Mahler

Gustav Mahler. What more is there to say?

I've been to Vienna. Very pretty city. Of course, one doesn't get much of a sense parking in a Jugendhostel, and bowling around the RingenStrasse. Tried to get into the Schonbrunn museum where they have the Klimt and Egon Sheile (sorry, this blog thing misses all the accents and umlauts), but that was closed. Still, there were very pretty gold-leaf onion domes, and riding on the tramway gave one a sense of being in a teutonic but art-loving place.

Since this was 1983 (and I'm typing all this from memory, so forgive my lapses), there were gypsies, or who are now called the Romany, encamped in city parks. They had recently travelled there in their motor homes (in Europe, called 'caravans,' a word which retains more of that old-world flavour), and had pictures of Andropov, the then Premier of Russia, in the windshield. Or was that Gorbachev? I'll have to check.