Christmas and vegetables

As for probably many others, this last week involved family, festivities, and too much food. I do like Christmas in my home town. For starters, Admont is a pretty safe bet for a true Alpine winter-wonderland. I remember two, perhaps three, green Christmases there in my lifetime. Secondly, Admont is very far away from rampant Christmas consumerism and, in that sense, Christmas there is very un-tainted and honest. Granted, I usually arrive on the 22nd or 23rd, missing most of Advent, but what I see is: Christmas lights on the main street, modest decorations on houses and in shop windows, and, sure, a selection of festive products in the stores, but the true consumerist madness seems to be happily outsourced to larger towns. And last but not least, there are all the childhood memories, down to the smell of the beeswax candles on the equally aromatic (real) tree, the crunch of the snow and the sound of the church bells.

This year, it was still technically a white Christmas, but in all honesty, the weather sucked. There was a fair amount of snow on the ground, but by when we arrived, a continuing weak rain was doing its best to wear it down. Slush Christmas. Other than that, everything was very nice. The celebrating crowd at my father's house was a rather unusual arrangement of old family and new partners that was ill-suited for overly high expectations of family idyll, but worked very well. That said, the elements of the Christmas Eve celebration were still the same I knew from my childhood and teenage years: a meat fondue (not at all a traditional Austrian Christmas dinner, but a wonderful way to draw out a meal: slower eating and plenty of time for conversation), a Christmas tree with the same straw ornaments from 20 years ago, the same song, exchange of gifts, lots of wine, and conversation until 1 am. And since for musicians, Christmas also means work, at 8 am the next morning, all six of us stood and sat, well-caffeinated and combat-ready, up on the organ loft of the abbey church: three of us in the orchestra, two of us in the choir, and one of us conducting the whole thing. The days after Christmas, of course, continued to involve lots of food and talking, more travel to visit my grandparents, and more food and talking there, as well.

It was a very nice time, but when we returned to Vienna, Steve and I were tired, and severely craving vegetables. Mind you, this Christmas was very kind when it comes to over-eating: nobody took on the role of a "mother hen", whose primary worry at any given hour is that someone might be starving to death on Christmas day. There was not much candy around, and everybody was happy with a rather modest lunch or supper to compensate for a big festive meal the same day. The portion sizes at every meal screamed "Welcome back to Europe": I would look skeptically at the small-looking portion of scalding hot food on the warm serving platter, wondering how that would feed 6, and then, in the end, find that it was plenty, and, moreover, I would not spend the next three hours in a food coma and nobody would be eating leftovers for three days. My mother's Christmas cookies are delicious, and somehow also the most healthy and nutritionally wholesome Christmas cookies one could ever hope for: they consist of ingredients such as buckwheat, oats, spelt flour, honey, and an impressive variety of grated nuts and dried fruits, and are very low on sugar coatings, frostings, cream fillings and the like. On the other side of the equation, we all like to go for walks (even though the slush put a little bit of a damper on that). But even with all those alleviating circumstances, it remains that the festive diet consisted mostly of meat, starches, bread, sweets and wine. The moment we boarded the train to Vienna from my grandparents' town, Steve and I were on a quest to consume a healthy dose of vegetables.

It proved surprisingly difficult. The only vegetable dish on the train's dining car menu was a vegetable curry, which Steve ordered, and I stupidly did not, too suspicious about whether curry in a dining car could be any good. (It turned out perfectly fine for a vegetable craving!) Foraging for dinner later in Vienna, we ended up at one of the pan-Asian places on Naschmarkt. The name rang some sort of positive bell with me and it looked a level or two up from your ordinary "Lotus Asia Kitchen", so we had high hopes. We ordered a green Thai Curry and a pan-fried fish "with vegetables". What arrived wasn't bad, as such, but definitely very adapted to the Austrian palate - which, to sum it up, is very meat and starch-heavy, very salty, and tangy, but shies away from anything that makes an honest appearance on the Scoville scale. The curry was too mild to be Thai and not sweet enough to be American Thai, and the fish was covered in a carrot-y sauce that reminded me of several hearty Austrian dishes involving cooked root vegetables. We had a serious introspective conversation about whether our idea of the various Asian cuisines experienced on the American West Coast was "authentic" enough to judge the authenticity of the food we were eating, and concluded, most likely, yes. (Plus, both of us have been to China.) Steve also concluded that Austrianized pan-Asian food was better than Dutchified pan-Asian food and insisted I put that on the record. Most importantly, though, we ended up fighting over the vegetables, which were clearly nowhere near the center of attention in the preparation of the food. It took getting back to home cooking to get that vegetable fix.

Thinking about this a little more, and scratching my head ("How come I never thought about this before?"), I remembered one of last month's orchestra outings, in which the group had reserved a room in a restaurant and settled for a limited menu that included exactly NO vegetarian option. Upon complaint, spinach dumplings with a creamy sauce were offered. From all I can see, vegetarians might be ok here, if they are willing to consume lots of cheese and cream, but it must be a tough country for a vegan. However, I also have a vague recollection of supermarkets overflowing with fruits and vegetables around the other solstice and half the country going into an asparagus craze somewhere around equinox. So, the jury is still out. This meat-and-starch thing might just be part of "the season".

Season's greetings

Here we are, suddenly it is "the season". I've already seen several days of snowfall (followed by today's rain), and just as I have spent most of my money and nerves buying winter clothes, I am finding myself spending more money and nerves shopping for Christmas gifts. At least I won't be sending them overseas, so I am not having to consider size, weight, customs restrictions and shipping fees, which makes things easier.

The Viennese Christmas markets have produced even more offshoots on the various squares and plazas of Vienna than I remember from 6 years ago, and the smell of various spiced, sweet, hot alcoholic beverages is joining the usual olfactory background of wet streets, car exhaust, döner kebab and cigarets. I am currently going through a non-photography phase (yeah, that happens), and even if I wasn't, it would be hard taking pictures at those Christmas markets, especially since I tend to not see them in daylight. I'd get something like two unknown people's faces (probably with one of them in the process of taking a bite of something) three more people's backs, some snow flakes or steam reflecting my flash, and perhaps a chain of lights in the otherwise black background. So, here's something off the interwebs instead:

 Image credit: MAGMAG Events & Promotion GmbH, from here.

Glühwein, Feuerzangenbowle, Glühmost etc. can be a very nice thing to have on a cold day. However, I remember Viennese Christmas seasons as month-and-a-half long merciless strings of social Punsch/Glühwein events during which I would get more and more disgusted and fed up with the stuff. There was no way out, unless I stopped attending social events. Even when I pulled the emergency brake and stopped drinking it sometime in mid-December, I could still get very fed up with the smell. My years in Tucson were a welcome break from it. First, you have to wait for the weather to get cold enough to warrant making hot drinks (and then there is stiff competition from hot chocolate), second, to the best of my knowledge, there were two people aside from myself who would make it (a German friend and an Australian friend, go figure…), and third, even if it were a popular drink, it couldn't legally be sold and consumed on every street corner. Two or three Punsch/Glühwein events per Christmas season with American moderation on the amount of alcohol consumed turned out just right for me. Of course, this year, my Punsch/Glühwein consumption has ramped up a little, but so far, things are under control. I presume some combination of no longer being a student and still being "new in town" is my saving grace.

But back to the seasons - what is mind-blowing to me is how fast they have changed. In absolutely no time, beautiful fall has turned into real winter - just yesterday, it seems, that tree in front of my office still had leaves on it! Sounds like a trite platitude about how time moves on oh so quickly, and I wouldn't be writing about it in my blog, if I didn't remember the exact opposite feeling from my first months in Tucson. I arrived on July 27, 2007, it was sunny and hot, and it was monsoon season - I distinctly remember the creosote smell in the air, and how I was wondering what on earth that was. Even though, of course, people immediately taught me about it, monsoon didn't mean anything to me. You have to live through the rainless Tucson spring and early summer to understand. The thunderstorms were neat and sometimes spectacular, but the Alps have pretty impressive convective summer thunderstorms, too, and rain as such wasn't anything special to me yet. The change of season from monsoon to fall didn't register a whole lot with me either, partly because I had not yet developed much sensitivity to the high temperature ranges. To me, there was no real difference between the low 90's or the mid-100's, and besides, I did not have my mind wrapped around the Fahrenheit scale yet, so the numbers made no intuitive sense anyway. As far as I was concerned, it was sunny and hot every day, and that meant it was "summer". So, from July to November 2007, it felt like time was not moving at all.

Only over the course of a couple years did I calibrate to the comparatively subtle seasonal changes in Tucson: The winter low desert hiking season and the gorgeous sight of the occasional snow in the Catalinas. The running streams and fields of golden poppy in spring. The dreadful June cooped up in air-conditioned buildings watching the news on wildfires, with the occasional escape to Mt. Lemmon or Mt. Graham. And, of course, monsoon: the slow buildup of clouds, the first time it's humid enough to smell the creosote, and eventually the first rain, drawing me and my neighbors, who I would never see otherwise, out of our suburban dwellings onto the streets, watching the miracle of water falling from the sky. Then the flooding streets, the lower temperatures, plants that had looked half-dead growing leaves, the slopes of the mountains turning green. And the gorgeous sunsets produced by the clouds.

When describing the excitement of Tucsonans about monsoon to Austrians, I used to say that it was like getting excited about the first snow. It probably helped conveying it, but I am not so sure it's doing it justice. Yes, people were commenting on the first snowfall this year, and the second. (The first was a freak one in October, a week after my arrival.) But the talk about beautifully "sugar-dusted" houses and hills, Christmas mood and soon-to-open ski lifts is not comparable to the level of excitement and dominance in conversations that accompanies the first monsoon storms. And one thing is completely missing from the "first snow" talk: the enormous sense of relief. Snow is a welcome and exciting thing (with some downsides, mostly related to traffic, but that's the same with the monsoon), but in the end, people feel more or less entitled to it. Monsoon rainfall is viewed as a gracious gift.

Culture shock?

Apparently there are people out there who never get culture shock. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. And really, I don't  know how people operate who say they never get it. It seems like the most logical thing: a couple months in, you realize that you've lost your past life, you've become sore with the constant abrasion between the cultural norms you are routinely operating on and the ones you're confronted with, and you've run out of steam, because in spite of all the energy and effort spent trying to get settled, you are not (yet).

I had culture shock (or re-entry shock, but that's really the same cake with a slightly different frosting on it) after every move overseas, and in retrospect, I know that after my first move away from home, from Admont to Vienna, I had it, too. When I arrived in Seattle, I was warned and prepared by the nice people from the University of Washington's "Foundation for International Understanding through Students". Culture shock arrived, I dealt with it by seeking out stores that sold German/Austrian food, my mom sent me Austrian newspapers and a few of her watercolors (which made me cry like a baby), I was missing home, but I wouldn't actually have wanted to go there, because I loved Seattle. I waited it out, felt good again after a month or two, and went back to Austria a few months after that. Where, after another couple months, I had re-entry shock, which sucked. It's one thing feeling disoriented in a new culture, it's another to feel at odds with your home country. But there it was. I went to Starbucks a whole lot, dressed like an American college student, and listened to KEXP online. I waited it out and things were good again. I went to Tucson a couple years later, in July of 2007. I went through a pretty rough time the following January, and it took a little while to come to grips with Tucson, but eventually I settled into years of normal life, with all its ups and downs. Big ups and downs, mind you, but part of normal life. Actually, I just realized that the only place I lived in continuously for longer than in Tucson is Admont.

So, "going home again" this time, I was dreading getting hit by culture shock in a cold, dark winter, with no Steve around to cheer me up. I tried to heed some people's advice to not expect it too much, to avoid a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I still prepared: before I left Tucson, I made sure I had a supply of ground dried chiles from Native Seeds, I moved my 1702 pint glass as a high priority item, and I bought those cowboy boots at "How Sweet it Was" on 4th avenue not just to show off.  As with the last return to Vienna, I am amazed at how easy it is to get re-oriented here, shopping inconvenience and orchestra heartache notwithstanding. Just last week, I was swayed into contemplating that maybe, this time, I am getting away with it, that maybe, I have become a cosmopolitan who can just move and feel at home anywhere on the planet. Or, failing that, someone who has gotten sufficiently familiar with the cultural differences between the Western US and Austria to be able to move specifically between those two places without too many issues. Or that maybe I've grown out of it, now that I am on the other side of 30.

But now I am not so sure anymore that I am getting away with anything. Since a couple of days, I feel sore and sad, my energy is low and there's also a dash of negative outlook in the emotional mix. I am a little fed up with yet again trying to get a foothold in this city that's obsessed with the past and happens to also be full of my personal past. All I want to do right now is go back to Tucson to hang out and play a boardgame with my old friends, ride my old bike, talk to my old boss, stop in for a chat with Dr. B, go to Trader Joe's to buy my food, go to SASO rehearsal and have some ridiculously intense stout at 1702 afterwards, dig through a thrift store for dirt-cheap black concert shoes (there's no such thing as cheap shoes in this country), and plan a camping trip with Steve somewhere in the desert for the weekend. I want to get back to what I have known to be business as usual in the last few years. The "dash of negative outlook" comes from the fact that I know I won't be able to do just that ever again - because even if I went back to Tucson as soon as possible (even under most conducive circumstances, that could not happen until years from now), it would not be the same thing anymore, it would be another new life to get used to. There are also some irrational things that are puzzling to me even while they happen. Ridiculous small things can make me cry. Life seems bad even though everything is going well. It suddenly becomes important for me to drink my beer from the 1702 glass, my cowboy boots somehow make my walk through the day a little easier, and the chicken fajitas I cooked using some of the ground chile from Native Seeds mean a little more than "finally some spicy food". All of it sounds suspiciously like culture shock. It seems a little early to me, though, it's only been 6 weeks. Maybe I am just in a bad mood because many Viennese routinely are, but I would absolutely hate to think that it's that contagious. Perhaps I can parse how much of this is darkness-related by getting my hands on some vitamin D supplement…

Politics and my friend Maria

I got to know my friend Maria way back when we were both 18. We were paired up in a dorm room as freshmen. We became friends in the very uncomplicated way 18-year-olds become friends when they share a dorm room: we bonded over figuring out life away from home, good or bad grades, and late-night phonecalls to our respective long-distance boyfriends. Throughout our student years and beyond, we met for coffee, movies, walks and meals, invited each other to our various parties, took a climbing class together, and eventually we even stopped introducing each other as “my former dorm roommate” (so much for the European definition of “friend” vs. the American one). We stayed in touch through my years in the US, not particularly frequently, but we also did not feel the need to contact each other every week. Whenever we met, no matter how long it had been, we had great chats and it largely felt like no time had passed.

A week ago on Sunday, Maria and I went for a long walk along the Donaukanal, followed by some delicious tea and cake at a trendy café by the riverbank. The Donaukanal was beautiful in its urban way, sporting some last fall colors along with the usual colorful graffiti. And my amazement with this much flowing water has not worn off yet. The tea was also impressive, as it was not your odd tea bag, no, it was a bundle of fresh herbs to be drowned in the hot water. Never seen that before.

For Maria and me, it was the first time in years that we hung out together without it being the “OMG, we haven’t talked for AGES, what’s going on in your life”?-kind. When you become friends at age 18, you cannot easily guess whether you’ll still have anything in common at age 31, especially when you embark on very different careers, and spend years apart in different corners of the world. But we still get along wonderfully. I almost forgot how much I enjoy talking politics with her. This time, we re-bonded over something that we now have in common: We are both 31, unmarried and childless (but in LTR's), on relatively ambitious career tracks and have, at some point in the last few years, veered off a path many Austrian women take: sacrificing their careers for raising children.

I know I am venturing into emotional territory here (“What’s wrong with prioritizing your children?”), so I want to emphasize that I am not talking about a couple making a well-planned and conscious decision to temporarily dial back the career of one or both partners to make space for the family. I am talking about a large group of educated, highly trained mothers sliding into a traditional housewife role through a string of small, voluntary steps, subtly guided by a complex interplay of social norms and the welfare system, and jeopardizing their own future economic base in the process. I am a scientist, so without any further dangerous navigation through risky verbiage, here’s some stats (all data from Statistik Austria, for the years 2010 or 2011):

87.3% of women with children under 8 interrupted their employment when the youngest child was born, compared to 6.4% of men. Fair enough, someone has to give birth after all. But, of those 87.3%, only 13% interrupted their employment for less than a year, and only 5.6% for less than 6 months. 70.7% of women with children under 3 are not employed. Of women with children under 15, 64.7% are employed - compared to 93% of men. Of those 64.7%, 43.4% are working part time (cf. 4 % of the men). That means, only 36.6% of women with children under 15 are working full-time. Of the employed men with children under 15, 78% state that their partner is taking care of the children during work time, for the employed women with children under 15, that same rate is 30%. A few circumstantial facts: 56% of all university degrees and 43.5% of all doctorates are earned by women. The “unexplained gender pay gap” is about 18% (it’s around 25% if you include the “explained” parts, such as the split into the different kinds of jobs women and men tend to work). The divorce rate (the probability that current marriages will end that year) is around 43%. Single (or divorced) women with children are among the groups with the highest risk of poverty. Retirement pensions (a part of the social welfare system here) for women hover around half of those for men, largely due to the gender pay gap and time spent outside of the workforce while raising children.

Ignoring any big-picture economic viewpoint, one might ask: if the career interruption opted for by many women is voluntary, what is the problem? You cannot judge people for how they choose to organize their lives. But, well, “voluntary” is an interesting concept. If you feel “strongly compelled” or “morally obligated” to do something, or simply “can’t see another way to make it work”, how voluntary is it? A last tidbit from Statistik Austria: the most common complaint of those part-time working women with children under 15 is that they cannot find childcare that would allow them to work more hours.

On our long walk, Maria and I chewed through quite a few of the many factors that come together to produce statistics like this and the question of the “voluntariness” of it all. Perhaps a couple things are worth mentioning: One is that there is a long-standing notion that young children should be spending 100% of their time with their mothers (nevermind the fathers, they usually don’t even enter statements like “It’s not good for a 6-month old to be taken away from their mother and handed to a stranger!”). Another is that there is an equally long-standing notion that “combining children and career is difficult”, usually formulated as uniquely female problem (men are fine, men with children are responsible fathers of families.) Both together strongly transport the message that as a woman, you have to make a choice between family (and in particular, being a "good mother") and a career. Also, men are automatically assumed to be ambitious and career-focused, while women are automatically assumed to be quiet and family-focused. Needless to say, the automatic assumptions of your social surroundings go a long way when you’re a kid or young adult looking for guidance. The way the social welfare system is currently set up, women are pretty much told that “what you do” is: you take between one and three years off for each child. The government will give you money for up to three years, and technically, you are still entitled to your job after two. Partly as a consequence, a vicious supply-demand cycle makes daycare for children under 3 a pain and a half to find. Just for good measure, Kindergarten for kids over 3, and primary school traditionally only do half days. And last but not least, in a society that is generally slow and often reluctant in changing its ways, men and women slip into traditional gender roles in their relationships as a matter of course. The mother staying at home with the children for several years, during which she is (understandably) responsible for the entire household, cements those roles and sets the example for the next generation. I could dig up more statistics on things like how the housework is split, but I’ll save you another paragraph full of percentages.

Why do we care, Maria and I? Of course it’s a classic “cause” you can care about. But I think we care on a more personal level, too. First, people like me and her and our partners can wind up competing with men with housewives in professional life. Once people like us start a family, on the basis of sharing the many duties, joys and chores of life evenly, we have to face the truth that nobody in such a partnership can put quite as much time and energy into their work as a man with a housewife (or a woman with a house-husband, of course, but we can all take a good educated guess about the percentage of that among Austrian couples with children under 15). I am not trying to blanket-accuse all men with housewives of not caring about spending time with their family. It just feels like they have a “secret superpower” that allows them to rarely ever have to worry about things like getting off work early enough to pick up the children from somewhere or what to make for dinner. (It reminds me of a certain incident of playing an area-control boardgame with a couple and a few other people: the man in the couple won the game by a large margin, essentially because the woman protected him and did not care to win herself. The rest of us were in an unfair disadvantage and the game was frustrating.) Another reason we care is because how couples our age share the family duties impacts how society views us and what people expect of us. Maria and I are both lucky to be in good job situations right now, but for many women in their 30s seeking a job in Austria, there are issues around employers’ implicit expectations of them taking years off and/or being less dedicated of a worker than a man for reasons to do with raising children.

If you have followed me through here, thank you. Maria suggested I split the entry in two parts, because it’s too long, and I agree in principle. It would have left me with one entry entirely about Maria, and another entirely about politics. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the former would have left me feeling strongly compelled to (completely voluntarily) write similar entries about all my dear friends here, and all my dear friends there, and that just might not be compatible with a career in my day job…

Rehearsalmania

So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how much I missed the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra. I still do. A lot. But things have improved in as much as I am not completely numbed by it anymore. I am enjoying playing, and I am not contemplating putting the viola into a corner anymore.

I did end up joining that second group that had contacted me, and it was a good thing I did, even though this means I am seriously swamped with rehearsals now. One reason: Their upcoming concert is in this hall:

Looks familiar? No? Well, if it doesn’t, that may be because usually when people see it, it’s on TV, stuffed with people in fancy outfits, decorated with flowers, it’s January 1, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra are playing the Radetzkymarsch. I wasn’t aware amateur orchestras even got to play in Musikverein until a few months ago. So, needless to say, playing my first concert in Vienna in Grosser Musikvereinssaal is pretty glorious and I am very much looking forward to it.

But I am pretty happy about playing with this new group for other reasons, too. They are in good shape. (They wouldn’t be playing in a sold-out Musikvereinssaal otherwise.) They are mixed in terms of age and background (the orchestra I joined a few weeks ago is mostly students) and they have only around 15 rehearsals per concert. Three months ago, 15 rehearsals would have sounded pretty close to unacceptable to me, but I have to adapt my expectations to the local custom (25+ rehersals per concert seems to happen, too).

Part of the local custom is to spend all this rehearsal time meticulously polishing every detail. As a violist, this inevitably entails spending significant amounts of time listening to violins rehearsing. But don't get me wrong, I am really enjoying the progress: sound, phrasing, rhythmical accuracy, fine-tuning chords… I have not yet seen much time wasted (which is something that can happen with too many rehearsals). I am re-learning the balance of following the principal while standing on my own stable feet and I am enjoying the feeling of blending into a section in terms of sound quality, dynamics, and intonation. I am also enjoying the fact that nothing gets glossed over: if it’s out of tune, I will get tuned. If it’s early or late, we will do it again until it’s on time. If it rushes, we are told off. If it doesn’t sound like it should, it will get fixed. There is very little “getting away with things”.

I remember this meticulous detail work from my student days in Vienna, but haven’t experienced it all that much in the last few years. I was leading a section in an orchestra in which the philosophy was more along the lines of: “Here’s this awesome, incredibly challenging program, this is the compressed rehearsal schedule, now let’s make a mad dash for it”. With around 6 rehearsals per concert, you spend much rehearsal time in “survival mode”. You know that you have this and perhaps 5 more chances to figure your entrances out, and nobody will go over it slowly 10 times until it works. Perhaps it is the reason my fellow American amateur musicians strike me as confident, terrific sight-readers, bold to the point of recklessness, and (sometimes a little too) carefree. In contrast, rehearsing things over and over will deliver a more polished, higher quality product, teach people about good playing and being sensitive to musical subtleties – but perhaps it also makes people a little more insecure and overly cautious? I will have to re-visit this idea in a few months, or perhaps, years...  

Anyway, even with good work being done, the many rehearsals sweating over every detail feel a little much for me right now. (Along with everything feeling sharp - I spent the last 5 years tuning to A440 and everybody here is doing at least 443.) But yesterday, I had this conversation with one of the musicians here, which, I think, neatly hits the nail on the head why they do it this way. I told him that in SASO we did Shostakovich 5 in 6 rehearsals, and even as I said it, I realized how utterly “devil-may-care” it sounded to him. “The Vienna Symphonic Orchestra may be able to do that”, he commented, laughing and shaking his head. My answer was equally fast: “In Tucson, there is no Vienna Symphonic Orchestra.”

Thanksgiving

Perhaps a good indicator of how "at home" you are in a culture is how much you care about its festivities. Thanksgiving is probably the most American festivity I know. It has not been imported into this country in any way. Which is too bad, in some ways, because isn’t “being grateful for what we have” a pretty important concept in a time where many of us live in (what most people in the history of mankind would view as) unashamed luxury, yet the commercial infotainment around us constantly suggests further unmet desires and needs? Trick-or-treating rode across the Atlantic on a wave of commercials and media, and so did Valentine’s day and the figure of Santa Claus, but Thanksgiving is conspicuously absent. Most Austrians are only very dimly aware of it, and certainly have no concept of its importance in the US.

Consequently, when I first moved to the US, I was very much an indifferent observer. I got invited to something like three Thanksgiving dinners in Seattle, all by nice people who were eager to show us international students what the day was all about. I felt honored to be invited, and clearly it was an important part of learning about American culture, but on a personal level, I would have been just as happy goofing off by myself that day.

Some things about these Thanksgiving dinners struck me as confusing. In particular, the part where everyone walks off after the meal and watches TV: you got your entire extended family together just to watch TV? TV and family gatherings don't go together very well in at least this Austrian's mind. And wouldn’t it be a much nicer prolonged meal if it was served in several courses, instead of one big pile of everything? Another thing I found strange about Thanksgiving dinners was the way people would not care at all if the food got cold. When I cook, I try to minimize the number of things left to do between taking the food off some sort of heat source and people digging in. But at those Thanksgiving dinners, people took their sweet time putting the food on cold serving platters, then calling everyone to the table, then someone would ceremonially carve the turkey (perhaps with precious time wasted before, figuring out who’d get to do the honors), then everything got served onto cold plates (the most illustrious guest first, meaning he/she would end up with the coldest food in the end), then maybe a toast or a prayer…and all the while, I would sadly watch the food equilibriate with its surroundings and the cold plates. Then, after half an eternity, we would finally eat, and the food was usually very good, but boy, it would have been excellent (quite) a few degrees warmer.

I got invited to two very fun Thanksgiving dinners the first two years in Tucson, involving large crowds and having more of a “party” feel, but Thanksgiving did not become “real” to me until the third year in Tucson, in which the rapidly cooling plate of food looked like this:

It was cooling rapidly because we, a group of adventurous friends, were eating it on a campground, which can be a chilly affair in November, even in Arizona. We had just returned from a two-day backpacking trip through the (waterless) Superstition Mountains. We were hungry and wiped out, but we cooked the entire Thanksgiving dinner on two gas stoves and a campfire - except for the turkey, which was not a turkey, but a rotisserie chicken bought in Superior, AZ. The rotisserie chicken proved two things to me: 1. In a pinch, it is a perfectly fine substitute for a turkey, and 2. A chicken with all the Thanksgiving sides is a perfectly filling meal for five to six. With the chicken, we had sweet potatoes, stuffing (with the rest of the trailmix thrown in), cranberry sauce, tomatillos, green beans, a grilled squash, wine and lots of fun and we surely were very grateful for the good food. There is something wonderful about eating good food after two days of backbreaking physical work carrying gallons of water through the desert.

Thanksgiving 2010 was a dinner for two, prepared by Steve. The meal was excellent and involved an appropriately sized piece of turkey, home-baked dinner rolls and a cranberry dessert. I had many things to be grateful for: I had just pulled out of some difficult times, found a new position and an apartment and I was starting a beautiful new relationship. Thanksgiving 2011, Steve and I hosted together. Everything, including the cranberry sauce, was made from scratch. I stuffed a squash with a filling containing dried mushrooms from Niedere Tauern and wore my Austrian outfit. We made sure the food stayed warm, and the TV-watching was replaced by a constitutional walk around the neighborhood. Our two guests were Erika and Zhen, a Chinese student who would have been just as happy goofing off by herself that day. I think it is safe to say that I have arrived “on the other side”.

I thought that this year, I would do a Thanksgiving dinner for my friends here in Vienna. I would tirelessly run through Viennese stores to find all the necessary ingredients and spend the Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving preparing the meal. Now it is Sunday. I have tirelessly run through Viennese stores for completely different things. I am proud of finally having bought groceries and made some sort of plan of cooking basic food for myself. I am finally, today, getting round to cleaning up the apartment for the first time since moving in, but am still way too disorganized to even buy a rotisserie chicken. I completely missed Thanksgiving, save for a very late night skype call to Steve’s family.

It does feel like I truly missed something. It is the first Thanksgiving-less year in six. I have many things to be grateful for: I wrote a dissertation and graduated, found a new position and an apartment, and Steve is coming over here very soon. All my loved ones are doing well. Leaving Arizona was very sad, but at the same time, I had so many wonderful experiences, and I received so much friendship, love, and appreciation from people there that gratitude is at least as important of a feeling these days as sadness. And I miss Thanksgiving to express my gratitude for these things in an “official” setting.

And, of course, a decent, home-cooked meal wouldn’t hurt either.

Wö®§t M&xik@n €v@®!

So, this last week has been more or less a nutritional disaster. One that I had seen coming, but still. Between being away all last weekend, and busy every single evening from 7 to 11(+), I had no time whatsoever to buy food and cook it. I also did not want to spend a whole lot of money eating out, because I knew I would be doing it all week. So, lots of visits to the well-known lunch stops around my workplace (cheap and decent), bakeries (cheap, decent, but somewhat lacking in variety), McDonalds (cheap and crap), one of those ubiquitous noodle places (cheap and ok-ish), and some late-night grub at after-orchestra-beers (moderate and decent). But at lunch today, my string of boring-to-questionable culinary experiences hit a low of epic proportions.

Part of my problem with the lunch places around my building is that I grew sick of them years ago and to my dismay, the 5 years away seem to have made no difference: I am still mostly sick of them. So, interested in checking out a new place within walking distance, I came across this café with an all-American menu. It featured burgers, a Philly cheesesteak, cesar salad, and some “Tex Mex” options - burritos and tacos, served with “nachos”. Now, don’t get me wrong here, the moment I walked through the door, I knew I was asking for trouble. The place did not look either Mexican or American, the server was from Eastern Europe, and there was nobody else there having lunch. But I stayed, partly out of curiosity, partly thinking, “Well, how bad can it be?”

I had no idea.

I ordered a beef taco and a coke. The coke was good. But what I found on my plate was so far removed from Mexican food it would have made Taco Bell look authentic. The “nachos” were just a pile of tortilla chips with nothing on them (in retrospect, that may have been a good thing). Not that there is anything wrong with chips and salsa, but it took two dips into the salsa for me to recognize its base flavor and main ingredient: ketchup. The taco was a flour tortilla clumsily half-wrapped around a pile of cheese-laden ground meat that was closest to a cheesesteak in consistency and flavor, but would still be a little bit of an insult to a cheesesteak. I am still trying to figure out whether the cheese was Emmental or Gouda…but I digress. The point is, that taco filling wasn’t even a cheesesteak, let alone anything from anywhere near Mexico. Needless to mention, nothing on the plate had ever been in the same room with anything hotter than a bell pepper.

I figured this abomination of a taco was so thoroughly un-American, there was no point in even trying to grab it, so I pretended I didn’t know any better and ate it with knife and fork. I tried my best to make a dent in it, but had to give up after two thirds of it (that’s pretty whimsical for European portion sizes), paid, fled in terror and wanted to forget the whole thing.

Except that I had to set eyes on the place again when I took the tram back from work (yes, this means I will have to look the other direction twice a day from now on), and got angry. Not because I spent too much money on a bad meal, that's my own darn fault, but because the place is such a disgrace. To Mexico, to the US, and to Vienna. Even if they know nothing about Mexican food (which they clearly don’t), and don’t bother to ask the interwebs at all (which they also clearly don’t), heck, we are in the center of a European metropolis! With the Sacher and the Imperial two miles away as the crow flies, don’t they have any sort of intuition that melting cheese over ground beef and throwing it onto a cold tortilla might not be good food? Are they thinking that “American food” means you HAVE to make it as bad as humanly possible? I mean, no wonder people here think that American food is garbage, if places like this, along with McDonald’s, Hooters, and TGI Friday’s are the culinary ambassadors!

I want this place to go out of business, asap!

Train travel

One thing I always missed in the States was train travelling. I missed anything on rails, really. I can count the times I have seen a passenger train at the Tucson train station on one hand. There were something like three trains going to LA and three trains going the other direction – per week. Nevertheless, the Tucson train station is beautiful, and I would love to get off a train there one day. There was also the Old Pueblo Trolley - it was so old it made me feel like I was in a technicolor version of “The Third Man”, but unfortunately it was also completely impractical, so I almost never took it.

I think trains are great. They are powerful and elegant, even the most crummy of them. If they are too crummy to be elegant, they instantly transition to cute and nostalgic. There is something about the slow and steady acceleration, or the way they wind themselves through a mountainous landscape, or the torpedo-ish speed with which they fly along a suitably long and straight track. Austria does not have much in the way of real high speed trains, like France or Germany, but along the Danube valley, even the not-so-high speed trains can ramp up pretty impressively, certainly beyond anything you could legally do on an (Austrian) Autobahn.

There is much to be said for train travel in terms of the comfort, in particular on the not-so-crowded routes. Here I am, feet up on the seat opposite, typing this entry and getting more and more distracted by the gorgeous Alpenvorland landscape going by. I don’t get sick, I don’t get impatient, I don't get bored. I can read, type, sleep, walk around, eat, drink, you name it, all in as much comfort as you can really get while travelling (oceangoing cruise ships notwithstanding). And sometimes I meet very interesting people and have inspiring conversations with them. It’s easy to get talking on trains, especially in cars with those opposite seat arrangements. It’s not like on planes, where you and your neighbor are just too close and too stuck for real talking comfort. On the train, you are spaced just right, close enough that you can start talking, but just far enough that you can also quit talking again. And should you for some reason really need to flee, you can always pretend it’s your stop and find a new seat two cars down.

I can take two train routes from Vienna to Admont. One is longer, and the trains running on it are fast, the other is shorter, but the trains on it are of the “crummy” and “winding themselves through mountains” category. Ultimately, they both take roughly the same amount of time.

I LOVE the slow route. It begins at Wien Westbahnhof (the architecture of which is worth an entry by itself) with an Intercity train, the fast and elegant kind. Separate compartments for 6 people each, little brochure listing all the stops and connections, snacks & beverages cart, worldly long distance travellers. An hour later, at Amstetten, I change to the slow Regionalzug. No more brochures, no more compartments, no more beverage cart. No big train stations, either, but instead pretty views of small farms. As the train travels into the foothills of the Alps, the towns, houses, and farms grow progressively more picturesque, at first still perched on slopes and hills, then nested into small valleys. Eventually, the farmland is largely replaced by forest, and the mountains grow higher and higher. At the stations, you see people on the platforms dressed in the traditional outfits. As of, let’s say, Waidhofen an der Ybbs, I am the only person on that train typing on a laptop. Not because people don't own laptops, but because the pace of life is sufficiently slow that they don't feel the need to type on them while on the go. Then, after Weyer, the tracks turn into Ennstal, and the landscape starts to feel like home, childhood home, that is. Now there are no more villages: the valley is cut deep and there is only room for the train, the river Enns and a small road. The villages are on a terrace some 50 - 100 meters higher. It feels like time has stopped. The river is the same, the landscape is the same, there is that same little boat tethered to the shore at that one spot that was already there when I first travelled this route consciously, about 20 years ago. Only the seasons change on this part of the route, and no matter the season, the landscape is amazing. A blue, green, or turquoise river going through forests and by rocky cliffs, interrupted only by the occasional small run-of-the-river hydropower station. The mountains grow higher and higher, the train takes a turn and we enter Gesäuse, a narrow, rocky gorge with high limestone peaks towering over it. The river has turned into whitewater. As I am writing this, I am travelling through that very part. This time, everything is coated with a bright snow-white furry frosting of rime. It looks enchanted in the evaporating fog, with the sun slowly breaking through. (Unfortunately there are too many reflections in the window to take any pictures). Admont, on the other end of Gesäuse, will look like a respectably sized town, after all this lonely landscape. That whole slow transition from busy, metropolitan Vienna to the Alpine countryside happens so smoothly, it just makes me think: “This is how travel should be”. 

Of course, time has not stopped. The route used to run several times a day when I was a kid. No more. There’s a special train Saturday morning and another Sunday late afternoon. Which happens to work alright for me right now, but I am sad about the change in schedules nevertheless. The buses that have replaced much of the route at other times just are not the same thing. They are small and uncomfortable. If you have luggage, you have to open a disgustingly dirty trunk and cannot wash your hands afterwards because there is no bathroom. I can’t read lest I get carsick. They have a radio going (usually Ö Regional - if you don't know what that means, just rest assured: it's bad). And they don’t go through the empty valley, but up on the terrace, where the villages are. (I must begrudgingly admit that that makes sense.) So, I am treasuring every opportunity to travel the route by train.

I am sort of regretting never having taken the train from Tucson. It must be just as wonderful to see the desert landscape go by. But I am only sort of regretting it. I did look into it, and it turned out just a tad impractical: From Tucson to where? El Paso? Been there, seen no reason to return. LA? Perhaps, but what to do there without a car? Rent one, when you can drive your own there faster and for cheaper? Go just somewhere, for the sake of being on a train? For about 60 bucks, I could have gone to Lordsburg, NM, and returned the same day, provided it was a Thursday, or I could have gone there on a Saturday, and returned on a Sunday. Do not ask me what one can do in Lordsburg without a car to get out of there. The various stories of the unreliability of Amtrak’s passenger trains weren’t encouraging, either, so one may end up spending even more time in Lordsburg. So, I never got round to taking the train to or from Tucson. Too bad...

Heartbroken

If you had asked me what I expected out of playing music in Tucson, back in early 2007, I would have answered: “I am sure I’ll play somewhere somehow, but it’ll probably be on the backburner and I’ll be happy to keep it on life support while I work like horse for my doctorate.”

It turned out VERY differently. My “musical career” (if you want to call it that) did not take a dip, but a climb. In the five sometimes chaotic years in Arizona, music was the one thing that always worked out very well. I played in a wonderful group, the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra. Not only did I play, I was fortunate to also lead the viola section and coach sectionals. The repertoire was interesting and challenging, the atmosphere was usually excellent. I felt that I was making the best of my musical education by having plenty of opportunities to pass on what I learned. I also learned a whole lot myself, about playing, about teaching, about contributing to a good thing. Preparing for and playing 5 – 6 concerts a year for a paying audience meant I was part of a regular concert cycle the way professional musicians are, and thus effectively practicing the profession I once trained for. Also, I loved being part of the community. I found wonderful friends there. Some of these friends have been my emotional support through many a rough time. Heck, I found my boyfriend there. I could continue singing the praise of SASO and eludicating the meaning of that particular “musical home” for me, or I could write about how nothing is ever perfect and that SASO had its rough edges, too, but you get the idea. I had a place and it was a good one.

Returning to Vienna unfortunately also meant leaving SASO. I could get into that, too, but that’s a whole other entry. Let me just say: it was very hard.

In past major moves I have run into the following issue: Everything is new, everything, even the smallest mundane task (see “shopping inconvenience”), is challenging, music has never been my breadwinning career, so, typically there were more than enough science-career things to worry about, and all of this would result in music being on the backburner for a little while. In the case of the move to Arizona, it took 6 months and a visit to a counselor for me to remember that I am, at my core, a musician, and that putting the viola aside for an extended period of time is nothing less than forgetting a part of my very identity. “Not this time”, I thought before this move, and started to be proactive. I researched amateur orchestras in Vienna well ahead of time and spread word among my (very small and professional) Viennese musical network. And lo and behold, last week on Tuesday, I sat in the first rehearsal of an amateur orchestra associated with one of the city’s (non-music) universities, and today I got a phone call from another group.

It do not want to write about what I think of this new group after just three rehearsals, not because I don't have any thoughts, but because it's not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is that I am starting to doubt my decision to make finding a new group a high priority item on my list of “things to figure out asap in Vienna”. I have not been able to play in this new group without fighting tears during rehearsal, or bursting into them afterwards. It does not help that we are playing Tchaikovsky’s 4^th symphony, the SASO-sound of which is still in my ear. In all three rehearsals so far, there were quite a few instruments missing, so it was easy for my brain to replace the missing instruments with the sound of the respective SASO players. There are many things I instantly started to miss about SASO, within the first ten minutes of that first rehearsal last week, and today, for the first time, I had a deep feeling of “ok, time to go back to Arizona”. The question “Why on earth have I left SASO behind?” forced itself into my brain, demanding an emotional (rather than rational) answer, and I couldn’t come up with one. I miss having my place and I miss my friends.

I am fully aware that no new group can live up to this at the moment. In a way, I feel like someone out on a date, who is nowhere near getting over the last breakup. Perhaps I am too heartbroken to be playing music right now. I was worried about being punished with insanity if I don’t play, but now I am worried about being punished with insanity if I have a major crying fit after every rehearsal. Should I give it a break? Then again, it still holds that I am a musician and need to play, SASO or not. I have to set myself up somewhere somehow, and in this city with its giant music scene, it might take a little longer, so perhaps I should just suck it up and plough ahead...

Shopping inconvenience

Steve left to go back to Tucson a week ago, and since then it feels like time is racing, and I am racing, and yet I am not getting anything done. The city is exhausting, which is completely expected. I am trying to gain momentum at work, meet old friends, catch up with family, play in a new orchestra, unpack boxes, do various administrative things, run errands, and everything seems to take forever.

Some of it actually does. I am wasting a lot of time shopping while not buying anything. Whenever I enter a supermarket, I am completely lost. Instead of buying reasonable stuff to eat during the week, I find myself checking out the international beer selection (Lagers. Sigh.) while fighting leftover childhood urges to raid the chocolate/candy section (it was quite convenient to be in a country without any of the junk food I remember from childhood!). It takes me forever to find essentials like toilet paper. I get frustrated over the produce (I don’t exactly know why), plus by then it's typically getting too late to chop vegetables for dinner anyway, so I buy more cold cuts and bread. And 50% of my time in the store I am fighting complete overload. Where is my Trader Joe’s?

Another part of the problem is that shopping is SO INCONVENIENT. Yes, I used to say the exact same thing about Tucson when I went there. And I still think it is inconvenient to shop in Tucson if you don’t have a car. But at least I could make an evening of biking to the mall. Here, all the stores are just around the corner, and all it takes is a little walk or a little stop on the way home from work. But here’s the problem: half of them close at 6 and the other half close at 7. None of them are open on a Sunday. And here I am, in need of a long woolen winter coat, shoes, food, house shoes, printer paper, daylight spectrum lightbulbs, a desk lamp, refills for my pens, sheets, and towels, just to name a few. To the best of my knowledge, I need to hit between 5 and 6 stores for just those things. Last Saturday was shot for the purpose of shopping because my father, brother and little sister visited me (which I am perfectly happy about, don’t get me wrong here). So, I am currently taking off from work earlier than I want to every day, just to race to perhaps one or two stores before they close. If I am lucky, one of them has what I need, and a sufficiently small selection of it, such that I am actually capable of making a decision. I am not good at making decisions over 50 kinds of winter coats, none of them under € 200, when I am hungry, tired, carrying my laptop and an umbrella, and rushed because they may kick me out in ten minutes. So I end up looking at things and not buying any. But most of the time I am actually on the street, I see the shops closed.

Did I hear you say “Just buy it online!”? Yeah, that's what I thought, and went onto amazon.de for those daylight spectrum lightbulbs. What I did not realize is that things don’t get dropped off on your doormat if nobody is home. You have to pick the packet up at the post office (hours, you guessed it, 8 am – 6 pm). This morning at 8:30, I waited for 20 minutes at the post office to pick up one of the lightbulbs I bought. There are two more on the way. Now, that might still be better than racing to a store that may or may not have what I need, but it does take some of the fun and convenience out of online shopping.

So what to do? I need a housewife! Because, clearly, that’s how these kinds of structures have worked in the past. I need a wife to buy the mundane stuff during the work week, so I have some time to look for a winter coat on Saturday, instead of trying to get to 4 stores, together with the rest of Vienna’s full-time employed. Oh, wait, now I remember, I already made plans for this Saturday. Clearly, I am not granting shopping the priority it deserves.

Probably, in the end, it’s all about getting used to it. I had my routine set up for “Tucson by bicycle”, and I cannot remember how my Viennese routine worked, back in 2007. Even if I did, it might not be much use, because I am on a different schedule and on a different budget. So I am probably just doing it all wrong. You go somewhere new, none of your routines work out any longer, and everything, the tiniest bit of everyday life logistics, is kind of abrasive. So, I guess, in that sense, “convenience” is mostly about what you are used to. But boy, would I like to go run errands after dinner instead of before!

Noodlekebap

When I left in 2007, Vienna was knee-deep in a pan-Asian food (and, with limitations, culture) craze. Sushi places were opening their doors at every street corner. Chinese dresses could be found in main street stores. People were crazy about Feng Shui, “Zen” this and “Zen” that, “Asian” spas and other true or perceived bits and pieces of “Asian” culture. Old Chinese restaurants decorated with generic imperial-looking paraphernalia that used to offer little more than chopped up meat on rice (with perhaps a few forlorn bamboo sprouts) felt compelled to ramp up their game. Instead of dirt-cheap lunch specials of sweet and sour pork, the word “Wok” appeared on signs in their windows and they changed their names from “China-Restaurant zum Goldenen Drachen” to things like “Lotus Asia Küche”.

Having lived in Seattle, and having travelled to China itself, I felt (for a change) well ahead of the fashion. I researched Viennese Chinese restaurants that offered dim sum, deplored the lack of Thai and Vietnamese food and was suspicious about the rise of the “Lotus Asia Küche”-category. If a host culture is clearly interested in your continent’s cultures, why would you move from more to less specific? Why go pan-Asian instead of being more daring and authentic with the spectrum of Chinese food offered? Off to Tucson I went, which was, admittedly, not the best ground for the various Asian cuisines, but nevertheless, there was “Gee’s Garden” for dim sum, “Sushi Yukari” for authentic Japanese food (as assured by several Japanese and experienced travellers to Japan), and several good Thai and Vietnamese places.

Preparing to go back to Vienna after 5 years, I was hopeful. Maybe the Asian craze had matured, maybe Austrians, living in the center of a small continent with 30+ languages and cultures, had gotten more informed about “Asia” and maybe one could now have a good green Thai curry in this town.

At first glance, I am a little taken aback. It looks like the happy mixing has continued uninhibited. The “Lotus Asia Küche” places seem to thrive. The menu of a Korean restaurant in my area of town also offers Thai and Japanese food. The lunch buffet at a “Wok” place near university is an unholy mix of Chinese and Sushi, with a deep-fried banana dessert that I recognized from the old-style Austrian Chinese restaurants but that I have never encountered in an American place or during my ten days in China. Chopsticks took a little while to find. A somewhat more upscale-looking place called “Chang” right around the corner from my apartment on one hand specializes on Peking duck, and the staff spoke Chinese to each other, on the other hand, much of their menu looked rather Thai. However, Thai or Chinese, the food was definitely good enough for a neighborhood round-the-corner place. To my knowledge, there is no specific law that says that no human is able to cook both good Chinese and good Thai food. Perhaps the mix places aren’t all that bad. Buuut…mix places somehow always make me cautious. And, of course, the search has only begun. Maybe the “pure” places are waiting to be found in the urban jungle.

On the other side of the spectrum, finding crazier mixes than Chinese-Thai has been no problem. There is a new fast food on Vienna’s streets: “Asian noodles". Noodles everywhere, in holes in the walls of tube stations, in booths together with pizza slices, at the traditional Viennese Würstelstand, at McDonalds (“McNoodle”, no joke!), and in döner kebab stands. Yes, döner kebab stands. No, I could never have imagined it either. Also, kebab meat can now be had in the to-go boxes (“kebab box”) familiar (to me, at least) from American Chinese restaurants. No, I have not tried it, or the noodles from the kebab stands, I have not yet been desperate/drunk enough. 

Some of these booths go the whole nine yards: kebab, pizza, sausage and noodles. Look no further, we’ve got it all right here.

What else is new on the “Asian” food front? Now, this I am utterly excited about: Bubble Tea! During my stay in Seattle, I developed a serious addiction to that stuff and could not find it for saving my life when I returned to Vienna. I was seriously contemplating cooking up my own tapioca. The better part of a decade later – voila! Boy, was I ever ahead of the fashion! Even better, the Austrian version is not catering to the American palate, i.e., I do not have to order it “half as sweet as you would normally do it”. And the best (worst?) thing: there are two Bubble Tea places right within a 3 minute walk from my office.

Fragrances and Cigarrettes

Given that this is my second return to Austria from the United States, I find it quite interesting to see what cultural differences I completely missed until now. Fragrances, for instance. Going shopping for shampoo, soap, candles and other smelly things in the US was always a bit of a lengthy process for me. I often ended up with Burt’s Bees or something equally pricey, such as artisan soaps from the farmers markets, and even there I was quite picky. I never grew fully conscious of why that was, but now it is completely clear to me. It was because the typical fragrance spectrum of your average CVS selection of cosmetics/home fragrances ranged from “sweet strawberry” to “candy store” with a little stop in the “baked goods” department (“carrot cake”, “pumpkin spice”, “vanilla cinnamon”….). On my very first visit to a “dm” drug store in my new/old home I immediately suffered from a complete overload of products I was actually prepared to buy. Everything seemed to smell like ridiculously expensive French imports (to the US, that is): flowery, moderate, not sweet or overwhelming, and far, far away from edibles. No raspberry-peach, no apple pie. Violets and calendula. I love it!

On a somewhat related note: Something has changed dramatically in this country, for the better. It took a couple days to sink in, but one day last week, Steve turned to me and pointed out that we had had four or five meals in restaurants and in none of them were we bothered by smoke. Apparently, the laws have changed to the extent that designating three of 20 tables in one room as “non-smoking tables” is no longer deemed sufficient. Halleluja, lawmakers have figured out convection and diffusion! Granted, smoke is still around a whole lot more than in the US. Some more traditional bars and restaurants seem to make sure that the more attractive/cozy/stylish front area is the smoking room and non-smokers get a good dose of smoke while finding their way into some less representative back room. If the place is small enough that it cannot physically be split into two sections, it may keep its “20^th century ambiance”. You see smokers on the street and on the balconies of buildings. Certainly complaining about getting a second-hand whiff here or there will not do you any good. But Austria has come a looong way from its turn-of-the-century definition of “non-smoking” (“Nobody is forcing you to light a cigarette, what’s your problem?”) to creating some actual refuges for people like me and most Americans.

Niedere Tauern, I am back!

We ended up fitting in two hikes, yesterday and the day before.

Yesterday’s hike led Steve and me to Moaralm and Moartörl. As expected, the Alm has packed up for winter, and surprisingly, we did not even meet a single other hiker. We did, however, see several workers operating heavy machinery for a new small hydropower station and other construction.

55 – 60% of power generated in Austria is from hydropower, and much of it does not come from the kinds of dams you see along the Colorado River, but adds up from many small run-of-the-river power stations. And apparently 9% of Austrian electricity demand (more than 50% of households) is covered by very small generating stations (http://www.kleinwasserkraft.at/wasserkraft). I do wonder how many households this baby can supply…At any rate, the echoing engine noises did not make for the most idyllic hike. But the views were still gorgeous.

This is the view from Moartörl, into the mountains surrounding Admont.

 Fall colors from the larches, a deciduous conifer:

For today’s hike, we raced the bad weather, from Edelrautehütte to beautiful Ochsenkar.

My mother calls this view: “At our home, in Canada.”. I have not been to Canada a whole lot. From what I have seen of the American landscapes, I think she is spot on when it comes to the beauty of it, but way off when it comes to the scale. This is maybe a miniature version of a Canadian landscape. Cute, easy to get to within a morning and no grizzly’s anywhere near. This is Steve and me on the bridge:

Steve and my father turned around soon after and my mother and I made a quick sprint to “Gefrorener See” (frozen lake), which was not exactly frozen, but not far from it, either. 

The tip of a finger was as far as I wanted to immerse myself in it, even though the Arizonan in me screamed: “It’s clear water! Jump in!”. The Arizonan in me also insisted on taking this picture:

 

By the time we turned back, the clouds had crept over the ridges. It was starting to snow when we arrived back at Edelrautehütte.

On a different note: Today I found that I can still drive a stick shift car. It’s quite a bit of fun on the mountain roads.