Typing this quickly in an internet cafe in Munich, waiting for a sleeper train to Paris, then on to Bayeux to see the William and Harold tapestry. I have wanted to see it ever since I was 11, and overdosed on History of Britain. (Who could blame me, really? Simon Schama is awesome. What d'you mean, you've never heard of him?!)
Anyway, the main purpose of this update is to let you know (if you're still battling on, trying to follow this convoluted and much-neglected blog)... that I'm going to be offline for a fortnight at the very least, with no chance of updating here. Still, the balance is that I'll be in Brittany (rural France), and spending a week of downtime. I'm hoping to use this time to catch up with all the writing I have missed or only taken notes for. That's a big chunk that covers the south of England, Amsterdam, Norway, and then Berlin and Prague.
So I'll be even more silent for a while... but then I'll swamp this blog with updated posts. Be warned... and be well!
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Vienna
(From now on, in an effort to actually appear at all relevant... I'm going to work backwards to catch up on what I've missed, instead of working forwards. Cami and Pat pointed this out to me, and it makes a lot more sense than what I've been doing! 'Tis up to you whether you have the patience to check back for older posts - Norway, Germany...)
German word of the day: schmetterling = "butterfly".
We rose late this morning, and dad and I consulted maps over breakfast. Meanwhile, mum looked up the slew of museums she was interested in, to figure out where to find them all. It's a very neat system in Vienna: practically every museum in the city is located on or around the same huge block.
Mum's list read thus: the Silverkammer, the Sisi museum, the Imperial State apartments, and the Schatzkammer (the Imperial treasury). Four museums in one day, which she really enjoyed, and which breaks our Berlin record. Pip and dad decided they'd quite like a restful day, so they decided upon seeing the Butterfly Garden and then spending the rest of the day in our flat. I liked the idea of seeing the Butterfly Garden, but I had also put 2 and 2 together (it makes 5) and remembered that the artist Egon Schiele had been Austrian. Sure enough, the guidebook in our flat told me the largest collection of his work was held in the Leopold museum, only a few blocks away.
We set out together and reached the Hofburg, where mum departed to find her cluster of exhibits. The rest of us found the butterfly garden nearby, which turns out to be housed in a beautiful art-noveau glasshouse. We found the entrance after a bit of deliberation, and our camera lenses and glasses steamed up the moment we stepped inside. The interior is stuffed full of tropical trees and shrubs and creepers, with a pond built in the center and a walkway overhead designed to look like a half-fallen tree. The feeding stations for the butterflies are artificial flowers that get sprayed with honey each morning, but there are also hundreds of different breeds of real orchids blossoming all around the room. There are glass cases along the walls filled with chrysalises hung on sticks, some of them just-hatched, the butterflies hanging upside down to let their new wings dry out. There are dozens of little quail scurrying around the floor of the faux-jungle, and bronze statues of someone's idea of "native people" hidden in the greenery. It's quirky, but the effect is quite spectacular under the glass-and-metal roof. High up on the walls are plaster sculptures of gorgons and things; totally incongruous. I wondered if the building had been designed for something else, originally.
There weren't an awful lot of the insects to be seen, but at a guess I'd say they breed more of them in summer, when most tourists come. The main type on show, and the most conspicuous butterflies were those beautiful iridescent black-and-blue ones... that Pip tells me aren't actually Ulysses because their "tails" were wrong... but they were captivating nonetheless.
We spent about an hour there, and then I left dad and Pip, and struck out for the "MuseumsQuartier" on my own. I had a map with me that I'd sketched out roughly that morning, showing me how to get to the Leopold, and how to get back "home" in the afternoon.
The building itself is quite striking from the outside. It was only built as recently as 2001, and it is basically a giant white cube with a few windows dotting the sides. I went in, and discovered that while the outside looks good, the inside is hellishly confusing. You deposit your coat around a corner before buying your ticket... then enter the museum-proper to buy your audioguide from a different desk around the corner... and then have to go up to a different level to find the loo. The way the stairs are designed means that you have to stride through two or three dislocated rooms per level to find the stairs that'll take you up one level further. The closest thing to a map you can get at the info desk is a list of who's work is shown on each level; it's like they're guarding the secret of the floorplan. No photos, no coats, no bags, no sideways looks. I've no idea whether it's the desired effect, but the gallery's architecture and general atmosphere leaves you in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate Schiele's paintings: alienated and confused. Hmm. Clever?
I would have had lunch before venturing into the exhibitions, but the cafe was veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and I decided I really wasn't that hungry any more. Back down the stairs I went, to the floor where Egon Schiele's name was listed.
His paintings were more amazing in the original than I had anticipated. I had been intrigued by the reproductions I had seen, and come to know his art by, but up close... the colours are so vivid, and his lines are so incredibly precise. The first room I entered showed his early works, mostly landscapes - with dilapidated old buildings drawn without any straight lines, and painted with watered-down oils so that it looks like every wall is damp and mildewed. The only bright colours are he used are painted along the washing lines. His trees look like bowed-down people.
Further on, there was a sizeable collection of the paintings he's famous for: his nude figures and self-portraits. At this point, anyone who's reading my blog and has firm ideas about nudity and eroticism being improper... had better skip the rest of this post. If you read on you may injure yourself, and the links aren't "safe for work".
The reason I have been captivated by Schiele's figures since I came across them is their full-on intensity. Not a single person he painted is ever "idealised", and the most contorted and ugly of all his paintings are his self-portraits. He is wholly unflattering. Angles replace curves; arms and legs get pushed and pulled all over the place. Every line is placed as though it were on a split-second whim, and yet the anatomy is perfect every time. He painted skin in purples and greens and poison-yellows, and yet it's still, convincingly, skin. Egon Schiele's figures are emaciated, or they bulge and blush in all the most embarrassing places... and their faces are coy or painfully self-conscious or even wildly angry... and yet they're so much more "real" than people painted by other artists. I've been a prude before, and some of his paintings can still make me wince... but it's precisely the fact that his art is so uncompromising that makes me admire it. I suspect the man himself was a total nutter (angry - egotistical - terrified by but driven almost entirely by sex and death). If his uncle had succeeded in dissuading him from art, I wonder whether his next choice of outlet would have been homicide or raving lunacy. But he was brave. Or maybe just arrogant.
They were displaying his 1910 Nude Self Portrait, which I'd seen reproduced before. It's a lot bigger than I had thought, and the colours more vibrant. It's also very hard to look at, in the original; those violent red genitals and those crazed eyes. It is entirely unsettling, and incredibly powerful.
On the opposite wall was a painting I didn't remember seeing before, called "The Hermits". It shows two men wearing black clothes and draped around each other in such a way that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. My audioguide pointed out that their faces were likenesses of Schiele, and his artistic idol Gustav Klimt (you know him: he painted THIS). Klimt is shown with his eyes closed, and as though he were resting on Schiele's shoulders. Schiele's eyes, on the other hand, are wide-open and angry... and as far as I could tell, the garland he's wearing is a ring of thistles. There's a lone rosebush painted in the background, and it's all wilted and dry. I was fascinated by the picture; it seemed so totally arrogant in its assumptions about Klimt and its declarations about Schiele's own originality... and at the same time, the artist seemed so totally terrified by his own brilliance. I gather Schiele painted it in one go, in a towering mood, and refused to change it in any way, ever again; to him it was painted totally "in the moment". After seeing this painting, I begin to understand the whole idea of expressionism. Makes me wish fervently that I could put that much feeling into my own pictures - but then I think, "at what price"?
There were lots of other paintings that amazed me, and one or two that appalled me. Judging by his paintings, he seems to have had a real fear of female sexuality before he married... and a kind of scorn for it afterwards. The earlier pictures of women have malevolent, angry expressions and lewd poses; the later pictures of women have homogenous faces, and look more like objects than individual people. He painted a lot of scenes of mothers with children; most of the mothers portrayed are either dead, inhuman, or blind. I can't help but feel that this is a man who had seriously disturbing psychological issues; but even in the midst of being disturbed by many of his subjects, I'm awed by his creativity and freedom of expression. Mind you, that got him into trouble, as well. He was accused and then found not-guilty of "sexual impropriety with a minor" or somesuch wording; and when that charge was dropped, he was sentenced to three days in prison on charges of obscenity. Somehow, the second charge seems to have honestly surprised him...
Well. Mixed as my feelings are, my conclusion is that I like his art. And I certainly got a lot of thinking done in that exhibition. Before I returned to our apartment, I also headed upstairs to see what the museum had of Klimt's work. "The Kiss" is hung elsewhere, but I saw his "Life and Death", which is beautiful up close. I also came across a very sad story about Klimt's early work. You see, there was a lovely (though tiny) painting of a girl in a lace dress hanging on one wall, painted so realistically I had assumed it was a photograph. Turns out it was instead an example of Klimt's early work, long before the decorative, gold-leaf style everyone recognises now. When Klimt was just becoming popular for this traditional, idealised style, he and another artist were offered a commission by the Vienna university. They were to paint allegories of philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine for the uni's faculty ceilings.
Klimt set to work, and had a sort of artistic revelation halfway through his preparatory sketches. Suddenly he had abandoned the traditional, acceptable style he'd become known for, and began painting his nude figures like real people - old as well as young; at different stages of health; some pregnant. He filled space with dozens of figures painted this way, his brushstrokes almost impressionistic across their skin, their poses strange and energetic. He started filling the gaps with the spirals and golden patterns everyone recognises from his later work.
And when he was finished, and presented the paintings... a group of 87 professors from the uni signed a petition demanding that the shockingly non-traditional works not be displayed. When the higher-ups argued, the debate went public. Tens of thousands of people came to see the modern, "ugly" paintings. Newspapers accused Klimt of deliberately trying to provoke people, and made nasty comments speculating whether anything uglier had ever been painted. In desperation, Klimt bought back the paintings, and didn't exhibit anything publicly for the next 5 years. I can't think of anything that would be so soul-crushing to a painter who truly thought his developments would be appreciated by the public. The paintings were eventually destroyed in a fire on the last day of World War 1; it's like a last jarring twist in the whole painful story. All that is left of the works are black and white photos.
So. Austrian art history is a mix of amazing, upsetting, and inspiring. For all of Schiele's personality quirks and flaws, and Klimt's unacceptability among the public of his day, the two have become Austrian national artistic heroes. There is a lot of speculation in this museum about "what might have been" if Schiele had lived past 28... or if Klimt hadn't been so crushed by the public scandal his art provoked. But I kinda suspect the element of mystery is part of the artist's appeal. I mean, poor Schiele watched his pregnant wife die of the Spanish influenza, and succumbed to the same disease three days later. If that kind of personal tragedy hadn't occurred, and he'd painted on into his old age, would his intensity have burned out? Would his work have become unfashionable?
I have rambled; all depart!
German word of the day: schmetterling = "butterfly".
We rose late this morning, and dad and I consulted maps over breakfast. Meanwhile, mum looked up the slew of museums she was interested in, to figure out where to find them all. It's a very neat system in Vienna: practically every museum in the city is located on or around the same huge block.
Mum's list read thus: the Silverkammer, the Sisi museum, the Imperial State apartments, and the Schatzkammer (the Imperial treasury). Four museums in one day, which she really enjoyed, and which breaks our Berlin record. Pip and dad decided they'd quite like a restful day, so they decided upon seeing the Butterfly Garden and then spending the rest of the day in our flat. I liked the idea of seeing the Butterfly Garden, but I had also put 2 and 2 together (it makes 5) and remembered that the artist Egon Schiele had been Austrian. Sure enough, the guidebook in our flat told me the largest collection of his work was held in the Leopold museum, only a few blocks away.
We set out together and reached the Hofburg, where mum departed to find her cluster of exhibits. The rest of us found the butterfly garden nearby, which turns out to be housed in a beautiful art-noveau glasshouse. We found the entrance after a bit of deliberation, and our camera lenses and glasses steamed up the moment we stepped inside. The interior is stuffed full of tropical trees and shrubs and creepers, with a pond built in the center and a walkway overhead designed to look like a half-fallen tree. The feeding stations for the butterflies are artificial flowers that get sprayed with honey each morning, but there are also hundreds of different breeds of real orchids blossoming all around the room. There are glass cases along the walls filled with chrysalises hung on sticks, some of them just-hatched, the butterflies hanging upside down to let their new wings dry out. There are dozens of little quail scurrying around the floor of the faux-jungle, and bronze statues of someone's idea of "native people" hidden in the greenery. It's quirky, but the effect is quite spectacular under the glass-and-metal roof. High up on the walls are plaster sculptures of gorgons and things; totally incongruous. I wondered if the building had been designed for something else, originally.
There weren't an awful lot of the insects to be seen, but at a guess I'd say they breed more of them in summer, when most tourists come. The main type on show, and the most conspicuous butterflies were those beautiful iridescent black-and-blue ones... that Pip tells me aren't actually Ulysses because their "tails" were wrong... but they were captivating nonetheless.
We spent about an hour there, and then I left dad and Pip, and struck out for the "MuseumsQuartier" on my own. I had a map with me that I'd sketched out roughly that morning, showing me how to get to the Leopold, and how to get back "home" in the afternoon.
The building itself is quite striking from the outside. It was only built as recently as 2001, and it is basically a giant white cube with a few windows dotting the sides. I went in, and discovered that while the outside looks good, the inside is hellishly confusing. You deposit your coat around a corner before buying your ticket... then enter the museum-proper to buy your audioguide from a different desk around the corner... and then have to go up to a different level to find the loo. The way the stairs are designed means that you have to stride through two or three dislocated rooms per level to find the stairs that'll take you up one level further. The closest thing to a map you can get at the info desk is a list of who's work is shown on each level; it's like they're guarding the secret of the floorplan. No photos, no coats, no bags, no sideways looks. I've no idea whether it's the desired effect, but the gallery's architecture and general atmosphere leaves you in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate Schiele's paintings: alienated and confused. Hmm. Clever?
I would have had lunch before venturing into the exhibitions, but the cafe was veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and I decided I really wasn't that hungry any more. Back down the stairs I went, to the floor where Egon Schiele's name was listed.
His paintings were more amazing in the original than I had anticipated. I had been intrigued by the reproductions I had seen, and come to know his art by, but up close... the colours are so vivid, and his lines are so incredibly precise. The first room I entered showed his early works, mostly landscapes - with dilapidated old buildings drawn without any straight lines, and painted with watered-down oils so that it looks like every wall is damp and mildewed. The only bright colours are he used are painted along the washing lines. His trees look like bowed-down people.
Further on, there was a sizeable collection of the paintings he's famous for: his nude figures and self-portraits. At this point, anyone who's reading my blog and has firm ideas about nudity and eroticism being improper... had better skip the rest of this post. If you read on you may injure yourself, and the links aren't "safe for work".
The reason I have been captivated by Schiele's figures since I came across them is their full-on intensity. Not a single person he painted is ever "idealised", and the most contorted and ugly of all his paintings are his self-portraits. He is wholly unflattering. Angles replace curves; arms and legs get pushed and pulled all over the place. Every line is placed as though it were on a split-second whim, and yet the anatomy is perfect every time. He painted skin in purples and greens and poison-yellows, and yet it's still, convincingly, skin. Egon Schiele's figures are emaciated, or they bulge and blush in all the most embarrassing places... and their faces are coy or painfully self-conscious or even wildly angry... and yet they're so much more "real" than people painted by other artists. I've been a prude before, and some of his paintings can still make me wince... but it's precisely the fact that his art is so uncompromising that makes me admire it. I suspect the man himself was a total nutter (angry - egotistical - terrified by but driven almost entirely by sex and death). If his uncle had succeeded in dissuading him from art, I wonder whether his next choice of outlet would have been homicide or raving lunacy. But he was brave. Or maybe just arrogant.
They were displaying his 1910 Nude Self Portrait, which I'd seen reproduced before. It's a lot bigger than I had thought, and the colours more vibrant. It's also very hard to look at, in the original; those violent red genitals and those crazed eyes. It is entirely unsettling, and incredibly powerful.
On the opposite wall was a painting I didn't remember seeing before, called "The Hermits". It shows two men wearing black clothes and draped around each other in such a way that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. My audioguide pointed out that their faces were likenesses of Schiele, and his artistic idol Gustav Klimt (you know him: he painted THIS). Klimt is shown with his eyes closed, and as though he were resting on Schiele's shoulders. Schiele's eyes, on the other hand, are wide-open and angry... and as far as I could tell, the garland he's wearing is a ring of thistles. There's a lone rosebush painted in the background, and it's all wilted and dry. I was fascinated by the picture; it seemed so totally arrogant in its assumptions about Klimt and its declarations about Schiele's own originality... and at the same time, the artist seemed so totally terrified by his own brilliance. I gather Schiele painted it in one go, in a towering mood, and refused to change it in any way, ever again; to him it was painted totally "in the moment". After seeing this painting, I begin to understand the whole idea of expressionism. Makes me wish fervently that I could put that much feeling into my own pictures - but then I think, "at what price"?
There were lots of other paintings that amazed me, and one or two that appalled me. Judging by his paintings, he seems to have had a real fear of female sexuality before he married... and a kind of scorn for it afterwards. The earlier pictures of women have malevolent, angry expressions and lewd poses; the later pictures of women have homogenous faces, and look more like objects than individual people. He painted a lot of scenes of mothers with children; most of the mothers portrayed are either dead, inhuman, or blind. I can't help but feel that this is a man who had seriously disturbing psychological issues; but even in the midst of being disturbed by many of his subjects, I'm awed by his creativity and freedom of expression. Mind you, that got him into trouble, as well. He was accused and then found not-guilty of "sexual impropriety with a minor" or somesuch wording; and when that charge was dropped, he was sentenced to three days in prison on charges of obscenity. Somehow, the second charge seems to have honestly surprised him...
Well. Mixed as my feelings are, my conclusion is that I like his art. And I certainly got a lot of thinking done in that exhibition. Before I returned to our apartment, I also headed upstairs to see what the museum had of Klimt's work. "The Kiss" is hung elsewhere, but I saw his "Life and Death", which is beautiful up close. I also came across a very sad story about Klimt's early work. You see, there was a lovely (though tiny) painting of a girl in a lace dress hanging on one wall, painted so realistically I had assumed it was a photograph. Turns out it was instead an example of Klimt's early work, long before the decorative, gold-leaf style everyone recognises now. When Klimt was just becoming popular for this traditional, idealised style, he and another artist were offered a commission by the Vienna university. They were to paint allegories of philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine for the uni's faculty ceilings.
Klimt set to work, and had a sort of artistic revelation halfway through his preparatory sketches. Suddenly he had abandoned the traditional, acceptable style he'd become known for, and began painting his nude figures like real people - old as well as young; at different stages of health; some pregnant. He filled space with dozens of figures painted this way, his brushstrokes almost impressionistic across their skin, their poses strange and energetic. He started filling the gaps with the spirals and golden patterns everyone recognises from his later work.
And when he was finished, and presented the paintings... a group of 87 professors from the uni signed a petition demanding that the shockingly non-traditional works not be displayed. When the higher-ups argued, the debate went public. Tens of thousands of people came to see the modern, "ugly" paintings. Newspapers accused Klimt of deliberately trying to provoke people, and made nasty comments speculating whether anything uglier had ever been painted. In desperation, Klimt bought back the paintings, and didn't exhibit anything publicly for the next 5 years. I can't think of anything that would be so soul-crushing to a painter who truly thought his developments would be appreciated by the public. The paintings were eventually destroyed in a fire on the last day of World War 1; it's like a last jarring twist in the whole painful story. All that is left of the works are black and white photos.
So. Austrian art history is a mix of amazing, upsetting, and inspiring. For all of Schiele's personality quirks and flaws, and Klimt's unacceptability among the public of his day, the two have become Austrian national artistic heroes. There is a lot of speculation in this museum about "what might have been" if Schiele had lived past 28... or if Klimt hadn't been so crushed by the public scandal his art provoked. But I kinda suspect the element of mystery is part of the artist's appeal. I mean, poor Schiele watched his pregnant wife die of the Spanish influenza, and succumbed to the same disease three days later. If that kind of personal tragedy hadn't occurred, and he'd painted on into his old age, would his intensity have burned out? Would his work have become unfashionable?
I have rambled; all depart!
Monday, December 22, 2008
Prague to Vienna
German phrase of the day: g'spritz = "with bubbles in".
Got up very early this morning, so as to have plenty of time to pack - and then found I'd overdone the earliness. As I was sitting around wondering what to do, I got a message from Pat to say that his first ever show on internet radio was due to start in a few hours. He's been asked to DJ for www.party934.com for a few hours each week, because the American "graveyard shift" is actually an ideal time for an Australian to be awake and broadcasting.
On realising groggily what his message meant by "first show", I got almost as nervous and excited as he sounded. Unfortunately, he was due on-air just as we were due to be out the door and walking to the station for our train to Vienna. I fenagled a little bit of extra time from my family so as to be able to hear the first 5 minutes of his show - hooray for family! It's kinda lucky I did listen to the first bit, or Pat wouldn't have had any warning that his mic wasn't working. Lack-of-hooray for technical problems! He wrestled with unfamiliar software while I tried to update him on what it sounded like. There was absolutely nobody "official" online to cover him while he fixed his mic, so he tells me he just resorted to playing music for the entire two hours, without pauses for talking. Baptism of fire.
I had to leave him battling technology, however... because it was a fair step to the station with packs on, and we couldn't afford to miss the train we'd booked. We made it in good time, and wandered to the correct platform. The station's only been changed into Prague's main station in the past week or so, and the new bits are built under the old station. There are points where you can look up to balconies and domes above, which belong to the now-abandoned old buildings. They'll redevelop it into a shopping mall or something, but I secretly like the idea of commuters scurrying around nervously beneath a big echo-y ghost station.
When we boarded our train, my engineering father realised it was a Pendolino. To us mere mortals, that means it's been designed to tilt into each corner so that the passengers don't notice the discomfort of being flung around by inertia. Mum has decided that the ideal way to travel is "with an art-lover and an engineer" - because you get random insights that you otherwise wouldn't. I think she said that after I pointed out to her that the manhole covers in Oslo had an interesting coat of arms on them. >.>
Anyway, our very comfortable train took us through rural parts of the Czech Republic, and through the slummier bits of outlying cities, both of which types of scenery were fascinating. The buildings here are so different, and so old. We passed rows and rows of allotments - Europe's answer to the vegetable patch and garden shed. A lot of the sheds seemed to have been done up into 4-metre-square holiday houses, with cute little windowboxes and decorated awnings - so that families can spend the weekend gardening, away from the city. We passed harvested fields where flocks of little brown deer ran alongside the train.
Eventually the country houses began to look different, and we crossed into Austria. Just after we entered Vienna, our train crossed over the Danube - and to my delight, it's really, truly blue! A sort of shimmery cobalt blue, like a crinkled silk scarf.
We disembarked not long after, and tried to find the right bus stop to take us near our apartment. We failed, and had the kind of four-way row only members of a family can have... where everybody's a little bit at fault at once, and nobody's going to admit it. We caught a taxi to our apartment instead, and got there safe and sound in the end. The next challenge was that our "greeter" spoke only German - and we speak only English, with a bit of French and Japanese between us. He took us up to the second floor and gave us our keys, and then we embarked upon a strange game of charades. I had made the mistake of trying to thank him in German for picking up my pack, and so the poor man decided that I must speak more German than I was letting on. He addressed several of his explanations to me, and then to mum when I proved no use. Still, we managed to understand several reasonably complex pieces of information - like the fact that the supermarket was around the corner, past the first set of traffic lights. I guessed traffic lights must be "Ample", like "Ampleman" in Berlin. I don't even know how to spell it accurately; I've only ever heard it spoken.
The man eventually managed to pass all the information onto we four stupid foreigners that he needed to, and seemed relieved to be gone. I felt sorry for him - I suspect he'd been expecting people who had at least a cursory understanding of German. We all slumped into the sofas in the living room, exhausted. Dad and I recovered long enough to go out and scout for places for dinner, and then the four of us vegged out until 5.30, when all the restaurants opened.
We settled upon the "Knossos", because it was close, and because even our knowledge of Greek is better than our knowledge of German - thanks to the cultural mix back home, we at least know Greek food-words. Turned out to be an awesome choice - Pip and I ordered the "fischplatte fr 2 personnen", and we were presented with a mountain of calamari, mussels, and other mystery-seafood surrounding an entire baked fish. Not very pricey, either! It was so early that we were the only people in the place, and I think the man who served us was the manager. He was very jolly and friendly, and jumped into our photo with delight. When I fumbled and dropped my fork mid-meal, he materialised from around the corner with a new set of cutlery and a sly grin.
After dinner we returned to our apartment, and I fell into bed early.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Prague 2
Czech phrase of the day: pristi stanice = "next station".
Pip and mum and I set out this morning for the Muzeum metro station. Mum wasn't actually coming with us - she was there as "backup" while I bought two 75 minute tickets for Pip and I. The plan was that Pip and I would go to Prague zoo while mum and dad went off and explored more of Prague.
We got our tickets, said goodbye to mum, and descended the escalator to the "linka C" platform. We footled about a bit trying to find the machine to validate our tickets, and eventually figured out it was back the way we'd come. No big deal, though, and we caught a train within 5 minutes or so. Every European country we've been in thus far puts home's public transport to quite hilarious shame. The idea of buying one ticket for multiple forms of transport seemed almost novel to me at first.
We got off the train at Nadrazi Holesovice, and boarded bus 112. At this point I got the route name confused with our destination, and we got off at the second stop instead of the sixth, in the middle of Prague-flavoured nowhere. Whoops. Pip said quite calmly that she wasn't bothered, because she'd been expecting me to get lost. Harsh, but fair.
Another bus came along quite soon, though, and this time we caught it to the end of the line. Mission half-accomplished...
Into the zoo we went. Wikipedia had told me that Prague zoo is rated the 7th best in the world (it's on a wiki, therefore it must be true!). First stop for us were the ring-tailed lemurs, which have been Pip's favourite animals since she was little (she had a teddy-lemur, not a teddy-bear, y'see). They're beautiful, sleek little animals, and their enclosure was quite amazing - it's on an island that you reach by going through a double-door airlock sort of thing (so that lemurs can't slip out the door with you by accident). At one end of the island there's a square greenhouse-looking thing which is the animal's sleeping quarters. At the top of that, though, there's a little cat-flap attached to a ladder, that lets the lemurs come outdoors to frolic around on their island. There are trees linked by ladders, all with park benches underneath so that visitors can sit and watch. There are no fences between lemurs and people. If a lemur felt so-inclined, it could come and cuddle you. Being winter (and feeding time), the lemurs had more sense than to be roaming around outside in the cold, but I still think their island is a cool idea.
We went to see the penguins as well, one of which decided to entertain us by swimming at lightning speed around the water tank in its enclosure - so close that I got splashed each time it porpoised for air. Awkward though penguins are on land, their shape makes sudden and wonderful sense when you see them swim.
There were a lot of other high points, as well. I'd never seen garials before - Indian crocodiles, almost extinct in the wild. The squirrel monkeys were my favourite animals of the day - they were in an octagonal hut with glass sides, and it was feeding time for them as well. They were rocketing around their enclosure, springing off the windows in front of our eyes with both feet, and stealing each other's broccoli. One launched itself for what it thought was a branch, seized another's tail, and they both fell out of their tree.
We saw gorillas, flamingos, big cats (there were only two inches of glass and air between us and a ton of tiger)... and we sang songs to the mountain goats, who were unmoved. Mountain goats are hard to impress.
We tried to see the red panda, but I remain firm in my belief that they don't exist - zookeepers just pretend they do so that visitors will always have a reason to come back and peer hopefully into the nocturnal gloom. The "twighlight" corridor had a semi-enclosed bat cave, and Pip and I flinched as little furry bodies went whizz-clicking past our ears.
There were even Przewalski's horses, with their thick noses and noble expressions; Prague zoo's main claim to fame is having bred the first Przewalski's horse in captivity. They went extinct in the wild, though some have now been re-introduced from zoos around the world. These ones were mostly staying indoors, save for the one who stood stock-still outside. Pip and I reckon he was probably working day-shift for the visitors.
We waved to the kangaroos and the emus on our way out. Czech visitors were taking each others' pictures with these weird and unfamiliar animals, with delight. Reminded me that everything is new and wonderful to /someone/ in the world. I rather liked the thought.
Pip and I made our way back after feeding all our remaining 2 Kraus coins to a ticket machine. We got back to our apartment by 4, and this time without making mistakes!
There was a pause of about an hour while everyone told stories of what we'd done throughout the day. Among other things, mum and dad had set out for a monastery in the old quarter, to see a beautiful old library that mum had seen a picture of, once, in an email. They had not only found the right monastery; they had even been taken on a tour of the library.
At 5, after all our recounting, mum and dad and I set out for the concert we'd booked the day before. Pip doesn't like classical music (especially if it has no words), so she stayed behind to do schoolwork. We retraced our steps from the previous afternoon, got a little lost, and finally made it to the Klementinum Baroque-era "mirror chapel". Part of mum and dad's day of wandering had included a guided tour of this place as well, so mum pointed out the old organ at the back that Mozart had once played, and the second organ at the front that replaced the altar under the communist regime. She also explained the ceiling paintings to me while we sat and waited for the performers to arrive. The panels are scenes from the Ave Maria, and some of them are quite entertaining in the careful way the visual has been constructed, so as not to subvert accepted theology of the time. For instance, one of the panels depicts the line "Hail Mary, full of grace". The painting shows the holy trinity shining "grace" onto Mary, who is then reflecting all her newfound shiny-ness into a mirror held up by cherub. The beam of light is reflected from there, out of the frame, to the rest of humanity. The elaborate zigzag is apparently carefully designed to show that Mary hasn't got her OWN grace to throw around - that would be an heretical suggestion - she's just "channeling" grace. Like moonlight is only reflected sunlight. The painter was being ve-e-ry cautious not to get things wrong.
Alas, no photos allowed. Do try to imagine it, though.
Anyhow, eventually the performers filed in. One of the particular drawcards of this concert had been the use of baroque instruments - and sure enough, the lead violinist was carrying a baroque violin with him. Boxier than modern-day instruments, and with a shorter bow. Our eyes boggled when a man walked in with what looked like a lute-cross-giraffe - the neck was about a metre long, and there were two fingerboards. When he played, he only used the shorter strings - the longer strings were "sympathetic" ones, that just buzz along with the others to create extra sound. The rest of the orchestra contained handful of secondary violinists, two violas, and two double-bass players.
First of all they played the Corelli Christmas concerto, and very well. I don't know the piece awfully well, but it's lovely. The next piece, however, was the reason we'd decided upon this particular concert in favour of the others we'd been offered on the streets. They were going to play the entirety of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
I know the Four Seasons is probably the most hackneyed of classical pieces ever.
I don't care.
I still love it to bits. It was the first piece of classical music I ever really sat up and took notice of, and I've never since met a Vivaldi piece I didn't enjoy. The best recording I've come across is by the Tasmanian Chamber Orchestra, and I have listened to that so many times that now I can actually compare performances - something I can't do with any other classical piece, because I just don't have any theoretical understanding of most music. I was thrilled to bits by the idea of hearing my favourite piece performed live in Prague!
I wasn't disappointed, either. The first movement of Spring was wonderful - the lead violinist had a jaunty little grin on his face the whole time, and sent his solos whirring among the high notes. The part I think of that movement that I have always thought of as "birdsong" sounded like a whole forest full of little birds teasing each other, and the part had been split up among all the violinists so that there were echoes, and calls-and-repeats. I realised there was something strange about one of the bass instruments being played - I had assumed it was a double bass, but something about the way it sounded was more like a horn than a stringed instrument. I don't know what the physical difference was, though.
Summer and Autumn were taken rather too quickly - the lead violinist was good, but overambitious. If he'd slowed it down a little he wouldn't have dropped notes accidentally, and the sound wouldn't have been quite so blurry. It would have made a difference for the poor accompaniment, too. Still - I was impressed by the fact that he'd tinkered with the arrangement. He added trills and curlicues in places they usually don't go... and he took some of the original "frilly" bits out. Sometimes to dubious effect, sometimes to brilliant effect.
Winter made up for the wobbly bits of the middle two sections. The Largo was different to any other performance I'd heard of it, before - something had been added to the arrangement so that the lute was playing notes not in the original (I think)... and the effect was that the movement had a happy, wistful feeling to it... not the slightly mournful feel I'm used to. Finally the whole piece was over, and everyone applauded very enthusiastically (including me!). True to Prague's "special extra for you!" personality, the orchestra played us a quick Bach piece right at the end before we left, by way of a "merry Christmas". I was elated.
We left the pink and green marble of the little chapel, and made our way back to our apartment in the dark. The Christmas markets were still bustling, and we bought greasy schnitzel-on-a-bun for a makeshift dinner. Back at "home", I read my latest book ("Iron Council") for a few hours before sleep.
I. Really. Like. Prague.
Pip and mum and I set out this morning for the Muzeum metro station. Mum wasn't actually coming with us - she was there as "backup" while I bought two 75 minute tickets for Pip and I. The plan was that Pip and I would go to Prague zoo while mum and dad went off and explored more of Prague.
We got our tickets, said goodbye to mum, and descended the escalator to the "linka C" platform. We footled about a bit trying to find the machine to validate our tickets, and eventually figured out it was back the way we'd come. No big deal, though, and we caught a train within 5 minutes or so. Every European country we've been in thus far puts home's public transport to quite hilarious shame. The idea of buying one ticket for multiple forms of transport seemed almost novel to me at first.
We got off the train at Nadrazi Holesovice, and boarded bus 112. At this point I got the route name confused with our destination, and we got off at the second stop instead of the sixth, in the middle of Prague-flavoured nowhere. Whoops. Pip said quite calmly that she wasn't bothered, because she'd been expecting me to get lost. Harsh, but fair.
Another bus came along quite soon, though, and this time we caught it to the end of the line. Mission half-accomplished...
Into the zoo we went. Wikipedia had told me that Prague zoo is rated the 7th best in the world (it's on a wiki, therefore it must be true!). First stop for us were the ring-tailed lemurs, which have been Pip's favourite animals since she was little (she had a teddy-lemur, not a teddy-bear, y'see). They're beautiful, sleek little animals, and their enclosure was quite amazing - it's on an island that you reach by going through a double-door airlock sort of thing (so that lemurs can't slip out the door with you by accident). At one end of the island there's a square greenhouse-looking thing which is the animal's sleeping quarters. At the top of that, though, there's a little cat-flap attached to a ladder, that lets the lemurs come outdoors to frolic around on their island. There are trees linked by ladders, all with park benches underneath so that visitors can sit and watch. There are no fences between lemurs and people. If a lemur felt so-inclined, it could come and cuddle you. Being winter (and feeding time), the lemurs had more sense than to be roaming around outside in the cold, but I still think their island is a cool idea.
We went to see the penguins as well, one of which decided to entertain us by swimming at lightning speed around the water tank in its enclosure - so close that I got splashed each time it porpoised for air. Awkward though penguins are on land, their shape makes sudden and wonderful sense when you see them swim.
There were a lot of other high points, as well. I'd never seen garials before - Indian crocodiles, almost extinct in the wild. The squirrel monkeys were my favourite animals of the day - they were in an octagonal hut with glass sides, and it was feeding time for them as well. They were rocketing around their enclosure, springing off the windows in front of our eyes with both feet, and stealing each other's broccoli. One launched itself for what it thought was a branch, seized another's tail, and they both fell out of their tree.
We saw gorillas, flamingos, big cats (there were only two inches of glass and air between us and a ton of tiger)... and we sang songs to the mountain goats, who were unmoved. Mountain goats are hard to impress.
We tried to see the red panda, but I remain firm in my belief that they don't exist - zookeepers just pretend they do so that visitors will always have a reason to come back and peer hopefully into the nocturnal gloom. The "twighlight" corridor had a semi-enclosed bat cave, and Pip and I flinched as little furry bodies went whizz-clicking past our ears.
There were even Przewalski's horses, with their thick noses and noble expressions; Prague zoo's main claim to fame is having bred the first Przewalski's horse in captivity. They went extinct in the wild, though some have now been re-introduced from zoos around the world. These ones were mostly staying indoors, save for the one who stood stock-still outside. Pip and I reckon he was probably working day-shift for the visitors.
We waved to the kangaroos and the emus on our way out. Czech visitors were taking each others' pictures with these weird and unfamiliar animals, with delight. Reminded me that everything is new and wonderful to /someone/ in the world. I rather liked the thought.
Pip and I made our way back after feeding all our remaining 2 Kraus coins to a ticket machine. We got back to our apartment by 4, and this time without making mistakes!
There was a pause of about an hour while everyone told stories of what we'd done throughout the day. Among other things, mum and dad had set out for a monastery in the old quarter, to see a beautiful old library that mum had seen a picture of, once, in an email. They had not only found the right monastery; they had even been taken on a tour of the library.
At 5, after all our recounting, mum and dad and I set out for the concert we'd booked the day before. Pip doesn't like classical music (especially if it has no words), so she stayed behind to do schoolwork. We retraced our steps from the previous afternoon, got a little lost, and finally made it to the Klementinum Baroque-era "mirror chapel". Part of mum and dad's day of wandering had included a guided tour of this place as well, so mum pointed out the old organ at the back that Mozart had once played, and the second organ at the front that replaced the altar under the communist regime. She also explained the ceiling paintings to me while we sat and waited for the performers to arrive. The panels are scenes from the Ave Maria, and some of them are quite entertaining in the careful way the visual has been constructed, so as not to subvert accepted theology of the time. For instance, one of the panels depicts the line "Hail Mary, full of grace". The painting shows the holy trinity shining "grace" onto Mary, who is then reflecting all her newfound shiny-ness into a mirror held up by cherub. The beam of light is reflected from there, out of the frame, to the rest of humanity. The elaborate zigzag is apparently carefully designed to show that Mary hasn't got her OWN grace to throw around - that would be an heretical suggestion - she's just "channeling" grace. Like moonlight is only reflected sunlight. The painter was being ve-e-ry cautious not to get things wrong.
Alas, no photos allowed. Do try to imagine it, though.
Anyhow, eventually the performers filed in. One of the particular drawcards of this concert had been the use of baroque instruments - and sure enough, the lead violinist was carrying a baroque violin with him. Boxier than modern-day instruments, and with a shorter bow. Our eyes boggled when a man walked in with what looked like a lute-cross-giraffe - the neck was about a metre long, and there were two fingerboards. When he played, he only used the shorter strings - the longer strings were "sympathetic" ones, that just buzz along with the others to create extra sound. The rest of the orchestra contained handful of secondary violinists, two violas, and two double-bass players.
First of all they played the Corelli Christmas concerto, and very well. I don't know the piece awfully well, but it's lovely. The next piece, however, was the reason we'd decided upon this particular concert in favour of the others we'd been offered on the streets. They were going to play the entirety of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
I know the Four Seasons is probably the most hackneyed of classical pieces ever.
I don't care.
I still love it to bits. It was the first piece of classical music I ever really sat up and took notice of, and I've never since met a Vivaldi piece I didn't enjoy. The best recording I've come across is by the Tasmanian Chamber Orchestra, and I have listened to that so many times that now I can actually compare performances - something I can't do with any other classical piece, because I just don't have any theoretical understanding of most music. I was thrilled to bits by the idea of hearing my favourite piece performed live in Prague!
I wasn't disappointed, either. The first movement of Spring was wonderful - the lead violinist had a jaunty little grin on his face the whole time, and sent his solos whirring among the high notes. The part I think of that movement that I have always thought of as "birdsong" sounded like a whole forest full of little birds teasing each other, and the part had been split up among all the violinists so that there were echoes, and calls-and-repeats. I realised there was something strange about one of the bass instruments being played - I had assumed it was a double bass, but something about the way it sounded was more like a horn than a stringed instrument. I don't know what the physical difference was, though.
Summer and Autumn were taken rather too quickly - the lead violinist was good, but overambitious. If he'd slowed it down a little he wouldn't have dropped notes accidentally, and the sound wouldn't have been quite so blurry. It would have made a difference for the poor accompaniment, too. Still - I was impressed by the fact that he'd tinkered with the arrangement. He added trills and curlicues in places they usually don't go... and he took some of the original "frilly" bits out. Sometimes to dubious effect, sometimes to brilliant effect.
Winter made up for the wobbly bits of the middle two sections. The Largo was different to any other performance I'd heard of it, before - something had been added to the arrangement so that the lute was playing notes not in the original (I think)... and the effect was that the movement had a happy, wistful feeling to it... not the slightly mournful feel I'm used to. Finally the whole piece was over, and everyone applauded very enthusiastically (including me!). True to Prague's "special extra for you!" personality, the orchestra played us a quick Bach piece right at the end before we left, by way of a "merry Christmas". I was elated.
We left the pink and green marble of the little chapel, and made our way back to our apartment in the dark. The Christmas markets were still bustling, and we bought greasy schnitzel-on-a-bun for a makeshift dinner. Back at "home", I read my latest book ("Iron Council") for a few hours before sleep.
I. Really. Like. Prague.
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