Culture-All New Year!

I'm happy to announce that VISHNU has finally delivered all of his presents, and i hope they helped you getting a good jumpstart into the new decade (i know the old one actually ends with December 2010, but since we had to change the third digit, i think it's okay to mark it as the turn of a decade)! My start into 2010 was a very cultural one, the visit of Yulia from Moscow was a great experience for both of us. Communication wasn't easy, but after picking her up and immediately taking her on the "Silvesterpfad" downtown, a few hot Punsch drinks certainly helped loosening her tongue. Since she stayed from December 30 until January 10 we had plenty of time to see everything we wanted, and that's exactly what we did. My personal highlights were certainly the visit at the Vienna State Opera (just being in that amazing building was worth the ticket alone, but Johann Strauss' "The Bat" was actually very entertaining, too!), and the many exhibitions that we covered: "Edvard Munch and the uncanny" & Austria's largest Egon Schiele collection at Museum Leopold, the Gender Check exhibiton at the Modern Arts (MUMOK) Museum, the Austrian Gallery (including Gustav's Klimt fabulous painting "The Kiss") inside the Belvedere Castle, and finally the Impressionism exhibition ("How the light found the canvas") at the Albertina Museum. Number 3 on my highlight list was the viewing of Carol Reed's black & white classic "The Third Man" at the BURG KINO cinema, who run it constantly for tourists & cineasts. I'd never actually seen it in full length or original language before, and the peculiar Viennese dialect mixed with Joseph Cotton's dry English voiceover narrative really added a lot of pleasure to the film, not to mention Anton Karas' famous "Harry Lime Theme" on the Zither. It is truly a brillant film noir, and I'm sure I will see it a few more times. And it proved to be a good idea for Yulia's visit, because even though she did not understand everything (her first question after the film was "Who was the third man?") she could grasp the plot, get an impression of post-WorldWarII-Vienna, and compare many of the film's locations with their appearance today... unfortunately, we couldn't take the ride on the ferris wheel since it is closed at this time of the year.

Apart from our programm, which further took us to the WEV ice skating rink, the nearby Wiener Konzerthaus for a classical concert, and the "Sissi Appartments" at Vienna's Hofburg, we also found time to enjoy the famous Viennese coffee houses and spend some time with her best friend Anna and her husband Heinz, finishing it off with a "Swiss-Fondue-Last-Supper" before Yulia's departure. She already mailed that she got back okay, and thanked me again for the diverse programm. I hope we stay in touch via email, and maybe there will be an opportunity to visit Moscow some day... спасибо Юля !