Feast of Fools

Vienna: it's very baroque. Also astonishingly dinky ^_^

Nobody actually wants to be subjected to the blog equivalent of my holiday photos, so highlights:

- Christmas markets! Nearly almost not quite enough to convert me to Christmas ^_^ Surprisingly tasteful, considering the potential, but good for the heaps-of-Christmassy-STUFF-in-appropriate-colours-and-vaguely-warm-and-glowy effect. Plus I brought back about eight kilograms of lebkuchen and now my flat smells faintly of Christmas all the time.

- Sausage-inna-bun, the route to much Tashular joy. 'Ein Hotdog mit Bratwurst, bitte!' are indeed the words that lead to heaven. Also, endless amusement as they impale innocent baguettes on terrifying spikes in order to make ketchup-mustard-and-sausage space. And the sausages are made of actual meat! Named meat! And not generally named 'Tiddles' or 'Rover' as far as I could tell.*

*this joke totally on loan from Terry Pratchett, I just can't remember which book.

- Sitting next to the soloist's elderly father at the Konzerthaus, who generally beamed with pride, pulled out little passport photos of his son to show us, and checked we were paying attention every time he got up to sing ^_____^

- Lovely welcoming little Asian restaurant called Koi, in which we sheltered from the rain and ate gorgeous food, and then got completely drenched pegging it through aforesaid rain to aforesaid Konzerthaus ^_^;;

- MOMUK, the contemporary art museum, jewel of the modern culture area called the Museumsquartier. Great big monolithic slate-coloured whale-shaped building, currently featuring an Erwin Wurm retrospective (he is awesome) and a medium-sized white bungalow balanced upside down on the roof (this is why). Ask me about the giant potatoes stuck in the walls, and the morbidly obese car that talks in gangster slang.

- Salzburg! Horrifyingly pretty, plus cold, crisp, shiny and about the size of a tuppenny piece. The fortress on top of the hill is wonderful, and we made it out of town before the Mozartiness reached permanent trauma levels.

- Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial, which I was expecting to be dark and foreboding and horrible and turned out to be strange and oddly beautiful and mournful and quite suited to the funny little square they've plonked it in.

- The Prince's Aide #1 (possibly called Dennis) in the weirdy Nutcracker ballet we saw at the Opera House. Scientists can prove that he was approximately 1073% better than everyone else in the cast, plus he had excellent velvet tights.

Lowlights:

- The Prater. It's basically a bombsite with a fairground in it. The ginormous Ferris wheel is fun though, if only for the precarious joy of the angle the cars tip to when everyone crowds to one side to take photos...

- The Picasso exhibition at the Albertina. There reaches a point in late Picasso when even the most ardent anti-feminist must surely be overwhelmed with the urge to dig him up from his grave just so that he can be smacked in his decaying mouth quite as hard as sensibility requires.

Also, Vienna is full of contemporary furniture shops, and I didn't go into a single one :-p