Vienna, Last Day / Prague, First Night

This morning I bid Vienna a bittersweet farewell, and prepared for the next leg of my journey to Prague, home to golems and goulasch. As the city disappeared through the window of the train compartment, smeared with the thumbprints of past passengers, I thought about all the things I'd miss: seeing the baroque church spires lit up at night, tripping on the cobblestone streets in the rain, eating gelato underneath the towering statue of Gutenberg and his printing press. I won't be able to run along the overgrown and rubble-strewn banks of the Danube, or take a bicycle ride through the wide and wild poppy fields of Niederösterreich, for a long while yet. These are things I won't easily forget, and don't want to.

I never did a moving-in post on the apartment, but I'm making up for it now with a smörgåsbord of photographs, taken with a heavy heart.

The last view, looking out onto the street.

Walnuts, ahoy.

Before we caught the train, I ran into the Naschmarkt to get one last Hungarian baumkuchen, which only shares its cooking method with the German variety. It's a single, long piece of dough wrapped around a thick spit, baked, and then dusted with various flavors - cinnamon, walnut, cacao, vanilla, "bounty" (coconut and cacao). Je l'adore.

The Czech countryside was stunning, particularly because our train cut through the Sudetans. This meant that in addition to feeling like I was zooming through a Venetian blind - tunnel light tunnel light tunnel light - I got some lovely mountain views. (Seconds later, a train roared past on the neighboring tracks, and I saw my life and a lot of seventies-era paint flash before my eyes.)

Let's ignore the big grey pole, shall we?

A democratic nation with communist stylings.

The train ride was about five hours long, but it was pleasant enough, especially considering that we had an entire six-person compartment - and thus, three seats each to sleep on - to ourselves for most of it. About thirty minutes from Prague, a slight Czech girl dressed for a Victorian tea party joined us, but this hardly changed matters as she silently clutched her umbrella in the corner.

Having learned from our handy guidebook that Czech taxi drivers are a treacherous lot just short of serial killer material, we opted to take the metro to the stop nearest our hotel in Josefov and then walk the remainder of the way... on cobblestone streets. I think the wheels of my suitcase are made of kryptonite; there is no other way they could have stayed on otherwise.

I decided that I liked Prague as soon as we checked in to our hotel, where we were cheerily handed "welcome drink" vouchers for either mojitos or champagne at the bar. It was about dinner time by the time we rolled out, so we decided to meander around the Jewish quarter and Old Town until we found something suitable.

Clockwise from top left: the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, whose right tower is indeed stouter than the left; a quaint Old Town street; St. Wenceslas' horse on the façade of the Storch House; the view down Na Prikope to Palác Koruna.

The first thing that struck me about Prague is that it feels really small. At first I was under the mistaken impression that it was quiet and empty of chatty tourists, too, until we arrived at the Old Town Square and I was rudely disabused of my delusions. Then the city started feeling like Barcelona, with Old Town Square replacing La Rambla and souvenir Bohemian crystal taking the place of teacups shaped like the Sagrada Familia. I think it's the Gothic architecture, and the streets deliberately arranged to lead to the greatest amount of confusion, and all of the scantily-clad and tanned women (tourists, no doubt; natives are pale and actually wear clothes) scampering off to the various clubs and bars arrayed around the center.

A sampling of the oddball stores we passed: I think I know what inspired this glass shop's name; marionnettes!; the bicycle parked by the Absintherie; look what I found! Not pictured: the Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments.

To get to the vegetarian restaurant selected for tonight, we passed by the Charles Bridge. It was spectacular, even with tourists crawling all over it like lice. There was a queue to cross it.

The restauraut's name, Lehka Hlava, translates as "Clear Head," and was located on a warmly lit side street (cobblestoned, of course). It was all vegetarian - one of about half a dozen in the entire city - and featured a ton of different culinary influences and several exotic drinks.

The decorations inside were beautiful, but it was too dark to get any good pictures. Apparently, in the Czech Republic it's not uncommon for lone diners to join other tables if there are seats, so we split a large table with a pair of women from Tel Aviv. They were so friendly, and just as impressed with the menu as we were.

The Greenhorn, juice pressed
from young barley shoots.

Since we were feeling so healthy, we ordered carrot cake, thinking it wouldn't come doused in a delicious chocolate sauce. It did, and so it disappeared too quickly to take a picture. Oops.

Let's take it from the top: polenta gnocchi, barley risotto with tempeh, sesame stir-fry.

Barcelona, Segunda Dìa: Park Güell is Swell

Caution: this post contains pictures of cute animals, palm trees, sunshine, and amounts of whimsy that have been shown to induce seizures in adults. You may be inspired to listen to flamenco music for days, or consume alarming quantities of tropical drinks. You have been warned.

Rue de Gaudí is a lovely, shaded pedestrian boulevard that begins at the northern corner of the Sagrada Família and spans several blocks of cafés, restaurants, and souvenir shops. It culminates in the magnificent Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, for whose services I would deliberately break my arm. It has sixteen pavilions and numerous exquisite gardens - or so I am told, as I was not able to see for myself. Inexplicably, both the magic hospital and the magic fountains were conspiring against me this trip: the gates were closed and entry was barred. Perhaps someone especially contagious was running about the grounds, threatening to infect tourists. I would have braved the plague.

Yes, this is seriously a hospital.

Our infirmary dreams thus thwarted, we had no choice but to find solace in another garden - Park Güell, site of Gaudí's mad-hat adventures in landscaping.

That is not Ophelia.

We stopped by a smaller park on the way up, home to a lovely old abbey and many lovely nuns, and also a basketball court, where we paused to munch on Spanish pastries. While in some the sight of sun-soaked cobblestone churches inspires religious fervor or, at the very least, some beatific smiling, in the Czar it inspired a flurry of Hamlet quips. I ignored him and filled up our waterbottles at the old-fashioned spigot. Get me to a nunnery, indeed.

Two ensaimadas and endless steps later - Park Güell, like so many places with great views, is located at the top of a very big hill - we arrived through the backdoor, and were instantly transported to a tropical paradise. There were palm trees, and brightly colored umbrellas, and a café that probably served daquiris and piña coladas. "Why, there should be parrots!" I said, and lo, who should utter a scratchy hello but

It was then that it fully hit me that I was in Spain.

Our first stop was the Banc de Trencadis, one of the longest and prettiest benches in the world, is a tiled beauty curving around the perimeter of the Sala Hipóstila, a stone forest of massive Doric columns. It was originally intended as a market; had Gaudí's plan been implemented, I'm pretty sure it would top La Boqueria. What beats buying sugar plums in a stone temple, in the middle of a fantastical park?

The bench proved to be quite comfortable, and more than amenable to a photoshoot in front of the city skyline, with the Hansel and Gretel gatehouses peeking out from below us.

It would appear I have been inspired to intolerable heights of whimsy.

Having feasted our eyes on the beautiful tiles and gingerbread houses, we then walked around for a bit, and I discovered my future home.

Further on, from the top of a pile of stones and stone crosses, I shamelessly took a dozen pictures of the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes sitting up there, enjoying the wind (it was so hot! Gaudí forgot to build an oasis) and resting our poor, abused bipeds.

Also spotted: a rebellious Catalan roof.

We made our way back down and ended where we should have started, at the giant mosaic lizard that guards the front entrance. Mr Lizard was aghast that I had the aplomb to make a kissy face at him.

Then, as I turned around to wave my good bye to the park, I saw him. The most majestic pigeon I have ever laid eyes upon - the Lion King.

He made my day.

Barcelona, Segunda Dìa: The House that Gaudi (Half) Built

On my second day in Barcelona, I was determined to see every structure that Gaudi so much as breathed on. And where else to start but the Sagrada Famìlia, Gaudi's infamous, incomplete, incomprehensible monument to the Holy Family in stone. The Czar and I started out the morning with a lovely café con leche and croissant - which I am now able to order myself, in gloriously butchered Spanish - and then walked up to the cathedral along Passeig de Graçia, stopping by all of the Modernista buildings along the way. Some of the apartments - which people actually live in! - are incredible, like lost buildings from Atlantis, and I'll be doing a separate post on those later today.

The cathedral, in addition to being huge and awe-inspiring and breathtaking and all of those other obvious adjectives I have to get out of the way, is also hilarious. There are all this strange little details, like spires topped with cobs of corn or bushels of blackberries, turtles with columns growing out of their backs (a creation myth not entirely in line with Catholic doctrine), and the words to 'Hosanna in the Highest' wrapped lurid yellow around several towers. I can only imagine what all of the people Gaudi hit up for money for this thing thought they were patronizing -  it is a simultaneous ode to Christ, sea creatures, and the agricultural glories of Spain (to which I would myself erect a staggering monument - where else can you find cherries for two euro a kilo?).

Given its enormous size, it was somewhat difficult to fit the whole thing into one photo frame. I tried, backing away as far as possible and trying not to fall into the curiously large and curiously green and scummy pond behind me, but it was a lost cause. Instead I took several dozen pictures of the Nativity façade, little knowing that they would lead to innumerable future headaches as I tried to piece them all together. Oh, if I had only known then what I know now! But I succeeded in the end: behold my triumphant victory over Photoshop and the interminable mockery of my peers.

This behemoth has been under construction since 1882 and is allegedly going to be finished in 2026, but I don't believe them for a second. Why settle for a mere hundred-and-forty-four years when you could go for a solid hundred-and-fifty? There is glory in round numbers, after all.

There were about that many people in line to get in, so while we waited, I amused myself by taking pictures of some of the elaborately detailed metal doors, which are on the Passion façade, the side of the church featured in the first picture. I love all of the details included here, and the myriad ways in which the metal was molded: there are embossings, engravings, impressions, and many more technical terms that I don't know for making copper look cool. It really just looks like someone took a sheet of copper and went wild pressing the contents of a fleamarket into it. The Que es la veritat? door is my favorite.

I would argue that the inside of the cathedral, as bare of a construction scene it may be, is even more impressive than the outside. Even though it's even more of a construction site than the exterior, the huge, vaulted ceilings, towering columns, and echoing spaces of the nave are the manmade, indoor equivalent to being on top of a mountain looking over hundreds of miles of open air. I felt like a sacreligious ant.

Only two of the gargantuan - I am running out of synonyms for 'big' - stained glass windows are complete, but there are many, many windows waiting to be filled in. Once they're finished, standing in the nave is going to be like swimming in a rainbow, every conceivable color of light setting the entire space aglow. In the upper righthand picture below, you can see a window work-in-progress, which is what most of them look like.

It's actually quite a short walk through the inside of the cathedral, since most of it is filled with heavy duty construction equipment and is cordoned-off with aluminum fencing. Unsurprisingly, the vaulted ceilings are quite good at amplifying the whirring sounds of drills, although the dulcet sounds of sledgehammers did not quite approach the majesty of organ music and angelic trumpets.

Once we emerged from the light of God into the light of day, it was back to another queue, this time for the lift to take us all the way to the top of one of the turrets. A staggering amount of architectural detail was visible in the alcove where we waited: rows upon rows of lacy stone trim; tiny, twining flowers; elaborately wrought Gothic script. Stone demons and nefarious toads crawled along the bottom of the arches, while an unnamed bishop stood above us writing his Christmas list ('Item one: nefarious toad repellant. Item two: socks for mother. Item three: more construction workers.' I feel like priests placidly limit themselves to three things in the interest of piety.)

The view from the top of the stairs was well worth the two euros we paid for the elevator. I do not begrudge them this money, as I want to see this building finished in my lifetime and every ripped-off tourist helps.) I took many, many pictures, including these, shot while leaning against what I think was a pineapple stuffed with turtledoves. That thing that looks like a field of grass, that is liquid seaweed.

Barcelona, Tapas: Cerveseria Catalana

After having the best seafood of my life for dinner the previous night, and then exhausting myself visiting every building Gaudi even breathed on, I was ready for the best tapas Barcelona had to offer. So the Czar and I set out for Cerveseria Catalana - which translates as Catalanian Brewery - and were met with an enormous crowd of people spilling out from the entrance, holding wine glasses and waiting for a seat at the bar. We very cleverly scouted out a couple about to leave, and dove for their seats as soon as they took their last sip of wine, settling ourselves in for a long dinner spent sampling all of the culinary curiosities set out before us.

A little bit of history: The word tapas derives from the Spanish tapar, to cover, and, as with many good things, owes its birth to alcohol. The tradition originates in the Spanish bars of old, where tapas started out as slices of bread or meat used to cover patrons' glasses between sips, to prevent fruit flies from swarming around the sweet wine. Eventually tasty morsels - olives, tomatoes, octopus tentacles - meandered their way onto the slices of bread, and tapas blossomed into a full-fledged cuisine.

There are a lot of different ways to enjoy tapas - sitting around a table with all the dishes on the table at once, paying by the toothpick at a bar - but in this particular instance, we happened to be seated at a bar, and indicated to the bartender what we'd like delivered to us. After having tried the self-selecting toothpick method on another occasion, I can say I prefer this one - it leads to a slower, more languorously enjoyed meal.

The first thing we tried was the Sputnik, to commemorate Mother Russia: a baguette with tuna, roasted red peppers, egg, and some kind of delightful sauce.

Then, a mad array of dishes appeared: to the left, battered calamari; above, four cheeses piled high and melted on toasted bread; and to the right, mediocre patatas bravas.

Easily the highlight of the evening was the finale - we weren't sure what the hell it was when we ordered it; all I knew was that it looked good and had toasted almonds on the outside, always a winner - which turned out to be goat's cheese, melted to perfection and coated with toasted almonds and a drizzle of jam. We ordered seconds.

The evening would have ended with literal fountains of light and joy had the Font Màgica - literally, the magical fountain - on the former Olympic grounds not been closed at an hour when it should have been open, probably because the people who turn on the switches were on strike for not being paid enough to turn on the switches. (Strikes happen a lot in Spain: I am told that sometimes flights are delayed for four hours, and then once you're on the plane, sometimes they are delayed for another hour that you spend flying around the Mediterranean waiting for enough workers to return to operate the towers, and then once you've landed sometimes it takes you three hours to get from the airport to the city because the train workers are also on strike. I love me some unions.)

Instead, the Czar and I met up with two of his friends - hailing from Germany and the Philippines, respectively, quite international, these Spanish students - in a tavern in Barrì Gotic and drowned our disappointment in a bottle (or two) of leche de pantera.

Edging our way past the cramped and crowded little bar, we sat down at a stained wooden table, amidst a cloud of cigarette smoke, and the Czar soon returned with an unmarked bottle of what looked like milk - and a shaker of cinnamon, to be dusted on top of the poured drinks. At the time, I had no idea what was in it, and the bartender wouldn't reveal the recipe, but later I learned that leche de pantera was devised by some clever Andalusian legionnaires by mixing condensed milk with any kind of high-octane alcohol. Never underestimate the genius of Spanish soldiers. That night we only had the original kind, but apparently it comes in green, blue, and pink as well. Not sure I want to know from what animal that milk comes from...

Doro paused to roll a cigarette before we disappeared into the sweltering night - the kind where even the cobblestones start sweating in sympathy - and this photograph makes me wish that we had places like this in the States. And that I could legally frequent them.

Barcelona, Interlude: La Boqueria

I am a liar, and have not posted for the past two days, but I realized in the course of sorting through my camera that of the nauseating number of photographs I took (683), well over two hundred are of various Gaudi structures. Thus I think my shock-induced hiatus can be excused, and also my cousin came to visit, and, well, so I've been a little stressed.

When I find myself in times of trouble, Father Joseph comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be... Oh, so that's not how the song goes? Had Paul McCartney visited Barcelona before writing that song, I think he would have sung a Spanish tune:

Bad one-in-the-morning induced puns aside, La Boqueria was my favorite place to visit in Barcelona, narrowly edging out Barri Gotic's mojito bar, and conveniently located five minutes' walk from the Winter Palace (this name is ironic in the extreme, since the Czar's apartment was about a million degrees too hot - I slept with my mattress wedged in the doorway to the balcony, desperately hoping for a wayward breeze). We stopped by there every day, usually after a croissant and un café con leche, to feast our eyes and gorge ourselves on fresh fruit.

This is what the average stand looked like - dozens upon dozens of fruits piled high, rendered all the more exotic by their Spanish names. The variety here makes the Asian market by my house look like small fry - try finding fresh cactus flower there! Or this many fresh papaya, or dragon fruit, or...



No matter how exotic, produce here was so unbelievably cheap it made me want to cry tears of joy. It's about sixty cents for two mangoes and two plums - versus upwards of three euro for one mango in Vienna. Suffice it to say that my wallet was not happy to return to the Naschmarkt produce aisles.

The most colorful stands in the market were easily the fruit stands selling freshly pressed smoothies - every imaginable combination was there for the drinking, including some unexpected ones (cactus fruit, for one, but also coconut and blackberry seems oddly exotic). I loved it when the actual fruits were shown above the placards, but that didn't make it any easier to decide on a flavor.

Those forks sticking up at the bottom of the picture were wedged into plastic containers containing freshly-cut fruit, or else stabbed into a watermelon slice or half a pineapple, that you could buy for about a Euro - yum!

Of course, there were plenty of less healthy things for sale... like the produce stands' vitamin-deficient, sugar-loaded counterparts. Just as much color, a hundred times more tooth decay. I love how the fried eggs and the foot-long gummy snakes look.

Also on display, mysterious jars of brightly colored things that look like punch. I wish I'd sampled some just so I'd know what they are - I think they're some kind of heavily candied fruit in syrup, but I'm not sure.

The center of the market is devoted to seafood, of which there is an incredible selection, given Barcelona's location on the coast. Note the fresh octopus! I wish I could have bought a freezer's worth of these little guys and taken them back to Vienna with me. I grow weary of smoked salmon, and am not yet brave enough to debone an entire zander by myself, in my tiny kitchen, without a fish knife and an extensive first aid kid handy. But I could totally cook an eight-legged kraken - I have visions of tentacles wriggling out from beneath the cover of a pot. Someday!

(I am perhaps too fond of fish.)

Barcelona, Dia Uno: La Fonda, la playa, y mas demasiado vino

I do not even know where to begin. I spent five incredible, beautiful days in Barcelona, and I have so much to write about that it's impossible to do the city any kind of justice. But I will struggle on, and I figure if I'm really boring for the next few days in Vienna I should be able to manage. So check back often! I will try to post every day for the next week.

I could barely sleep the night before my ridiculously early flight, which was good considering how ridiculously early I had to wake up (the U-bahn wasn't even running). I had an entire row on the plane to myself, though - there were eight people on the entire flight - so it was all right, and I quickly got wrapped up in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, hardly an inoffensive tome of Canadian literature (though I didn't like the ending). Reading became increasingly difficult as we flew over the Mediterranean, because I kept looking out of the window obsessively for my first sight of the Spanish coastline. When it finally came into view, all I could hear was someone faintly saying, in whispered tones of shock and awe, "I'm going to Barcelona," before the blood came rushing back to my head and I realized that I was talking to myself like a fool. This experience was to be repeated several times.

My host in Barcelona was the Czar, so-called for the shirt he chose to wear when he picked me up at the airport, who proved all too amenable to visiting all of the places I had scrawled onto a very long list. After dropping off my bag at his apartment, we sauntered down the long, wide street that comprises La Rambla, infested with men hawking strange bird-call whistles, cheap kebab joints, and tourists. Oh, and bats.

Welcome to España! Quite a change from having a brocaded and bewigged Mozart invite me to a concert.

On La Rambla, my first stop was La Boqueria, the jaw-dropping, beautiful, awe-inspiring, sprawling, delicious market to which I will devote an entire post. After drooling over the dizzying kaleidescope of fruits and vegetables and dried nuts and juices and oh!, it was off to La Fonda, the best seafood restaurant in Barcelona and thus, the world. I defy you to argue with this:

La Tasca, eat your heart out: this is authentic, stuck-to-the-sides-of-the-pan seafood paella, the most famous of Spanish rice dishes, with lots of formerly crawling critters on top. Between the two of us, the Czar and I ate the entire pan. I don't think I can try paella anywhere else ever again; it simply can't top this experience.

Clockwise from upper left: Our waiter was like our own personal Dali - he poured us shots of orujo de hiervas (and even spelled it out on a piece of paper for me), the bright yellow drink I am holding in front of my eyes like goggles in the second picture, and which he called it the national drink of Spain. The Czar is pleased with the day's catch, and I am ODing on crema catalana, similar to crême brulée, and some kind of delightful chocolate something that was delightful and chocolatey. I was too catatonic after the seafood to remember what it was called.

Afterwards, it was off to the beach with a two-euro bottle of wine to aid with our digestion. This is the view from the stone steps bordering Barceloneta - those boys in the sand on the left were quite entertaining, and were, in addition to the near-toxic level of food in our system, the reason it took us a few hours to budge from the seaside.

Tomorrow: gawdy Gaudi, tasty tapas, and lucious leche de pantera. Also, alliteration.

Laa an der Thaya

I'm back in the city now, having spent the weekend biking the countryside surrounding Laa an der Thaya, which is seriously the name of a town. In fact, there are quite a few places around Vienna with the word "Laa" in it, but I'm not sure what the significance is, if any. Another funny one to look out for is Unterstinkenbrunn - which literally translates to "the bottom of a stinking well" and is lovingly referred to as "Stinky" by the locals. They recently paid €50,000 for a plastic statue of an onion. There is also an Oberstinkenbrunn, which is, you guessed it, the top of a stinking well.

My family lives about an hour and a half north of Vienna, in the area tucked into the elbow of the Czech Republic known as Niederösterreich. It's all fields and mountains and  forest (in German, der Wald, which I think is much more evocative), with so much open space and sky that it takes my breath away. The roads are all lined with picturesque poppies, wildflowers, thistles, and every kilometer or so a small roadside shrine, crumbling and covered in moss. One of my favorite pastimes is stealing glossy red cherries from the low-hanging boughs - which, unlike Roman pears, come without a forty-year guilt contingency.

In sum, the countryside makes even bad days look good, as Klimt will have you know:

Die Große Pappel oder Aufziehendes Gewitter | The Large Poplar or the Approaching Storm, 1903

Though I didn't bring a camera along for this weekend's cycling, the last weekend that my parents were here I was compelled to take a lot of pictures through the window of our moving car. (You are spared my Pulitzer entries in the street sign category.)


I actually used to play amidst the ruins in the middle picture when I was younger, since it's located right above my older cousin's house (which is my favorite house in the entire world - it has a garden roof, bamboo flooring, a million solar panels, and everything is laid out according to Feng Shui). The buildings in the lower left picture are wine cellars, of which just about every family has at least one. They're the sites for Heuriger, which are weeks-long events where you can sample the tavern's young wines, various beers, delicious traubensaft (grape juice, but as you have never tasted before), and assorted Austrian dinner fare - delicious breads and tons of spreads, many of which include meat. I'll be going to one in the Wienerwald in the coming weeks, so I'll devote a post exclusively to that visit.