Elsien's Traveblogue

Winter is coming to Vienna. I saw adverts on posters throughout the city asking for 'snow clearers' and there was a brief flurry of snowflakes as I walked to Ottakring Underground station yesterday morning. It was pretty cold, but the sun came through in the afternoon and warmed everything up a little.
I sheltered from the cold in the very warm Kunsthistorisches Museum, where I was on several quests. The first one,finding the Saliera, Benvenuto Cellini's saltcellar which I had to write an essay about in the first year of my Art Historycourse, came to nothing: the whole department of sculpture and other artefacts is closed until 2013! So no medieval wooden sculpure either.
However, the Caravaggio chase was more successful: they have three and had displayed them all, in the 400th year of his death, along with a load of 'Caravaggistes'. Putting the '-istes' with the real thing shows the man's genius: The Madonna of the Rosaries is a brilliant realistic composition.I love the filthy footsoles, turned towards the spectator at eye level ... There's a muted David with the Head of Goliath, but my favourite is the Crowning with Thorns, painted as if from below.
Next stop Rome, where most of his paintings are ... (February, I hope!)
More walking around Vienna, more baroque churches, although they were originally Gothic, which is already quite a baroque kind of style. An organ concert in St Peter's Church, Wiener Schnitzel mit Kartoffelsalat for lunch – got to have it while you're there! The waitresses were Chinese though; even Vienna is quite multi-cultural, in spite of the Austrians resistance to immigrants ...
Will try and get to the Freud Museum today.

I beat the strikes! On Sunday night I managed to get out of Brussels on the penultimate train before the country closed down: national rail strike ... and into France, which was about to erupt into a general strike.
I had trouble getting to work in Versailles on Monday morning and back to my hotel on Monday evening as the RER Line C, which I have to take to get there, was either still on strike from the previous week or already on strike for the next day. There weren't many trains, most were cancelled.
Tuesday morning I did get to the airport, RER Line B was running one in two trains from the overground platforms and Niki Air was running beautifully. Good old Niki Lauda, rather prefer him to Michael O'Leary!
So, now here I am in Vienna – was supposed to have done some work here for the European Commission, but they postponed it. I had such a good deal on plane and hotel bookings though that I decided to go anyway and use it as an art study trip: there are at least three Caravaggios here and the Cellini Salt Cellar I wrote an essay on two or three years ago, sight unseen.
There's also Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial, which I saw yesterday. It's a big blob of a thing in an elegant, baroque square – must have been quite a shock for the Viennese. Still, what they did to the Jews was quite a shock too. When I was there, a large group of teenagers arrived, with teachers and a guide and while the guide was feebly droning about “millionen Jüden getötet” a girl posed herself on the edge of the monument in classical 'model' pose while her friend took her picture, to be posted on FB no doubt. I was too late to take the picture of them taking the picture, alas. An Austrian man and I agreed that “man weisst nicht ob man lachen oder schreien sollte... ”
Central Vienna is beautiful, more pictures to follow. Art Museums today ...