Update report 3. advent (Dec.2007)

Subject: Update report 3. advent

Impressions of Vienna, Third Advent 2007

So far Vienna has been a fairy tale experience:

beautiful buildings, snow-covered streets, throngs of holiday visitors and shoppers, a fabulous Christkindl Market (Christmas Market) with innumerable booths selling Gluehwein (spicy hot punch of every ilk), food and small handcrafted gifts etc. What has impressed us most, however, is to experience that this city is a real melting pot of languages, races, nationalities and cultures, primarily from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Yesterday at the restaurant, e.g. a customer started ordering in Hungarian and was surprised that the waiter did not understand his language. The waiter told him that he speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish but not Hungarian; so the customer switched to one of those languages and continued his order. The subways are typically humming with the babble of many tongues.

The huge neo-gothic City Hall or Rathaus is perhaps the most beautiful and impressive that we have ever seen (open to the public). Right now it and the local surroundings are decorated in magical colorful-like figurines of Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses, Elves etc. The entire grounds around the Rathaus are covered with a huge Christmas Market consisting of a great number of wooden booths which are all alike, selling local handcrafted-art products, Christmas tree ornaments, gifts, etc.There was a delightful snow falling gently as we had coffee and Sacher Torte with other revelers inside the Rathaus, part of which has been converted into a Coffee House for the occasion.

The Rathaus is located on the Ring Street which encircles the Old Town of Vienna. We often take the street car number 1 around the three or four miles circumference (the RING), and admire the many old buildings along the way: the state Opera, the University, the Stock Market, the Parlament or State legislature, several libraries, numerous museums, parks, and of course the impressive, stunningly beautiful City Hall. It takes the tram about 25-30 minutes to go around the Ring once, and sometimes we do two trips before getting off.

Our inexpensive transportation ticket (for a week) allows us to use the intricate, excellent subway system plus the many trams and buses as much as we like. In this way we are slowly becoming acquainted with much of the inner city. Like Paris, this inner city area is an open-air museum with famous historical buildings and monuments on every other corner. Again like Paris a great deal of history has occurred here over the past millennia: Wien was originally a Roman Colony called Vinda Bona (good wine). Again like Paris, recent excavations show an even older layer of human presence under those Roman ruins.

Vienna is one of the culturally most diversified cities we have seen, as already mentioned. So far we have personally met

only a few Viennese, and they have all turned out to be very outgoing, sociable people, often with complex personal histories of displacement and relocation.

So far we have been to a number of musical performances, most recently a trumpet & organ concert in St. Anna's Church, a small intimate downtown church. It was lovely. We were surprised, however, that it was attended almost exclusively by gray-haired "seniors" like us. Only a  short block away, the wide pedestrian zone in the Kaerntner Strasse was packed with younger holiday revelers. In case we did not mention it before, we also attended a delightful Strauss & Mozart chamber music concert in the Auersperg Palais a couple of days earlier. Tomorrow we plan to see "The Tales of Hoffman" in the Volkstheater.

Best wishes to all, and more later.