Pilot Data: November (so far)

After that Oktober quickie, I'm almost up to date! Let's see what's been happening...

November 1 is All Saint's Day. Since Austria is largely, largely Catholic, the holiday is seriously celebrated here, and banks and schools are closed. Citizens go to the graves of loved ones and do yearly care-taking and decorating. (Halloween, by contrast, isn't widely celebrated, though it's catching on among the younger generations. Even trick-or-treating. Free candy?! Internationally appealing!)

Wall of the Zentralfriedhof

For this reason, then, a friend and I went to the Zentralfriedhof (the central cemetery) to celebrate (is that the appropriate word here?) with the Viennese. The Zentralfriedhof is HUGE. I've heard that the Viennese like to say that it's half the size of Geneva but twice as lively. :)

Not really knowing anything about the cemetery, we turned right when we got in and wandered into the Jewish quarter.

It's deserted. It looks almost like the cemetery tried to parody itself (appropriately so for Halloween, but very sad, if beautiful). Most of the graves are overgrown, some are toppled over, and a lot of the crypts have been broken in to. Apparently a large part of the the cemetery was bombed during WWII, and the misplaced gravestones have been stacked up in a sort of makeshift monument with a sign explaining what happened--otherwise we would have been totally lost.

We couldn't find stones to leave there, but we left flowers.

Entering the Christian half (three-quarters, honestly) of the cemetery was a completely different experience. The trees were trimmed, the pathways were broad and open, and hundreds of people where there, taking care of the graves. We went to the cemetery chapel, which has a beautiful art nouveau interior, saw the graves (and/or memorial graves) of some famous Austrian composers, as well as a collection of memorial war graves.

It was a very beautiful day.

Later in the week I went to Schonbrunn (again) to watch the sunrise. I had to get up at 5 AM in order to be there on time (and was actually a little bit late), but it was worth it!

Later that week (later that day, actually), I went on a (semi-whimsical) roadtrip to Krakow. Three friends and I decided to rent a car on Thursday, and on Friday, amazingly, we were off! It was supposed to take about 7 hours to get there, but this, of course, was a roadtrip... through countries where we couldn't speak the language (though, of course, we made it eventually).

Krakow was awesome. It's a nice, old, small (in the center) medieval city. Very charming. The people very nice. Legend is that the people of Krakow were terrified of a dragon that lived in the Wawel hill and would eat their livestock (and young maidens) until one day a citizen named Krakus (or something similar, though the Wiki version claims otherwise) covered some sheep in sulfur and somehow got the dragon to eat them.

The dragon then got very thirsty, and drank from the river until it exploded! And then they build a fortress on the Wawel hill and lived happily ever after. In some version of the story the hero gets to marry the king's daughter.

At any rate, it was incredibly windy when we arrived, so much that all of the flowers from the flower market in front of the main church were blowing away and the vases were breaking. We decided that the dragon of Krakow must have angry and was torturing the citizens of Krakow from its den in the past. ^_^

The city is very beautiful (in a completely different way from Vienna, which is a Baroque city). We went through the central market (which is incredibly touristy), where almost every stand is selling some combination of amber goods/chess sets/dragon-related paraphanelia, for way much than you would find in Vienna. This was also the first place I had been in Europe where they weren't on the Euro (they are instead on the Zloty).

We also went to the castle on the Wawel Hill (of course)... where Freidrich Chopin is buried! I never knew he was Polish... for whatever reason everyone always pronounces his name in the French way. It was a surprise, but a nice one.

Yes, I'm in a car in Slovakia.
Yes, that is a castle.

Getting back was a good time. Let me tell you about it! Getting there was also a good time. We missed a roundabout (all roundabouts, on this trip, quickly became the bane of our existence) and ended up driving into the Czech Republic. This shouldn't have been a problem, as they both border Poland, but our directions were supposed to take us there through Slovakia. The worst that happened was that we had to stop and buy a map (yes, we tried to take a roadtrip without a map--hehe) and were maybe three hours late.

On the way back we were doing perfectly well with following the directions, when we ran into a roadwash about 20 minutes up a mountain, away from any sort of town/city/dwelling place. Don't ask me why the directions had us crossing the border on mountain road instead of a highway. Luckily, there was a resort nearby where whose the reception was awake and spoke English, and helped up get back to... wherever we needed to be in order to get back to Vienna!

Otherwise, I've been: