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

Freiberg

More messages from the frozen past! Beaming blue skies and 20+ degree temperatures are beckoning distractingly from outside my window... I may have to update a bit more often to get through all the winter photos before this starts to get ridiculous.

Only one month ago I travelled by car with a group of colleagues to Freiberg in eastern Germany. Freiberg is a tiny medieval town just West of Dresden. We weren't there for a holiday, rather for a course the details of which probably don't need to be too deeply gone into here except to say that it involved computers (as a lot of things do these days, even if one claims to be studying rocks the whole time).

I didn't do much looking round the town, to be honest. This was a combination of the freezing temperatures, driving snow, and pure laziness on my part. Unlike most Germans I never had to start school at 8am and I still cannot deal with waking up early. This means that when you make me start an intensive week long course every day at 8.30am by the time 5pm rolls around I am a little bit groggy, to say the least. Towards the end of the week my lazy PhD student physiology was slowly hammered into shape and on the very last evening in Freiberg I managed to brave the cold and frozen fingers in the early evening and get a few shots of the sleepy, picturesque town.

I did ask one of the demonstrators what there was to actually do in Freiberg for the students at his university, and the answer was basically: go elsewhere. Nonetheless it is a very charming place to spend a few days, knowing that one day you will leave again and dive back into the real world.

In my case the intrusion of the real world was pretty abrupt, as we travelled immediately from Freiberg to big, flat, dirty, noisy Berlin...

Anyhow, I bet you all want to get outside and enjoy the weather as much as I do, so here's the customary photo link, have fun! I repeat the now tradition plea to click the enlarge button to actually see the nice resolution photos.

Der Tom

Everyday Beauty

Hello there! In real time I have just successfully presented my talk at the European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna, and am now relaxing after an intense and exciting week of rock discussion and free alcohol consumption, all while basking in the recently sprung Spring weather. However, in blog time we are still mired somewhere in mid March, a bleak and chilly time...

Looking at the bunch of photos I have for you this week, no obvious story occurs to me. The only unifying thing about them is that they were all taken within an area that you could safely call central Vienna, inside the second ringroad called the 'Guertel' or belt, which splits off districts 1-9 from the double digit districts. It is quite a marked architectural and socio-economic boundary in many ways, Vienna definitely suffers a bit from the stratification that occurs in many European cities, something that (at least in the past) was avoided in London by virtue of the patchwork of council housing veining the whole of the city. Anyway, the Innenstadt is certainly the Vienna of the postcards.

These photos lend themselves best to description by caption, so by all means, head on over to picasa! And so new camera doesn't get sad, I will repeat the usual advice that by clicking on the magnifying glass you can see them at high resolution.

Enjoy exploring the things that form the backdrop to my daily wanderings!

Der Tom

Auf dem Bisamberg

Travel one stop outside Vienna on the S-bahn to the Northeast and (if you got the right line) you arrive in Langenzersdorf. As always, the transition from central Vienna to the edges causes one to pause briefly. Just a few kilometres outside the city limits and everything really does seem to be a village. If it is a suburb, it is not a suburb of any kind that the British would recognise. To be honest, several areas of Vienna inside the city boundaries are also villages in all but fact, so maybe one could conclude that whoever drew the boundary of 'Vienna' was being a bit generous.

 Above, Wolfersgrunweg, a 'street' in Vienna's 21st district found in the course of this hike :-)

Langenzersdorf lies at the foot of the Bisamberg. In many ways this small hill is the little brother of the Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg to the southwest across the river, in fact geologically it is exactly the same. The danube flows through the gap between the two groups of hills, the gap bearing the name of the 'Donaupforte', or Danube gate.

 Looking from the Leopoldsberg across the 'Donapforte' to the low hump of the Bisamberg, taken by me on a much less pleasant day.

The Bisamberg may have the same rocks underfoot as the Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg, but in many ways it is subtly different. The flora and fauna of the Bisamberg belong not to the Wienerwald and alps, but to the Pannonian basin, the warmer and more southerly climate zone of the low lying land which stretches from Vienna across the whole of Hungary. There are more conifers here, and the soil seems very sandy. In fact in the past the whole place was a managed landscape, maintained by grazing as a grassland much like the Chiltern hills of my home county.

Once you have climbed up the hill, enjoyed the view over the Danube and travelled through the woods you come to the tree-free areas of the Bisamberg, a long shallow slope back down to the outskirts of Vienna. Here you can find earthworks thrown up in defence of Vienna during Austria-Hungary's war with the Prussians in 1866. The atmosphere here is again very different to hikes in the Wienerwald as you are completely exposed to the wind walking through rolling fields, with the towers of the newer parts of Vienna hanging in the distance.

 Austro-hungarian ruins

The area is also (according to one of the many informative nature signs) recognised for its Hohlwege (hollow ways, just like we have in the UK) as the older tracks cut deep into the sediments forming the uppermost, most recent layer of the local geology. These sediments are loess, dust-fine grains formed by the grinding and pulverising action of glaciers in the last ice age, transported and deposited first by milky melt water streams and then blown into their current locations by the wind.

The whole walk is best topped off with a visit to one of the many wine establishments or 'Heuriger' that can be found on the outer edge of Vienna.

Hope you enjoy the photos! Don't forget to press the magnifying glass if you want to see them at high resolution.

Der Tom

Camera is dead! Long live new camera!

As you don't know, because I didn't tell you, my trusty camera companion disappeared under suspicious circumstances last June. After a long and valiant struggle through the postal systems of Norway and Sweden, camera was thwarted in its attempt to return to me at the last minute by some unknown worker in the austrian postal system, who removed camera from its packet and replaced it with a bottle of (decidedly less useful) vinyl cleaner. Thanks, postal worker. I wish camera the best of luck in its new life!

Now though I can reveal to you, the people of the world, that we have a NEW camera! As new camera is much more expensive than old camera, it is capable of taking nicer photos, though only if the person using the camera actually has any skills. Also owing to new camera's expensiveness, I feel it should be put to some use. What is the point of storing all these photos if nobody else looks at them? Furthermore, I think posting photos on the internet is a good way to encourage myself to actually use new camera.  Plus, I figure you invisible presences out there might like to see some new images of this very photogenic country in which I find myself (plus guest appearances from other countries!).

SO, I shall be posting links from time to time of things I have photographed, which you may peruse on Picasa. These images have been uploaded at high resolution, so if you want to look closer at one you like, don't forget to click on the magnifying glass at the top to load the high res version! I have already stored up a number of different sets of photos, so there should be material available for a while.

I am trying to take 'better' pictures, so these galleries tend to be slightly less good at documenting the appearance and interesting features of a place I have visited as if you were visiting it yourself. There are less travelogues and more unconnected details. Nonetheless I hope that through them and the captions you will get an impression of the sorts of places I hang around in and what my life is like at the moment.

It is difficult to write easily and often about my time in Vienna now everything is so normal to me. I don't mean I don't spend most of my time marvelling at how good we have it here. My friends will tell you that I still manage to do so almost daily. Nonetheless, there is only so often that one can blog about perfectly ordinary comings and goings in different restaurants and cafes before it becomes rather routine. Hopefully by letting the pictures of the interesting things do the talking, I can more regularly introduce you to my life here without repeating myself, and maybe get better at photography in the process!

The first set of shots are selected from a bunch taken as I wandered around the immediate neighborhood of my house in the 1st and 8th districts of Vienna very soon after I got new camera. They showcase a few of the beautiful things one can see in the central districts of Vienna almost without trying, as long as one rembers to look.

Bis bald ('till soon)

Der Tom