Tom in Wien and the Land of the Changeable Weather

A long time ago, in a galaxy that just so happens to be the same one we are in now, I decided to go on holiday to the good old United Kingdom! Such a trip is fraught with dangers, mostly the danger that the required scheduling is so monstrously complicated that it grows into a hideous multi-headed creature and eats you. This did not however occur, though somehow my meticulously forged itinerary does still make me a bit uneasy. I remember a time when one didn't have to be organised! I guess that was a time before I had just under two weeks to try and visit as many friends and family as possible while they were scattered across the country and leading busy lives...

The whole trip was something of a whirlwind, in 12 days I visited 7 different places and saw goodness knows how many people, but many were still left out. I regret each and every one but unfortunately unlimited time was not in my possession.

Exeter cathedral

I'll keep the actual itinerary recount brief, as a lot of the time what I was there for were the people, not the places! But there were some new things. A lot of time was spent in London, from which I made day excursions to Oxford (which never changes, actually met a french girl who studied decadence, albeit the literary movement epitomised by Oscar Wilde et al), and Milton Keynes (not half as bad if you go there for a conference about space things). I also made a longer excursion to Exeter, my sister's university town. As well as putting a face to her life and anecdotes of the last years, this afforded an excellent opportunity to be a real proper tourist in my own country. Seen through Austrian eyes, there is a lot to like about the historical towns and cities of Britain!

New College Oxford. What a lawn.

My biggest trip by far was via Ediburgh and Glasgow (briefly) to team up with my friend Gavia for a crazy, spontaneous trip to Orkney! Just off the tip of John 'O Groats this archipelago is chock full of history and scenery and being an island and very northern represents a combination of two of my favourite things! After a train journey to Aberdeen and a short plane hop we had a very enjoyable time, albeit less than 72 hours I think... The scottish weather threw up the usual mix of sun, rain and dramatic clouds which meshed nicely with the 5000+ year old monuments, Viking runes, Viking cathedrals and tasty foods/whisky on offer.

An island in Orkney

Britain is pretty great for a holiday y'all! You should, like, go sometime. A very abbreviated set of photos of my travels can be found by carrying out the usual operation.

Der Tom

PS possibly incomplete list of British foods eaten: fish and chips, curry, boiled beef + english mustard in a bun, devon pasty, victoria sponge, haggis (stuffed in a chicken), cullen skink + oatcakes.

Tom in Wien and the Visit of the Parents

Occasionally, people just plain can't believe what I write on this blog and have to come and see for themselves what's going on here. Of course many of them claim they have come to see me, but am I better than Vienna? We may never know, but for sure the best thing is the combination of us both!

My parents had been to Wien before, so I could dig into some slightly less conventional/ extra tourist attractions in addition to the general Innenstadt/ Kaffeehaeuser/ Brauerei round that I tend to base my initial introduction to Vienna tours on (of course due to the variety available here, I can and do amend this itinerary regularly. Book your places now!).

Among other things we finally got to the (conjoined!) arms and armour museum and the old musical instruments collection. Favourite instrument (you can use handsets to listen to them being played) was definitely the 'Viola de Gamba', at the time called just the 'Viola' as our modern version wasn't so popular. They look beautiful with their strange dropped shoulders and sound great, a differently tuned cello with way more strings. Check one out below!

Among the other things on the itinerary was a trip to the area of the Bisamberg, where we accidentally found an entire wine festival in progress! Result.

And having promised wildlife, I was extremely gratified to find that the Lainzer Tiergarten offered up excellent views of wild boar, a black woodpecker, a slow worm and another queen ant!! Photos of most of these are found in the album accompanying this post, mixed in with a few of the blue and distant hills of the Wienerwald because who doesn't want to look at that???

Der Tom

Quick Trip to Linz

If there is one way in which I approximate almost exactly a native viennese person, it is this: I barely ever leave Vienna. Oh, sure, I go for hikes outside the city limits, but when it comes to actually visiting other areas of the country I have an absolutely terrible record. In a cumulative two and a half years I have been to a few mountainous regions but of the major cities and towns of Austria I have seen very little. I went to Graz for the weekend once, and I have changed trains in Salzburg...

This kind of laziness is exactly why people outside the capital think Viennese people are selfish idiots. Linz is the 3rd largest city in Austria with just under 200,000 inhabitants (dependant, as always, on where one decides the city stops) and is also only about an hour and a quarter from Vienna. Of course, till last month I had never been. As a schoolfriend of mine was also crazy enough (sensible enough?) to move to Austria and now lives in Linz, I finally took the chance of a free day off for the 1st of May to check it out.

To be honest, I did almost no official tourist stuff, but perhaps that allowed me to get a more natural picture of Linz life anyway. The one exception was a trip to the big beer festival/ fairground of the Urfahranermarkt, where I inadvisedly went on a ride and spent the rest of the evening feeling like I had drunk 3 pints of beer despite being sober...

The contrasts with Vienna aren't very strong architecturally, it's Austria so evereything looks amazing, the differences come with the more relaxed, small town atmosphere. If you walk down Linz's main street or go out to the bars, you will meet people you know. I imagine this to be both a curse and a blessing.

Of course, a smaller city means it is even easier to get out into the surrounding countryside, which we took full advantage of. Back in May, it seemed like the lovely weather would stay forever...

I had great fun in Linz, and hopefully I'll be back again! Here's the few photos I managed to get.

Der Tom

The in between spaces of central Vienna

Today's small batch of pictures were taken on a couple of occasions in late April and as such I was a little lost for a theme to put to the accompanying blog post. However eventually something has popped into my Saturday-addled consciousness. Lucky you, internet!

All the photos today were taken in the green/blue spaces of Vienna, but unlike a lot of recent things I have posted, they are all places that can be reached almost instantly in the middle of the City.

The Donaukanal branches off the regulated Danube proper and passes right by the first district before meandering back off to join the main river. At the point where it passes some of the poshest and most elegant of Vienna's architecture it forms a sort of trench between the 19th century plaster la-di-da buildings. The concrete walls of this trench are full to bursting with fantastic graffiti, like taking a part of the south bank and stretching it out a loooong way. Stepping down from street level to this park/walkway/canal/art gallery, in summer encrusted with several 'beach' theme bars and deckchairs, is an excellent thing to do if and when the Habsburg atmosphere of the city centre is starting to get you down!

As for the rest of the photos, we have a buch of my absolute favourite building in Vienna, the Nazi-built flak tower in the Augarten. This *thing* looms ominously out over the second district, clashing rather with the surroundings. Encountering it in the leafy, relaxed Augarten with oblivious children playing underneath it can really give you the feeling that this is some kind of a propped open time rift back to 1945, if only you would dare to climb over the rusting fences...

I guess the tenuous point of this rather waffly post is to sing the praises of all the parks and squares of Vienna (or heck, any city really) that are stuck in between the bits of the city you see every day, and in which you can pause to contemplate or merely change your suroundings utterly with a short walk.

Here's your link, hope to see you round here again soon.

Der Tom

This post brought to you by the objective fact that The Mountain Goats are the best band ever.

Bisamberg 2: Bisamberg Harder.

Having waxed lyrical about the Bisamberg in a previous post regular readers of this blog (and are there any other kind?) will be familiar with this easy to reach but nonetheless very out-of-the-way-feeling hill just outside Vienna. Never being one to turn down an opportunity to go for a walk or to show off Austria, I went back to the Bisamberg relatively soon after my first visit to lead my friend Ash and some visiting acquaintances of his on the winding route through the woods and vineyards.

The weather was a great deal clearer than my earlier visit, which made for some good views of the distant edge of the alps and the shiny towers of Vienna's transdanubian districts. However, even more notable was the abundance of wildlife, especially wildflowers. Having discovered that the Bisamberg is in a slightly different biological realm to the Wienerwald it wasn't a surprise to see a bunch of interesting plants that I definitely don't recall seeing before.

Other wildlife encountered on the walk included MASSIVE queen ants, after seeing one we assumed we had been extremely lucky until we came across many more in quick sucession and realised we had merely chosen to go for a walk on some kind of swarming day. Frankly the shape of the queen ants was just that tiny bit disturbing, the really thin body and distended abdomen just screams 'not normal' even though of course the things still come from earth like everything else. Probably.

 Not the largest of these freaky creatures we saw...

Final 'wildlife' spot of the day were a field of ostriches. Not known for being natives of the area, one can only assume they came for the pleasing combination of the words 'Austria' and 'ostrich'. Interestingly, ostriches are called 'Strauss' in German, and I do wonder whether fans of the late great Waltz composer Johann (he of the ludicrously golden statue in the Vienna Stadtpark) ever associated him with these decidedly ungraceful looking birds.

 Strauss & Strauss. Can you tell the difference?? (thanks wikipedia for the photos)

At the end of the walk I finally managed to make it to a particular wine establishment I had had my eye on for a while, and we were rewarded by a man talking in thick and unintelligible dialect who sold us wine from the vineyards around his house for the princely sum of €1.10 a glass...

A few pictures, mostly of flowers and vineyards, can be found as usual hiding behind this green text.

Till next time

Der Tom

Eeee-jeeee-ewe

Due to my relentless obsession with publishing things about my life in chronological order and an enjoyable but pretty exhausting visit to the UK last week (7 towns/ cities in 12 days...) we are still mired somewhere back in the middle of April in blog time. At least we have reached the sunny part!

EGU is the european geosciences union, where 10,000 (yes, actually not a hyperbole) geoscientists roll up in Vienna each year to exchange knowledge and knock back free wine/beer. The whole thing includes disciplines as widely separated as atmospheric scientists, plasma physicists, sedimentologists seismologists and anything else in between, and all in all, it was pretty good fun.

This year was the first time I gave a talk. I was apprehensive beforehand, not really about the talking in front of people, more about the fact that I was worried there weren't going to *be* any people, as my session took place on a Friday afternoon. Thankfully, and a testament to the interesting things said in the first installment of our session earlier in the week, a big bunch of people turned up and my talk went over rather well

Outside my own talk, I enjoyed this year's conference a lot more than last year's. Somehow an extra year in the PhD business has allowed me to relax a little bit. I no longer have the idea that I am somehow failing if every microsecond of my day is not filled with interesting, high quality and relevant discussions about my project.

Exploring poster sessions outside my own discipline was great fun, and great scientific discussion practice. Perhaps the high point of my conference was attending a poster session on deformation of ice where I was able to help someone bridge the gap between the literature on the phenomena from their research area (materials science) and the work done on similar things in geology. It was a brilliant moment when the person replied to my email a few weeks later to say that what I had said had encouraged them to try some new and useful stuff!

Ah yes, and I mentioned the sun... During and immediately after the conference I got some pretty great (if I do say so myself) photos of the long awaited sun setting over Vienna.  I hope you enjoy them half as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Der Tom

Contrasts

I was just going to post my pictures of a snowy first of April sojourn in the hills above Vienna today, but the recent weather has just been so summery I can't resist letting a little bit of it into this post. So in honour of the lightening quick thaw and rapid acceleration to 25+ degree temperatures over the last few weeks, I am presenting one album of photos separated by only a little under 4 weeks showing the two separate worlds we Vienna-inhabitants have experienced during the last month.

First up we have the lingering grip of the returned snowy weather, plastering the trunks of trees and turning the forest almost white, colour provided only by the dead leaves of the previous year. This batch were taken one evening when I embarked on a brief walk up the steep path to the Leopoldsberg more for the excercise than anything else, although the Leopoldsberg's lonely atmosphere is always welcome, strengthened this time by the snow, clouds and distant misty sunset colours behind Klosterneuberg. I ended up returning to normal Vienna level by wending my way through the wintry vineyards.

And secondly we have pictures hot off the press from earlier this afternoon, when a friend and I slathered ourselves in suncream and set off to the very end of tram line 60, right at another part of the official edge of Vienna, SW of the city. This was our first outdoor, real rock climbing trip of the year and although I am stil a bit rusty it was fantastic to finally set foot on actual rock again after an absence of what must be several years. Climbing outside will always feel more real than indoors, no more brightly coloured holds and routes set by humans to be a certain exact difficulty!

Hopefully this post sets the stage well for some posts displaying my other springtime April activities. I must say the dramatic weather change and the buzz of late night Vienna now that everyone sits outside on the restaurant terraces instead of huddled inside over a coffee is most welcome. I cannot remember the last time I was quite so happy with how lovely the city of Vienna is!

Der Tom