The Chris Hahn Experience

The Chris Hahn Experience is, as one of my roommates once stated, "putting your life on hold for two or three days and allowing your id to reign supreme." In the old days this meant going to bars on Water Street, hanging out around a campfire in the backyard until the sun came up while smoking cigars, playing video games for hours, and wandering all over Eau Claire in the middle of the night... and then repeating all of this on the second day of his visit. Usually when Chris Hahn leaves my house on a Sunday afternoon I am exhausted and perhaps a bit sick but I always feel a sense of accomplishment. Not that I was "productive" but that I've truly done something spontaneous, fun, and something that connects me to my past.

Over the past eight years we've continued this tradition and I think it really says something about a guy who will come and visit no matter where I live. When I moved away from Eau Claire, the first time, I was surprised (and slightly terrified) when I awake one morning to find Chris Hahn in the kitchen of my house in Spring Grove, Minnesota. It ended up being a great weekend despite my initial concerns of an intruder in my house. There was also the time when I came home from school (I was teaching in Eau Claire at the time) to find Chris Hahn playing video games on my computer. Upon realizing I was not home he found his way into the house, I think through a window, and patiently waited for me to get home by playing a few levels of Diablo II.

It's this sense of spontaneous fun that Chris brings each time he visits. Of course now that we're a bit older, married, and have other responsibilities in life the unexpected visits are fewer and further between and we have to plan out times when we can get together - especially now that we live nine hours away from each other. So when Chris decided to come down for a visit this weekend I knew it would truly be an Experience.




I think perhaps the highlight for me was the epic game of bocce ball that we played across the Quad on campus yesterday afternoon. Two hours and several hundred yards later, Chris won the day by a score of 27-24. We started in the middle of the Quad and didn't stop until our bocce balls landed on the university seal beneath the clock tower.


Overall a great weekend. Thanks Chris.

A Night In Chicago

Thanks to my students last year, Kaia and I received tickets to five Chicago Symphony concerts for the 2010-11 season. Our tickets include performances of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner, plus we get to see some awesome conductors: Haitink, Muti, Boulez. Saturday was the first installment of the series. Unfortunately Maestro Muti has withdrawn from the remaining performances for the month of October due to illness, which we found this out in an email earlier this week (as the matter of fact he's currently back in Italy seeking diagnosis and treatment from his own doctors).

With this news we packed ourselves in the car and made the two hour trip yesterday afternoon. We managed to hit Chicago right at the same time as the US vs. Poland soccer match and the preparations for the Chicago Marathon (10/10/10). Needless to say traffic was terrible. We ended up in a traffic jam heading on to Lakeshore Drive that lasted for about a half hour (in which we managed to go half a mile). With my cheer ebbing to a perilous low we finally made it to the Millennium Park Garage on the north end of Grant Park ($27 for the evening) and managed to find our way to dinner.


Our dinner destination was the Chicago Curry House, a little restaurant tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Michigan Avenue. They have great food and it is also a restaurant where you might run into musicians from the orchestra before the concert as it turns out. We were seated at a table right next to some musicians and we overheard one say to the group they were with "it's too bad they didn't have more notice for this week so they could have gotten someone better" obviously referring to the conductor who was filling in at the last minute. This piqued my interest so I tuned a cautious ear to the conversation to see if I could learn something. Here are a few things I picked up (I've turned them into helpful hints for my own conducting):

1. Don't lecture the orchestra (according to my teacher musicians want to know 6 things: louder or softer, faster or slower, shorter or longer)
2. Don't flail (conduct the music and don't be distracting)
3. Don't ask the orchestra to do something when they are already doing it
4. Conduct high enough so that the members of the orchestra can see what you are doing (don't conduct below your belt)

after watching the concert I might also add:

5. The podium is your space (as a conductor) - don't lean into the string sections
6. Don't hit your baton on the concertmaster's stand (or any of the principal player's stands for that matter)
7. Don't flail
8. Don't dance around on the podium all of the time
9. Be clear
10. Don't flail

The concert was very good however. The orchestra played very well in spite of the flailing and I look forward to seeing the next concert in November. In the meantime I will be heading back to Chicago on Tuesday night to see the Marinsky Orchestra with Valery Gergiev play Shostakovich 15. That will be very exciting. And Gergiev doesn't flail, he shakes.

Fall Has Arrived

It's been a couple of weeks since I last wrote a blog post. My lack of posting has been mostly due to the fact that I've been spending most of my time working: much studying, attending rehearsals, researching in the library and preparing to conduct for seminar. We have managed to sneak in some fun in the last couple of weeks and we've even managed to do some free things.


Last weekend Kaia and I went to Allerton Park. It's a large piece of land owned by the University of Illinois, donated by wealthy Chicagoan Robert Allerton, about 20 miles west of Champaign. He gave his estate to the University in 1946 when he decided to move to Hawaii. It's a beautiful place to visit. There are acres and acres of gardens; miles of hiking trails through woods, pastures, and along the Sangamon River; and some historic buildings. You can even get married there if you want - and if you have lots of money. Our visit was a tad on the cool side - temperatures were in the 50s and it was overcast and windy. That still didn't stop us from having a picnic after our hike though. Best of all it was free!


This weekend we went to the Curtis Orchard in southwest Champaign. Since fall is in the air we're beginning to get the craving for apples. This is typically the time of year when Kaia makes and cans several gallons of applesauce for us to enjoy throughout the winter. We also usually make pies, crisps, and apple rings as well. Since we are broke, and also since we gave up all of our storage space and our kitchen, we are operating on a much more limited basis. With this in mind we visited the orchard, with pastoral thoughts in our minds about the countryside, the quiet, the crisp air, and the solitude of strolling up and down rows and rows of apple tress in the filtered light of autumn. We were in for a slightly rude awakening when we arrived to find heavy traffic in the parking lot, crowded conditions in the store, crabby parents yelling at tired children, and no solitude whatsoever. It's okay we still managed to score some Cortland apples. Plus we got a free cider slush when we showed them our I-Cards. Being a student may mean crushing debt and putting your life on hold for a few years, but there are some benefits!

Tonight's game plan is to make apple pie, applesauce, and dehydrate some apple rings. Tomorrow I'm going to get serious about a paper that I'm researching and try to tackle Charles Ives. I know I will study better if I have plenty of apple-based products to eat.

Saturday in the Windy City

Yesterday Kaia and I did a novel thing. We boarded an Amtrak train and headed north to the Windy City. It's roughly two and a half hours to Chicago by train from our Champaign and there are three trains per day that go through here. We can leave on the City of New Orleans early in the morning, take the Illini later in the morning, or the Saluki in the evening. It's a comfortable ride and we can actually get work done on the train, which is exactly what we did yesterday. I brought along some articles and some scores and a book and worked for the entire train ride to Chicago. Consequently I had to lug around my backpack all yesterday, but it was small price to pay really.


We met up with Chris and Kerstin and a couple of her swimming friends in Millennium Park at a giant sculpture nicknamed "The Bean" (actually called Cloud Gate as I found out later on). It's an amazing piece of art that basically reflects the entire city, the sky, and everything that surrounds it with it's mirror-like surface. It's a great place to meet up with folks since its is such an iconic structure in the park. From there we walked through Millennium Park to the Pritzker Pavilion and the Crown Fountain. From there we headed to the Art Institute and spent some time looking at the collections. I love the Impressionists and the Chicago museum does not disappoint. I was particularly blown away by the Monet paintings in the Impressionist gallery. We also managed to see "American Gothic" and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" among many other things. It was a great visit.


Once we left the museum we headed to a restaurant inside the Loop called Miller's for some drinks and desserts. It was nice to sit down at this point - my feet always get tired in art museums - and take a bit of a rest. While we were there we made some dinner plans. Chris knew of a pizza place somewhere in downtown that he had been to a couple of times. It's called Lou Malnati's, just one block North of Merchandise Mart so we headed there for dinner on the "L". OMG it was amazing pizza. They have a trademark "butter crust" for their deep dish pizzas and the sausage is not just cut up and arranged on the pizza so much as it is a slab that covers the entirety of the pizza above the layer of cheese. It was truly a remarkable feat of pizza engineering to say the least.


After getting over full on pizza, Chris and Kerstin escorted us back down to Union Station and we went to a place for one last drink before we had to catch our bus. Our trip back to Champaign was on Megabus, the dirt cheap double decker tour bus mode of transportation that leaves four times per day from Union Station back to our town. It was a quick two hour trip from downtown to downtown and then we caught a city bus back to our apartment. Not bad. The thing I enjoyed about this experience was the fact that we didn't have to drive anywhere. We just got on a bus here, got on the train, rode the trains around Chicago, and then took buses back home. We didn't have to worry about parking, gas, directions, traffic, falling asleep on the way home, or any of the typical things that we have always associated with our going out of town trips. It was a great way to spend the day.

We had a great time in Chicago and it was awesome to see our friends. Plus we have a whole new city in which to hang out. Yesterday was a great day.

Labor Day Weekend

When we left Eau Claire in July we took an entire house worth of stuff to Illinois with us. After coming back from Europe and unpacking our boxes we realized that, with no basement storage space in our apartment, we were not going to have enough room for everything. As a result we had a number of boxes filled with various items, from childhood keepsakes to a belt sander, for which we had no space. This was the whirlwind weekend to take care of all of this.

On Friday we piled ourselves and our boxes in the car and headed up to Eau Claire for the weekend. We left at 6 PM and arrived around 1 AM. Luckily Nobu was nice enough to let us crash at his place. This was great for two reasons: he stays up late so arriving at one in the morning was not a problem and we hadn't seen him for several months. Upon arriving at Nobu's we stayed up until 3 AM talking and drinking wine. It was great to catch up.


The next morning we went out for breakfast and then hung out during the day. Nobu left for the Twin Cities around 5 PM for a party and Kaia and I went to her mom's house to drop off some stuff and pick up our house plants. We both felt like 19 year old college kids again and we piled all of our boxes in the basement. After dinner with Carole and Randy we headed to the Joynt where we met up with Chris Hahn and Mike Renneke. It was great to catch up with those guys and we even went to Burrito Express at El Patio as a treat afterward.

Sunday morning we woke up at Nobu's house, then had lunch with Kaia's dad and Gail, and then headed to La Crosse to visit my parents. They took us out for dinner and we spent the night there. Today we awoke in La Crosse and returned to Champaign with our car loaded with plants, apples, beer, maple syrup and clean laundry. Yes, I brought my dirty laundry to parents' house and washed it there. Like I said, we are 19 again.


It felt like a whirlwind this weekend but it was great to see everyone. The next time we are back in Wisconsin it will be Thanksgiving. I can almost taste the turkey now...

Two Weeks of School

It's hard to believe that by Labor Day weekend this year we've already had two weeks of school. Typically we are gearing up for the first day of school and maybe have had one or two days with students by now so it's hard to believe that we're already been through two full weeks of classes. One thing about graduate school is that there are no orientations or convocations so you just kind of slip into the school year and before you know it you are doing piles of research.

We did miss the Minnesota State Fair this weekend, something we've been doing with Nicole and Dan for the past several years. In order to get our summer festival fix we went to the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival with Peter and Ena (my colleagues in the conducting studio) and their significant others. While this was no Minnesota State Fair, there was delicious sweetcorn (albeit slightly expensive), some live musical acts (including Soul Asylum), and lots of food. It basically takes up two blocks of Urbana's downtown area. All in all not too bad.


We are beginning to fall into the rhythm of the school year. My class schedule allows for a lot of downtime and time for study. Things will pick up later in the semester when I am traveling to do my observations but right now I have basically two full days per week to study. Conducting seminar has been great and it is exactly what I need from an educational standpoint. It's wonderful to get specific instruction on my needs as a conductor three times per week. Right now I'm focusing on making my gesture more compact and succinct which will allow for more fluid nonverbal communication with the orchestra. Economy of gesture is important, especially for yours truly with my ape-length arms.

I spent a good deal of time last week working on Beethoven 1st and 9th Symphonies. This week I will be spending some time with the Overture to Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss. All the while I need to begin to look ahead to next month when we tackle the Enigma Variations and a pair of Mozart Symphonies. It's nice to be focusing on this literature and to have a chance to really get in depth with the music. This really is the perfect learning environment for me right now.

First Week of School Reflections

Sophie is helping me learn my Bach Chorales.

Our first week of school is behind us. Only fifteen more weeks until the end of the semester. It really doesn't seem like that much time. From my perspective last week was a breeze - probably because I spent a total of 2 hours in class. We don't start with our conducting class and lessons until the second week so I had a lot of time on my hands during the first five days of school. This was not a problem because I managed to fill them up studying scores and getting ready for conducting seminar so don't worry about me being bored.

I have three classes this semester for a total of twelve credits. On Monday and Wednesday I'm on campus from 9:30 AM-5:00 PM. I have Problems and Methods at 9:30 AM (a research class) and conducting seminar at 1 PM. Wednesdays I have a lesson at 11 AM and we have orchestra Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 3-5 PM. Tuesdays and Thursdays are free so I can travel to observe student teachers. This gives me lots of time to study scores and learn repertoire. Right now we're trying to see if we can make it without me having to get a part time job. If we don't starve we should be okay.

All things considered the first week of classes went well. I think it's going to be a great semester in the conducting studio. I really like my colleagues (we've already had several get togethers - we're hosting the next one) and I think it will be a great working environment. It will be nice to get to know some more people as the semester moves along. It's hard to move to a town and not know anyone at first, luckily I know my fellow conductors, and I'm sure things will get better as we go along. Plus I'm excited to start with my full schedule tomorrow. I'm going to conduct the first movement of Beethoven 9 in seminar.

Aside from school Kaia and I have been exploring "Chambana". We've tried several restaurants (there are tons of them in this area) and have enjoyed the variety. There are some great Italian places, Indian food, and nice places to get coffee or dessert. Two nights ago we tried out "Cakes on Walnut," a cupcake/dessert place in downtown. Yum. I had a brownie that was out of this world. As the matter of fact my mouth is watering right now just thinking of it. We've also been to the farmers market, joined the local co-op grocery, and have explored many of the parks in town. We're also in the process of finding a church that we can attend regularly. There are four catholic churches in town, one on campus, two in Champaign, and one in Urbana. It's not like home but hopefully we will like one of them enough to want to go back. We've been to all and we've narrowed it down to two finalists. We're going to need to make a pro-con chart or something for this decision!

School Daze

I just got back from four hours of music theory testing at U of I. One hour of aural skills from 11 AM to noon and then three hours of written theory covering functional harmony, tonality, and twentieth century techniques. I think I did pretty well on most of it but there are some glaring holes in my music theory training, particularly when it comes to the twentieth century. You see, I was never very good at math, nor did I enjoy it, so I've never really gotten into serialism or tone rows or matrices. Now that I'm 31 years old and a bit more mature than I was as an undergrad I will probably feel a little bit more like learning these things. Either way theory testing is a great way to spend a Saturday.

This week I've had a bit of stuff to do. On Monday and Tuesday we had TA orientation and the U of I Graduate Academy. It was basically a two day workshop that tried to cram an entire teaching degree program into twelve hours of sessions. Additionally I had to teach a mini-lesson or "microteaching" on Friday to a class of five other grad students. I taught them how to write a major scale in bass clef. Unfortunately my eight years of public school teaching did not get me a "pass" so I had to take all of the classes just like everyone else.

I also met with the supervisor for my TA position this week. He and I sat down and talked about my responsibilities as a student teacher supervisor this year. It turns out that I'll be driving up to Chicago quite a bit this semester to observe student teachers in middle and high schools. I have four student teachers under my observation: three of them are placed in the Chicago surrounding suburbs and the fourth is in town here at Champaign Central High School. I will make three observations of each student this semester which means a bit of commuting. The university will pay for my gas and hotel when I go up to Chicago and I will get to check out a car from the school as well. I'm looking forward to getting out to the schools, to watch the teachers, and to see all of the different programs. This will be a great experience. Let's just hope that I don't get lost in the Chicago suburbs!

Classes start on Monday for us, but my first full week won't really hit until the second week of the semester. Conducting lessons and seminar start once the orchestras are up and running. I'll be helping out with the auditions on Monday and Tuesday so this week I'll only have one official class. Once the semester gets under way and all of my classes begin I will have class Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I've set aside Tuesday and Thursday for observations and studying. It's a pretty sweet schedules - a far cry from those 6:45 AM jazz band rehearsals everyday!

Waiting for Cooler Days

It's hot. That's about all there is to it folks. Our apartment sits on the edge of the research park, a relatively new addition to the U of I with very few trees, and the agricultural testing fields. As a result, our place bakes in the sun all day long. Couple this with the fact that we're on the third floor of the building and you have a recipe for hot. Thank goodness for air conditioning.

As a result we've been hibernating for the past two weeks in the relative comfort of our living room, making forays into the community for things like food and other supplies. We have managed to check out a considerable number of sights around town and also figure out where we need to go to get everything we'll need. This has been done mostly in the cool of the evening when the sun is mostly down. Otherwise going out is pretty miserable.


Last weekend we checked out some of the restaurants and bars in downtown Champaign. There are some really classy places to get a drink and hang out on the weekends. We found a restaurant that offers live jazz every Saturday night, a brewery that makes its own beer, and a bar that reminds us a lot of Wisconsin bars. Plus we've managed to get a couple of meals out. We tried an Indian restaurant last weekend and last night we went out for Italian at The Great Impasta.


We also made a trip to the U of I bookstore this week, got our student ids, and took a stroll and bike ride through campus. It's a beautiful campus with lots of stately buildings, a great quad, and some really nice landmarks. We also checked out the city bus system (we get free rides with our student ids) and found that there are several bus stops right outside our front door that take us to campus in about ten minutes. This is great because I don't really want to have to worry about parking if I don't need to. We also purchased some school supplies and I got myself all decked out with Illini wear.


This week we also got library cards at the Champaign library, went to the farmers market in Urbana, and checked out some music events at the Krannert Center and an outdoor music concert at the Research Park last night. On Thursday night we even went to the Quad and watched date night on a big screen that was set up. I guess they show movies once a month on the Quad in the summer. It was nice.


Next week things get rolling towards the school year. It's still summer vacation but I have some meetings on Monday and Tuesday for my TA and then again on Friday for the school of music. One week from today I get to take placement tests in music theory and history. This will determine what levels of theory or history I need to take. Classes start a week from Monday. I'm excited to get started.

Settling In

(Gene at his new favorite place to hang out - Jarling's Custard Cup)

What a difference a few days can make! We arrived home on Monday night, cats and all, exhausted from our long trip. Jet lag coming back from Europe is different than going over. We've been falling asleep early (8:30 PM) and waking up early (5:30-6:00 AM) ever since we arrived. Last night was the first night we were able to stay awake past ten. I even got to watch The Daily Show in its entirety.

It's been a long week of unpacking but we're finally finished. This morning we unloaded the last box of stuff and took our last trip to the box recycling bin. Now we need to clean up and straighten things a bit. Thus I am procrastinating by typing this blog. It's a small apartment but we've managed to get a lot of stuff into the space. We are on a first name basis with the staff at the local Target since we've been there every day for the past week buying storage items.

Here are some pictures of our mostly finished place:

Living room

Dinning room/kitchen

Bedroom

We also have a second bedroom that is our basement, office, music room, and general storage area. It's actually a pretty nice nice space and I'll upload a picture of that once it's finished.

As I mentioned in my last post, we got home on the hottest day of the summer and our air conditioning wasn't working. It was 92 degrees in our living room and there was nothing coming out of the vents when we turned on the air. Luckily the maintenance staff is awesome. We managed to get it cooled off to 80 degrees by the next morning with fans but it was still unbearable. Well it turns out when they remodeled this apartment over the summer they crossed wires with the thermostat in the apartment in the basement. So for the past three weeks our thermostat has been telling the air conditioner in 104 to blast cold air into the basement. The maintenance staff came by and fixed it right away. It was nice to not have to fix it myself by the way.

By Tuesday afternoon we had cold air coming through our vents and all was well. Thank goodness because it was in the upper 90s for the past several days. Yesterday we finally got some relief and we even opened the windows last night! This morning when we woke up we heard some sheep baa-ing from the agriculture research barns just a few blocks from our house. Thus far the winds have been favorable by the way and we haven't smelled any of our neighbors. Let's hope it stays that way.

Last Day in Vienna

We awoke on Sunday morning, exhausted, after our two frenetic days of sightseeing. Since we were both tired we decided to take it easy. The lady in charge of our pension was nice nice enough to allow us to keep our luggage there after we checked out so we didn't have to lug it around the city until our 6:30 PM flight. Baggage free, we set out to take in a few more sights in the city.


We started with a walk east from our pension to the Stadtpark. This is the former emperor's hunting grounds now a city park. It's full of trees, ponds, fountains, and statues. It's also the park where Johann Strauss used to give his famous waltz concerts at the Kursalon near the grand entrance. On our way to the park we found the last remnants of Vienna's city wall which was torn down in the 1850s and replaced with the Ring. This remnant is at the entrance to one of the U-Bahn terminals near the park. We also saw a great big statue of Beethoven and a Gymnasium where Schubert went to school.


After a nice stroll we continued south toward Karlsplatz. This is a gigantic square that has an enormous baroque style church (Karlskirche), the Wien Museum, and the Succession, an art museum that is home to a famous mural by Gustav Klmit. We visited the museums and had a picnic lunch of sandwiches that we bought from a little booth in the subway in the square. Afterward we had some coffee at Cafe Tirolerhof near the Opera and made our way back toward the hotel. We stopped for ice cream at Zanoni and Zanoni in Hohermarkt and then visited the Jewish Memorial in Judenplatz.


We got back to our hotel around 5:15 PM, picked up our bags, and headed toward the U-Bahn. There is a direct train from the Landstrasse U-Bahn stop to the airport so we took that. It's a 15 minute ride and we were dropped off at the terminal. Check in took forever and they had to close down one of the terminals due to some unclaimed baggage but we eventually were on our way.

After our flight we had a 12 hour layover in Amsterdam so we got a hotel room right next to the airport at a place called Citzen M. After staying in nice pensions and the Hotel Garni for three weeks, this was kind of weird but it was cheap and close so we didn't mind. The room was the width of a king size bed and probably twelve feet long. The shower and the toilet were encased in a couple of cylinders with sliding glass doors. The closest thing I can compare it to is the transporters on Star Trek (you know, beam me up Scotty). At least it was a room and we weren't sleeping in the airport.


Our flight left the next morning and we arrived in Chicago at 12:30 PM on Monday. Kaia's aunt picked us up from the airport and we came back to Champaign that same evening, cats and all. When we arrived at our apartment it was 92 degrees in the living room. Our air conditioning was broken. Welcome home!

Vienna Day 3

Our third day in Vienna started with a tour of St. Stephan's Cathedral. We walked by it plenty of times in the first few days and even climbed the south tour, but it took us a while to work the cathedral into our schedule. It was definitely worth the wait. The cathedral dates back to the fourteenth century and even earlier than that in some spots. Much of it was destroyed in WWII due to fire but the outer walls and quite a few of the inner details remain. It's a beautiful space.


After our tour of the cathedral we headed to the outskirts of town to visit the city cemetery. This is the final resting place of Brahms, several of the Strausses, Schubert, and it has important memorials to Beethoven and Mozart. It's a lovely place and a quiet contrast to the bustling city center. It was fitting to visit the grave of Johannes Brahms especially after grappling with his first and second symphonies over the last few weeks.


From the cemetery we had lunch at the Naschmarkt, this time not in the pouring rain, and then toured the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the collected artworks owned by the Hapsburgs including Renaissance and Baroque art as well as Roman and Egyptian art) and the Hofberg treasury. The highlight of the treasury, for me, was the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor which is about 1100 years old. It was made in the 900s and was worn for the coronations of all of the Holy Roman emperors.




After the museums Kaia and I enjoyed a Sachertorte at the world famous Cafe Sacher and then finished up our day at the Rathaus. The Rathaus is Vienna's city hall and every summer they have a music film festival each night. The city of Vienna sets up an enormous screen in front of the city hall and shows concerts, mostly classical, for thousands of people who show up to eat, drink, and enjoy the festivities. The night we visited we enjoyed Teppanyaki and Radler (it's German/Austrian beer with lemon) and stuck around for the first act of Carmen on the giant screen. It was quiet an event with thousands of people and it happens every night in the summer. It's something to behold.


After we watched a bit of Carmen we hopped on a tram that took us part way around the Ring and back to our hotel. What a lovely evening.

Vienna Day 2

After a good night's sleep Kaia and I began a rather frantic day of sightseeing on Friday morning. We had a hearty breakfast at our Pension and set out to see a number of different sights within the Ring.


We oriented ourselves to the city with the Rick Steves walking tour which brought us to the Vienna Opera House as our starting point. We decided to see what the daily tour schedule looked like and lo and behold we were able to get into the 10 AM tour which began shortly after we arrived. We ended up taking the fifty minute tour which included some sneak peaks of the backstage area and other interesting parts of the building.




After the tour we continued on to see of the other great sights within the Ring. We went to Albertinaplatz, walked north along Kartnerstrasse toward the cathedral, climbed the 343 steps of the south tower for some great views of the city, walked down the Graben and began to head to the Hofburg Palace. Along the way we went to Buffet Trzesniewski (Gesundheit!) for finger sandwiches that only cost 1 Euro each.


Following our lunch we visited the Hofburg Palace, home of the Habsburg rulers of the Austrian empire. We toured the Royal Apartments and also the palace proper where we saw lots of dishes, place settings, and cutlery, a museum to Empress Sisi, and recreations of the apartments from the era of Kaiser Franz Joseph. It was mind boggling and also a bit dull in places (especially when we were viewing the fifth set of silver plates from the early 1800s) but impressive nonetheless.

Once we finished our tour of the apartments we recovered with some apple strudel and coffee at Cafe Mozart and then visited the Haus der Musik. This was one of the surprising highlights of the trip. It's an unassuming museum tucked away off of Kartnerstrasse with four floors of musical exhibits. One floor is about the history of the Vienna Philharmonic, another floor is about the great musicians who lived in Vienna, another floor is about the science of musical sound. We spent a couple of hours there and I even had a chance to conduct the virtual Vienna Philharmonic. I can put that on my resume I guess.


To conclude our thirteen hours of sightseeing we had dinner at Cantinetta La Norma, a little Italian restaurant Nobu recommended to us near the Haus der Musik, and then we strolled down Kartnerstrasse back to our hotel.

Zlin to Vienna

We awoke, feeling slightly the worse for wear, on Thursday morning ready to board a train to Otrokovice, and head to Vienna via Breclav. The entire trip took roughly four hours with connections but was remarkably smooth. We went with a group of the conductors from the workshop to the train station and then shared a compartment on the train on the three hour ride into Vienna.

When we arrived in town we all said our goodbyes and parted ways. I was sad to say goodbye but I was very excited to get the last leg of our vacation, and time together with Kaia, underway. After arriving in Vienna we took an incredibly easy U-Bahn connection to a stop just a few blocks away from our hotel (the Schweitzer Pension) on the northern edge of the old town inside the ring.



After checking in and getting our bearings Kaia and I decided to head out to explore the city on our way to see Die Fledermaus at Theater an der Wien that evening. We took a walk through Hohermarkt (a busy square) on the way to Stephansplatz (the square with St. Stephan’s Cathedral). Once we arrived at St. Stephan’s it began to rain and the skies opened up as we continued our way down Kartnerstrasse. Luckily we had Kaia’s trust 50 Kc umbrella so we were not totally drenched. We took a moment and ducked into the U-Bahn Station to get our bearings and finally decided on dinner at the Naschmarkt right in front of the the theater. We had our first non-Czech meal in two weeks and our taste buds exploded (I had forgotten about ginger and spices other than salt)!


After dinner we went to Theater an der Wien and enjoyed a very entertaining performance of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss. We met up with a couple of the conductors at the intermission and talked for a bit. I also had my first completely German speaking transaction when I ordered a couple of bottles of water at intermission. It was great. After opera we headed back to our hotel and collapsed, soundly, into bed.