Vienna

Naomi's off in Scotland for a few days catching up with another college friend, so I'm briefly doing some solo blogging again. Only 12 days left until we return to the US. Berlin has been very good to me.... but it feels like time to go home.

Anyway, some pictures from Vienna. We saw a huge amount - far too much to put up here.


This is the cathedral in the center of the city, the Stephansdom. The big tower was supposed to be one of two, but then it ended up being one of one. Right next to it but underground (not shown) they discovered an old buried church, the original purpose of which is sort of unclear.

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A little bit outside of the main city is a huge graveyard. It wasn't especially old (started in the 1700s, if I'm remembering right), but it had some highlights. Like Mozart's, Beethoven's and Schubert's graves, all together - shown above. The internet actually tells me that they're not quite sure where Mozart's body was, and that this was sort of a guess. Brahms was also just off to the side. Wow.

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Later that same day, we went out to Schönbrunner Schlosspark, where the Hapsburg summer palace is. We walked around the grounds, but didn't go inside. It's a big palace:



They also had their very own fake Roman ruins:

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Our last night, we decided to be young and hip and so went out. There was a movie of an opera being shown by the Rathaus (town hall), and lots of food stands set up near it. It was... sort of weird. But Naomi got a great picture of the Rathaus, and we had some very tasty dessert from a stand.


Vienna was really beautiful, and for me it was fantastic to see Naomi's old childhood haunts. Plus, there are some very sensible parts of the city's lifestyle. For instance, they have something like British tea-time - except that cake is almost mandatory, and it's coffee instead of tea.

We intend to go back.

Vienna and Prague - 3 pictures

Yesterday we came back to Berlin after a few days in Vienna and Prague. Both were wonderful - Vienna especially, since Naomi still knew some people there from her childhood. We'll say more later, but here are some highlights:


Hühnerschnitzel in Vienna. We had it twice - once in a Heuriger near where Naomi used to live, and once at a famous/extra-touristy restaurant in the inner city called 'Figlmüller' (this picture is from the latter). Both were good. The former was better.

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We had a day of Art Nouveau, involving a lot of Klimt and Schiele. This building had a leafy dome, and a mural by Klimt inside. Really sweet.

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Prague was very different - it took us a little while to understand why people get so excited about it, but we came around (a cheap, delicious meal helped). The castle/palace on the hill overlooking the town had about 5 different architectural styles. This is the cathedral that the castle surrounds. Notice the big tower, which starts gothic, but doesn't stay that way as it goes up. The mural next to it is of the dead rising from their graves to be judged.

Quick Vienna update from Colin

Yesterday, I took a train from Berlin to Vienna, where I'm going to meet Naomi (who's been in Italy). It was about 10 hours, but first-class was only about ten Euros extra, so I ended up without neighbors (my seat was alone on its side of the aisle) and a huge picture window. The views were beautiful, especially the stretch between Dresden and Prague - the train followed the Elbe river ('Labe' in Czech) through a fairly steep valley.

I got to Vienna around 10:30pm, and walked to my hostel. I got a bed in a 6-person room. It was 'fine,' as my brother would say. A little too hot, but pretty quiet. I had an over-priced hostel breakfast in the morning. Actually, it wouldn't have been overpriced if I had taken it up on its offer of "all you can eat," but I learned in Frankfurt that starting off the day by eating all the hostel Musli you can eat makes the rest of the day feel like you're a clump of soggy oats.

I walked then over to the hostel with I'm supposed to meet Naomi - about an hour walking. Some first impressions: people seem to eat schnitzel here the way the Germans eat dönner kebab (though they also eat dönner here). The city looks more like Paris than Berlin, at least, from what I remember of my 3 hours in Paris last year. It's older, both in population and in buildings, and so there's a lot more of "so-and-so lived here" stuff.

My main plan for our time here is to eat cake and ice-cream. Naomi can make the call on the rest.

Huh.

I wasn't thinking about this, but the last post ended up working as some sort of "in which countries are people looking at my blog?" thing. On my personal website, I have Google Analytics set up, which tells me which general areas people who look at the site come from (unless they live in a one-person city, there's no way to identify them, so this is only moderately creepy - if it's any consolation, most websites have something like this now).

Anyway, after I linked to my site from this blog, I unexpectedly got a huge rise in the number of people according to Analytics. For instance, it's had more than 20 hits the past two days, and 10 hits from Brazil yesterday (on a normal day, the site gets between 1 and 4 visits). I don't mind popularity, and I've heard great things about Brazil, but... what??? Are these real people? Spam bots? Does anyone know?

(And... we're back in the US in only 20 days!)

More temporary bachelorhood

First a question and a picture. The question is this: what do you think of the photos on my NYU page, and personal webpage? More specifically, do they make you feel like you'd want to hire me to be in a philosophy department? Any feedback is welcome.

And here's the picture (from the side of the memorial church from two posts ago):



In other (fascinating) news, I got the paper down to 29 pages. It got less painful as I went along - partly because I realized that I should write a quick paper addressing this one view that has become 'hip' recently (interpreting Kant as holding that the self is an activity). That's actually the view I originally thought I was going to defend... and it's good that I didn't, because last September a new book came out arguing for that at length.

Speaking of work - last Wednesday night Nick and Karl (Stang and Schafer) let me pitch one of my possible job talks to them. It was super, super helpful. I've never had that amount of relentless, punchy feedback in one sitting before. The two of them together, with enough added coffee, are like a Kant centrifuge - kind of violent, but just so that all the junk floats to the top and can be skimmed off. Of course, now I realize that the paper needs to be completely rewritten. But that's okay.

Temporary bachelor life

For the past few days I've been on my own in the apartment, and I have a few more days before I go meet Naomi in Vienna. My main goal for this lonesome stretch was to get a new version of my writing sample together, both shortening it down and incorporating the various comments I got when I presented it last month. The revision's going slowly, but it's getting done. The thing's 34 pages now (leaving out the 'works cited' section'), down from 39, and I'll see if I can trim off another 4.

One thing that's funny about doing revisions like this is that, after going through about a dozen versions, there is some reason for every aspect of the paper - everything in there has some sort of justification. So cutting it down is an internal struggle at every step. I think that's why it's taking me so long. I remember the same thing happening to a number of other NYU people who were getting ready to go on the market; they were getting lots of feedback, and spending lots of times working on drafts, but ended up making almost no real changes in the last few months.

On a different note: I was so excited to find peanut butter at one of the nearby supermarkets that I forgot to get olive oil, which was my main reason for going.

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (more old photos)

(Naomi's still away for the next few days, so this is just Colin.)

One place we've visited a few times is this church. I thought I'd post a couple more photos associated with it. It's a really striking site - the bombed-out old church and a new church built right along side (the new church has the cross-less statue of Jesus against the blue glass wall). World War-era destruction just isn't preserved like this in most of Berlin, understandably enough.

Here's another outside view of the church, and of a part of the ceiling inside:





Inside the newer part of the church is this charcoal drawing:


Maybe other people had heard of it, but I hadn't. It's called the 'Stalingrad Madonna,' done by a German pastor during the battle of Stalingrad in 1942 who was captured in the battle and died in a POW camp two years later. There are supposedly copies of the drawing in the UK and in Russia. The words on the right mean 'Light, Life and Love.' It is a Christian image (and the words are from the Christian Bible), but none of that is essential to the effectiveness of the image itself. The Pastor (Kurt Rueber) wrote that his aim was to represent the feeling of safety.