Sightseeing in Vienna

After a leisurely start including an overpriced but wonderful breakfast in a Viennese coffee house, we got to work on seeing the sights. We tried to avoid the historic centre, as we had signed up for a hostel walking tour later. This didn’t leave a whole lot! The main sight was the Hundertwasserhaus, an odd but beautiful architectural work of art from 1983.

Then we went to the Vienna International Centre, hoping to see some UN buildings. Alas everything, even the courtyard, was behind locked doors. We did see Donau city however; a slightly futuristic apartment/park complex. A quick jaunt back to the hostel with the subway and we began our walking tour of the ‘real’ Vienna with Wolfgang. Spectacular, and a lot of fun. Dinner was in a nice little Italian place... Afterwards we were a little exhausted from so much walking!

Viennese Danube-side artwork, and Matt 'reflecting' by the pool in Donau City

Modern architecture at Donau City
(click on the picture to see the Austrian expressions on the wall of the building)

The museums quarter

Historical Art Museum at Maria-Theresa-Square


Left to right: Balcony of the National Library (back then Hotel Imperial) at the Heldenplatz, from which Hitler gave his speech announcing the "Anschluss" of Austria; Goethe statue; Mozart statue. According to our tour guide Austria's greatest trick is to persuade people to think that Goethe is Austrian and Hitler is German. Nobody argues about Mozart.


The beautiful city hall with circus; Cafe Central, supposedly a hangout of Trotzky, Lenin and other intellectuals; one of Vienna's old street cars.


Vienna at night


St. Stephen's cathedral

Recovering from the journey

Just had a good and much needed nights sleep at the ‘Red Carpet Hostel’. They really do have a red carpet, and apparently we are all celebrities. Hence we received free glasses of pinkified sparkling wine.

Getting the bikes off the train went about as smoothly as could be expected, as did putting them back together. We were 20 minutes delayed thanks to our railjet breaking down in St. Pöltem... It must have just pushed itself too hard. Wien Westbahhof is under construction, and we had no map, but having looked at one in a store, we found the street we needed. Later, after a truly typical Matt & Birgit restaurant search, we found a lovely small, seemingly ‘local’, and (crucially), cheap place. Our first sights of Wien were truly spectacular... now I wonder what it will be like in daylight!?

Railjet Moaning (both me and the train)

The great 'high speed train of the Austrian railways' just limped its way through Linz. So far I'm not buying the 'bikes would delay our dwell time in stations' (more here, in German) argument. We were already 5 minutes late. I can assure OBB that getting a bike in a bike bag on (and I expect also off) a train is more burdensome than a bike with both wheels attached. Isn't this why we invented the wheel in the first place?

We're doing 200km/h, bumping along, but at least bumping along quuckly, the LCD screens that the train is plastered in proudly displaying the fact. Unlike the Germans, they don't try to hide their slower speeds... parts of the crawl out of Germany were at 90km/h. They may charge ICE prices, but this is no ICE. The only distinguishing features in that regard are the power outlets, refusal to take bikes and gratuitous screens. The smell of brakes and rock hard seats would at best allow one to call the railjet an IC in nice paint.

But! Enough complaining. We are on holiday, we're piercing onwards into Eastern Europe, and in less than 1 1/2 hours we'll be in Vienna.

First hurdle cleared

We and the bikes are safely onboard the 'railjet'. We found two perfect spots, and so far no one complained. We´re now sitting happily watching the beautiful countryside and recovering from the rather strenuous effort of getting all the stuff here!

What I got out of Bristol...

...at least in terms of pictures :P 

Vocal Training in Bristol (almost)

Now for a post absent of all travel, neither blissful or chaotic. We were in the beautiful South Gloucesticeshire countryside for a weekend of training, reflection, prayer and planning with the guys from the Speak Network. In keeping with the 'Speak'-ing theme, the event is always called 'Vocal Training', and is aimed (from what I can tell) mostly at those aiming to lead Speak groups in cities and Universities, and at those who want to be empowered to network with other campaigners whereever they are. I guess Birgit and I fall into this latter category, as we are missing terribly the wonderful opportunities we had in Boston with the Boston for Bhopal group.

Rather than try and describe Speak in the abstract, I'll just recount what I can remember of what we did. Hopefully that way it's more interesting, and gives a flavour of what Speak is all about... Its mostly from my perspective, perhaps if Birgit has time she'll make a post too.

The event lasted from Friday night until Tuesday morning, but we were only there until late-afternoon Sunday. Friday evening was fairly laid back. We ate together (wonderful Pasta and a Tomatoey Vegetable goodness), talked together and prayed together.

On Saturday, we arrived part-way into a session, "Being a rhythmic community" by Scott Allbrecht from the Catholic Worker Farm, just north of London. They take people in off the streets and live together with them in community. Scott put it something like "living with other Christians is just too easy". He has found the experiences very tough but also very rewarding - that living in this way can teach you how to love and how to be loved. He also believes strongly that unless love is active, religion is worthless, pointing out that Jesus love was active through his death.

At the farm, they also do a lot of gardening - supporting a philosophy of using one's hands, of doing physically active work. A challenge then is to find a place in one's 'rhythm' of life for such work.

Then, we moved on to considering Civil Disobedience as a form of protest. This was certainly a little more controversial, but perhaps rather challenging. No one seems to disagree that when laws are utterly unjust, people will, and are justified in rising up in disobedience against them. The interesting thing is what we do about laws that are perpetrating injustice, or leading to injustice against others, rather than ourselves. Now we start to take in things like the 'legality' of arms fairs, military bases and so on. Does the illegality of the consequental actions trump the paper legality at home? Scott certainly doesn't think so. The other interesting, small point, is that part of reconciling the Bible's contempt for unjust laws with Paul's direction to obey the authorities in power is to obey to the letter 'just' laws... even if they might seem stupid. But on that particular topic, there is apparently a whole book, by Karl Barth.

Much of the rest of the day was taken up with considering how to nurture a Speak group... how to organize events, distribute workloads. All backed up with lots of prayer. Some of the tips on event planning were especially interesting - I found them applicable to a wide range of voluntary projects, not just Speak groups. I've pasted them in below:

As part of 'caring for one another', we put our names in a hat and chose someone for whom we had to be an 'Angel'. The assignment was to do one nice thing for that person each day. I limited my duties to making cups of tea, but my (anonymous) Angel made me a lovely note and left it on a table at the front (below).

Saturday evening was a really powerful and thoughtful experience. We sat in the large tent reading and picking up newspaper stories on world events. We also added headlines and questions of our own that weren't in the news just then. We then spent a lot of time in quiet and not-so-quiet prayer and thought. We picked out a story on the election troubles in Afghanistan, and wrote a few headlines of our own on the plight of women there, those in prison in Kenya for not paying medical bills, and continued suffering of people in Haiti. As the others made their way to tents for sleeping-in-the-cold attempt 2, Birgit and I headed back to Bristol and had a pot of tea in the hostel lounge.

Sunday was a lot more campaigns and action focused. We heard about the corporate accountability campaign, although thanks to Bristol's excellent bus service we missed most of it. We did get some material on the campaign though. The thrust is that companies are now so global, its very very hard to keep them accountable for anything they do in ill-protected parts of the world. Birgit and I know this only too well from the Bhopal campaign. I really see this campaign, despite the strong legal and technical focus, as being one of the foundation of how we can move forward on development. If we can create a global legal framework, or at least a system in the UK to hold UK companies accountable for their actions abroad, we could begin to reduce exploitation, and have it naturally replaced by sustainable development. There'll be more information on the campaign on the Speak website soon.

Next up, campaigning against the Arms Trade. This isn't a new campaign for Speak, but they want to make it the focus of Soundcheck 2010, their large conference in London next year. They, along with CAAT (Campaign against the Arms Trade), have already had a large measure of success in seeing the Defence Export Services Organization (DESO, a special organization that promoted UK arms sales around the world, and the only industry-specific lobbying organization in government, and an organization situated in the Ministry of Defence, rather than the DfTI... I could go on) shut down by Gordon Brown. Alas, DESO has now been reincarnated as DSO, now within the DfTI, and with fewer staff, and without a CEO from the arms industry in charge. Nonetheless, Speak and other groups are rightly demanding that the arms industry gets no special treatment by government above other industries, and they will be campaigning on the streets of London for this next year. Lots more info on the campaign can be found at Campaign against the Arms Trade, with Speak-specific resources to come soon. We talked a lot about Mobilization, the process of galvanizing people who aren't particularly connected with Speak into action for the day of protest. We each had to make a list of people we thought we might be able to ask - send me an email to find out if your on it ;-)

After lunch, we learnt about 'Music Speaks', Speak's new record label to publish justice-preaching artists. We also had some live music from some attendees. Where it gets especially creative is the link between this and Speak events. They are really pushing for groups to organize events and give Music Speaks artists a venue. Hence the message is spread, and fundraising can happen to support campaigns further. Fundraising, I should mention, was a recurrent theme through the conference. It can be hard to justify donations to Speak when there are so many other good, and somewhat more direct ways to help the poor. The flipside is that without campaigning to change some of the laws and practices stacked up against the poor, this direct help might always be needed. There are campaigning groups out there that receive large 'corporate' funding, and don't ask for monetary support (the ONE campaign springs to mind). Speak does receive some support from other NGOs, but it isn't enough to do everything they feel called to do. They also believe that committing a small amount of money can strengthen the bind between a member and the network. This seems to be like a bit of a chicken and the egg conundrum... perhaps part of the solution lies in having groups set fundraising goals with of course the help of their members, but also including events, that can build even more support.

Finally (for us at least) Symon Hill (a grassroots PR consultant, or rather, a media-savvy person), did a wonderful workshop on using the media to get your message across. This really pushed us to think about what media to pursue, and how to phrase our message. The central, sad but true message is that the media is used and manipulated by those we are campaigning against. If we don't use that columnspace or airtime, somebody else will.

Munich to Outer Bristol without planes or cars... easy, right?

I thought it might finally be time for "Matt" to put an entry on "Matt and Birgit's" Travel Blog. So, here goes. This one's going to be fairly travel-centric, and I'll put what we were actually doing in a separate post.

A while back we decided we would make the trip to Vocal Training, a training event for people from the Speak Network. As said above, I'll try and make the event itself another Blog post, but you can click on the links for more.

In my limited experience, they like to locate Vocal Training in what I would term the back arse end of nowhere (you'll have to take my word for it that at home this isn't such an offensive description!). And they have good reasons, its a bit like a spiritual retreat in some ways, so a 'rural' location is just right.

So now, how to get there. I needed to come from Munich, and Birgit would be coming from Frankfurt. Die Deutsche Bahn (say that in your strongest German acccent, it sounds GREAT) have a wonderful offer called the 'London Special' (or if we want to be authentic, the London Spezial). Here, for the bargain price of €49, you can travel from ANYWHERE in Germany to London. Now, it is of course not that simple. Firstly, you have to travel through Brussels, but that's no problem. Second, you are now playing a game of "find the train with some cheap seats left", which any UK readers of this blog will be familiar with. But you're playing it with at least two trains, and in my case even more as I wanted to stopover in Frankfurt, and they all need to somehow connect. Further, once the €49 tickets run out, they go up... €59, €69, €79, and who knows how much higher. We could find Birgit a ticket for €69 fairly easily, and several 'vias' later (i.e. not the quickest route), we could find tickets for me for €79, which meant it would be silly to buy the tickets together. There is no option to not take a reservation with a Eurostar ticket, they come for free and automatically, so Birgit and I would be separated...!

The solution, happily, was simply to add an extra reservation to my ticket, and have Birgit buy no reservations on the rest of here optional-reservation trains. As the observant may have noticed, we now had 3 seats and two tickets...!



Vocal Training was in 'Coalpit Heath', which is between Yate and Bristol. All that I could deduce from pouring over Google Maps was that Bristol 'Parkway' might be close, so we booked a direct train from Paddington for that part, using the tips from Seat 61 on how to buy a 'London International' ticket that covered the tube journey.

The journey from Munich via Frankfurt, Brussels and the Tube to Bristol Parkway was wonderful. So smooth, so fast, so easy! I might even go so far as to say relaxing. Perhaps not as fast as flying, but I'm told its hard to find flights to Bristol airport, so we would have had to transfer to a train in London anyway. No fun.

So now, we were in Bristol. Or at least Bristol Parkway, far from the real Bristol. Before I go on, its worth saying that we should have travelled to Yate, and stayed on site in a tent, or slept on a floor. This is the benefit of hindsight I suppose. We also should have travelled from Parkway to Bristol by train, but we thought we should do everything by bus to buy one combined ticket.

The travelling fun ended, and chaos began. Can I buy a ticket here for the bus? Nope. Can you tell me anything about bus tickets? No, but here's a nice leaflet (and, in fairness, it was a lovely leaflet). When a bus arrived, we told the driver we wanted to go into Bristol, and then later back out to Coalpit Heath. There are no tickets for anything between a day and one week, so we took what seemed like a bargain-ish £4 day ticket. And off we went to Bristol.

After about an hour and a half, we were still on our way to Bristol. Or at least being carried along by the slowly moving gunge of Bristol traffic. According to a nice old lady (nice old ladies, it appears, are the main users of Bristol's buses), the traffic is usually worse than this. So there was still much to be thankful for.

This picture sums up bus travel in Bristol well

We found our way to the hostel, which was wonderful. Great staff, great travellers, great food, lovely rooms, and a nice location by the quayside. I had hopes that we could do a little sightseeing, but it was already time to seek out the next bus and head for Coalpit Heath. The driver stared at out mile long ticket, and off we went. This was another long journey, but thankfully mostly because of the distance, and not the traffic. A lengthy walk through some country lanes, and finally we spied the tents. We'd made it!!! And I refer you to my other, currently hypothetical post for more details.

Almost there!!!

We were fortunate that other people with these things called cars drove us back to Bristol on Friday and Saturday evening. On Saturday morning, the £4 ticket didn't exist any more. Apparently such a ticket only existed for Bristol itself, and the price was now £6.90. We opted (after some lengthy discussion with the bus driver) for two singles instead. A bargain at £3.80 each for a distance of ... miles - I hope you can spot the sarcasm. Another nice little old lady on board told me Bristol bus fares could bankrupt you - I was inclined to agree. Perhaps part of the problem was that the buses were empty, and the few inhabitants were old ladies, travelling for free? Thinking ahead, I had asked the staff in the bus station if they knew anything about the mysterious bus 581 that went directly from Yate (nearby) to Parkway, so we could escape Bristol at the end of our trip without having to go all the way in and out again. Apparently the service wasn't run by First, so he couldn't tell me anything. The internet would later tell me that this service doesn't run on Sundays, so I needn't have bothered asking. The next morning (Sunday) I asked if there was the possibility of buying something that would cover a train journey from Yate to Parkway. The bus driver really felt like there might be something he could sell me, but he didn't know what, or how. So off we went on a fresh pair of gold-crusted single tickets again, and fortunately someone drove us to Parkway on his way home.

Now that we had escaped the 'Bristol Overground Network', it was back to London. Simplicity and civilization, right? Alas, our special London International tickets were eaten by the Paddington ticket exit machines. Of course we should have not let them near the machine and talked to the staff. But, it was too late. The explanation was 'the machines are programmed that way'. In a more secluded spot, the staff member told me that they hated these machines, and that newer, even more annoying ones were on their way. We'll send the Tube tickets (an Oyster receipt in my case, I brought the card just in case of such a disaster) to First Great Western and see what they say.

Apart from that minor hiccup, there isn't much else to say. I'm happily sitting aboard the Eurostar now, speeding towards Brussels, and I'm fairly certain there'll be no more problems (although things are FAR from perfect when travelling in Germany, they are at least usually better explained than "that's the way the machines are programmed"). That said, the check-in lady at Eurostar was thoroughly confused by us having two seats with one ticket. I had made the mistake of showing Birgit's ticket first (on the journey to the UK, we only showed mine). Looks like there's a little bit of miscommunication between Deutsche Bahn, Eurostar and whoever runs the ticketing system(s). And perhaps the possibility of bringing travel companions for €2 a head, though I wouldn't risk it!