Vienna

Vienna was considerably more happy and uplifting of an experience.  I liked Vienna, or Wien, as the Viennese call it. 

 I went there to meet up with one of my best friends from high school, Melissa the bass player (NOT base).  I’d actually never seen one of her concerts, so I was pretty excited that the first concert I got to watch her in was a solo concert in Vienna. 

The first night was great—we did that reunion thing at the airport, that embarrassing running and hugging thing—and then jumped on a train, both trying to talk at the same time, just really excited that we were both in Vienna together. After we arrived into the city, we went straight to a pizza place, which I was thrilled about, seeing as I had been craving pizza for a good month or so (pizza isn’t a huge thing in Britain), and it being a Friday during Lent, the pizza was in the shape of a fish, which was also exciting.  I think the pizza was supposed to be shared—and I ate the whole thing.  Opps.

The next morning was the concert—and it was awesome! Melissa did great, actually everyone did!  It was short—about an hour—because everyone just went for a few minutes each.  But Melissa’s classes/ concert hall is in a freaking palace! Its not fair, she takes classes in this grand building, set with gold and marble, high ceilings, large sculptures and floor length mirrors—and I take classes in a cramped, creaky townhouse.  Oh well.  At least everyone speaks English, and I don’t have to use public transport.  Give and take, right?

Afterwards, we just explored Vienna.  It is a rather pretty city.  I’ve been reading a crime series set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, so I was thrilled to be walking along the Ringstausse and have Melissa say, ‘Oh, that’s the Kunsthistorisches,’ and I’d actually heard of it!  We walked over to Belvedere—a true palace, the palace of the Hapsburgs, or at least, one of them. It was—so grand.  Of course.  The gardens just went on and on.  The palace did too, we just didn’t go inside (it was costly!) an afforded some amazing views when you walked up this enormous hill.

Looking down, I realized that the city was really just piles and piles of glamorous marble, streets and streets of it.  Everything in Vienna is grand.  Excpet for their affinity with stringing wires (for the trams, for the street lights, for electricity), and their predilection for smoking, Vienna is wonderful.

Sunday was just as good.  I had to buy my bus ticket, which was confusing and not helped by my ignorance of German (I can now order tea Schwatz te mit milch bitte! or ‘black tea with milk, please!) but that’s about it.  We wandered around Stephenplatz, where we went inside the grand cathedral.  It never ceases to amaze me when I go to places like Vienna, like England, like Barcelona, and touch the cool stone of the walls that these walls were built 500, 600, 700 or even more years ago.  Before America was anything but a forested, almost untouched piece of land, lived on only be segmented tribes of Native Americans that had no idea that such a building could even exist. It never ceases to amaze me old Europe is.

We took lunch at a charming Café (I had a crepe with cheese, apples, and some kind of jam, it sounds weird, but it was so good!) and then headed over to the Danube, a short train ride away.  Everyone says that the Blue Danube thing is just a myth—and maybe its not as blue as, say, a blue crayon or the sky on a clear day, but I’d still say its pretty freaking blue.  Compared to the Mississippi, its…crazy blue. 

But the evening was the best part—we went to the opera.  I’d never been, but I had high expectations.  It just seemed like such a high-class, aristocratic thing to do—see an opera.  They’re always seeing operas in Victorian books, so I was very excited.  We got there—and the opera house is brilliant by the way—and waited in lie for what seemed like forever (I actually brought a book…) but it was all worth it.  We bought a 4 euro ticket to stand about 7 or 8 meters behind people that paid a god 100 or 200 euros to sit. 

Normally, singing in movies makes me angry—I just want them to get on with the story! (English major in me speaking) But the opera was great!  We had a quick dinner, which was good, it gave us energy to stand for 3 hours—before we settled down to watch the opera. It was crowded (we were basically standing in horse stalls) but it was all part of the experience.  They have these little screens that tell you what they are saying (it was in Italian!) but as not much really happened, and they liked to repeat themselves, I found myself just watching the characters, listening to their voices, studying the scenery.  I don’t know much about operas (or anything really) but I was amazing.  Too bad they died in the end—but hey at least they sang about it!

More Cardiff. 

Okay, so this is the bad part.  Kristyn really wanted to see a hockey game, so we bought tickets to see the Cardiff Devils—which is wayyy more exciting than it sounds. It was pretty cool, even though I know nothing about hockey.  It’s a pretty fast-paced game and really easy to lose track of the puck.  The Devils won, which was good.  The Devils fans also liked to do this thing where they took off their shoes and held them in the air whenever something happened (I was never clear exactly what that entailed…) But so yeah.  The game was fine.  It was what happened before we arrived that was the bad part.

We had to take a bus there.  And the bus, being a typical city bus, took us all over the place, meandering here and there through first nice, and then slowly grimier and grimier neighborhoods as the bus slowly ambled outside of the city.  We came up to a three-way intersection and saw a stopped red car off to the right side (i.e. the wrong side of the road here) and, thinking it hit another car, I looked at my seatmate and said, ‘Oh, that sucks.’  The bus slowed down to swerve around the car and as we passed it, we realized there was a man lying facedown in the road, halfway under the red car.  His jeans were torn, exposing the flesh underneath, and his arms were above his head as if he had tried to brace himself before he fell.  By his side, about 2 meters away, lay a bent, damaged motorcycle.  He wasn’t moving, and a little circle of people had gathered around him in a semicircle.

On the bus, there was a collective gasp as people stared at the man, unable to look away. There wasny any police there, no ambulance.  No one was doing anything.  And we just sat there on the bus, watching the scene outside.  The three rowdy men in the back actually stopped the bus and jumped off to ‘see what was happening’…pretty sick, right? And then the bus turned the corner and he was gone. 

Yet I couldn’t get him out of my mind.  That picture of the man, just lying there, unmoving, with the group just standing around him was burned into my eyes.  It really disturbed me, that feeling of helplessness, that I didn’t—couldn’t—do anything.  For days, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, instead, sharing it with anyone who’d listen.  What did they tell his family? What was he doing there anyway? Why didn’t they pay better attention? Why do people ride motorcycles anyway, as dangerous as they are? I’m pretty sure that this experience, this image, as fleeting as it was, changed something in me.  I’m not sure what, but things suddenly seemed a little different, life suddenly seemed a more important. 

Thanks to some Google research, I later found out he died right there on the scene.  When the bus drove by, when I looked out that window—he was already gone. 

Caerdydd (otherwise known as Cardiff)

The day started off in madness. 

I went for a run, totally forgetting that the Bath Half was today, so as I popped out of the canal onto the road, I was thoroughly surprised to see throngs of people standing in lines that literally went on for several streets all clutching their numbers.  After breakfast, Sophia and I headed out to the train station to catch the 11:25 train to Wales.  Unfortunately, we forgot about the marathoners.  We spent the next ten minutes shouting things like “banana!” and “clownface!” and “Go dog!” to the various costumed runners. There were also an awful lot of people running for charities, which meant they had to wear really strange outfits.  Like the breast cancer runners—they each literally wore a single giant stuffed boob strapped to their chest (or back…).  It was strange.

After about an hour and a half, we arrived in Cardiff.  It wasn’t a terribly huge, impressive place—in fact, it was rather modern, even plain.  At least, until we got to the Castle.  The Castle was easily my favorite part of the whole trip.  It was so interesting!  The outer wall was impressive enough, but inside it, it was just gorgeous.  There was a huge open space, all green and wonderful.  Plopped in the middle was a still-standing medivel castle.  Off to the side, there was the more modern castle that the Victorians used to live in.

The whole thing started off with a bizarre movie set in modern Cardiff but with “history coming to life” through the centuries.  The modern girl was running around fighting football players turned to medeivel soldiers…odd.

The Victorian castle was pretty nice, mostly because it was really pretty without being over the top.  The rooms were done up nicely, there was an octagon stairwell (that we couldn’t use) the dinning room had a huge table, there was suits of armor in the halls.  My favorite was the library though.  So many books, of course I’d like it!  It was decorated with hand-painted banners bearing the names of the king’s favorite writers.  The only ones I can still remember are Aristotle, Pluto, and Dante.  I guess he was a fan of the classics. 

The medieval part of the castle was really great though.  You had to climb a host of stairs to get to the top, but the view was worth it!  Cardiff may not be the most glamorous city, but it certainly looked nice from above.  The stairs got steeper and steeper as you go through the stone rooms.  They weren’t much to look at now, but the Hugh, the audio-guide man, told me all about the lives of the families that used to live in these tiny rooms with walls as thick as a bank vault.  He also informed me to look at the medieval graffiti and the small hole in the lowest apartment that was apparently the toilet. 

After a delicious little lunch at a local sandwich shop, we headed over to the National Museum via the shopping district.  The shopping district was modern and placeless, but the National History Museum, alongside the courts and the town hall, were very grand and gorgeous.  We went inside the National Museum—but we couldn’t get through it all!  Cardiff isn’t big enough to have separate museums; so there was a whole art section, which included neo-classical, impressionism, sculpture, modernism, and even an exhibit on Buddhism, which I loved because it made me think about my  (hopefully) future Himalayan trek.  I was excited about seeing some Van Gough until I leaned in closer and saw that had painted that view 37 times so its no wonder they have one.  But the museum closed at 4:45, and after spending an hour and a half upstairs, we realized that we only had 20 minutes to see the science stuff.  Sometimes that gets really boring, and it was at first until we turned the corner and entered the dinosaur room.  I wish I got to see more of it, but the guards were literally herding us through the halls to get us out and the only exhibit that I truly remember seeing clearly was the one on prehistoric bugs—including a clump of giant cockroaches and a gigantic spider.  I was so traumatized that my heart didn’t slow down until after we sped through the rest of the dinosaurs, went outside, through the reception of an Indian wedding and were back in the center of town. 

Okay this is getting long, so I will continue this in the next post.

How to Relive Your Childhood...

Being an intern at a museum’s education center is fun!  It’s like reliving your childhood twice a week.  No really, minus the cleaning up afterwards, its spectacular.  In one workshop on architecture, I got to draw a line drawing of the famous Royal Crescent (a big, curvy row of fancy houses for Bath’s upper echelons).  Afterwards, the children all crowded around me and ooohed and ahhhhed, acting like I was freaking Leonardo da Vinci or something.  In another, there was an extra station set up, so I got to paint a box in the style of Mondrian.  (Afterwards, the kids made sculptures with wood scraps, but that’s where I put my foot down.) It ended uo looking more like a stained glass window, but whatever.

Today, the teacher, Chrissie, had this whole class planned out where she told that story about the hen who made bread and none of her friends would help her using little puppets, stuffed animals and various objects to represent the bread-making stages, and then we made bread!  I’ve made bread about twice in my life, so it was a very exciting experience for me!  At the end, there was an extra loaf, so then I even got to try some, and it was sooo delicious!  I did have to have an epic battle with the printer for a solid 30 minutes to get the thing to print out all the pictures of the kids for their little photo memory books, but the bread at the end was so worth it…