B's sister R joined us soon after we arrived, and we sat down to a great meal: beef broth with strips of salted pancakes (like soft noodles), and then the main course of roedeer with gravy and potatoes, a pretty decent Italian red wine. Ice cream for desert, and coffee.
They have New Year's traditions here. One is the giving of good luck charms, which are as follows: the chimney sweep, the pig, the horseshoe, the toadstool and the clover. B's folks gave us little figurines incorporating all these features: a pig wearing a chimney sweep's hat, with a clover and a horseshoe at the pig's feet. So we can't help but have a lucky 2008.
We watched a brief slide show I'd requested---B's dad dug out some old family slides and I got to see photos of B and R and kids, ranging in age from about 2 to about 15. I know: slide shows are like watching an old man chew a tough steak, except more boring. But I enjoyed looking back at these sisters I know only as adults, and looking at much younger versions of their parents. It was kind of charming.
B and I said our Auf Wiedersehens and drove into the center of town to catch just a bit of the madness of Vienna's massive New Year's celebration. The 1st District is taken over by hundreds of thousands of people strolling around, drinking Punsch, and buying the obligatory good luck figurines. We saw a lot of people wearing pig hats...
The locals know the madness only gets worse as the night progresses, so they do what we did and spend a couple of hours or so walking around or dropping into coffeehouses or restaurants, then they get the hell out and leave the celebration to the tourists.
It can get kind of dangerous, according to B's friend Eti, who with his wife Ina joined us for a drink at one of the local cafes: at midnight, drunken revelers like to throw their empty champagne or beer bottles high into the air. Imagine one of those things falling on your skull, courtesy of our friend Mr. Gravity.
The other fun thing is to get hit with flying rockets, or have a huge explosion go off in your ear. Though strictly verboten, fireworks go off at all hours of the night and day in the 48 hours or so leading up to Silvester (which is what the Austrians call New Year's Eve.) Some of these fireworks are pretty powerful, judging from the sound of them. Like our old M-80s. I've been hearing what sound like shotgun blasts since Saturday, and the WHOOSH! of rockets firing off. Today it only got worse. Imagine some drunk fuckard firing a string of those things off in the middle of a huge crowd downtown...
After a couple of hours walking the slushy streets, we drove home to a extraordinary supper:
gravlax (which I must admit I was a bit squeamish about when it was first introduced to me by B when we first met, but which I've since come to love), a salad, and a nice white wine B's dad sent home with us.
B made the obligatory mustard sauce to go along with the gravlax, and this is what we ended up looking at, then scarfing up:
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