Monday, February 8, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
Bratislava in January
A spur of the moment decision after receiving a RyanAir email (in October?) led to us booking a cheap fare and taking off to Bratislava for a January weekend. It was below freezing most of the time (potentially the reason for the cheap fares) but we largely had the place to ourselves.
 |
| Castle Wall Fam-Selfie |
Bratislava is known as the place where the monarchs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were crowned. It has an old castle on a bluff overlooking the city and the curve of the Danube River. The old town section is well-manicured: after the fall of Communism they've invested lots in bringing the Altstadt (or we should say in Slovak: "Stari Most") back up to par. It now is an attractive enclave of cobblestones, cafes, cosy restaurants and 400 year old Churches hidden around corners.
A winding lane climbs out of the old town to the castle on the hill for a nice hike, which is part of the old coronation route the Emperors would take. In the summers they do re-inactments of the coronation with a big fest and costumes and the whole bit, which we one day may return to witness.
 |
| Toy shop booty |
 |
| Pensive moment contemplating the former Monarchy |
 |
| We're not cold |
However being January, it is quite cold. We have the town largely to ourselves, but the cold is not something to be trifled with, especially when you have children in tow.
Hiking around in cold weather with children is generally not a great idea: it starts out as a screamfest, which is stressful to parents and onlookers. Eventually they do quiet down as they become incapacitated and lethargic with frostbite.
We've all grown up with stories of kids whose earlobes froze off to fall on the ground and shatter. To avoid that, it becomes important to find indoor activities. We planned our strolling with warm up stops in toy shops, cafes and anyplace out of the wind. One such gem was the Bratislava children's museum.
Most interesting exhibit/plaything was this one: a "Y" letter punching bag. There is something about the usage of the letter Y in the Slovak language that has long been debated. Apparently it makes many words difficult to pronounce and is seen as betraying your "provincial" nature if you say it incorrectly.
To fight back against this entymological outrage, they've strung up a stuffed "Y" so that children can don boxing gloves and beat the shit out it. The Y is still in the language so I guess this is just to make children feel better struggling with it in school? Curious.
 |
 |
| A Slovak National Statement against the accursed letter Y. |
 |
| The type of Olde Europe street we fantasized about before moving here |
 |
| Warm-Up in a sunny cafe after the freezing Zoo visit. A Top Ten breakfast location. |
Thursday, January 14, 2016
What do you want to be when you grow up?
#1: Professional Aspirations
Tonight at dinner Jasper declared that he wants to be an archeologist. He wants to dig up stuff around old castles - primarily to try to find old swords and treasures. Jay noted that a lot of castles are in parts of the world where they don't speak English or German but he said that's fine - he'd like to travel around the world anyway. And then he reminded us he can count to 10 in Spanish.
Tonight at dinner Jasper declared that he wants to be an archeologist. He wants to dig up stuff around old castles - primarily to try to find old swords and treasures. Jay noted that a lot of castles are in parts of the world where they don't speak English or German but he said that's fine - he'd like to travel around the world anyway. And then he reminded us he can count to 10 in Spanish.
Very useful! And, Jay's envious. I can just imagine our retirement - going from one dig to another with our son, the archeologist.
Cody wants to be a Police. Until recently Cody wanted to be Kitty cat, so this is a big career direction change.
#2: Looking back on 2015
We asked Jasper what sorts of things he's learned after spending six months living in a foreign society, traveling to new places and interacting in a new language. He thought for a second and said:
'Well, my arms are longer."
#3: Table shenanigans.
Cody enjoys "active eating" which means that he mostly treats dinners as a channel for excerising, exploring boundaries, and physical displays of affection such as the Mid Meal Jump.
MMJ occurs anytime after we've all sat down, not always at the middle of the meal. He whispers "mid meal jump!" sets up on his chair, and then suddenly springs at me. It is quite cute, this small person clinging to you with a big smile and happily announcing "Mid Meal Jump!" But sometimes MMJ occurs when I, being at dinner, am actively putting food in my mouth. The jumper usually lands on my arm which disrupts whatever I am drinking/eating and sometimes can result in a mess.
I like the fact that he thinks this is super funny, but I do realize that it just lets him extend dinner since it is yet another delay tactic. But what can you do.
We asked Jasper what sorts of things he's learned after spending six months living in a foreign society, traveling to new places and interacting in a new language. He thought for a second and said:
'Well, my arms are longer."
#3: Table shenanigans.
Cody enjoys "active eating" which means that he mostly treats dinners as a channel for excerising, exploring boundaries, and physical displays of affection such as the Mid Meal Jump.
MMJ occurs anytime after we've all sat down, not always at the middle of the meal. He whispers "mid meal jump!" sets up on his chair, and then suddenly springs at me. It is quite cute, this small person clinging to you with a big smile and happily announcing "Mid Meal Jump!" But sometimes MMJ occurs when I, being at dinner, am actively putting food in my mouth. The jumper usually lands on my arm which disrupts whatever I am drinking/eating and sometimes can result in a mess.
I like the fact that he thinks this is super funny, but I do realize that it just lets him extend dinner since it is yet another delay tactic. But what can you do.
David Bowie
On Sunday, David Bowie died of cancer at 69. He was one of the major influences on pop music in the late 20th century. In the late 70's he spent time in Berlin, living in an apartment at Hauptstrasse 155, barely two blocks from our flat in Schoeneberg.
For all the other groupings that he created or was a part of, one major one was that list of artists who moved to Berlin and experienced a creative rebirth. In fact the city attracts people for this reason - somehow it features prominently as a place to come and rejuvenate creative energy. While the Weimar Republic's Berlin of the 1920's attracted that generation's artists, Bowie was among the first to recognize the place as such in the post-war period. He sought a respite from the drug-induced malaise of rock star parties in the LA scene in the seventies, and for three years here he produced some of his most acclaimed work.
Something about the "outpost" nature of Berlin during the GDR era served to attract artists: The city was basically surrounded by Soviet tank battalions, sliced through the center by the Wall's death strip barrier, and still full of pock-marked buildings from the final days of the greatest conflagration in history. It was a city trying to forget its WWII past while living with the unsettling daily reminders of guns pointing at its head.
The Anderes Ufer, was just two doors down from his apartment, is now called the Neues Ufer and houses a Bowie memorabilia collection on the walls since he and the Stardust band frequented it. People who come to Berlin and write about the city's musical history will inevitably stop in and write about the Neues Ufer since it features so prominently in the landscape due to the Bowie connection.
Into this scene Bowie appeared, eager to find a place where he could be anonymous.
"I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German film look...A black and white movies look, but with an intensity that was sort of aggressive."
He recorded at Hansa Studios, whose former location sat right next to the Wall near Potsdamer Platz. Apparently one could look out of the window and see directly into a guard tower on the Wall, where East German guards scowled back with their machine guns. VERY edgy.
He recorded three albums here between 1976-78 which he later referred to as "his DNA." The middle one, Heroes, is the best known. Its title track goes straight to the issue of the divided city and a hopeless love affair as a metaphor for it.
I put his song "Heroes" on my playlist when I moved to Seattle in 1998, one of those songs you remember vaguely from childhood but that experience a resurgence when you listen again with adult ears. And then I have another resurgence with it living here now and understanding it in yet a different light.
Truncated version of "Heroes" lyrics:
The key stanza references the Wall. One day Bowie looked down from the recording studio window at Hansa and saw a couple kissing near the border strip. The idea for the song was born: an indictment of the GDR regime within a hopeless romance that only triumphs for a brief moment. Another stanza about dolphins is a reference to East Germans who perished trying to flee to the West by swimming the Spree River and drowning or being shot in the attempt.
The very notion of this creative force of Berlin is a bit of a paradox of course: The GDR regime and the Wall provided the pretext for something to struggle against, yet without it the city may not have been as bizarrely inviting.
In 1987 Bowie returned to Berlin to play a three day concert at the Wall. He sang "Heroes" as a crowd of East Germans gathered on their side of the Wall to hear the music, since such concerts were illegal in East Berlin.
"And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again."
A week later Reagan was in Berlin with his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. Two years later the border opened and the GDR was history.
The night he died I came up out of the U-Bahn at Kleistpark curious to see if anyone had put up flowers or something outside his old flat. And did they. I spent an hour in the near-freezing mist with a large crowd that clustered up and down the sidewalk in front of 155 Hauptstrasse. The candles, flowers and letters written on postcards and old album covers spilled down from the building entrance steps onto the sidewalk. Packs of people with teary eyes mixed with cigarette and weed smoke. Someone had the Deutsch version of Heroes on a loop. Nearby Neues Ufer and another bar were packed and playing Bowie tributes.
I went in the Neues Ufer and edged my way to the back to see the Bowie picture shrine and listen to the conversations, but had to leave soon since there was barely room to stand. Outside in traffic people honked as they drove by. A drunk guy set off a few bottle rockets. Others mostly just stood and stared at the flickering candles and notes next to the piles of flowers, the way you must when someone is suddenly taken from you.
"I had not intended to leave Berlin, I just drifted away. Maybe I was getting better. It was an irreplaceable, unmissable experience and probably the happiest time in my life up until that point."
In the single "Lazurus" from his final album, which was just released last week, he says a thinly-disguised goodbye to his fans since he knew his time was short. The video features him lying in bed with a wrap around his head and two stones resting on his eyes. A showman to the last.
Additional Links of Note:
Vox article about the effect of the 1987 concert on the Wall's collapse.
Here's a wonderful article from the UK's Independent about him that I discovered shortly after we moved here. It offers up a rich sketch of our neighborhood and the musical history than surrounds and infuses it. It now is relevant for yet another reason.
Bowie's BBC obit.
For all the other groupings that he created or was a part of, one major one was that list of artists who moved to Berlin and experienced a creative rebirth. In fact the city attracts people for this reason - somehow it features prominently as a place to come and rejuvenate creative energy. While the Weimar Republic's Berlin of the 1920's attracted that generation's artists, Bowie was among the first to recognize the place as such in the post-war period. He sought a respite from the drug-induced malaise of rock star parties in the LA scene in the seventies, and for three years here he produced some of his most acclaimed work.
Something about the "outpost" nature of Berlin during the GDR era served to attract artists: The city was basically surrounded by Soviet tank battalions, sliced through the center by the Wall's death strip barrier, and still full of pock-marked buildings from the final days of the greatest conflagration in history. It was a city trying to forget its WWII past while living with the unsettling daily reminders of guns pointing at its head.
The Anderes Ufer, was just two doors down from his apartment, is now called the Neues Ufer and houses a Bowie memorabilia collection on the walls since he and the Stardust band frequented it. People who come to Berlin and write about the city's musical history will inevitably stop in and write about the Neues Ufer since it features so prominently in the landscape due to the Bowie connection.
"I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German film look...A black and white movies look, but with an intensity that was sort of aggressive."
He recorded at Hansa Studios, whose former location sat right next to the Wall near Potsdamer Platz. Apparently one could look out of the window and see directly into a guard tower on the Wall, where East German guards scowled back with their machine guns. VERY edgy.
He recorded three albums here between 1976-78 which he later referred to as "his DNA." The middle one, Heroes, is the best known. Its title track goes straight to the issue of the divided city and a hopeless love affair as a metaphor for it.
I put his song "Heroes" on my playlist when I moved to Seattle in 1998, one of those songs you remember vaguely from childhood but that experience a resurgence when you listen again with adult ears. And then I have another resurgence with it living here now and understanding it in yet a different light.
Truncated version of "Heroes" lyrics:
Though nothing, will keep us together
We could steal time,
just for one day
We can be Heroes, for ever and ever
What d'you say?
I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing,
nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, for ever and ever
Oh we can be Heroes,
just for one day
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads
(over our heads)
And we kissed,
as though nothing could fall
(nothing could fall)
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes,
just for one day
We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying,
then you better not stay
But we could be safer,
just for one day
Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh,
just for one day
We could steal time,
just for one day
We can be Heroes, for ever and ever
What d'you say?
I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing,
nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, for ever and ever
Oh we can be Heroes,
just for one day
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads
(over our heads)
And we kissed,
as though nothing could fall
(nothing could fall)
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes,
just for one day
We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying,
then you better not stay
But we could be safer,
just for one day
Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh,
just for one day
The key stanza references the Wall. One day Bowie looked down from the recording studio window at Hansa and saw a couple kissing near the border strip. The idea for the song was born: an indictment of the GDR regime within a hopeless romance that only triumphs for a brief moment. Another stanza about dolphins is a reference to East Germans who perished trying to flee to the West by swimming the Spree River and drowning or being shot in the attempt.
The very notion of this creative force of Berlin is a bit of a paradox of course: The GDR regime and the Wall provided the pretext for something to struggle against, yet without it the city may not have been as bizarrely inviting.
In 1987 Bowie returned to Berlin to play a three day concert at the Wall. He sang "Heroes" as a crowd of East Germans gathered on their side of the Wall to hear the music, since such concerts were illegal in East Berlin.
"And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again."
A week later Reagan was in Berlin with his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. Two years later the border opened and the GDR was history.
The night he died I came up out of the U-Bahn at Kleistpark curious to see if anyone had put up flowers or something outside his old flat. And did they. I spent an hour in the near-freezing mist with a large crowd that clustered up and down the sidewalk in front of 155 Hauptstrasse. The candles, flowers and letters written on postcards and old album covers spilled down from the building entrance steps onto the sidewalk. Packs of people with teary eyes mixed with cigarette and weed smoke. Someone had the Deutsch version of Heroes on a loop. Nearby Neues Ufer and another bar were packed and playing Bowie tributes.
I went in the Neues Ufer and edged my way to the back to see the Bowie picture shrine and listen to the conversations, but had to leave soon since there was barely room to stand. Outside in traffic people honked as they drove by. A drunk guy set off a few bottle rockets. Others mostly just stood and stared at the flickering candles and notes next to the piles of flowers, the way you must when someone is suddenly taken from you.
A couple days later, while the shrine of flowers and candles still stood, a new street sign appeared on the 155 block of Hauptstrasse proclaiming it now "David Bowie Strasse." German efficiency.
Bowie eventually left Berlin and moved on with the next stage of his career, having conclusively put the glam rock Ziggy Stardust years to rest and sated his Berlin itch.
"I had not intended to leave Berlin, I just drifted away. Maybe I was getting better. It was an irreplaceable, unmissable experience and probably the happiest time in my life up until that point."
In the single "Lazurus" from his final album, which was just released last week, he says a thinly-disguised goodbye to his fans since he knew his time was short. The video features him lying in bed with a wrap around his head and two stones resting on his eyes. A showman to the last.
Additional Links of Note:
Vox article about the effect of the 1987 concert on the Wall's collapse.
Here's a wonderful article from the UK's Independent about him that I discovered shortly after we moved here. It offers up a rich sketch of our neighborhood and the musical history than surrounds and infuses it. It now is relevant for yet another reason.
Bowie's BBC obit.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Friday, January 8, 2016
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Holidays in Innsbruck (THROWBACK POST, THIS HAPPENED 3 MONTHS AGO)
Oh yes, this one is way overdue. So late that it kind of falls into the "do it before it is pointless" zone. So here we are: Christmas with the cousins in Berlin and then retreating to the mountains of Austria for a week of exploring and seeing some friends from Italy.
After a few days in Berlin we hit the train south to Austria.
We spent the week in Tulfes at an inn run by a wonderful Swiss couple. We spent our days touring Innsbruck, nearby small towns of Hall and Wattenberg. Extensive hiking trails link the smaller towns up and down the valley so we got a chance to spend some time on those. Evenings we took over the tables in their quiet bar area and sat everyone down to a big table and family meal which worked out much better than cramming people into our kitchenette suite.
We also had time to spend with wonderful old friends Elena and Franco from Italy. One aspect of this was caravaning up and down the Innsbruck valley in their Zafira minivan, which provided a front row seat to occasionally spirited and entertaining Italian-style conversations. In many cases, the flavor of the interaction was that of a typical husband/wife chat about driving. It is of the type that has characterized nearly every relationship since the introduction of the internal combustion engine: Male driver makes wrong turn irrationally while female navigator scolds. Since Italian men are mostly beyond reproach when it comes to driving, this requires diverging viewpoints from other vehicle occupants to be communicated in an even more spirited manner.
I love Italians in that they have daily animated conversations that sound slightly dangerous. One way to temper the energy of the exchange is the use of fond words for each other. A good example is the word "Tesoro." It means "treasure" in Italian and is a term of endearment. Many times we heard how Franco is viewed as a treasure. Frequently his treasured status was communicated at high volume, usually as we missed another turn-off.
By the end of the week, the previously lovey-dovey term "Tesoro" seemed to be a little bit closer to "Blockhead." But this is just how things sound to our ears, which are not accustomed to such amazing exchanges.
(roughly translated from Italian)
We are driving down Autobahn and approaching clearly-marked exit.
Elena: Here comes our turn.
Franco: Are you sure?
E: Of course I am sure.
Driving down Autobahn and nearing the clearly-marked exit.
E: Here it is, get off here.
F: Here?
E: YES. Here!!
F: No, I think this just wraps around and backtracks.
E: No it does not Tesoro! Take this exit!!
F: The next one is the correct one.
Drive by the exit.
E: You missed the exit!! Why didn't you turn?
F: What, and hit that cow?
E: What cow? Tesoro, now we are lost forever!
Etc etc
This whole endeavor was a wonderful Christmas present from Rocky and Colleen, who have been structuring family trips since before husbands like Rucker and I even showed up. They have amazing energy to chase around the world and keep the grandkids entertained - this requires doing a lot of things that perhaps the older you get the less inclined you are to engage in. Like playing "leg ram" with Cody, who lines up at the other side of the room, lowers his head, and rushes at you to strike heavily into your thigh in hopes of knocking your legs out from under you. Or the getting up early to read to nickering children who are in a new exciting place and just want to rage against any authority figure. Or taking everyone ice skating and sitting outside freezing while the kids stumble around and crash into people.
These are wonderful memories to make for grandparents. The scale is quickly tipping though: as we get older the kids also get more dangerous and destructive. While I enjoy wrestling with them on the floor, it is more and more a good idea to do so with some sort of head protection. Also, wrapping yourself in blankets and pillows will help diffuse the blunt force trauma that results from two boys bending their will to a full-on tickle monster battle. They do not hold anything back no matter who they are working over. Outside of wrestling battles, there is the playing with/dropping of knives at mealtime, the general noise level (screeching, screaming up and down the Pension hallways) and screams of pain, real and imagined, that result from scrapes with cousins.
It is a lot for an adult to manage this, even sprightly adults. I believe that on this trip, the grandparents may have realized that in addition to grandkid memories and beautiful scenery, another potential outcome of these trips could be their untimely deaths. I think this myself sometimes when I get an unexpected knee to my temple during a wrestle match, or watch as Cody comes to join the wrestle melee gripping a long-tined steak carving fork, assuring me that he'll be super careful with it.
So this makes it all the more impressive, this thing that Nanny and Poppy do, tirelessly, for us.
Guest blogger Jay Boynton kept a trip journal when he was last in Innsbruck, at age 20 while backpacking around Europe. Unfortunately there are no photos from that trip that have survived due to my inability to understand shutter speeds with the camera I had at the time. But here are some comments from the 20 year-old pen on his first international eye-opening trip:
12 July 1990
The city is set right under the Nordkette Tyrolean Alps and thus is a very pretty area. I walked down Maria Theresia Strasse and gaped all the way - the same view was on a poster in the Irvin Language ab back at Miami University. Heavy, dude. My room was a hole in the wall with a sink. I dropped everything there except the camera and map and set out to explore Innsbruck.
Visited the Olympic Museum inside the Goldenes Dachl commemerating the 1964 & 1976 Olympic Games here. Hung out in the Altstadt, much better than Basel's or Zurich's, and then went up the StadtTurm for a view of the city, realizing again that the immense Nordkette really makes it.
Somewhere along the way I had lunch then took a bus to the cog railway, the railway to teh cable car, and the cable car to to the Seegrube station. Cows grazing all around stroll through the terrace that overlooks the city, their bells clanging away. I saw one approach thisi man who was enjoying the view. The cow looked right at him and "mooed" loudly. I laughed!
I hiked up the mountain from the cafe through more cows, then sat on a rock, took some pictures and reflected on the trip and life in general. Then I hiked up further than the cows, found some sort of a tower, climbed it, and took more pictures. All I could hear was the fresh Alpine wind and the cowbells. All was at peace.
Took the 8pm cable car back down the mountain for a pizza and beer at the base of the lift. I shared a car with a family with two kids, about 8 and 9. I thought wow this will be me in a few years. I will subject my family to Jay's European Vacation..I hope I don't become the average tourist with the video camera and the flower print shirt. That will suck if that happens.
Then I discovered that I missed the last cog railway down to the city by 40 minutes after my pizza and beer. So instead of hiking down the winding roads all the way back, I jumped the fence, scrambled through someone's backyard and lowered myself over the abutment onto the high degree slope of the incline rails. Off I went! I made it back to the town in 1/2 the time it would have taken otherwise!
Returning about 9:30pm I went back out to explore Innsbruck's nightlife in the Altstadt. Great place if you are with people but largely sucks by yourself. Sidewalk cafes and bars teem with people and many quiet sidestreets split off for endless strolling possibilities. For future reference, NEXT TIME HERE BRING WOMAN."
History Lesson!
So the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled this area for hundreds of years that the Habsburg family line persisted. It all came to an inglorious end in 1918 with their defeat at the end of WWI, as they joined the demise of two other family dynasties of the Hohenzollerns (Germany) and the Romanovs (Russia) in an event later referred to as the "Fall of Eagles." They all had eagles on their family crests.
But before all that, Habsburg Innsbruck sat at a trading crossroads about halfway between Verona and Munich. Traders coming over Brenner Pass from Italy came through the town and as a result it grew in influence. It was named capital of the Tyrol region in 1429 and saw further progress when emperor Maximilian I lived there in the late 1490's.
Walking through the churches and surviving 15th century buildings I was enchanted, as I was the first time I came here, by the onion domes on the churches set against the forbidding and beautiful mountain backdrops. It is easy to make the jump to thinking of this place back when it was all about swords and emperors and animal husbandry. The middle ages were not just dirty little villages limping along from one plague epidemic to the next...In certain places they were movie sets for the Lord of the Rings!
If you had to live in the Middle Ages, do it near the mountains where at least you can feel like you are in a movie set. (While you spend most of the year freezing your ass off since central heating is not really a "thing" yet.)
End of the week saw people scattering back over various horizons. We trained it to Munich. On the Austria - German border we saw no-nonsense German border police physically pulling unregistered refugees off our train in a case of racial profiling in the truest sense of the term! Lots of people are trying to sneak into Germany through Austria so they are hyper - aware. Germany is taking the lion's share of refugees seeking to come into Europe, but if you try to get in outside the typical channels, you are really asking for it. As we saw!
And with that, we rushed into 2016.
 |
| Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt Christmas Market |
 |
| Open carriage ride around town (our gift to the family). |
 |
| Christmas night: room full of presents yet kids prefer to crowd around a game on the iPad. |
After a few days in Berlin we hit the train south to Austria.
 |
| Saving up!! |
 |
| Hiking the Nordkette ridge above Innsbruck. Way above. |
 |
| From the town hall tower. |
We spent the week in Tulfes at an inn run by a wonderful Swiss couple. We spent our days touring Innsbruck, nearby small towns of Hall and Wattenberg. Extensive hiking trails link the smaller towns up and down the valley so we got a chance to spend some time on those. Evenings we took over the tables in their quiet bar area and sat everyone down to a big table and family meal which worked out much better than cramming people into our kitchenette suite.
 |
| Nordkette and Innsbruck from Bergisel, the Olympic Ski Jump |
 |
| Cousins and Luca in Hall's Altstadt |
 |
| Jay joins the Italians on the Stubaier Glacier for some turns |
 |
| Bergisel Olympic Ski Jump |
We also had time to spend with wonderful old friends Elena and Franco from Italy. One aspect of this was caravaning up and down the Innsbruck valley in their Zafira minivan, which provided a front row seat to occasionally spirited and entertaining Italian-style conversations. In many cases, the flavor of the interaction was that of a typical husband/wife chat about driving. It is of the type that has characterized nearly every relationship since the introduction of the internal combustion engine: Male driver makes wrong turn irrationally while female navigator scolds. Since Italian men are mostly beyond reproach when it comes to driving, this requires diverging viewpoints from other vehicle occupants to be communicated in an even more spirited manner.
I love Italians in that they have daily animated conversations that sound slightly dangerous. One way to temper the energy of the exchange is the use of fond words for each other. A good example is the word "Tesoro." It means "treasure" in Italian and is a term of endearment. Many times we heard how Franco is viewed as a treasure. Frequently his treasured status was communicated at high volume, usually as we missed another turn-off.
By the end of the week, the previously lovey-dovey term "Tesoro" seemed to be a little bit closer to "Blockhead." But this is just how things sound to our ears, which are not accustomed to such amazing exchanges.
(roughly translated from Italian)
We are driving down Autobahn and approaching clearly-marked exit.
Elena: Here comes our turn.
Franco: Are you sure?
E: Of course I am sure.
Driving down Autobahn and nearing the clearly-marked exit.
E: Here it is, get off here.
F: Here?
E: YES. Here!!
F: No, I think this just wraps around and backtracks.
E: No it does not Tesoro! Take this exit!!
F: The next one is the correct one.
Drive by the exit.
E: You missed the exit!! Why didn't you turn?
F: What, and hit that cow?
E: What cow? Tesoro, now we are lost forever!
Etc etc
These are wonderful memories to make for grandparents. The scale is quickly tipping though: as we get older the kids also get more dangerous and destructive. While I enjoy wrestling with them on the floor, it is more and more a good idea to do so with some sort of head protection. Also, wrapping yourself in blankets and pillows will help diffuse the blunt force trauma that results from two boys bending their will to a full-on tickle monster battle. They do not hold anything back no matter who they are working over. Outside of wrestling battles, there is the playing with/dropping of knives at mealtime, the general noise level (screeching, screaming up and down the Pension hallways) and screams of pain, real and imagined, that result from scrapes with cousins.
It is a lot for an adult to manage this, even sprightly adults. I believe that on this trip, the grandparents may have realized that in addition to grandkid memories and beautiful scenery, another potential outcome of these trips could be their untimely deaths. I think this myself sometimes when I get an unexpected knee to my temple during a wrestle match, or watch as Cody comes to join the wrestle melee gripping a long-tined steak carving fork, assuring me that he'll be super careful with it.
So this makes it all the more impressive, this thing that Nanny and Poppy do, tirelessly, for us.
Guest blogger Jay Boynton kept a trip journal when he was last in Innsbruck, at age 20 while backpacking around Europe. Unfortunately there are no photos from that trip that have survived due to my inability to understand shutter speeds with the camera I had at the time. But here are some comments from the 20 year-old pen on his first international eye-opening trip:
12 July 1990
The city is set right under the Nordkette Tyrolean Alps and thus is a very pretty area. I walked down Maria Theresia Strasse and gaped all the way - the same view was on a poster in the Irvin Language ab back at Miami University. Heavy, dude. My room was a hole in the wall with a sink. I dropped everything there except the camera and map and set out to explore Innsbruck.
Visited the Olympic Museum inside the Goldenes Dachl commemerating the 1964 & 1976 Olympic Games here. Hung out in the Altstadt, much better than Basel's or Zurich's, and then went up the StadtTurm for a view of the city, realizing again that the immense Nordkette really makes it.
Somewhere along the way I had lunch then took a bus to the cog railway, the railway to teh cable car, and the cable car to to the Seegrube station. Cows grazing all around stroll through the terrace that overlooks the city, their bells clanging away. I saw one approach thisi man who was enjoying the view. The cow looked right at him and "mooed" loudly. I laughed!
I hiked up the mountain from the cafe through more cows, then sat on a rock, took some pictures and reflected on the trip and life in general. Then I hiked up further than the cows, found some sort of a tower, climbed it, and took more pictures. All I could hear was the fresh Alpine wind and the cowbells. All was at peace.
Took the 8pm cable car back down the mountain for a pizza and beer at the base of the lift. I shared a car with a family with two kids, about 8 and 9. I thought wow this will be me in a few years. I will subject my family to Jay's European Vacation..I hope I don't become the average tourist with the video camera and the flower print shirt. That will suck if that happens.
Then I discovered that I missed the last cog railway down to the city by 40 minutes after my pizza and beer. So instead of hiking down the winding roads all the way back, I jumped the fence, scrambled through someone's backyard and lowered myself over the abutment onto the high degree slope of the incline rails. Off I went! I made it back to the town in 1/2 the time it would have taken otherwise!
Returning about 9:30pm I went back out to explore Innsbruck's nightlife in the Altstadt. Great place if you are with people but largely sucks by yourself. Sidewalk cafes and bars teem with people and many quiet sidestreets split off for endless strolling possibilities. For future reference, NEXT TIME HERE BRING WOMAN."
History Lesson!
So the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled this area for hundreds of years that the Habsburg family line persisted. It all came to an inglorious end in 1918 with their defeat at the end of WWI, as they joined the demise of two other family dynasties of the Hohenzollerns (Germany) and the Romanovs (Russia) in an event later referred to as the "Fall of Eagles." They all had eagles on their family crests.
But before all that, Habsburg Innsbruck sat at a trading crossroads about halfway between Verona and Munich. Traders coming over Brenner Pass from Italy came through the town and as a result it grew in influence. It was named capital of the Tyrol region in 1429 and saw further progress when emperor Maximilian I lived there in the late 1490's.
Walking through the churches and surviving 15th century buildings I was enchanted, as I was the first time I came here, by the onion domes on the churches set against the forbidding and beautiful mountain backdrops. It is easy to make the jump to thinking of this place back when it was all about swords and emperors and animal husbandry. The middle ages were not just dirty little villages limping along from one plague epidemic to the next...In certain places they were movie sets for the Lord of the Rings!
If you had to live in the Middle Ages, do it near the mountains where at least you can feel like you are in a movie set. (While you spend most of the year freezing your ass off since central heating is not really a "thing" yet.)
End of the week saw people scattering back over various horizons. We trained it to Munich. On the Austria - German border we saw no-nonsense German border police physically pulling unregistered refugees off our train in a case of racial profiling in the truest sense of the term! Lots of people are trying to sneak into Germany through Austria so they are hyper - aware. Germany is taking the lion's share of refugees seeking to come into Europe, but if you try to get in outside the typical channels, you are really asking for it. As we saw!
And with that, we rushed into 2016.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)