Today the city came alive again. The 12 Days of Christmas are over, and everyone is going back to work. I, for one, am glad. I spent the holidays home by myself nursing a badly injured little dog and feeling very alone. Vet’s office closed for days in a row as I worried about whether the latest development warranted calling the emergency number and getting the vet away from her celebrations and, on top of that, many friends out of town. Now life is getting back to normal. And the sun is coming up noticeably earlier. It was already bathing the park in a rosy pink at shortly after seven this morning.
Tag Archives: holidays
Christmas greetings
24 DecSome things, thank goodness, never change–or at least they haven’t changed yet.
I am in the process of sending out my Christmas and New Year’s greetings by e-mail and am getting a slew of auto-replies back. Almost all of them say that the recipient is out of the office until January 7. Apparently, people are still honoring the twelve days of Christmas here. What a wise folk! 😉
The Wiener Linien
1 NovThe Wiener Linien is the public transport authority in Vienna and true to form they are running extra trams on this All Saints holiday to accommodate those people who can’t afford a car or simply choose not to drive to the cemetery for their traditional visits to the graves of late loved ones. Classic Vienna.
State holiday
26 OctAbsolutely perfect fall weather (see below) for the Nationalfeiertag today and a record number of people in the Vienna Woods to make the most of it. What does Austria celebrate on its state holiday? Many Austrians themselves are not sure. A quick look at the German-language Wikipedia shows that it is Austria’s return to sovereign state status when the last occupying troops (Brits in the province of Carinthia) left. The Austrian parliament then immediately enacted a law ensuring Austria’s eternal neutrality, a point that is now viewed with some skepticism given Austria’s EU membership. So today Austria celebrates its sovereignty and its neutrality. True to Austrian custom there is no extra day to make up for the holiday even though it falls on the weekend. On Monday we all have to go back to work. In the meantime we get to enjoy this:
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.
New Year’s Day
1 Jan
Went to Café Weimar for breakfast this morning to welcome in the New Year (starting as I mean to go on ;-)). I reserved a table for two people and two dogs and this is what the card looked like. 🙂 And people say Viennese coffeehouse waiters aren’t friendly!
The mushroom is to bring luck in the New Year. The fish is to put in one’s wallet to ensure lots of money coming in. Mine went in there immediately and is, I hope, doing its job!
And, of course, what is a New Year’s breakfast without sparking wine (Sekt) served here with light, crispy fish cookies, again to ensure plenty throughout the year. But careful–you have to eat it head first or some terrible fate will befall you!
Odd that when I still lived in the U.S. I listened to the New Year’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic every single year it was broadcast, first on the radio then on TV. Now it is rather hit or miss whether I hear it. This year it was, as you can see, a miss. I had other fish to fry. 😉
White Christmas?
25 DecWell, we didn’t make it, at least not downtown.
Never mind. It still has a certain Viennese charm. (The focus on my camera works just fine, by the way. That is the common Viennese winter fog you see in the picture.)
ecbinvienna 