Citrus Season

My life has gone nuts in the last week, I am not kidding. I am going to write about it when the dust has settled, but for now, I will pretend that nothing happened and post this entry about citrus, which I meant to write all of January, finally wrote the day before my life went nuts, and have not had the time and space in my brain to post until now.

Sometime about two weeks ago, it was on a day with heavy snowfall, someone said to me on the hallway at work: "That's a little different than Arizona, isn't it?" and I answered: "In Arizona I'd be picking grapefruits right off the trees, wearing short sleeves!" Now there is a certain danger that with comments like that, I spread the erroneous idea that grapefruit trees are happy in the Sonoran desert. They are not. But they seem to be handling the sun and heat reasonably well if they get watered, and they are happy enough to produce fruit. So, citrus trees are a common sight in people's yards, bitter orange trees line many a road, parking lot, or outside seating area, and there is a road called Orange Grove, which is indeed the location of at least one orange orchard. Road names in the US often refer to things that disappeared around the time the road got built, so didn't think there were any orange groves along orange grove road, until I bought oranges from someone at the farmers market who assured me that that was exactly where they came from.

The University of Arizona campus, which is not just a park, but an arboretum and botanical garden at the same time, also has a large number of citrus trees, which I figured were worth learning about. Most of them are bitter oranges, which are not good to eat, and difficult to process into anything more edible. But to my pleasant surprise, the big yellow citrus fruits hanging on other trees on campus turned out to be grapefruits. Giant fruits with a peel several centimeters thick and sweet, juicy pink or gray-white flesh. At first I felt awkward foraging on campus, in plain view of hundreds of undergrads who were probably wondering exactly what kind of freak I was, but eventually I stopped by the responsible university office and was told that, yes, I was free to harvest the fruits from the campus arboretum. From then on, I didn't care what freak they thought I was, because I wasn't a freak but a human doing what humans used to do: foraging.

Throughout the year, campus supplied grapefruits, rosemary, bay leaves, tiny little red chiles, figs, lemons, and any amount of olives and calamondin limes I could ever want. The figs were good, but sticky business to harvest. The olives, I salt-cured successfully one year, and unsuccessfully the second year, for reasons unknown. I was clearly not the only one harvesting lemons from the one small tree there was, so I rarely actually got my hands on one. The calamondin limes, I made several jars of terrific marmalade out of one winter, and had enough of it to last me a second one. However, it was quite a mess dealing with the tiny fruits and their many seeds, so I never did it again. 

 

 

The most worthwhile harvest I stuck to year after year was the January and February grapefruit season. The fruits were harvested by other people, too, but it seemed that I was a more skilled and/or courageous climber than most other gatherers, so with a little bit of effort, there were still plenty of fruits within my reach. The most fun way to do it was to climb the tree and drop the fruits for a friend to catch. I'd carry bags and bags of grapefruits home on my bicycle. There was grapefruit juice for me every morning and greyhounds (vodka and grapefruit juice, a drink served to me first in Tucson's Hotel Congress, albeit with canned grapefruit juice) for many boardgame evenings.

Citrus season was also noticeable on the farmers market and to a degree in the stores, but the one thing that puzzled me was that it was next to impossible to find blood oranges in Tucson. One year, they were specialty items at AJ's (the upscale food store in the upscale part of town) and juicing them felt like unashamed decadence. The next year, Trader Joe's had them, something like 6 pieces for about 3 dollars, and they were available for about two weeks. Better than nothing, but not what I remembered from Vienna.

I have to say, in spite of the fact that there are no grapefruits to harvest here, I am quite happy with citrus season, first and foremost because of the enormous amounts of blood oranges sold by the bucket for a song and 90 cents in every supermarket. I am not kidding, this is what we got a couple of weeks ago, bucket included, for about 3 Euros (I can't remember exactly):

Blood oranges are wonderful juicing oranges, flavor and color of the juice are beyond comparison. Steve and I are currently spending 15 minutes every morning producing orange juice (it could be 5, but Steve doesn't like pulp, and straining the juice is quite a bit more time consuming than juicing). An apple a day? Forget it, a glass of blood orange juice a day! We are both dreading the day the blood oranges will disappear from the stores. But rumor has it that by then, the days are going to be longer, and some mysterious thing called "spring" may be around the corner…

January

Sometimes a month just disappears, and at the end of it, you turn a calendar page, wonder how it can be that you have to pay rent already when it seems like you just did it yesterday, and your brain is more or less blank when trying to remember where the time went. So, partly in order to overcome my bewilderment at the fact that it is February, I will attempt a summary of the past weeks:

There was a wonderful weekend beginning of January, on which Steve and I celebrated my birthday with what I think was the best Italian meal I ever had. The place, "Sebastiano's", was located at an otherwise not particularly vibrant street corner a three minute walk from our apartment and exceeded all our expectations: the food was exquisite but simple, nothing was excessively "fancified" or gimmicky, but everything was incredibly well done. It takes quite a bit to have me rave over a marinara sauce! 

That weekend was also the beginning of a few very cold and snowy weeks. My birthday hike, a "tradition" I started in Tucson, where January is prime hiking season, was climb up Leopoldsberg in snowfall. The trails went through vineyards and forests, which were just about to turn white, making for quite the romantic scenery. However, the view from the top (a mere 425 m/1394 ft, but nothing less than the northeastern-most outcropping of the Alps), which is supposed to give you a wonderful panorama of the Danube and the city, was a little limited:

The walk down "Nasenweg", a very well built path (pavement, steps, handrails, benches, little viewing platforms, you name it…), involved steep switchbacks of blank ice. It was a matter of hanging on to the handrails for dear life while sending the feet on a semi-controlled downhill slide.

A few weeks later, we had the opportunity for more winter hiking on a trip back to Steiermark. The main purpose was to visit my grandmother, but the trip also had the nice side effect of getting out from under the lid of fog that often leaves Vienna without sunshine many days in a row this time of the year. After lunch and chats with my grandmother, there wasn't enough daylight left for a whole hike, which did not stop us from doing 95% of it.  We got sunshine, a view, a wonderful winter sunset and moonrise and the last half hour of hiking in the amazing brightness of a full moon lit snowy landscape.

The hike started and ended at Erdefunkstelle Aflenz, a spot I have always found fascinating. It is quite a unique location geographically, with a relatively wide view and low horizon (for a place in the middle of the Alps), that was chosen as a location for an array of satellite dishes forming a major satellite communications hub. What I really like about it is that all the administrative buildings are underground, so the dishes look like they just grew there, out of nowhere, like flowers or mushrooms. Playing with my new toy, a Nikon D5100 DSLR, I managed to get this pretty neat night picture of one of them:

What else happened in January? Steve joined the orchestra, which started rehearsing for a concert in March, and it is very nice to be playing together again. We also played chamber music together for the first time since I left Tucson. We are starting to have a social and cultural life: a couple boardgames played, a movie seen, friends met for dinner a couple of times, and we are making mild progress at trying to get to concerts. Meaning, we finally ended up going to one. In Tucson, it was easy to dream about all the wonderful concerts we'd go to, every week, heck, three times a week, plus all the museums of Vienna - but now, it turns out, we have a couple things to do aside from going on a cultural binge. Also, for most human beings, the task of making a choice of way too many good options causes paralysis rather than decisiveness, and looking at a Viennese concert scheule for any given week definitely falls into that category. There are usually between 5 and 10 concerts on the horizon that are interesting, and 3 of them would have had us running to buy tickets way in advance, had they been scheduled in Tucson. But now, we are often finding ourselves unable to make a decision, and when we do, we seem awfully slow to actually get round to buying tickets. Many thanks go to my friend Lukas, who metaphorically kicked our butt by getting us a good deal on tickets to a Wiener Symphoniker concert in Musikverein that he was playing in as a substitute. It was great, and about damn time, to hear one of the big Viennese orchestras, and equally great to see my old buddy from music school way back when having made it this far.

At work, things picked up speed: there are lab classes I will teach in the upcoming summer semester, which require preparation, and I operated an instrument during a measurement campaign, which I enjoyed a lot. I love my area of research for the occasional very manual lab and field work, such that not all of work life happens in front of a computer screen. Since it so happened that I was chained to the computer for the better part of last year, this change in the task mix is quite welcome.

Not everything has been culinary bliss, music and beautiful hikes the last few weeks: Getting Steve a visa is proving more difficult than expected. There are several avenues to explore, but none of them seems logistically easy, which means that the next weeks/months may be a little challenging and stressful for both of us. Less existential, but quite unpleasant: A corner in our bedroom that seemed slightly moldy turned out to be the very edge of several square feet of prospering multi-colored fungus, exposed after Steve moved a shelf. I am fairly disgusted with mold and grateful that Steve did the rather serious first (and second) emergency cleanup, but the root cause of the problem is likely not eliminated, and my guess is that building management will have to get involved. My mouse/keyboard-inflicted tennis elbow is officially diagnosed as chronic (on the plus side, my chances are very good that the ten units of physical therapy I will need to make time for are covered by my insurance). T-mobile USA does not believe me that I moved to Austria and wants to charge $200 for getting out of my contract. I was also forced to pay 100 Euros "stupid tax" for riding the tram without a ticket, which was sitting happily at home in the pocket of the previous day's pair of pants. And it turns out that, mysteriously, not all of our neighbors are thrilled to hear us play our high-pitched string instruments, so, very soon, negotiations and treaties will need to be arranged. No month is perfect.