Category: Austria

Tern­berg OÖ

Tern­berg is a small town in Ober­ös­ter­reich, very near Weyer where I went a few years ago.

Return to Öz

I think people get the idea I go to some kind of Alpine Scand­inavi­an utopia, by look­ing at the scenery and maybe an mental image of some long ago ski holi­day or week­end break in Vienna.

Schloss Belvedere, Vienna

I real­ised I still had a few photos from Febru­ary in Austria left unposted, so here they are. Strange to think that six weeks ago I was trav­el­ling around Cent­ral Europe for work, and now I don’t venture more than a mile or two from home.

Amstetten

Amstetten is the most extremely aver­age place in Austria. It’s a largish commuter town in between Linz and Vienna. You have no reas­on to visit it. Its main claim to fame is that Josef Fritzl lived there. I was there to teach in one of the schools as a visit­ing teach­er.

A less than excit­ing walk around Salzburg

I was supposed to be back in Austria right now, running more school work­shops. Obvi­ously that’s not happen­ing now, due to the Coronavir­us lock­down. Here’s some photos from Salzburg a couple of weeks ago, where I flew en route to Amstetten.

What’s in the box?

Austria Post does an excel­lent fixed price box with­in Europe which is extremely handy when you’re trav­el­ling around for weeks on end with a 20kg luggage restric­tion and need­ing to dress nicely for work and no access to laun­dry.

Assor­ted Deutsch­lands­berg

Here’s some assor­ted photos from Deutsch­lands­berg. It’s a very ordin­ary small Austri­an town near Graz. Although it’s a pretty and nice place, it’s prob­ably not where you’d pick for a holi­day in Austria (although they do get hikers and people coming for the wine trail in the summer).

Arrival in Deutsch­lands­berg

My next work assign­ment was in Deutsch­lands­berg, a small town at the foot of the Koralm Alps, near the Slov­e­ni­an border. (Austria is a lot further south and east than people imagine). I was there three years ago (at a differ­ent school), when it was snow­ing heav­ily. This time I arrived to bril­liant sunshine, and went for a walk up in the vine­yard filled hills with Jemeala, one of the other teach­ers.

Graz

En route to my next work assign­ment in Deutsch­lands­berg near the Slov­e­ni­an border I stopped off in Graz overnight. I’ve been to Graz loads of times. It’s a really nice city, even if every­one does have a thick Arnie accent. 

Cross­ing the Alps playl­ist

To travel in between Vienna and Graz, until the never-ending tunnel under the moun­tains is finished later this decade, you have to take the train over the top of the Semmer­ing Pass, going up and down over the Alps. You get some spec­tac­u­lar views, and the train­line itself is a UNESCO site. It’s hard to take good photos out of the train window, so here’s my playl­ist for over the moun­tain.

Wall­ern Carni­val- home of the Party Tract­or

A lot of small towns in Austria have a Mardi Gras carni­val, and they often organ­ise them to be on differ­ent days to not clash. This means that if I’m in Austria doing school work­shops in Febru­ary I often see multiple carni­vals. Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land is still the most surreal I’ve seen.

Pamha­gen and Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land- the Kansas of Austria

My next work assign­ment was in a small village called Pamha­gen on the Austria-Hungary border. The main hotel in the village was closed, so we were put up in a neigh­bour­ing village called Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land. Pamha­gen is only about 70 miles away from Vienna, but it’s a million miles in real­ity. Until 1989 it was pinched between the lake and the heav­ily milit­ar­ised Iron Curtain. The border is open again now, with no pass­port controls (thanks Schen­gen Agree­ment!) but the area still feels like the end of the line.

Street Signs of Vienna

Vienna has strong rent controls for shops, mean­ing that many of them are in the same loca­tion for decades, lead­ing to lots of vintage shop signs around town (along with styl­ish new ones like the brew­ery one above). Here’s a selec­tion of differ­ent ones I spot­ted on this trip.

Architek­turzen­trum Wien

I also visited Vienna Archi­tec­ture Centre- I’d never been inside this small museum before, but the entry was thrown in free with the bundle tick­et I bought for the other exhib­i­tions.

Türkenschan­zpark

About 15 minutes walk from the school I was work­ing at in Vienna, and next door to the Univer­sity of Life Sciences was Türkenschanz Park

Vienna Academy of Fine Art

On a rare day off in Vienna I went to the Open Studio day at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. This is the top art school in Austria, and also the same insti­tu­tion that famously rejec­ted Hitler twice for his lack of creativ­ity. The studi­os are in this impress­ive build­ing, the Semper­de­pot, which was origin­ally built to store theatre scenery and props.

Das Geht Sich Gut Aus

I’ve been in Vienna and now a tiny village on the Austro-Hungari­an border for the last few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been listen­ing to.

Kunsthalle Wien – Nina Vobruba/​Malte Zander + Time is Thirsty

The Kunsthalle Wien holds tempor­ary exhib­i­tions- I caught the last day of this show. It defin­itely isn’t the best thing I’ve seen there- I’ve previ­ously been to block­buster Basqui­at, Haring and Švank­ma­jer shows there, but it was included in the Combi-tick­et I bought for the other museums, so I made sure to see it.

This Means Noth­ing To Me?

I’ve been back in Vienna since Saturday, but I was busy at the annu­al work confer­ence. Last year was the first in a decade that I didn’t spend any time in Vienna, and that was strange. Vienna is a very big and grand capit­al city for a small coun­try of six million sparsely spread moun­tain people, a remnant of the days when it was the capit­al of the whole Austro-Hungari­an empire, cover­ing Austria, Hungary, Czech Repub­lic, Slov­akia, Slov­e­nia, Croa­tia and parts of Romania and Poland.

Inns­bruck

Here’s some more old films I scanned- this time of Inns­bruck from two years ago. Stand­ard Ilford HP5 with a 70s Pentax SLR.

Schwartz­see

A short train ride or couple of miles walk outside Kitzbühel is the Schwartz­see (“black lake”). It’s full of miner­als washed down from the moun­tains that give it the glassy black effect…

Kitzbühel

So here’s a couple of assor­ted photos of Kitzbühel town. It’s a ski resort in the Austri­an Tyrol, about equidistant between Salzburg, Inns­bruck and Munich…

Hahnen­kamm

In July I went to Kitzbühel in Austria for work. I was there to run a work­shop in the local middle school, and the mayor gave me and my three co-work­ers tick­ets for the local ski lift…

The District Without Qual­it­ies?

So I’m back in the UK. For good now. Most of this week has been taken up with house-hunt­ing, arran­ging vans etc. More on that soon. I don’t like to count my chick­ens before they’re hatched.

However, I was tidy­ing up the folders on my computer this week, and found these miscel­laneous photos of Vienna from Febru­ary.

This Means Noth­ing To Me

I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teach­ing work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of plan­ning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for veget­ari­ans) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while polit­ic­al turmoil with dire consequences for many vulner­able people goes on around the world.

Two new zines

I had two never-before-seen zines to bring with me to the Shef­field Zine Fest (photos of the fest­iv­al coming later in the week). Issue 22 was new, where­as issue 14 has a bit of a history. I made no. 14 a few years ago, mislaid the pages, found them again last year and finished some bits off, made a few copies, mislaid them again moving house and then found them again recently. Now they’re safe in a folder with all my other master copies, scanned to a pdf, and avail­able to print whenev­er I want.

Fanzine Ynftyn 14- jo, frei­lich, die gnädige Frau Magister Emma ist nach Öster­reich gekom­men

I used to go to Austria quite a lot to run work­shops in schools, trav­el­ling from school to school each week. I star­ted writ­ing this zine after my first trip to Vienna in 2010, didn’t finish it, and then finished it off a couple of years later. I made a few copies at the time, but then mislaid the pages again when moving house, so barely anyone has read it. I recently found them again, and scanned them, so people can order it now!

Salzburg

On the way from Nieder­ös­ter­reich to Vorarl­berg I stopped off alone in Salzburg along the way. I had to change trains in Vienna, and after a week of hearty, dairy-laden alpine food I was very, very thank­ful to eat some dhal and chapat­tis at the station. I really, really liked Salzburg and would gladly return there. I don’t know what it is about the city, but it just had a really nice atmo­sphere. I arrived at about 5pm, found the hotel really easily, and dumped my stuff and went for a wander. It’s an old univer­sity town, with a castle perched on an outcrop of the moun­tain look­ing down. There is a stereo­type in Austria that people in Salzburg are snobby, but I found them friendly enough.

St Wolfgang­skirche, Nieder­ös­ter­reich

While in Kirch­berg-am-Wech­sel we were given a tour of a disused church perched up on the moun­tain­side. It has suffered a lot of misfor­tune over the years (if you can read German there is a wiki­pe­dia article here), it burnt down and was rebuilt twice, and is furnished with all kinds of leftovers from other churches, which makes it more inter­est­ing.

Hermannshöhle

While in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel I also got to go on a tour of Hermannshöhle with anoth­er teach­er. It’s a series of caves inside one of the moun­tains, with lots of stalac­tites and a bat colony. Usually the tours are at set times and only in German, but we got a private tour in English, which was really nice.

Kirch­berg am Wech­sel

Last Summer I spent a week work­ing at the juni­or school in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel, a tiny moun­tain town on the east­ern end of the Alps on the border between Lower Austria and Styria. It is essen­tially one long street between some moun­tains, with “Lower Austria’s finest stalac­tite cave” (more on that later) and a yearly Wittgen­stein fest­iv­al. As moun­tains go, by Austri­an stand­ards they are pretty tame, mostly being below the tree-line. When I said some­thing to the kids about the moun­tains they basic­ally went “what moun­tains?” and when I poin­ted out of the window they went “oh yeah, those, there are much better moun­tains in other places”. Still, I like any kind of moun­tains, and the Wech­sel is still 1,743m high, so it’s hardly a hill. Mountains/​hills and water, that’s what I like. I wouldn’t do well some­where like Kansas.

Dreams of the Alps

I spent a lot of last summer trav­el­ling up and down the Alps by train. Here are a couple of pictures I took out of the window. Taking photos from the window of a moving train can be very frus­trat­ing, you see a spec­tac­u­lar view, but by the time you have taken a photo some­thing like a fence is in the way. I like long-distance solo train trips, espe­cially ones with spec­tac­u­lar scenery and no stress or time pres­sure when it comes to connections.Both of these pictures are some­where near the Austrian/​German border. Inter­est­ingly German for night­mare is Alptraum – “Alp dream”. That alp is a night time incubus type thing, not the moun­tains, but it gives a strange mental image if you’re an English speak­er. An Alp dream would prob­ably involve frol­ick­ing with goats in a sunny moun­tain pasture. I clearly read Heidi too often when I was young­er.

Travels Without My Aunt

I’ve spent most of the past month trav­el­ling around Germany and Austria teach­ing. It’s for an extra-curricular school programme. You do activ­it­ies to boost the children’s speak­ing confid­ence in English, work on creat­ive projects, and put on a show for the parents with present­a­tions of the projects, and drama writ­ten by the students. You don’t need to speak German to do the job, and you never speak German in the classroom, but of course it comes in useful to under­stand if the kids are being naughty, and in your time outside the classroom.

The hills are alive with torren­tial rain.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I’m currently in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel, at the east­ern end of the Austri­an Alps for work. I didn’t really have much access to the inter­net last week in Dresden, so I haven’t updated prop­erly. I saw most of the sights, also went to the DDR Museum in Rade­beul and ate a lot of pastry and spätzle.

Hunder­t­wasser

Every so often I like to write on here about things I like, and why I like them. I’ve (finally) been finish­ing my zine about Vienna, and there’s a section about Hunder­t­wasser in there, but I didn’t really have enough space to say everything that I wanted to say, and in a b&w zine obvi­ously you totally miss out on the colours, which are a major part of his work, so here is a longer thing about him and his work. I’ve visited the Kunsthaus/​Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna quite a few times, and I wrote about one of my visits here. I first came across his work in 2001, when I was 16/​17, and bought a £3 book from a discount shop because it looked inter­est­ing from a quick flick through. I’m glad I did! All the pictures in this entry are either taken by me, or come from hundertwasser.at. I don’t feel like I’ve really caught  my exact favour­ites here, but collect­ing images from lots of differ­ent sources and making sure they were all cred­ited prop­erly would have taken a long, long time. Here’s an over­view of some things.

Oh Vienna

In Septem­ber I returned to Vienna to teach anoth­er English in Action programme. I’ve got photos of galler­ies and exhib­i­tions I need to sort out still. Here’s some odds and ends of photos of other stuff.

Super Dick­manns

I saw these in the super­mar­ket in Vienna and burst out laugh­ing because I am essen­tially 12. I wanted to bring some back as a joke present, but the boxes are big, and it’d be pretty diffi­cult to bring a box back unsquashed. (It’s like giant tall tunnocks teacakes). The stick­er on the bottom right says “plump and chocol­atey!”

Friends in Vienna

This is Delal. She saw some pictures I’d posted on my tumblr ( emmajanefalconer.tumblr.com) tagged with Wien and sent me a message to see if I’d like to hang out, because it seemed we liked loads of the same things. She’s from Germany origin­ally, and is study­ing Journ­al­ism in Vienna and likes draw­ing and photo­graphy too.

Nacht­markt

After going to the Hunder­t­wasser places, I met up with the other teach­ers, and we went to the Nacht­markt. Basic­ally there were loads of food and drink stalls arranged on a square outside the town hall, and they were play­ing a clas­sic­al concert on a giant screen outside the town hall. The food wasn’t cheap, but it was very good (I only really had snacks and some beer though, seeing as the liason teach­er from the Vienna school had taken us out for a very good dinner at a Japan­ese restaur­ant at lunch). I partic­u­larly like the chan­deliers the stall in the first photo has. Pity it was selling melon flavoured drinks, I’m not a big fan of melon.

Fotoauto­mat

There was a b&w photo­booth round the corner from my hotel in Vienna that was €2 a pop. I took a strip most days to docu­ment what I’d been doing . I also had some with Delal, and some of me hold­ing up signs, but I’ve cut them up for zine use now, and I can’t find what I did with the photo of the whole strips.

Kuche

Also I ate this deli­cious cake at the museum. It’s chocol­ate cake with a layer of cran­berry jam on top. It’s my new favour­ite. I don’t even like jam.

Leopold Museum

I was work­ing in Vienna a few weeks ago, and I haven’t got round to upload­ing photos and putting them here. There’s plenty to come. I went to as many art exhib­its as I could in the week I was work­ing in Vienna. I’ve never felt so spoilt by all the free entry in London. I think I spent about €40 over­all just on museum entries. It was worth it to see some things in the flesh though.

Hello aus Öster­reich

I’m in a small town in SE Austria called Ober­pul­lendorf right by the Hungari­an border. I’m here to teach some English work­shops with kids. I’ve got 1 week here, 1 week in Vienna, and one in a town near Verona, doing essen­tially the same thing, but in differ­ent schools with vari­ous age groups. Oberpullendorf’s got about 3,000 people, but there’s a pretty good selec­tion of shops, and cafes and restaur­ants here. Also 3 under­wear shops and a bong shop, which seems a bit odd for such a small town.