more on my life and days

Here are pictures of the outside of our apartment building, built in 1969! and ugly colors! Top shows the bicycle rack outside our door, with Rich's bike in front!

Have to catch you up on a couple of days. Sunday we first went back to the Wien Museum, mostly because it is free on the first Sunday of the month and we hadn't finished a couple of the special exhibits last week. The main one we wanted to see is called Madness and Modernity in in 1900- Mental Illness and the visual arts in Vienna. Turns out there was a huge round building constructed in late 19th century to house the mentally ill of this city- thousands of them. It was eventually replaced by the huge Steinhof Sanitorium which has the big church designed by Otto Wagner that is still on the outskirts of the city. The exhibition talked about the great interest in mental illness in Vienna at the turn of the century- and the medicalization of it as well. Obviously Freud didn't come out of nowhere. Anyway, to continue the theme we then went to the Freud museum in a different part of the city. It is at the apartment and office rooms that he and his family occupied before he fled to England. The rooms are all there, but only one is furnished with his things. It is kind of a wierd museum - one of the large rooms has walls covered with pictures and facsimiles of artifacts relating to his life and work. So you go around the room with a notebook that explains what you are seeing.

Sunday night was the best yet! We went to a wonderful concert of the Vienna Symphony. It was at the Musicverein building which was really impressive. This is where the New Year's concert takes place every year. It was built in 1866 and is just beautiful. And everyone gets all dressed up to go. So it was fun to watch the people too, but the music was fantastic. We heard a cello concerto by Shuman and th 6th symphony by Dvorak.

I was going to do more, but it is time to go out to a museum- so I will post this now and write more later.