Venice, Vienna and Prague: January 30 – February 15, 2009

(Written on February 23, 2009, after a series of weekend trips from our homebase in Munich.)

Marian and I are fundamentally different sorts of travelers. She suffers from Plaque Plague, a chronic inability to bypass anything remotely brass-looking without stopping for a read, even when said artifact is in a language she doesn’t read. I, on the other hand, prefer to explore new lands from an outdoor café or public square, coffee in hand, developing a voyeuristic sense of the passing native population.

Despite 28 years of marriage, we seemed to arrive at an easy compromise on our weekend jaunts. First of all, of course, you can’t do justice to world-class cities like Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Prague in a weekend. Second, there are only so many hours of the weekend that you can spend inside yet another fourteen-dozen historic churches, particularly when we’ve made it impossible to not use St. Peter’s Basilica as the benchmark. Third, ditto for museums and galleries. Fourth – and here’s my side of the compromise, ditto for the inside of cafés.

So, our compromise is to work with a list of the top-ten or twelve things to see, stay outside where the locals are, and walk. A lot.

We’ve walked in the brilliant sunshine of late spring-like weather. We’ve walked through bone-chilling damp and cold. We’ve walked through miserable, wet and sloppy snow. A lot.

We haven’t done justice to the world-class cities we’ve seen, but in as much as one can do so in something less than 48 hours, we’ve given it our best shot.   

After spending two weeks in Italy at Christmas, there was a minor sense of home-coming as we headed to Venice the last weekend of January. The Trenitalia train wound its way from Munich down through Innsbruck and the Austrian Alps, allowing us to marvel from only a slightly different vantage point the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

The Trenitalia train ride through the Austrian Alps gave us a different perspective on the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

Roberto Benigni – clearly on uppers – had been hired to do the afternoon’s announcements. In a setting that felt a little bit like something out of “A Room With a View,” Marian and I shared our six-seater berth with an older woman and a very reserved, if not timid, young couple (they whispered across the berth to each other). Long before Roberto had finished his first announcement – delivered in an over-the-top exuberant Italian, ratcheted up a number of notches on the over-the-top exuberant Italian scale – even the young couple was laughing out loud.

Just when it couldn’t get any funnier – in a laughing with him sort of way – he then repeated the announcement in a no-less-exuberant German. You have to realize that at no time in history did anyone intend German to be a language of exuberance. His exuberance waned not the least in the English rendering, unfortunately for Marian and me, the message got entirely in the way of the medium. We spent the balance of the trip looking forward to his performances.

I don’t want to overstate it, but Venice is as close to a disappointment as we’ve experienced. Cool weather on Friday evening gave way on Saturday to the chilling dampness that only an island can deliver. That gave way on Sunday to wet snow. While it wasn’t a disaster, our accommodation was our first and only experience so far with something less than truth in web advertising.  

Having said that, Venice rightfully belongs on a must-see list for its remarkable architecture and the watery context in which it sits. The age of the structures and their dubious underpinnings dish up a remarkable array of leans, twists and compression that left me thinking that if one structure collapsed (as some have in the past), the whole thing would come down like falling dominos. But then: some of the buildings have been around for a thousand years. 

However fading the "Glamour Queen," Venice remains a must-see destination.

We saw under a half-dozen buildings that weren’t missing large sections of parging, exposing the underlying red brick construction. In many instances, chunks of bricks were also missing. Graffiti is rampant, as are dog-droppings. There is a pong to the smaller canals that eliminates any question as to the final disposition of sewage, but raises a big bunch of questions about the source of the water coming out of the tap.

Venice is described in various tourism publications as a “fading glamour queen.” That fairly describes, I think, the almost palatable sense one has of its rapid decline, despite its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The highlight of the visit for us both was stopping mid-Saturday afternoon at a traditional Venetian wine bar for a warming glass of red and a selection of the imaginative and tasty canapés for which the Venetian bars are noted. Hanging on the wall was a newspaper photo from the early ‘90s showing the walkway outside of the bar – sitting that afternoon about three feet above water level – under waist-deep floodwaters. It gave us an even deeper sense of the improbability of the place.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, the following weekend, turned out to be the prettiest city I think I’ve ever seen. As a bonus and in tribute to off-season travel, we had a low-cost hotel suite that was gorgeous. The weather on Friday afternoon and Saturday was positively spring-like. In addition to walking many miles of streets, we took a long walk along the Danube River, an even longer one along the Danube Canal, and took a ride on the city’s 200-foot Ferris wheel that dates to the early 1800s (cabins rather than chairs) for a bird’s-eye view of the city.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, may be the prettiest city I’ve seen.

I once heard a town planner who’d studied the characteristics of great town squares compare such places to livingrooms. There are real or implied enclosing walls, lots of places to sit, lots to look at, and a minimum of heavy activity (e.g. we don’t typically play football in a livingroom). That’s all of Vienna.

The city gives the immediate impression of being clean and elegant. The buildings are universally pale – white, off-white, sandstone – and are no more than five or six stories high, so they give a sense of enclosing without overwhelming. Virtually every façade offers a feast of imaginative and whimsical architectural touches – asymmetrical balconies, turrets, and porticos, the former two often supported on the shoulders of cherubs, angels, mythological and/or whimsical figures. Modern architecture, where one sees it, is no less imaginative. There are few straight lines to bore the eye.

We woke to rain on Sunday and that became a good excuse to visit the Monet to Picasso exhibit in the Albertina Gallery, housed in a portion of the former royal palace. The featured exhibit was great and a Gerhard Richter Retrospective was icing on the cake. Neither of us knew much of Richter; he’s a remarkably prolific artist in more media and styles than should be humanly possible – everything from impressionism to hyper-realism.

Vienna and Prague are terrific cities to see back-to-back. The architecture is very similar, but whereas Vienna breathes refinement, Prague gives the sense of that more varied, untraditional, esoteric, perhaps earthy blend of arts and culture to which we attach the term “Bohemian.” Prague, as we discovered, is the largest city in the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Like Vienna, Prague is a pretty city, but there is an intriguing earthiness to it.

We had lined up a beautiful apartment in the Old Town of Prague. From there, we walked. A lot.

In brilliant sunshine but cold temperatures, we headed out early Saturday morning, crossing the Charles Bridge into Mala Strana, the minor quarter and, the oldest part of the city (yes, older than Old Town). We spent most of the morning and early afternoon wandering Prague Castle and the quarter, before heading back to wander the Old Town in the afternoon. We had most of the day Sunday, so again used our time to see the Old Town and to take a long walk along the Vltava River that runs through Prague.

Apart from the gorgeous architecture, stand-outs of the Prague trip in my mind include Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice (usually somewhere in the order of 250,000 voices).

I was surprisingly thrilled to see places where Beethoven and Mozart worked and/or performed their works (In Vienna we saw similar indicators of where Bach and Strauss worked). Saturday, we stumbled across a small folk festival that may have been related to the start of Carnival. It was terrific to hear a trio play what I assume was traditional Czech music. We also tasted traditional flat bread toasted over an open flame.

Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice.

Without taking anything away from the city itself, the truth is that the highlight of the Prague trip for me was the people we met along the way.

On the Friday train ride, we wiled away a number of hours with Michael and Catherine Tierney, originally from Washington, D.C., and their wonderfully precocious eight year-old son, Aiden, sitting a couple of berths away from us. Michael was a NASA earth-sciences engineer, but took up a job as an intellectual property attorney with a Munich firm last August. Catherine’s father was in the diplomatic core, so she travelled much of her younger life and had lived in Prague for a few years in her adolescence. For her, the weekend was to be a trip down memory lane. 

Catherine had that look in her eye of a parent carrying the load of a “wonderfully precocious” child. In a variation of what Marian used to do with our boys and their friends, Catherine assigns Aiden “tasks” to occupy his brain…and relieve hers! She sent him off, for instance, to determine which of the train car’s berths had the fewest occupants. Counting books in a bookstore is apparently always good for a few minutes rest.

We ran into the couple again in Mala Strana Saturday morning. Aiden was looking very much like a young man who would have preferred to be pursing his passion – soccer. In one of those been-there-done-that gestures to fellow parents, Marian asked Aiden to count the number of lions he saw in the statues that line the Charles Bridge. I asked him to check the statues for St. Propeller Head, the patron saint of computer programmers (photo attached).  

We asked Aiden to watch for St. Propeller Head along the Charles Bridge. The statue is, in fact, of St. Anthony of Padua, by Jan Oldřich Mayer, dating from 1707.

Late Friday afternoon, we had about a 20 minute wait for the rental manager to show-up with the key to our rented apartment. It was cold and the building’s unilingual Czech superintendent somewhat reluctantly invited us to wait in her miniscule office (room for one person to sit). We had compiled a list of essential Czech phrases off the web. Marian asked about the pronunciation of one phrase and that touched-off a wonderful lesson in the Czech language and the dos and don’ts of visiting “Praha,” all conducted with a great deal of laughter.

Viktor, the retirement-age rental manager, showed up and took us up to the apartment. While registering, we asked where he learned to speak English. What followed was an amazing story.

Growing up under the thumb of the Stalinists, he secretly listened to Radio Free Luxemburg to learn English. University friends were killed in “Prague Spring” uprisings of 1968 that prompted the Soviet invasion in August of that year. Viktor told his father he had to leave before he did something rash. His father said, “we’re coming, too.”

The family escaped to Vienna, but, he said, the communists had a long reach. The family moved on to Switzerland and Viktor settled into the telecommunications industry. In one of those freakish coincidences of the universe, he eventually moved to Munich and lived a few blocks from our flat Wald Trudering. He is back in Prague now, running the rental business with his wife and son, and ruing the lingering social apathy/inertia inflicted by the Soviets.

On Saturday, we stopped for mid-day coffee at the Starbucks in Mala Strana. We ended up at the opposite ends of two two-seater couches from an older French-speaking woman and a woman about our age. The younger woman disappeared for a few minutes and we took our French out for a ride, asking the mother where she was from. Algiers originally, it turns out, currently living in Paris, and with a son living in Quebec City who she visits regularly. Marie, her daughter, returned to the table and we had a great yatter. What was so remarkable for Marian and me was that listening to the two women speak French was almost like listening to English. After months of German, Italian and a dash of Czech, it was like music to Canadian ears!

Great Public Squares

I think it was Michael Enright I heard on CBC several years ago, interviewing an academic who had just finished a study of great public squares around the world. He likened such squares to living rooms. They’re delineated by explicit or implicit walls, there’s an abundance of comfortable places to sit, and the level of activity is sufficient to provide entertainment (e.g. people walking by) without being overwhelming (e.g. a soccer game).  

We’ve applied this criteria to the public squares we’ve visited over the last couple of years. The massive square in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna, for instance, is unwalled. Even with masses of people strolling by, it’s hard to feel anything but entirely exposed in the face of the towering gothic structure, the focal point of the square. Perhaps this was the intention.  

Marienplatz in Munich, on the other hand, is the length of several city blocks, walled on parallel sides by gorgeous architecture and sufficiently winding so as to imply walls on its remaining two sides. A voyeuristic day can be lost to the rathaus glockenspiel, historic architecture, and, when all else is exhausted, the steady stream of humanity. 

Our experience with public squares in Mexico and Central America has been varied. In Zihuatanejo, Mexico, a basket ball court on the el centro waterfront is the official public meeting place and is a complete failure as such. Why wouldn’t it be? A basketball court and a living room have nothing in common. 

In Copan Ruinas, the public square is something like an Alex Coville painting: at first blush it looks good, but there’s something just not quite right about it. One entire length of the square is walled by a…wall. A high wall. On its opposing side, an elaborate and ultimately phony-looking pillared entrance way leaves you feeling like you’ve entered into another world, a world that, in the shadows of its wall and entrance way, is unsafe after dark. 

The public square in Antigua, Guatemala, on the other, is beautiful. It’s framed by historic architecture – including the city’s main cathedral – fronted by arched arcades. Walkways criss-cross the square, interrupted by water fountains, stands of mature trees, and, of course, well-worn benches.  

The central water fountain in the public square in Antigua, Guatemala. Four sets of prominent, water-spouting breasts provide a whimsical balance to the town's main cathedral, pictured in the background.

Again, one has the sense of being able to sit all day, simply watching life go by. That life and the sense of safety it engenders lingers well into the evening.  

Curiously, our favourite public square on this trip is the one in Patzcuaro, Mexico – “curiously” because the entire square was barricaded and under restoration while we were there. Despite the construction and the steel fencing keeping the public out, it was impossible to sit sipping a coffee or cerveza in any one of the many eateries gracing the arcade that walls the square without regretting its inaccessibility.  

It’s difficult to see such public squares and not feel some regret that rejuvenation of Market Square in hometown Kingston – however beautiful – was limited to refurbishing a market place rather than a public place. On days when the market is not operating and temperature precludes ice on its ice-skating pad, Market Square becomes little more than an empty room.