Vienna Roll

In all fairness to Vienna I shouldn’t be posting my online graffiti about it here. I spent a long afternoon in the place, most of that in a museum. It wasn’t so much a skite as a chip off a skite to Bratislava. They make it so easy. The shuttle train goes over and back all day between the two cities for about 8 Euro return. They are only 65 kms apart and the trip takes about an hour. In fact Bratislava airport is the RyanAir airport for Vienna.

The day I went, during Christmas week, the train was boarded by boisterous, clear-skinned gangs of twenty something Austrians in expensive sports casuals who may have been on an adventure, or just doing some budget Christmas shopping. Whatever it was, it was done and they were on their way back home early enough on a Sunday to be in time for church. There was also a more subdued scattering of non-Austrians. Bratislava is something of a late Saturday night to Vienna’s Sunday morning, a little more dishevelled in spots. But then Titania’s palace would look rough and ready next to any plain public building – never mind an opera house or palace – in downtown Vienna, all cream stone and painted railings. As for the Christmas decorations! The city was dolled up like Liberace on concert night - not a burnt out bulb in the rows and wreaths of sparkling lights.

At the Christmas market in Rathausplatz the same ornaments displayed in every Central European city at Christmas – decorations, candles and wooden puzzles, as well as gingerbread and toasted almonds and sausages - were on sale for a premium. And the mulled wine was twice the price of Bratislava (same quality too), plus you had to lay down a mortgage deposit on the ceramic mug. None of your plastic beakers in this here green postcard metropolis.

I happened to have a book with me on this trip, a volume of Arthur Koestler’s earliest memoirs that I had bought at a car boot sale a few days before in Spain – the only English language book I could find. It wouldn’t be your average airport fare, but it had a kind of musty relevance on this trip, since he had lived in Budapest and Vienna, and Vienna is an up-river sandblasted version of Budapest. Almost a hundred years later, the contrast between the two cityscapes and cultures probably hasn’t changed much.

Koestler writes of venturing inside Gerstner’s luxurious tearoom, aged around 15, in 1920, when the “misery of the post-war inflation years in Vienna was at its peak”

“The air inside Gerstner’s was hot, perfumed, and sweet; the sounds were muffled to a low murmur by the thick, soft carpets on the floor, the silk tapestry covering the walls, and the velvet curtains on the doors; it was like the padded interior of a chocolate box. The people who sat chatting and smiling at the small, polished tea-tables all looked wealthy and well-groomed and happy. They were mostly nouveaux riches, speculators and profiteers, for the old bourgeoisie of Vienna had been destroyed by the inflation as finally and completely as if it had been buried by a landslide; nevertheless, this new clientele of Gerstner’s looked perfectly civilised and did not even try to assume blasé manners. The people of Vienna had never learned that an air of boredom is an essential part of savoir faire; and so warmly saturated with tradition was the atmosphere of their city, that the parvenus had already acquired the unique Viennese art of being not only rich but actually enjoying it. They had that courteous gaiety and amused self-mockery and warm malice and flickering erotic spark, which had prevailed at Gerstner’s in the past Imperial days.”

I didn’t get anywhere near the inside of the padded chocolate box. I stayed outside on the cream vellum exterior. But I thought that commentary from an insider-outsider more than compensated for the poor rap the Austrians get today in the soundbite media. I had my bag lifted down from a train for me (not this trip) by a man in full business garb, and it wasn’t because he wanted a date. Three people got involved to help me get a ticket from a machine in the tram when I didn’t have change. The driver had shrugged when I sat down anyway to fiddle with my fiver. One of the three told me there were padded cells in Austrian jails for the likes of me and had a good laugh with his girlfriend. All in English, by the way. At the museum two men stepped aside and held the door.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum had so many Egyptian artefacts, including mummies, giant sarcophagi and even a full height granite pillar, that I couldn’t help but think it is time every country gave everything back. This museum is only in the halfpenny place on that score by comparison with the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan et al. I just hadn’t been in a major museum for a long while and had forgotten. There were so many Old Masters upstairs – Rubenses and Reynoldses and Rembrandts and Dutch Elders and Youngers and lighter French and Italian fare – that I left bog-eyed. In the end what I can bring to mind easiest are the ghastly – sorry! - fruithead and fishhead paintings of Giuseppe Archimboldo and Jan Steen’s Beware of living the Good Life, a louche scene of vice and disorder. There was a wonderful portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt and a beautiful portrait of Mary Magdalene by Titian or Tinoretto. But too, too many paintings to see in one day.

All these paintings and artefacts were acquired and assembled by the Hapsburgs, whose origins and achievements were celebrated in a separate exhibit of paraphernalia and thick-crusted brocade capes which could have stood up without help. Most outstanding exhibit of all was the massive shelf on the nose of Maximillian I, which either gave him the martian energies to carve out an empire and found a dynasty or the complex that needed all the trappings of empire to enable him to find a wife.

The Kunsthistorisches is a bang for your buck museum, but far, far better if you live in or around and use one of those season tickets. Having said that, I don’t know if I would be running back every Sunday to see hall after hall of massive, dark religious scenes – crucifixions and transfixions and sermons and sacraments. I was relieved ten minutes walk from the front door to be looking at bling up town in the Rathausplatz, at trees festooned with red heart balloons and falling icicles. I felt like the bespectacled secretary character who throws off her glasses and shakes out her hair at the office party and hits the dance floor. 

Vienna seemed to be a happy place at Christmas, where people were looked after well by their city and kids kept innocent and warm.

CheapSkite Day Breaks

DAY BREAKS FOR PEOPLE WHOSE PENSIONS GOT EATEN BY THE SUITS

You don’t have to fly off somewhere to have a bargain break. And the sun doesn’t have to be shining either.

Cheap skite for a wet day

I was googling different types of travel breaks to see what could be reinvented less expensively here and came across ‘mosaic holidays’. In fact I knew an academic couple who did a one week, 8-hour a day mosaic holiday in Verona a decade ago and the wife said it was furnace hot and altogether the most gruelling experience of her life - and she had a row of kids and a bombastic, ever-restless husband (the holiday was his idea of switching off).

Well this is absolutely not that kind of break. In the blissful liberation of being in a hiatus between jobs for the first time in years I browsed a dozen beaches this week, gathering bits of seaworn pottery. There was no one around, just a few strays like myself doing the same thing. Or similar anyway. Several were gathering glass. A Frenchwoman was poring over the stones looking for orange and cream sea-hardened periwinkles that had come loose from their shells and been washed up. She collected these extremely rare finds to put in a transparent glass vase and she told me her back was broken and her eyes were strained but she was happy (though probably not as happy as I was). This day-holiday, by the way, cost €4. I had a flask of coffee with me. On another posting I will describe the super tuna sandwich that everyone should have with them when they set out on a day's ramble.

I read somewhere about some famous Warren Buffett type who was burnt out after years on Wall St and took a sabbatical on a deserted Caribbean island. He took long beach walks every day gathering bits and one day when his heart leapt at the glint of a spectacular piece of seaworn beach pottery he said he knew that he had experienced greater euphoria than a killer trade would ever give him again. 

This is the kind of thing I imagine he saw: 

When you get home you can put all the bits together in a design that pleases you and get even more value from the day.

And here are one or two I made earlier:

 

Art, Health and Gourmet Eating for Refined Cheapskates

Freeform Art Workshop at the (beach below the) Atelier of Salvador Dali in Portlligat, followed by a handsome 5 hour walk on smugglers’ coastal paths and lunch - without a reservation! – at El Bulli (beach)

The middle section here (Portlligat, through Cadaques, over the mountain and south along the coast to Montjoi bay) is not for the faint-hearted. It is a 4-5 hour walk and there is no bus or taxi rank at the end of it to take you back to where you started. So you have to have cooperative friends, or forget the walk and settle for the creative endorphins let loose by the elevated company you have not quite spent time with today.

I’d like to say the material for the following portraits all came from Portlligat beach, but to be honest only about half of it did, the rest being from Cadaques. But technically Portlligat is only a suburb of Cadaques and Dali was a man who liked to go into town on his night off with the best of them.

 

On the left here we have an unusually subdued Mae Worst and on the right an understated self-portrait of the great master himself Servidor Doily after a night on the town. 

El Bulli is rated the world’s best restaurant and you have to book three years in advance if you want a table in August (but not August 2011 or 2012, when the great chef is taking a break). You don’t have to take a break, though. You can dine al fresco beneath the modest walls of the place, like the two Dutchmen I met feasting on twigs and berries after descending from a 10-day trek in the Pyrenees. I like my food, but if you think this photo shot isn’t staged, you are very wrong. You don’t want to be drinking wine before driving back the twisty mountain road to town. I brought the accoutrements from home on a boring, bad old day just for something to do and to take this hasty photo. 

That’s El Bulli above the cork in the wine bottle. 

You can see what a lousy day it is, which is how come I managed to lay it all out for this compelling shot,  and then pack it back into my rucksack to eat at home, all without being spotted by beach strollers.