Vienna: Do & Co.

02--Schonnbrunn gardens

Eric has a brief review of our final dinner at Do & Co:

Ahh, back to Do & Co and we can’t wait. This time we add desert and actually eat more, but the bill comes out about 40 euros less than the first time! Both times the total with wine comes to less than 200 euros for the three of us, an incredible bargain considering the quality of the food and the helpfulness of the staff (Eric’s German is, shall we say, weak).

Right off the bat we order the same Gruner Veltliner we had the first time, a 2003 Emmerich Knoll, designated “Reid Loibenberg” vineyard from the Wachau region (write it down). All of the Gruners we’ve tried this trip have been extremely versatile-- have gone with fish, meat, and asparagus—and each one has been vastly different from the others. This is a truly fascinating grape.

We start with foie gras on a toasted brioche and the best cole slaw ever! Ms. Eats goes for the rack of lamb (again from Uruguay) in an olive crust. Excellent! The lamb is cooked just right, pink in the middle, juicy and with a slightly wild taste, like the lamb was actually grazing on a hillside somewhere. Better than the filet of the first visit!

Dad gets the signature dish “Skipper Do & Co,” grilled Irish salmon, monkfish, and loup de mer. We have no idea what loup de mer is, but it seems to be a white fish, skin crisped up from a well-executed high heat searing, but without drying out the flesh. Fishtabulous! And I get the “Kalbsbutterschnitzel.” Did you get that? No? Well, it’s essentially two veal meatballs with mashed potatoes and roasted onion chips. Sounds plain and simple, but the sauce had to have been produced with the assistance of 6 young virgins and at least two pacts with the prince of darkness. Really, the sauce was that good.

03-Croquet house at the Schonbrunn

The veal was as light as air and probably food processed with herbs and spices until it floats, maybe with an egg. After questioning the waitress we seem to think that the veal meatballs were seared in butter, then the butter was probably cooked with a little flour until you get that nutty aroma, and then something with the virgins and Satan.

Dessert is a trio of chocolate mousse with an elderberry sauce (but it didn’t smell like your father). The dairy and butter in Vienna is unbelievable. I can’t describe it justly. Light light light and creamy. Delicious is too soft a word.

All in all the best food in Vienna, maybe Austria. France has a high bar to beat. (When I die I want to go to hell, that demon knows how to eat!)

Vienna: The Gift Shop at the Top of the Universe

The Stephansdom.
Two connections and sixteen hours later, Eric makes it to Vienna. And immediately falls in love with Viennese efficiency on the new CAT airport train. A few misdirected steps around the Stephansdom later, he manages to get to the Hotel Konig von Ungarn, where Mary Ellen and her Dad have been already relaxing in the blessed air-conditioning of their luxury suite (no kidding about that!)

Eric’s going to go for the 38 hour mark, however (go, Eric, go!), and rolls himself into the shower, pulls on some khakis and sandals, and we’re off!

To lunch, because of course, that’s the first thing on everyone’s mind, always. We go in search of a restaurant recommended in the guidebook and can’t locate it (the guidebook, we later discover has a misprint) but we end up outside the old University a couple of blocks from our hotel at a student hangout called Inigo’s. Prices are low, portions are large, beer is cold, everyone is happy.

After lunch we notice we’re opposite the Jesuit church, which looks fairly plain from the outside, but when you step inside, blows your eyeballs out with Baroque gilding and mock architectural murals on the ceiling. As we wander the place, a group of some twenty earnest looking young men pile into one of the pews, pray hard for about five minutes, and then leave. Soccer team? Jesuits priests? Or participants in the new “Five Minutes to Heavenly Abs” regime? We may never know.

There’s a concert of the Schubert mass scheduled for Sunday morning, so already discussion ensues about what musical events we’ll be going to hear.

Stephansdom - The Gift Shop at the Top of the Universe
Our next target -- after changing some euros, making a dinner reservation and most importantly, locating a WC—is Stephansdom, the Gothic monolith of a cathedral at the heart of the Old Town.

Outside, all three of us make a beeline for the poster advertising Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the cathedral on Saturday. Unfortunately it conflicts with our plans to hear the Vienna Philharmonic. They are in fact also playing a Gounod mass on Sunday at the same time as the one at the Jesuitkirche. One hour in Vienna and already we have too many musical choices.

A Dominican monk stands at the door trying to sell cheesy booklets to benefit the handicapped children, one of which my Dad buys, and promptly sets down someplace inside the cathedral, saying he did his part. Inside this Catholic cathedral though, things look a little more Protestant than in the Jesuit’s church – less in the way of painting or gilding, or decoration of anything really. We wander through the building which is already overrun by camera-wielding tourists just like us, but Eric decides that he’d like to get high…

Outside there’s a small un-prepossessing door that leads to a man, who is pleased to charge you 3 Euros to climb yourself silly. Of course we don’t realize this at the time and happily pass through the turnstile and start heading up the stone, spiral stairway. The narrow, stone, spiral stairway. The dark, narrow, stone, spiral stairway. Did I mention there was no railing?

About a quarter of the way up, we thought might almost be there, when we passed a woman on the way down. (Did I mention there was no railing and it was narrow? And dark?) Eric bounded ahead like a mountain goat, while Dad and I struggled up the 465th step (about halfway). Did I mention there was no railing?

Admittedly, the views through the narrow slit windows are wonderful, and you can see the tiled roof in all its glory from the stairs.

We arrived at the old bell room (About halfway—okay, two-thirds up.) More stairs. Eric bounded ahead. Suddenly we heard a voice echoing through the stone spiral, “You’re almost there.” Yeah, sure. “You gotta see this!” Uh-huh, puff, puff.

As we came up the last of the 1035 steps, we found Eric sitting gnome-like on the doorway of…a cheery, brightly lit gift shop. At the top of the spire. At the end of the Universe. Struggling for enlightenment? Trying to get closer to God? Well, folks, thereÂ’s a postcard and rosary shop at the end of your pilgrimage. Did God and redemption await when the Crusaders got to Jerusalem? Or maybe just cheap slides and T-shirts?

The thing that got us thinking was that, someone – maybe the novice monks?—had to carry all that crap up the stairs. The cards, the rosaries, the slides, the postcard rack, the cash register, AND the telescopic binocular machines that afford you a view over Vienna for 1 Euro. No T-shirts that said “I Climbed Closer to God and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” though, danke schon.


The gift shop at the top of the universe
Well that was enough of that.

We went back down – enough to make you nauseous going around the spiral, let me tell you! – and headed for our first cafe down the Graben.

Cafe Hawelka and the discovery of Eiskaffee

A few steps from the dom, hidden down a little side street called Dorotheergasse, there was, just as described in several books, a quiet, slightly musty-looking place called Cafe Hawelka. Also as promised, at the doorway, Leopold, the founder, who is now at age 90-plus, sits on a stool, greeting everyone with a “Gruss Gott” as you enter.

We sink into one of the striped overstuffed couches opposite a little cafe table and take in the atmosphere, which is circa 1930’s, wood paneling with well worn booths and tables, that look like they’ve served everyone from Kafka to, well, us.

In the book I read about something heavenly called “Eiskaffee” –made with coffee and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. You can get it “mit schlagobers” (which would be whipped cream) or “ohne schlagobers” (which would be without whipped cream.) Definitely “mit.”

There are tourists like us posted in various corners of the room, but also people who look much more attuned to cafe pacing who are reading the newspapers and writing. It’s a pretty far cry from Starbucks, although I do feel they could benefit from wireless access if they want to keep the young writers coming here.

We suck down the eiskaffee with unearthly speed. Ooops. So much for the tradition of lingering for hours over your drink. But we do hang out for at least half an hour, at which point it’s obvious from our heads, which droop like fading wildflowers, that we need to go back to the hotel for a siesta.


We went back to the blessed air-conditioning of our hotel, figuring God can always find us there if He needs us. We’re planning on instituting the siesta in the afternoon.

Dinner at the Restaurant Slightly Lower Than the Top of the Universe, But Which Has an Elevator
Do & Co.
First night in Vienna and our first restaurant from the Let’s Go book recommendations is a big hit. Do & Co is above Stephansdomplatz in what is surely Vienna’s Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a bustling tourist filled shopping area right around Stephansdom, in the heart of old Vienna. All in all much more interesting than the Wharf, what with the combination of a huge gothic cathedral intermixed with street performers painted silver and barkers trying to sell you tickets to a “Mozart Concert” in which all the musicians are dressed up in powdered wigs and they play “The Blue Danube Waltz” and “Eine Kliene Nacht Musik” over and over.

Well, up the elevator to the 7th floor and a table outside overlooking the platz, it’s dinner time.


The view from our table on the balcony at Do & Co.

This meal started with white asparagus, or “spargel,” with a small boat of hollandaise sauce to drizzle over them. I now understand why this veggie is such a big deal here. Unbelievably creamy, sweet and vegetal, this is not anything like asparagus I’ve had in the U.S. (though you can find white asparagus at Whole Paycheck or other fine stores, it doesn’t even come close to the Austrian kind).

Next we pulled the cork on what has become my favorite Gruner Veltliner so far, a 2003 Emmerich Knoll, designated “Reid Loibenberg” vineyard from the Wachau region. This wine is crisp like a Riesling, and has the body of a good dry Chardonnay. It also accompanied everything on the table. More on Gruners later.

OK, now the real fun. I had a filet of Uruguayan Veal with mushroom risotto, and crispy vegetable tempura. Excellent creamy risotto and the veal was coked moist and just pink, in other words, just right. We don’t see Uruguayan beef much in San Fran, but they sure raise good beef there. Dad had giant prawns in a decadent butter sauce, a little paprika and a few other mystery spices. Big fat juicy succulent prawns -- a plate full. Eric tackles monkfish and green asparagus (hey the stuff is good here) in a curried lobster sauce. The sauce was so good we wanted to swim in it, all the fish was fresh, and the beef moist and grass fed. Our meal was so good we vowed to come back, and we did, on our last night in Vienna.

Walking off dinner

After the fabulous meal at Do & Co, we needed a walk, and so we strolled down the Graben, the large mostly pedestrian avenue that leads away from the Stephansdom. I was fascinated by the tidbit of information that the Graben was originally a ditch where all the bodies of plague victims were thrown. There’s an enormous memorial column in fact, known as the Pestsaule, that marks this history in the middle of the street, but it was under renovation when we were there, although a very informative display surrounded the scaffolding, replete with disturbing images of the plague years.


It’s off the Graben that you can find Dorotheergasse where lurks Cafe Hawelka and also the famed Trzeniewski sandwich shop that we plan to hit the next day. This time, though, we continue all the way down to Kohlmarkt at the end of the Graben and turn down the street, just wandering randomly.

Along the way, we pass Demel, a konditorei which is the home to the some of the fanciest confections and desserts known to humankind. The window display looks like a sort of sugar version of Cartier’s, with elegant arrangements of meringues and chocolates that make it easy to believe this place used to supply the emperor. Luckily they’re closed, so our willpower is not tested.

We continue on to the impressive looking Michaelertor, where a looming stone edifice of a gateway leads into the Hofburg Palace. There are monumental statues depicting the labors of Hercules spaced out along the front of this behemoth, and our guidebook informs us amusingly, that the statues once inspired Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger and beloved son of Austria to new heights of bodybuilding bulk. Seeing them, I can well believe it.


In front of the place is a rounded pit in which you can see the remains of a Roman encampment, apparently where Marcus Aurelius once sat. It just reminds you of the vast swath of history that Vienna, which was called Vindobona in Roman times, encompasses. It also makes me giggle a little at the memory of signs you see in America “Established in 1972,” which seems pretty pale in contrast with “Established in 15 B.C.”

The square (or circle, or sort of half circle) of Michaelerplatz has some other interesting buildings around it though. Adolf Loos’s modernist -- and therefore to our eyes, much less fussy – building stands to one side. This was the building that Loos – a Moravian architect– created, and standing as it does, opposite those heavily ornamented and overwrought sculptures, you can see how it pretty much embodies the principles of his manifesto “Ornament and Crime.”


We wander into the Michaelerkirche, a lovely unpreprossessing church that faces the gate on the other side of Michaelerplatz, which houses a spectacular organ. After reading the article about the mysterious “Organ Leprosy” that is sweeping Europe, I can’t help wondering about the state of health of every organ we come across. The crypt, which promised open coffins was unfortunately closed, but we decided that that was probably… okay.

It’s still light out – I often forget how much further north everything is, and how late it stays light. We often found ourselves still wandering out at 10:30 pm thinking it was perhaps only 8:30 or so. The air is so pleasant though, without the heat of the day, and everyone else is also walking about, so it seems more normal to be “flaneur-ing” our way about the city than it ever does in San Francisco, where you scurry through the fog huddled in a full leather jacket to get back to a warm cup of tea at about 10 pm.


But this is Vienna. Strolling down Herrengasse, to one side of the gate, we happened upon Cafe Central, which is quiet, but still inviting, with a lovely golden hued interior in the evening light. We stop in for a cafe melange and lounge in what feels like splendor with all the chandeliers and other ornamental crimes hanging about. It’s getting late though and so reluctantly, after a nice rest, we decide it’s time to head back to the hotel.

Wandering past the Am Hof, we make our way back up to the Graben. Along the way, an English couple stops us to ask for directions to the U-Bahn and feeling like we're at home already, we send them off towards the nearest stop. For a moment, it feels like we live here.

Vienna: Eric's travel interlude

Airplanes Suck, Air France food is good.

At 4:00 am, Eric’s fifty-five alarms drive him out of the bed in San Francisco. Bill—who was the most important alarm-- also calls, just to make sure Eric really is up.

Already packed, and ready to step out the door, Eric is already missed by the cats, who thoughtfully leave him with parting gifts of an organic nature on the living room floor. Delay number 1.

But, he gets on the road and makes it Bill’s house, where the car is going to be stashed for the price of one bottle of Ravenswood Rhone style Icon wine, and in no time at all, he’s waiting on the security line at Oakland Airport. Around the baggage claim, out the door, down the street… to the next terminal…

On the Jet Blue flight Eric begs and pleads for a front row seat, so he can get a sprinting start to make his fifty second connection to Air France at JFK. It’s an uneventfully crammed flight, though, and our hero makes it through to New York relatively unscathed.

Despite getting on the wrong airport monorail train, and going the wrong direction, he makes onto the flight to Charles de Gaulle with only a few snooty run-ins with their impeccably manicured staff. But when they place glass of wine in his hand and serve up some chicken fricassee with smoked salmon and a wedge of Camembert, he’s mollified…

Charles de Gaulle, considered by some to be the worst airport on the planet, is a living, breathing circus sideshow of design flawed tunnels that go the wrong way and officials with an uncanny ability to ignore you, even when you are begging for help.

Bern to Vienna: Zentrums, Zytglogge and Zurich

In the morning all seems well with the trains. Apparently the Swiss, horrified by the lapse of rail order worked all night not just to restore the power, but also to make sure that everyone has been shipped to his or her destination – even if they had to transport them by rickshaw. They’ve also cleaned the stations, returned all the trains to schedule – basically you’d never know there was a disaster at the station when you walk through in the morning.

We check out of the hotel Marthahaus, and drop the bags in the lockers at the station. Thank goodness we won’t schlep all that around all day.

Zentrum Paul Klee

We’re planning to head out to the outskirts of Bern to see the Zentrum Paul Klee. We have been exceptionally lucky in our timing the whole trip and the zentrum just opened the previous Monday, amidst much fanfare. It’s the largest collection of Paul Klee in the world and had been established at the Kunstmuseum –some 4000 pieces that pretty much cover his entire life’s work. The museum’s already extensive collection has been augmented by the donation of hundreds of works from the artist’s family, which they gave to the city with the proviso that the city build a big museum.

The place they chose is in rolling hills up above the river and the Italian architect, Renzo Piano echoed the landscape with three gently arching semi-hobbit holes into the ground. That sounds like it’s small and cute, but in fact, when you enter, it’s apparent that this is a huge soaring triple space, with an airy café and auditorium for public performances at one end, an enormous permanent exhibition of Klee works in the center, and a library in the third. Downstairs, there’s spaces for more exhibitions, traveling and permanent, and also workshops for educational programs for the kids. It’s so new that the wood floors still smell like they just cut them and the fittings sparkle with even more than the usual cleanliness and the best part is that it’s air-conditioned.

We’re so stunned with the overall effect we almost forget to use our museum cards to get in, and start to pay the admission fees. I wonder how many tourists do that.

The collection itself is immense, laid out in a hangar-sized space and tracing the development of the artist’s work chronologically– which probably would have made sense had we followed it chronologically, but the collection sort of sucks you in organically and you find yourself wandering from painting to painting looking at the oddly dreamlike shapes or attracted over there by colors, or distracted by that one’s geometry.

Throughout the place, there are kids, not lounging around like bored troublemakers in the corner, but rather sprawled on the floors with paper and colored pencils, working hard at making their own interpretations of the Klee designs. Two girls compare fish drawings and giggle. A college-age student sneaks in amidst a group of ten-year-olds while the teacher explains something to them, and crouches down, pretending to be a part of the class, to the kids’ amusement. Everywhere people are pretty much enjoying Klee. Wow, not much like how they go through the Legion of Honor back home.

Barengraben: grab those bears

We leave the cool museum and get back on the bus headed for the Barengraben, or bear pits, where two bored-looking troublemakers of brown bears are skulking around in the open pit just across the bridge from the city center. People are staring at them, and they’re staring back, a little sadly, I thought. They’ve got to be dying of heat because I’m dying of heat and I don’t have a thick fur coat on. The bears are a mascot of the city though, and despite some efforts to have them moved to a more reasonable larger exhibition place, the people “love” them so much that they want to keep them right there. In the pits. They at least have a little pool a rock cave thing in the center and plenty of branch-y things to play with, but still, the pit looks pretty small to me.

I don’t much like the pit, and we get back on a bus and head into town. Near the station there’s a old-fashioned tearoom with a confiserie in the front called Eichenberger’s where a lot of older Bernese are sitting having lunch. It looks like fun, so we wander in, and the waitress is very chatty and nice and tells us that the place is world famous for its truffles and chocolates which have been hand-made on site for decades.

We order omelettes and something cold and sit to enjoy the atmosphere. After lunch we get a box of truffles for one of Dad’s friends and he buys a pipe next door.

Kunst, kunst, kunst

We’re not far from the Kunstmuseum, so we pop in there next, and they turn out to have a small but very choice collection of paintings, from early Flemish right into impressionist and modern works. There are a few fine Monets and a Blue Period Picasso, but the great extent of the place’s space is taken up with three floors for traveling exhibitions.

There’s a questionably avant-garde exhibition of Chinese artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution, though it does have some very humorous pieces, including a giant diorama of troops marching through Tiananmen Square. The artist has used plastic toy soldiers and toy tanks, little saluting officials, all painted the same icky tan color, but if you start to examine the parade, at the end you see, he’s started to include waltzing couples, then little alien dolls, dinosaurs, spaceships and the creature from the Black Lagoon, also painted icky tan.

Back to the platzes

We have some time to kill, and figure maybe we can fit in a tour of the Zytglogge’s mechanism, but it turns out that they only do one tour a day, at 11:30. We wait around to see the clock strike five though, beside scores of Japanese tourists.

The minutes tick by and as we get closer, suddenly we hear the little gold rooster crow, and he creakily flaps his wings – it’s so subtle you can barely see them move. We wait, for music, or a parade of little figures or something, but there’s silence.

Then the King sitting next to the rooster, moves his hands slightly, tipping the scepter and raising the orb a little bit. Then nothing.

Then, suddenly the guy up above begins to strike the bell that’s hanging over the clock face. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Then it stops.

The rooster crows again, and flaps wearily.

That’s the show. The Japanese tourists applaud politely, and we all move on.

Subtle, very subtle.

We walk over to the Bundeshaus. This place is so homey and intimate that I totally keep forgetting it’s the capital of Switzerland. It doesn’t seem like a capital. Capitals are supposed to be noisy and dirty and teeming with masses of people.

The terrace behind the Bundeshaus is lovely though, with a view over the river and lawns of sunbathers outside of a large pool. Up near us there are guys playing on the ubiquitous oversized chessboards as we all quietly enjoy the view and breeze from over the river.

Marking time until the train to Zurich, we wander into a Loeb bookstore and collapse onto the couches in the cool basement, and in no time at all, it’s time to head to the station and catch the train to Zurich. Which is right on schedule. These people are amazing.

Zuricher pasta

The trip to Zurich was pleasant – traveling in first class definitely is nicer than when I backpacked across Europe in second class.

We arrived in Zurich, tossed our stuff into a locker like experts and headed on out to the town. It was fairly bold to step out of the train station since we didn’t have a map, and the tourism office was closed by the time we got there, but adventure is our middle name.

Actually this entire trip I’ve noticed has begun to revolve around the food – how do we find it, how do we get there and when is the next meal? I’ve decided that if I ever had any advice for travelers in foreign lands, it would be, plan lunch and dinner, then plan the rest of your day. Oh, and also figure out where your nearest bathrooms will be.

We walked down a promising pedestrian zone street directly away from the station and found a nice Italian restaurant though, where the waiter was willing to let us stumble along in German. The food was unexceptional, but sitting outside was quite nice with more of a breeze in our faces than we’d had in Bern.

Late night trains

The hardest thing about rail travel though, is that overnighter train trip. Whether you’re a backpacker or you’re going first class, you still have the exhaustion of being out all day sightseeing and marking time until you can reasonably think about moseying back for your train, which in the case of overnight journeys, is often at 11 or 12 midnight. And often you’d rather have fallen prone on a bed at 10.

The hotel train or Euronight costs about the same as a night in a hotel, which I think is why Rick Steves, the travel expert, pushes the couchette system. Couchettes are the reclining easy chairs that you can get cheap reservations for in an open style train car instead of a compartment. You throw your luggage in the overhead rack, secure your moneybelt around you and push back for the night.

In some ways I can see the appeal, because the actual private compartments give you the illusion of being in a room, but it’s a room that’s about nine feet by nine feet, whether it’s for one, or for two or even three people. Everything is cleverly design to fold away, or swing aside, but let’s face it, in a double which is set up like bunk beds, one of the two of you has to have the agility of a monkey to get to that upper bunk, stash away your suitcase and change into PJ’s. And no matter what, only one person can really stand at a time. I couldn’t imagine three people in one compartment.

Still, if we felt a little cramped and uncomfortable (“Are they kidding?” my Dad says on seeing the room, “Is this made for midgets?”) A walk through second class, which is NOT air-conditioned, and always has three bunks to a compartment, quickly makes us grateful for the space we have. I do notice that there are luxury “suites” available in the upper level of our hotel car, which seems to mean you get a desk as well as beds, and it’s a little more roomy, but frankly, as I said, one might as well just take away the illusions – you’re all getting to Vienna at the same time, and everyone is going to need a shower when you get there.

I clamber up into my top bunk though, and feeling slightly nauseous from the swinging of the train and trying to check off my breakfast choices on a card written in German while traveling backwards has made my head explode. Dad and I tuck into bed as soon as possible, and actually sleep quite nicely all the way to Salzburg.

In the morning, we wake up and politely negotiate who will stand up first. Somehow we manage to get dressed and I signal the porter, a nice guy, who has been helpfully telling me about festivals in Vienna – apparently there’s one called Insel on the Donau canal—and he comes in to fold away the beds and pop out the bench and table. Now this I love. The beds just fold up and swing out of the way,and then the compartment seems actually quite luxurious for two.

We had asked him the previous night if we should go to the restaurant car for breakfast, and he gave us the “rabble in the restaurant car” kind of “no.” So we opted to be served – this felt kind of pleasantly silly – and sipped coffee and had our croissants as the countryside went by.

Arriving in Vienna, we had no trouble locating a taxi, and got straight to the hotel to relax and clean up before Eric arrived.

We had gotten in a tad early and the reception desk guy seemed a little non-plussed and told us our room wasn’t quite ready –but then gave us, I think, a nicer suite than we had reserved, for the same price.

The Konig von Ungarn, or King of Hungary, which I’d chosen mainly for its location – “right behind the Stephansdom in the heart of Old Vienna” – but also for price and recommendations, turned out to be, I think the nicest hotel we’d ever stayed in. It was very old world classic, in a building next to where Mozart composed the “Marriage of Figaro.” The rooms we had were a “family” apartment, with one room upstairs and one downstairs, but common bathroom, and entrance area. Both sets of rooms though, had a TV and radio and little sitting room, and we quickly flowed into and spread throughout the place with luggage and carry-ons.

I could have been the King of Hungary as I got into the sparkling shower, then collapsed on the 400 thread-count duvet to wait for Eric to arrive…

Berner Oberland: Where adventure awaits

What a day.

We got an early-ish start, knowing that we’d be going to the Jungfrau region today, and, well-supplied with food and drinks from our little shopping trip yesterday, we headed out to the station.

I had exhaustively researched the trip to the Schilthorn and all its many complications and choices – dreihtseilbahn? Post bus? Is a cable car the same as a luftseilbahn? – and I finally mapped out our route. The man at the Swiss Rail office was very nice and when I explained our proposed route he didn’t seem to think it outlandish. The whole thing was a kind of expensive ticket, (108 CHF) even with a 25% discount offered by our rail pass, but we feel like it’s worth it, since the ticket lets us pick and choose our methods of transportation, which will turn out to be important.

Apparently, we can use our rail passes to get ourselves to Interlaken Ost, an old ski resort town, but from thereon in we are on a private railway. Our new tickets, though, cover everything.

To understand where we’re going, you have to picture a long valley slicing deeply into the Alps. Interlaken, which, as its name implies is between two enormous and enormously beautiful, jewel-like, aquamarine lakes, is a jumping off point for exploring a few valleys, but the one we want, which I have chosen because it’s supposed to be less touristy, is the Lauterbrunnen or “Loud Falls” valley. On the one side of the valley is the stunningly huge face of the Jungfrau, beside the Eiger and Monch peaks, and on the other side of the valley are several lovely little towns and a peak that we’re going to the top of, called the Schilthorn. James Bond fans will remember it as the site of the revolving restaurant “Piz Gloria” that figures in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

From the Schilthorn side, we’ll be able to see the Eiger and the Jungfrau, instead of being on them, and since I’m assured that the trip to the Piz Gloria is all very easy to manage, I decide, probably a better place for me and my Dad.

We take a little train to Lauterbrunnen, the town. We’d been warned already that we need the front half of the train, since the back of the train goes to touristy Grindelwald. On the ride up I can see already I’m going to have to ration my film, because everything looks so spectacular you just want to keep snapping photos.

From Lauterbrunnen, we follow the signs to the funicular or cogwheel train to Grutschalp. I just like saying “Grutschalp.”

The funicular is sometimes called a lift, and it might as well be an elevator, because the thing, which looks like a multicompartment mine car assemblage, seems to go almost straight up the face of the cliff. Grutschalp pends over Lauterbrunnen.

Up at the top, I had proposed that my dad and I walk to Murren, because the views are lovely and the pathway is supposed to be pretty level, but I can see already that we have a lot of walking ahead, so we decide to take the mini train – a one car affair that holds maybe 50 people – to Murren instead. The windows are wide open on the train, and having been advised to sit on the left side, we are treated to some spectacular views of the mountains and valley below us.

Murren is so charming it hurts. It doesn’t look overly touristy, but does have a little of the simulacrum feeling. Are real Swiss houses actually THAT neat, with bright geraniums hanging out of windows boxes and lace curtains, carved fences and picturesque water troughs in the shadow of the Jungfrau? Maybe this is really how it’s supposed to be. Just like Heidi.

I’ve read that J.R.R. Tolkien traveled this way as a young man, and much of the Lauterbrunnen valley and mountains inspired his Lord of the Rings landscape. It was easy to believe, since the land is almost exactly as he describes, from the snowy mountain passes, to the waterfalls, to the villages nestled in the valley. We even passed a village called Isenfluh on the way in, and I couldn’t help but think that he stole the name for Middle Earth’s Isen River. And the cursive, semi-Celtic Swiss calligraphy that seems to be ubiquitous on all the houses and signs, closely resembles Elvish writing. I feel like a hobbit setting out on an adventure.

We pass through the town to the Schilthornbahn – a footpath to the Schilthorn is marked on the way there, but as it would mean ascending some 5000 feet up the mountain, the cable car is the way we’re going. It’s the longest aerial cableway in Europe, a sign helpfully informs us – I wonder, is there a longer aerial cableway in Kuala Lumpur, say?

The car ascends majestically, passing a stream and fields, where you can see truly happy-looking cows lolling about on soft grassy patches like contented cats. We change cable cars at Birg, which is basically a rocky promontory that looks like an excuse to stop on the way to the Schilthorn, and watch the altimeter climb to 2900 meters. Nearly ten thousand feet. I’m light-headed, or maybe it was the vertigo of looking down from the suspended cable car.

Once up though – and it was cool, though not cold up there, and yes, there was quite a bit of snow – the view is everything that was promised. You can see Mont d’Or, Mont Blanc – and countless peaks whose names we couldn’t even pronounce. The wraparound terrace lets you walk all the way around and suck in just how spectacular it really is. Maybe the Jungfraujoch is higher – the ticket was certainly more expensive! – but the view here just can’t be beat.

Inside the Piz Gloria, is a revolving restaurant where they are happy to serve you overpriced food, and you are happy to pay for it while you sit and watch the entire world go by. We get away with ordering two hauskaffees which turn out to be liberally laced with schnapps, and spend a good hour or so admiring the view.

The descent to Murren was uneventful, although I did wonder how many people faint from vertigo at the heights. The trip is a good one for older as well as younger people, though, since you really don’t have to climb a step. Really, when you get to the Piz Gloria, there are even escalators and elevators to take you higher, and it looks like everything is completely wheelchair accessible.

From Murren we have decided to walk to Gimmelwald, since it’s a downhill trip and the alpine flowers are in full bloom. The way is longer than I had imagined, certainly longer for us than the promised 30 minutes, but the vistas are totally worth it. Midway through, we perch on a conveniently shady bench and have our picnic. With chunks of fresh bread, Vacherin and prosciutto, and a glass of wine in hand, we were feeling pretty much like the world was our oyster.

The trek down to Gimmelwald pretty much does it for my Dad, though, and we resolve to take the cable car down to the valley floor at Stechelberg and then the Post bus from Stechelberg to Lauterbrunnen to catch the train back. I’m really wanting to see the waterfalls that I heard about though, and I find out that the bus makes stops all along the valley, so we can get on and off at Trummelbach falls.

Trummelbach was a bit of a bonus. I figured if we’d have time, we’d see it, since the one or two things I’d read made it sound like fun – a waterfall inside the mountain. When we got to the front gate, it turned out that it was 10 CHF to get in, and I thought, well that’s a bit much to go look at a waterfall. The man assured us though that it was to cover the lift inside the mountain, and so we decided to just go ahead and do it.

Nothing, not even poems to Trummelbach written by Lord Byron, could have prepared us for how amazing it was.

The funicular (more like a glorified mine lift than ever) took us up a ways into the mountain, and then the operator pointed us toward a path that seemed to dive into a cleft in the rock face. We could hear the falls, a kind of monstrous roar, deep and basso that made me shiver, and on the first turn in the path, we saw an astonishing rage of water boiling through a cataract. Some 20,000 liters of water per second was the information they gave, with the melt from the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungfrau, all flowing through this one place. The falls must be even wilder in the spring.

The path continued back deeper into the mountain and as we made our way into the darkened tunnels, it became clear that the water had cut vast slashes and carved out great funneling tubes in the rock face, right through the mountain. Like dwarves, we went further and further into the misty tunnels, thoughtfully lit at strategic places, and at each new stopping place were more and more awed. The paths allowed you so close that you could feel the force of the rushing water, and then it put you above madly bubbling cauldrons. It was colder there, beside the glacier chilled falls, than on top of the Schilthorn.

Now this, I said, is worth the price of admission.

As we came out of the falls into the light again, I could see the grayish clouds moving over the Alps like the darkening of Mordor, and was quite glad for the advice to come early – the afternoons are always cloudy in the Alps. But the scene, with its speckled patches of sunlight and enormous fluffy clouds hanging over waterfalls all the way down the valley, was certainly nothing less than overwhelming.

Still, we were tired by this time, and happily piled into the post bus to Lauterbrunnen, and onto the train back to Interlaken. There was a bit of a wait for the next train to Bern, and so after a moment’s debate, we headed into the Coop supermarket to get some salads and sandwiches for dinner, figuring when we got back to Bern, we’d probably want nothing more than to collapse into bed. A couple of café lattes from the local coffee shop and we were ready to board the train, which came a little early into the Interlaken station. Little did we know what lay ahead.

Entirely exhausted, we slumped gratefully into our seats, hoping to have a nice relaxing time with our coffee and some cookies – ready for the hour’s ride back to Bern. Everything was running smoothly and I was admiring the views and taking pictures of the beautiful evening light over the Thunsee, when suddenly, the train ground to a halt. It stayed there for a good five minutes, and I thought to myself, the Swiss are not going to like this.

The SBB or Swiss Rail is renowned for its timeliness, and in a recent survey, they found that something like 80% of its trains pull into the station within a minute of the scheduled time --97% of its trains come in no less than four minutes late. Well, there we were, waiting, waiting, waiting -- and then I saw a conductor marching up the train and thought – oh-oh, definitely not good. I’ve seen that look before – on Amtrak. It’s the “I-hate-that-this-train-is-going-nowhere” look. This cannot be good.

After he passes by, announcements ensue in German and French, but no one around us speaks English, so we’re in the dark until a voice comes on saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, due to a technical difficulty we are unable to continue the journey. We apologize.”

I think to myself, well, that’s nice, but does that mean you’re just going to leave us here forever, between Interlaken and Spiez, then?

Well, to make a long travail short, we finally get inched into the Spiez station on the main line, and change trains twice, each one hotter and more crowded than the last, and we are over two hours late by the time the train finally pulls out of the station. Thank goodness we had no place to be that evening. We were lucky to have gotten ourselves dinner and ate it -- a little disconsolately, but feeling more fortunate than others who were stuck with what was on the snack cart. There’s been rampant confusion, and AFTER the train pulls out of Spiez, the conductor informs us that the train is going to Bern, but it will then continue to Zurich, not Basel.

When we arrive in Bern finally, there is absolute chaos at the Hauptbahnhof. Seriously, did I mention that the Swiss are an orderly, organized people? This is CHAOS. That must be one helluva a technical difficulty.

As we come down the stairs from the track, a horde of people in a little group are running against the tide, desperately tugging luggage behind them, rather like the train station scene in “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.” Outside the station, a completely disorganized crowd of literally hundreds is milling around, with about a dozen buses pulled in front. Men in orange vests are shouting into bullhorns, “Thun! Basel! Zuricher! Luzerne hier!” People are dashing for the buses, which are a motley assortment of city buses, tour buses, private coaches, all with different signs indicating other cities. We take in this whole affair in amazement. There is a line of dozens of buses up the side of the bahnhof all the way to the Lorraine Bridge. I spot our city bus stuck in the line about halfway down.

“I think we’re walking to the pension,” my father observes.

You can measure the scale of the disaster by the fact that a trash can outside the station has overflowed with bottles and cans onto the sidewalk and the garbage is starting to scatter on the street. Unheard of.

I would learn later that we were caught in the largest collapse of the Swiss rail system in their entire history. A voltage drop near Ticino caused the entire system of the SBB to shut down throughout the country, and the rail officials were desperately trying to shuttle people by bus and plane to their destinations. I spoke with a guy stuck in Bern, who was staying at the Martahaus overnight in the hopes that he could get back to Basel in the morning. A sweaty, and decidedly harried looking official appeared on local TV saying they hoped to have everything back to normal by tomorrow.

We shall see…. I hope so-- how else will we get to Wien?

Bern: To Market, to Market

Having checked the weather, we’ve decided to risk waiting til Wednesday to go to the Jungfrau region, so we decide to hit the famous farmers’ markets in the streets of Bern to stock up for the Alpine excursion.

The markets, which line various arcades along the streets and then spread into the Barenplatz and beyond, are wonderful, with gorgeous produce that positively glistens in the bright sunlight. I’m still recalling the sweet succulent cherry tomatoes I had with my Costoletto on our last night in Milan at the canals, and all these tomatoes have that same beautiful red color. The onions – apparently Bern has a famous Onion Festival every fall – are so shiny I think they’re winking at me, and then there’s cheeses.

Now, looking over the selections we’re confronted with in the Swiss market, I have to say we get a very fine choice of cheeses in San Francisco. In fact I think it’s amazing how much terrific stuff we get in San Francisco, but the cheeses here are definitely different. One woman gives us a taste of Vacherin de Jura (Swiss definitely) and we succumb and buy a hundred grams. I’m quite pleased actually to have conducted the entire transaction in a kind of pidgin German/French mix. And I think that I’m flattered that when I try to communicate in very poor German, most people immediately switch to French, not English. So maybe all along they’ve been thinking I’m a crazy French tourist.

We collect grapes, meat, nuts, and a challah-like zopfbolle of bread (transaction completed in French) and then swing by a supermarket to get some water and a local rose. We should be set for tomorrow.

On our way back to the hotel to drop things, we stop in the Einstein Haus, where I am jubilant to see that in the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis (1905 was the year that he published five papers, four of them seminal, on topics ranging from electrodynamics to Brownian motion to the Special Theory of Relativity) his wife Mileva Maric’s contributions and sacrifices have not been forgotten. There is even a sympathetic note that calls her his intellectual equal, a woman who gave up her own academic career to work on the mathematics of relativity, only later to be trapped in housework and nappies.

The house is very small, and I try to imagine Mileva and the baby and Einstein smushed in here, but I do recall one or the other of them saying that their years on Kramgasse Street were the happiest of their lives. In pictures you can see Mileva go from a pretty young woman to a sad-faced almost resentful-looking hausfrau. For that matter, Einstein himself looks sadder and sadder as the years pass too, although it still steams me to see him sitting there amongst Lorentz and Dirac, Curie and Schroedinger and think that Mileva should have been there with him. As Anna Quindlen said, in his private life he was no Einstein.

In the afternoon, we search unsuccessfully for a little underground tapas place that was recommended in a guide book, but fail to find it and settle instead at a local bar, which serves late lunch. Then we wander into the Munster Cathedral, which, I must say, is very Gothic looking for a Protestant church. OF course the interior isn’t much decorated if you don’t count the highly Baroque organ that dominates the rear of the nave. Everything seems to be in the midst of cleaning though, and they’re setting up for a performance of Haydn’s Te Deum that night, which we consider going to. If we’re not exhausted. Hah.

A quick bus ride puts us across the Aare on our way to the Rosengarten, or Rose Garden, which is in full bloom and filled with an orderly riot of pinks, reds and oranges. As promised the view of the city is spectacular from this side and I think that if I were a spy, I’d set up shop someplace over here and watch all the streets from the convenience and shade of the terrace.

For dinner we try to find Cave 49, the place under the sidewalk, and finally locate a bar in a cellar, although the proprietor tells us that it’s changed and is now just a bar – no food. I ask him for a recommendation for dinner though and he sends us to Restaurant du Webern up the street and we wander up that way.

It turns out to be a good recommendation – the food is not too expensive and we have a gazpacho, and share a “farmer’s dinner” which is composed of Rosti, and egg sunny side up, a slice of cheese and two thick slices of ham. I muse that it’s just like the breakfast at Denny’s except that the potato pancake is WAY better, the egg is real, the ham is fresh cured and the cheese is Tete de Moine. Otherwise it’s exactly the same.

I have a Gebrunntecreme for dessert which turns out to be a lovely caramel crème. A lot of it. In a big bowl.

We decide to skip the concert and instead walk around examining the fountains, some of which seem to have been removed from Kramgasse for the construction work that’s going on. But the one outside of the opera house on Kornhausplatz of an ogre eating small children is amusing enough for all of them.

Eating children. Hmmm, no thanks… I couldn’t have another bite….

Bern: Smiley's City

Once in the train station in Bern, it seemed like countless businessmen and residents were rushing past us as we tried to find the tourism office, which I had read was on the street level. As it turned out, everything is remarkably well-labelled, although matters are definitely simpler if you read German. Then you don’t miss little details like “Express bus” or “for employees only.”

Still, we found the office where a very nice woman answered many random questions like, how much is the cable car ride to the top of the Schilthorn in the Alps, can we see Reichenbach Falls where Sherlock Holmes died, and where is a good place to get dinner? She also gave us a nice clear map of the city -- I learned from previous trips that you should never leave the train station or airport without obtaining a one. I can ask for a map and a bathroom in at least six languages.

She also directed us to the hotel via the public bus service, which is very quick and efficient, but could benefit from air conditioning. The Pension Martahaus, which I’d read as catering to a range of clients from backpackers to businessmen, turned out to be a lovely quiet little place in a more residential area. And indeed, we ran into a pair of backpackers and a businessman in the lobby as we checked in.

I had been worrying about whether or not it was convenient to the city, since it looked a little outside of the Old Town or Altstadt, on the maps. It turns out to be a moot point, though, since everything in Bern is pretty much walking distance. If we hadn’t been dragging fifty kilos of baggage, and totally not known which way to go, we could easily have walked from the train station to the hotel.

The one thing that maps don’t tell you, though – and this is true of maps in San Francisco too – is the elevation. That would be really helpful. Really helpful. After freshening up in the hotel, we decided to head into the Altstadt for dinner, and I took us along a road that seemed to make a nice path close to the botanical gardens and then across the Kornhausbrucke bridge. What it didn’t note is that it took you down all the way to the riverside, which was several hundred feet down, sweeping nicely past the foot of the bridge to a pedestrian bridge, from whence you had to climb all the way back up on the other side.

Still, it was a lovely, shady walk and we were amused, but also a little alarmed to see that city denizens apparently swim in the river on hot days – “swim” here, meaning “get carried by a pretty darned swift current around the bends in the river at a fairly good clip.”

When we got up the other bank though, we found we were next to the Stadttheater and in the heart of the town. Everything in this lovely little town is neat looking, even the graffiti – what little there is. Red geraniums are hanging out of window boxes everywhere you look and that grey stone of the houses looks as clean as if the place had been just built last year. But it’s all so nice, and quiet and charming that it’s hard to believe that this is the capital city of Switzerland.

The restaurant, called Harmonie, turned out to be quiet and pleasantly out of the way of too much street traffic. It serves Swiss specialties, which is what I had asked for from the tourist office agent. She looked at me as if I were nuts when I asked about fondue and said, “It’s a little too hot, I think, for fondue…” but then gave me the “Do as you wish, you crazy tourist, you” shrug and handed me the map.

I guess everyone thinks it’s a bizarre request in summer – why would you want a heated thing on your table – and when I order it, I have the distinct impression that the people at the next table keep turning around to see if the nutty American will spontaneously combust. Nevertheless, it’s yummy. They bring me a basket of bread and the booziest fondue I’ve ever had in my life. I’m happy.

For dessert I go with the summer specialties though, and submit to Suessmoschtcreme, a local dessert, I am led to believe, which looks like a vanilla crème but has been liberally laced with apple cider.

Rolling ourselves out of the restaurant, we walk about the old town a little, and see the Zytglogge and spot some of the fountains – all very brightly painted. Apparently Swiss German is a little like Dutch, in that I will never figure out how to properly pronounce anything. The word “Zytglogge” looked to me like “Ziteglogger” but when we get on the bus later and they say the name of the station, the manicured Swiss voice says something more like, “Zeet-clocker.” Well, a clocker it certainly is. With a little mini zodiac and all kinds of little figures, it’s less impressive than the one in Munich, but still a lot of fun.

Walking back across the river, my Dad calls up memories of “Smiley’s People” in which master spy Alec Guinness walks the bridge in Bern. With the Milanese yellow moon suspended next to the spire of the cathedral, I think, I could be a spy in this town, but I’d have to be a very relaxed spy.

Milan and Bern: The Misty Mountains

We're trying so hard not to rush, but I just have to squeeze in a bit of time to see the Portniari chapel, so we take the metro back to the Navigli district (shuttered again as if nothing had happened last night...) and walk to Sant'Eustorgio again. It looks like it's not to be though as the chapel seems to be closed on mondays. As my Dad and I wander into the church though, we realize that the back doors under the crypt are open. Two women are busily tending the gardens and they've opened all the doors to the sacristy and the chapel, so we furtively sneak back there and get a peek at the brilliant colors of the Michelozzo fresco. Luck has really been with us this time.

I read belatedly that the Metro stop that we've been using near the hotel -- Loreto -- marks the square where Mussolini's body was strung up after he was killed. My Dad remembers the ghoulish nastiness of it, and I'm happy enough never to have seen it.

Helene asked about the train station in Milan -- I have to say, it is one of the largest but also most confusing stations Ive been in in Europe. For all it's gargantuan architecture, it's hot and bothersome, and we wandered around so disconsolately, we almost missed the train, which with Swiss efficiency pulled out of the station on the DOT.

Travelling in first class is new to me, and the whole air conditioning thing is much appreciated, but of course what was most fun was the gorgeous ride through the lake region and the mountains.

We passed Lake Maggiore which was an extraordinary color (the light of the sky all day was an extraordinary color too) and then moved into the mountains. I couldn't help but recall that I'd read J.R.R. Tolkien passed through the region and found the inspiration for Rivendell at the Lauterbrunnen valley. As I looked up and down these positively lush valleys with their streams and waterfalls and saw the gathering clouds over the Alps, I thought that his picture of most of Middle Earth must have come from this area.

Spectacular scenery flew by the windows and when a small crowd got off at Spienz on their way to Interlaken, I couldn't help but want to trail after them into the mountains. That we'll do on Wednesday though...

More to come on Bern soon...

Milan: Museum wanderings

Pinacoteca Ambrosiana

Sleeping in very uncharacteristically late (i.e. 11 am), we get up in a leisurely fashion, promising not to run ourselves ragged today.

The first target is the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. My usual museum instinct, left over from wars at places like the Uffizi and the Louvre, is to get there at the moment the doors open. You then have two hours over blissful emptiness to enjoy the art before the buses start unloading. As it turns out, hardly anyone was at the Ambrosiana, which is a little bit of a shame, because it is a terrific collection of art founded in the 16th century by Cardinal Borromeo in a beautiful palazzo setting. But we’re not complaining.

There is, in the original collection, a fine Leonardo portrait of a composer, but I think the more interesting thing is looking at how highly influential he was on all the art that followed. I’m impressed too, by the Cardinal’s appreciation of Flemish International Gothic art, which is one of my favorite periods. Looking at his collection, you can completely trace the advance of Flemish techniques, landscape and symbolism into the regional art. They have a still life of fruit by Caravaggio on the wall and for the first time, I realize that there is a direct line through all the religious painting -- which increase over the centuries in the amount of symbolism packed into their frames -- to the still lifes – Caravaggio’s is a meditation on the passion of Christ as represented by the fruits he chose to paint, and the withering of the leaves.

The house itself is also blessedly air-conditioned which makes it a million times nicer to walk though, and on the way, we bump into other visitors, who are impressively informed about the art. My Dad is wondering if a painting of the Annunciation, which also depicts in the background a saint lounging like a bum on a street corner next to a lion, shows St. John the Evangelist or St. Jerome. A visitor sitting next to us helpfully explains that it is St. Jerome meditating on the miracle of the Annunciation, and sketches us a little background. I try to imagine the same conversation occurring in San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, and fail.

Castello Sforzesco

From there we walk along the via dei Mercanti towards the Castello Sforzesco, and happily, though many things look closed after the previous night doubtless blowout bash, there is a festival of Swiss cheese going on in the street, and we get to sample everything from Emmenthaler to Vacherin. Unfortunately it puts me no closer to ascertaining whether the sketchily labelled cheese we bought in San Francisco really was raw milk French Vacherin or a Swiss Vacherin.

We’re trying not to overdo things again, so we head into the castle (that makes the trip sound much easier and shorter, and leaves out all the moat/bridge/portcullis parts) and resolve to seek out just Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta, which is housed there. And maybe the da Vinci plank room. But no more. But if we see some interesting armor on the way, that would be fine too.

The Pieta is remarkable, not just for the organic swoop and curve of the back, or for the mysteriously disembodied right arm that tugs at Christ, but for the scarring that mars the faces and torsos. Apparently Michelangelo intended it for his tomb, but um… displeased with how it was going, he attacked it and bashed the hell out of the faces, almost erasing them. They look like slightly resentful ghosts that can’t emerge from the stone. Nevertheless, the modeling on Christ’s legs, the only really finished looking part, and the sad accusatory stance of the figures is so astonishing you think, surely he meant it to look this way, as some sort of indictment.

Navigli District

From the castello we Metro down to the much-talked about Navigli district in the southeast of town. Hip, hot and happening is the impression I get. But apparently this is not at 5 pm. Well, maybe hot. Which it is. Deathly hot.

Every storefront in the district is, of course shut tight and the whole place looks like a depressed canal-side version of Oakland. With more yellows. We wander dejectedly along the canal, stared at by Milanese, who are doubtless wondering why these tourists insist on being out in the afternoon sun.

A pass by Sant’Eustorgio reveals that we are too late even to see the Portinari Chapel, so we give up and head to a sort of semi-open looking place on a barge in one of the canals. We must look really tired and pathetic, because the wait staff lets us in, even though it’s not open yet, and they set us up at a table next to the canal where there’s a breeze blowing and the sound of lapping water constantly.

It turns out to be the perfect place, and as we watch the entire district come to life, we happily down wine and Milanese specialties, and finally look relaxed.

After dinner, a miraculous change has come over the whole place – it’s like the entire canal has blossomed colorful umbrellas and literally hundreds of people are wandering the area enjoying the legendary happy hour. Vendors line the canalside and satiated young people lounge at the hundreds of tables that have mushroomed up everywhere. Much drinking, much lounging, this on a Sunday night. I certainly can’t blame them.

Milan: Non Timeo Adversa

Santa Maria Delle Grazie
We arrive on the dot at 8:00 am at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, home of da Vinci’s Last Supper, to disaster. They lost my reservation, the one made months ago. But as I stood there, holding firm that there must be a way, the bored ticket seller reluctantly informed us that, in a stroke of good luck, that night was Milano Live and from 11 pm to 4 am, one could line up and see the Last Supper for free. Boy, were we lucky. I think.

Wandering about the church itself was interesting. There is, according to our guide book, a Leonardo in the lunette above the main doors—nothing spectacular, an image of the Madonna with saints and patrons, but I found it amusing that everyone rushes to see the Cenacolo painting when right there, out in the heat and rain and snow, is this other Leonardo fresco that no one cares about.

The interior of the church was darkened and one tired-looking Dominican padre sat in the very middle silently watching all the tourists wander around his house. I’m impressed by the dome, which is painted and decorated with geometrics, only emphasizing the mathematical feat represented by Bramante’s circular dome placed on a cubical space. The decorations throughout, in fact have a geometric, almost mudejar design to them, which is apparently Lombard in style, but reminds me a lot of mosques.

More on the Last Supper later.

Sant’Ambrogio

From Santa Maria, we walk through lovely little streets in mounting heat to the fourth century basilica, Sant’Ambrogio, the church of the bishop saint who is pretty much responsible for Christian Milan. All the talk of his crusade against Arianism makes me wish I’d paid closer attention in my Early Christian Centuries course. In any case, there he is, Ambrose himself, or all four feet of what’s left of him, in a glass case, flanked by two other saints who are obviously less marketable as standalones.

These reliquaries are bizarrely disturbing, as always, (a finger, a tibia, a hipbone, a pair of eyeballs… it’s like a natural history exhibit) but the crypt-like scene under the altar, which reveals some original foundations of the basilica as well, is interesting if only to consider the 1,519 years of history you’re confronted with. Then there’s the ancient Roman emperor who’s in the fancy marble piece under the pulpit. I see dead people.

There’s a beautiful sound in the church as a few singers practice harmonizing in the nave. We surmise they’re there for a wedding, since there are some spectacular lily arrangements scenting the entire church, and several very smartly dressed people are fussing about the nave.

A quick visit through the halls and we stumble over a picture of the bombed out Sant’Ambrogio from August, 1943. It’s amazing they were ever able to put the place back together. Saint Ambrose must have worked a good bit of magic on that. Which makes me wonder, do saints have to keep working miracles after they’ve been apotheosed? Or can they go on sort of Saintly vacation, maybe just work a couple of miracles, just to keep their hand in, on an at-will basis?

Museum of Science and Technology

We backtracked to get to the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, mostly because it had Leo’s name on it and a few models I wanted to see, but boy, were we in for a treat.

Firstly, let me extol the virtues of being up early. At none of these places did we see more than a dozen people, although as we were leaving Sant’Ambrogio, wedding guests and busloads of tourists were filling the place up. At the Leonardo museum we were the third or fourth ones in. Now that’s heavenly.

The models, of many of Leonardo’s clever engineering inventions for flying, dredging barges, moving bridges and the like, are fun to look at and you can move some of the around, but the real terrific part is in the buildings out back, where they have real rail cars and locomotives in a hangar sized “station” and a warehouse sized space housing a masted sailing ship and a piece of a cruise liner as well as several jet planes. It brings out the kid in all of us I suspect because the sheer size and scale of things makes you just want to scamper all over everything, which for the most part, you are allowed to do.

Duomo

Properly suited up (meaning I’m not wearing a trampy skirt, but one that a Hasidic rabbi would approve) we head over to the Duomo to try again.

This time, the guard barely looks at me and has absolutely no interest in my bag. We enter the cool space – this must be why Italians were religious, it was a place you could get out of the heat – and begin walking around, examining the high gothic (and High Gothic) windows. For the third largest cathedral in the world, it feels remote and not very inviting to me. I much prefer the Duomo of Florence for some reason, although this place is spectacular. It feels a bit, however, like it’s trying too hard.

We examine some of the sculpture, but decide to go up onto the roof terraces, from whence, I had heard, there were great views.

The elevator is only a euro fifty more than the stairs, so we’re taking the elevator, which is a few minutes ride up. On the roof, incredibly, you can see the spires up close and they are even more amazing than anything in the interior. In fact the whole place is so much more interesting on the roof, where you can see that detailed carving and statues, blind trefoils and elegant designs have all been placed in places that surely no one on the ground will ever see. This building is decorated over every square inch. I don’t envy the cleaners their job. It’s got to be a lot easier to do, say, Santa Maria Delle Grazie’s plain brick façade.

One detail that hadn’t dawned on me from below was that every single spire has a saint perched atop it. Thousands of saints all over the darned place. You’ve never seen so many saints. With all that holiness, you’d think it wouldn’t be hotter than hell up there.

Teatro Arcimboldi

After the Duomo escapade, we seriously needed a shower, so back to the hotel to freshen up and change and get ready for La Scala Ballet. I had asked at the tourism office about the way to get there. Apparently a shuttle runs from the end of the Piazza when there are shows at the Arcimboldi, (“Ten minutes,” she says) otherwise, it seems no one would go there since it’s so far out in the middle of nothing. I also asked if there are places to eat out there, which she assures me there are -- “plenty of restaurants…”

Well, the ride takes half an hour and when we arrive, there is one overtaxed coffee shop and one closed restaurant with a bar that’s open and which will, of course, be happy to serve us overpriced panini. What choice do we have?

The area is something like La Defense in Paris. Industrialized and impersonal – you can just see the city officials trying to drag businesses and people out to create a “new community.” The theater is very modern – nothing out of the ordinary, although the sound is good, and the ushers wear pewter-colored medallions on heavy chains around their shoulders, like burghers of the city. It has a picture of La Scala on front to remind everyone that they had really wanted to book a show at the old theater, hadn’t they?

The ballet was quite good – more on that in an official review-- and we lucked out in that it was an evening that Massimo Murru was dancing the Rite of Spring. The real evening though, had just begun.

Meanwhile, back at Santa Maria delle Grazie

The line must have formed at 6 pm when the place closed for evening. We rushed back to see the Cenacolo, chugging our way expertly through the streets, only to discover that about 500 other people had the same idea. I’m heartened though – the line is no longer than the security checkpoint line at Oakland airport, and they’re letting 25 people in every ten minutes instead of every fifteen minutes. A quick calculation shows that if we’re willing to hold fast, we will definitely get in to see the painting. At what hour? Well…

It seems that the line is mostly natives -- not tourists, who, no doubt, have gone to bed -- even though tram after tram packed tightly with Milanese are headed for the Piazza Duomo at 11 pm, for the open air concert. And not just young people – I see a pack of older women heading out, and a motorcade of what seems to be the Milan equivalent of Dykes on Bikes goes by. No wonder the woman at the ticket office was reluctant to tell me about this. Who wants tourists crashing your party?

Without even hesitating, we get into the line, which has circled back through the piazza and is lurking around the trees. I wonder if my Dad, at 71 is going to hold out after a harsh day of heat and walking and theater, but he’s tough, and he’s determined to see the painting. “For anything else,” he says, “Probably not. But for da Vinci….”

I run across the street to buy some water and juice –overpriced, naturally, but I’m beginning to wonder if anything is normal price in Milan, or if a bottle of water always costs three euros – and we settle in for the waiting, still dressed in our nice theater duds. I don’t feel overdressed, even in this crowd, but I do notice that what I’m wearing certainly doesn’t fit me well enough and that my shoes have no style at all. I comfort myself with the knowledge that at least I polished my toenails properly, which turns out to be important, as everyone on the line has plenty of time to examine each other’s feet.

The marathon line creeps slowly forward, buoyed by each advance, and miraculously we make it in. Of course “in” means passing through countless gate/lock enclosures inside the building – a portcullis swings shut behind us and a glass door miraculously opens in front of us. It’s like being in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. One clever man behind us notes that if we don’t all make it into one enclosure, the next set of doors won’t open. So, all those people who pushed to the front of the group are still going to have to wait for us in the back. It’s lovely and cool inside though and when we finally arrive in The Room, it is impressive for the size and sheer emptiness of the space.

I realize again how important it is to see things for real, in situ. The fresco itself, which is larger than I would have imagined from pictures, is in horrid condition -- restoration or no, it is positively in shreds. The Madonna in the doorway at the front is in better shape – here you can barely make out the faces of some of the disciples. But had I never entered that cool room, I’d never have known how big it really is, how strange it feels to stand in front of it, the way that it repeats the architectural elements of the windows in the refectory, and most peculiarly, how it creates an extended, almost exhilarating, sense of space so cleanly in what is really not a large hall.

In the end, at 2:15 a.m., as we are shooed out the door by an unseen THX-1138 voice, I think, yeah, definitely worth it.

On the way back to the hotel, after riding a packed Metro at 3 am back to Citta Studi, we passed a bronze plaque on the wall with a lion and the words “Non Timeo Adversa” -- I do not fear adversity. Indeed.

Milan: Postcards and notes

We arrive in the airport finally, and – O, happy Carry-on bag! – go straight to the taxi stand and get in for the ride to the hotel. The Hotel San Francisco, which I only half chose for the name, is a warm little family place with most importantly, air-conditioned rooms, and second-importantly, a lovely garden out back. It also has a small but very nice shower, which I need after accumulating a thick palpable layer of grossness for hours on the flight.

Duomo
Our first target, which we hope we can achieve before the jet-lag really sets in, is the Duomo. We take a Metro down to the piazza and come out of the subway station right beside the cathedral. No amount of photos or description really prepares you for the sort of overwhelming eye-overload of all that Gothic-ness in such large proportion. The façade is still being restored, and the rest of the cathedral will follow. Looking at it, I figure by the time they finish, it will be time to start again. Still, the pink marble in the places they’ve cleaned is spectacular and looking up the sides, you can see the sheer amount of devotion to sculpting, if not God, that went into this edifice.

I’m unfortunately not allowed into the Duomo as my skirt is deemed too short. The guard looks in my bag and then peers around it to look at my legs. “That’s quite bold,” I think to myself. But then he waves me back. Oddly enough, the skirt, which is perhaps only three inches above the knee, is too short for him, but we would later see mini-skirted visitors roaming about the cathedral in garb far shorter than mine. I guess it’s all a matter of opinion.

Thwarted, but undaunted, we head into the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II, which is also very impressively high. With a glass arched ceiling and a floor sporting illuminated tiles scattered throughout, the place reeks of Belle Epoque. Fancy shops and expensive cafes abound and we can’t resist buying some overpriced lattes and watching the show go by. Businessmen in impeccable shirts (how can they wear pink and tan and look so masculine?), tourists in Tevos (why does pink look so bad on Americans?), grandmas on their way through with shopping bags, kids spinning away on the mosaic testicles of the Bull of Turin on the floor under the dome. I could almost – but not quite—forget the jet lag.

La Scala

Behind the Galleria is the Teatro alla Scala (although I don’t see any scalas or stairs around, so I wonder how it got its name.) I tried months ago, unsuccessfully, to secure tickets to the “La Boheme.” Hah. If a computer could have laughed at me, it would have done so. The whole place only reopened in December of 2004 after two years of renovation. Two years of slogging out to the boonies to the less desirable digs in the Teatro Arcimboldi has apparently made the Milanese hungry for Old World glamour and just about every ticket possible was snapped up before you could even say boo.

We can go into the museum, however, which has an oddball assortment of objects – Toscanini’s baton, Puccini’s pince-nez -- I half expect them to be set up like saintly reliquaries, with the sacred object mounted in a jewel-encrusted gold case. The most interesting thing, I thought, was the cast of Chopin’s hands. It was fascinating to see those long elegant fingers that George Sand must have fallen in love with.

The real fun though, was that you are permitted to lurk in the boxes of the house and peek at the newly restored glory. While we stood there, they were putting together the sets of “La Boheme,” with the same barked orders, hammer knocks and crashes that can be heard in houses the world around. The fabrics, the finishings on all of the boxes was lovely and the house so romantically and wildly elegant that you know you need to wear jewels and silk just to walk in the space.

That was about as far as we could push ourselves though, and reluctantly we went back to the hotel for a much needed siesta.

In the later evening we went out to a trattoria near the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, where I had a truly scrumptious risotto Milanese and my Dad had a Costoletto alla Milanese. The wine – a local one recommended by the waiter – turned out to be quite an assertive one called Sforzato. But one glass of wine and I was pretty much ready for bed again, so we headed back to the hotel and crashed for the night.