Salzburg: Ancient Home of Blond, Blue-Eyed Baby Jesus

Last weekend our little family headed out to Salzburg. Our mission was to show Nava to her great grandmother and a couple of Alex's wonderful cousins and their families, and to coo over another freshly baked baby girl named Floriana, who is an adorable porcelain princess with rosy cheeks and sweet blue eyes. 

Alex's Oma 

She is also blonde, because this is Salzburg. 

There are so many natural blonds in Salzburg that it is one of the last remaining homes of blond, blue-eyed Baby Jesus. Other places may have swapped His image for something a little less European, but Salzburg is old school like that. Blond Jesus (and his blond parents) have had their pictures carved, painted, frescoed, lacquered and cross-stitched all through the city. The traditions of Christendom are obvious in other ways - for example, I heard someone with no particularly religious leanings use "Christian" as a synonym for "civilized" (as in, "Why don't you call at a Christian time of night?"), which I've never heard in Vienna. 

Salzburg has just under 150,000 residents, and at least that many tourists wandering around day and night. The main reasons for the tourist boom are the architecture, the Mozart, and especially The Sound of Music, that great American classic, which no Austrian has ever seen but which everyone has heard of because tourists bring it up all the time. It was filmed in Salzburg. That scene where the Von Trapp family are hiding from the Nazis in a cemetery? Yeah, that's basically Alex's grandmother's backyard. 

St. Peter's Abbey. Don't let that 18th century dome fool you.
In the same century as this place was first used as a church,
Attila the Hun battled Rome, the Shaolin Monastery was founded
and Mayan civilization was enjoying its glory days. Sidenote:
The building on the right houses the oldest continuously running
restaurant in the world. "Genuine Salzburg hospitality for over 1200 years".

There is a part of Salzburg where young and dynamic people hang out, or so I'm told, but like most tourists I've never been there. I've only ever spent time in the the Altstadt, or old city, which radiates a stony coldness even on hot days. It also radiates conservatism and wealth, and many of the oldest (and most touristy) streets in town are filled with designer shops that have had a sort of Ye Olde Catholick Towne facelift. 

Alex's Oma lives in an area at the foot of an enormous rock called the Mönchsberg, atop which sits a properly medieval fortress. Around its base are chunky edifices and pathways that look like they were scraped into the mountain by monks who had nothing but wooden sporks to work with. Growing outward from the cliffside are cobblestone alleys lined with baroque-looking churches (and other buildings, but it feels like mostly churches) that hide truly antediluvian cellars in their bowels. 

Regular people in Salzburg

This city is old as they come. It was once a Celtic settlement, but in 15 B.C. the Romans took over. That city, Iuvavum, fell apart in the 5th century but was later reestablished as the bishopric of Salzburg in 696 A.D. by Saint Rupert, or so Wikipedia tells me. 

You want to know how old this place is? St. Peter's Abbey, in which Alex's grandmother resides, is the oldest known convent in the German-speaking realm and indeed it is SO OLD that when St. Rupert came through he had the place renovated. The core of the building and spire that exist today were built in the Middle Ages, but of course at that point the site had been used as a church for a good five hundred years already. Despite the sometimes kitschy renovations, there's a kind of Indiana Jones feel to Salzburg, like some crusader might have stashed the Holy Grail in what is now the basement of the local Prada. 

More regular people

And in such a place, I guess it shouldn't be THAT surprising that traditional Austrian dress is back. Alex and I were told that young, hip people across Salzburg can now be seen rocking their Dirndl and Lederhosen, like, all the time.  And to our utter amazement, it was true. In Vienna, if you wear such things others will assume you are either selling cheese at a farmer's market, attending a wedding, or have atrocious politics. (Which is too bad, really, because a good Dirndl gives every woman--flat, fat or otherwise--a lovely hourglass figure.) 


Anyway, in Salzburg wearing your Tracht (national dress) these days doesn't mean anything! It just means you're wearing clothes! I wish I had gotten a picture of the one guy who was wearing Lederhosen with a V-neck sweater and a slouchy beanie over his dreads, but you'll just have to take my word for it. However, I did manage to take photos of these other perfectly regular people wandering around in their Dirndl and Lederhosen without goose-stepping, getting married or carrying wheels of cheese. 

Sadly we had to leave Salt Castle after only one night. 

Spot the Austrian detailing at this crosswalk!
(I see one hat and at least two pairs of Lederhosen.)

And thus we abruptly find ourselves at home on the Gumpendorfer Strasse of the 21st century, where the Volk have assiduously hip tattoos, do hot yoga, drink gin, and dress like the Amish. It's good to be back around normal people. 

Pennsylvania Dutch Country or Gumpendorferstrasse? This photo shamelessly plundered
from this website: http://www.theinquiringmind.net/2008/10/peoples-of-america-amish.html

Nava Gets a Gift

Hooray! My good old friend Denia is in town. I don't get to see her much because she lives in California where she does brilliant nuclear stuff and where I assume she and her colleagues gossip about quarks and Snapchat with Nobel Prize winners. 

Anyway, because Denia is lovely and still condescends to speak to the likes of me, we had a great time chit chatting and playing with the baby, and then Denia and I went out for a walk (and by walk I mean she waited with me at my gynaecologist's office, because that's the kind of stellar feminist friend she is). We talked about literature, meditation, iron-rich vegetables and the recent work of a transgendered Stanford professor of neurobiology. Actually, she talked about those things. I talked about baby poop and my episiotomy. 

Unfortunately, however, Denia was generous enough to bring young Nava a lovely baby book as a gift. Predictably, it is about rainbows. It opens with the sentence: "Little Rabbit and his mother were sitting under a big, red flower petal." You see, that's where they were waiting for the rain to stop. 

Denia and Nava. Looks like Nava just finished reading her new book!

The book is about what rainbows are made of. I always thought rainbows were made of light refracted through tiny water drops suspended in the atmosphere, but apparently that's wrong. It turns out rainbows are made out of RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE and PURPLE.

Thanks a lot for this super educational book, Denia. I thought you were a scientist. 

Okay, actually the book is really cute and has this whole thing with pop-out ribbons that build into a rainbow. And Denia is a wonderful person whom I love. Thanks so much for visiting, Denia, and thank you very much for the book. 

This is What Constitutes a Major Achievement in My Life These Days

Because Alex and I are adherents of the Path of Least Resistance School of Interior Design, we decided to conveniently locate Nava's diaper changing table in our living room. For the same reason, and because we are almost entirely innocent of either good taste or disposable income, our living room is basically monochromatic: everything is either black or white or a shade of gray. 

But the changing table was made of wood stained a fairly deep yellow, which didn't match, and it was missing an attachment that would have made it deep enough to fit a baby (we'd been laying her sideways). 

So last weekend, we built an attachment and painted it white!

BOOM. White changing table. Shot from below to add majesty.

Um, and that's it. 

Gosh. I was hoping this would be more of a blog post. It seemed like a serious achievement at the time. It involved planning the table extension, dismantling parts of the table, going to the hardware store, having wood cut, sanding the whole thing, nailing new bits together and painting everything twice. All on a Saturday. OH, oh, AND blogging about it. WITH a baby! I think we should get extra points for doing it with a baby. 

Not that our baby can talk or propel herself, or anything, but she does squall* loudly and for no reason for a couple hours every evening, and that made it pretty hard to concentrate. On the plus side, it made it totally irrelevant that Alex could have woken the dead when he was nailing pieces of wood together (at that point I was making futile efforts to calm our hysterical and inconsolable bairn, who was not hungry or in pain but was having her usual 6 pm bout of what I imagine is Creeping Existential Dread). 

Whatever. Fixing up the table was really hard and we are proud of ourselves. 

Here's a picture of our baby. She continues to be by far the best thing we've made. Didn't even have to go to the hardware store. 

P.S. Shana Tova, to those who celebrate it 

* By the way, the expression "a squalling infant" was a cliche I'd often read, but I feel like now I really understand. And we're lucky enough to have what they call an easy baby (knock on wood, salt over left shoulder, etc)! 

My First Baby Book

Baby books depicted are not necessarily terrible

Look!
I am a baby book.
Read!
I am about the letters A to Z.   

Your baby needs a good head start.
So you will read me to your baby 
but your baby will not give a fart.

She will not care on your couch.
She will not care on a chair.
She will not care in your arms.
She will not care anywhere.

She will stare
past your shoulder in the air
and you will wonder why 
you have not written a baby book yourself
because frankly
baby books are dumb. 
They make your soul numb. 

They have a rhythm and a rhyme
but only sort of and only sometimes.

This one cost fifteen euros
that you could have spent
elsewhere
and your baby would still stare
past your shoulder into nowhere. 

P.S. Really looking forward to books for slightly bigger children, which are better suited for reading than chewing. 

One Month!

Last Monday young Nava turned one month old. I wanted to write this then, but life. Also still no computer of my own. Anyway. She has not been eaten by the cats and the only injuries she has sustained were self-inflicted and nonlethal (various punches to the noggin near meal times, a couple scratches courtesy of the fastest growing mini fingernails in the world), and she continues to grow and gain weight. Hooray us! 

She is certainly doing better than our worthless, worthless cats, who now do lavish pees and poos anywhere they please at all times of the night or day. If Nava's first word is m******f***** it's not my fault. 

My mom can make me wear anything and I am totally defenseless. It makes me want to punch my own adorable little face!

Anyway, for the record, here are some of Nava's major achievements so far: 

1. Crusty umbilical cord replaced by 100% cute belly button.
2. Very smallest onesies officially outgrown, and the next size diaper is waiting in the wings
3. Can bring fist/fingers to mouth within three tries
4. Poops without weeping most of the time
5. Almost never crosses her eyes
6. Occasionally unclenches fists and uses those tweeny little starfish to grab things
7. To my dismay, sometimes she keeps her legs straightened even when sleeping. Less and less froggy. 

Her goals for next month include losing the black fuzz on her ears and learning not to eat while crying or cry while eating!