The word “Grätzl” deserves its own post, it has so many associations for the Viennese. Short version: It is Viennese dialect and refers to one’s neighborhood.
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Making the most of the late summer weather
6 SepWhere does one go in Vienna when the sun is still shining and the temperature is still warm? To the Heurigen (wine tavern), of course. Mylo and I are meeting friends in the beautiful garden at the Dorfschenke in Neustift – and this is what we saw on the way:
🙂
Regeneration of a district – Neu Marx
20 Jun
This morning Mylo and I took a trip out to a part of the 3rd district I haven’t been to in ages, if ever. We needed at health certificate for him for reasons that belong in another blogpost and had to go out to the MA (Magistratsabteilung) 60 to get it.
They are based in an area that used to house the stockyards and the slaughterhouses, as the photo above suggests, and are located on a street that did not appear on my 25-year-old map. (It didn’t matter. I asked a construction worker who at first said he was sorry they came in from Mödling and didn’t know the area. It was clear from his accent that he originally came from somewhere outside Austria, possibly Hungary, and, indeed, he then lit up and said, “The street named for the Hungarian comedian, Karl Farkas?” and pointed me in the right direction.)
In addition to the monumental statues of steers on the gates to the stockyards, there is other evidence of the past uses of the space–for example, an enormous building still called the “Rinderhalle” or “beef hall” and the Municipal Vocational School for Butchers (photo below). In true Vienna fashion there is also much for the 21st century. The Campus Vienna Biocenter, one of the leading international biomedical research centers, is out there, too. And there are a number of cheerful eateries that lend life and gaiety to the neighborhood.
I’ll be going back–not just because we couldn’t get everything accomplished today (also in true Vienna fashion)!
Destruction of the old
16 JunOne of my usual walks with Mylo is through the courtyard of a turn-of-the-last-century house. Many of the old houses have closed the access because the people walking through have abused the privilege by being especially loud, stealing bikes chained to the railings, or using the space as an open-air toilet. I have always been grateful that we are allowed to walk through this courtyard and experience this very private part of Vienna, right down to the abandoned concierge’s quarters–tiny and without any windows directly to the outside but with a protruding, glassed-in front entrance where the Portier could sit and keep an eye on what was going on. Seeing that always makes me think of Hans Moser films and Eva Ibbotson novels set in Vienna.
My distress was all the greater then to see the destruction of the railing on one side by what seemed to be some incompetent tree work.
Then, being the suspicious person I am, I started to wonder if the damage wasn’t intentional. In Vienna it has been known to happen that historical houses protected by law from being razed are mysteriously damaged beyond repair by bulldozers incompetently driven into them at odd hours of the night. This frees up the land for a modern block of apartments, which is often quicker and cheaper to build than the restoration of an old house.
Along the same principle, I wonder if the massive tree branches weren’t allowed to fall accidentally on purpose on the railings so that the owners of the house could put in simple, cheaper railings as they have already done on the other side.
Of course, it’s easy for me to criticize. I don’t have to pay for the restoration of the railings. It still makes me sad, though, to see the replacement of the beautifully wrought old railings with the completely generic new ones.
Summer
8 JunIs it possible that summer might come to Vienna after all? And on a weekend? ?? The mood at Café Dommayer in Hietzing suggests that it just might.
Lavender
5 JunIt strikes me as one of the best ideas of the Office of Parks (and they have a lot of good ideas)–planting lavender upstairs at Schottentor, what I call the windiest corner in Vienna. Not only does it look nice, it smells wonderful in the wind that constantly blows off the slopes of Kahlenberg down Währinger Straße into Vienna.
Lavender at Schottentor
Wildlife in Vienna
30 MayThat’s “wildlife” consciously written as one word, not “wild life”. (Some people would say there isn’t much of the latter in Vienna–however much there is of the former–although all I can say is that there is a lot more going on than there used to be!)
The Kurier (daily newspaper in Vienna) has a magazine on Saturdays and in that magazine last week they had an article about wildlife in Vienna, accompanied by beautiful photos. The article starts with someone in the 13th district telling about a fox–dubbed Adam–who visits his garden. It goes on to tell about a project “Wiener Wildnis” (www.wiener wildnis.at) that records and protects that wildlife.
Among the other animals mentioned, and pictured, were: stag beetles, ground squirrels (related, visibly, to groundhogs), black-bellied hamsters, seagulls (not bad for a landlocked country!), swans, mallard ducks, grey herons, rabbits, agile frogs (that “agile” is part of the name and the genus is part of the “true frog” family :-)), cormorants, bats, common kestrels, hedgehogs, badgers and beavers.
I was most surprised by the hamsters (I always think of them as pets, only), the badgers, the beavers, and the grey herons. I’ve encountered deer, boar, foxes, squirrels (of course), ducks and so on in the Vienna Woods and sometimes even in the city parks.
The most delightful encounter I had with one of these animals was with a hedgehog. I was at a Heuriger (wine tavern / garden) in Neustift am Walde, felt something run over my foot, looked under the table and almost melted when I saw the most beautiful little hedgehog scuttling away. It made me think of the Beatrix Potter books I grew up on.
Grateful thanks go to Wikipedia for the English names of the animals. My system? I look up the German names in the German-language Wikipedia, get the Latin name, copy that into the English-language Wikipedia and voilá! Then I know that a Turmfalke (Falco tinnunculus), which left to my own devices I probably would have translated as a “tower falcon”, is a Common or Old World Kestrel. 🙂
Ascension
9 MayMay is the month of many holidays, Austria still being a Catholic country. Today was Ascension, which means we still have Pentecost Monday and Corpus Christi to go. What to do on a holiday in May when the weather is perfect? I opted for lunch at the Palmenhaus in the Burggarten with a friend. A good choice.
May Day, a personal memory
1 MayIt is many years ago now that I found myself in a sun-flooded, absolutely gorgeous meadow in the Vienna Woods (like the one below) doing the first of what was to become a regular reflection on this May 1st holiday on the state of my life and business.
After I had put my notebook away and was simply lying back on my picnic blanket enjoying the warmth and the sweetly scented air I suddenly heard in my head Richard Strauss’s “Morgen” and was overwhelmed with well-being. Something about that experience has never completely left me.
Text:
And tomorrow the sun will shine again
And she will reunite us, happy ones,
On the path that I go along
In the middle of this sun-breathing earth …
Onto the wide, wave-blue, shore
We shall quietly and slowly descend
Mute we will gaze into each other’s eyes
And be enveloped in the profound silence of happiness.
– John Henry MacKay
(my translation of what was probably already a German translation of his original)
If you want to hear it, here is a recording of Gundula Janowitz, a member of the famous Mozart ensemble at the Vienna State Opera in the 1950s and 60s and one of my favorite Austrian sopranos, singing with wonderful simplicity:
May Day or The Band Played in Tune
1 MayToday is May Day, International Workers’ Day, and a public holiday in Austria among other places. One of the many parades has just passed under my window on its way to City Hall, where there are various celebrations. Because this is Vienna the marching was relaxed and not entirely tidy and the band played musically and in tune.
May Day has a lot to do with Vienna, the city government here being predominantly socialist. There is a lot of red around–flags and flowers and so on–and, true to the apparent Viennese belief that even those who earn less well should be able to enjoy the good things in life, the wine served at the City Hall festivities is decent.
Some things are changing, though. The Social Democrats no longer have an absolute majority in Vienna, as they did for decades. They now govern in a coalition with the Green Party. That may help explain why public transport runs on the usual holiday schedule on May Day rather than not starting until about 2 p.m. as used to be the case, something I found out the hard way my first year in Vienna when I was trying to get to lunch at friends’. (I ended up walking. Luckily, it wasn’t far but I felt I had earned my Schnitzel!)
The People’s Party (Volkspartei (VP), essentially the Conservatives) has its own Fest this coming weekend. Like many things in Austria, the system of providing a “red” option and a “black” option (the color of the VP is black) is alive and well, even if the idea of Proporz–divvying up positions on boards in state-owned industries and other bodies according to who came out on top in the last national elections–is dying out with those same state-owned entities.
ecbinvienna 