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Wandering in Wienerwald
Oct. 14th, 2007 09:53 pmLate yesterday: Colleen, Johanna, and I tried out a little Irish pub near my house that boasted Strongbow AND Guinness on tap. It's a little overpriced, which seems to be the norm for Vienna, but it's rather chill, the beer is very good, and they also have free wireless. I think I'll head over there sometime this week when I need to escape my evil little room.
Today's meeting with Alexandra was not bad, as I feared it would be. We met up at end of U4, and took a bus to the top of the Wienerwald, the forest outside Vienna. It was clearly a popular thing to do- the bus was packed and the area was quite simple full of people.
This time of year is the end of the Sturm and Heuriger season in Vienna. Heuriger are little wine-drinking establishments that serve only their own wine, and some selection of buffet-style food. The name comes from the wienerisch word "heurig", a corruption of "heute Jahr"-- "today year". (Standard German would say "dieser Jahr- this year", but I like heuriger better. The idea is that they only serve wine fermented in the past year, and also a local type of half-fermented wine called "Sturm" made from grapes pressed this year. It's a bit cloudy and makes me think more of hard apple cider, but the red is truly wonderful stuff.
The scenery and the season tend to encourage picnics and outdoorsiness in general. We must have passed at least ten Heuriger in the course of a three hours walk, and they all had some sort of seating outside. We ate an incredibly welcome and tasty lunch at one little Heuriger that was almost entirely outside- food was sold from a table and a booth where two women would periodically call for more of whatever they were running out of. I saw people lugging wine in plastic buckets to fulfill the demand, and little kids drinking their quarter liter out of little engraved glass mugs. It was very relaxed and wonderful, and the food was really good. I think I got a little bit of a sunburn, but not so you'd notice.
(Alexandra also brought useful information: The man at Naschmarkt with a huge tub of sauerkraut is apparently a local celebrity called "Gurkin Rudi". Alexandra shares the Naschmarkt love, and recommended one particular butchers are being both very high quality and very responsible. I'm still a little loathe to try and buy meat there, but she says you can get good lamb from the Turks- but not pork, of course, which is apparently a big deal for the pig-guzzling Viennese.)
After the really great lunch, we just sort of wandered down the mountain. Alexandra would stop and point things out, and we would squint out over Vienna for landmarks- weird to have hills around a city. There were also some photo-ops with us kidlets before Alexandra's camera ran out of juice. It was a nice exercise and the conversation was goofy and German and fun. We talked about having difficult names for people to deal with- no one can say "Kathleen", but people also apparently have trouble with Colleen's last name. Alexandra was apparently mislabeled by her boarding-school as a man when she was sixteen because "Alexandra" was not yet a very common girl's name. (Both the women with whom I have studied German had the first name Alexandra:).
Of course, the trip ended with Kaffee und Kuchen at a little place at the foot of the mountain. I had Lebkuchen, only to discover it's a kind of big soft gingerbread- but it actually came in the form of a cake with semichocolate-filling, so I was fine with that.
So, after that I came home and went back to work translating my resumé into German. I made dinner, which turned out once more to be a variation on chicken soup- this time with onions, eggplant, and noodles. The eggplant may have been a bad idea. I think it would have been significantly improved by roasting the eggplant and onions before adding them to the soup- they lacked flavor.
The roomie is named Vanessa, and comes from Linz. She seems pretty nice, and her mother is overburdening her with food and cooking supplies. Her sister (I presume them to be twins) is living in my own dorm, where Colleen still lives. She's actually going to be going home for the break when my friend Karel is coming to visit from Copenhagen, so Karel will *not* have to sleep on the floor! Yay!
Anyhoo, my loves, I am slightly dead, and there is much to do on the morrow, so goodnight all.
Today's meeting with Alexandra was not bad, as I feared it would be. We met up at end of U4, and took a bus to the top of the Wienerwald, the forest outside Vienna. It was clearly a popular thing to do- the bus was packed and the area was quite simple full of people.
This time of year is the end of the Sturm and Heuriger season in Vienna. Heuriger are little wine-drinking establishments that serve only their own wine, and some selection of buffet-style food. The name comes from the wienerisch word "heurig", a corruption of "heute Jahr"-- "today year". (Standard German would say "dieser Jahr- this year", but I like heuriger better. The idea is that they only serve wine fermented in the past year, and also a local type of half-fermented wine called "Sturm" made from grapes pressed this year. It's a bit cloudy and makes me think more of hard apple cider, but the red is truly wonderful stuff.
The scenery and the season tend to encourage picnics and outdoorsiness in general. We must have passed at least ten Heuriger in the course of a three hours walk, and they all had some sort of seating outside. We ate an incredibly welcome and tasty lunch at one little Heuriger that was almost entirely outside- food was sold from a table and a booth where two women would periodically call for more of whatever they were running out of. I saw people lugging wine in plastic buckets to fulfill the demand, and little kids drinking their quarter liter out of little engraved glass mugs. It was very relaxed and wonderful, and the food was really good. I think I got a little bit of a sunburn, but not so you'd notice.
(Alexandra also brought useful information: The man at Naschmarkt with a huge tub of sauerkraut is apparently a local celebrity called "Gurkin Rudi". Alexandra shares the Naschmarkt love, and recommended one particular butchers are being both very high quality and very responsible. I'm still a little loathe to try and buy meat there, but she says you can get good lamb from the Turks- but not pork, of course, which is apparently a big deal for the pig-guzzling Viennese.)
After the really great lunch, we just sort of wandered down the mountain. Alexandra would stop and point things out, and we would squint out over Vienna for landmarks- weird to have hills around a city. There were also some photo-ops with us kidlets before Alexandra's camera ran out of juice. It was a nice exercise and the conversation was goofy and German and fun. We talked about having difficult names for people to deal with- no one can say "Kathleen", but people also apparently have trouble with Colleen's last name. Alexandra was apparently mislabeled by her boarding-school as a man when she was sixteen because "Alexandra" was not yet a very common girl's name. (Both the women with whom I have studied German had the first name Alexandra:).
Of course, the trip ended with Kaffee und Kuchen at a little place at the foot of the mountain. I had Lebkuchen, only to discover it's a kind of big soft gingerbread- but it actually came in the form of a cake with semichocolate-filling, so I was fine with that.
So, after that I came home and went back to work translating my resumé into German. I made dinner, which turned out once more to be a variation on chicken soup- this time with onions, eggplant, and noodles. The eggplant may have been a bad idea. I think it would have been significantly improved by roasting the eggplant and onions before adding them to the soup- they lacked flavor.
The roomie is named Vanessa, and comes from Linz. She seems pretty nice, and her mother is overburdening her with food and cooking supplies. Her sister (I presume them to be twins) is living in my own dorm, where Colleen still lives. She's actually going to be going home for the break when my friend Karel is coming to visit from Copenhagen, so Karel will *not* have to sleep on the floor! Yay!
Anyhoo, my loves, I am slightly dead, and there is much to do on the morrow, so goodnight all.
