I saw a story on the ORF website this morning that the Volksgarten in Vienna, famous, among other things, for its stunning rose garden, came into being 200 years ago yesterday. It was the first garden in Austria to be designed and created by an emperor specifically for the people. (The emperor at the time was Franz I, great-nephew of Empress Maria Theresia.)
For several years, I apartment sat for friends of my family’s. It was a 200m2 flat in a distinguished old building (took two days to clean those traditional double windows!) right behind the Parliament in Vienna. The Volksgarten was less than a five-minute walk away and I sat there often.
Two other vivid memories: riding past on the tram and seeing the Lippizaners grazing in the Volksgarten (the Hofburg caught fire in 1992 and the horses were led to safety in the park) and sitting on a bench in the rose garden not quite a year ago having gone to Josef-Meinrad-Platz to test my way out of quarantine. I got there only to find that the computers were down and no testing was taking place. It was the first time I had been out of the apartment in over a week, and it was wonderful.
My father, who spoke very little German, used to get great pleasure out of the way German allowed the stringing together of nouns into one enormously long, often difficult-to-pronounce word. He would have loved this one: Gummischuhsohlenfabrikantenfamilie.
The family, who manufactured rubber soles for shoes, is named Beer and owned a villa in Hietzing that, Christian Seiler reports in today’s Kurier, is finally going to be renovated and opened to the public. Worth going to see apparently and not just for its designation.
P.S. I can’t help thinking that Mark Twain, too, would have delighted in this example of the awful German language.
Drinking water from a fire hydrant? Yes, in Vienna, where a Viennese friend once proudly said that here we flush our toilets with water others buy in supermarkets. (It comes from the mountains, thanks to Kaiser Franz Josef. Mentioned here: https://ecbinvienna.com/2022/01/04/08-breitenfurter-strase-to-alterlaa/)
In this case, there is a sponsored run to support cancer research today and the runners apparently will be able to get water at this station near the Narrenturm. (More about the Narrenturm here: https://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/en/narrenturm)
It’s late and hot. Maylo and I were on our way home from a Heuriger. (Where else would we go on a hot Friday evening? ;-))
It was quite a long trip home with several changes and long waits. We were waiting the tram that would more or less drop us off at our door and Maylo was lying on the sidewalk looking tired. Next thing I knew a man, dirty and poorly dressed but with gentle eyes and a smile, was sharing his bottled water with Maylo, pouring it onto the pavement and watching while Maylo lapped it up.
I couldn’t tell whether he was deaf and that’s why he didn’t speak or simply didn’t speak German. He tried to communicate with gestures and I sadly couldn’t tell what he wanted to say. Then our tram arrived and I thanked him for the water and said good night. Just as the tram doors started to close, he slid the bottle in to Maylo and went his way.
I was sure he needed the wonderfully cold, almost full bottle of water more than Maylo did, but I also thought he perhaps wanted to give it to a hot little dog more than he wanted to drink it himself.
In any case, it was a very special exchange for me, especially in a world where ever more people push themselves ahead, never mind the others, and I wanted to share it with you.
Here is a nice, light story in a world full of heavy news. A 10-meter whale sculpture that stood in front of a Gasthaus (kind of restaurant), zum Walfisch, in the Prater is being moved to the Wien Museum now that the restaurant it represented is no longer there. It is so big that it is being moved in now while the renovations are still ongoing. Eventually it will be hung from the ceiling.
More about this later, I hope, but now I have to go to work. The curse of the drinking classes, as my father loved to quip, possibly quoting George Bernard Shaw. Curse of the writing classes is more like it! 😉
Thursday was a holiday in Austria (Corpus Christi). What does that have to do today in the Trafik? More than one would think. When a holiday in Austria falls on a Thursday then many people in Vienna take a “Fenstertag” or “window day” and leave town for a four-day weekend. This leaves behind in the city people like me, who have no family to visit in, say, Salzburg, and those who have to work.
This was clearly visible in the Trafik this morning. Usually, there are a lot of people in and out on a Saturday morning. Many, like me, are picking up their newspaper to be read during a leisurely breakfast. Today only a few came in and all of them bought cigarettes but no newspapers, apparently on their way to work. Maylo and I stayed for a while and chatted with the Trafikantin, which we otherwise never get the chance to do, before wending our way home for breakfast.
I love Vienna when half the population is out of town. 🙂
Two days ago I caught a whiff of a sweet fragrance as we set out on our morning dog walk. Yesterday it was clear it was the linden blossoms of one particular tree that gets a lot of sun. Today it reminded to let you know — it must be June, the linden trees are out.
Every year the MA 42 (the “Magistratsabteiling” of the City of Vienna responsible for public parks and gardens) choose certain mixtures of flowers that they plant everywhere. The daffodils and red tulips are gone, but these have come out. I have no idea what they are (I am the kind person who is happy to work in a garden as long as someone else tells me what to do), but they are tall (about a foot and a half) and look like something out of Dr. Seuss, if you ask me. Fun.
We are nearing the end of the Rundumadum. In fact, because I started with the last leg of the trail, I have now come full circle. I do still need to get the stamp from the Roter Hiasl restaurant in the Lobau as they were not open when we passed that way. Then I will be eligible for my City of Vienna hiking pin. 🙂
But I am getting ahead of myself, which is a pity because the start of this stretch was so enticing (not just because the bus took us uphill and we only walked downhill ;-)). Here it is, an old “Kellergasse” within the city limits.
An old “Kellergasse” in Vienna’s 21st district
What is a “Kellergasse”? Many will already know that a “Keller” is a “cellar” and, in this case, a wine cellar, and a “Gasse” is a narrow street or alley. They are (or were) common in wine-growing regions and were used to store wine before it was sold. Now, many people are buying them up and converting them into weekend retreats. As they are typically in rather green and agricultural areas, they make good retreats.
We followed Krottenhofgasse all the way down into Strebersdorf (one of the many villages that were incorporated into Vienna), oohing and aahing over the many flowering shrubs, which were at least two weeks behind what they are in town.
In Strebersdorf, we linked up with the Marchfeld Canal again, part of which we had seen on one of the earlier stretches, and carried on in even as it started to rain, noting the many places you could go down to the water and presumably swim. I couldn’t say I’d be very tempted as the water was pretty murky, but it might be nice to have the option nearby on a hot day.
On the left is a stretch of the canal that had an unidentified round structure on the shore (barely visible on the lefthand side) and on the right is a view still of the canal, although it looks like a lake or pond, with a glimpse of the church at the top of Leopoldsberg on the other side of the Danube (not visible). You can see from the photos that the weather was not bright, to employ a bit of understatement.
As has happened before, we at some point lost track of the Rundumadum signs and had to find our own way. We navigated, rather unusually, by checking out the bus route and managed to find our way to the 34A, which took us back to Floridsdorf. And just in time. By the time the bus pulled into Franz-Jonas-Platz in front of the U6 station at Floridsdorf it was coming down pretty heavily.
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