Suzanne's Vienna birthday

Bratislava, Sunday 20 December

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Work

I haven't written much about it here, but I am in Bratislava to work. Here's what's been going on with my teaching and research.

This was the final week of classes. I have now finished the last of my three-hour lectures and all that remains is to give the final exam in the master's course ... three times. It turns out that the students here are entitled to have two attempts at the final exam, and that they also have the option of not taking it for the first time until January. But there are other students who are leaving for the spring term and need to take it in December.

Thus, I give the exam the first time next Tuesday morning. Then again on 11 January, and then a third time on 18 January in case there is someone who took it the first time on the 11th and wants to try to improve his or her grade. It's a bit of a challenge to come up with three different exams that are equivalent in length and difficulty. I hope that everyone will take it next week and be happy with his or her score, then there might not be many to worry about in January.

At the end of my last class on Wednesday, one of the students came forward to say some very nice things and present me with a bag of gifts from the class. I was surprised and truly honored that he and they had gone to the effort and expense in the midst of their busy schedules! In the gift bag was a huge cookie in the shape of Santa's boot, frosted with the Slovak expression for Merry Christmas:

They also gave me a small Slovak flag, a wooden pen in the shape of an ax with Bratislava painted on one side, and a bottle of very potent (52% alcohol!) Slovak tea-flavored liqueur called Tatratea that we will open and sample on Christmas.

On the research side, I presented an updated version of my paper on unemployment in the U.S. states on Thursday afternoon. About a dozen students and faculty attended and managed to stay awake. A few good questions at the end suggest that at least some of them were paying close attention and thinking about the issues raised in the paper.

As for the research that I came here to do, I've finally been making some progress. It took a long time to begin to build a network of people who know about Slovak labor markets. They exist, but they are not in the places I expected to find them. Once I began finding them, the whole network opened up and I have now talked with about five economists and related professionals and have another five set up for future conversations. All of the available data are sitting out on the Internet, so the actual data collection can be done in Portland. What I can't do in Portland is talk to the local experts and find out the important pieces that the data cannot tell me. That's my agenda for the next month.

Opera

On Thursday evening we headed to the new building of the Slovak National Theater (they have two, the historic building and the new building) to hear Puccini's La Bohème. From the opera schedule, it looked like Thursday night's performance was the opening night for this production. But when we bought a program (for 4 euros this time), we discovered that the opening night was in spring of 2014! It seems that they run their productions over several seasons, with multiple casts and conductors listed in the program. This is the third season for this production.

The performance was good, but not as clean as one would expect to hear at the great opera houses of Europe. I was impressed with the tenor singing Rodolfo, and thought that the soprano as Mimi was good at times. Suzanne was less convinced by Mimi. They announced something about the soprano at intermission that sounded like she was ill, but they did the announcement in Slovak and German but not English, so I only caught part of it. I expected an understudy for the last two acts, but she came out and finished the job.

The orchestra struggled to stay beneath the singers at times and, while the individual performances were fine, they were not always locked in as an ensemble. Overall, it was a good performance and highly enjoyable. A good bit better than the Portland Opera (at less than half the cost), but we really miss our opera-going times in Houston!

Vienna

One of the reasons that I wanted to come to Bratislava was its proximity to Vienna, a city where we spent three months in 1980 and that we loved very much. It's ironic that we had been in Bratislava for three-and-a-half months and had not been to central Vienna even once. So we decided to spend part of the weekend there and celebrate Suzanne's birthday (a milestone, but I know better than to tell which one) exploring Vienna's famous Christmas Market and revisiting some old landmarks.

We arrived late Saturday morning at our pension on Mariahilferstraße. The map below may help orient those of you unfamiliar with Viennese geography.

The old city walls of Vienna were replaced in the 18th century by the loop of wide roads called the "Ringstraße." Each section of the ring has a different name based on what is nearby: Parkring, Opernring, Burgring, etc. Inside the ring is the oldest part of the city, now called the First District.

Mariahilferstraße is a very fashionable shopping street, closed to most traffic, just outside the First District, in the southwest corner of the map. Our pension was near the intersection with Stiftgasse, just inside the map boundary. The street under our window was bustling with constant activity on Saturday as the locals and tourists alike crammed the shops and department stores along the street. The late afternoon picture below captures the festive atmosphere with the holiday decorations above the streets.

We hoped to find some special things at the Christmas Market, which stretches across many of the squares and plazas of the central city. There were several clusters of stalls on Stiftgasse near the pension, and the largest locale is Maria-Theresien-Platz, the green square on the map between the two symmetric buildings housing the Naturhistorisches (natural history) and Kunsthistorisches (art history) Museums.

Entrance to Mariahilferstraße from the north

Austria's favorite monarch, Maria Theresa, presides over the square bearing her name

Christmas Market stalls in Maria-Theresien-Platz

Sample of the magnificent local crafts at the Christmas Market

Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of two twin buildings bracketing Maria-Theresien-Platz

Adjacent to Maria-Theresien-Platz is the Hofburg, the main Hapsburg winter palace, which has been in the news recently as the location of Syrian peace talks.

Hofburg Palace from Heldenplatz

We walked through the Heldenplatz in the front of the Hofburg and headed north through the First District. Vienna is one of the handful of magnificent imperial capitals from the great 19th-century era of monumental architecture. While Bratislava has many beautiful buildings and palaces that have been nicely restored, Vienna is literally full of them. It seems like every street of the older parts of the city (and not just the First District) is lined with palatial structures adorned with statues and other ornate stone work.

Imperial Treasury attached to the Hofburg

St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of Vienna, with its tall bell tower barely visible in the fog (top center)

One of our destinations in the First District was Demel, a famous pastry maker and confectioner. We found it, right where it's been for centuries, and went in to buy one of their famous Sachertorten to be Suzanne's birthday cake!

Small sample of Demel's magnificent edible art

After a long walk, we arrived at the Danube Canal (the side channel of the river that goes past the old city) and the location of the apartment in which we lived in the summer of 1980 at Hollandstraße 1A (top of the map, toward the right). If the three most important considerations in real estate are location, location, and location, then this apartment is wonderful on all counts. It sits 50 meters from the canal and a short bridge from the edge of the First District. We lucked into it because Stanford rented it to faculty teaching in their Vienna overseas program, but it was vacant for exactly the three summer months that we needed it. The neighborhood is a little different than we remembered it from 35 years ago: more shops on Hollandstraße and the OPEC world headquarters (whose machine-gun-armed guard we could see from our kitchen window) is no longer sandwiched between the Raiffeisen Bank building and the IBM building next door.

Hollandstraße 1A is the gray door in the center of the picture

I anticipated that we would be hungry about this time, and identified a very highly regarded vegetarian restaurant just a few blocks away on Karmeliterplatz (on the map it's by the blue transit station on Taborstraße). Harvest Bistrot has a weekend vegan buffet that is truly outstanding, if a wee bit pricey for those of us who are now accustomed to Bratislava prices. We made our tummies very, very happy there, and then headed out on the considerable trek back to the pension.

I made my wife very unhappy by accidentally leaving the nice, compact, one-page street map that the hotel had given us at the restaurant. I assured her that I knew how to get back to the pension without a problem. And I did, but a slight scenic detour beckoned and, predictably, we got a little off track. I still maintain that we would have racked up they same 20,000 steps on our Fit-bits had we taken the slightly more direct route, but Suzanne's aching feet disagree.

A couple of final thoughts on Vienna:

When we were here in 1980, about half the dogs we saw were adorable wire-haired dachshunds. We fell so much in love with them that we found two in Texas when we got home and enjoyed their company for the next 15 years. But in all of our wanderings around the city yesterday and today, we saw many, many dogs, but NO wire-haired dachshunds! Where have they gone? Elsa and Katrina, we miss you!

And finally, what's a visit to Central Europe without accordion music? Especially when the accordion players are wearing (horse? reindeer?) masks!

You won't be surprised to hear that their tip bowl was not empty. Here's a little music for you from the home of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, etc.

Auf wiedersehen for now. And a Merry Christmas to all. This will be a different Christmas for us, but we'll do our best to make it merry for each other!

Postscript

An hour after we arrived back in Bratislava we got the following email from the U.S. Embassy here:

This message informs U.S. citizens residing in, or traveling throughout Austria, of the continuing need to exercise caution during the holiday season.  U.S. Citizens are reminded to be vigilant around buildings or locations where large numbers of people gather for transport or celebrations.  U.S. citizens should be especially aware of these locations during significant dates or holidays.

I guess I'm glad we didn't know this before we went!