit the graves of loved ones and place a lit candle there. Because it gets dark early in winter, and so many people light candles at the grave, it's quite beautiful in the graveyards.

There were lit candles at the graveyard yesterday, too, though not nearly as many as on Christmas. B and I drove out to the huge Central Cemetery and she placed candles at the graves of her maternal and paternal grandparents, who are buried side by side.

Vienna's huge Central Cemetery. Note the mist.

Lueger Kirche in the Zentralfriedhof 

Driving out of the huge cemetery, we noticed the full moon, low and huge just above the horizon. I shot some video, keeping the moon in my viewfinder as we drove along...

Then to B's parents's house nearby, where we enjoyed coffee and conversation. I'd brought 140 big-band and Swing CDs with me on this trip as a gift for B's dad, who's a big fan of the music of that era. He showed me how he built a new shelf for the CDs, numbered each of them with a little sticker, then wrote down the title of the CD, its sticker number, and other data into a hard-bound book he keeps. He does the same thing with his DVDs, his VHS tapes, his records...anal retentive, or just really organized? You be the judge.

 

We also doted on their cat, Gri-Gri. She actually "belongs" to someone else in the neighborhood but several years ago the cat decided she'd rather spend her time with B's folks, who were never pet owners and didn't want a pet of any kind. But Gri-Gri kind of charmed her way into their lives and now she has her own special place on the couch, covered with a little towel. She's been told not to lay anywhere else on the couch and amazingly, she obeys.

 Gri-Gri, the queen of Simmering.

Back home, we started on our celebration. B prepared a fantastic meal which started with appetizers made from crab meat and caviar.

While eating this, we played a dice game very similar to YAHTZEE. 

Meantime, the main course was in the oven----trout stuffed with shrimp and dill, and diced potatoes. It was B's first time to prepare stuffed trout but everything came out perfect, and it was delicious. Watch out for the bones, though...

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For several days leading up to New Year's (or Silvester, as they call it here) you hear fireworks going off. It's all a build-up to the lengthiest fireworks extravaganza I've ever seen, which happens on New Year's Eve. It usually begins several hours before midnight, as the New Year happens in various parts of the world. For instance, there are a lot of Turks here, so when it's midnight in Turkey, you'll hear a lot of fireworks. An hour later, more fireworks as the people of that time-zone who happen to find themselves in Vienna detonate their explosives. 

 

These displays are not the most spectacular, mind you, in terms of OOHing and AHHing, but in terms of enthusiasm and intensity, it's fucking NON-STOP for hours. I am not exaggerating. HOURS.

And none of it administered by the city or state. It's just many thousands of maniacs who spend hundreds or even thousands of Euros on fireworks of various potency.

About 11:30 we set out for the vineyards about a half-mile behind B's house. The streets were wet with moisture and there were literally hundreds of explosions going off. The streets were mostly empty and it was rather like running through a besieged city where nearby firefights were happening. BOOM! BAM! BOOMBOOMBOOM!

Close to the vineyards we encountered groups of people carrying their rockets, heading the same way. It was really foggy---the air was unseasonably warm----but we could see rockets flashing eerily in the foggy skies only a few hundred meters ahead of us. It made me a little nervous, moving TOWARD a bunch of (possibly) drunk psychos firing big rockets...

The vineyards were very muddy. We walked between the vines, which, because they are supported by strands of wire, and because of the constant explosions around us and above us, gave a WW I trench-warfare glow to everything. The mud, the wire, the rockets, the bombardment. Except, no real danger. Unless you count the possibility of catching a rocket that tilts downward just prior to launch.

Vienna itself was far below but the fog was so thick, visibility was very limited---you COULD see some of the larger explosions high in the sky far away, but it was like watching the sun through thick clouds. Nevertheless, all around us, above us on the steep hill, and in the streets just below us: CONSTANT flashes of light and the BOOM! of fireworks.

A few minutes after midnight we walked home and opened our champagne. Fireworks were still going off constantly, even past 2 AM. I put my audio recorder out on the balcony for about five minutes just to record the noise of everything, and I bet there wasn't ten seconds of silence during that entire time; indeed, since about 5 PM.

Another tradition: in a special spoon, we melted little metal figures...a house, a hat, etc. When the metal is melted you dump it into a bowl of cold water where it forms into bizarre, jagged shapes. This is kind of like a 3-D Rorshach test, I guess...you're supposed to look at the distorted metal and figure out what it means.

We stayed up until about 3:30 this morning. Coincidentally, the fireworks finally petered out about that time.

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One last tradition. Every New Year's Day the Vienna Philharmonic broadcasts a concert heard around the world. I'm listening to it now, and occasionally pop into the living room to watch on TV. PBS shows this a couple of times on New Year's Day and I highly recommend it. Interspersed with the music are always interesting little video vignettes that show Vienna at its finest. 

 

Check it out.