Vienna

In Vienna we stayed in a wonderful pension in the heart of the old part of the city, a block away from St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Highlights of the trip include a horse and carriage ride into the city, a visit to the Belverdere Palace Klimt collection, riding the Riesenrad -- the Vienna wheel first built in 1897 (5 years after George Ferris's Chicago wheel), and a tour of the Hofburg Palace, 

As for the last, we had been seeing posters, boxes, calendars, coffee table books, and all sorts of other memorabilia devoted to a beautiful woman named, in italics and with a whisper, Sissi. Brief forays into these materials told me she was an empress of Austria, Elisabeth of Bavaria. The Hofburg Palace was the winter home she shared with her husband, Franz Joseph, who reigned as emperor for 67 years until World War I. Even so, even as the last empress: why so many pictures? She's certainly pleasant to look at, but what makes her otherwise so iconographic? 

The Hofburg Palace hosted a detailed museum to Elisabeth's life -- including public perception and private despair. I learned that it was she who brought Austria and Hungary together; the picture above, in fact, is her coronation portrait as the Queen of Hungary. But Elisabeth married early to the claustrophobic life of the imperial court, and the exhibit is haunted by her lonely poetry, made no less bitter when her son, Rudolph, at age 31, shot his 16 year old girl friend before turning the gun on himself.

Hungary's relationship to Elisabeth, as I discovered the next week when I asked in school, is as complicated as Hungary's relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, but it seems mostly positive. I went with the drama students to the Csiky Gergyely Színház in Kaposvár, where we were treated, through a one-day open-house, to roam the building, and where the theater was preparing for their production of Erzsébet.

At right you can see a prop of an all-important accessory -- her ghostly dress.

Back in Vienna, one of the things we learned was how much Elisabeth worked on her hair (2-3 hours a day) and her body (and its 20 inch waist). At one point in the tour, in 40 rooms devoted not to Sissi but to the imperial cutlery, I stopped at a beautifully crafted but mysterious-looking press that turned out to the one piece in the museum to squeeze everything together: silver, power, claustrophobia, cult of beauty. The object at left is a duck squeezer, and this is the answer. How did the empress stay so thin? Kacsalé, as I reported to students the next week. She didn't eat the ducks served to her: she drank them.

If you are like Stephanie and don't believe me, please click on the placard at right, which I photographed just for such disbelievers.

Our stay produced more traditional experiences and observations as well. Therefore, no more words, except for the part where I talk about the woman who gave us the horse and carriage ride.

 

Above, our 20 year old driver. Below, what came out of her mouth during the rise, from a combination of German and English: 

You, you don't belong there. Get on the sidewalk. Get on the sidewalk. Get off the road. Get on the sidewalk. Get your dog off the road! Get him off! And keep him on a leash. You want horses to stomp your dog? This is not a place to have a dog unleashed. There is the hunting lodge. Look at this. Look what he's doing, trotting his horse! How would you like it if you had to trot all the way through the park? Would you like that? Would you like that? How would you like that? Huh? Girls? What would that be like for you? Would you like it? No, you wouldn't.