Saucer surprise at Maribor Vinotek

Down by the River Drava in Maribor there is a Vinotek that serves local wine ... and good coffee as well.

Vinotek by the Drava in Maribor

I was having an espresso there on Sunday morning when the wind blew away the small paper serviette under the cup, revealing an image on the saucer.
I had a closer look ...

Espresso cup ... and what's that on the saucer?

... and found someone staring up at me from below. What a surprise and I would have missed him without the wind gust.

Oh,  hello there!

Maribor Music Festival 2012

The Maribor Music Festival 2012 concerts so far have ranged from virtuosic Mendelssohn to electric guitar.

Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) performed in London on 1st September and received rave reviews. They performed the same concert in Maribor on Wednesday to an equally warm reception from the packed hall. On Thursday they played Bach and Mendelssohn with an incomparable virtuosity.

The ACO are in Maribor for the whole festival this year, playing sometimes alone and sometimes joined by the Slovenian Philharmonic.

Last night they were joined by comedian Gerry Connolly and Brian Ritchie (Violent Femmes rock band). In the second half Satu Vanska sang and it turns out she is not only a virtuoso violinist but has a lovely voice and good comic timing.

Satu plays violin

The unrenovated Maribor

In among the  interesting cafes of Maribor you can still find signs of the old Yugoslavia. Near the large renovated square with its fresh new cobblestones is this old house with its peeling plaster and an old wooden door that looks as if it has not been varnished for a century.

Unrenovated house in Maribor

 If you walk into the door and along the courtyard inside you come to a narrow little yard with washing hanging on pulleys. It is old but swept clean and geraniums hang from the small balcony above. Past the washing is a forlorn but romantic garden lane with a little path through scattered leaves and a set of stairs that leads to the houses up the hill behind.

Old but tidy

Back garden of unrenovatd house

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Cafe design

There are coffee shops on every corner in Maribor and each of them is distinctive. This one behind my hotel has a steel tree inside and  ...

serves coffee in cups that are as interesting as the decor.

New Art Gallery for Maribor

If you are interested in architecture, have a look at the website that shows the competition results and various options offered by architects for the new Art Gallery to be built in Maribor. Some are less inspiring!

Isabella Cafe

The Isabella Cafe opened in 2010 and is now an established part of the Maribor cityscape. The owners are environmentally and fresh food conscious and their soups and salads are delicious, as is the Human Fish beer they serve. 

Beer at the Isabella Cafe

I had a Human Fish beer at the Isabella and drew their bowl of oranges.

Oranges in bowl.

Ornamented bank building

This was my view of Maribor over coffee yesterday in the Town Square.

Building housing the bank in Maribor Town Square

I have had cause to visit this building as it houses the local bank and I was attempting to sort out some issues with my bank card. They are sorted now, but I am suddenly very aware of how exposed those tourists are who have had their wallets stolen.

Maribor, Cultural City 2012

Maribor 2012

The only outward sign that Maribor is the 2012 European City of Culture are a series of large balloons around the city. This may be the only outward sign but a lot of the city has been rejuvenated in the lead up to 2012. Another large square has been created ... finished this year at last. There is a music event taking place there as I write - the music is floating over the city, quite unusual haunting music.

Newly finished city square.
Behind the spot where the photo was taken is a very large tented podium with loud speakers etc.

All of the inner city is closed to traffic and it has a wonderful effect. People walk or ride bikes and the atmosphere is relaxed and friendly. When will Australia take a leaf out of the European book? Perhaps Sydney, Melbourne (or Umina!) could apply to be the next City of Culture?

Painted boy

Yesterday the streets of Maribor were full of young people with markings. Some had every bit of exposed skin marked ; others had marks here and there.

Boy in Maribor street with his freshman markings.

It is a yearly ritual - the fourth year students mark first year students and all of them are very excited.

Life in Maribor

There are lots of outdoor cafes in the old city of Maribor and the tables spread right out over the streets which are closed to traffic.

Coffee shop patrons in Maribor town square

The Cafes are lively, full of people chatting over a coffee or a soft drink. Occasionally there is a table of beer drinkers, but mostly people sit for what seems like hours with a bottle of water or lemonade or a coffee in one of its many forms. The clientele are of all ages; tables of youngsters, tables of mature ladies, tables of families, tables of men, all of them chatting in the sun. Somehow life seems simpler here.

Families and bicycles

Medieval Maribor

Back in Maribor, looking out over medieval rooves as I walk along the 4th floor corridor to my attic room. How could you not love a city like this?

Austrian/Slovenien border

From the window of the train

This is the border between Austria and Slovenia, between Graz and Maribor a train ride of something over an hour. . 

At the border the train stops for some time; perhaps they change engines. This visit I had to change trains, from the red and white Austrian rail carriage into the Blue and white Slovenian one. The steps of the Slovenian train were high off the ground so people were lifting children up and heaving up baggage after them. I sat looking out the window thinking how these national borders affect the people who live near them. Now there is little difference between the two countries, but not so long ago this was the start of Soviet influenced Europe.

Music magazines

As I wrote from Sydney, I couldn't find a single music or art related magazine in the Sydney Airport magazine/book store. I was looking for Opera Today to read the article on Christine Goerke, one of the singers I sketched in New Zealand.

I checked at the book store at the Graz railway station and there I found four different magazines about opera, two about musicals, one about ballet and so many art related magazines I didn't bother to count them. There were just as many titles about computers, sport, cars etc as in Sydney of course, it's just that the offering was more balanced. Opera Today was not one of the four available opera magazines so I left with Das Opernglas.

Maybe Lyndon Terracini (Opera Australia artistic director) could arrange that at least one store in Sydney carries opera titles, perhaps the opera house store? Would that be too much to ask? 

Graz Kunsthaus

The Graz Art Gallery by the Mur River has a very unusual shape.

Model of the Kunsthaus Graz which stands outside the gallery

As with most European art galleries, there is an entry fee (8 Euro in Graz) and I always wonder how many more people would visit if the galleries were free as they are in Australasia. They might attract people who thought they were not particularly interested in art, especially on a wet day like Saturday. Instead I was one of a select very few who were wandering around the exhibits.

The first floor was given over to media art, a very crowded floor of media screens none of which captured my attention for more than 5 seconds. Media art can be wonderful, but just because things move doesn't mean they are interesting.

The work on show on the top level with those odd shaped window-tubes was much more interesting and worth the eight Euro entry fee. Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, who had done a four month residency in Austria, was showing work created in Austria and back home in China. His paintings were very large and naturalistic but all of them were worth looking at. They were mostly simple scenes of people talking or looking, set against a backdrop of their locality but somehow they made you think up stories to fit them and I found myself going back to have another look at several.

Paintings by Liu Xia0dong. The round tube windows are a feature of the building.

The tube windows on the 3rd floor are unusual and the space is a bit awkward with few internal walls (or perhaps the internal walls had been taken out for this show) but that didn't detract from the paintings.

Liu had also made movies showing his method of working. I found them much more interesting than the media downstairs. The one I watched was a 38 minute movie about a horse market in China.

Screen showing movie of the work habits of Liu.

It showed the market, how Liu chatted with the peasants to see what was going on, how he sketched and then transferred his sketches onto large canvases. He had quite a few young helpers and my impression was that they helped not only with the set up and transfer of sketches but also with the painting.

At the top of the gallery there is a glassed-in balcony where you can look over the bridge crossing the River Mur to the city beyond. The river was turbulent and still the rain fell.

Graz, viewed from the top of the Kunsthaus

Tide turning for smokers

Germans are, as a nation, very concerned about health so it is surprising that so many of them smoke. Things seem to be changing though, judging by railway station etiquette. Areas for smokers on train platforms are now marked with thick yellow lines and on the stations I visited, smokers were using them.

Platform at Munich Ostbahnhof

On Austrian railway stations passive smoking is the norm as smokers still spread themselves right along the platform and it is impossible to find an unpolluted spot. . There were no smokers in the Graz station hall, but almost every patron at the Lavazza coffee shop in the station building was smoking so I bought a takeaway and sat outside the shop to drink it.
The Polish woman at breakfast told me that in Poland smoking in enclosed spaces and on station platforms is forbidden and that not so many young people smoke.

Austria is wet and cool

Before leaving Sydney I had seen television coverage of the heat and fires in Spain so I was surprised that Munich was cold (14C). It was also very wet and as my train to Graz sped through the landscape I looked out over sodden fields with puddled water and gushing rivers almost breaking their banks.

Swollen river between Salzburg and Bischofshofen

In Austria I had to change trains in Bischofshofen and was pleased my wait was only 15 minutes because it was even colder there.The Alps, soaring straight up from the railway line were very misty and romantic, a view easier to paint than photograph, but soon we were over the top and racing along wet green fields again, this time with typical Austrian Chalet houses.

Wet Austrian landscape

I wasn't surprised this morning when the television showed fresh snow on the mountain tops. Graz is wet but warmer - about 22C.

Austrian webcam: the caption at the bottom reads "Summer Operations from 21.06-16.09.2012"

Munich Ostbahnhof

On the long hours of the flights from Sydney to Munich I thought, 'This is too far - I must be crazy.'  Once I got here it didn't seem too far at all. Our bodies are programmed to forget the bad bits which is probably just as well.

Munich was 14C and very wet.  I took the S-Bahn to Munich Ostbahnhof where the coffeeshops were just opening. There were very few patrons at 6am when I got there but lots of people pausing in their rush to work when I left at 8am to catch my train to Graz.

Oz culture

The magazine/book store at Sydney airport has stands and stands of motoring, computing, home and garden, baby and 'women's interest' mags but not a single art or music magazine. I wanted to read the article about Christine Goerke in Opera Today. Instead I bought 'The Economist'.

Siegmund painting

The painting Siegmund is finished and I have left it sitting on the easel so it will be the first thing I see when I walk back through my door. A full photo is online at artsmitten. 

Mortimer: clever and erudite

John Mortimer's clever and funny autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage turned up on the top of a pile of books during my spring clean and I have been taking great pleasure in re-reading it. (Mortimer is best known for his creation Rumpole of the Bailey.)

Today I am reading page 190 in which he writes about Peter Sellers being like a blank script which others could write on. 'I don't think it is common for actors to provide such a degreee of blankness for others to write on,' he writes and notes that the 'Peter Sellers character may be more common in daily life than is comfortable to realise.'