Travelling Hopefully

Continuing my sojourn through the Hofburg I wandered through the silver room.  This is a collection of cutlery and crockery.  Don't get the wrong idea.  It is called the silver room but not all the pieces are made out of silver.  Quite a few of them are made out of gold.  Porcelain and crystal are quite well represented as well.  Also linen, apparently no dinner at the Hofburg was complete without intricately folded table napkins.  My audioguide bemoaned the fact that napkin folding is becoming a dying art.  I'm sure its tragic but there are a few other dying arts I might try and save first before leaping to rescue napkin folding.

Most of the silverware isn't actually that old, dating from about the 1830s despite the fact that the Habsburgs had been eating for a least a century or two before that.  The reasons are simple, firstly as the silverware got old and battered from use it was melted down and refashioned into something else but the main reason is the Napoleonic wars.  During the wars the empire was (as usual) desperately short of money and all the silver in the empire was called in to be melted down to pay the soldiers (badly).  The emperor Franz set a personal example by having his entire dinner service melted down.

Moving past various imperial eating utensils (one set of which is still used by the Austrians for state dinners, I wonder what the Czech and Hungarian ambassadors think of that?) we come to the Sisi experience.  It is safe to say that Vienna has a Sisi fetish or at least that the people who visit Vienna and spend money have a Sisi fetish.  I breezed swiftly through that taking in portraits, jewellery, accessories and quotes from her not particularly good poetry.

For the record Sisi was the empress Elisabeth, wife of Franz Josef.  They were possibly the most spectacularly mismatched pair imaginable.  Sisi was beautiful, emotional, neurotic, impatient of court etiquette and possibly the worst choice of partner for a staid, workaholic emperor of limited imagination.  Apparently he adored her.  Whether she returned those feelings is open to doubt but it is probably fair to say she was fond of him and wished him well.

Unable to bear the routines of court life and the behaviour expected of an emperors wife Sisi got away as much as she could travelling almost compulsively more for the journey than because of any particular destination.  She rarely settled in one place for long and was usually longing to depart pretty much as soon as she arrived.  This eventually led to her death as she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist on the shores of Lake Geneva while she waited for a ferry.  After her death the Viennese, who had never liked her much when she was alive, idolised her probably because she was beautiful and tragic two things which are always guaranteed to draw a crowd.

Lest the record seem entirely negative Sisi did render her husband two valuable services.  She helped reconcile him with his Hungarian subjects (Hungary had risen in revolt at the beginning of his reign.  The revolt had been brutally crushed and Hungary had existed in a state of sullen resentment ever since).  Sisi fell in love with all things Hungarian, learnt the language and generally helped make Hungary and Hungarian people more acceptable at court and also made the monarchy more acceptable to the Hungarians.  The second thing she did was introduce Franz Josef to an actress named Katarina Schratt who eventually became the emperors "special" friend although there was no physical aspect to their relationship.  Katarina Schratt could provide the sort of domestic homelife Sisi was utterly incapable of and give the emperor some companionship while his wife was roaming the globe.

Franz Josef's apartments were the real reason I took the tour.  It actually didn't take too long to go through them because in a huge palace complex Franz Josef lived in about half a dozen rather simple rooms one of which was an audience chamber (anyone could get an appointment and drop in on the emperor).  The most important room was the study, Franz Josef spent most of his life there working at his desk.  He logged a twelve to sixteen hour day, seven days a week for sixty eight years.  He even took work on holiday with him. His last words were apparently "wake me tomorrow at four".

Next to the emperor's apartments were the apartments Sisi used on those rare occasions when she was in Vienna.  On her insistence the Hofburgs first bathtub was installed for her use.  Franz Josef, of course, disdained such newfangled things and to the end of his days washed by being sponged down with cold water.

The Spanish Riding School is also in the Hofburg.  This is where the famous dancing horses are trained.  I know they're there because I saw a sign telling me so.  That's as close as I got though because my interest in horses begins and ends with the likelihood of them winding up in my soup.

As if one Habsburg palace wasn't enough the next day I was off to Schonbrunn a little place in the suburbs where the Habsburgs could get away from it all.

Travelling Hopefully

I must admit I think I am suffering from cathedral overload.  How often can one stare at soaring ceilings, stained glass windows, and magnificent artwork before one says "enough"?  Still I had to go to Stephansdom, the cathedral church of Vienna.  It has soaring ceilings, stained glass windows and magnificent artwork.  It also has the sarcophagus of emperor Frederick III.  Frederick was an early Habsburg emperor who spent much of his time being chased from one of his territories to another by various enemies.  He eventually beat them all by the simple process of outliving them and taking their lands after their deaths.  Frederick didn't have much success on the battlefield but he had a certain amount of political rat cunning.  He was frequently accused of indecision or procrastination but when it is crowned with eventual success I think we can give it the term, patience.

Having visited one dead Habsburg I decided to drop in on a hundred or so more.  The imperial crypt situated below a very modest Capuchin church contains the bones of a hundred and sixty or so dead Habsburgs including a number of emperors.  The most magnificent, of course, is the joint sarcophagus of Maria Theresia and her husband the emperor Franz (who was only a Habsburg by marriage).  By contrast that of their son, emperor Josef II, was very simple indeed as befitted a monarch who tried to make all his subjects get buried in tin boxes as a public health measure.  The reaction of the public for whose health he showed such concern was a universal "like Hell" and Joseph was forced to back down.  An emperor can annoy the aristocracy as much as he likes but it is very unwise to piss off the peasants.

Old Franz Josef is there of course, flanked by his wife and son both of whom predeceased him (being associated with Franz Josef didn't appear to be good for the life expectancy).  The sarcophagi of his wife Sisi and his son Rudolf are surrounded by fresh flowers and little gifts.  Nothing but a single modest bouquet (dating to 2011) adorns Franz Josef's austere sarcophagus but that dull, dedicated man would not expect to be rewarded simply for doing his duty.  If he were capable of irony he might be amused by the fact that all the bouquets have been given to two people who avoided theirs.

Having wandered around a room full of dead Habsburgs I decided that I might as well go through their stuff as well so I visited the Hofburg.  The Hofburg is the palace complex where the Habsburgs hung out when they were in Vienna.  There are arches, large buildings, wildly overblown statues and open spaces where the preceding can be comfortably surveyed.  My first stop was the treasure room.

Anyone who has read something of the history of the Habsburg empire knows that it spent a good deal of its existence teetering on the edge of bankruptcy so it came as a slight surprise that the treasure room is rather well stocked.  There are gorgeous robes, brocaded cloth and jewellery including an emerald quite literally as large as my fist (its the largest single emerald in the world).  There is the crown, orb and sceptre of the empire of Austria of course but there is also the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the crown, a cross set with pieces of the true cross on which Christ was crucified and the spearhead from the lance that pierced his side.  You can take the last two with as many grains of salt as is necessary to choke them down but they have been objects of veneration for over a thousand years.  There are gods from legitimate religions that aren't that old, they're practically sacred by osmosis.

Oh yes, they also have the holy grail and a unicorns horn (pass the salt again please).  The "grail" is a huge bowl carved from a single piece of agate.  As near as anyone can tell it was probably made in Constantinople in the third or fourth century AD.  That would make it early Byzantine or late Roman depending on your point of view.  How the Habsburgs got their hands on it is anybody's guess but they were nothing if not acquisitive.

I think my favourite piece was a Hungarian holy relic which was supposed to be given back to the Hungarians as part of the divorce settlement between the two nations at the end of the first world war.  The Austrians duly handed it over and it turned out to be a forgery.  It had been given to a jeweller sometime previously for restoration and rather than restore it he had made a copy, returned that to the Austrians and sold the original on the black market.  Subsequently the treasury museum managed to buy it back, what the Hungarians think of this was not recorded.

Travelling Hopefully

If there are two visuals I will take away from both Prague and Berlin they will be crutches and dogs.  Every second person seems to be hobbling around with the aid of at least one and sometimes two crutches.  One can't help wondering if central Europe has a terrible outbreak of foot disease.  In between the cripples dogs wander in and out.  Lots of people have dogs and they take them everywhere; trains, restaurants, supermarkets, you name it.  The only place I saw dogshit on the streets however was Luxembourg where the canine presence was much less ubiquitous.

Prague has no end of cafes, restaurants and nightspots.  Sheer curiosity almost tempted me to enter one place which offered something called "Techno House Jungle Rap".  However they severely damaged their techno house jungle rap credentials in my eyes by naming the place "Disco Duck".  I went elsewhere.

At the entrance to Prague railway station I was accosted by three Slovakians all of whom tried to sell me aftershave and one of whom also tried to sell me women (in his defence I'm pretty sure he was only offering to rent the women).  I can only assume the women he had access to liked a man who smelled nice.  Deeply offended by the implication that these women (who were nowhere in evidence) would reject me on the basis of my odour I refused their kind offer twenty or thirty times and fought my way inside.

Leaving Prague I shared my compartment with a young honeymoon couple from Mexico and an elderly couple from Argentina who proceeded to barricade us into the compartment with their luggage.  Fortunately we didn't have to evacuate the train in a hurry.  The other two couples chatted happily away in Spanish, occasionally breaking into English for my benefit.  Once again I felt like an ill educated slob for being monolingual.  Even the panhandling perfume pimps at the station had spoken English.

Prague is behind me now and Vienna beckons.  Much thanks to Nigel who was my host and a damned good one.  Rolling through the beautiful Czech countryside we slid into Brno which appeared shabby, gritty and industrial although I will confess that the window of a train carriage probably isn't the best vantage point for a fair description.  All I really know about Brno is that it is the birthplace of the eponymous bren gun.  The Czech role in the Second World War seems to have involved designing a lot of high quality military equipment which was used by other people after Czechoslovakia itself was occupied.

Late Sunday afternoon is not the best time to arrive in Vienna.  Much of it appeared closed.  On the plus side I only got a little bit lost on my way to my accomodation and only had to make one panic stricken phone call to my hosts asking where on earth they were.  Eventually I arrived and climbed the 105 steps to my cosy little room.  In fairness my hosts did warn me about the steps in their airbnb guide so I have no reason to complain.  I do wonder what my host Stefan was thinking as he attempted to explain about the room while I lay on the floor gasping like a landed fish with black dots dancing before my eyes.  Eventually I decided not to have a heart attack and prepared to take on Vienna the next day.

Travelling Hopefully

In keeping with my impromptu "monuments in the rain" series I picked the greyest, wettest day of my stay in Prague to visit Prague Castle.  The castle is actually a massive palace complex perched on top of a hill overlooking the city.  Since time immemorial (about 870AD actually) there has been a fortification of some sort on the site.  Successive rulers (over the years dukes, kings, emperors, presidents and, briefly, a reichsprotekor) have lived and worked there.  It is still the official residence of the Czech president.

Anybody visiting the castle hoping to see examples of late ninth century architecture are going to be disappointed.  Like most building complexes that have been lived and worked in for over a thousand years there has been a fair few changes.  Various rulers have torn down, built up, renovated, subtracted from and added to the castle.  That's before we get into the fact that different parts of the castle have burnt down, been blown up and on at least one occasion hit by lightning (there is a five story tower which used to be a seven story tower before the lightning strike).

The weather did fine up long enough for me to watch the changing of the guard at midday it was very impressive although it didn't quite have the machine like precision of the guards at Buckingham Palace.  I wandered around the breathtaking cathedral of St Vitus with an equally breathtaking interior, carefully placed ropes made getting good pictures of the inside difficult.  I visited the old royal palace and checked out the window made famous by the defenestration of Prague (technically the second defenestration of Prague.  Apparently tossing people out of windows is the standard Czech method of registering a protest against government policy).  All three victims on this occasion survived the seventy foot drop with only minor injuries.

There are some nice paintings in the picture gallery with a couple of works by Titian and Tintoretto to name just the artists I've heard of but sadly most of the magnificent collection built up by Emperor Rudolf II is scattered to the winds as a result of looting by Swedish soldiers at the end of the Thirty Years War (which was precipitated by the previously mentioned defenestration, what goes around, apparently, comes around).

The view of the city from the castle walls is amazing which is the reason the castle is where it is although the original builders were probably thinking in terms of "fields of fire" rather than "photo opportunities".

With the wet gloomy day turning into a wet gloomy night naturally I decided to hit the town.  I went to the Black Light Theatre to see "Aspects of Alice" a piece that takes Lewis Carroll's character as an adult and puts her into a series of scenes showing her the most important emotional moments of her life against a backdrop of Old Prague.  It was very well done although I didn't realise Alice was a lesbian until that point.  Strangely the theatre announcements were made in English and Italian but not Czech, still I guess they know their audience.

No restaurant that even pretends to serve Czech food will be without goulash with potato dumplings.  I've eaten it about three times so far.  If you see a restaurant offering "Czech and Mediterranean" food that means goulash and pizzas which I'm less certain about.  The waitress at my first restaurant kindly offered me the choice of sparkling or stale water.  I went with the stale water, it wasn't very tough.  On my way back to my accommodation I saw a man walking his tortoise.  Berlin, your sparrows have just been trumped.  It was moving at a pretty decent clip for a tortoise too.

Travelling Hopefully

I'm walking everywhere in Prague.  Well when I say everywhere I mean somewhere.  Sometimes I walk to the same place twice, occasionally deliberately.  Walking is definitely the best way to see Prague especially if you can't figure out the public transport and a helpful German has made you petrified of taxis.

Today I walked to Josefov near or possibly in the Old Town, the signage isn't explicit.  Josefov is the old Jewish quarter or it was before a city development at the beginning of the twentieth century demolished most of it.  Bizarrely what was left was preserved by the Nazis who intended it to be the centrepiece of a "museum of an exotic and extinct race" and shipped Jewish memorabilia in from all over.

I visited the Pinkas Synagogue which now serves as a memorial to Czech holocaust victims.  The building is virtually empty inside but the walls are covered in writing.  The lettering is black, red and gold and has quite a visually pleasing effect from a distance.  Up close you can see it is just a list of names.  All the nearly eighty thousand Bohemian and Moravian Jews who perished in the holocaust are given by name.  As I said the walls are covered in writing.

On the way out I passed through the old Jewish cemetery.  It was cool and dark and absolutely crammed with gravestones and memorials.  Some people think cemeteries are creepy but compared with the synagogue where death had essentially been reduced to a telephone directory I found it a peaceful and even happy place.  Death, the ultimate act of life, had been given the respect it deserved.  You had to leave the synagogue via the cemetery and I rather think that was deliberate and very appropriate.

I'll try and be funny next time OK?

Travelling Hopefully

I left Berlin on what must have been the shabbiest looking train in the Deutsche Bahn fleet.  I was very glad of a first class ticket, I suspect second class were helping push.  Still it was functional enough, we rolled smoothly through eastern Germany on route for the Czech border.  On the way we passed through Dresden which didn't impress from the window of a train carriage.  For the record eastern Germany looks like a slightly less well maintained version of western Germany.  Also at Dresden we picked up a river which would be our constant companion for the rest of the trip.

I haven't really got used to crossing borders with no ceremony whatsoever.  I looked up and we were in the Czech Republic.  I did notice differences though, for starters there was forest.  There was forest in Germany too but it looked as though the Germans had dusted off the trees in preparation for visitors.  The Czech forests were just there.  The border region has mountains or, at least, overachieving hills which is probably the reason it was the border in the first place.  Also in the Czech Republic I saw factories belching smoke into the sky.  It was the first time in my trip I had seen anything that looked like industry.

Conversations with Thomas having convinced me that all Czech taxi drivers were going to beat me to death and sell my organs on the black market I decided to walk from the train station to my accommodation.  It wasn't a long walk and I barely got lost.  Taxi drivers notwithstanding Prague has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  You don't need to visit any of the main attractions, just wander around the streets in the city centre and you will encounter a breathtaking array of magnificent old buildings interspersed with the occasional palace or church which stand out even against all the other buildings.

I want to take a moment out from the glories of Prague to address a very important social issue.  Who the fuck decided that segways were a good method for touring a city?  In both Berlin and Prague I encountered clutches of giggling tourists rolling around on these ridiculous things.  No wonder drivers in Berlin are pretty relaxed about bicycles, trying to sight see while at the same time zipping down the streets on a segway strikes me as possibly one of the most stupidly dangerous things you could do.  Let's get something straight, the segway has only one legitimate use; that is to provide mobility for a certain type of American to fill the gap between when they're too big to fit in the pram but not yet obese enough to qualify for a mobility chair.

I strolled through the Old Town and parts of the New Town of Prague.  For the record the New Town is old and the Old Town is really, really old.  In the Old Town you have the opportunity to marvel and the breathtaking diversity of tourists Prague has to offer.  There are also more cafes and bars than can be reasonably expected.  My favourite cafe was called Cafe Rybyka a small, comfortable place inhabited by the most honest people in Prague.  I know they're honest because the guy next to me left his dope on the bar while he went out to buy tobacco and rolling papers and it was still there when he got back.  I decided not to try the same trick with my iPhone however.

Tuesday was museum day.  I visited the Museum of Communism.  I was going to say something funny and smartarsed about that but they've thought of all the good lines themselves.  My favourite; a post card announcing "The Museum of Communism:  Above McDonalds and across the road from Bennetton.  Viva Imperialism."  The Museum itself would benefit from better lighting and a more efficient display of their exhibits so I guess they're really capturing the feel.  Down at the Charles bridge (about which more later if I can be bothered) I took time out to wander through the Museum of Torture which took me back to a better, simpler time before psychotropic drugs and "enhanced interrogation techniques" when all a torturer had were some simple tools and his imagination.  Various implements of judicial persuasion were laid out each with a little card explaining exactly how they could ruin your day.  Amusingly the English language version of these cards had syntax that was, shall we say, a little tortured?

Dinner at the Crazy Cow Steakhouse which had a Texas theme to it.  Not exactly Czech I know but how can you go past a steakhouse called The Crazy Cow?

Travelling Hopefully

You know the old saying, "One mans trash is another's museum exhibit".  The Museum of Things on Oranienstrasse takes that to its logical conclusion.  Since it was only fifteen minutes walk from where I was staying I trotted along to take a look at Kei's suggestion.  The museum exhibits standard household objects from the late 19th century until yesterday.  Genuine is contrasted with fake, tasteful with kitsch and functional with overblown.  The walls are lined with cabinets containing homely domestic objects from the last hundred 
years or so. I'm pretty sure I recognised a pair of shears that were still doing sterling service in my parents house up until recently. Think of the place as a midden heap in the making. Future archaeologists are going to have a field day with this place when they dig it up.

In the centre is the core of the exhibition which was sourced from the Deutsche Werkbund an unholy alliance of artists, designers and industrialists who "endeavored to forge a new understanding between product designers, manufacturers, suppliers, and consumers by establishing “ethically pure” design principles such as quality, material honesty, functionality and sustainability." They were, according to the museum "pushing for a cultural utopia achieved through design and way of life reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century". All of which I must confess I find rather disturbing.  

The Werkbund fought a relentless war against kitsch as an example of form over substance (and a pretty hideous form at that), that they were completely opposed to. Personally I think they're wrong, when some illiterate slob nails some plaster ducks to his wall he is plugging into the same motivation that inspires someone else to spends thousands on tasteful interior design. Function by itself isn't enough, we need embellishment as well.

But that's enough of Berlin for the moment.  I took a train out to Hamburg to meet Thomas and Prue for lunch.  After various petty difficulties relating to missing trains by a minute at every single opportunity I slid out of Berlin and hurtled towards Hamburg.  On the way I thought I saw deer in a field.  They looked like deer or at least they looked like what I imagine deer to look like.  It's possible they were miniature, emaciated cows.

Hamburg presents a distinct difference to Berlin.  In Berlin I worried if I was about to get mugged. In Hamburg I was afraid I'd be refused entry to the city for failing to meet the dress code.  Prue and Thomas met me and we went to lunch.  I bought socks (not for lunch) and we took a tour of the town hall which is huge and manages to make Sydney's look small and quietly understated.  During the second world war when the allies literally bombed Hamburg flat and killed some forty thousand of the inhabitants the town hall escaped unscathed with only one bomb dropping nearby which didn't explode.  They have the detonator on display.  I find it slightly embarrassing that we trashed the entire of Hamburg and still didn't take out the politicians.

After the town hall we went to the planetarium where we saw a documentary on stars narrated by somebody who Germans think is Whoopi Goldberg.  It was  very interesting if slightly interrupted by the man behind me snoring.  In his defence it was dark and the seats reclined.

That was pretty much the end of my stay in Berlin.  Next day I headed to Prague.  So it only remains to thank my beautiful and talented host Jah and her delightful sister Yip who made my stay so enjoyable, showed me things and translated for me in shops when it became obvious that my German wasn't even up to the task of ordering donuts.  When the time came to leave I didn't want to.