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 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...

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Spending Vast Sums of Money (2) and NaNoWriMo

I've just got my tickets to New Zealand. I spent about four hours staring at different websites, ringing different travel agents to get them to explain their terms and conditions and then telling them that, no, I didn't want to book over the phone (I'm paranoid they'll spell my name wrong and tick aisle seat instead of window seat, and then I'll have to change EVERYTHING and these things are costly to change) but at last I clicked the final button and took the plunge and poured lots of money into the mouth of the travel beast.

It is stressful clicking that last button. Double checking dates and times (what if I've booked for 2014? What THEN? Oh, you mean you can only book a year in advance? Okay, then. But what if it's SEPTEMBER not February?), card numbers, spelling of names (obviously I might have spelled my name wrong. Or given a different name. Or just put 'Name' instead of my actual name. I did that once), trusting that this is a reputable website and most of the reviews I've spent the last hour trawling are okay, or at least acceptable. And then screen-printing pages in two different ways to prove I've seen the confirmation and can brandish it in people's faces if anyone dares to suggest otherwise.

I'm not paranoid, am I?

Thirty-six hours each way. It doesn't matter when you leave or when you arrive, because time doesn't really have a meaning anymore. You're not on London time, and you're not yet on NZ time. It's a long grey limbo of the body-clock.

I suppose it does kind of matter when I arrive for people who want to meet me at the airport. They're nice arrivals times, don't worry.

My plan for today was to get all my NaNoWriMo done by midday, which of course didn't happen. I was a bit behind until yesterday, but I caught up and am back on track. I'm not using Scrivener, because I found out that, if your computer crashes, the Scrivener index file corrupts and you can't use it anymore. I decided that, with my usual inability to turn my laptop off for weeks, it wasn't worth the possibility that all my extra notes and pretty structure would become unusable if the computer crashed. So I'm back to MS Word, which is kind of strange after so long using Scrivener.

Writing so much and rationing my time is strange. Normally, I must read over what I've written quite often, because I'm not really doing that now and I feel like I'm writing blind. This is funny, considering that this time I have actually done a bit of planning and I know where the story is going, whereas last time I did NaNoWriMo I had absolutely no idea. I'm enjoying it though, and getting to know characters that I hadn't realised were so interesting. I think I may have built some rather large plot holes into my plot, however, so there's a bit of work needed to fill them in.

Have a good week!

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The name's Bond.

I have a blow up boot thing that means I can walk! A bit! With crutches! I took advantage of this to spend the day at the movies, making the most of my free movies card and my sore crutch hands.

One of the films I saw was Skyfall, at the big screen where I saw Spiderman (well, one of the times I saw Spiderman). Like when I saw Spiderman, they had film problems. Last time it was the coordination of the 3D images. This time everything was pink for a while, which it turns out is very distracting. Everything was back to normal by the time the actual movie started (there were a very, very many ads, ninety percent of which were Bond themed) so I got to witness the Istanbul opening sequence in proper technicolor.

And I had been to many of the places! I recognised the exotic street corners and bits of mosque wall! I realised that the compositing if locations was done with quite a bit if artistic license, because there was no way some scenes could have happened in the real places, unless there was some time-space stretching going on. But what am I talking about? This is a Bond film. They laugh in the face of reality and probable-sequence-of-events.

Bond films can do this, I think. You can see the filmmakers gleefully rubbing the hands as they contemplate different action scenes. What do you mean, it's unlikely there'll be (highlight the spoilers if you want them) a digger and four VW Beatles on a Turkish passenger train? It's all right! It looks awesome! The audience will accept it! The bar of willing suspension of disbelief is higher for Bond. We want to see a fun movie. We don't really care about the little details, like the fact that Circle and District underground trains do not run in deep-level tunnels. We can forgive, if you give us villains using entire (strangely empty) Jubilee line trains as weapons at Embankment Station, where Jubilee trains do not run. Ha! That beats a puny little laser, Goldfinger.

It's a good movie and I really enjoyed it (though I was slightly concerned that the villain was portrayed as gay, considering various 'moral' debates at the moment. Yay for having gay characters on screen and having a more numerically-accurate representation of society, but not so great that it was portrayed negatively. There's already enough negativity around, and it just solidifies prejudices, doesn't it?).

I've been thinking about plotting lots this week, considering I'm doing Nanowrimo next week, and so I went into Skyfall with a particular eye. The movie follows the beats of a story well - problem, try to solve, doesn't work, try to solve, maybe we have, yes we have! Oh... no, screwed up. Badly. Try to solve... Fall back... Try to solve... Maybe... Yes! It was also interesting in that they address Bond's seeming invulnability - a character who has too much skill or power is too easy to get out of situations, so there's much less tension. I have been struggling with this in my Nanowrimo planning - how do you stop a character from becoming unbeatable, especially in fantasy? In Skyfall, you're no longer sure that Bond will be up to the challenges he faces. You're reasonably sure he won't die in the end, but there are lots of things that could happen that don't include him dying... Tension is higher because Bond isn't so perfect anymore.

And, I have to admit, I cried. This is the second time I have cried in a Bond film. The first time was when a car in one of the Pierce Brosnan movies got sliced in half by a helicopter-mounted circular saw. This time also involved the destruction of a car... No, I don't want to talk about it.

So I'm inspired, and back to the plotting! Must figure out how to heighten the tension and maybe think of a few scenes with explosions...

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Nanowrimo and the Broken Foot

The longer I'm on crutches, the grouchier I become. Latest in my tale of woe is the closing of my bus stop - apparently they feel the need to do road works, and this for some reason affects the ability of my bus to stop at the proper place. Ha! Why couldn't they wait until my foot was healed? And the buses do not stop elsewhere along the road, even when I'm late and there's no way I could ever run with crutches without taking a skidding tumble down the hill in a tangle of broken limbs. I'll have bones poking out of me soon.

I am also imagineering (can I borrow that word? I'm pretty sure it's copyrighted. Hmm. Thanks, Disney) a dumb-waiter that could ferry plates, groceries and cups of tea between the kitchen and my room. It would be nice if it could also ferry me. Or maybe some kind of Great Glass Elevator, which could also save on plane fares (thought: is the Great Glass Elevator pressurised? How fast does it travel? Would you have to go through customs, and if so you'd probably have to land near an airport, and if so do you have to worry about air traffic control?)

In other news, I've decided to do Nanowrimo this year. For those who don't know, this involves writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and this year over 300,000 people are doing it in the month of November. I did it three years ago and was amazed at how I could go from absolutely nothing (I had a last-minute change of idea, which meant that my pre-November planning consisted of about half an hour on the evening of October 31st) to an almost-complete first draft. Things just seem to click sometimes as you're writing and plotting, and a story comes through when a month before there was nothing.

This time, I'm going to try planning, and hopefully I won't have to change my idea at the last minute like last time. My commute takes an hour and a half each way at the moment, so I should have a reasonable amount of time to get my 1667 words done each day. I'm still not quite sure about my ending, but i'm confident it'll sort itself out. Eventually. I'm quite excited to get into the writing and see what will happen.

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Freewriting versus the Inner Editor

So today is the tenth of November (or the eleventh, for those of you who are living in the future). That means that anyone doing NaNoWriMo should be reaching 16,667 words. If you haven’t, there are still twenty days to catch up. It’s possible! Don’t give up! If all else fails, take your main character to the supermarket. And then he bought a tube of toothpaste. And three bananas. And a jar of hot chilli sauce. Eventually you’ll get back on track and write some words that are worth keeping, but in the meantime you have a hundred-and-twenty item grocery list to add to your word count.

There’s something freeing about just putting down on the page whatever comes to mind, and not worrying whether it makes sense or is useful to the plot. It can make sense later, during the editing process, and NaNoWriMo is all about the word count, so why worry now?

I’m currently in the every-little-word-must-mean-something-stupendous stage or state of mind, which can be very annoying. I keep thinking I see the finish line ahead, but then I start thinking about some other part that could be improved or changed, and how the novel as a whole would be so much better if I just rewrote some things here and there, and the finish line recedes a little bit. And then my rewrite starts off a whole cascade of other small changes that will make everything sparkle properly, once I’ve finished this round, and then halfway through I get distracted by another bit that really needs attention, and then that leads on to another bit, and-

Must rein in perfectionism. Maybe I should do a pseudo-NaNo, where I just have to write and not concurrently edit. Good luck everyone who’s still bashing away at NaNo!

Fifty Thousand Words and really good bread

At this very moment, thousands of people around the world are sitting in front of their computers or poring over their notebooks, typing madly or scribbling frantically, trying to reach that magic number: sixteen hundred and sixty seven words. Why? It’s November! NaNoWriMo!

(National Novel Writing Month, in which you attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days.)

I did it two years ago and ‘won’, despite my computer cord dying on the 28^th of November, necessitating me copying all my files to my external hard drive as my computer battery indicator flashed dire warnings about critical levels. I had to finish my final three-and-a-bit thousand words on the university computers. But I did it!

It’s a great experience. You have to get over your inner editor and just write, write, without worrying if something sounds stupid. You put your writing first (even on holidays at the beach). You stop using contractions (“won’t” only counts as one word, but “will not” is two!).

When you keep writing, your characters and plot do strange things and the world of your story opens up before you. It’s a voyage of discovery, even if you’ve outlined the heck out of it. And when you do get to the end, you can scroll back through your thousands and thousands of words and think yeah, I wrote that. In a month! Haha, super writer! And then you read over it and some of it is really really bad, but some of it actually ... isn’t. Some of it is quite good. In your humble opinion.

I keep thinking I will do it again some time, but that some time keeps getting pushed back to ‘next year’.

But for those of you who are doing it this year, here’s what I learned.

1.     1.  Choose an idea that won’t need hours of research, or do all the research in October. I outlined a huge idea in October, and dropped it at about 8pm on the 31^st of October because it was going to need at least an hour of research a day. Started afresh with a completely new idea. I had no idea where it was going, and it went fine.

2.    2.  Keep up with the word count! 1667 words is a lot easier to reach than 3334. Or 6667.

3.   3. Have different parts of your story going at the same time. Maybe this works for me because I get distracted/bored easily, but I prefer to call it writer’s block. If you get stuck on one bit, don’t waste time staring at it or bemoaning how bad it is. Think of another bit and start in!

4.   4. Free-writing is good. Something comes out of it eventually. Even if you’re only describing what your characters had for breakfast.

5.     5. I have Gabe’s typometer in the bottom right hand corner of my screen, telling me how fast I’m typing and how many words I’ve written today. It won’t quite match up with your word count (it counts EVERYTHING, including Google searches and IM conversations), but it’s a nice little in-the-moment motivator. How far can I get the needle to turn?

6.      6. Don’t leave it until 11pm to start writing.

7.      7. You will get faster! By the end of the month, I was able to get out my 1667 words in a little over an hour. True, they may not have been the best of words, but they were on my page!

You can do it!

(Now stop reading blogs and surfing Twitter and go and write.)

And finally: an announcement.

I have Vogel’s.

(this is a NZ brand of bread, and not a strange disease, for those who were wondering).

Tomorrow I will have Vogel’s toast with butter for breakfast, and on Sunday morning (when I have retrieved all my food and bits and pieces from my old flat) I will have Vogel’s toast with butter and Marmite. And for lunch I will have, among other things, a can of L&P (Lemon & Paeroa, fizzy drink World Famous in NZ) and Arnotts Mint Slice. Tesco’s sells Vogel's, but the rest of my haul is from a NZ shop and cost about three times what it would in NZ.

And I will be happy.