Oben

In the last week or two I have managed to get out into the countryside a bit more, helped naturally by the lack of -15 degree temperatures, winds and snow...




At the weekend I made a trip once again up into the hills north of Vienna to visit what has fast become one of my favourite places in the whole Vienna area, the Leopoldsberg. Great views, far fewer people than the Kahlenberg and less cheesy piano accompaniment. Instead there are concrete viewing platforms, a lonely boarded up set of buildings surrounding a church and a gorgeous view over Vienna and the danube. I have now been up here twice at sunset, and although chilly it is certainly worth it.

Returning from the Leopoldsberg I stopped off at the Kahlenberg, which had been all but cleared of tourism by the still bitter wind and retreating sunlight. And I am hugely glad I did, for the final throes of the sunset were even more spectacular with a better view of the first peaks of the alps to the southwest. For some reason the sky above them stayed pink and orange long after the rest of the deck of clouds had turned blue-black, the wispy orange glow almost giving the impression of fires on the peaks. Utterly impossible to capture with my small (but trusty) camera, but I have got some shots to give y'all an impression of what you're missing!

Of course the Wienerwald is nothing, hill-wise, in comparison with the real alps. Luckily we had a research group seminar scheduled at my professors house right at the end of an alpine valley. Two and a half days of research discussion, beer, food, sledging (I mean proper down an icy track from high on the mountain sledging too) and snowball fights. Pretty OK for a start to the week! And now I actually know what my colleagues are working on in a bit more detail, which is always nice. This time the sun was shining brightly and it was ideal conditions for even my camera to achieve its best results. So if you are curious what an average snow depth of greater than 1.5 metres looks like, click on!

Bis bald,
Der Tom

Der Alltag

That means 'daily routine' or 'day to day stuff' or something like that. I use this word because much of what I have been doing for the last month and a half has been pretty routine, and not really worth writing about. I do of course live in Vienna, so that doesn't mean it isn't really fantastic, it's just that I've either written about most of the things I have been doing before, or I would just be telling you what I said while hanging around in whatever cafe/bar I happened to be in that night, and what I had to drink... Of course if that is what my audience desires... Well, if that's what my audience desires I will get a twitter account in disgust and tweet boring/jealousy causing things about how pleasant my life is.

On the work front I have a few more exams than recently but mostly things are progressing as before, ie I keep looking at things and thinking about them and enjoying very much that it is my job to try and figure stuff out. I submitted an abstract to the EGU conference in Vienna, so if that gets accepted I will have my first official poster at a conference, which will be really cool!

One thing I did do which was absolutely excellent and I haven't mentioned before was to go to the Magritte exhibition at the Albertina (oh and I also bought a ticket for THE WHOLE YEAR for only €30, so I can go back in the museum whenever I want without worrying about how long I go for etc etc).

The Magritte exhibition had over 250 paintings all by the same man, so inevitably the big thing I learned was how many more styles and paintings Magritte had made than the traditional few you always see with the men with apple faces. There were a huge number of different approaches to Magritte's central idea of words and things and pictures of things not all being the same, united by his easily recognisable very clean and well painted style.

It was especially good to have lots of pages from Magritte's letters and writings to explain a bit of the philosophy behind what he was interested in, even though after a while thinking too hard about to what extent a painting of a piece of cheese (entitled 'this is a piece of cheese' and always displayed under a cheese bell) is or isn't a piece of cheese due to the way it has been presented does tend to make your head hurt.

One of the best paintings was this masterpiece of surrealism (follow the link for a larger one!!)



Called 'Time transfixed' what I and my gallery companion Ash both really like about this picture is that all of the shadows etc are perfect. If a train really did extrude out of the wall of your fireplace, this is how it would look. It just hangs there, being a train and looking completely real and nonchalant but at the same time totally impossible. Cool!

The other type of magritte painting that I didn't really know about before were the various huge birds/bird sillhouettes with the trademark magritte clouds, floating over a stormier grey sea and sky. Again, I have put a small image here but it is definitely worth it to look at it bigger, the original is huge)



It is hard to say exactly what I find so great about these, but it is something to do with the truly dreamlike quality of the image. A huge bird shape floats in the sky, looking at the same time flat due to the fact it is a silhouette, and in other parts of the image seeming like an actual giant dream bird. I especially like how the blue sky where the bird shape is also looks almost like a gateway, and the bluish light shines onto the waves where the 'tail' meets the horizon and makes them a slightly different colour. Once again it feels like if (in a dream or wherever) you did see a giant cloud-bird-gateway-silhouette over a beautiful grey stormy sky, this is how it would look.

There were way too many individual painings to go into much detail about them here, suffice to say I am grateful for the opportunity to see so many images in one place and get the overview of all the different things Magritte painted that would be difficult to get seeing a few pictures at a time in one gallery after another.

Keep warm out there! (Oh yes I didn't mention it got down to minus 15 but now it is sitting steady at a night time temperature of about minus 7 with snow on the ground...)

Der Tom