Where has the week gone?

The week since we got back from Prague seems to have flown by and no posts to show for it! So I will start to catch up.

Monday was spent recuperating from all the walking and general exhaustion from the trip (I hate to admit that this sort of thing takes it out of me more than it used to!)

On Tuesday, I met a friend of Nancy Sach's from DC who is now in Vienna with her husband who works for the Canadian Embassy. She was very nice and it was great to find someone I can talk to easily. We spent several hours and had lunch at the art museum, becoming ladies who lunch! (and why not!)

That evening Rich and I went out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary. Found a very nice Austrian restaurant, but one with a more modern take on the food, so it was considerably lighter than the traditional fare. Just like in the States, there is a lot of emphasis on the chef, whose photo was on the website and who greeted us from the kitchen when we came in! We had a great meal and fun to listen to the conversations around us which mostly we couldn't understand, but several times during the evening, we could hear the word Obama coming from other tables! The Austrians didn't understand all the fuss about health care, but clearly most we talked to and heard are happy about the vote (altho not nearly as happy as we are!)

And after dinner we walked over to the Hotel Sacher for some sacher torte, as we had said we would do. It is a very cutsey place, and very committed to the Original Sacher Torte. It is of course also made many other places, but they stand by that claim.




Carl and Michele came to our apartment for dinner on Wednesday night. We were happy to be able to host someone here, even tho I had to clean the place that day! We all took a really long walk in the Prater before dinner and made it much further out than we had done before. They had been all the way thru the Hauptallee (the long main road) on their bikes, but we hadn't.

Thursday morning I went back to the same yoga place, then met Rich at the TU for lunch afterwards. Then we went to an interesting show of current architecture in Prague that was on display at his school. Having just returned from there, it was particularly interesting. The main architecture and planning school is located at the TU, so that is the natural place for this sort of thing. Their comment was "here is what is being done, but why isn't it more cutting edge!" Some was really good, but not really that much. That night we found an English version of Alice in Wonderland, which was sort of fun.

Friday, after yoga at a new place, we took a guided walking of some sights of Jewish interest in Vienna. What was really interesting was that there were 8 people on the tour and everyone besides us was German-speaking and none of them were Jewish! But the guide was quite good and we hope to do some more tours with her in the future. On this tour we went by the main old synagogue- the Seitenstettengasse- the only one to have survived Kristallnacht. We couldn't go in because it was Friday afternoon, but we can tour it another time. Then we walked by the two kosher restaurants in town- one meat and one dairy, across the street from each other!


Then the tour took us by this building which replaced the building that was the headquarters of the Gestapo. Also a place of many murders in its basement. The stone band that you see here was added to an otherwise unremarkable modern apartment building to show what happened on this site. It has skulls, and images of torture as well as the dates and numbers of victims from this place.

Right across the street from this building is the memorial shown below- a memorial about Mauthausen concentration camp, not too far from Vienna. These are stones carved by inmates there, along with a plaque about the victims.

Then we went to the Documentation Center, where there are displays and ongoing research about Austrian resistance, (which the tour guide insisted was quite strong tho unacknowledged) as well as information about individual Austrian victims of the Nazis. The tour guide does research on individuals who disappeared, and there seems to be a major effort to document (and try to celebrate the lives) more than the deaths of the individual Austrian Jews and other victims.

Then we went to the Holocaust Memorial (which Rich and I had already seen) and she gave us some good stories about the difference of opinion about where it should be and when it should have been built. It was built on Judenplatz, which was the center of the Medieval Jewish ghetto, but not where most Jews lived during any of the 20th century. Apparently Simon Weisenthal was the main voice for building it here. And during the course of excavations for the monument, they found the remains of the medieval synagogue (which I think I explained previously). Anyway- there was a camp who wanted to move the memorial some place else, so as not to disturb these remains, but that was not acceptable to others, so the archeological remains were lowered in place and the memorial put on top, as it is now and the remains are visible thru the museum, by going down a ways! ( Always there are negotiations!)

So quite an interesting tour, and it obviously had to be completed by some coffee, which we found in the Easter Market which was located nearby. See Rich enjoying it below! The little booths are put up for a couple of weeks before Easter and sell all sorts of crafts, antiques, crap, and food-- in celebration of the holiday?




I will make a separate post about Saturday which was quite a special day.