We camped up the road from a few buildings designed by Otto Wagner (and two of those redesigned by Ernst Fuchs):
This was the day we were at the Schloss Schonbrunn. It was also the day we took the Ring tram around the first district of the city and found the Brit Milah party.
Later that evening, as we looked for an Internet cafe, we stopped into a McDonalds where we found an Internet kiosk with free Web access and a "virtual" English keyboard. Mark did some correspondence about Seder, and our plans for the Warsaw visit.
We walked on to the concert at the Imperial Theater for the light but entertaining kitsch concert of Mozart, Strauss, Lehar, Haydn, and Beethoven. The small and lively group performed the most famous movements of the most famous compositions of these (well, except for Lehar), most famous composers. The silliest part was that they had a couple of dancers perform "ballets" as well.
A couple of days earlier Lily (who was Russian born, but had lived in Israel for a number of years) had sold us the tickets at St Stefansplatz-- she gave us a good price and coupons for free drinks.
This was about the most "touristy" thing we've done.
People all over Vienna were buying flowers. This was, of course the week before Easter as well as Pesach.
We saw many kinds of flowers, roses, tulips, forsythia beginning to bloom.
And, we saw:
pussywillows,
which reminded me of Mom.
Monday morning we had our meeting with Dr. Eckstein at the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien registry. Here, the community maintained and still maintains records of weddings, deaths and births from the 18th century in old leatherbound books that are still in pretty good condition. All of it has been microfilmed.
Some categories of information are also available in their database. The Mormons duplicated much if not all of these records, which they now keep in Utah. Apparently, the registry still responds to inquiries to establish credentials for reparations. We found the record of my (Debbie's) maternal grandparent's marriage, with their signatures, address before marriage and their witnesses (at the bottom of this page).
At the Stadttempel synagogue tour we had learned about the Reform influences in the construction of the building with the bimah at the front, instead of the center. There we met Carolyn and Stephanie Hesz and learned about Stephanie's master's thesis about the Vienna Holocaust Memorial:
We visited the Jewish museum there, that explains the medieval synagogue that was found beneath the area where the memorial was built and checked the plaque on one of the buildings that surrounds the square in which the memorial stands.
We followed up on Dr. Eckstein's suggestion that the phone book we needed could be found at the city headquarters, the Rathaus. However, not only could we hardly find the way in but when we finally found the tourist office, the attendant gave us a phone number for the addresses that did not work, unfortunately. Mark also found information there about gay life in Vienna.
We looked into the elegant Landtmann Cafe, favored by Freud (it's very close to the University) and bought a cookie... but not (what we were told was) Freud's favorite:
On our walk back to the the Berg theater we saw a plaque honoring Polish leader Jan Sobiejski and his role in saving Vienna from the Turkish siege (but the photo is not in focus).
At the Berg theatre and saw the Klimt movie, which (while we have no way of acurately evaluating it) seemed very informative, though also surreal.
Following the movie we returned to the Wrenke restaurant, the veggie place we had enjoyed on Friday night. We ran into Carolyn and Stephanie. They joined us for a fun and yummy dinner, along with discussion about memorials, about Jews and Judaism, food and family.
Throughout our visit in Vienna, we found the Pickwick Book Store/Pub and English DVD rental store to be a great place to plotz and check our email--free WiFi!
On Tuesday morning we made our way to my (Debbie) maternal grandparents' address/apartment building, which looked as though it might be the same building they actually lived in, judging from the floor and the old style of the elevator (Debbie peeked in).
We stopped for a break, looking into the MAK, perhaps the Viennese MOMA (?), where we enjoyed the designs of items in the gift shop, including some more corrugated furniture (remember Ferrara?).
Then, we took a nice long walk to the Belvedere Park and Museum, saw Klimt and Schiele, some Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, and Kakoshka. If you looked carefully at a display case in the corner of the room with the Klimts you could read an update on the 5 Klimts whose ownership were contested going back to family in NYC (to be displayed in LA in May/June, we understand.) One of the Austrian women we met at Seder on Wednesday night expressed great disappointment that the Austrian Minister of Art had not accepted the offer from the American family to purchase the art and keep it in Vienna. (In the gift shop you could buy a chocolate kiss (but not a Hershey's kiss. This one was made by a local chocolatier and wrapped in a small reproduction of Klimt's Kiss.)
We made our way to the recommended Oberlaaer Cafe in the first ring, for a lovely "donut" and coffee hour. The donut (should have written down the actual name of the pastry) really is not like American donuts at all, but I (Debbie) have a recollection that my mother used to occasionally like those chocolate covered donuts perhaps because they reminded her of the ones she had as a child in Austria. Mark napped after his coffee (again). Do you get it?
We rented the movie The Tin Drum on DVD from Pickwick's, to watch in the van on Mark's computer, as preparation for the visit to Gdansk/Danzig. It really is a very beautiful movie which we recommend you see as well with its images of divided family paralleling a divided city, the maturation of a child paralleling the maturation of the city.
We had decided to stay in Vienna for Seder, as you know, because we weren't sure whether we could find one in Krakow. We since have learned there was a Seder at a hotel in Krakow.
Just before Seder we walked across the Danube and saw the Mexico Plaza (mentioned at the beginning of our Vienna report).
We really enjoyed Seder with Angelika and David. They set a festive table. We met Mimi and Theo, their children, along with Barbara and Michael (Angelika's brother), Eve-Marie and Daniella. We ate a huge amount of food, witnessed the Moroccan custom of circulating the Seder plate over the head of each person, followed an abbreviated version of Mark's haggada, tasted their Ashkenzi charoset and home-made gefilte fish. (That's the first time I (Debbie) have had gefilte fish in about 12 years. (We took a photo of the group after the kids went to sleep and Angelika's brother and Barbara had left:
As we ended at about 1:30 AM, Angelika and David invited us to spend the night but we decided to try to get a head start on the drive. We drove an hour or so parked at a truck stop and slept very well.