mutteringhousewife

January 5, 2014

Another Day in Milan

I’m understanding a lot more Italian. I can even string a sentence together, but it usually takes me about ten minutes, so not great for conversation. Io ascolto ma non parlo. I actually managed to get that one out, I rather expected a round of applause, but let’s face it, every Italian’s English is better than that. What it does mean is that I can at least translate for the benefit of my family. “Why haven’t you put out enough chairs? How many are there? Seven! No, not seven, eight! Eight! I’ll count them, one two three four five six seven eight! See! Where’s another chair? Where should you sit? No, not there, over there, you’re not doing anything!”. There’s a lot of exclamation marks and a lot of hand waving and we get there in the end.

My husbands family have been very kind and escort us around their home town, a beautiful city chockers with churches and sculptures and beautiful apartment buildings. We walked past evidence today of the perils of trying to build anything here.

You can’t dig so much as a hole for a pot plant without turning up some Roman ruins. Apparently this turned out to be part of the Imperial compound back in the day when Milan was a big cheese in the Roman world, between the 200s and the 400s AD. Back in San Ambrogio’s time. Remember him? The dead guy in the glass case? Good times.

We start the day with a coffee. In Giorgio’s case, a fag and a coffee and a fag, everyone smokes here, but not inside, so that’s nicer than Austria.

The coffee shops are tiny and exquisite and just like all the tourist guides say, you stand up for your shot. I need to take a photo with a Travelling David Tennant for comparison. Next time. The kids have been loving the freshly squeezed orange juice that all the cafés knock out. Our apartment even has an orange juicer. Not a toaster or a kettle, though.

And if you ask for a cappuccino after about ten o’clock in the morning, like my dear husband did, aspersions are cast on your sexuality. At least the coffee definitions are similar to Australia, I recognised the macchiato, unlike the giant mug of milk I got in Munich.

Then, as you do, you pop in for a squiz at The Last Supper. Actually, Isabella booked for us, they shuffle you through in groups of about thirty. You’re not supposed to take pictures, it’s famous enough to Google. Take note of the doorway the friars knocked through Jesus’s feet. The masterpiece is sadly faded, but incredibly impressive, especially compared to the picture by the poor sucker who got to paint the other end of the room. I did sneak a pic of that.

The Duke of Milan, who commissioned both works, got himself photo bombed into that painting, so he looks as though he was at The Crucifixion. Lucky he didn’t try to pull that one on Leonardo. The Horror got personally shushed twice, they didn’t want his piercing voice to shake the fragile plaster off the wall. He was making pertinent comments, I should add.

Later in the afternoon we had a demonstration of Italian driving, which apparently by national standards was very cautious. We were actually going to see the lake which, even in the rain, was very picturesque.

“Shouldn’t that guy have given way to you?” asked the husband. “In Italy the rules, they are more like approximations” Giorgio answered, swerving around a pedestrian who was foolishly trying to cross at a pedestrian crossing, as the Moose giggled nervously in the back seat. Later we saw some fine examples of double parking, parking on the median strip, leaving your car wherever you stop, really. Outside our apartment it is normal to park on the pavement, which means you have to get out by driving along the pavement.

Which means you have to look both ways before stepping out of your front door. I’m starting to have second thoughts about the advisability of driving around Tuscany.

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January 4, 2014

The Italian Museum Experience

It’s a common solution to a common problem around Europe. Here we have this castle or palace lying around empty now that we have some semblance of democracy, and here’s all this detritus lying about the place because people have been living here for thousands of years, not to mention those over eager nineteenth century archaeologists bringing truckloads of the Middle East home to put back together. Let’s put the latter in the former.

And so it is in the Castello Sforzesca.

I think we were a bit spoilt in Germany. You can guess how their museums are laid out. Subject order, chronological order, huge amounts of information. They’re a little more laid back here, which for some aspects of life are terrific – the kids aren’t getting the death stares they were in German museums – but not so great for getting a picture of the grand sweep of history that the castle represents. In fact they hardly mention the castle at all. There are just bits of castle with, say, a collection of armour and assorted weapons in it. Or a dungeon with a couple of mummies and sarcophagi far from home lumped in with local Bronze Age finds, in which a glass case full of what looks a lot like neck rings and bracelets is just labelled “Metal Hoard”. Frustrating. The castle is in very good shape, but I’d love to know a great deal more about it, instead of passing random doors and not knowing what they were used for.

Or these heads, mounted just beside the top of the portcullis.

I think there was a sign below mentioning that they were Roman, but from where?

I know who this guy is.

Sant Ambrogio, he looms large in the history of Milan, having been a very busy bee around the end of the 300s AD. And what gets me, and freaks out the Muffet! is that you can go and visit him in his church just down the road.

I think that’s him in the red. Again, more information! Actually, the church did have a little sign in English with the history of the body, because of course all I wanted to know was “no way! Is that really him! His own dead body!!”. Yes it is, placed in its current casket in the 19th century. His body has been continuously venerated all these over sixteen hundred years. I can’t believe there wasn’t a line out the door for it, instead of a solitary weeping Orthodox woman begging for his intercession.

I’m also getting the impression that Leonardo da Vinci spent a fair bit of time in these parts. After passing through rooms in the castle with painted ceilings we came across one full of scaffolding with a sign saying it was under conservation to restore the work of Leonardo on the ceiling. He’d done a rather nifty leafy thing, giving the impression of a rainforest canopy. We’re going to see the Last Supper tomorrow. Just briefly though, Giorgio says museums give him the bores. I think we’ve just about had enough of them too.

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January 2, 2014

Milano New Year’s Eve

There’s a familiarity about Italy that I blame on over twenty years living in Italian neighbourhoods. We went into a local supermarket yesterday, and the kids said it was just like Lamonica’s in our suburb, selling croccanti, crostoli, panettone, chinotto and a ton of Nutella. We’re here to meet my husband’s Italian family and last night we shared New Year’s Eve with them.

I think I’ve finally worked out the relationship. Here’s my husband with the woman who was married to his half-great uncle, Zia Nina.

Which makes her son Giorgio his half second cousin. I think. I’ve discovered that I can understand some of the conversations going on around me, and can sometimes answer a “come si dice?” question. For a brief period in May of 1984 I could actually speak Italian in whole sentences, sometimes even using correct tenses. There are echoes of this ancient skill still lingering and I hope I can drag some of it to the useful part of my brain in the next couple of weeks.

While my husband was discussing the family tree with cousin Giorgio and his fabulous wife Isabella, I was discussing the nature of colonials being obsessed with genealogy with a man who bore a striking resemblance to my father. Here he is with the Muffet.

Luciano is the godfather of Giorgio and Isabella’s daughter. He said that Italians are not interested in such things. The reason is that they know where they belong, and it is here. Giorgio has lived in his apartment for sessanto anni (sixty years). On a walk around Milan today he showed us the church where his parents were married.

It struck me for the first time what a wrench it must have been for all the Italians who live in my area to uproot themselves and travel half way around the world. No wonder they maintain such strong ties with their home village.

Anyway, the night was about the food. Mamma Mia, so much food. First some salumi, some carciofi, some Ligurian olives. Then some homemade lasagne Isabella’s friend Titi had made and brought. “You know lasagne?” she asked. Oh, how we laughed.

It was so good, and much lighter than the Southern version we were familiar with. I was wise to the ways of the Italian feast, so had left some room for the roast chicken that followed, but I was a bit worried my husband was going to burst at the seams. Especially as we must also have the fruit salad that Luciano had brought. It contained twelve fruits for the months of the year that had just been, and the Muffet and I managed to guess them all, though I’d argue that an almond is not really a fruit. I really liked it in the fruit salad, though, made a mental note. Then we had to eat a bunch of grapes naming the months as we ate each one (a good refresher). And then, of course, the panettone which is far nicer fresh than after it has spent months at sea to arrive at Lamonica’s. Also torrone, of which I’m very fond, especially the Venetian version brought by Titi that looked like the Alps. And chocolate. Very lucky. Then more champagne, which wasn’t champagne but a lovely light dry prosecco claimed by our hosts to be far superior to that French rubbish you spend so much money on. And then the fireworks lit by the local lads out on the street which were very entertaining, especially after one lot fell over and started randomly strafing them.

So now I know what it is like to have a food hangover on New Years Day rather than the conventional kind. But Isabella still has a fridge full of food for us to eat that she didn’t manage to serve last night, so we soldier on. I’m going to have to move in to the gym when we get home.

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January 1, 2014

Thoughts on Germany

There’s a lot of things to like about Germany. It makes such a difference to your enjoyment of a city, Barry O’Farrell, to be able to get around it easily. In Germany the pavements are wide, there are dedicated cycle ways every where, the public transport is integrated and frequent and clean. Some of the bigger cities, and this is also true of Austria, seem to have been built for giants. The buildings and roads are just enormous, you could ride an elephant into your hostel. If you happened to have one. You can take your dogs anywhere, into the banks, into the shopping centres, into most hotels. I’ve never seen one poo, so I don’t know the protocol, but maybe they’re better trained than at home.

Embarrassingly, almost everyone can speak a little English. I feel I like a cultural imperialist. I have picked up a few words of German, and even downloaded a language tutor app, but got annoyed when I found out that the gender for the word “girl” is masculine. Like an English speaker should complain. I may continue with it, I’ve been told my pronunciation is very good (thank you Christopher Bowen), and I want to come back here. I’m pinching a couple of words. They call their phones a Handy, I like that. It does mean expunging the adjective from my vocabulary, but I can live with that. I’m also taking Schicksal for the word fate. Schicksal.

The place is full of history, but I guess that’s true of all of Europe. Even the little village of Wittmar, where we were so generously hosted, had a ruined Dark Ages castle and the Bismarck tower, a popular local suicide spot.

In Wittmar we were fairly close to the old border between East and West, so we got some modern history too.

We went on to an East German village, and that was pretty sad. Full of abandoned and dilapidated houses. Sabine told us that during the Cold War the East Germans hoarded everything they could get their hands on, including stones and bits of wood. They haven’t lost the habit.

Even the village castle was mostly ruined, but partially inhabited. We didn’t see anyone outside at all. It did mean that the kids could climb on it without anyone looking sternly at them.

Of course Berlin is still shuddering with the war, it’s everywhere. There’s bullet holes everywhere you look. Buildings are still being rebuilt. This is a church, the spire has been half bombed off.

Everywhere we went was the small footnote, “this building is a reconstruction, it was flattened during the war”. I wonder if they just kept all the bits of each building in a pile and used the bits to rebuild? I’ll have to get a book. It must cost a fortune. The Berlin Dome looks convincingly old, though the original was only sixty years old when it was bombed. There seemed to have been a history in the city of each ruler knocking down works of the previous ones and building bigger and better versions.

And there’s the history they’ve pinched from elsewhere. We lined up for two hours to get into the Pergamon museum, losing a chance to go to Checkpoint Charlie, but inside they had this.

The Ishtar gate of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. Oh yes indeed. Also this marketplace entranceway from ancient Pergamon, complete with a Greek inscription marking the spot of the barber.

Come on Frank Lowy, surely you could fancy up the entrance to Westfield Burwood a bit. There was a ton of other stuff that they’d hauled out of the Middle East in container loads, the Moose was taking notes for the future when he does Ancient History. It was amazing.

One could go on about the history forever, but I’m moving on. I’m not bowled over by the local cuisine. I’ll show you a summary.

Can I just say that the specialty of Berlin is curry wurst? You know what that is? It’s a frankfurter cut up with curry sauce squirted on it. And the curry sauce tastes like tomato sauce with a bit of curry powder mixed into it. I have had some delicious meals here, you can do a lot with cabbage, and anything with venison is very good. Also there’s a lot of berries around the place. I wouldn’t actually kill for a pad Thai or some bok choy with oyster sauce, but I’d really like some. There’s a lot of pizza joints around. The Horror spotted some sushi places. We peeked at the menu of one and it did have sushi, but also tomato soup and chop suey, so I wasn’t convinced. I do love the bread here. I wonder what they do to it? I may have mentioned the beer.

We’re here in a mild winter, but it still means a fair old rug up to go outside, and a de rug once you get inside. The sky is very low. We like it because we’re on holidays, but it would be a bit depressing to live through. On the other hand, the rain is unconvincing, so you can still tourist in it and pretend it’s not happening. Apparently the winter does make summer a celebration.

Speaking of which, they do Christmas in style. I’ve never seen so many giant, beautifully decorated Christmas trees, even inside churches. I’ve told you about the Christmas markets, and something else I’m taking home is lit candles everywhere. You have to remember to blow them out before leaving the house.

I’ve been very impressed by the environmental credentials of the country. There’s windmills all over the place, I think they look rather elegant, and depressed looking solar farms. I realise coal is cheap in Australia, but come on! We have so much more sunshine than here, it’s embarrassing that we don’t make more of an effort. A lot of takeaway places serve food and drinks in reusable cups and plates, you get a deposit back when you return them. That can’t be too hard either, can it?

So it has been terrific, and I want to come back. And next time, I want snow.

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December 30, 2013

Berlin – Still Under Construction

I haven’t got the hang of Berlin. All of the other cities we’ve been to you just hightail it to the Altstadt, visit the main church, the new town hall and the old town hall, various museums and the Christmas markets and you’re done.

Berlin doesn’t appear to have a centre. Sure, there’s the Brandenburg Gate, but that’s blocked off for New Year’s Eve, or Silvester as it’s charmingly known in these parts. There’s a giant park adjacent to that (the Tiergarten) with many bits walled off ditto, including the gravesite of 2000 Russian soldiers. I did spot a monument to three great composers in there, Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven.

Of course Haydn and Mozart were Austrian, but borders were more fluid back when the monument was originally built, and maybe they had an Australia New Zealand thing going on. It started a theme for Berlin. This monument had the krapfen blown out of it during the war and is a reconstruction.

The Reichstag was burnt to a hollow shell during the 1930s, then had the krapfen blown out of it during the war, but has been completely reconstructed and we toured the dome at the top. Very much worth a look, even just for the pictures of the history of the building.

It’s a bit difficult to walk around Berlin, not just because of not having a centre and Silvester, but they’re also building some new train stations in the middle of town (are you listening, Barry O’Farrell?), plus despite it being such a long time after the war they’re still painstakingly rebuilding some of the buildings destroyed then. Some cities would say, oh bugger it, let’s just start again. To a certain extent this has been done, and Berlin is rightly proud of its modern architecture. But they’re very aware of being a city that’s over seven hundred years old and they’d quite like to look like that.

It’s got a slightly more dangerous feeling to it than other cities we’ve visited. The first morning my dear husband stopped to read his map right next a group of skinheads. I had to restrain myself from asking “which one of you bitches wants to dance?”. There’s a lot more English on signs. There are more baristas in coffee shops, as opposed to push button coffee machines (erk). The public transport is excellent, not just for the connections, cleanliness (Gladys Berejiklian) and ease of use, but the decorations in the stations. Here you go Kev. Working and everything.

It has the second biggest department store in the world, the KaDeWe, where we (except for the bored husband) indulged in some excellent German pens. We also had a snack at the food hall, which was David Jones on all kinds of drugs.

We also stopped at a Christmas market that wasn’t selling the usual decorations and glüwein, it was all handmade stuff. Look at these leather pouches that we got, allegedly made by the stallkeepers mum.

It also has about a gajillion museums containing all kinds of stuff “acquired” during colonial times, one of which we peeked into today for a dose of gobsmackingness. We also surprised the kids with the museum of computer games.

They had my entire computing history. The TRS 80, the text only adventure game Zork, the Apple II (signed by Steve Wozniak!), the first Mac. Remember Bard’s Tale Kev? I beat the Moose at Asteroids on an Atari. Ahh, the memories. We’ll go to another proper museum tomorrow.

We attempted to do a bit of the Wall, but that thing is over sixty kilometres long. It is commemorated by a cobblestone track which disappears a lot under construction zones, but we followed it along the river a bit and saw some very sad memorials to the people shot trying to cross it. We’ll go to Checkpoint Charlie tomorrow for the full experience.

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December 28, 2013

Ice Hockey

We’re staying with a very generous family in Germany whose daughter we borrowed for a couple of weeks earlier this year. Wanting to be the perfect hosts, they asked us if there was anything in particular we’d like to do here in the north of Germany? I ignored my dear father’s suggestion of visiting the worlds biggest model railway setup in Hamburg. He wants to see that, he should come here himself. My dear husband suggested popping into a Bundesliga soccer game, fun for the whole family. Alas, they were having a Christmas break. But we could go and see an ice hockey game, also a new experience for our hosts.

Let me tell you, you have to get out and see ice hockey. I’m guessing that we don’t really have an equivalent in Australia, I know there’s a bit of ice hockey played, but it couldn’t be like this. For a start, the ice looked a lot colder than that at Canterbury Ice Rink, it stayed dry. And there were a lot more people there. And you got a free pat down on the way in because of crowd violence, that added an edge. I could have wished to be slightly further from the drumming chant leaders.

But they really added to the atmosphere, the crowd was impressively musical and knew a lot more songs than One Nil.

At first there didn’t seem to be any rules at all, except that you score when your puck goes into the net at the other end. Which made me wonder why there had to be four referees. Eventually it appeared that there were some things that were beyond the pale, such as slamming an opponent into the wall, sitting on a goalie, hitting the puck into the crowd, having more than six players on the ice at any time – and that was confusing, there was constant interchange that basically involved them leaping the fence at exactly the same moment that someone leapt in the other direction. At one point the opposition decided they’d like to score a goal, so took off the goalie and had six players all trying for a goal. That lasted about ten seconds before the home team scored from behind the half way line. Back to having a goalie. It was very fast moving and very exciting, for some fans perhaps a little too exciting.

They had some excellent innovations that we could adopt, such as vending machines for your ice hockey essentials. I would have got some shoelaces, but I didn’t have any coins on me.

Also the plastic beer mugs have hollow spike handles that means you can stack a whole lot on top of each other. Not only that, but if you take them back to the bar you get a deposit back, which means no litter. Alternatively, you can pinch one to take home as a souvenir, remind me to show you some time. As a side note, I appear to be able to tolerate German beer. Australian beer is delicious, but gives me all kind of digestive problems, as does American beer which also has the disadvantage of being non delicious. I’ve even had two in a row with no noticeable side effects. Interesting.

However. The game is in twenty minutes thirds and there seem to be a huge number of players in each team that only spend a couple of minutes on the ice at a time. It may just be a local thing, but the opposition (Schwenningen) was pretty much ignored by the announcer and booed by the crowd. And the referees got death threats when they scored their only goal. The home team (Wolfsburg) had a huge introduction with pictures of the players on the big screen and a whole lot of carry on when they scored. The players themselves seemed fairly good natured, there was only one bit of fairly half hearted biffo. Not even too much angst when a stick was broken. And the puck doesn’t stay horizontal to the ground as I’d imagined, it was spinning on its side, being chocked into the air and players could slam it to the ground with their hand to avoid sticks being at head height.

As a sport avoider in general, I would put this up the with AFL as an excellent spectator sport that looks really hard to do yourself, only a lot shorter and with more singing. Thanks Sabine and Thomas, we couldn’t have asked for kinder hosts!

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December 23, 2013

Munich. Beer.

There are some beautiful sights to be seen in Munich. Many of them are in the Marienplatz, the square in front of a huge complex of buildings that appear to be the seat of government. Makes anything in Australia look very lame indeed.

If you look closely you can see about half way up the tower is a two storey set of puppets. On the hour these perform a fairly basic show with bells accompanying that brings the square, already crowded with Christmas markets and their attendant shoppers, to a complete standstill. As my dear husband remarked, it isn’t going to replace television, but apparently it’s a must see and we saw it.

What was far more interesting is that you can catch a lift right up to just below the spire. I do think they should make tourists take the stairs, but anyway. The view on a clear day is spectacular, we could just make out the Alps in the distance. The detail in this place!

And everywhere really, I can’t get used to it.

Wouldn’t something like that be roped off in Australia? Yet it was just sticking out of a random wall.

But what Munich is about is the beer, and at some point you must inevitably go to a beer hall. We went to the Hofbraühaus which seats a touch over three thousand patrons at any one time. It’s a bit hard to judge exactly how old the place is, people have been drinking beer on this spot for a thousand years, but bits have been torn down, rebuilt, enlarged, moved a bit, bombed, burnt down and rebuilt some more. It’s old and it’s big, OK?

What you do here is find yourself a giant table with benches and an old chair at one end

And order yourself a giant plate of meat and potatoes, some cabbage if you’re feeling like some kind of vegetarian hippie, and some beer. It comes in litre glasses. If you’re terribly wussy they do have one half litre option and something called Radler which is a shandy, but that only comes in litres too. The husband and I decided to share the original beer brewed on the premises.

The chap behind us ordered two as soon as he came in, one light and one dark. You never know when you’re going to be able to catch a waiter.

The Moose and I shared a green salad and what turned out to be two boiled veal sausages, which were a little salty but otherwise very nice. The Horror topped himself up with his current addiction of wiener sausages. It took us a few days to persuade him to try them, now that’s just about all he’ll eat. Muffet and the husband shared a large slab of roast suckling pig. Other tables tended towards giant bits of meat attached to what looked like a brontosaurus shin bone. It was all a bit Flintstones.

Dessert choices were limited, but the Horror was very pleased with his icecream, Muffet and Moose should really have shared the dumpling with vanilla sauce, it was bigger than their heads, and the husband and I shared this.

It was a Christmas special of gingerbread mousse, and what an interesting presentation, boys and girls.

We picked up some bread rolls and clementines for dinner, but couldn’t resist getting a couple of half litre bottles of a very pleasant beer for less than a euro each at the supermarket. I think it’s classed as a food group here.

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December 21, 2013

A Tourist in Salzburg

I’m falling behind, I’m actually in Munich, but you’re going to hear about the schmaltzy day we had in Salzburg. We finished the day classy with the Moose’s last concert in the Mozarthaus in St Gilgen, but before that…

It’s hard to resist the stalls every few metres selling glüwein, so that afternoon we didn’t. We then hailed a two pony chariot for a half hour circuit around the altstadt of Salzburg.

The driver was from Texas, but he had either not spoken English for a really long time or he was raised by coyotes, because he was very hard to understand. “That be the man monastery”, he said, waving up the hill. “And that be the woman monastery”, indicating the Nonnberg, famous for its starring role in The Sound of Music.

The Sound of Music was the biggest thing to hit Salzburg since Mozart, it’s responsible for a large slab of its economy. It would have been remiss of us not to go on a Sound of Music tour then, remiss. I did actually manage to watch the movie for the very first time a couple of weeks before we left, so I was an expert.

Our tour guide sounded a lot like Michael Douglas as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (which I watched bits of on the plane in between dozing) only prerecorded. I guess he’d probably run the tour a gajillion times, and it sounded like it. I can do you an imitation when I get back if you like.

It would have been worth it just for the scenery. Look, here’s a swan frozen in the ice. I’m sure it could have left any time it wanted to.

Did you know that if you skim a stone across a frozen lake in the direction of the back gate of the Von Trapp house it makes a kind of almost birdsong like pinging sound?

The gazebo had to be moved from the grounds because of all the tourists wanting to dance around it in the middle of the night, but it’s still on display in the grounds of Hellbrunn Palace. It was permanently locked after an eighty year old tourist broke her hip trying to dance on the seats inside. There’s always someone who’ll ruin it for everyone.

The bus then headed for the countryside, with bonus group singalongs! through some breathtaking scenery to Mondsee where the von Trapp wedding was filmed. This place has it all, snow capped mountains, lakes, cute houses, polite drivers, and extraordinarily ornate churches.

If this had been the first I’d seen I’d have been a little overwhelmed, but I now realise that’s just how they make churches around here. I think they chose this one just because it didn’t have a road going right past the entrance.

The tour guide also gave us a bit of background to the real Von Trapps, for which he apologised, revealing that he’d had hate mail for doing it in the past. How dare there be a real story! The Nonnberg really was where Maria had been a novitiate when she was hired to look after the Von Trapp kids and you can’t go in the today because it’s still a working abbey. But they really didn’t live where the movie was filmed and they didn’t escape the Nazis by climbing over the Untersberg because if you did that you’d actually be going to Germany. And Maria eventually died in her eighties of eating too much cheese, getting gangrene in her stomach and refusing to go to the doctor. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

The tour was totally worth it for many reasons. They encouraged you to buy a beer at ten in the morning for the scenic bus ride. You got to drive past the world headquarters of Red Bull. You got stories of how weird American tourists can really be (who has time to watch the Sound of Music TWICE a day every day?). There was a bit of Mozarty stuff thrown in for free. The scenery. And I’ll have a tour guide impression to do at parties, something for you to look forward to.

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December 18, 2013

Fog and Castles

We’re getting the hang of this now. What we want is castles, atmosphere and castles. Ruined if possible. We’ve had two in the last couple of days.

The first was care of our dear friends the Laciks. We first met Igor over twenty years ago when he joined the then boyfriend’s research group at Sydney University. They share a horrifyingly similar sense of humour, so we saw a lot of him and his then new wife Beata while they were in Sydney, then again when we went to Europe just before we were married. Contact since then has been very sporadic, but the memories were sweet so we were delighted to spend the day with them yesterday. They were very generous entertainers. And you’ll never guess, they have our dogs!

That isn’t Meriadoc. They also had the Slovak national instrument whose name escapes me, but it was like a cross between a didgeridoo and a bassoon, but had a surprisingly high sweet tone.

We tore ourselves away from the dogs and photos of the dogs when they were puppies (they actually have two children too and we got a couple of photos of them and very good looking they’ve turned out too, but the dogs, you know) to go to Castle Devín.

It was really really ruined, there were even Roman bits in it, and made me realise how very little I know about the history of this part of Europe. For the kids the highlight was the well into which you could drop a stone and count to about ten before it plunked into the water in the bottom. The castle is at the confluence between the Donau and the Moldau, so we walked along the banks for a bit until we saw this monument.

Lucky we were with locals, because there is no plaque or explanation. It is made from the barbed wire fence that separated Austria from Slovakia. People were shot trying to cross the border before the Velvet Revolution, there’s another monument nearby with all of their names. I know, really heart stopping.
We then went to have lunch at the highest point in Bratislava, the restaurant in the television tower. Here’s the Muffet and Beata, and you can see the view behind them. That detail behind them is actually a reflection from inside the restaurant, don’t get your hopes up.

Yes, thick thick fog. We may as well have been underwater, but the food was sensational. Igor did threaten to keep us there eating until the fog cleared, but we would have still been there now and who would be running the Bratislava Polymer Institute? It would have ground to a halt. What was happening outside was that the fog was combining with the subzero temperatures to do this to all of the foliage.

Driving back down through the iced forest, Igor remarked that you wouldn’t have been surprised to have a werewolf leap out of the undergrowth and drip blood all over the car, and he was right, it was dead atmospheric. It made everything look black and white and for the first time I realised what an impact Little Red Riding Hood would have made in such a landscape.

Today we headed for Salzburg, but we really had to stop at Castle Dürnstein where Richard the Lionheart was held captive until he was rescued by the minstrel Blondel. Supposedly. It was way up the cliff behind the village and again very ruined, but we got the general idea.

The village below seemed to have an apricot theme. The tiny cobblestone streets were lined with shops selling apricot jam, apricot liqueurs, apricot nectar, apricot hand cream, apricot chocolate (I was tempted), dried apricots (excellent), apricot chutney and I lost focus a bit after that. But don’t think they only sell apricot products.

Though you’ll note the apricot coloured cardboard.
And then on through the fog and many more kilometres of magical iced forest to Salzburg. Of which more presently, I’m sure.

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December 16, 2013

An Awesome Museum

We weren’t planning to go into museums yesterday, just thought we’d wander around Vienna and go gorblimey, will you look at that. And there was a fair amount of that. But then we found ourselves up near the Rathaus and saw that there was a museum of armour And a museum of musical instruments. It was like a museum specifically for us.

When you live in a country that has been ruled by a succession of dynasties over hundreds of years but now you’re going through a period of Western democracy, you tend to have a lot of leftover palaces. This museum was in the Imperial palace, and just the building would have been worth the entrance price.

When we got into the bit with the armour, the Horror was in paradise. We’d hired the English language audio guides and they were very helpful in pointing out the interesting bits because, dear reader, there was a lot of armour. Horse armour, jousting armour, some other horse battle armour whose name started with R, foot fighting armour, ceremonial armour, mix and match sets of armour, squire armour, armour you wore to weddings, armour you had made after you’d spent years eating too much schnitzel.

Hall after hall after hall of it. Sometimes with a five hundred year old painting above it of a prince wearing that exact same armour that was right in front of you. Eventually the Muffet got over it a bit, but that was OK, because then there was musical instruments! I think the best way to describe it is what the Horror said, it looks like in each room they’re evolving. Very early brass, woodwind and stringed instruments, then through all the various permutations people put them through until they became today’s versions. I wish some of them were still around.

For the benefit of my choir, I saw some crumhorns displayed and they do look like they’d be rather harsh. I did love all the keyboard variations, especially this one,

On the right it’s a spinet, on the left it’s a tiny organ, with the bellows at the back and the wind coming out of the bottom end of the keys, towards the player. On top is painted a backgammon board and if you turned it over (it was mounted over a mirror) it had a chessboard painted on the bottom. Awesome.

AND there was a harmony piano, man, I didn’t take a photo. It was enormously complicated with five rows of keys with various circle patterns on them. The idea was to have a perfectly tuned keyboard upon which F sharp was slightly different to G flat. It went out of vogue very quickly because it was too damned hard to play. But that actual one on display had been played by Haydn and Beethoven. That actual one.

You know what? It’s put me off any museum I’ll ever see in Australia.

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