Springtime in Deutschland

Spring has been absolutely gorgeous in Karlsruhe. In just a few short weeks, the landscape changed from barren and grey to lush and green. For the most part, the temperature has reminded me of a typical spring in the Bay Area. There are at most a few warm days (with highs in the upper 60's or lower 70's, degrees in Fahrenheit of course) followed by a few cooler days (upper 50's to mid 60's). The biggest difference is that it still manages to rain here in Karlsruhe, whereas springtime in the Bay Area has been bone dry for the past few years. In any case, the warmer weather and sunshine has put everyone in a cheerful mood. And how can you not be when you see such floral happiness when you take a stroll around the Schlossgarten?

Or when you walk along streets lined with trees that are loaded with blooms like these (that was quite a rhyme if I do say so myself).

In short, it's just been purdy out here. It's hard to believe that we only have a few more months to spend in Karlsruhe, though we will surely make the most of the time we have left before we return to Oakland.

Lunch menu

In today's (British) English version of the lunch menu at the lab cafeteria:

Courgette stuffed with Ratatouille...

I had to consult the German version to find out what a courgette was:

Zucchini Schiffchen gefüllt mit Ratatouille...
(zucchini boat filled with ratatouille)

I asked Glenda after I got home and she did not know what a courgette was either. So I didn't feel so bad.

As you can see, the German version of the menu is always more precise. But it is not accurate (in the way precision and accuracy are defined in science). In this case, there was stuff on a zucchini sliced in half, but I am not sure I would call that stuff ratatouille in a visual test. I had salad bar instead.

School registration problem resolved

The kids are now registered at our neighborhood school for the next school year. Thanks to Gabriel's string class teacher and the staff at the school office, we don't have to show up in person for the process. I will receive a couple forms from the school office, fill them out, sign and return them. That's it. School starts on August 31.

Day nine: Wien - return to Karlsruhe

The landlady came around noon to pick up the apartment keys and to return our safety deposit. The cab ride to the airport was smooth as there was not much traffic on the roadway. We arrived at the airport a bit early and ended up having more sachertorte and apfelstrudel at a cafe. Once again, no one checked our photo identifications throughout the return journey.

We had to wait for over 90 minutes at Frankfort airport's train station for our fast train to Karlsruhe. This was not a train delay, but more of my stinginess. Our hugely discounted train tickets (roundtrip for about 50€ for our family of four), which we bought weeks ago, were valid only on the later train.

The leaves have all come out during our trip to Vienna. The boulevards in Karlsruhe are now lined with colorful flowers and green foliage. This is going to be a beautiful spring in Germany for us.

Day eight: Wien - Belvedere, Easter Monday

Today was Easter Monday and our last full day in Vienna. The only attraction that we had yet to visit was Schloß Belvedere, a palace that has been turned into an art museum. Getting there was pretty easy: the bus that stopped outside our apartment took us there directly.

Belvedere is divided into upper and lower Belvedere. Upper Belvedere houses a large Gustav Klimt collection, and visitors flock to see The Kiss, similar to the throng in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

After lunch at the cafe in Upper Belvedere, we let the kids burn off some energy in the gorgeous garden leading to the Lower Belvedere. The Lower Belvedere is hosting a special exhibition on Alfons Mucha, a commercial and decorative artist. Jocelyn did not seem to like the art so much, but her eyes lit up as soon as we entered The Power of Ornament exhibition in the Orangery of the Lower Belvedere. She is more an avant-garde type.


Before we returned to the apartment, we had...yes, you guessed it...more pastries for afternoon tea.

Cafe Schrödinger

One of the most famous Viennese was Erwin Schrödinger, the father of quantum mechanics and whose equation has caused physicists and philosophers a lot of grief over the past eight decades.

The route of tram 1, which we have been using a lot this week, includes a stop in front of Cafe Schrödinger at the Technische Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology). The cafe's logo uses Schrödinger's signature.

I decided to find out more Schrödinger's life in Vienna on the web. It turns out that his alma mater was Universität Wien (University of Vienna) across town, and not TUW. But one of his grandfathers was a professor at TUW (which was called Technische Hochschule then). I am still puzzled by the presence of a cafe bearing his name on the wrong campus. But then there is Cafe Einstein near UW, and Einstein did not spend a substantial amount of time in Vienna (as far as I know). Poor Boltzmann did not get a cafe named after him in his home town.

Newspaper bags in Vienna

Newspaper bags have gone up on sign posts all over town for the weekend. Each of these plastic bags has an attached coin collection box. Unlike the newspaper boxes in North America, which can be opened only after paying, nothing prevent the absentminded readers from taking a paper from the plastic bag without paying. We walked past three of these absentminded readers today.

Similar to the corresponding systems in Germany, buses, streetcars and the U-Bahn (underground) here also run on an honor system. There are conductors who would perform random fare checks throughout the systems, and fines are substantial if a forgetful rider gets caught without a valid ticket. But there is no obvious way to enforce such spot checks on the newspaper system.

Day seven: Wien - Haus der Musik, more schnitzel and more sightseeing

Our first stop this morning was Haus der Musik. On the first floor of this interactive museum is a series on this history of the Wiener Philharmonik (Vienna Philharmonic), its colorful past (and its colorful maestros), and the renowned Neujahrskonzert (New Year's Concert). The kids' favorite on this floor was the Walzerwürfelspiel (dice game of Waltz). I call it the Waltz Monte Carlo. They rolled two dice several times, and a melody (drawn randomly from a library...and in Physics lingo, this is a Monte Carlo) was played after each roll. At the end, the full composition was played. Another one of the kids favorites , amongst different stations featuring the properties and physics of sound, was conducting the Wiener Philharmonic on the third floor. The baton had a transmitter and the musicians on the TV screen played to the baton's motion. The third floor also has excellent exhibitions of composers who spent time in Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauß, Mahler, Berg, Schönberg, Webern. We learned that Schubert was so poor that he composed most of his music without the aid of a piano (which he couldn't afford to own).



We had lunch at Figlmüller, which is famous for its Wiener Schnitzel. We were lucky as there was not a long line when we got there. By the time we left, it was much longer in the narrow alley. We order two schnitzels to share between the four of us. They were huge, and we could not finish them. The schnitzels were good, but the frying took the juice out of the pork. So our Figlmüller schnitzels were not as good as the ones that we had at Schloß Schönbrunn, which were juicier.


After lunch we walked down to Donau (Danube in English). We expected to see

Donau so blau, so schön und blau (Danube so blue, so beautiful and blue)

as in the first verse in the chorus version of Strauß's An der schönen blauen Donau (the Blue Danube), and were disappointed by the view of a brown, muddy river.

We completed our unfinished tour of the Ring in the afternoon. We took tram #2 to the Wiener Stadtpark (city park), where we walked around and visited a few monuments including those of Schubert and Johann Strauß (son). The kids had a brief "break" at the playground before we boarded another #2 tram to the Burggarten, where we visited the Mozart statue. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the surrounding area such as Heldenplatz, Hofburg, and Michaelerplatz.




It is simply iresistible ....we stopped for an apfelstrudel (Glenda), eis (kids) and zitronetorte (yours truly) before heading back to the apartment for a nice home-cooked meal.

Day six: Wien - Naschmarkt, Secession and Theater an der Wien

We returned to the apartment for a short rest before heading to Naschmarkt. By the time we got there in the early evening, most of the stalls were already closed. The city crew was busy cleaning the debris in the nearby flohmarkt (fleamarket). But some of the die-hard sellers (and shoppers) just moved to the far end of the lot and continued on with the hawking.

We walked along the left bank of Wienzeile, where most of the restaurants and food stalls are. As we were walking around in the area, we spotted the "stars" and knew we must be close to another historical landmark. Then we saw it off a side street: Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven lived during 1803 and 1804 to finish Fidelio and where his only opera, Symphonies #2, 3, 5 and 6, and his violin concerto were premiered. The stars in this area are all giants: LvB, Mozart and Salieri among them. Poor Dvořák's star is under a garbage bin.



The row of restaurants and food stalls end at the Secession, where we turned around to go back to a restaurant that we settled on earlier. Here are two pictures of the Secession, the institution found by a group of breakaway artists in the late 19th century.


After dinner we stopped by an open-air cafe at Nachtmarkt to enjoy some Viennese dessert. Here are the kids waiting anxiously for their apple strudel.

Day six: Wien - Technisches Museum Wien and Beethoven Pasqualatihaus

We always try to visit a technology or science museum wherever we go. This trip is no different. We went to the Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Technology Museum) today. This majestic building was specifically built as a museum of trade and industry during the reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph I, and was not a conversion from some imperial residence. Once we entered the main building, we were greeted by the vast open space in the main foyer.


The exhibits are excellent at TMW. We started from the section on musical instruments on the top floor. The kids learned about pipe organs and played various types of keyboard instruments, such as the harpsichord. The pictures of some of the instruments (and other exhibitions at TMW) can be found here.

We worked our way down the building, and saw many excellent exhibits in telecommunication, computing, appliances, locomotive, power generation, scientific instruments and the human body. The kids had a lot of fun at a mock TV broadcast booth and spent quite a bit of time playing with a computerized version of Enigma, an encryption and decryption machine that was used most notably by Nazi Germany during WWII.


We left TMW in mid-afternoon. After a short stop at a nearby ice-cream parlor, we headed to the Beethoven Pasqualatihaus, an apartment where Beethoven lived for 8 years and where he composed his 4th, 5th, 7th and 8th symphonies and Fidelio. Unlike the Mozarthaus or the Haydnhaus, which occupy a whole building, the Beethoven Pasqualatihaus is a small museum on the fourth floor of the building. There are other residents on other floors of the buildings. In this museum the displays do not have much narratives and most of them are identical to those at Mozarthaus and Haydnhaus.

Day five: Wien - ZOOM Kindermuseum and (part of) the Ring

We visited the ZOOM Kindermuseum in the MuseumsQuartier in the morning. Since it is Good Friday today, we made a reservation for the kids to take part in the Erzähl' mir was vom Tod ("Let's talk about Death") program, originally developed by Das FEZ-Berlin. It is a series of exhibits and hands-on activity for kids to understand aging, death and legacy. The kids even mixed a longevity drink (with camomile, lemon drops and water).


We had lunch near the MuseumsQuartier and spent about an hour on the Ring, a boulevard that goes around the old town. We did not go around the whole ring, only about a quarter of it. But we saw the Parlament (Austrian Parliament), the Rathaus (City Hall), and Burgtheater (National Theater). Since it is a holiday today, we didn't get to see the inside of these magnificent buildings.



After this short stroll, we returned to the apartment to give the kids some rest (it has been a few long days). More pictures from today can be found here.

Grüner Veltliner

The apartment we rented for this trip has a nice kitchen, and we try to cook dinners as much as possible (to reduce the salt intake and the Euro outflow). I saw a large selection of Grüner Veltiner at the supermarket nearby, and bought a bottle. I don't know much about white wine, but learned after the purchase that this variety is mainly grown in Austria and the Czech Republic, and pairs well with asparagus. Well, we had white asparagus for dinner by chance. This bottle is a good value for 8€, and is rather fruity. It did indeed go well with our asparagus, salad and pasta.

Day four: Wien - Albertina

Albertina has one of the largest graphic arts and photography collections in the world, and its current exhibitions consist of:

• Monet bis Picasso: die Sammlung Batliner (Monet to Picasso: the Batliner Collection)
  
• Gerhard Richter: Retrospektive (Gerhard Richter: Retrospective)
• Fotographie und das Unsichtbare (Photography and the Invisible)
• Das Zeitalter Rembrandts (The Age of Rembrandt)

Glenda and I decided that this list of exhibitions should quench Jocelyn's thirst for arts over the last couple of days; so our family spent some time at the museum this afternoon.



Jocelyn got really chirpy when we were going through the Picasso and Richter sections, but was less so at the Rembrandt-era exhibit. The highlight for me was the photography exhibit which features pictures from 1840 to 1900. These pictures depict the probe of the "invisible" world: from moon shots to x-ray pictures (radiographs) from Henri Becquerel and others, Ernst and Ludwig Mach's sonic shock shots of projectiles, and other magnified pictures of the microbe world. This exhibit was actually shown at SFMOMA after we left the Bay Area, but I was lucky enough to see it in Vienna (out of all places) today.

There were also 21 exquisitely decorated Habsburg staterooms in Albertina. While we were admiring the elegance of the decor, we were surprised to find a few Michelangelo sketches tucked in a corner in one of the staterooms.

Day four: Wien - Opernhaus and Staatsopernmuseum

After lunch we barely made it in time to the guided tour of the world renowned Opera House, where the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera) performs. The guide took us to various parts of the building, including what-used-to-be the Emperor Suite (Kaisersalon), which is usually closed unless someone has rented it for a substantial sum or during the bestowal of the honorary title of Kammersänger (or Kammersängerin) on an exceptional singer.

We got a chance to sit in the great hall and enjoyed the ambiance (sans the music and the cheers from a full house) for much less than the top-tier 168€ ticket. But we can't afford this price (times 4), or the hours to queue up for the standing-room tickets on the day of the performance (for 3€ each). I suppose we could get the less expensive tickets, but the kids would not be able to last through Wagner's 5-plus-hour epic Parsifal. So, no opera performance at the Opernhaus for us on this trip.




The ticket for the guide tour also entitled us to visit the opera's museum Staatsopernmuseum, which is located in a separate building approximately 200m away. We labored through some of the exhibitions (as all of the descriptions are written in German) for about 30 minutes before heading to Albertina across the street.

Day four: Wien - Haydnhaus

We woke up to another nice sunny day. Since the city of Vienna is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death (on May 31) this year, we decided to go to Haydnhaus first, which is only a short bus ride away in District 6. After his return from London, Haydn lived in this house on Haydngasse (used to be called Kleine Steingasse before this street was renamed) during his final years. This part of Vienna was considered a vorstadt (suburb) during Haydn's time, but the tranquility inspired him to complete two of his most famous pieces: Die Schöpfung (the Creation) and Die Jahreszeiten (the Seasons).



There are a number of interesting displays and we learned quite a lot about Haydn and his work. For example, the tune of the German national anthem, Das Lied der Deutschen, came from Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which Haydn wrote when Austria was under Napoleon's attack. Copies of his canons, which were not published until after his death, are framed and hung on the wall in his bedroom (similar to how he had it). One of the rooms in the Haydnhaus is dedicated to Brahms, who was an ardent admirer of Haydn and whose residences in Vienna no longer exist. Unlike Mozart, who gambled his fortune away, Papa Haydn was quite a philanthropist and supported older folks who had no children to turn to (just as Haydn himself). When he passed away, Haydn left a handsome amount to his copyist Johann Elßler, whose daughter Fanny Elßler was a famous ballerina (and with whom I share the same birthday), and to his maid Anna Kremnitzer.

The audio guides used in Haydnhaus are all iPod Touch. The narratives are much shorter than those at the Mozarthaus, and have more musical interludes of much higher output quality. All in all, Gabriel was one happy fellow after this visit to the Haydnhaus.

Day three: Wien - Sachertorte

Across the street from the Opera House is Hotel Sacher, where one can find the original Sachertorte. Having a meal at this five-star hotel would probably cost a fortune (we didn't even dare to check its restaurant menu). But the hotel runs a small cafe, Sacher Eck' (literally, the Sacher Corner), on its premise. The Eck' only serves drinks and pastry, but that's all we wanted for afternoon tea anyways. The price is not too different from other cafe in this touristy area (and that means approximately 3+€ for a small bottle of fizzy water, ~4€ for a cappuccino and ~4-5€ for a torte). Prices are somewhat cheaper outside the tourist sites.


We ordered a Sachertorte, a Wiener apfelstrudel (apple strudel), and drinks. The strudel is absolutely fantastic. I found the Sachertorte too dry. Perhaps we should have used the mount of whipped cream to add more moisture in each bite.