City of Music, City of Dreams

Distance Traveled:   40,570 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB-PP-HCMC-NC-TH-HA-H-L-MR-AG-SV-TF-AC-LL-ML-CZ-TF-CZ-SV-L-BP-ZG-SP-LJ-VN)

Time Difference: -8 hours (from Brisbane)

Soundtrack: Beethoven's Piano Concertos

Currently Inspired by:  David Helfgott!

Stacks: A faintly bruised little toe from kicking a desk, and a tiny steam burn from the stove in my apartment.  Apparently I've forgotten how to cook.  Is a head cold considered a stack?
Words written: 70,038. All quiet on the western front.

Canals in LJ City

Ljubljana is, in a word, cute.  In three words it would be cute but forgettable.  Europe’s smallest capital city (of Slovenia), it has history, art, architecture and culture, just on a tiny scale compared to everywhere else I’ve been, and when you consider that their population is about 280,000 then that is entirely reasonable.  If the Slovenian language was different from Croatian then I was unable to tell.  (I don’t even know if the language spoken in Croatia is called “Croatian”).  My ignorance relating to this entire part of Europe is stunning, especially when you consider that I’ve been there.  As I was a selfish young teenager during all the Yugoslavian drama in the early nineties I only have the vaguest idea of what went on, and if the people over here I have spoken with so far mention “the war”, they tend to do so very briefly and then quickly move onto other topics, so my instinct is to leave the subject alone and do some research on my own, which I shall at some point.

As I knew nothing about anything, I was keen to have some kind of a guided tour about the place, and caught a bus into town where I marched up to town hall to take a guided walking tour.  Unfortunately I had just missed one by about fifteen minutes and the next wasn’t for four hours, so I decided to make do on my own.  Consequently, I ended up walking around all the main sites of Ljubljana and taking photos of everything I liked without ever knowing what it was I was looking at or why things were the way they were. 

Use of black in the Cathedral

One of my favourite stops on this trip was inside the Cathedral.  It was happily unlike (the many, many) others I have seen.  Still ornate and dripping in gold, but with an unusual use of black in its design, and it really worked a treat.  Unfortunately I still had to go through my usual twitchy church ritual, which consists of pausing near the holy water at the entrance because I feel weird entering without blessing myself, reason finally winning out against conditioning, walking in and sitting in a pew to have a quiet look around, only to have to pause and fight with myself at the beginning of it about not genuflecting first, feeling awkward about leaving the pew without kneeling down and saying a Hail Mary or an Our Father, taking a few photos before feeling super tense and paranoid and rushing outside to gulp lots of air, only pausing by the holy water again on the way out.  So anyone who thinks that childhood Catholic conditioning doesn’t keep its hooks in you, remember that a committed atheist is writing this blog right now, and I always, always, always, always have a version of this experience inside churches.  On rare occasions I will just bless myself and genuflect and do the stuff to make myself less tense about it, although I’m always cross with myself afterwards.  The argument in my head goes like this:

“You’d better bless yourself before you go any further”
“Don’t be ridiculous”
“But you’re supposed to”
“It one of the many arbitrary and arcane religious rituals devised to control the masses.  I don’t even believe in all that crap”
“Well in that case it doesn’t matter, it’s just a bit of water on your forehead.  What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is I don’t want to pander to organised religion and its evil, greedy, intolerant, sex obsessed nonsense”
“It’s a bit of harmless water ffs, not a political statement”
“None of these rituals are harmless when you look at them in the context of all the harm done by organised religion”
“Then why are you going into the church at all?”
“Errr... cause I like the art...”
“*shakes head at own hypocrisy*”

Interesting pose!

The thing is, I think the art and music that has been inspired and produced by religion is the best part of it.  The art doesn't hurt anyone that can see it, the music doesn't exclude anyone that can hear it.  Are they evil in and of themselves?  I argue with myself about this all. the. time.  How can an organisation that refers to itself as charitable, manage to commission and pay for pieces of art from the most famous artists of all time?  Why do cathedrals contain so much marble and so much gold, and how many poor people could be fed and could have been fed by the cumulative costs of all of these buildings and their contents throughout the world and throughout time?  Wasn't Jesus supposed to be a poor and humble carpenter who eschewed worldly possessions?  Why does his spirit need to be housed in these giant palaces, and why do his bishops need to be preside over such splendour? Anyone who wants to get into this with me, feel free!  This is a bit of a religion-bashing post.

 

Craving fresh food and NO bread / pastry / pasta I went into a Japanese restaurant and had a tasty but hideously expensive late lunch, and then continued back the hotel feeling like I’d just had a good five hours’ walking with little to show for it.  The constant icy weather and rain didn’t help matters.  I regretted not just sneaking in and tagging along with the walking tours that I passed, something I considered several times but never had the balls to do.  Being in a large group may have also saved me from nearly getting run down about a thousand times by Slovenia’s many fast and crazy cyclists that don’t appear to follow any discernible road / footpath rules.  I was a little paranoid there because there are a few countries that I didn’t decide on going to until recently and as such they are not included in my travel insurance.  Knowing my luck, something will happen in one of these places.  To see the nonetheless cute Ljubljana, click here.

I'd love to come here in summer!

Lake Bled is gorgeous, or at least I saw enough of it to imagine that it would be gorgeous, stunning in fact, in nice weather.  As it was, cold, grey, and for the most part thundering down with rain, it had limited impact, for which I was sorry.  It was the largest lake I’ve ever seen in person, and had a castle at one end of it that I was absolutely certain had a beautiful princess locked in its tower, awaiting her prince, and some green hills with a windy path and a few stone houses with chimneys where I’m sure a woodcutter and his wife lived next door to a witch in a gingerbread house.  I’ve never seen a place that more evoked an air of fairytale wonder.  Certainly most fairytales were set here, or somewhere like it?  It’s too picturesque.  Click here to see the few photos I was able to get at Lake Bled.  It is actually the colour of emeralds up close, but unfortunately the sky reflected in it made it grey.

Himself

I. LOVE. VIENNA.  I mean, I REALLY love it. I embarked on my journey in a jacket, long sleeves and long pants, and arrived about four hours later into a 27 degree, cloudless Spring day, much to my sweaty delight.  Vienna is almost too beautiful, if that is possible.  You find yourself taking photos of chemists and post offices, because they look like museums.  The museums in turn look like palaces, so you can imagine what the actual palaces look like!  In the suburbs (where I am staying), you could easily be in Brisbane.  Generic streets and roads, BP service stations, supermarkets et al give the impression of being Anywhere, The World.  However the centre of the city is where it is at, and by IT I mean a ridiculous number of the most gorgeous buildings I’ve ever seen, a glut of world class concert halls, universities, opera houses, Roman ruins and some of the best museums and libraries in the world.  It also houses a veritable treasure trove of monuments, not dedicated to a pack of generic warmongers like in most capital cities (although there are a couple), but instead to people who with their contributions have made the world a better place.  People like Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Goethe, Freud, and of course the Immortal Beloved Beethoven.  All either from Vienna or worked there at one point in their lives.  No wonder they call it the City of Music, and sometimes (because of Freud) the City of Dreams.

I have managed to avoid the rich Austrian pastries thus far, not through any act of willpower but because I am so goddamn sick of bread in all its incarnations.  Bread: The Traveller’s Staple.  Hungry?  You buy a sandwich if you can find one.  Order a soup or salad?  Comes with bread.  Want something quickly while you’re out?  You have a wide choice of either sweet or savoury pastries and cakes.  My kingdom for a plate of veggies.  Just veggies.  I am definitely not eating to maximum nutritional benefit.  When I arrived in Vienna, I was almost immediately assailed with a temperature and a nasty head cold that kept me inside, aching and feverish for my first two days here.  Considering I only had four days in the city and I have been wearing a jacket pretty much every day since November, you can imagine I wasn’t overly thrilled to be stuck inside while the sunny world went on its merry way outside my window.  I was too sick to write or even sit up for long, and spent my days crabbily watching episodes of the West Wing online and picking at my split ends.  When it let up, it was like the end of a jail term and I bounced out of doors, marching around the place trying to stuff everything in as expediently as I could, quickly tiring my not-fully-recovered self.  

David and the SSO

That first night, after coming back for a quick nap and a shower, I went to see David Helfgott playing piano with the Stuttgart Symphonica in the most famous of Vienna’s concert halls, the Golden Hall in the Musikverein.  If you don’t know who David Helfgott is and would like to, click here.  Of course it was utterly brilliant, and my enjoyment was only slightly dampened by the strong compulsion to stab the Japanese man next to me who insisted on breathing through his partially obstructed nose the entire time.  It started as an annoying little rasp and as my rage levels rocketed and my ears zeroed in on him, he turned into a fucking human kazoo.  On several occasions I was so close to nudging him with my elbow and going “Oi, One Man Band, can you open your mouth please?” that I actually began to bend my arm, but I always chickened out.  Do the Viennese crowds know how to do applause!  David (I should say ‘and the orchestra’, but it was him, really) received easily close to a ten minute standing ovation after the performance, and then did three encores, each of which were followed with several minutes more of standing ovations.  My arms were actually tired, which I think speaks to the need to do some pushups more than anything else.

My irritability when I was ill was compounded by the fact that I tried to book tickets to see the Vienna Boys’ Choir in concert one night while here and discovered that they were sold out.  Of course this was entirely my fault for not checking ahead, but I was being such a spoilt brat that I literally kicked the desk when I found that out and hurt my toe a bit.  Further investigation revealed a Sunday morning mass at the most famous of the inner city chapels with music provided by the VBC.  I went onto the website and it was in German only which was fine.  I got it translated and found that tickets couldn’t be booked online which was fine.  I emailed them instead, and it bounced back.  Things were still fine, as there was a phone number.  I rang and rang it at various intervals for the two days, got the receptionist at the hotel to try for me also, and nobody ever answered.  Things were becoming distinctly not fine.  Finally I tried again in a desperate attempt yesterday and they answered, and advised me that most of the tickets were gone but if I arrived early on the Sunday morning they may have some “cheap seat” tickets still available.  I rocked up early this morning, with a hopeful face and a pocket full of dreams (and euros, they won’t take dreams apparently, the stingy bastards), and managed to score myself one of the last tickets! 

VBC in their last song after the mass

After all that, it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.  I’ve seen the VBC before, many years ago when I was in school and they did an Australian tour, and they were impeccably groomed, disciplined, angelic and goosebump inducing.  This new crop were sullen and fidgety.  Some of them just stood there looking around wherever they felt like it, idly playing with their robes, not opening their mouths when they sang.  Some of them looked like they weren’t even singing, scratching their faces and adjusting their untidy hair or uniforms.  Also it was a small group of them, maybe 20 or so.  I get the feeling that these Sunday masses are simply a money making activity (like most Sunday masses – ba-boom tish!) and they get whatever dregs they can to perform and don’t really treat it like a proper performance.  They did sound alright, but not any better than a decent choir, and that is not the way it should be.  I think it is dangerous of them to mess with their brand like that, because how many people might go to that who have not seen them before, and leave thinking that’s the best they can do?  Hmmm.  

Anyway, I’m glad I went and it was a nice start to the day.  Except for the mass part obviously, but it was all in German so I managed to tune most of it out.  The priest was obviously a higher ranking kind of priest, I don’t know what, but you can always tell because at least in the Catholic Church they denote rank by giving them more big and ridiculous hats the higher up they get, til you get to the Pope, whose hat is half the size of him again and that weird building shape.  This priest had a strange hot pink kind of fez thing with a big fuschia bobble on top that looked like something Aunt Mildred wore to the races last Spring Carnival, so I think he must’ve been pretty important.  The day only improved from there.  A walk in the sun, a visit to the Mozart memorial, a sit on the softest grass among tiny white flowers, a trip to the Danube and the northern part of the city and the genuinely friendly sunshine conspired in the most pleasant fashion to give me a feeling of utter contentment.  It was one of those “perfect days” and I treasured it.  Vienna will always be coloured golden in my memories.

Can you SEE them?

The Schonbrunn Palace (how do you get little dots and dashes above your letters?  I’ve never known how to do that) had the most beautiful grounds.  I didn’t go inside the palace, but I strolled around the gardens for ages, enjoying the sun on my face, the fact that I was wearing short sleeves, the cute little squirrels, and imagining I could hear the tinkling strains of a very young Mozart playing the piano inside for the Queen, something he did when he was six years old, along with his sister, who, it mustn’t be forgotten, was also an incredibly talented musician but who unfortunately possessed a vagina in the wrong era.  As I tripped around the long alleyways of fresh spring green trees and blossoming tulips, I could almost visualise like a delicate overlay sitting over reality, a bunch of famous composers of the day in their stockings and breeches, strolling alongside me, composing and conducting the floating dandelions like notes through the air and I remember thinking “This is the real Vienna.”  If you come here, you must go to Schonbrunn Palace.

Said fanged deer.  Fake or Real??

Unfortunately due to time restrictions I didn’t have time to do at least half the things I wanted to do, and the toughest choice came today – choosing between the Fine Arts museum and the Natural History Museum.  Both world famous.  I know Natural History can be a bit boring (and nothing in history changes!) so I was tempted to go to the Fine Arts Museum but when I realised a. I’ve seen pretty much nothing but art museums on this trip thus far b. The Art Museum was having a Gustav Klimt exhibition (whose work I don’t care for) and c. The line to get in was thirty metres long, I decided to opt for Natural History, and didn’t regret it.  It deserves its reputation.  Not only is the interior of the building unsurpassed in beauty, the collection was the most comprehensive I’ve ever seen.  I spent an hour looking at rocks, for heavens’ sake.  ROCKS.  I’m fairly convinced, although I’m sure even the tiniest bit of research will prove me wrong, that this museum has one of everything.  One of everything in the world.  One of every snake, spider, elephant, bear, (these are all stuffed obviously), bird, fish, mineral, stone, fabric, and so on.  They even had this deer looking thing in the exhibit that held all the deer family, and it had fangs.  I’m sure that a museum worker put them in there as a practical joke years ago waiting for someone to notice and forgot about it, and no one’s ever said anything.  You know, a bit of taxidermist humour, such as it is.  Bambi ain't got fangs in my world.

I’ve just noticed how huge this blog is, so I’ll sign out with this interesting fact:  Vienna is 51% green space.  There are 120 metres of green space for every resident, and something like 2,800 parks in total (1.7 million inhabitants).  No small wonder it is so beautiful! Click here to see my Vienna photos.

Til Next We Speak

*LOVE*

N