Out With A Bang

Sooooooooo it's been a while... My bad.

Quick summary of my last week in Vienna:

To start I had three classes. First was Francesco Scavetta's A Surprised Body. Francesco is a tall, bald, Italian man with a soft voice and a very physical way of teaching. The class involved a lot of floor work requiring a soft body. It involved a lot of emptying of the body and using external support. It was honestly very challenging for me to keep all the sensations he was asking for. Sensationally it was challenging and beautiful work.

Next class was Alice Chauchat's Confusing Agency. This involved a lot of thinking. The majority of this class included improvisation scores to provoke observation and conversation. The scores often included the impossible, so it would highlight the struggle of negotiation. For me it enabled "noodling" in the sense that I moved with not too much motivation and the movement allowed more work to be done in my mind. However, it felt less purposeful and I felt as though I wasn't paying attention to myself, but to these thoughts that seemed removed from dance in a sense. It wasn't my favorite.

Finally I had Eleanor Bauer's Dancing, Not The Dancer. This was also an improvisation based class, but Eleanor's energy just too it to a different level. The initial rules were 1) Say yes to the movement before you can name it 2) Complete it with your everything 3) Observe. These rules gave us bombastic movement at first, but after a few times, we could find more subtlety and enjoy doing less and know how to complete that as well. It really felt like I had a purpose and everything I wanted to do was impulsive, but completed to the fullest. Loved it.

After the festival came to an end, we partied one more time at the Festival Lounge and then on Saturday morning... BUDAPEST!!!!!

Yes, queue singing of the song "Budapest." Spontaneously I decided to tag along on a trip to Hungary with a few friends I met from Alberta! It was both excellent and too short. We did a two hour walking tour, took a train over to a beautiful traditional bath house, and then we made it back to our hostel in time for an awesome pub crawl!

So we got shots at every bar and partied hard, met some other cool tourists and made it back to pass out. The next day me and Raine spent the day hungover, since we all got trains at different times, and then I caught my train back to Vienna. Then I flew back home on the Tuesday and her we are!

Since my trip it has been a little weird and difficult not being completely immersed in newness, and I'm not as busy as I would like, but I will for sure be doing my next adventure ASAP.

Happy Travels,

G

The Lonely Traveller

So coming out of an eventful week, I'm quieting down a bit.

One luxury of travelling alone is not worrying about anyone else's timeline. I can wake up whenever I want, see whatever I want, eat when I want, it's all in my hands. I'm finding it interesting to really have so much time alone. Even in a crowd, I'm isolated. I can't understand anyone when they speak, I have trouble communicating to people, and I have nobody to communicate to in my own language. This time has really been me learning to rely on me again. I've always been self-sufficient more or less, but now it's really telling of how important that is in a situation like this.

I've done some sight seeing and now I'm just trying to be accustomed to my routes to and from the dance studios, and prepare myself for the 26 days straight that I will be dancing... Daunting? Absolutely.

I've found the route I need to take to the dance studios and timed it roughly, and I've been double and triple checking my schedule of classes and shows to see so that once it starts, I'm ready to give it my all. I must admit I've been feeling pretty lazy with the amount of down time I have, but I'm doing my best to get out everyday and get something done, even if it's just a walk to the park.

While it has been pretty lonely, I did get to meet up with old high school buds on their own Euro-trip! Sarah, Cameron, Shane and I all went through high school in Halifax together and when I found out their next stop was Vienna, I had to make plans with them to get out of the lonely traveller blues. Yesterday the four of us went for lunch at an Italian restaurant by Stephansplatz station, a very crowded and beautiful area with Stephansdom (gothic church) right in the center. The reunion was really nice to catch up with them, we had an excellent conversation about art history and today's contemporary art and ate some excellent and well

priced food. They were going to the Kunsthistoriches Museum and since I had already been, I decided to head home. The brief encounter was enough to make me feel a little social for the first time in a week and a half.


I have had some good opportunities to get lost as well! Sometimes I might forget my life-saving map booklet and it somewhat liberates me to wander and find things I wouldn't be looking for. It is the perfect way to see Vienna's streets that are so full of life, coffee and gelato! I have become an avid gelato lover and I don't think I've seen a regular ice cream bar yet, so gelato is the dessert of the month for me. I think my favorite so far is haselnuss.

The ImPlusTanz festivities will be starting on Tuesday so this should be my last non-dance related post, so get ready for some weird contemporary coming at ya!

Happy Travels,
G

Explorations

What an eventful/uneventful week!

The first few days got off to a rough start. The jet lag hit me pretty hard because I was in bed for probably a full 24hrs after arriving with an awesome headache, a sinus infection, and intense fatigue. In 30degree heat on top of that, I just need to crawl into a hole for a while.

In order to stop feeling so lame I commanded myself to get outside, no matter how hot. So I went to discover my new neighbourhood. I found a health food store, a Hofer (grocery store), MANY cafes, the closest U-Bahn (underground) station, and the best way to get to the famous Danaukanal (Danube River). The neighbourhood is A. Beautiful and B. well connected so I feel pretty lucky to be here. After a few days of nothing in particular, I should probably get going on experiencing tourist life.

First was the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum... Woah, That's a real museum. The building itself is across from the Naturhistoriches (Natural History) Museum and are almost identical buildings. They were both built around 1890 by Emperor Franz Joseph, the Art History Museum for the housing for emperors' and archdukes' personal art collections to be shown to the public.

As I walked through, I felt lucky that I could at least speak English if I didn't understand German because everything in the exhibits were written in both. I walked through the many rooms full of paintings dating back to as early as the 15th century and admired the immense detail and skill these artists have. It was also interesting for me to read how people analyse paintings and what people can get out of them; the process was very similar to how you can analyse dance and I felt very connected to the artists in that way.

Much of the museum was also dedicated to trinkets and valuable collections. I found it almost comical to walk through some of these rooms to find priceless statues and trinkets belonging to past royalty. Some of the items were understandably desirable: beautiful clocks, jewelry boxes, model ships etc. There was one item that just made me laugh at the expense someone paid to have this hilarious piece of art, Bear as a Hunter.



I'm fairly confident that there aren't many museums that can compare to this one.


Tuesday I decided Shönnbrunn Palace and estate gardens was my next destination. To say the least, this place is massive, so you will read that word frequently in this description. You first approach the gate that looks like something from the Never Ending Story and you enter the courtyard that leads up to the mansion. The courtyard is basically a football field and the palace has about 1500 rooms... I took a shortened audio tour of a few rooms to get a feel for the baroque style. Then I went to the gardens behind the palace... It must be multiple football fields in size because it's just massive. Included in the gardens is a labyrinth (which you pay extra to enter so I didn't bother), a massive fountain statue of the god Neptune and his entourage, and a massive hill behind the fountain leading to another monument. Yes, it was massive. Before I got to the hill, I got distracted by the entrance to the Vienna Zoo!

I felt conflicted about being in the zoo. I love that we get to see and learn and study them, but I'm not sure about if they should really be stuck in cages and then never be able to be released into the wild. I got over my internal moral battle though and walked among the animals. The zoo had basically everything including an awesome polar bear exhibit! The bears had become accustomed to the warm environment, but it seems like they preferred the cooler water they swam around much of the time. There was also a seal show where I got soaked by this guy jumping for fish.



That is where I met a fellow traveller who was from the States. He had a poor pronunciation of the word "danke" by my low standards, but he was cool to talk to.

When we parted ways, I decided to go to the Donau Zentrum and do some shopping. I treated myself to a few dresses from stores I didn't know, and then headed home for a much deserved cold shower.

Yesterday it thankfully rained. In the cool rainy weather it was the perfect day for revisiting Museums Quatrier and hitting up the Naturhistoriches Museum. While the building was as beautiful as the Kunsthistoriches, it was not highlighted because of the difference in subject. The best part was the dinosaurs! As a kid I really liked the idea of being a paleontologist, so I think that kid is still in me. There were incredible skeleton models, mechanical moving dinosaurs, real bones and fossils, a kids dream. They also had thousands of taxidermy animals on display, which I really enjoyed browsing around. There was also a great exhibit on human evolution. They have a great collection of skulls...



After I left, I grabbed some lunch in Museums Quartier, and then headed out to walk around the city aimlessly. I forgot my map that day so it was decently easy to get lost. It was really nice walking around the old cobblestone sidewalks and really taking in the city's character. Bakeries and cafes everywhere, beautiful fashion shops with fur coats worth thousands, and monuments and old buildings to admire everywhere. Every time I felt nervous about being lost, I walked onto a new street where there were plenty of cafes and streetcars, so I never felt too worried about it. I ended up stopping for a drink at The English Café! I had read about it online, and it was a pretty hippie with lots of books to read. Strange place, but really nice to have a beer and watch Wimbledon tennis on the big projector. Upon leaving I felt it time to find my way home. I found a street with streetcars and figured out where I needed to go pretty easily. I got home safely and relaxed for the rest of the evening.

The U-Bahn system is pretty intense, then when you add the S-Bahn and the streetcars and busses, it can be pretty complicated. I've been taking it one day at a time, and since I'm here for 5 more weeks I feel like I have that luxury. This is why I feel it was slightly uneventful also, because I've had a lot of down time and I enjoy that a lot. I do look forward to dancing and doing more festival related things. It feels a bit lonely sometimes when you don't know anyone and you don't speak the language, but I'm glad I've been able to go at my own pace. It will definitely pick up when ImPulsTanz starts.

Happy Travels,
G