Tag: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

More Vienna- Hunder­t­wasser

Also on my to-do list was the Hunder­t­wasser museum. If you’re not famil­i­ar with him he was an Austri­an paint­er, archi­tect, graph­ic design­er, envir­on­ment­al­ist and all round inter­est­ing eccent­ric

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.

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.