Friday night, three days before we went to Mozart Haus and took our tacky gift shop photos, we attended a performance of Mozart's Requiem in an appropriate setting: the ostentatiously baroque Karlskirche, the church dedicated by Emperor Charles VI to his namesake, Saint Charles Borromeo. It was a wonderful performance.
When I say ostentatious, I'm thinking of things like the altar sculpture of St. Charles. B., where the old priest is being carried to Heaven on a cloud erupting from the wall:
... from the shop at the Mozart Haus, where he lived during some of his more flush years from 1791 to 1794. My vote is for the golf balls:
Eileen favors the tissue pack. Blow your snot into Figaro!
But there's always the breath mints, too:
The global travelers in front of the Hofburg Palace, Vienna
My parents have dealt with the strangeness of their first trip to the Old World by pretending they haven't left the New. Take striking up a conversation with strangers: our first instinct is to try to avoid it whenever possible - after all, stranger is just "strange" with a dangling "r" - whereas Dad in particular seems to seek them out for conversation. This happens all the time when we're with them in Connecticut or California or Hawaii; now it's happening in the Czech Republic and Austria. The fact that so many people here speak excellent English only encourages that feeling of familiarity.
