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.