Lost In Translation

at some point.
I dunno. No postcards for weeks – then 14 come along at once.

Filed under: Life, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

While in Vienna, Miss M celebrated her 12th birthday. I asked her what she might like to do or see or have as a present. I thought she might like to go to the ballet as she has dancing lessons – but she chose to go to the opera (clearly more sophisticated than [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

The title of this postcard is probably as classy as the content is ever going to be. It means “the place where the Kaiser himself has to go on foot” – i.e. the loo, toilet, bathroom or however you describe that essential little room.
Down in the Karlsplatz subway, there is a new addition to [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Four days are not enough to rediscover a place but I was amazed at how much was surprisingly familiar still after 23 years and how much I had forgotten. Roads were not where I remembered and to add to the confusion, there are far more cars racing round the city. There are more bicycles [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

Vienna is stuffed full of churches, museums, palaces and architectural delights. I only had four full days which is not enough to even scratch the surface. We made a plan of what we wanted to see and tried to fit as many as possible into the day, bearing in mind that we needed [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

Poking around in a bookshop one day, my eye fell on a small book extolling the virtues of Vienna in glorious technicolour. The text was a concise summary of Vienna’s finest virtues in German with an absolutely stunning translation into English. I could not believe my eyes. Not just any old translation – [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

One day, the family had an arrangement to meet up with Viennese friends, so I took the opportunity to revisit old haunts. I took the tram up the Wiedner Hauptstrasse to find my old flat in the Johann-Strauß-Gasse. I had lived there with E but she had not expressed any enthusiasm for seeing the place [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

My main reason for visiting Vienna on this occasion was to meet up with friends. I had originally met E in a seminar series on “Language used in Austrian newspapers” at the university. [We both found it a bit tedious but were obliged for different reasons to continue attending]. E is a New Zealander and [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

When I arrived in Vienna for the first time on Tuesday, 20 September 1983 at around 9 a.m., I left the station and saw two signposts – one to Budapest and one to Prague and felt that I had arrived at the edge of the world. And in a way, I had. Vienna is only [...]

Filed under: Austria, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off

At the risk of becoming geeky about trains, here is another postcard on that subject. This was the part of the journey I was most interested in discovering as on previous occasions I had always travelled this route by night and had no idea what it looked like.
So from Nuremberg to Regensburg it was [...]

Filed under: Germany, Postcards on October 30th, 2007 | Comments Off