I love cities and buildings and walking around and exploring. My friends are often interested in theatre, art or music, and that makes sense, but for me walking is usually enough. It’s both the seeing and the anticipation that come …

We associate the French with beauty, refinement, elegance, grandeur. These are visible everywhere in Paris, as is occasional disorder and chaos, but underlying them is a discipline that is harder to discern. This year I was in Paris for more …

Yesterday I returned to Vienna by train from Znojmo, in the Czech Republic.  Znojmo was the terminus of my trip,  suggesting old links with Austria; however, the train was almost empty when it reached the town on Tuesday morning, and …

Last week, I took the train south from Klagenfurt (in south Austria) to Trieste.  Reviewing Google maps, I had assumed that the train headed directly south through Slovenia.  But history or geography planned a route that skirts Slovenia completely.  The …

I started this story yesterday and then lost the draft, so I have started it again, and I need to make hay of it. . . . My sister is a something of a hero; she is stable, thoughtful, considerate. …

Vienna is not huge. It is a substantial city, and it is a capital city, with about 2 million inhabitants, and about 2.6 million in its metropolitan area.  It has a long history, combining remnants of Imperial Majesty with established …

Aunt Dora, our grandmother’s sister,  is someone we never knew.  We did not know her because she was unable to get out of Austria.   While preparing our Austrian citizenship applications, our lawyers hired an archivist to  document evidence that our …

Before World War II, my maternal grandparents owned an Auskocherei and then a Gasthaus in the Ottakring district of Vienna. About the first restaurant, my uncle wrote: “My family’s little restaurant offered some specialties once in a while.  My father …