Friday Creature

I can't believe Friday has wound its way around again! Here's some sort of European bee for today's creature. If you're missing the birds (I'll get back to those ASAP!), check out some beautiful pileated woodpeckers from Les Jones! Also, there are plenty of all sorts of creatures on the ark!

Bush Goes to Europe

George arrived in Vienna last night and he's going to spend the next several days meeting with the leaders of the EU. Let's hope that he can keep the smirking to a minimum and save the wise-cracks for the sympathetic and forgiving reporters we have here in the States. His handlers may be able to keep him in front of friendly crowds here at home, but can they hide him from an entire continent of hostility?

Mr. Bush's image is plastered around Vienna on the cover of the Austrian news magazine Profil, under the headline "The Mad World of George Bush." On Tuesday, anticipating Mr. Bush's arrival, an Austrian commentator, Hans Rauscher, offered a brutal assessment of the president in the daily newspaper Der Standard.

"George W. Bush is probably the worst president of the past 100 years," Mr. Rauscher wrote. "The world has to suffer him until 2008."

linkswende.org (photo is my own, from last month in Vienna)

Friday Creature

I've posted a photo of a hooded crow before (I think Keera has as well). I really like these birds -- they're dressed up in handsome suits, they provide a marked contrast to the crows I'm used to here in the States, and they're common enough in Europe so that I can get a good look at them even on a busy day of touring.

Yes, folks, it's true: Friday has rolled around again already -- creatures are boarding the ark and the weekend fun is set to begin. I hope you have a good one!

Karl Marx Hof and Hundertwasser Haus

Here are my last two travelogue photos -- both buildiings, which proved to be very entertaining this trip. This first picture features part of an enormous block of flats that was built in the late 1920s. Karl Marx Hof's architect was Karl Ehn, who was a student of Otto Wagner (scroll back a few days to see a few Wagner buildings).

And this last building was my favorite of the trip -- Hundertwasser Haus. This is an absolutely incredible living space designed by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser in the mid-1980s, in response to what he considered to be soulless modern architecture.
We weren't able to go inside Hundertwasserhaus -- it is all private residences -- but around the corner is Kunst Haus, a museum dedicated to Hundertwasser's work, featuring more buildings, paintings, graphic art, postage stamps, flags and some of the artist's philosophical musings.

Well, that's it for the photos. Thanks for being patient with me. I'll see if I can get worked up about something (there's so much to choose from!!!!) and get back to my regular schedule of rants and random tidbits...

MQ, Schonbrunn & Parliament

I'm just about done with photos from Vienna (I'll be going out with a bang tomorrow), and there's not a whole lot to connect these last few.

There's a cool hangout in the square at the center of the Museumsquartier where I caught this juggler while we were on our way from the Leopold (with an incredible exhibit featuring Klimt and Schiele) to the Museum of Modern Art (which was mostly pretty weird -- some was pretty damn disturbing -- but there was a cool Paul Klee painting called "the scarecrow"). I took some photos of the museums but they didn't end up being all that interesting, whereas this guy offers some sense of the atmosphere there.








You can click on this image of Schönbrunn Palace to get the full shot -- there was just no way to fit it all into a normal frame (we spent and evening there for a tour, dinner and a concert).

And finally, I didn't get a photo that did the Austrian Parliament justice (there was too much wiring and other urban clutter gunking up all my shots), but I did get a few photos of the remarkable statuary, including this shot, which would probably give John Ashcroft (a stunted man who appears to live in mortal fear of having an erection) a stroke.

Stephansdom

Right in the center of Vienna is the 12th century Cathedral of St. Stephen, Stephansdom. We spent the better part of a day there, checking out the cathedral, touring the catacombs and crypts, and climbing up to the top of one of the towers.

Not too far from Stephansdom is Judenplatz, where we visited the museum, and the chilling holocaust memorial that sits in the middle of the square.

Naschmarkt

After being frustrated by hitting sites in Vienna at the wrong time of day for optimal light, I was finally rewarded on the afternoon we wandered through the Naschmarkt!

What a beautiful market with a staggering variety of food! If I ever get to move to Vienna, I'll have to live nearby so I can shop at the market every day.

(Looking at these pictures of food reminded me that it's been a while since I've checked in with Traveler's Lunchbox, and I was delighted to discover that Melissa has returned to posting after a short, thesis-related hiatus! Hrmmm.... Chickpea Chaat....)

Friday Creature

We ran into this little Austrian pug on our way back down from the castle fortress ruin in Dürnstein. He ran up to me and let me pet him while he caught his breath and then he ran on ahead to catch up with his people. One of the really cool things about Austria is that there are dogs everywhere, even in the city -- I saw lots of people with dogs on the subways in Vienna -- and they seem to be well cared for (I didn't see any wild dogs or the messes that dogs leave behind when they're on their own).

I can't believe Friday is here already. I hope the weekend has all kinds of happy goodness in store for you (don't forget to swing by to see who's boarding today's ark)!

Danube Valley

We did make it out into the country during our visit to Vienna. We got up early and spent a day in the Danube Valley, starting out in Herzogenburg to visit an Augustinian Monastery, which was founded in 1112 and features a beautiful baroque church.

The town of Krems features several churches and a Wine Museum, not to mention the numerous actual vineyards that fill the surrounding countryside.

Dürnstein was my favorite stop of the day because of the castle fortress ruin that sits at the top of a steep hill in the center of town. It's where, during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was held prisoner by Duke Leopold V until a ransom of six thousand buckets of silver was paid. We hiked to the top and back down again before grabbing a (very!) quick lunch in town.

And our last stop of the day featured the abbey and church in the town of Melk. The Baroque Benedictine abbey is the setting at the beginning and end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and the church not only features a beautiful organ, but is also the second place that day where we encountered elaborately dressed skeletons in glass coffins (the first was in Herzogenburg). Oooh, that's scary, kids!

Secession

Here's another cool Otto Wagner building in Vienna, the Postsparkasse.

We went by the morning after we saw the Wagner Apartments, on our way to the nearby MAK, which we visited primarily to see Secession art (I was pleasantly surprised to find a piece by Margaret McDonald Macintosh there), but I also enjoyed seeing the furniture and panels from David Roentgen. From there, we went over to the Belvedere (below), to see the Gustav Klimt collection. We finished up that day at the Museum of Fine Arts (highlights there included Brueghel and Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath).

We ran out of time, so we didn't get to follow our thread through to see the actual Secession Building and Klimt's Beethoven Frieze until the end of the week (where my luck with [a lack of] light on buildings continued, as you can see). This building also serves as the companion to the bookend I mentioned in yesterday's post.

Otto Wagner

This is an image that puts a bookend at the beginning of the trip for me. These are the Wagner Apartments and we saw them at the end of our first full day in Vienna. They were designed by Otto Wagner, who also designed the Karlsplatz Pavilions, where our group had stopped for a photo at the start of the day. From there, we went on to visit the Historial Museum of Vienna, the Freud Museum and the Hofburg Palace Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum and Treasury.

It was a full day, so we opted to stay close to home for dinner and wandered past the Wagner apartments along our way ("home" was the Hotel Ananas, which is right next to the Pilgramgasse U-Bahn stop). These buildings are just outside the Kettenbrückengasse station, near the Secession Building and Naschmarkt, which we would be visiting later in the trip. But more importantly, Wagner was part of the Secession artists group, which would provide a thread that ran through many of the places we got to visit in Vienna (I do love the Art Nouveau!).

This particular image kept repeating for me throughout the trip, as we were to pass it again and again when we visited sites nearby. It was hard to photograph -- getting the whole thing in the frame would have been difficult because it was all so close to the other buildings in the area, and that would have caused an unacceptable loss of detail anyway -- and I never did catch it in full sun. I looked on the web to see what other photographers did with the challenge, and they all seemed to struggle along with me.

Vienna

Happy Memorial Day! I'm going to try to post a photo or two of my trip today, and maybe add a few others over the course of the coming week.

We visited Vienna (and environs) in the company of some friends with whom we've been traveling on an annual basis for about a decade now. After a few years visiting wine countries (we went to Italy and France in our previous two trips), it was a nice change of pace to visit a county that is also known for its beer. After a long day of touring, it can be a real treat to sit back after dinner, enjoy a beverage and hear how the day went for our fellow travelers. This photo was from the first day's postmortem, when we sampled a beer from Salzburg.

US Disliked? Or Bush?

According to the Washington Times, the US is disliked more than ever by people around the world. But from what I've seen on my recent trip to Vienna and in past annual trips to Europe, it's not the US, or Americans, who are hated -- at least in Europe, anyway -- it's Bush that they can't stand.

These posters were plastered all over the subways and streets of Vienna last week. They refer to Bush's plans to attend an EU Summit in Vienna on June 21st (I do hope he's not expecting friendly crowds there).











Additionally, many of the posters provided further opportunity for locals to express themselves, resulting in a number like this one. As the week wore on, I saw fewer and fewer posters that hadn't been defaced in some way.

The mocking of Bush has even become part of corporate advertising campaigns (the inset more clearly shows the happy meeting between Bush and bin Laden):