Monday In Strasbourg

We're in Strasbourg, France through Thursday afternoon. B's working, I'm spending my last week with her until we meet again in December.

B's job is tough enough to do, but the commute is another thing altogether. A morning flight from Vienna to Stuttgart, then the train from the airport to the main train station, then the TGV to Strasbourg, arriving about 2 PM.Then a cab to the hotel. Then she went to work, finishing about 7 PM.

The international symbol for "Watch Your Ass"

We walked through the wonderful Orangerie, a park near the European Parliment. The only thing we don't like about this park is that it contains a small zoo, mostly with birds like storks. I hate seeing animals caged up, and while these birds seem well cared for, still....but the park is beautiful, with a pond where people were rowing boats, lots of swans and ducks, pavillions and a restaurant and plenty of benches where people can sit around being French.

Caught in the act of being French.

B went to work and I walked a kilometer or so to the Cafe Brant, a venerable old watering hole across the street from the university. The patio has about thirty tables and all of them were full except for two, one of which I quickly snagged. I ordered a large beer and sat in the sun answering email and looking around.

The French seem very relaxed. They can't be as relaxed as they seem, but who knows? Maybe they've figured out how to live in modern society without going insane and now can get on with the business of enjoying life. There were all kinds of people sitting on the patio----students, old people, the artist types...but sorry, no berets. I've seen more berets at the Red Cup in OKC in a given month than I've ever seen in Strasbourg, which is too bad, because berets are cool hats. But back to the laid-backedness of the French---to see them sitting around the cafe, with their easy laugh and casual conversations and nice clothes and magnificent health care system, you'd think they hadn't a care in the world.

A word now about French women. As a group, I think they're the most attractive in Europe...but not because they're more physically beautiful than anyone else. There's just something about them---that upright posture when they ride their bikes, or their polite demeanor, their touch of class, the fact that you rarely see one who looks as if she grew up eating Happy Meals, or whatever it may be. 

The Italian men are the handsomest in Europe, so I think if the French women mated with the Italian men, the result would be a race of super-models who could speak two musical-sounding languages and cook really well.

There's more to say about Strasbourg and the Alsace region, but as you can see I'm too loopy after a long day to make much sense of anything...

Thursday & Friday

Thursday afternoon, we grabbed the bikes and rode along the canal, then to the Ringstrasse.

The Green Party managed to get a section of the Ringstrasse closed off in order to focus attention on the plight of cyclists. This closed-off space was lined with sod and people sat on the grass listening to music, talking, or recieving / handing out info about various Green initiatives and ideas.

Ride your bike instead of driving your car!

(cough, cough, never in America, cough cough!)

Though there are bike paths along the Ring, they could use an update and a clearer delineation between them and pedestrian paths---every so often a pedestrian (usually a tourist) wanders over into the bike path and nearly gets killed. I've done it.

When I move here, I won't buy a car or motorcycle or even a scooter. Owning and maintaining a motor vehicle in Vienna is a hassle compared to doing the same in Oklahoma City. At most, I'd get a bicycle. Even at that, using a bike as transportation is a bit worrisome to me because this is still a town filled with drivers, people who insist on clinging to the automobile in a town with excellent public transportation. The fucking Austrians just HAVE to have their cars, period. And then they HAVE to drive them fast. So being a cyclist in the middle of town ain't for the weak of heart.

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Friday, we met B's dad H at his house, then hit the road for our mushroom spot 45 minutes or so south of Vienna.

 What the countryside looks like where we hunt mushrooms.

Being pessimists (or as they call it, "realists"), they didn't expect to find any mushrooms. But me, being essentially optimistic even when I have no reason to be (or as they call it, "being American") I said: "Bullshit. We'll find mushrooms."

I like hunting mushrooms. It's like a scavenger hunt, and even if you come away short, it's still fun walking through the woods.

Different mushrooms come out at different times. We hoped to find some Steinpilze(porcini/cèpes), but saw none. However, we did score plenty of Eierschwammerln, or as we call them in English, chanterelles.

What the forest gave us. 

This is about five or six pounds of mushrooms, mostly chanterelles.

These mushrooms were kind of gelatenous.
B thinks they're called "ice mushrooms" ("white jelly mushroom", actually, in English -B.) and says she's only seen them once before.

This fungus looked like beautiful yellow coral. ("Gelbe Lohblüte" or Hexenbutter - "witches' butter"- in German and "dog vomit slime mold" is one of its common names in English, poisonous - B.)
I put my finger in the shot to give a sense of scale.

Walking back down to the car, we saw a man hiking along the road.

Before returning to Vienna, we stopped at the Gasthaus for lunch.
L to R: warm sauerkraut salad, Grammelknödeln (dumpling stuffed with ground pork drippings),
Topfenknödeln (cream cheese dough, stuffed with apple and cinnamon, rolled in breadcrumbs, lightly fried),
Kaspressknödel (a cheese dumpling, but pressed flat and fried), mixed salad, i.e. potato salad with lettuce and tomato salads.

When we got back, B was out on the balcony watering her plants. She came back in and in a whisper told me to bring my camera. "It's the start of the yearly tradition," she said. Walnuts have started falling from the trees. Our downstairs neighbors, an elderly couple, gather the walnuts and then the old man sits outside shelling them. B says it happens every year...the guy's a millionaire, BTW.

The neighbor and the start of our neighbors' Shelling Walnuts Outside tradition for 2011.

Vienna does not suck, ladies and gentlemen.

Wednesday: Oberlaa

Wednesday afternoon we went to Oberlaa, a big park in Vienna's 10th District.

It wasn't always a park. Prior to 1974 it was vineyards, woods, ponds, and fields. B used play there as a child, before the park was built, and many Austrian films were shot there in the days when the area was used as a film location.

Now the huge park features many different gardens, ponds, fountains, and meadows. And, on its fringes, a modern spa called Therme Wien.

The first area we visited featured model homes, all of which are mostly prefabricated and then assembled on site. I like a modern architectural style but most of the houses we saw were more or less traditional in appearance.

I liked this house the best.
Unfortunately it was closed so we couldn't look inside, except through the windows.

A shot through the window.

There were a lot of bunnies hopping around, or sitting around eating the grass. I like bunnies. One of my flaws.

We walked along several quiet ponds.

I also like ducks, who may be the bunnies of the water.

There are a lot of places to sit and read.

Many people were enjoying a walk with their dogs.

This happy boy would fetch the ball, bring it back to the edge of the pool,
drop it, and his human would toss it back in for him.

This was the dog's-eye view of the stepped series of pools he played in.

A couple enjoying a stroll through the beautiful Oberlaa.

We enjoyed wandering through the park and finally came to the spa, Therme Wien. We went inside to take a brief look around; the Austrians are apeshit for these spas the way Asians are apeshit for acupuncture----it's so much a part of their health system, they can't understand why other Western countries with Canada as a northern neighbor and Mexico as a southern neighbor aren't also apeshit for spas. Answer: pampered rich people do like spas, but the ordinary person is as likely to visit a spa as he is to get an Armagnac enema.

But in Vienna, your average Joe or Jane makes it a point to visit a spa for a massage, sulphur baths, mud treatments, sauna, etc. as both a preventative measure and as a healing measure following illness or accident. Go figure. Different cultures.

I'd actually been on the edge of Oberlaa once without realizing it, last year while riding around on a Sunday afternoon. Now that I've been there, I plan to spend time in Oberlaa once I move here...and all the other great parks in Vienna, too.