Austria
Germany and Austria: Learning to Kill Two Biers with One Stein
August 6, 2010 by Kim and Clark Kays
To commemorate our two month anniversary as world travelers, we finally finished this post. Buses and trains are great, but it’s difficult to visit small towns using public transportation alone. So, we splurged a little and got a car. Three hundred bucks bought us a Nissan Micra (for the week, at least). Definitely pricey, but you only quit your jobs and travel the world once, right?
We did the typical Romantic Road route of Wurzburg to Fussen. The term was invented by travel agents in 1950 to describe the traditional, stereotypical German/Bavarian sights along the route. Apparently, there was some kind of conflict in the country five years earlier and tourism (along with the rest of the country) needed rebuilding.
This is a popular route for tourists, but we mostly avoided the hordes—except in Dinkelsbühl. We made it just in time for the Kinderzeche Festival, one of the biggest festivals in Bavaria. We had no idea this was going on.
The Swedes were all up in Germany’s shit during the Thirty Years’ War, and the Swedish army besieged the town of Dinkelsbühl for kicks. The city councilors would not surrender, and the decision was made to pillage the town. The…
Read more…
Austria: History, Culture & Economy
July 31, 2010 by A'Keiba Burrell
Austria /ˈɒstriə/ (help·info) or /ˈɔːstriə/ (German: Österreich (help·info)), officially the Republic of Austria(German: Republik Österreich), is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers 83,872 square kilometres (32,383 sq mi) and has a temperate and alpine climate. Austria’s terrain is highly mountainous due to the presence of the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 metres (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,797 metres (12,457 ft). The majority of the population speaks German, which is also the country’s official language. Other local official languages are Croatian, Hungarian and Slovene.
The origins of Austria date back to the time of the Roman Empire when a Celtic kingdom was conquered by the Romans in approximately 15 BC and later became Noricum, a Roman province, in the mid 1st century AD—an area which mostly encloses today’s Austria. In 788 AD, the Frankish king Charlemagne conquered the area and introduced Christianity. Under the native Habsburg dynasty, Austria became one of the great powers of Europe. In 1867, the Austrian Empire was reformed into Austria-Hungary.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 with the end of World War I. The First Austrian Republic was established in 1919. In the 1938 Anschluss, Austria was occupied and annexed by Nazi…
Read more…
Mavida Balance Hotel, Salzburg, Austria
June 30, 2010 by Duncan Mills
It’s Saturday morning and Chapter Square – the Kapitelplatz – is alive with the sound of music. Not the music of the von Trapp family, nor the music of Salzburg’s most famous son, Mozart – in Mozartplatz, a statue of him stands tall, overlooking a winter ice rink and a huddle of wooden market stalls selling Christmas decorations, glasses of gluwein, spicy bockwursts and mustard-topped frankfurters….
But for once this is not a Mozart moment. A rat-a-tat of marching drums and pipes drifts across the square, followed by the clip-clop of shod hooves and the shuffle of polished boots. All becomes clear when 100 men enter from a side street, wearing immaculate uniforms, tricornes on their heads, frilly shirts and socks pulled up to their knees. Cavalry and infantry come to a halt, some lining up in front of the grand baroque cathedral, the Dom, others on the opposite side of the square with the 900-year-old Hohensalzburg Fortress as an imposing backdrop. And then the small contingent from the village of Zell am See raise their rifles and let off a volley into the crisp sky.
Salzburg, Austria
Hohensalzburg Fortress, Salzburg
Later, as…
Read more…
Osterreich: Wien und Hallstatt
May 30, 2010 by Susie Hughes
For you non-German speakers (erm, like me) that’s “Austria: Vienna and Hallstatt.” The Broseph and I arrived in Vienna last Tuesday after a pretty easy journey from New York, despite almost missing our flight! After finding our hostel (http://www.hostelruthensteiner.com/) we cleaned up and set out to find some lunch and hike around the city a bit.
Vienna has this great way of sort of springing sights on you. You’re walking around thinking, this is nice, very Euro, nice buildings and whatnot, and then all of a sudden you walk around a corner and past some trees and see some giant palace or something. It’s truly amazing how you just stumble upon these giant edifices- we just sort of came across the place where Hitler told 250,000 people that Austria was part of the Third Reich in 1938, and it’s not a small place! My favorite building was the city hall, or the ‘rathaus’, a huge gothic (I think?) monstrosity that goes on for a few blocks. With several huge Austrian flags hanging from it, it looks very grand and imposing. (I’m afraid I haven’t yet found a location to plug my camera in and get some pictures up…
Read more…
The Creative Class and Crowdfunding
February 11, 2010 by David Sasaki
Last week I took a trip to Graz, a university town in southern Austria, to congratulate its fine residents for their most reasonable decision to remove my governor’s name from their local soccer stadium. Just playing. But seriously, listen to Act One of This American Life #398 and just try to tell me that you wouldn’t remove Schwarzenegger’s name from your own local stadium.
In fact I was in Graz for their 2010 Creative Industries Convention, which proclaimed grandly that we would design the creative societies of the future. For the uninitiated, there is a whole world out there that believes that hip, young people with Apple laptops will invent a new 21st century economy to replace all those lost manufacturing jobs headed for China, Bangladesh, and Mexico. In 2000 BusinessWeek dedicated an entire special double issue to show how “the Industrial Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy.” Two years later and Richard Florida published his bestselling book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argued that those cities that could attract said young, hip people with Apple laptops would fare best in the 21st…
Read more…
Café Life Tops Vienna with Whipped Cream
August 13, 2009 by Susan McKee
(Photo by Susan McKee)
Schlagobers drew me to Vienna the first time. Such a wonderful word, it’s Austrian dialect for the mounds of whipped cream piled on a cup of coffee in a Weiner Kaffeehaus. I learned about the indulgence during a sixth grade German class, and spent years dreaming about traveling to Austria to experience it for myself.
Coffee has been the life blood of Vienna ever since the Turks brought the dark, rich brew to this part of Europe. Well, actually, the Ottomans were bent on conquest, and left some roasted beans behind after their crushing defeat in the 17th century — but, heck, the Austrians quickly figured out what to do with the booty (grind, brew and filter!) and café life was born.
Coffee houses are used like second living rooms by Austrians. For less than 5 Euros, you can sip just one cup of coffee but have its accompanying glass of tap water refilled all day if you’d like. In every café, you’ll see people reading, writing, studying or just hanging out.
One can imagine that a traveler from Seattle experienced an epiphany in a Kaffeehaus that resulted in the now…
Read more…
