Biltmore was the dream project of George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of the “Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt. He wasn’t much of a businessman, but seems to have been a genuinely nice person in a noblesse oblige sort of way, and an early environmentalist. The Biltmore Estate was designed to be a working farm, employing hundreds of locals and investing heavily in the local economy and community.

And, it’s a castle.  With real pretty gardens.

It’s interesting visiting an estate that is designed to resemble Europe less than a week after actually being in Europe.  Vanderbilt originally wanted to create a more or less exact replica of a French chateau in the North Carolina foothills.  Fortunately, he ran into Frederick Law Olmstead who had a more creative take on the plan.

While the house itself is pretty much a copycat version of a Loire Valley chateau (with modern perks such as 43 indoor bathrooms and a basement swimming pool) the estate grounds represent one of the earliest efforts at forest preservation in the United States.  In fact, a large portion of the estate became Pisgah National Forest after Vanderbilt’s death, according to his wishes.

The gardens near the house are clearly planned, but lushly informal and horticulturally diverse in a way that is rarely seen in Europe. And the wildlife, as always, is far more abundant than it ever is across the ocean.  Walking around in the warm American sunshine, listening to the birds, I felt like I was inhaling pure oxygen for the first time in a year. And then there are the beautiful Smoky Mountains on the horizon.  I don’t know if it’s in my DNA or what, but I feel like I belong in these mountains.

Biltmore itself feels kind of Disneyfied, but then you have to keep in mind that it was meant to be that way.  From the beginning, it was designed to essentially be a theme park for rich people.  That hasn’t really changed: the only difference is that now you don’t need a personal invitation to get in.  And there’s a gift shop.

Anyway, I didn’t know that wine was a thing at the Biltmore. Granted, this is the first time I’ve been to a wine tasting that started with a very large woman shouting “Hey! How y’all doin’ today?”  But the samples were generous, and quite good. My daughter and I were both pleasantly surprised. I bought several bottles for the road.

While shopping, I told a salesperson that I lived in Austria, and that the Biltmore wines compared favorably with Austrian wines.  Well, of course she was retired military and had lived in Germany and visited Austria.  I’ve learned: never assume that Americans have never traveled. In any area with a large military presence, there will always be people who have lived in Europe and want to talk about it! Guess that will be me, one day

“Maria of the Shores” is one of the oldest churches in Vienna. Sitting atop a little hill, it once overlooked the Danube.  (The river has since changed course and was diverted permanently when the Danube Canal was built in the 19th century.) Traces of the wall that once encircled RomanVindabona can be seen in the church foundations.  Winding medieval streets and some of the oldest houses in Vienna surround it.

The first church was supposedly built on the site in the 9th century by grateful sailors. In the 12th century, it was rebuilt in the Romanesque style,  and renovated in the Gothic style in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.  Later on, it was deconsecrated and used for, among other things, a pawn shop and a stable for Napoleon’s horses.

Finally, in the mid-19th century, it was restored quite nicely in the Gothic style and dedicated to Saint Clement Maria Hofbauer, an 18th century Moravian priest who is also one of the patron saints of Vienna.

The current church is a mix of original medieval and 19th century construction and artwork.  It all comes together pretty well, and is a nice break from the Baroque overload of most other churches here.

Click any photo to open a slide show with captions.

This morning, I went by my favorite thrift store here in Vienna, Carla, a Catholic charity shop.  I was dropping off a couple of bags of clothes and stayed to browse.

It was my lucky day. I bought all this stuff!

All for 112 Euros. Now that is my kind of shopping!

SPO Rally at Rathausplatz

International Worker’s Day is a big deal here in “Red Vienna.”  The Social Democratic Party holds a huge rally downtown. Party-organized groups from all over the area march in for the rally; many of them wear traditional clothing and are accompanied by brass oompah bands. Everyone waves Socialist red flags. (Glenn Beck would probably drop dead of shock seeing all these old white people that look just like his fans waving their little red flags!)

It is essentially a family event, though trouble has been known to crop up on occasion, and there were (as always) plenty of well-armed cops around. We ran across a noisy group of Turks yelling about something or other with flags depicting Che and other luminaries. Their music was better, though

What I didn’t know before is that this parade represents more than just support for a political party. Back in the bad old days, when the Austrofascists (Nazis) took over, they banned the socialist party, and May Day celebrations. In 1933, the Viennese simply all decided to take a walk on the Ring at the same time on the same day in protest. So, the May Day march and rally commemorate that event as well.

For May Day, the local American women’s’ club arranged a tour of the Waschsalon museum of “Red Vienna.”  The museum gets its name from its location in the former communal baths of the enormous socialist housing project known as Karl Mark Hof.  After WWI, the housing situation in Vienna was so bad that it basically led to the rise of the socialist party here. Taxes were raised, and dozens of housing complexes were built around the city, with apartments that, though tiny by modern standards, were considered to be a huge improvement at the time, with innovations like indoor plumbing and private kitchens!

Many of these complexes were designed by famous architects, and of course Austrians do not build anything shoddily. So, the Viennese are proud of their rather unattractive apartment buildings, which are generally in good condition to this day, and are gradually being renovated—though some continue to have shared toilets and communal showers.

In some ways, these complexes presaged contemporary New Urbanism. Open space and windows were emphasized because they were considered to be healthy. “Walkability” was a must, since cars were not common among the working classes.  And, all the complexes were mixed-use, with small shops, restaurants, launderettes, libraries, and kindergartens located on lower floors. Socialist, or just plain smart?

Karl Marx Hof is the largest of these complexes and was considered a showpiece at the time.  It was also the site of a battle during the short-lived Socialist resistance to the Austrofascist takeover in 1934, which eventually led to takeover by the German Nazis in the Anschluss of 1938. The Nazis renamed it Heilegenstädter Hof. In 1945, the Socialists restored the original name.

The museum is about the Hof and other historical aspects of Socialist Vienna: housing, healthcare, childcare, education, sports, and celebrations.  I couldn’t understand all of the German information, but I have a weakness for Socialist Realism and enjoyed the posters, books, and other items that were displayed. (Click any photo to view captions.)

We had a hearty lunch at the Sänger Blondel, named for the minstrel who supposedly rescued Richard the Lion Heart from Dürnstein castle. Afterwards we visited Stift Dürnstein, then hiked up to see the castle ruins.

A little wine and apricot shopping, a small kugel of apricot ice cream, and the day was complete.

(Click any photo to open a slide show with captions.)

Planted today: zucchini, and garlic cloves (just to see what happens). I already thinned out the lettuce and spinach, and together with some volunteer turnip greens and spinach that have been coming up from last year, I’ve got my first harvest–a bag of baby salad greens.

I have a couple of more pots to fill. I’m thinking cherry tomatoes, and those small Chinese eggplants if I can find them at the garden center. And some annuals to plant around the edges and pretty it all up a bit. Sweet potato vines would be pretty coming over the sides of the pots…

I don’t really know why I garden, but  I do know that it sure makes me happy to go out in the morning and water and weed my plants. Every year, I am excited to see the seeds sprout, even though, duh, that’s why I planted them!

No matter where in the world you are, cheap thrills rule.

Quotes from the original post in italics:

We moved to Fairfield County in Connecticut—home to some of “THE best schools in the country”…The other parents were friendly enough to be sure, but one of the first things I discovered was that people with school-aged kids in American public schools are very proprietary about where they’ve sent them. Everyone wants you, as the newbie, to list all the reasons (i.e. hear you repeat all the same reasons they themselves made) why you chose their beloved school district. Conversely, people with kids in private school are made to feel defensive or even cagey about their reasons for choosing a private education over their community’s “excellent” public school offerings. Or they want to know if your child is athletically capable of helping their community soccer/baseball, etc. team win the league trophy. After that, they’re “just not that into you”.

OK. If you move to a wealthy area populated by high-achieving people, they are very likely to be quite concerned with money and conventional measures of achievement.  If you choose to move to that area, you are assumed to share that mentality. I mean, really, are the houses in the next county appreciably any different from the houses in Fairfield? Probably not. You are buying into a certain demographic when you choose a house based on its location in a “top” school district.

Speaking as  a parent who has been dealing with schools for nearly twenty years, a more 360-degree perspective, that takes into account more than test scores and ratings, may lead to a better experience. Or, if you want to live in a neighborhood like that, by all means, go ahead. But don’t be surprised when you get what you pay for.

I went into shell shock when I moved back to the States as a 30-something year old mother to discover that no, in my experience, my American-based counterparts (at least where I lived) don’t generally go out mid-week when they have diaper-clad or booster seat-aged children at home. When I proposed to a friendly-enough CT mom that we get together for Monday night cocktails, she looked at me as if I were from another planet.

I get that, I really do.  But there are reasons for this. Parents of young children in the States are usually either 1.) both working full-time in order to afford unsubsidized, expensive day care and want to see their kids at the end of the day or 2.) one-income families and not able to afford frequent babysitters.

That said, there were times during our last seven-year stretch in the States when I became a little irked at how adults’ schedules were completely centered around their kids. You can’t miss that one soccer game? Really? And some PTAs are seriously on steroids.

On the other hand, I grew to really enjoy watching my daughter’s softball games, and my son’s soccer and basketball games, and chatting with parents on the sidelines. It probably helped that neither of them were star athletes, played only in the intramural/rec leagues, and no one took it too seriously. It felt weird at first, because I didn’t grow up in a suburban environment myself, and had never anticipated that I would end up as a “soccer mom.” But I actually kind of miss it now.

I discovered that life as a parent in America is extremely child-centric and that other people really do expect you to take sincere interest in the fact that Little Logan made honor roll AND got a trophy for it… in Kindergarten no less.

See overachieving suburbs, above.

I was popular enough, or so I’d believed, when I’d lived in London the first time around with my three small children (my youngest was born here). I had a great set of girlfriends whom I socialized with on a regular basis – girls nights out at least every other week (Mondays or Tuesdays), dinner parties once a month with husbands (Wednesdays or Thursdays). 

“Popular?” I have some great girlfriends too, but I don’t think I have ever have heard the term “popular” since 8th grade–in the US or overseas.

Most of all, I’ll admit, I missed swearing. American women don’t cuss like English women—it’s considered uncouth and untoward. Swearing in Great Britain, however, transcends all classes. My mother was visiting me in London and came down the stairs to find my very posh girlfriend announce, “I’m hosting a sit-down dinner tonight for fourteen barristers. F—k me!”

I lived in England for a year a long time ago (and liked it very much), so yeah, I know they do swear more there. But this honestly does not seem like such a big deal to me. Of all the cultural adaptations we have to make as we move from country to country, cleaning up one’s language so as not to offend the natives seems pretty low on the list of hardships. I mean, it’s not like you had to learn a whole other language to make friends, right?

Needless to say, I lasted all of 3.5 seconds with the Perfectly Pleasant set in Connecticut (okay so it was more like five months).

Hm, I’ve read (and personally experienced) that it takes anywhere between six months to a year to really adjust to a new culture. In fact, five months would be just about the lowest point for most people.  I’m just saying.

I sat in traffic one day as I was driving home from my son’s soccer championship(!!) game where no one would talk to me (except for one woman but she had bad shoes) and I asked for a sign from God as to whether I should stay in CT or move closer to NY where I was sure to find a sidewalk and women who wouldn’t bristle at the word “shit.”

Shoes? Really? Maybe those other women were freaked out because you were checking out their feet?

Friendships in expats communities are formed quickly because when you’re away from home, your friends become family. You’re forced to list people you’ve only just met as your emergency contacts and you rely on them to help you settle in, show you the ropes and introduce you to like-minded people. You’re obliged to compress your assessment of others as to whether they’ll fit your own friendship criteria (the ability to swear without judgement and good shoes are obviously important to me). You have no choice but to strip down all the layers (politics, religion, parenting, socializing, family values, etc.) in an accelerated time frame (you may only have a few years together, after all) to decide if you can indeed make this person “family.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the flip side of this may be a tendency to make snap judgments (and burn bridges).

On the other hand, there is truth here. It IS quicker and easier to make friends in an expat community, without a doubt. Though I liked living back in the States, and look forward to going home again, I have come to understand that my closest friends will probably always be people who have shared that expatriate experience. That’s OK. But it certainly doesn’t mean that I have nothing in common with people who haven’t been there and done that. I do not define myself as an expat: it is just one of the things that I “do.” I also like to renovate houses, garden, quilt, knit, and watch bad television shows. I am a person with many interests who happens to have spent quite a few years overseas.

I didn’t write this just to pick this person’s essay apart, though it did kind of bug me (obviously). I think on a macro level it demonstrates one of the hazards of expat life.

We gain such tremendous experiences from our travels, and there’s no doubt that we broaden ourselves in so many ways. But there is a danger in identifying too closely with “the club.”  By defining ourselves primarily as a Cool People Who Live a Lot of Places, we may actually narrow our perspective, and forget that there are zillions of people who live in the same place their entire lives doing interesting things. But you won’t find out about them unless you ask.

And you probably won’t ask unless you, too, have been doing something other than packing and unpacking boxes and traveling and have something else to talk about other than your expat experiences. Which, to be perfectly honest, are not that interesting to people who have not chosen to live that way. As a person who lived in one place for 18 years before college and never traveled outside the southern US, I know this to be true! Just ask my TCK husband about the many blank looks I gave him when we were first dating.

It goes without saying that if you feel like the most important thing about yourself is your status as permanent outsider, then you are in for a rough landing when you go home.

And for heaven’s sakes, woman, let the shoes thing go.

St Ruprecht is debatably the oldest church in Vienna, dating from about 740 AD. The current church, dating mostly from the 13th century, is the only Romanesque church in Vienna. It is located on a small hill overlooking the Danube Canal, which used to be the main course of the Danube itself.  The area below it, Morzinplatz and Schwedenplatz, was a port since Roman times, known especially for the salt trade. It was filled in when the canal was built.

In fact, St Ruprecht is located smack in the middle of the old Roman garrison town of Vindabona (and the later medieval center of Vienna, known as the Berghof). Bits and pieces of Roman ruins are found everywhere around here, and the Hoher Markt nearby was the site of the Roman baths. If you visit the Roman museum, operated by the city of Vienna at Hoher Markt, you can go underground to see some ruins that were discovered during post WWII reconstruction of the area.

St Ruprecht is the patron saint of salt traders, among other things, and Ruprechtsplatz, where the church stands, was a salt market for hundreds of years. Now it is populated by several bars, as it is part of the “Bermuda Triangle,” an area known for pub-crawling and general partying.

Morzinplatz was the location of the Metropole Hotel, which was used by the Gestapo during WWII. It was basically a way station to concentration camps and attracted a lot of bombing. St Ruprecht was largely spared, but many buildings in the surrounding neighborhood were destroyed. The Metropole itself was completely swept away after the war, and replaced with a park and a small memorial to the victims of the Nazis. To this day, though there are many hotels in Vienna, not one of them is called the Metropole.

Ironically, the area had been the Jewish Quarter for two hundred years, a community of up to 185,000 people. Small brass plaques in the sidewalks mark places where Jewish families lived before the war. Our guide pointed out that many of the shops on the ground floors of older buildings in the neighborhood have heavy shutters.  This is because they were Jewish shops, and whenever a pogrom was anticipated, the owners would lock them up tight to preserve their windows and wares.

The only synagogue in the city that was not destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 was the main temple, located just a couple of blocks from St Ruprecht’s. One theory is that this was because it was so closely located with other buildings that it could not be burned without damaging them. Another is that since the community archives were stored there, the Nazis simply wanted to be able to figure out who was Jewish in order to round them up.

Today, the Jewish community in Vienna numbers about 7,000 people, and is still located more or less in our neighborhood.  I often see Orthodox Jews walking around (or whizzing by on razor scooters), and there are several kosher restaurants located nearby.

So, today’s tour was a reminder of just how much history there is under our feet in this neighborhood. I am signed up for another one next week, of a different area. This is clearly a great way to get my geek on!

The same goes for the terrace. If a rich Austrian lived here, they would probably put big pots of shrubbery on the terrace to improve the view, along with an elegant little wrought iron café table. They might even pay someone to clean the picture windows.

But, I live here, and like most renters, and I am not inclined to spend a fortune on things I can’t take with me. And, I have a cat, requiring a quick and dirty solution to discourage him from walking on the roof, seven stories up.

So, my terrace is decorated with cheap plastic Home Depot pots (lighter in the HHE than terra cotta) and whatever else I could scrounge up to plant in, including plastic bags.  With an improvised chicken wire fence  to deter the cat. It’s Nashville on the Danube, folks!

Spring seems to have finally arrived, after winter so interminable even the Viennese were getting pretty grumpy about it.  Daffodils and forsythia have just popped out in the park across the street. So, it’s time to plant!

I’ve moved nearly all the pots up to the roof (see cat, above) and topped them off with a bit of compost and extra gardening soil.  Last week, I planted spinach, chard, and lettuce, all of which are supposed to be winter-hardy.  Some of those seeds have already sprouted. Plus sage and parsley.  And “Katzengrass” for the cats (it’s a thing here–lots of apartment kitties).

Today, I experimentally planted a few bush beans, thinking maybe in full sun on the warm metal roof they could do OK this early. If not, they are easy to replant.  And in another experiment, planted a few basil seeds under little greenhouses made of recycled strawberry containers. We shall see.

Later, I’m going to plant zucchini, and see if I can find some “Tumbling Tom” cherry tomatoes to grow upside down in a couple of pots. And, of course, I will plant some turnip greens once I can get the seeds. A girl needs her greens, after all.

It may not be an elegant terrace, but it works for me.

To start with, there are street vendors everywhere. Some run food carts, but mostly they just seems to hang around all selling whatever fell off the truck that week.  When we were there, they were selling incredibly irritating gel toys that squeal like a stuck pig when thrown on the sidewalk.  And some kind of laser helicopter pen things.  And umbrellas, which makes a bit more sense. In theory, these guys are Roma, but they sure looked Tamil to me.  They were pretty good at taking “no” for an answer, anyway.

There are also Africans, who are all selling the exact same carved wooden bowls and masks, or knock-off Gucci purses.  The whole time I was there, I did not see even one of these guys making a successful sale (other than the laser helicopter pen things, which were a hit with kids, of course).  So, I have no idea how they make a living.

We saw a few beggars, which were pretty much like beggars everywhere, except thankfully a lot less pushy than in some third world countries. (No icky “give me money or I’ll touch you” routines.) I did think it was interesting that each church had just one beggar at the door. There seems to be a system at work: maybe Roman Catholic churches sell begging concessions along with bobble-head Popes and saintly baseball cards.

And Italian guys dress up as gladiators and pose for photos. Some of them are really into it, with “Roman” tattoos and quality gladiator wear.  And other street performers who make themselves up as living statues of various kinds.  And a few musicians.  And Tigger (?)

There are some established street markets. At Piazza Navona you can buy prints and watercolors. There are small food markets at various points throughout the city. We also saw piazzas with booths for antiques and books, but they were closed for Easter. Next time, maybe.