Listen
Play "My Favorite Things," from The Sound of Music
One of my favorite things to do when I go to other countries is to make wild generalizations about them based on the tiny sliver of exposure I get -- like if someone from India flew to, say, Poughkeepsie and reported back, "Americans seem to love cheese fries!" Today, I flew into Munich and took a shuttle to Salzburg, stopping in several small villages in between to drop other people off. Now that I'm an expert on Germany and Austria, some observations:
- There are no ugly buildings here. There are old buildings in a particular Teutonic-village style, with stone exteriors and brown tile roofs and wood-hewn doors, and there are some new buildings, built in what I guess you could call the Modern Sustainable style (lots of colored panels, very squared off, big glass doors and windows), but I have not seen a single one of what you see in virtually every American town these days: the cheap, disposable, thoughtless strip-mall-and-McMansion style.
- The streets in these villages are incredibly narrow, there are tons of storefronts and houses butting up against them, and there are people walking all over them. These places are quite conspicuously not built around automobiles.
- There are people on bikes everywhere. And gardens.
- There are vans for cargo, and there are small cars for people. I haven't seen a single SUV, or even very many full-size sedans. (How can they tell who has the biggest penis?!)
- Somehow Google knows I'm here, and is serving up its homepage in German. Now that's just creepy.
Oh, and about the Schloss Leopoldskron? Sure it's beautiful and all (that picture below is the view from outside the back door), but there's no AC, and it's hot here. It's gonna be a sweaty night.
Comments
View as Flat
dissociated Posted 2:08 am
11 Jul 2008
You can tell there's a different way of thinking in Europe, or maybe it's just that they've been doing things that way for so long and their streets have always been that narrow, so they work around it. I miss the buildings. North American ones are shabby in comparison, and design so incredibly limited and unvaried here. Some friends of mine (who've never been to Europe) keep insisting that it's because North Americans want everything to be cheaper upfront, but I don't buy that. It's just an established pattern and less regulation that leaves us with crappier, more uniform products. The more research you do, the more you realize we're getting the lowest common denominator compared to Europe.
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alphaniner Posted 2:20 am
11 Jul 2008
http://www.google.com/intl/en/
I have been living in Germany for a couple of months now and the fact that google automatically decides that I want my search results in German is annoying.
If I wanted German results, I would have typed in http://www.google.de and not http://www.google.com!
Also if you are a gmail user, google very recently lost the trademark for gmail here (actually they never had it). I used to always type gmail.google.com
now I have to type mail.google.com
All the bikes and people walking around the pedestrian friendly downtown areas are wonderful though:)
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caniscandida Posted 5:51 pm
13 Jul 2008
Meanwhile, let us never miss any opportunity to comment on art and religion, two fundamental elements of human nature which Maria von Trapp famously combined:
Salzburg is of course the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the best-loved composers of all time; surely DR would have had to be blindfolded, or drugged, not to notice one of the town's principal tourist attractions.
Of interest to political scientists and historians is the datum that the Archbishopric of Salzburg survived till relatively recently as an autonomous principality within the empire ruled from Vienna; it must have been one of the longest-surviving ecclesially administered states in Europe, after the Vatican, and Mount Athos in Greece.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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