The Last Month

I very vividly imagine my arrival at San Franciscio Int’l Airport as follows: I see my family waiting for me, I walk toward them, and, as my mom is about to hug me, I grab her shoulders and kiss her once on each cheek. And I proceed to do the same to my brother and father. Then I step back smiling and say, “God I’m hungry, can we get some rolls and ham and a couple shots of espresso with whole milk before we get in the car?” In the car on the way home I roll down the window and watch the Santa Cruz mountains approach in the distance, feeling manically, crazily attracted to them and horribly exposed among the East Bay’s low hills.

I will dream about Alps and wildflowers and cobbled streets for my whole first week in California and spend my waking hours disappointed by American dairy. I will consider going back to Austria. I will consider moving to Vermont. I will consider buying a cow.

Preemptive nostalgia has struck, in no small part thanks to the glorious weather we’ve had here, and in even greater part thanks to the fact that spring here is riotously gorgeous. The fields are lush and green, the streams and rivers sparkle an unbelievable shade of turquoise, tiny blue and black birds literally land on your windowsill, and wildflowers shoot up from the grassy hillsides in explosions of yellow, pink and lavender. The perfect scenery around my house is starting to achieve a slight shimmer around the edges, as though I’ve dreamt it into existence.

Obama, Osama, Austria

Osama bin Laden’s death has made the wrong kind of waves. When I signed on to Facebook for the first time yesterday I was greeted by a flood of exuberant status updates: “Go USA!” “We got ‘em” “Obama: 1, Osama: 0”. Eager to read an in-depth account of the incident, I searched Google News for articles about Osama bin Laden. Much to my bemusement, the first that popped up was on ESPN: Phillies crowd erupts in ‘U-S-A’ cheers. USA Today and several smaller outlets carried similar articles, but actual coverage of the event was sparse.

It was not until four hours later that I found a satisfactory, non-gleeful article (from the Economist, unsurprisingly). Osama’s death’s greatest impact on the US’s efforts in Afghanistan is not yet known, but its impact on the US’s reputation abroad has become rapidly clear. A colleague approached me in the teachers’ lounge this afternoon asking not my opinion on Osama’s death but on the spontaneous festival it inspired in my country. He told me “it sent shivers down (his) spine” to watch footage of the celebration in the US.

To be honest it didn’t exactly rub me the right way either. I have already seen the American reaction justified as a very human expression of joy upon getting revenge on the man that ruined so many American lives. There are two significant problems with this argument. The first is that Osama bin Laden did not personally carry out the attacks on September 11th, nor did he independently plan them. The second is that—as human as it is—revenge has no place in a civilized society, much less in its politics.

While I fully support the American people’s desire to breathe a collective sigh of relief and maybe even drink a glass of wine on this occasion, I am disturbed that we as a people feel it is appropriate to dance and sing around a dead body. Osama was a bad man, but death is death and it should not be celebrated.

The media are just as responsible as the revellers in this scenario. They have spent the last nine years pandering to the simple mindset of affected Americans who wanted their loved ones’ deaths on 9/11 to have meaning. “Murdered by an America-hating master villain cowardly hiding in a cave” sounds a lot better than “incidental casualty of an expression of frustration by a coalition of Muslim extremists”, so Osama bin Laden has been treated by both the government and the media as a kind of bearded Dr. No. When al-Qaeda proves, inevitably, that it still exists, the glee so many people felt yesterday will become powerlessness. From the highest highs, the lowest lows.

Salzkammergreat

I’ve been planning a post on Jewish Krakow for the last week now, but like my trip to Sicily, my visits to Krakow’s Jewish quarter, former ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau are a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around. So instead of dragging you through the emotional mire, I’ll entertain you with a thrilling adventure story… kind of.

The town where I’ve been living since the (saga of the) move lies near the southern border of one of Austria’s most beautiful topographical regions*, the Salzkammergut. Salzkammergut translates roughly as “salt domain” thanks to the massive salt deposits in the region. Salzburg (“salt castle”) is the westernmost border of the Salzkammergut, and it spans the northwestern part of Styria, southwestern Upper Austria and eastern Salzburg. The Salzkammergut is a land of crystal lakes and impressive pre-Alpine mountains. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, think Sound of Music.

Yep, there it is. As I learned on a Sound of Music tour I took through Salzburg Land with my cousins Jessie and David, the film’s outdoor scenes were actually filmed right in the Salzkammergut. Almost feel like you’ve been there already, right?

Wrong! The Salzkammergut is SO much more than pastoral panoramas. It is a climber’s/skier’s/hiker’s paradise, the source of Salzburg’s wealth, and the oldest continuously-populated area of central Europe. It’s been supporting human inhabitants for 7000 years. In fact, the beginning of the European iron age is known in German as Hallstattzeit in honor of the Upper Austrian Salzkammergut city of Hallstatt, where an archaeologist discovered a huge prehistoric cemetery in the 19th century.

Hallstatt continues to be a truly fascinating place to visit. It is a tiny village of 1000 perched precariously on a small swath of earth between the imposing Salzberg mountain and the equally imposing Hallstättersee—a lake so deep (125 m) that it attracts scuba divers. Much of Hallstatt’s strange charm comes from its difficult geographical position. Some of the town’s oldest buildings are built into the side of the mountain, and its newest perch on stilts on the shore of the lake.

In fact, space is such a problem for the Hallstatters that until about 1900 they exhumed buried bodies from the cemeteries every 15 years to make room for new ones.  After an exhumation the bones were allowed to blanche for a few weeks in the sun and moonlight and were painted in remembrance by the deceased’s survivors. They were then set to rest in the Bone Chapel adjacent to the Catholic church.

Over time this necessity has evolved into a tradition, and the practice has developed its own peculiar cult and symbology. The ornamentation of the skulls has symbolic value: the rose (for love), ivy (for life), laurel (for victory), and oak leaves (for glory) show up often. The skulls of priests were placed on books adjacent to the crucifix and remain the highest situated skulls in the chapel. It is still possible to be interred in the Bone Chapel, but you must request a placement during your lifetime. Most Hallstatters opt to be cremated these days.

For more pictures of Hallstatt and another lovely lake, Gosausee, see my album on Facebook.

*Austria is officially split up into nine provinces along politico-historical lines, but its residents also identify themselves with their topographical regions, which often span multiple provinces. 

Easter in Central Europe

I just got back from Krakow this morning and I finally have the time to sit down and write something about it. Krakow is lousy with Catholic churches and dirty pigeons, and 50% of the tourists there are either Spanish or Italian—quite possibly because of the huge Catholic presence. In fact, I saw a chartered bus unloading a massive group of Spanish priests right outside the Old Town. In his book Postwar, Tony Judt contends that the most enduring effect of WWII on Europe is the homogenization of nations, and Poland is pretty much the prime example of this phenomenon.

Before the war, Poland was home to the world’s largest Jewish population, as well as considerable numbers of gypsies, ethnic Germans and Ukrainians. The ethnic communities of Poland lived in relative harmony. Their children played together at school and the adults did business together in town. Now Poland is almost exclusively Polish, and is also the most Catholic country in Europe, with almost 90% of its population belonging to the Catholic church. 

Traveling to Europe’s most Catholic country during Holy Week was a pretty bad idea. Shortly after buying my train tickets to Dresden and from Krakow, I realized that I was set to be in Krakow on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. Yes, these are all holidays, and yes, they are all observed. In Poland and Austria, as well as Catholic parts of Germany, Easter is a BIG deal. Catholics fast on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. On Holy Saturday they bring parts of their Easter meal to church to be blessed by the priest, and then they go home and build massive fires. Easter Sunday is a huge feast, complete with candy, booze and very big presents.

Instead of searching for brightly colored eggs or chocolates, central European children search for new bikes or TV sets. But besides that one little difference, the Easter symbols are basically the same. Austrians especially like making human-size straw bunnies and dressing them in old clothes like scarecrows. They also play this game where you knock two eggs together and see which one breaks first. It doesn’t seem like much of a game to me but I guess anything can be amusing for sugared up children.

I didn’t see many Easter children’s games in Krakow, but I did see a unique pagan tradition on Easter Monday. In some bizarre holdover from pre-Christian times, single Poles go around on Easter Monday and pour water on their romantic interests. I guess I didn’t expect this to still happen in cosmopolitan Krakow, but the back streets of the Old Town were full of teenagers emptying bottles of mineral water on each other, and, in a few cases, shooting at each other with Super Soakers.

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Max Klinger - Der Pinkelnde Tod (Death Peeing), 1900
Museum der bildenden Künsten, Leipzig, Germany 

Ideas for sociological studies I have come up with based on my experiences in the past two days:

1. Interview museum security guards.
2. Come up with a definitive theory of why there is always only one white guy in any given internet cafe, and he always appears to be looking at porn even if he’s not.
3. Determine what makes a person seem trustworthy or untrustworthy, and which experiences make a person trusting or untrusting.

Leipzig: more than an ugly name

So I spent the day in Leipzig, and I got there from Dresden using the most awesome thing ever in the history of things: MITFAHRGELEGENHEIT.de. This is a website that basically allows you to arrange carpools around Europe, and it is the sweetest thing ever. It cost me all of €5 to get to Leipzig and €6 to get back, and it was faster than the train.

The city itself was almost as exciting as the website. Despite its amazing cultural history, Leipzig has developed into a financial center rather than a cultural one. Today, the building where Goethe first heard the story from which he would adapt Faust is sandwiched between two massive 19th century exhibition halls. Similarly, the church where a young Bach played the organ (St. Thomas’, if you’re wondering) stands across the ring street from a motley collection of steel-grey office buildings.

Despite sounding and in fact being kind of awkward, Leipzig does have its high points. I especially enjoyed the Museum der bildenden Künsten, a magnificent modern building finished on the inside with amazing hardwood and full to the brim with exceptional paintings and sculptures. Everything in Leipzig is on such a huge scale that it’s easy to overlook even the most momentous structures. For example, I nearly missed the incredible, sprawling, medieval-castle looking New Courthouse. Incidentally, Luther was tried at the New Courthouse in 1512.

Leipzig owes its intimidating scale to its great tradition of hosting trade shows. The city is home to countless horrifyingly huge exhibition halls and several hundred annual fairs. As I said before, this is nothing new for the city. It has been erecting these buildings since the 18th century. Everything has grown up around and within the halls of Leipzig, including Germany’s largest train station. (Seriously.) As a result even the historic city center is big, boxy and unwieldy in nature.

Overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the place, I bought myself a walking tour guide and tried my darnedest to follow it through the city. I found myself, among other places, in a coffehouse attic-cum-museum dedicated to coffee, a luxurious shopping passage, an ultra-modern shopping passage, and the square where the real historical Woyzeck was hanged. The last one was actually kind of incredible for me, I have to admit, but the effect was ruined by the fact that the square has since become a construction site. I also learned some cool things, like that Reclam Verlag was founded in Leipzig and that… um… well yeah…

For those of you who excelled in history, Leipzig should ring a very special bell. Napoleon lost the so-called Battle of the Nations there in 1813. In honor of the battle and its fallen (the Germans call it the Völkerschlacht, or Slaughter of the People) the Germans erected a huge, maginificent, noteworthy, breathtaking monument in the outskirts of the city—which I completely neglected to go see. So there you have it, friends. My ultimate touristic shame.

Off to Krakow tomorrow!

Dresdner Nachrichten

I’m kind of falling asleep at the moment so I’m unfortunately going to have to make this relatively kurz. Today I “slept in” until 8 am and left for the old town of Dresden after a leisurely morning with Frischkäse, Brötchen and Die Zeit. I had decided that of Dresden’s many painstakingly reconstructed Baroque attractions, I was most keen to see Das Grüne Gewölbe, the Green Vault. Dresden’s big deal historic resident, King Augustus the Strong, assembled the Green Vault in the 18th century as a seriously gaudy showcase for his seriously gaudy artistic possessions, commissions and inheritances.

It consists of 10 rooms, and each has a special theme and decorating scheme. Conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a complete work of art, the rooms are designed to both complement their contents and evoke emotions like awe (and possibly also jealousy) in the visitor. For this reason, the rooms become increasingly opulent until the “climax” room, the Hall of Precious Objects. Then comes the infinitely more modest Heraldry Room… but wait, there’s more! The climax is actually yet to come! Brought near to the point of aesthetic exhaustion by the wonders of the king’s vault, visitors are delivered a final fatal blow in the form of the Jewel Room. And then they presumably just wander around dazed for the rest of the day.

I arrived at the Residenzschloss—the former royal palace—at about 10:10, and when I got to the front of the line for admission into the Grüne Gewölbe, I was informed that I needed to wait in a different line. So I waited in that line. Forty-five minutes after arriving I had managed to buy a ticket for the next available entry into the Gewölbe: 2 pm. Almost everyone in the lines around me was in some way Slavic. I sadly cannot differentiate between Slavic languages, but I’m sure they were speaking one of them.

I don’t know why, but I find Dresden’s proximity to the east impressive. Culturally it has just as much in common with Poland as with Austria, but as a part of the former GDR it also has a special culture all its own. My host told me about an east German children’s show called Sandmann, (Sandman) which was always on before she went to bed. At the end of the stop-motion animation, the Sandman would appear on the screen and throw dust in the direction of the audience. The screen would start to sparkle and go blurry, and the children of the GDR would go dutifully to bed.

Speaking of my host, I am staying with a very cool girl named Stefanie who I found on CouchSurfing, a website that connects travellers with people who are willing to share their homes and knowledge with them for the duration of their stay. I’ve been a member of the website for a long time, but this is my first time actually interacting with another member. It’s been an amazing experience so far. She and her roommates have shown me so much I would have never seen without them and made my time so far very comfortable. Tonight the four roommates, a boyfriend and I had a BBQ on the patio.

I think this is sadly the first time I have ever felt really comfortable alone in a group of German-speakers. Being here has made it even clearer to me how unbelievably isolated I have been in Austria—not just linguistically but personally. Sure, even the Saxon dialect of German that is spoken here in Saxony is incredibly understandable, and I feel quite at home in conversations between native speakers. But more importantly, these are people my age with similar concerns and goals and interests. The past two days have confirmed my negative impression of my time in Austria, but they have at the same time shown me that exchange is not impossible and that perhaps I am not just naturally predisposed to antisocial behavior.

Enough about me, more about Dresden. Dresden has two major sections: the old town and the new town. The old town is the part that was carpet bombed to smithereens in 1945, and now that it has been rebuilt to former specifications it’s easy to see why the Allies would target it. It’s beautiful and regal and ostentatious—if it were possible to bomb German art and progress and self-consciousness, you would do so by bombing Dresden. The new town is a completely different ballgame. Much like East Berlin, Neustadt is hip and young and bohemian. There are vegetarian restaurants, record stores and reasonably priced boutiques around every corner.

Despite their similarities, natives insist that Dresden is not Berlin. It’s smaller, it’s kinder, and it’s way, way less pretentious. But most importantly, Dresden has a shop entirely dedicated to mustard.

Dresden, city of wonders

I got into Dresden at 7 am this morning on the night train from Vienna. I have already started to see the differences between East and West Germany and am very excited to see more of the city tomorrow. My CouchSurfing host Stefanie met me at the train station around 10 am and we went to the Deutsches Hygiene Museum, which is both exactly what and nothing like what it sounds like. More later!

Sicily.

I got back from Sicily a month ago tomorrow, and I’ve been agonizing over the etiquette of gratitude for the past couple of weeks. I promised my cousins Valentina and Fabio a selection of recommended music and Austrian beer, but I can’t very well send a massive package of Märzen to the kids and nothing to the adults. Not that the kids are really kids anymore – Valentina’s 30 and Fabio’s 28. I think. They are my second cousins once-removed, the children of one of my grandmother’s cousins on her paternal side. Maybe I should make a chart. Hold on one sec….

You should be able to click here to make it bigger. It’s pretty basic and I have rudely left out several of Vito’s siblings and my dear aunt Kim, but I’m sure you get the point. Vito’s sister Agatha was the only other Mandina kid who came to America, and her son Nick is something of a genealogy freak. He got me in touch with Scipione’s kids in Mazara del Vallo, and the rest is history.

Part of the reason I’ve been putting off this post for so long is that there is so much to say about my trip to Sicily. It was a great vacation, sure, and I saw a lot worth writing about; the food alone could carry a three hour long conversation; I reconnected with family I didn’t even know I had; I experienced a new culture. All of these things could be handled in a series of posts, I guess, but there’s a much bigger problem at play here: I have only a very vague idea of where Sicily stopped and my family began, where culture stood in for personality and excitement for interest. Even a month later I don’t know how to properly describe my experience.

The family tree seems as good a place to start as any, and it has the advantage of being objective and certain. My great-grandfather Vito was born in 1894 in Mazara del Vallo, a small fishing city in western Sicily, in a narrow marble street facing one of the city’s magnificent marble churches, relics of the wealth of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and finally Normans who controlled it between 800 BC and 1282 AD. 
 

He joined the merchant marine as a young man and jumped ship in southern Texas, only to travel north to Canada and reenter the country legally a few years later. In 1929 he married my great-grandmother Catherine Rappa in New York City and joined the legions of Sicilian-Americans. All of his six brothers and sisters but one remained in Mazara del Vallo, the children of a scion of Italy’s crumbling aristocracy. A more detailed family tree shows that some aristocratic family traditions have (for the most part) endured, such as naming the first born son after the paternal grandfather. The tradition also lives on through gorgeous heirloom furniture and silver that stands unassumingly in the less used rooms of Nicolo’s and Ferdinando’s houses.

Outside of these relics, there is nothing to suggest that my cousins are special or privileged in any way. Valentina and Fabio live at home and work in Mazara (Fabio does IT for a local grocery store and Valentina co-owns a tattoo & piercing parlor with her boyfriend Peppe), but most children of the city have to move out to find a job. It’s small and the economy isn’t growing; according to Valentina you either invent a job or go to the mainland and find one. All of their friends that are still there own or operate bars, pubs or restaurants, but several who live in Milan, Parma and Rome come back to visit frequently.

Agata is 25 and lives half the time with her parents in Mazara and half the time in Rome with her older sister Antonella. She is studying to be an occupational therapist at the University of Rome. Her brother Alessandro, the oldest of the siblings, is married and lives in Parma. Life on the island, though economically complicated, is quite simple. There are three meals a day, and lunch and dinner ALWAYS have three courses. Family lives close by, the smell of the ocean wafts over the seaside promenade and the weather is fine. Openness is the order of the day and passive-aggression just means you get yelled at instead of hit. The wine is amazing, the seafood is heavenly, and espresso flows like water.

All of the stereotypes about Sicilians are true. They are loud, they eat a lot, and they love their families and their Vespas. When my minicab driver picked me up from Nicolo’s to bring me to the airport he said, ”Hey you know Nicolo’s son? What’s his name? His girlfriend, Romi, is my wife’s cousin’s daughter.” Small world, right? I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was so I just smiled and laughed and replied with a non-committal noise like “wow” or “cool.” I did get the impression that Nicolo was a big man in the community though. He’s gregarious, loud, funny, and loves eating. I think that explains why he and Mariella are so good together: she is a marvelous cook. And when I decided I didn’t want to eat anymore she would egg me on with an urgent “Mangia! Mangia!” which became her battle cry for the week.

When I wasn’t eating, I was taking walks or drives around the town, beach and surrounding countryside with various groups of relatives. The longest by far was a magnificent 12 hour voyage through Trapani and Marsala and back with Agata. We saw many beautiful things and drank some wonderful Marsala wine.

Valentina also took me on a voyage. This one was to Palermo on a horrible rainy day. She showed me around as best she could but it was hard to enjoy anything in the torrent.

The weather eventually drove us into the small but impressive Palermo Museum of Contemporary Art, and later the macabre Capuchin Crypts, which we walked through several times before I’d had enough.

Edvige and Ferdinando took it upon themselves to show me the great cultural sites around Mazara, and we spent two more rainy days at Gibellina Nuova, a bizarre city designed and built by modern sculptors in the 1970s, and Segesta, one of the great ancient ruins of Sicily. You can Google much better pictures of Segesta than the ones I took, but Gibellina is kind of underrepresented online. The original city was destroyed by an massive earthquake in 1968, and the ruins of the city were encased in concrete. Below this maze-like monument a new city was built according to the whims of a group of Italian artists.

I think that’s all for now… To see more photos click here, here and here.

I am still alive.

The last month has been absolutely insane for me. I can’t remember the last time I was able to sit down at the end of the day and muster the energy and mental capacity to actually write something worthwhile. Even now my brain is completely fried. I really can’t write much more right now, but I will do my best to pop back in during the weekend to compose a longer entry about one of my recent adventures. These include: visiting long lost relatives in Sicily, a weekend in Salzburg with Seattle-based cousins Jessie and David, snow shoeing, Fasching in Bad Aussee & Carnevale in Venice, moving, teaching a bunch of obnoxious pimply pre-teens at an intensive English week in Scheifling, my awesome new tutoring gig(s), and the Commute from Hell. Feel free to vote on what you most want to hear about in the comments.