Skeletons in the quarry

Michael's showcase day down in Orsay went well yesterday. His seminar had a pretty full room, and people seemed interested and he got some good questions afterwards. He also had a second more informal talk about some of the technical specifics of his work with his french counterparts, and that was also well received. So it was a very full day for him, but overall successful!

I went to visit the Paris Catacombs in the morning, which was an interesting experience. Basically, the entire underbelly of Paris is a network of very old quarries that were hewn out to collect limestone to build all the pretty buildings around here, dating back to Roman times. So it's a very extensive network of tunnels below the subway and sewers and the rest of the city. In the late 1700s, many of these started to collapse, as most weren't reinforced in any way (no such thing as OSHA in the 1100s), which started mass panics in Paris as whole streets and houses fell into massive sinkholes. King Louis XVI commissioned a project to survey and stabilize the quarries. At the same time, the cemetaries that had been used by Paris since it's founding were also starting to feel the strain of centuries of city life and poor sanitation, and literally started overflowing and poisoning people. That sounded pretty gross.

The solution, therefore, was to empty the cemeteries and put the bones into the miles of newly reinforced quarries, and thus the Paris Catacombs were inaugurated in the late 1700s. They basically excavated the ceremonies, has some priests pray over the mess, and then dumped the bones down shafts into massive piles, roughly grouped by cemetery. Then, because being macabre was fashionable during the Victorian era, they stacked up the skulls and femurs along the passageways and opened it up to tourists. It has apparently remained a popular curiosity, because the line to get in was incredibly long. 

The tour route was only 1.5 km, but there are something like 200 km of tunnel.

"Stop, here is the Empire of the Dead" - that's not dramatic at all.

Oh hello.

They got a little artsy

Behind the nicely stacked parts are just mounds of bone.

They even decorated the pillars? Apparently in the 1850s it was trendy to attend clandestine midnight orchestra concerts down here.

In the end, Michael is very glad that he had talks to give, because he would not have enjoyed the Catacombs.
We met up with Michael's old Harvard lab group mates, Nick (who we also saw in Vienna) and Augustine (who lives here), and went out for a very nice dinner. It was rather fun because Augustine just ordered everything for us, and it was all quite delicious. The restaurant owner even came over to show us pictures of the winery from which our wine came from, as if any of us knew enough about wine to appreciate the terroir in any real way. But it tasted good!

Bonjour, Paris!

 So a pigeon flew full speed into my face today and knocked my glasses crooked. That was weird.
 
 Anyway, welcome to Paris! We arrived yesterday after an easy flight, and then met up with my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Vero, and cousin Eliott to walk around the neighborhood and get some dinner. Eliott now makes Michael look short, so although I'm sure he's tired of hearing it, he's grown a bit since we last saw him. So it was very nice to catch up a bit, since it's clearly overdue.

 Today Michael started his visit at the high energy physics lab in Orsay, so he spent the day having some productive meetings and getting to know the LIGO group there. And also finishing his talk for tomorrow.

I also tried to have a somewhat productive day, but got kind distracted by Paris.  I started the day ostensibly looking for a good spot to get some writing done, since that is a perpetual to-do list task, but mostly ended up wandering around central Paris instead. Our hotel is in Montparnasse, just to the south of the city center, and so my wanderings took me through several noteworthy areas. I walked through the Luxembourg Palace gardens, which were lovely (although clearly had too many pigeons), and then had lunch and got a little bit of work done just outside the Pantheon. Then I went up to Notre Dame, and just sat inside for a while people watching and admiring the stained glass windows. Finally, I walked a ways along the Seine down on the quai. The weather in the afternoon turned lovely after a rainy morning, so the walk was quite nice. This week will be much more of work week/play things by ear than the last, and I'm rather enjoying the change of pace.

Le Jardin de Luxemburg.

Hello famous landmark.

Notre Dame is indeed pretty

Does this need a caption?

Stupid pigeon.

Auf Wiedersehen Wien!

We are currently sitting in the Vienna Airport to catch our flight back to Paris! It's been a great week here, and it was certainly a very interesting cultural experience. Since our flight is boarding very soon, this will be short.
We spent our last full day in Vienna wandering through the city Art Museum, which could easily have filled multiple full days - there was a ton of fascinating things to see. Then we wandered around the city on last time, and found ourselves at the Praterstern, an old amusement park, so we took a ride on the historical Giant Ferris wheel, which had lovely views of the city.

This marble carving of Daphne and Apollo was particularly amazing, and has apparently been (rightly) considered a masterpiece since it was carved sometime in the 1600s.

The details are tricky to see, but this is a bit of raw ore with native gemstones with sculptural elements added on. It kind of reminded me of super high class model painting.

This amazing thing is an automaton, crafted of gold and silver way back in the day.

Nearly all of the little bits on this move in some manner - the drummer strikes the drum, the sails get wiggled, the pipers raise and lower their trumpets... it's kind of insane and super cool.

The art museum had a neat little catwalk that allowed you to get pretty close to the ceiling frescos painted by Klimpt. I thought these were really cool, since they mimicked the old style fresco designs but had modern compositions. Also the painting is impressive.

More cool details.

We found a cafe with a very pretty view and got some work done.

The ferris wheel was miraculously Michael's suggestion.

It was pretty tall, and has been around since ferris wheels were invented (obviously it's been retrofit).

The meal for our last dinner here was an obvious choice.

Stift Klosterneuburg

 Michael's conference talk yesterday was well received, as was Nick's, and afterwards we went to dinner at a wonderfully quaint and delicious Austrian restaurant, and then wandered about the city in the evening. All and all a very nice Thursday.

The building had a sign that said 1447... I don't think it's actually that old, but maybe?

We wandered back to Stephanspatz, the main city center, and went inside St Stephan's cathedral. It was suitably wonderous.

Most of Vienna looks something like this.

Today, we re-attempted our trip to the 900 year old monastery, better armed with information about how to get there. It really wasn't that long of a trip, we just needed to get on bus 400 instead of 45. Oh well. I was definitely expecting stoic turrets and solid stone walls, and also some dark wine cellars (since the monastery is also the site of the oldest continuous winery in Austria), and what we found was not that. Turns out the Austrian Emperor Joseph II decided that the Monastery needed to be stepped up, in order to keep up with whatever the Spanish were doing in the late 1700s, so it's actually yet another Baroque palace. So it was full of ornate stucco ceilings, walnut walls, and lots of gilding. Apparently, Emperor Joseph had plans for much more to be constructed, but after his death his daughter Empress Maria-Theresea built Schonbrunn, instead, and since the monastery had to pay for all it's renovations itself, only a single main wing was finished in the full Baroque style. There is also a very fancy Gothic style church. I'm still a bit confused about what all was built when...We went on a tour of the monastery, but since it was all in german, we had to use pre-recorded audioguides which were clearly less informative than the live tourguide, which was kind of a bummer. The one bit we did have right is that there are 6km of dark wine cellars, but we certainly didn't walk through all of them! We did swing by the modern winery's tasting room at the end of the day, which seemed like a fitting cap to the visit.

Wait... that's the monastery?

pretty fancy... The plans for the building in the late 1700s included 8 of those types of domes (each representing some important crown in the austrian empire) but Emperors/empresses are fickle and construction stopped when the reign changed hands.

The clouds foreshadowed the evening weather.

But they did make for dramatic views over the river valley, and cooled the weather off quite a bit, which was quite welcome.

The monastery had an impressive treasury display... I was somewhat awed by the silver work examples.

And there was a playground?

Yeah, that's a palace dining room, not exactly monk cloisters. Although except for a brief period during the wars, the monastery has been continuously operational.

The stunning fresco in the main ballroom was all alegorical about Empress Maria Theresea, even though she was the one to abandon construction. I'm still a little confused about all the stages of remodel the grounds went through.

The hall was designed to make us mortals feel small.

The gothic church was also stunning. Also, it was pouring rain about 20 minutes before this picture.

The detail is tricky to see, but amazing in person.

The monastery is also home to the Verdun Alter, a beautifully detailed enamal artwork that depicts scenes from both the old and new testament. We couldn't get very close, but the depictions were beautiful.

After our tour, we wandered the grounds some, and found some rather short doors.

It was a pretty nice afternoon!

Once we headed back to Vienna, we wandered around looking for a spot for dinner, and ended up at a kind of funky expat british pub. It started pouring rain while we were eating, and didn't seem like it was going to stop anytime soon, so we got rather (very) wet on our way back home... but I guess we know to bring our umbrellas for tomorrow!

Schonbrunn Palace

 On Wednesday we went Full Imperial Court. As in, we visited the Schonbrunn Palace complex, which was the summer residence of Austria's nobility during the height of Hapsburg power and prestige in Europe. So it's quite the place.  The palace itself is Austria's most visited historical site, so tours have a timed entry, so we got our ticket and then wandered around the grounds until we could go in. The grounds are quite large and host a number of sites and activities, and we hit up a lot of them.

In the courtyard of the Schonbrunn Palace

The park gardens were lovely, and the large greenhouse was beautiful!

It was like walking into a rainforest inside. On conservatories I've been to have been more like plants on display, but this one the plants were just... being plants in all their glory.

Nifty glass architecture.

 One of the attractions was the Austrian Zoo, which is apparently one of the best in Europe. And it was indeed a very nice zoo! The layout had some holdovers from the days of private menageries, but the enclosures were very well done. Since we were there in the later afternoon, we also happened to hit feeding time for most of the animals, which was neat because it meant that even some of the shy ones were out in their pens munching away. We also caught a glimpse of a sea lion show (it was very popular and I could only kind of see over people's heads)... I knew sea lions were big, but at one point the male sea lion got up and gave the handler a hug and oh goodness gracious did it dwarf the very large human male. So that was impressive. They also had a very cool rainforest exhibit, that included a rambunctious pile of baby otters and a walk in cave filled with bats. I thought that part was pretty cool, because it was the done the same way that lots of other zoos do the walk in enclosures with birds, but instead you had bats flying around. It was also along a one way route through the rainforest, so I guess if you were afraid of bats or the dark you'd have to face your fears. I've never seen an exhibit like that, and thought it was really neat.

Communing with the creatures.

Elephants eat a lot.

 The tour of the grand palace was also really neat. There were no pictures allowed, unfortunately, because many of the rooms were indeed Splendid, with a capital S. We had an audio guided tour as part of our Vienna Pass, which was pretty neat as it guided you through each room and gave you a little bit of extra information. It was pretty clear that they were trying to move people through the palace just to handle the crowds, and it was actually fairly effective. None of the rooms were too crowded and you could get good look around. I wish that the audio tour had been a little more detailed, since many of the rooms were incredibly detailed, and the recordings mostly focused on the historical figures rather than the rooms themselves. But there were a couple of rooms that made it totally worth it. One was a completely temperature and humidity controlled room, in which they had all us tours walk through in an enclosed glass tunnel, in order to preserve the original 300 something year old wall hangings and bed in Empress Maria-Theresea's official bedchamber, which was more for ceremonial christenings and whatnot than actual sleeping. The bed was impressive - gold embroidered pillars and canopy, rich fabrics, and lots of opulence. There was another room that was entirely inlaid walnut and gilding, with parchment pieces from Ancient India framed into the walls. The recordings kind of skimmed over the obvious colonial implications of that (and another room filled with pen drawing of chinese-inspired day-in-the-life scenes), but again, the preservation and detail was impressive. Overall the visit was worth braving the other tourists.

We capped off the day by meeting Michael's grad school friend, Nick, who is also here for the conference, for dinner at a very tasty traditional austrian restaurant, and then going to a Mozart and Strauss concert. Yep, culture! It was a kind of funny affair, but quite lovely. It was clearly aimed at all us tourists in Vienna who think, "my, I am in the center of the classical music universe, I should listen to some live classical music but I don't know anything about it". So basically, us in a nutshell. It was held again on the grounds of the Schonbrunn, in a venue called the Orangerie that has been hosting live concerts since the era of Mozart and Strauss and all the other composers who lived here, which I thought was cool. The first half was all Mozart, and the second half featured Strauss, and was a mix of their symphony pieces, operas, and ballets. The opera singers were impressive, as basically all opera singers are, and the ballet dancers were a little limited by their stage size. All in all, though, it was a very beautiful, and live music always has that little extra something that makes it special.

Getting our culture on at the Orangerie in Schonbrunn Palace. Other than the projector lighting, it was a fairly authentic experience.

Michael's grad school friend Nick joined us, too.

The program was a mix of typical symphony pieces, opera and some ballet. It was definitely a smorgasbord of "classical music for the uncultured people who come to Vienna and want to say they saw a Mozart concert", but that's kind of what we needed.

 Thursday (today) is Michael's conference presentation, so he's actually attending the conference this afternoon, and I'm planning on catching up on some work emails and getting a little bit done while sitting in a river front cafe, so it's unlikely we'll have too many pictures, but I'm looking forward to some low-key enjoyment of this city.

Wait... where are we going?

Public transportation in Vienna is awesome. I suppose that might not mean very much as somebody currently living in  LA where public transportation is abysmal, but really... train stations are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from whereever you are and the trains run every 5-10 minutes, buses run regularly in the areas the trains don't go, and there are bike lanes on every street, and pedestrian only zones throughout the city center. We also got a week-long pass that lets us ride as much as we want, which is super convenient since we have to take the train into the city proper, and that had us feeling like transportation pros.

   We're also tourist pros, since I discovered on our first Europe visit that most cities have a pass that grants admission to most of the major tourist sites and a lot of littler attractions, too. Vienna is no exception, so we've been making great use of our passes (and since the money is spent up front, we get over our natural inclination to not pay entrance fees). The Vienna Pass also includes unlimited rides on the very touristy but very useful Hop On Hop Off buses, which take tourists around to most of the major sites and have recorded information guides about what you're driving past. So they are both informative and useful for getting around!

Riding the tourist bus like the tourists we are. But the recordings about what we're driving past are pretty helpful.

 On Tuesday morning we went to the Belveder Palace, originally built as a summer home for some Hapsburg prince and then later the primary residence to a number of Archdukes and other fancy people. It was also one of the first public art museums, commissioned by Empress Maria-Theresea, and that has continued to today. It is a great example of Baroque statelyness with an awful lot of gold thrown in. After wandering around the museums and the very pretty grounds, we set out to see more sights.

Someday I will have a cottage garden like this one. Except probably smaller.

The view towards the center city

Hello fancy ceiling. Most of the detail is illusionist painting.A celebration for the wedding of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis was apparently held in this room. Seemed fitting.

Napoleon continues to get the admiration he craved. But seriously, it's a cool painting in person.

Ah yes, what a quaint summer house.

Unfortunately, I'm not very good at reading guidebooks, apparently, and both of the two things I wanted to do - visit an old insane asylum on the outskirts of the city and a winery tour - were closed on Tuesdays. We'll prehaps try to reattempt that later in the week. Fortunately we only made it partway to either of those places before Michael double checked the opening times. We did hit up the Sigmund Freud Museum, which is actually at the sight of original home and office. It was a neat experince, although they are also in the process of restoring more of the rooms and renovating, so clearly visiting in a few years would probable be the right choice. They did have a recreation of his reading chair, which was apparently custom designed and very odd looking because his favorite reading pose was to hook his leg up over the arms and lean back with the book over his face, and some designer friend of his tried to make a seat that would better support his head in his position.

Pretty church with pretty windows!

Hallo, Wien. We took the tourist bus up to a vista above the city, which had a few pretty walks through some forest and obviously nice views. The city center is on the right, the island we're staying on is on the left, and vineyards are in the foreground.

After the Freud Museum, our misadventures really began. As I said, I thought that we'd get out of the city and see some of the surrounding countryside and visit a winery a little ways out of the city, only to realize it was closed. So we tried to change course and go visit a very old Monastery instead, which was even further out of town. No big deal, public transportation is awesome here. So we take a different bus down from the overlook (wait, are we on the right bus? Is this going to the right place? yes, ok) to catch a train that heads north. Except the train tracks are down for maintenance, so we have to take a replacement bus instead. Ok... except that we're pretty sure that the nice lady at the ticket counter told us the wrong bus number, because we got on a bus (number S45, which is what she said) and it was definitely going the wrong way. It took us a while to figure it out, since maybe the route was just a little funny? Did we get on going the wrong direction? What is going on exactly? In the end, that bus just took us to another Viennese train station, and since I was getting grumpy and we were both hot and tired, we gave up and came back to the hotel, where we both promptly and unintentionally took a two hour nap. So in the end it was actually not that bad. ;)

We did venture out again in the evening to get food (we stopped at a delicious shawarma place) and check out a ballroom dance studio that was having an open dance. That was quite fun. It wasn't like usual studios we go to - it was more like a ballroom dance-club scene with a bunch of lounge seating and a bar. There were maybe 8 couples, so it was pretty quiet, but they played a nice variety of music and I was able to rent some dance shoes, so we had a lovely time! And now we can say we've done the Viennese Waltz in Vienna, so that bucket-list item is complete.