Greece

     On our first day in Greece we went up to the Acropolis. We walked up from our hotel, which was very near. It was the Acropolis Hill hotel, and the Acropolis was visible from the roof. We went up through the gate, between soaring marble pillars, and the Parthenon was in front of us.

     The most surprising thing about the Parthenon was how big it was. The tapered pillars make it look even taller from close up, because as they get thinner it looks like they are getting much farther away. I saw some of the friezes (the ones Lord Elgin didn't steal). After the Acropolis we went to the Acropolis Museum and saw a lot of statues and reliefs from the Parthenon.

Near the Parthenon was the Erectheon, with caryatids. The caryatids were my favorite part. I learned that fluted columns probably came from the fluting in the dresses of the caryatids. The ones on the temple turned out to be replicas, but I saw the originals in the museum. In the Acropolis museum we saw not only things from the Parthenon but statues from an earlier temple that had stood on the same site, and that the Persians destroyed.
      The evening after the Acropolis, we saw the Parthenon in the dark. It is lit up so it looks like it is glowing.

      After the Acropolis, my favorite place was Mycenae. It had a king, Agamemnon, but turned out to be a tiny hilltop fort. We saw the foundation of the palace, which was much smaller than I expected; Daddy and I went down the steps of the cistern, where water was stored; we saw the graves, and the houses; and we saw the lion gate. The stone over the gate, on which the lions are carved, is huge. It must have been hard to put up. The lions have no heads, because their heads were made of a blue and white stone and fastened on, and are gone now.

We also saw the tomb of King Agamemnon. It isn't really his tomb but it is fun to call it that. It is a beehive tomb, a stone dome sixty feet tall in the center. The gate was very big. That is me in it in the picture, on the left.

      Of all the museums we went to, my favorite was the Cycladic Museum. It was full of marble figurines from the Cyclades Islands. All of them looked pretty much the same except for size. The biggest was as tall as Bibi and the smallest was a few inches tall. Only the noses were carved; the eyes, mouth, and hair were painted.

With the Cycladic figurines we saw a statue of a person standing looking up, from 4000 B. C. - much older than the rest - and from the coast of Turkey. It was the oldest thing we saw in Greece.

      Athens is a very white city. We looked at it from our hotel roof, and all the houses are white with red roofs. The streets are lined with orange and olive trees, and feral cats. There are a lot of stray cats in Athens. There are also a lot of very good olives and feta cheese. We had baklava for dessert one night, which I think was Bibi's favorite part. I liked the feta cheese and the cats.

Ferris Wheel Interlude

Pictured: ferris wheel, view from ferris wheel.

Happy almost-Thanksgiving to everyone, and happy almost-birthday to Maeve. Full-length Vienna take 2 blog post coming soon (homework permitting), followed by Milan sometime after Thanksgiving break!

Vienna: Hofburg Palace ~ Sophia

Last of the Vienna series. At least until I go back this weekend. (Yes, there's a bit of a time lag on the posts. Shh.)

I spent a whole day on the immense grounds of the Hofburg Palace. The Habsburgs were all about the absurd opulence -- recall their treasury from the last post. Accordingly, the palace grounds are pretty spectacular.

Some sort of ornamental sculptural building thing. Who knows. This is what happens when you have emperors with more money than they know what to do with.

Enormous fountain sculpture, with ducks.

The palace itself, with ornamental rose garden. (I should emphasize that this shows maybe 5% of the castle grounds. Really, they were immense. Multiple orchards, huge green areas, jogging trails.)

For a small admission, you could wander through a selection of labyrinths (some featuring mathematical puzzles, no less). Children's admissions in Vienna go up through age 19, so I got to have some fun dialogues when I bought my tickets.

[In German:]

Clerk: What can I do for you?

Me [offering credit card]: One children's ticket, please.

Clerk [bewildered]: Sorry, what?

Me: One children's ticket.

Clerk [incredulous]: How old are you?

Me: Eighteen.

Clerk [skeptical]: ID, please?

Me [handing him my passport]: Here you are.

Clerk [reluctantly]: Huh. One children's ticket. Here you are.

[Repeat every time I bought a ticket to anything.]

If you made it to the center of the hedge maze, there was a treehouse from which you could see the whole labyrinth. And take pictures, of course.

Another hedge maze had various traps (e.g., weight-sensitive stepping stones that squirted water at you when you stood on them), and a set of mirrors in the middle.

Which, of course, made for something of a maze of their own.

There was also a playground, with various cool equipment. My favorite was an enormous Habsburg eagle: you could climb a rope ladder to get inside, and it would move its wings if you bounced it. (I managed to refrain from trying this myself. Barely.)

I'm sure Maeve and Bibi will be delighted to hear that there was in fact a doocot. Although I don't think they call them that in Austria.

I stopped by the grocery store for lunch. They were selling Christmas chocolates, for both good and bad children. I approve of this custom.

Lunch in the rose gardens.

The last stop for the day was the marionette museum. They display the marionettes that they use to perform operas, and show videos of how they're made. I really wanted to stay to see the marionette production of the Magic Flute, but unfortunately that would have kept me after the last train left to Budapest. Which would have been bad.

A marionette together with its concept sketch and partially-sewn outfits, showing the design process.

I managed to catch the last train home, with help reading the timetable from a young man who turned out to be a railroad engineer. He spent most of the three-hour trip home explaining errors he'd found in the timetable, problems with the ticket machines, and how the couplings between the train cars work. Apparently his version of a fall vacation is to take trains across Europe, not to see cities like Vienna and Budapest, but to see the trains and train stations. I've never seen someone quite so enthusiastic about trains; it was great. The people you meet, I guess.

Vienna: House of Music ~ Sophia

Next in the Vienna series is the House of Music. I don't think I can actually adequately convey the sheer weirdness of this place, but my best try follows. For the full effect, you should probably turn on some really hair-raisingly strange ambient sound, and lower the lights to about 25%.

Really, my first warning should have come before I even walked in the door. Every other museum in the aptly named Museum District was an incredibly elaborate feat of architecture, with pillars and domes, fountains and statues. This one was a rickety, shabby little building tucked away in a corner. The clerk at the front desk seemed vaguely surprised to see someone come in.

The hallway up to the first floor was lined with odd, brightly-colored paintings of composers and musicians ranging to world-famous to completely obscure. It also featured the first of many plaques, which, instead of following the standard title-artist-date-description format, contained strange philosophical statements about the intent of the exhibition in English and German.

The main exhibit on the first floor was a random waltz generator. Following the instructions projected on the screen, I rolled the red and blue dice on the lightboxes, which automatically read off the numbers and chose corresponding musical phrases for flute and cello. At the end, it did indeed play a randomly generated Vienna Waltz.

There were also various glass display cases with an eclectic assortment of music-related artifacts. You see here Brahms' glasses. I spotted at least three pairs of glasses from different famous composers throughout the museum. They seem to have a theme going.

And here are the batons of various famous conductors. If you ever wanted to know what Strauss' or Toscanini's batons looked like, now you do. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, they look exactly like everyone else's small pointy sticks.)

Well, that was all fairly normal museum stuff, right? Time to move on to...

... the Sonosphere. (Also known as The Next Floor, but apparently they thought it needed a name.)

No, that's not a camera malfunction, that's the first room of the Sonosphere: dark, with a faintly glowing plastic bubble thing in the middle. You can't tell from the picture, but there's an ultrasound picture projected onto the bubble, and loud, hair-raising whooshing noises playing. Text from the placard:

"ringing of the senses

on the borderline between chaos and order

vibrating air, flows from the silence, creates space"

The hallway is also completely dark, with only this lit case set into the wall. It contains sand shaped into wave patterns. Placard text for this one:

"auditory pathway

the journey of sound into the human ear:

reducing noise to the smallest sonic impulse.

the sonic atom."

I'm skipping the room full of screens with corresponding headphones that invite you to play various disturbing tricks to your sense of hearing. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were equally weird. Instead, we're moving on to: the room full of giant musical instruments. This one was as tall as I am. The drum was even taller. Placard:

"laboratory of perception

sound processing and phenomena of hearing.

the borderline between reality and imagination

in the light of measurable dreams and the laws of emotion"

Hallway into the next room. Everything's still dim, with ambient noises playing that change from room to room.

And here is the last room of the Sonosphere. Each of the metal studs and faucets is in fact a speaker. If you put your ear to one, you can hear the sound noted on the small card next to it. These ranged from "sneeze" to "new york city street" to "interstellar space."

And at last we emerge from the Sonosphere and move on to the next floor.

This time the stairs feature the organ pipes of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Behind them on the wall you can see the standard stream-of-consciousness descriptions of what you're going to experience on the coming floor.

As it turns out, each room of the third floor is some kind of shrine dedicated to a famous composer. These are roughly eight times as creepy as you would expect, as seen here with the dead-eyed mannequins of some composer or other and his mistress.

Sometimes there are actual museum-type objects in the rooms. For instance: the door to Beethoven's house.

And sometimes there are just stoves. (No, it's not Beethoven's stove, despite being right next to his door. It's just a stove.)

This series of speakers plays the music that Beethoven composed at various periods in his life, growing gradually softer and softer to the point of inaudibility, so that you can experience what it would have sounded like to him as he went deaf.

The last hallway was covered with playbills for operas, balls, and concerts.

The final exhibit was a game for the various small-children who'd been trooping through, looking cheerfully bewildered by the whole experience. In the game, you can choose a piece of famous music and direct the Vienna Symphonic by waving a toy baton. The screen shows the orchestra, and the speed changes based on how fast you wave the baton, the aim being of course to match the sample clip played at the beginning. If the child makes it all the way through successfully, the conductor appears on the screen to congratulate them. If, on the other hand, they do badly, the on-screen orchestra stops playing to riot and shout insults at them: "You're completely useless!" "To think that I should have lived to see this day!"

I have no idea who thought this was a good idea for a game for small children. Actually, I have no idea who thought any of this museum was a good idea. But it was, in fact, extremely cool.

Vienna: Art Museum ~ Sophia

We had a long weekend last week, so I took advantage of this to take a little three-hour jaunt down to Vienna and stay a couple of days. Lots of very cool stuff, so it's getting broken up into a couple of posts.

Boarding the train was exciting; I managed to miss the first one by thirty seconds -- they were actually closing the doors as I walked up -- and when I boarded the next one (three hours later) it turned out I didn't have an assigned seat number. But eventually I found a free seat, so all was well.

Lots of architecture going on in Vienna. Cloudy skies and cool weather, so I got pretty much everywhere on foot while I was there.

The art museum had several rooms set up like this, with paintings covering the entire walls. The signs explained that it's more accurate to how the paintings would have originally been displayed, and lets them incorporate the design of the building as part of the art.

They had several rooms full of Rubens, including this picture of the child Christ and St. John the Baptist. There were also a couple of wall-size Rubens (which would have been painted with the help of his workshop) together with the original small sketches (which he did entirely by himself) for the purposes of comparison.

There was also a really spectacular collection of Bruegel, including this one (which some readers will no doubt recognize from Look And See)...

...as well as this one...

...and this one...

...and even this one.

After seeing the Bruegels, it was time to move on downstairs to the collection of artifacts from the Imperial Treasury of the Hapsburgs. This was one of the more ridiculous displays of opulence I have ever seen, featuring everything from miniature bear statues dressed as hunters and scented with ambergris to elaborate vases made of precious stones filled with artificial flowers also made of precious stone. I'll just hit the highlights, but you have to imagine these surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of other random, elaborately decorated objects made of gold, carved stones, and blown glass.

This one's actually a calculator that does simple arithmetic operations. Intended for land surveying, according to the sign, although I really can't imagine taking that thing out surveying with you.

A drinking horn in the shape of a dragon. For all your dragon-drinking needs, I guess. (Even the placard just gives up and describes it as "bizarre.")

Various mathematical instruments, fairly normal aside from the whole "being made of gold" thing. You'll recognize a protractor, a couple of compasses...

...and, oh yes, an artillery gunsight with calibration rod. I'm sure we have one of these lying around somewhere.

Finally, my absolute favorite. This is, of course, a glass centerpiece in the shape of a dragon. The idea is that there's a hidden reserve of water in its stomach, and when someone having dinner is foolish enough to press the lever on its tail, water sprays out its mouth and (presumably) squirts someone in the face. Everyone needs one!

And on the way out, one final look at the interior of the museum, which is impressive in its own right.

Next up: the House of Music, one of the more surreal museums I have ever had the ... pleasure? of visiting.