First week in Vienna

Theseus Temple Vienna

Votivkirche

We have been in Vienna for a week now.  We have a very nice apartment conveniently located near a subway stop and other public transport, and within comfortable walking range of our German classes.  It is not even uncomfortably far to walk downtown.  There are lots of grocery stores, restaurants and other shopping within a few blocks.  The apartment is two large rooms with high ceilings, on the inner courtyard of a five story building, so it is quite quiet, but there is also not much difference in the light between a cloudy day and a sunny one.  But, in fact, the weather has been quite pleasant, mostly in the 60s and occasionally in the 70s.  There have been a few light showers, but no long periods of rain.  

Mozart

Schubert and Beethoven memorials

The German classes take up a lot of our time right now.  Ron has classes in the morning.  There have only been 4 people in his class, but this week it will have 8.  My beginners’ class meets in the afternoon; 90 minutes of grammar and 90 minutes of conversation.  Last week we had 10 students – 3 Swiss, 2 Russians, 1 Czech, 1 Mexican, 1 Australian, and 1 English.  This week we lost one Swiss and the Czech and gained a Swiss, Greek, and American.  I feel like I am doing OK with the grammar, but it is still really hard to build up vocabulary.  

It is interesting to have to explore the city separately.  It is a good stretch for me.  We have both been

Brahms

tending to explore around by subway and tram and then on foot, but not to go into the museums yet, because we don’t really have time.  I have been going into churches, almost all of which have been interesting to some degree or another.  Ron has been seeking out memorials and statues to composers and writers.  We also sought out the Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten, which is looking all nicely cleaned up.  Vienna is a big city with around 3 million people, so it is larger than DC.  It is even more monumental, given its imperial history.  So even just looking at the outsides of buildings is interesting.

Mayer am Pfarrplatz heurige

This weekend we took a fun expedition to the other side of the city.  We are south of the city center, and we took a tram to the northern district of Heiligenstadt.  There we got on a bus to go up into the hills.  We were trying to find a particular heurige or wine restaurant.  We asked the bus driver if we were on the right bus to Pfarrplatz, and he said yes, but neglected to tell us that the stop was not called that.   We did not bother to consult our map.  It actually turned into one of those fortuitous travel adventures.  We drove on and on, through the town of Grinzing which is chock-a-block with quaint restaurants, and up to the top of the hill and the end of the line. We emerged to a spectacular view of Vienna, although the day was somewhat hazy/smoggy.  The whole area is a park with lots of hiking trails and even a farm petting zoo.  There was a very broad paved path which looked like it was a way to walk all the way back down into the city.  There were a couple of restaurants there with lots of outdoor seating.  One of them seemed to be having a festival to celebrate the new wine harvest.  I think the local radio station was there providing music and commentary.  The music, however, was 50s American country – friendly but odd.

Beethoven

Beethoven Haus

After wandering around for a bit and consulting our map carefully, we got back on a bus, and successfully found our restaurant, Mayer am Pfarrplatz.  They bottle their own wine, at least some of which is grown nearby.  They were also featuring the pumpkin harvest, so we had cream of pumpkin soup and pumpkin risotto for lunch, both very good.  Heiligenstadt used to be a distant suburb and had a mineral spring, so it was a place people went in the summer for their health, including Ludwig van Beethoven.  The restaurant claims he stayed there in 1817.  A half a block down the street is another building in which he may have stayed which has a few rooms converted into a museum.  It highlighted his Heiligenstadt Testimony, which is a despairing letter he wrote to his brothers about his health and growing deafness.  He talks about how he feels isolated from people who now think of him as grumpy and misanthropic.  Not only does he miss hearing birds singing, for instance, but it is also an embarrassing disability to have as a musician, even though he does in fact continue to write beautiful music.

Karlskirche

Karlskirche altar

Saturday evening we went to a performance of the Mozart Requiem in the Karlskirche, which is an amazing Rococo church downtown.  The wall behind the altar has a huge golden sunburst with Jesus ascending to heaven.  So the setting was spectacular.  The church also has an echo which lasted 2-3 seconds, which provides a dramatic close to the musical passages.  The chorus was 13 people including the four soloists.  The orchestra was small but quite adequate for the space.  All in all, a very satisfying experience.

Sunday afternoon we went on a tour given by the school of the Hapsburg palace area in the heart of the city.  We went around the outside of the complex and saw a number of things which we hadn’t caught ourselves yet, so it was well worth doing.  And we have a better idea of what to go back to.  The tour was in German.  She did a good job of speaking slowly and clearly, and since I have been reading some of the history, I could follow it a little, and Ron did some translating for me.

Lipizzaner Horse Stable

We have a number of musical performances planned and other sightseeing, so there will be more to write about later.

Schonbrunn Summer Palace

North Berwick

North Berwick

The street where we live

Bass Rock

We spent three days in North Berwick and the East Lothian area.  Our apartment was just around the corner from one of the two beaches.  North Berwick is right on the mouth of the Firth of Forth and the North Sea.  Most days you can see across to the other side of the Firth.  There are also several islands off the coast; the most prominent is Bass Rock because it rises very high out of the water and is very white.  It is a major gannet nesting site.  It and the other islands also provide nesting places for seals and many other seabirds, including puffins, but those had mostly gone by the time we were there.  NB’s main tourist site therefore is the Scottish Seabird Center, about 3 blocks away. Besides lots of information about the birds, they have interactive cameras stationed on 4 islands.  You can move the camera view around 360 degrees and zoom in and out, so you can get a really close up look at some of the birds, or zoom out for a broad view.  This is how we discovered that Bass Rock is not white from all the bird guano, but because it is packed with white gannets.  You can go for your own look-see at www.seabird.org.

North Berwick Law

Harbor

The town itself is a good looking prosperous community.  The High Street with most of the businesses stretches for 4 -5 blocks parallel to the beach.  It had a good variety of restaurants and pubs.  The harbor itself is very old, from the 13^th century, when it was a pilgrimage stop for people wanting to cross the Firth on their way to St. Andrew’s.  They were going to pray to the saint, but nowadays the pilgrimage is for golf.  There are many courses in the area and in 2014 the British Open will be nearby.  Walking around the town, we came across a half a dozen historic plaques to locals who became famous golfers.  The promontory that the harbor is on sets off the sweep of the two beaches on either side.  The other main feature of the town is a tall basalt hill just on the outskirts, called the Law.  This part of Scotland is full of these volcanic remnants, and these tall isolated hills are all called laws.  We did not climb it.

North Berwick in the 1300s

Tantallon Castle

To the south of NB, there were two places we went to: Tantallon Castle and the town of Dunbar.  Tantallon is a ruined castle on the coast just across from Bass Rock.  It is hard for the pictures to

Courtyard of Tantallon Castle

give you a real sense of the scale of the place.  Two walls rose 5 stories and had halls and rooms and battlements.  The inside courtyard was mostly open to the sea because they didn’t need battlements on that side.  It was built around 1350, and survived various sieges brought about by the lord’s shifting intrigues with
the royalty.  It was finally rendered uninhabitable by Cromwell’s army.  I knew Cromwell had invaded and devastated Ireland.  I didn’t realize he had done the same to Scotland.  We really enjoyed wandering around.

View from the heights

Tantallon Castle about 1500

John Muir birthpalce

John Muir statue

The town of Dunbar is a little further along the coast.  It also has an intriguing harbor and was once a very busy fishing port.  Its new claim to fame is as the birthplace of John Muir, one of the founders of the environmental movement.  He lived there until he was 11 when the family moved to Wisconsin.  Now the small building has been turned into a good exhibit on his life and work.  I was very impressed with his writing:  “Around my native town of Dunbar, I loved to wander … along the seashore … and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle, when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one.”  It is especially helpful to imagine this said in Muir’s Scottish accent.

Entrance to Dirleton Castle

Courtyard

To the west of NB we visited another ruined castle in Dirleton.  The oldest parts date to the 13^th century, but it went through two other building phases when different families inherited it through marriage.  It has very good signage with pictures of what it looked like before it was a ruin.  The most impressive parts here, and distinct from the other castle, were the huge kitchen and bakery with gigantic fireplaces and ovens.  Also there is a very nice chapel off the hall.  The dungeon is right under it.  It is smaller than Tantallon, but seemed like a much more pleasant place to live.  It was also destroyed by Cromwell.

Saturday September 22, we had an uneventful drive back to Glasgow, about an hour and a half, turned in our car, and flew off to Vienna via Heathrow airport.  We thoroughly enjoyed our two weeks in Great Britain.

Kitchen fireplace

Dirleton Castle in the 1500s

Edinburgh

Edinburgh skyline and train station

We spent three of our days in Edinburgh.  There is a very nice fast train that runs From North Berwick into the city centre.  The city is quite compact and easy to walk around.  The weather has continued to be cool, mostly in the 50s, with occasional drizzle.  Our first day, we started off walking up to the Castle, which is located on a basalt promontory called Castle Rock.  They recently had a big celebration in honor of the Queen’s Jubilee in the Esplanade in front of the Castle, and were in the process of removing the bleachers and stands, so some of the view was blocked. 

Edinburgh Castle

Oddly enough, we had just watched a rerun of the celebration on TV the night before.

The castle is huge and imposing, of course. The oldest portion dates to the 12^th century, but many portions are much newer.  We decided to just visit the forecourt and not pay to go inside as a lot of the exhibits seemed to focus on military history.

St. Giles High Kirk

We elected to spend our first day just walking around the city.  From the Castle, the main street of the Old Town proceeds for what is known as the Royal Mile to the Queen’s Palace of Holyrood.  It is full of lots of shops, tourist attractions, statues, old houses and narrow alleys.  The most magnificent building is the High Kirk of St. Giles, which we did go into.  Its central tower is very distinctive and different, like an open work crown.  There are many memorials to Scotland’s famous thinkers and writers.  We also asked them for directions to the Quaker Center, or at least the street it is on!

Arthur's Seat

The Royal Mile turns out to be, in fact, about a mile long, and mostly downhill the way we were going, so we did a lot of walking.  It ends at the Palace that the Queen uses when she comes to the capital.  The new Parliament buildings are right down there too.  It is a pretty good example of modern architecture.  Since Parliament was in session, they were not doing tours, and we also elected not to go into the Palace.  That end of town is dominated by another basalt cliff called Arthur’s Seat, and some other hills, all of which have stayed open land. 

Greyfriar's Bobby

We walked back up a street parallel to the Royal Mile, a much more normal business street, bordering on the University district.  We sought out a statue commemorating Greyfriar’s Bobby, a Skye Terrier who stayed by his master’s graveside for 14 years.  It reminded us of a similar dog statue in Wellington.  Wikipedia tells me that this is probably an urban myth.  Probably stray dogs found that graveyards were good places to hang out because people would feed and fuss over them.  People liked making up a story about a loyal dog, and the caretaker often found it to his advantage to play up the myth.

Quaker Center on Victoria Terrace

 We found the Quaker Centre on Victoria Terrace, which is a pedestrian balcony that runs above and alongside Victoria Street, which plunges downhill.  By the end of the terrace, you are two stories above the road.  We returned to Edinburgh on Wednesday to attend the midweek Meeting for Worship.  We first went up all the way to the third floor where the main Meeting Room is.  It is a magnificent setting high above the city, but it was also clear that it was not where the people were.  So we went down a floor to the library and found the group.  There were about 14 of us, and it was a very nice silent meeting.  We visited with a number of people afterwards, including a young man from Guilford College starting a year at Edinburgh University.  Just down at the end of the Terrace was the Scottish Genealogical Society.  We went in to see if I could find anything more about the first Bell that I know of, who is reputed to have been born in Scotland.  Unfortunately, no real luck, but the volunteer helping me was very nice.

Theseus Temple Vienna version

Wednesday before Meeting for Worship, we also went to find the Edinburgh version of the Temple of Hephaestus.  Part of the façade of the Old Royal Grammar School is based on this Temple, and we are collecting photos (see Penshaw monument recorded on the drive to Scotland).  We walked a bit around the New Town, which was built up as a new business district in the 19^th century.  Then we visited the Writer’s Museum, which is a small house off the Royal Mile dedicated to Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson.  I learned a lot.  Burns grew up in a farming family and was known as the plowman poet.  He was part of a revival of the Scottish language and culture.  Sir Walter Scott came about 12 years later and was the only one of the 3 to live a long life.  He is so revered by the Scots that there is a huge memorial to him in Edinburgh – a statue under a gothic spire as tall as most church spires.  He was the first English language novelist to receive great international recognition during his lifetime.  The train station in Edinburgh is named after his novel Waverley, supposedly the only station named after a novel.  It is nice that the city has at least as many statues of writers and philosophers as it does kings and generals.

The rest of our time in Edinburgh we spent in the National Museum - Wednesday afternoon and most of Thursday - looking at their exhibits on Scottish history and prehistory.  I also viewed their exhibit on Scottish geology.  I learned that Scotland and England mostly have been on different tectonic plates.  Until recently, Scotland was part of the North American plate, but when the Atlantic Ocean opened up, fairly recently geologically speaking, Scotland separated.  Then England banged into it and they have been uncomfortably  merged ever since.  Otherwise, Scotland’s geological history seemed pretty similar to the English history I had seen in Kendal, but these exhibits were much better done – really good clear fossils and dioramas in particular.  There was also lots of interesting information about the medieval and renaissance period and the nobility and the church.  We enjoyed it, but museums are also exhausting too.  It was always pleasant to come back to our small town and take a walk on the beach.

The drive to Scotland

Saturday September 15, a bright, clear, windy, and cool morning, we left our little cottage to drive to Scotland.  We chose to drive east through the Dales, which is also hilly country, but more rolling and less craggy than the Lakes.

Durham Catherdral

It is very much sheep country, with fewer trees as we headed east.  We were on a reasonably major road, so it felt wide enough not to panic every time a car or truck approached.  Our first goal was the town of Durham, which used to be a major power center in the north of England, but now is mostly a university town.  It was reasonably easy to drive into the town center and park.  The dominating feature is the Cathedral, which is huge and magnificent.  From early on, the bishops were the actual rulers of the area, not any earl or duke, and the bishop was known as the Prince Bishop. 

Durham Castle Tower

It was only a couple of hundred years ago that the crown officially regained administration over Durham.  St. Cuthbert is the patron saint buried in the Cathedral.  He brought Christianity to the North.  He is often pictured holding a king’s head because King Oswald’s head is also buried in the tomb.  I don’t know why.  The Venerable Bede, the 8^th Century chronicler of the early English church, is also buried there. 

Durham market square

The town also has a castle but there was a special event happening and we weren’t allowed in.  We were amazed to discover a La Tasca tapas restaurant to eat lunch in.  La Tasca is one of our favorite Rockville eateries.  We learned that La Tasca is a UK chain with over 50 locations here and fewer than 10 is the US.  We also were amused to come upon the market square which was quite busy on a Saturday with stalls and amusements.  A modern adaptation of a medieval activity.

Penshaw Monument 1

Our next stop was about 20 miles away to the Earl of Durham Memorial, more commonly known as the Penshaw monument.  High on a hill is a reproduction of the Temple of Hephaestus from Athens.  (It has sometimes been called the Theseus Temple, but that was an erroneous attribution.)  The temple in Athens is one of the best preserved, so it has been copied in many places.  We have a print at home of the reproduced Temple in Vienna, a lithograph created by August Julius Wetteroth in the 1850s. 

Penshaw Monument 2

He is a distant cousin of Ron.  We will also see a version of the temple in Edinburgh.  There is one in Dayton OH and Montpelier VT.

Now we continued up the A1 along the coast to our destination in North Berwick.  Along the way we could see the ruined monastery at Lindisfarne, where St. Cuthbert was prior and bishop.  It is a dramatic setting, but it was too late to drive over to see it.  Besides it is one of those places with a causeway to the island which is covered at high tide.

View from monument

We arrived at North Berwick (pronounced, we finally discovered, as berrick) about 5 o’clock, collected our key, found our apartment, and moved in, only to discover that the smoke detector was beeping every 30 seconds.  We walked back to the shop where we had collected the key and called the emergency number.  A human being answered and said they would fix the problem.  Then we walked on to the train station to check the schedule for Sunday because we wanted to go into Edinburgh for Meeting for Worship.  We found that the first train was at 12:30 while meeting was at 10:30.  Not auspicious beginnings!  However, when we got back to the apartment, the maintenance man was there and he replaced the alarm battery and turned on the heat and hot water.  So things began to look up.  We also figured this gave us an excuse to go out to dinner at the Indian restaurant we had passed on the High Street.

Earl of Durham plaque