another week gone

... and so few left (a scary thought, to be sure). For one, I have a midterm this wednesday, not to mention loads of make-up classes (to compensate for time lost to national holidays and such, only it's at monday, 8am) and more work than I'm anxious to do.

Further, I haven't done nearly the travelling I would have liked, although I'm working on it--I went to Vienna this past weekend. It was a great trip, although far too short. I went with Jacob, and we stayed with people he'd worked with a little bit on some research over the summer, but who he had never actually personally met (but were unbelievably kind and generous); the guy Jacob knew, Thomas, took us to an improvised contemporary music concert (the subject of their research/interest in common; I found it a little challenging). It was really cold there, but we got a fair amount of coffee to make up for it. I got lots of postcards there, and I'm going to actually, for real, send a batch out to everyone. It blew me away just how starkly different things were between Vienna and other places we've been (Romania represents the starkest contrast, but Austria is surprisingly different even from Hungary). Although the center of town has been preserved to maintain a sort of classical identity, the outlying areas were very built up and developed--modern architecture and bright colors were common. Although we did our fair share of wandering through some residential neighborhoods, saw the Duna (there called the Donau), etc, the whole downtown seems to be held together by tourism. Don't get me wrong, it was gorgeous, it was just... somehow less authentically part of the city--the Habsburg palace, the Hofburg, is cited as one of the main attractions, but Thomas said he'd never been inside once having lived in the city for seven years.

That said, we did end up going to a museum (the Belvedere, home of Klimt's "the Kiss"), which had an exhibition that was part Austrian history and part art collection, spanning the 20th century. Observations:
1. wow, did i not know much about austrian history beyond the monarchy (which ended in 1918)
2. "The Kiss", which I had previously assumed was a 'best-known' painting, iconic, but not necessarily better than the rest of the artist's work, is, in fact, absolutely amazing. Gorgeous. Words alone cannot describe.
3. again, the history major in me is fascinated by the way Austria directly addressed the parts of its history that it, no doubt, would prefer to forget
4. we got to see two of the pistols used in Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo, which was totally cool.