how to do a half french-half austrian christmas...

N°1 - The Advent wreath
Very important! People who have stayed in Sweden will probably already know the tradition of lighting one candle each Sonday of Advent, until all four of them are burning on Christmas Eve. The only difference to Austria is that here, we don't put them in a row, but in a circle...


N°2 - The Christmas tree

Also very important! It's crucial to find a true fir-tree, not a spruce, if you don't want to constantly sting yourself during the hours of decoration (also, the smell is different, and fir trees tend to keep their needles longer). Decorate with real candles, if you know what good taste is! Put the presents under the tree if you are a grown up; and if you are a child, you wait for the Christkind (Baby-Christ) to do it...

N° 3 - The Food

Crucial, since both French and Austrian people are known to be unable to resist Lucullian delights... Some families have a traditional Christmas menu; we prefer to make up our minds anew each year. We try to put some dishes from every culture, which is a bit of a tightrope-walk, but it always works out well.

N° 3 a) The Starter

This year: Vegetable mousse with shrimps and a sauce of white wine (Susa rediscovered her Photoshop and overdid it, as you can see...)

N° 3 b) The Main Course

This year: Venison-ragout, red cabbage with chestnuts and dumplings and black-currant jam to eat in little portions with the meat. When I read what I just wrote, I can't help but feeling disgusted myself, but it's actually one of the finest dishes you can get (and I know some people out there who can attest to my good taste! *grmpf*)...

N° 3 c) La Bûche

The only course that must not change! The Bûche is a traditional French Christmas dessert in the form of a freshly cut tree-trunk. There are several ways to make it, but in our case (which is the "real" one, of course...) you prepare a delicious chunk of biscuit, butter, nuts, coffee and liquor...

Then, using all your physical force, you try to shape this lump in the form of a tree trunk. Demonstration by my mom, the expert-Bûche-producer (also, she made an effort to look really French):


A ton of chocolate and half an hour of patient fork-work later, the tree is almost perfect....


Finally, you put some artificial snow in form of sugar and simply eat it!

And then, all you have to do, is drink some coffee and marvel at your presents over and over again...

i am from austria

I'll make the attempt to introduce you all to my hometown Graz in just one post. So it's going to be rather sketchy...

To start with, it's very simple: Graz is a town with a river and a kind of mountain in the middle. Napoleon has destroyed the old fortress on top of it except for some buildings, but only after the people from Graz had paid him dearly to spare them...

Climbing up that hill or mountain, you'll soon discover one of Graz' characteristics: the beautiful roofs (I stole the following picture...)

Graz is the capital of a department called Styria, also known as Austria's Green Heart (which is a bit stupid if you consider that basically all of Austria is green, most of the time...). Styria's emblem is something they call a "panther", but I'm not so sure what this poor beast is supposed to be in reality... Whatever, it's green and white and has a beautiful crown and dangerous claws. Once it even spit flames from its ass. Then somebody decided that this was definitely going too far and extinguished the creature's undecent fire. And now... ah... just have a look:

Now it's getting a bit more complicated. After having defeated the plague and the Ottoman army for good at the end of the 17th century, entire Austria was of course super-relieved and in the mood to show off their newly gained prosperity. Plus, Catholic church had made short work of Reformation - now clergy and aristrocracy suddenly recognized that they had the same interests. So they employed a lot of artists to make some publicity for them and to leave no doubt in the population that they were strong and had too much money. The results are beautiful and imposant (that's why they're mostly very golden).
Saint Sebastian and Saint Jacob under a Plague Column:

Personally, what I like most about Graz are its beautiful, cosy yards. You can always discover new ones (especially when you study art history and you know someone who knows someone who knows somebody who has got the keys...). As I'm a snoopy person, just randomly walking through an open door leading to the unknown is exactly my kind of hobby...

Austrian "Hausmeister" (concierges) and landlords love to leave their mark, like dogs, in form of little signs which tell you that what you are doing is on the edge of legality, even if it's just "going through", or "sightseeing"...


Usually, the beautiful yards have unimpressive doors, and vice-versa...


Some of our vices: smoking (Austria Tabak), drinking (Puntigamer Bier), Eating (red lobster in the background; sign of a restaurant), lotto...

Restaurants usually have nice names, like the "Golden Pastry" below.

Some years back, a new tradition was introduced to Graz: a huge Nativity Scene sculpted of ice blocks and displayed in a popular big courtyard in the center. Usually, the sculptures don't survive the first week of Advent; it's too warm...

Yep, of course we are affected by global warming too! But the population of Graz isn't very eager to help changing anything about the problem. They seem to be tied to their cars (the smaller the human, the bigger the car, I guess), preferring to spend 1 hour in the traffic jam than to just hop into the bus, the tram, or on their bikes and be there in 20 minutes. The results are really bad air and a lot of allergies and lung-problems - high life for doctors!

There are a lot of beggars too, many of them from Slovakia because they're not allowed to work in Vienna. See how xenophile we are?!

Seems like the perfect place to "Make Change Happen", hm?

coming home

Ooohooo! Back again... It feels so strange, I tell you! I spent most of my Monday on the airport of Berlin and I was... irritated. I got used to not understanding what people around me are talking about - but it's certainly better this way... Besides, Austrian and German people have this nerve-wracking habit to discuss everything on their cell-phone in public. The louder the better. Is it like that in Sweden too, or did I just not notice/understand?

Back in Graz I was welcomed by a nice guard of honor. Now, I'm sure I'll have to deal with some rumours about my family later, if I tell you that my parents put a lot of different beers all the way up the stairs to my room. You'll be disappointed when I tell you that by now we have only finished two bottles (together!); which makes not even half a litre per person. But we're working on it...

And the rest of the time I'm still a bit groggy; jumping emotionally from enthusiasm (some people started producing babies in my absence...) to despair. Not because of the babies. It's because of... ah... *sigh*... Life is hard. More about that in the next post.

Bliss! I have my biiig bed again. And a big room. And sunny walls. And two hours more light. And no rain!

conspiracy

I don't see any reason for smiling today.

Everybody is packing their suitcases, waving good-bye, wishing Merry Christmas!/God Jul! and telling me that we are going to meet next year, or - worse! - sometime in the future.

The entire world has conspired against me. I even know some people who are now sitting under the warm southern sun, wearing nothing but T-Shirts. In Lund it's raining, of course, and I'm sitting here - wringing out the 3.548th pair of socks. It sucks.

I just went for a cup of coffee with a friend for the last time this year. I feel miserable! I am like these pitiful cartoon-characters shuffling along with a fat rain cloud over their head while everybody else is whistling and walking under the clear blue sky.

But at least our conversation made me see what I want to be: a nomad.

copenhagen

The best place to live in probably is a big red house located on one of Copenhagen's beautiful canals. I now have this fantasy of inheriting it and renting the appartments. According to a well-informed insider, this is how I can keep warm and well-nourished until the end of my life without ever needing to send any applications to any employer. Hehe.

The worst place to live in probably is any flat located right next to Copenhagen's amusement park Tivoli, especially when it's next to one of its wild rides, e.g. The Demon, or The Golden Tower. I still can hear the screams of terror. By the way, I just found out that Tivoli promotes taking the Golden Tower (free-falling from 80m high!) as ultimate test of character [!]. I'm sure you guessed that I failed... *bouhou*

The worst thing that could happen to you in Copenhagen is forgetting your camera - now guess what happened to me? It's an incredible town, from its cobbles to its rooftops. Everything there's grandiose, from the Christmas decorations to the crowds of people in the streets, the price of your coffee and the number of super-rich and well-dressed humans (especially men!). Now this could be read as the description of an extremely decadent, tasteless and snobbish capital - but somehow Copenhagen manages to take all these adjectives and turn them into something magical and truly enchanting.

This is certainly due to the fact that all these Gucci/Prada/I don't know what - people suffer from a spectacularly odd succession of strange sounds flowing out of their mouths - this makes their richness more tolerable and somewhat a merciful compensation for their horrible disease. If you want to listen to this clown-language, click the following link (you'll also see what Tivoli looks like these days): Christmas at Tivoli.

Conclusion: a trip to Copenhagen is highly recommended.

esperanto-update

Shiny happy people

1 picture, 9 nations, and (hopefully very soon) 2 (two) common languages.

Not so shiny, but still very happy people

1 picture, 5 people, 4 nations...

(re)treat!

Phew, it was really about time that all this working should stop... I treated myself with this beauty on Monday, right after my - almost - final exam and right before falling almost drop dead into my bed. I know, I should probably have waited until I get my results, but God knows that bureaucratic mills grind slowly... Also, my beautiful onyx will remind me that, girl, YOU CAN WORK!!!

(Even if this: only attests me a quite low nerd score...)

And this evening, the learning will be proceeded on another level: I have my first Esperanto-class, thanks to Oleg, and I'm soooooooo excited. You know I love words.

Did I mention that Beta.Blogger is superb?! Look at all the nice labels I can pin to my posts! (And all the other things I can do, which you can't see, unfortunately - just know that I can make my whole blog undergo a complete metamorphosis in just one finger-click. Good to know that some things still work like that. Magnificent. Yeahyeahyeah, I'll stop it...)

memory

After a hard week and an exhausting Sunday (serving Glögg and Pepperkakor at the shop), we joined the International Memoir Society's first meeting yesterday evening. This society is presided by Susan McCabe, professor at the department of literature at the University of Southern California. The idea behind this Society - as far as I could get it - is to give artists from all over the world the opportunity to exchange, collect ideas and present their work, that should - of course - be linked to this rather ample notion of memory.

Susan was not there but I would really have liked to hear her opinion and have her lead the discussion. I read some of her poems - she's striking.

However, I had expected and at the same time feared the talk that came up. I'll seize the opportunities this platform gives me with both hands, but I have to find a way to go round this cliché-"art"-talk.

First, there were of course the unavoidable art comments, that "everybody is free to express everything with anything". Hum. I'd humbly like to state that I have quite a bit of a knowledge about this topic and that I don't have any problem with highly subjective art, BUT ... not any creative expression is suitable to be presented as art in public, however important to its creator.

Secondly, there was of course a long discussion about how our society is forgetting traditions; and about all these old people just waiting to die with no-one coming to collect all their knowledge. So, should this Society only collect the memories of our grand-parents? Are young people's memories not worth being dealt with?

It's an illusion to believe that there is something as "tradition". To be alive, a tradition needs to be constantly re-invented.

In early 19th-century Sweden, for instance, intellectuals bemoaned the loss of traditions and pilgrimaged to Dalarna, a part of Sweden considered as especially "Swedish".
There, they asked old people [!] to play them the oldest songs they knew, dance the oldest dances they knew and tell the oldest stories; completely disregarding the interesting new musical and cultural developments happening right in front of their eyes...

Now, of course, the work I would like to present in summer is again very subjective, but I'll try to avoid the slipperly "personal art" road and engage into something that I imagine to be useful and worth delving in for other people than myself.

Still; the starting point is very personal: trees. I've been "working" on this topic since early January, reading scientific and non-scientific books, visiting trees, taking pictures and collecting memories in a wider sense. And from the first moment on I remember falling in a kind of dreamy state whenever I spend some time under a tree; floating in images, sounds and scents.
One doesn't have to get metaphysical to aknowledge that trees gather under their bark memories older than the average human being. Most people don't realise how much influence the surrounding nature has on their own thoughts, actions and lifestyles...

All the pictures of this post (with the exception of the one above) have been taken at a hidden place near the river in the heart of Graz, where a wise willow has taught me many lessons in patience, truthfulness and protection during this spring and summer.

The sound of the river, sand on my skin and sun in my eyes - sublime memories!