Spring break visit

S had a conference in Munich in early march, so we took advantage of cheap airfares and spring break and visited the family abode together. I'd heard tell of the crocuses that bloom in the yard in the spring, but this was the first time I'd gotten to see them in person.

Spring snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) and common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) were also blooming  all across Bavaria. 

Some highlights:

Friday 3/13: The obligatory first-day hike to Herrsching, to get out in the sun and reset the circadian clocks:

A story waiting for a separate post: the life-saver without a boat in the Busgarage without a bus...

Saturday: Obligatory walk to Andechs (can you spot it in the distance on the ridge line to the right of the road?)

Bavaria is not known for whiskey, but there's a distillery on our favorite route to Andechs. A few years ago, as we walked by on our obligatory walk to Andechs, it occurred to us to knock, and we ended up buying a tasty honey-whiskey liqueur. This year we were hoping to replenish our supply, and wouldn't you know it, when we were about a quarter of a mile away, a distillery van drove past us and parked in the distillery driveway; and when we were about 250 feet away, the van started to pull out of the driveway--so I ran ahead, and asked if we might make a quick purchase. The owner was happy to oblige; he only happened to be there because he'd had to feed the sheep.

Speaking of speaking German, that's another topic for another post...  

At Andechs, we tanked up on Obazda and Brez'n. No daikon, because it wasn't in season yet.

Sunday: trip into Munich for the last day of the "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" exhibit at the Museum Mensch und Natur. In addition to the fancypants glowing images of the official show, the museum had an adjacent print exhibit of work by German kids that was just as entertaining and easier on the eyes... 

The government subsidized Deutschland Ticket, which covers all ground-based mass transit except fast-speed rail, has gone up in price again to €63. This is still a steal, but we felt a need to take advantage of it. So on Monday, we took a train to Donauwörth and hiked along the Romantische Straße to Harburg. We had both forgotten that we'd actually been to Donauwörth previously--in 2023, with E and A, on our way to Solnhofen to go fossil digging--which just goes to show that if I don't blog about it, it's like it never happened... Probably says something about the Romantische Straße that the most interesting photo I took was this one:

Tuesday: Since the Alps are only 1.5 - 2 hours away by train and the weather was good, S decided to go skiing on Tuesday. I rode the train south with him, got off in Oberau, and hiked to Kloster Ettal and then to Schloss Linderhof. The day began with Nebelmeer in Steinebach... 

...then brilliant sunshine in Ettal...

...and Linderhof, where the garden was all boxed up against the winter elements.

Wednesday: Did I mention that we had Covid? I caught it in the U.S. shortly before our trip, and then S caught it. We would have assumed it was just a cold had it not included a low-grade fever. This iteration was much more tolerable than the first time we had it, but it meant delaying visiting 103-yr-old Tante P until we were reasonably confident we weren't still contagious. We took mass transit to FFB to attend to some international tax law questions, then mass transit to Zankenhausen to visit P; and then we walked home.

Thursday: We walked to Etterschlag for lunch with family, then walked to Weßling for a sneak peek at a long-lost family artifact (subject for another blog post).

Friday: By the time S had figured out his conference was going to be in Munich instead of the usual Utah, the family abode had already been AirBnB-ed for one of the weekends of our stay. This motivated us to rent a car for that weekend and drive to Zurich to hear Cecilia Bartoli, Anna Sophie von Otter, and not one, not two, but THREE countertenors (including stand-out Kangmin Justin Kim) singing Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Zurich opera. 

Saturday: We spent a rainy morning in Zurich at the Kunsthaus, where this Picasso face reminded me of the Geefle.

Snow was falling by the time we headed north to Konstanz, where neither of us had ever been, and where hotels cost way less than in Zurich.

Sunday: We set out for a morning constitutional, then decided what the heck, let's walk to Mainau, the "flower island" in the Bodensee north of Konstanz, where we appreciated the off-season price and off-season non-crowds.

Highlights included the butterfly house...

...and a walk through the arboretum and sculpture gardens.

For the past 25 years or so, we've had a postcard from the Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie hanging in our downstairs bathroom. It depicts Gustav Eberlein's 1879 marble copy of the Hellenistic-Roman bronze Lo Spinario. In the 19th century, it was a popular work to copy in bronze--presumably before Eberlein copied it in marble--so it was nice to see one of those copies on Mainau.  

We took a bus back to Konstanz's Altstadt...

...before driving back to Steinebach.

At about 11:30 p.m., United Airlines texted to say "storms! On the East Coast! We're waiving rescheduling fees!", which I thought meant "you'll be stuck in airports all day/night if you try to fly home tomorrow," so I delayed flying home by a day. This meant missing a class I was supposed to teach at Claymakers, but it also meant that after I got off the phone with United's customer service line at 1:00 a.m., I was awake at 1:15 when S went into the kitchen and there was a loud bang followed by much cursing. Apparently the oil stove that heats the house hadn't been properly maintained in, oh, probably a few years, and the soot exploded. We were glad it happened while we were there instead of when renters were there, and glad no one was hurt. We did some preliminary cleaning, then went to bed.

Monday: S went to his conference, and I went to Edeka to get a refill of this fabulous cleaner:

...and then ran a few loads of dishes and systematically wiped as much soot off of things as I could. When S came home, he vacuumed some of the shelves that needed dead bugs vacuumed before cleaning. The kitchen ended up cleaner than it had been in years, and S found someone to fix the stove later that week.

The flight home was much less exciting...

Wien, continued

One of my favorite scenes from the Belvedere in Vienna. How times have changed...

Day 3, July 11: The Belvedere grounds and upper palace, the Justiz Palast, the Kunsthistoriches Museum, and the Wiener Staatsoper.

We walked from our Pension through the not-quite-yet open Naschmarkt...

...past the Karlskirche again...

...past the 1945 Soviet war memorial...

...with graffiti memorializing Alexei Navalny...

...to the not-quite-yet open lower Belvedere palace, with artwork in front by Urbana IL native Dan Graham.

Round and Around, 2019

We had breakfast across the street while we waited for the museums to open.

Given that the gardeners are now lawn-Roombas, it's no wonder that some of the shrubbery was trimmed...

...and some was not.

From afar, the upper Belvedere appears majestic...

...but close up, we saw the entire front was covered with a printed plastic image of itself for renovations. I was an impressive cover up!

We explored the art museum in the upper palace. Here's a photo of tourists doing what I would have been doing had there not been so many tourists.

Some of the character busts by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt:

Some of the ceilings were art too:

The medieval religious art in the upper Belvedere palace demonstrated that while Verona artists were still dabbling in smiley and frowny faces, the Viennese artists (or at least collectors) were a zillion skill sets ahead. Presumably that's what these folks were reading about on the cell phones: 

The Belvedere grounds are guarded by a dozen sphinxes.

After visiting the Belvedere, we swung by the Justiz Palast to admire the beautiful interior architecture.

They had an exhibit on the administration of justice--and the lack thereof--for war criminals in Austria and Germany following WW2. Some successes, lots of failures. 

Because it was stinky hot outside, we continued to tank up on museums. Given the choice between seeing the ~29,500 year old Venus of Willendorf at the imposing Natural History Museum vs. the Arcimboldo fruit and veggie portraits across the imposing Maria-Theresien-Platz at the equally imposing Kunsthistorisches Museum, we opted for the latter.    

In theory, the Egyptian antiquities in the extensive collection were purchased, not stolen.

Likewise this lion from the Babylonian Gate:

We actually laughed out loud when we turned the corner on the stairs and saw this view. More grandeur than we had already come to expect.

One of the snazziest cafes in Vienna is in the museum. Having already shelled out an astonishing 40E for coffee and cake at famous Cafe Demel the day before, we passed.

Arcimboldos:

One of my favorite curatorial decisions was this trio of adjacently hung Salome-with-John's-head-on-a-platter. Compare and contrast.  

From there, it was back to the Pension to shower and dress for a second night at the opera. 

Our seats weren't quite as good this time, but on the bright side, we sat in the correct seats.

Day 4, July 12: Taking things down a notch in the burbs.

Overwhelmed by the intensity of all-gorgeous-all-the-time, we took a train out to the suburb Ottakring on our final morning there, as friends had recommended visiting the 1907 Kirche am Steinhof, a Jugendstil church designed by Otto Wagner, mainly to be used patients at the adjoining hospital complex. The church was intentionally designed to accommodate the needs of patients with physical and mental disabilities: no sharp protrusions on the pews, a sloping floor so those in the back could see more easily, a holy-water system to reduce the spread of germs (although ultimately rejected by church officials). After the German annexation of Austria, many of the adult patients were sent to concentration camps, and young patients quickly filled their places. During WWII, 739 children were tortured and murdered in the children's ward of the hospital. The hospital grounds now include a memorial, and the hospital is still in operation.

Memorial. The posts represent euthanized children; each has a light on top.

The church:

Afterward, we decided to walk all the way to the main summer residence of the Habsburg rulers, Schloss Schoenbrunn, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. En route, it occurred to us that we might be near the Manner Waffel factory--and indeed we were, but the interwebs said they didn't offer tours.

The face of disappointment

We also passed this building. It was another very hot day, but we didn't stop because a place that can't spell "popsicle" correctly surely isn't a place to eat one.

Here we are, at last, on the grounds of Schoenbrunn, admiring the Palm House...

...and the castle...

...and the Gloriette up on the hill. Of course we had to walk up...

From the Gloriette, looking back down toward Vienna, we observed that the Gloriette and the palace aligned with a long road back toward town, but we couldn't quite make out why the road curved. So of course, we walked down, all the way to the curve in the road, to find out, and learned there wasn't any obvious reason.

Having barely used our mass-transit passes, we hopped on a train back to our Pension and then took another walk to kill time before heading to the train station.

Before heading out, we stopped (for the second time in three days) at the best gelato spot in Vienna, which just happened to be a block from our Pension.

After three sweltering days in Vienna, clouds and cooler air swept in as we waited for our evening train. Thunderstorms followed us to Salzburg and onward to Bayern (cuz typisches Bayrisches Sommerwetter), where storms and accidents elsewhere on the tracks caused delays. Eventually, our train backed up and dumped everyone out in Rosenheim, where assorted other trains were also dumping folks, with no information about whether any trains would be running to Munich that night.

When life gives you late-night lemons, musicians make lemonade:

Eventually a train showed up to take a circuitous route to Munich, and everyone crammed in.

Here's a photo of S ~1:00 a.m. waiting for the S8. "Where'd you get the fan?", someone asked. "Vienna!" he replied (because it was 95oF in the shade every day, and even high-ceilinged thick-walled Pensionen get hot). Not the answer anyone in rainy Bayern expected that night. 

We watched the mice skittering around on the platform while men peed on the tracks (the latter being the consequence of charging Euro-less people a Euro to use the restrooms in the train station) until the S8 arrived to take us back to Steinebach.