Austria Take Two: Ice Skating and Flying Home

Friday was our last full day in Austria. I wanted to go and find the elusive ice rink, so we ventured out after lunch (when it had warmed up from minus sixteen) armed with a map. We'd almost found it our first day in St Johann, when we went to look at the chair lift, but we hadn't walked quite far enough around the bend in the road.

One solitary boy was skating around the rink holding onto a large plastic penguin for balance. There was a little cottage beside the ice rink, but it looked like a normal house and the hut where I thought you might get skates was all shut up. I tried to ask a man when the rink might open, but he was extremely busy with some kind of flashing-light panel, and refused to talk to me. Luckily a woman with two kids turned up a few minutes later, and when I asked about skates she said 'in der haus'. It turned out the cottage wasn't a private house after all, and when you opened the door you walked through the little foyer and into a changing room, complete with a man at a window ready to exchange skates for 5€. I got some grey skates the wrong size first of all, and had to say 'kleine' and get some bigger, much prettier ones in white and purple. If I ever get any of my own, I think they will look like these.

The rink is outside, with mountains all around. The sun was on the ice and very bright. I hadn't skated in a few years, and was a bit wobbly at first and glad there was only one other person on the ice. I managed to stay upright, though, and The One Who Speaks Russian took some good photos and sat in the sun with her book. It wasn't long before the after-school crowd came onto the ice, but by then I was reasonably confident and even skating backwards some of the time.

There were some very good skaters, and some beginners. There was one boy dressed all in orange who fell over, at speed, almost every time I saw him. I wondered if his parents had dressed him in orange as a warning to other skaters.

At indoor ice rinks I've been to, they have a large lumbering vehicle called a Zamboni that sweeps the ice and makes it smooth again. At this smaller outdoor rink, they had a live Zamboni instead, a boy who looked to be about eight and pushed a scraper broom thing around. I think the broom changed hands a few times, and the kids looked like they were having fun.

The sun began to sink behind the mountains so I surrendered my beautiful skates and walked back through the town to the hotel, passing through the little Christmas market on the way.

There was one goal I had not yet reached for the week: building a snowman. I found lots of good untouched snow in the park next to the hotel, so I storked to a good spot and started.

Only I didn't really want to build a traditional snowman. I didn't have a carrot, for one, and snowmen always look a bit gauche. So I made a snow maiden instead. Unfortunately snow upon snow doesn't tend to make a good picture, but here are my best photoshopped efforts anyway.

She didn't come out exactly as I'd imagined her (and when I had the bright idea of taking off my gloves to get more definition and intricacy and such things as hands, it didn't turn out to be such a bright idea. More a very cold idea) but I was still pleased with her.

We got up early the next morning and prepared for minus sixteen on our way to the train station, but it didn't actually turn out to be that cold. I drunk in the mountains for the last time on our way into Salzburg, found the trolley bus to the airport and were on our way home.

One thing I really liked about Salzburg airport was passport control. Salzburg airport has only 9 gates, and passport control consisted of a smiley man at a little window sitting right next to the woman taking our boarding passes at the gate before we walked out onto the runway (into the first rain we'd seen - it really was warming up). Passport control at the UK border was not nearly so nice, but then it's generally not the most enjoyable of experiences.

One more week of work, and then Christmas!

Where did the year go?

 

Austria Take Two: Salzburg

Today was our Salzburg day. Our town is about an hour from Salzburg on the train, so we dragged ourselves away from our books and down to the train station in the freezing air. The sky was an incredible blue, the sun touching the mountains as we caught a nice regional train and began to wend our way out of the mountains.

This is an impressive journey, and worth doing by train I think. The road weaves back and forth and goes through tunnels, but the train spends most of the time right by the river with mountains towering on both sides, white peaks with slashes of black cliff face and dark snow-dusted forests hugging the slopes. We went past a castle on an outcropping of rock, and lots of little villages with colourful wooden houses covered in snow. Everything looks so clean and bright and untouched, with white expanses that I guess are fields in summer.

Salzburg itself is still pretty much surrounded by mountains, though there's more valley space. We took a tour of the old town with a nice guide who showed us the squares and the statues and took us inside the Dom cathedral, through a graveyard with beautiful wrought iron grave markers and past a very old bakery that is still baking bread.

He explained that one side of town is known as the Old Town, and the other the New Town because it was only settled in 15 AD. That's not a typo. The Dom has five organs (Salzburg has a proud history of music, of course), but before there were organs, singers and instrumentalists performed from balconies near the ceiling. The sound would have floated down from above and all around, which would have been an amazing experience.

The buildings are tall and close together, because there isn't much room to build, the streets narrow, and wherever you are in the city you can look up to the castle on the rock with the town surrounding it. We ended at Mozart's birthplace, then decided it was time for lunch and made for NordSee, which you see everywhere in Austria and apparently Germany. I had a very nice meal of fish, potatoes and buttered vegetables and, suitably warmed, we ventured back out to inspect the chocolate shops and the Christmas market.

Mozart ducks. Obviously.

This was my first proper Christmas market this year - in Vienna there were too many people to really see much of it. I got a glüwein (I think that's how you spell it - mulled wine) and wandered around warming my hands and looking at the stalls of decorations and jewellery and food. The market spills over into multiple squares and around the boarded-up fountains (protected from frost) beside the Dom.

Many of the buildings are inspired by Italian architecture, because Salzburg was a main trading point for people from Italy and Germany, especially when the salt mine was still open (Salzburg = Salt Mountain).

By four o'clock we were getting tired and cold, so we caught a train back to St Johann im Pongau and curled up with our books.

 

St Johann im Pongau: Days 3 and 4

We've been having a nice relaxing week in our little Alpine town, the One Who Speaks Russian and I. The hotel has a spa and a swimming pool, and there is a supermarket across the road with a good supply of chocolate. We have books (lots of books) and a few movies, and a beautiful view of snowy mountains out the sliding door. Also, have I mentioned,

IT IS COLD?

It's not a wet cold like you get in London. This is a crisp cold, hovering around minus ten Celsius and diving to minus eighteen at dawn, before the sun has had a chance to warm everything up again. On Tuesday we went out to find the McDonalds (wifi), and had a bit of an adventure trying to find a way across town and the river that was open to pedestrians. They only clear some of the footpaths of snow, and I'm sure in some places the roads are supposed to be higher speed so don't actually have footpaths, but eventually we saw the sign and slogged towards it through pristine white snow or grey mush, depending on whether we were following an actual path or not. The snow in some places is as deep as my knee.

Our internet at the hotel came with a five hour limit on it, so it was nice to be able to sit and check emails and things without worrying about the time. As we were walking back up the hill, a little old lady called us back and insisted on giving us lollies, which was very nice of her. When we got back to the hotel we sat in the spa for a while, and then retreated to our room for dinner.

Our little bar fridge doesn't have quite enough room for my sparkly red bowl of salad, but I've found a better solution: leave it just outside the sliding door in the day time, and it's perfectly crisp in the evening - not actually frozen. So I've been calling the balcony the fridge.

On Wednesday I spent most of the day determined to finish a book, and went out to see the local church just after the sun had dropped behind the mountains. The slopes were luminous, and the Christmas lights strung all around town were sparkling in the dusk. I didn't actually get in to see the church, but I had a nice walk anyway, taking pictures and watching the chairlift take people up the mountain. TOWSR and I had considered skiing, but neither of us has had much practice, and thought the expense and likelihood of broken bones probably wasn't worth it. Especially as my foot has only just healed. I'm keen to try skating on Friday, though, if the rink is open...

 

Austria Take 2 - Days 2 & 3: St Johann im Pongau

When we woke up on Sunday morning, the sky was a brilliant blue. I opened the curtains and caught my breath at the vista above and all around. St Johann im Pongau is in a valley between mountains, and from our window you can see across the valley to the white expanses of mountainside, the firs with their dusting of snow and the sloping roofed Austrian houses dotted across the mountain. It looks exactly like a postcard.

There was a bit of excitement when we realised we couldn't find the room key or my hat and gloves, but eventually they reappeared and we stopped with the conspiracy theories about people breaking into our room while we were sleeping. We weren't exactly sure how cold it was, but we ventured out into the crisp air with lots of layers and scarves and had a wander around the deserted town. It was Sunday, and nothing is open on Sunday, so we hardly met anyone on our exploration of the Hauptstrasse (High Street), a little snowy garden over a cliff edge, the bottom of the chair lift and around the Dom church.

When we got too cold we went back to the hotel and noticed the weather for the day had a temperature of -10. Which we'd just been walking around in.

A soak in the hot tub warmed us up, and then we went for dinner at one of the hotel restaurants where TOWSR got a special gluten free pizza and I got one with spinach, bacon and ewe's cheese (big enough for breakfast and lunch the next day). With sorbet, icecream and fruit with chocolate sauce to follow, we thought overall it was a pretty good dinner.

Monday morning we woke up to snow that TOWSR called semi-blizzard snow. We could not see the mountains. We could not see the buildings across the road. We could almost see the edge of our deck. So we spent the morning with books, and ventured out into the knee-deep snow around lunchtime to see how far we could get.

The snow ploughs had been around clearing the roads and footpaths, and we went down into the valley to see all the buildings with their blankets of snow, wandered around and retreated to the bookstore and supermarket. There really were a lot more people around than on Sunday, and it didn't feel so much like we were two of the last vestiges of humanity clinging to life in a dead world. The snow had stopped falling, and when we got back to our room I began to make a snowman on our deck, but stopped when I couldn't feel my hands anymore. A few hours later the snow began again, and we huddled happily inside as it rose higher and higher and covered up the sad beginnings of my snowman.

 

Austria Take Two - Day One: Snow (Action)

Hello all! I am once again jet-setting around Europe, and back in Austria, this time among the Alps. It was snowing when I arrived, and we had to walk across the runway to the terminal as snowflakes spun down and clung to our coats.

Thankfully I didn't have to leave the house this morning at a quarter to seven to get to the airport, as I originally thought - it turns out that Stansted Airport is much closer to my house than my brain was telling me, and I didn't have to go all the way into Victoria and back out again. There are 5/6 London airports, depending on who you talk to, and though I know Heathrow and City and where they are (City is, strangely, near the City) I always get confused about which other airports are which. I pulled up outside Stansted this morning and thought 'Oh! This one!', because I have actually been here multiple times. For future reference, Stansted is the one closest to Stratford, and is big and square and white and tent-like in construction.

I'll probably forget that.

Non-EU citizens have to get their passports checked at the bag drop (just because non-EU people can't be trusted. Well, I guess they check our visas?) so I did that, had some very early lunch and stood staring at the display boards until they put up my gate number. Then, I joined everyone else in a brisk walk towards our gate, none of us actually running, but everyone sliding looks at each other to make sure no one else was breaking into a trot. First person to the gate is first person on the plane, and the person who gets the pick of the seats.

I ended up about twentieth in the queue, and bagged myself a nice window seat behind the wing (I can never remember - which part of the plane is most likely to end in your fiery death in a crash?). There appeared to be no seat pockets in which to put my iPad and book, so I laid them on my lap and stuffed my coat, jacket and jersey under the seat in front, and we took off.

As we were flying over the Channel and coming in over the low countries, I saw a huge area that was sort of a hazy chalky colour. I was horrified. What kind of industrial waste was this? What had they done to their city?

It was a while before I saw others patches just like it, and realised it was snow.

As we flew eastwards, the snow patches got larger until they all joined together into a great white snow plain, and then the clouds came in and you couldn't see anything.

It was -4 Celsius and snowing when we landed in Salzburg. We had to walk across the runway to get to the terminal, so I bundled up in all my clothes and braved the snowy cold with my ugg boots. From there it was a matter of getting the trolley bus to the main station where I met The One Who Speaks Russian, and we caught a train that we really hoped would take us to the little Alpine village (look! Literally alpine!) where we would spend the next week.

The conductor didn't tell us we were on the wrong train when he checked our tickets, so we assumed we were on the right one, but we didn't know how long we had until we had to get off. At last the speaker informed us the next station was St Johann im Pongau, so we grabbed our bags and got off into the snow.

We didn't get too lost on the way to the hotel, though we did wander through a small Christmas market twice, and very soon we were in our nice hotel room with our snowy balcony and beautifully painted Austrian TV cabinet.

It was dark, so we couldn't see out the windows very well, but we had a nice evening of books and movies and cake for dinner.

 

Vienna Day 4: Walking Tour, Wiener Schitzel and St Stephensdom

Today was my last day in Vienna, and I was determined to get the walking tour that sets off from an associated hostel every second morning. We set out and got to the meeting point five minutes too late, but a man at the desk told us we could probably catch them up. After a bit of confusion about how long they could be possibly taking through the market, the large group appeared and we tagged on to them.

Our guide was very good, explaining all about the buildings and history of the city. The first building we saw was the one I may have mentioned the other day with the gold dome - the Secession Building. It was built as a gallery for artists who wanted to move away from the traditional styles at the turn of the twentieth century, and was the first art gallery to have clean white walls and very little decoration, in order to show off the art.

Next was the Vienna Opera House where you can see an opera for 3€ if you stand, and then the beginning of the Vienna Palace, which is a collection of buildings that goes on and on and on. Some of it is now used as an art gallery, some as libraries, and some as state offices.

It seems strange that you can just walk among all these buildings, staring up at the windows from the small courtyards and alleyways between them, where once I guess these were heavily guarded areas of the city. We also went past the Sacher Hotel, which I'm not exactly sure how to spell, but it's why the famous Sacher Torte is named as it is, and is also where that famous picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed was taken.

We walked down some of the most expensive shopping streets, and past an incredible monument to the plague that stretches up in three levels and has far more gold than you'd think would be on a monument outside H&M. The first level has an angel driving the personification of the plague into the ground, the next has the emperor with his gold sword praying on his knees (the only public place in Europe you will see a monarch on their knees) and above him are more angels and God.

The guide left us with recommendations for lunch, so a few of us had a good meal in a wood-panelled restaurant off a little alleyway. I was a bit worried about the Wiener schnitzel because I don't much like pork, but it was actually very good and came with salad and everything. No tomato sauce was required.

Nearby is the cathedral of St Stephen's, which we took a wander around inside after our lunch. It was once the tallest building in the world, and is pretty impressive from the outside with its towering pillars, incredible stonework and gold-and-black tiled roof. It was bombed during WWII, but was restored and reopened in 1955. You can't really tell there was ever anything done to it.

It was almost time to get my bus to the airport, so we went back to our hostel to get my bag. Now I'm sitting in the airport ...

... that was me realising that the screens said my flight was already boarding, and me realising that the gate was actually a lot farther away than I thought, and deciding that, though nice and modern, this airport possibly isn't very well designed because it's never quite clear how many more barriers and travelators there are until you reach your destination.

Incidentally, the flight is not boarding. They lied. Ah well. At least I'm here now. And contemplating the fact that I am severely behind on my word count for NaNoWriMo. This is what happens when you miss a day...

 

Vienna Day 3: Schönbrunn, Christmas Markets and Viennese Apartments

On Sunday the One Who Speaks Russian and I rose for our all-you-can eat hostel breakfast, which included boiled eggs, salami, capsicum and cucumber as many European breakfasts seem to. We loaded up on emergency supplies of Nutella and set out to walk to Schönbrunn, the Palace of the Habsburgs outside old Vienna proper.

The mist had come in overnight and everything had a silvery white light to it, so much so that from a distance things seemed covered in a light dusting of snow. The Palace is incredibly large and stately, with mirrored staircases leading down from main doors between the two wings. You can imagine Cinderella leaving her glass slipper on these steps. They were still setting up a Christmas market in the courtyard in front of the place, but they had an enormous Christmas tree up and decorated with baubles.

We walked around the side of the palace and through the gardens with their little hedges and dozens of statues. Everything is set up along a symmetrical line leading from the centre of the palace to the Neptune Fountain, and then up the hill to the Gloriette, a beautiful airy classical building with arches. It wasn't quite symmetrical (some of the trees on one side of the gardens are taller) but pretty much everything else was. After the zigzag climb up the hill we sat in the Gloriette and drank tea and coffee, which comes with a glass of water in Austria, and marvelled at the misty view over the palace and city beyond.

Next was the tour of the palace itself. You had to buy tickets at the main gate, so The One Who Speaks Russian offered to get them while I sat on a bench and nursed my legs, which were a bit sore after all the walking. I think next time I come to Vienna, I won't break my foot in the weeks beforehand.

The Palace rooms are incredible. They're mostly done in Rococo style, with curling gold mouldings everywhere and incredible crystal chandeliers. There are paintings covering entire walls that took years to complete in one room, and then you go into the next room and there are more paintings that took years to complete, and in the next room too. You can see they had a lot of money.

Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg daughter, and there is a portrait of her as a young girl in one of the rooms. A bit further on is the room where Mozart played for the Empress when he was six years old. I had heard of this concert, and it was absolutely surreal to be in the actual room where it had occurred.

At last we went into the Great Hall, which I actually gasped on seeing. The ceiling is three incredible frescoes of the Imperial family and the Austrian Empire in general, and flickering candelabra line the walls (the flickering effect is achieved by having the electric candle bulbs in springs that bobble in the wind. Actually quite tasteful). The ceiling is high and the walls are covered in curling gold designs. Unfortunately no pictures are allowed in the palace.

We took the underground to the Christmas market outside the Rathaus, which is the most famous and the busiest. It was just on dusk, and though the crowds weren't as thick as those we saw later, it was still a mission to get through everyone and see the stalls you wanted. Most of them sold food, but there were also lots of Christmas decoration stalls and a lamp stall among other things. We decided to make for TOWSR's friend's hostel, which is actually an apartment that she has entirely to herself at the moment.

The apartment is on the first floor, and you open the main door into a cobbled entranceway, climb some marble stairs, go along a corridor with an ornate stone water basin on the wall (dating from the time of the very first piped water, I'm guessing) and into the apartment. We had a lovely evening with dinner and a movie in the warm apartment, then set off for our own hostel.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Vienna Day 2: Naschtmarket, die lichter und das Cafe Central

This morning the One Who Speaks Russian and I got up early (read ten-thirty), made ourselves breakfast and ventured out into the cool, crisp air of Vienna. There was sun! I spent quite some time marvelling at this, and also at all the amazing stately buildings and modern shiny ones we were walking past on our way up the main shopping street to the Ringstrasse. Our plan was to walk around there and see all the main beautiful building sights, but then we saw a shiny golden dome away from the main areas and decided to go and see what that was.

It turned out to be a beautiful classical/Art Nouveau building with a lacy, leafy metal dome, and then that led us on to the Naschtmarkt. This is a long market bounded by two main streets that goes on and on, with fruit and vegetables and spices and meat and knickknacks and antiques and scarves and chocolate shops. We got chili hot chocolates and wandered, marvelling at the range of everything (there were fruits I'd never seen before, as well as durian/jackfruit wrapped in plastic so it didn't stink up the market). I got an entire kebab for three euros, which I thought was incredibly cheap, but by this time we'd done quite a bit of walking and my lower limbs were complaining.

We retreated to the hostel for a nap and a nanowrimo session, and I played with the lockers in our room and giggled (these lockers are amazing. They have inch-depth buttons that poke out, and if you push them in they just come out again and the locker doesn't lock. If you push the button with your key card between the button and your thumb, however, the RFID chip inside the key card does something and THE LOCKER LOCKS. These lockers have been sent back from THE FUTURE).

When it got dark we ventured out again, and saw a vintage tram trundling along that needed a picture taken of it. It looked like it belonged in a museum, but it was happily carrying people and advertisements on the main line alongside the modern ones. We took the U-Bahn Underground train to the centre of the Ringstrasse to meet The One Who Speaks Russian's friend, and walked past amazing buildings and fairy lights and three sets of horses and buggies, complete with old-fashioned lamps in the carriages and drivers with top hats. We then scrutinized the coffee houses and decided on one which was once frequented by Lenin, Trotsky and Freud - the Cafe Central.

It was an absolutely beautiful place to have coffee, with marble pillars curving up to meet each other at the ceiling, incredible cakes and a grand piano. i got a black coffee which was very smooth and not at all bitter, and some sort of hazelnut cream slice with a reproduction of Klimt's The Kiss on top of it. The One Who Speaks Russian was very impressed with her chocolate creme brulee torte thing, and we had a nice few hours sitting in this beautiful cafe, listening to the pianist (who played a song the Hopeful Gardener enjoys playing, and made me a bit homesick) and pretending to be sophisticated Viennese.

Back at the hostel, we listened to the live band in the hostel's bar and planned our day tomorrow. I should probably get some sleep so that I can make the most of it...

 

Vienna Day 1: the flight

I've opened up my blogging app on my ipad to see a note saying 'There are fairy lights on the bridges! There should ALWAYS be fairy lights on the bridges!' True. There should always be fairy lights on the bridges over the Thames. I'm pretty sure I made that note as I was taking the train home after work, through the autumn evening darkness. They haven't yet turned on the Christmas lights in the main streets, but they're all up, ready and waiting. This year the sponsor of the Oxford Street lights is Marmite, so there are Marmite-themed displays.

Right at this moment I'm sitting in the middle seat of an aeroplane row (I was seemingly the last one to choose my seats, because there were no window or aisle seats available whatsoever) on my way to Vienna. It'll be dark outside soon, anyway, so not much to see. My air cast has not exploded, as I thought it might (I realised this just as we were trundling along the runway in the half-hour traffic jam for one of Heathrow's two runways, when it was too late to get the deflator out of the overhead locker and deflate it). I was hoping to be able to walk around with a normal shoe, but I thought I'd take the air cast/moon boot just in case. I've got my normal shoe as well, which took me a good while to find, considering I haven't worn it in six weeks and it had given up and fallen down inside my wardrobe.

I hope to have many interesting things to report over the coming days... Right now I should be cracking on with NaNoWriMo, which I am now over halfway with! I'm still not entirely sure I know what's happening, but all should become clear. I've also fallen back into my normal writing pattern - write until I get bored and it's dragging, switch to a different part of the book, and then come back to the first part later. I think this is probably good, because I often don't actually need the bit I was stuck on.

The Vienna airport is very new and impressive, with futuristic arrivals board that are part of the walls. I caught a bus right into town and went past lots and lots of lights, but it's hard to figure out what buildings are when you only see the lights. Now I've found my way to the hostel after wandering for ages round the railway station, and I'm really looking forward to bed...

Posted with Blogsy