# 4 - Gottweig Monastery, drivers we like, festival day 1, and how to flush an Austrian toilet
Guten Tag,
Welcome to update Day 4 of the Monks trip. I messed up on the last update and told you it was for Mittwoch, or Wednesday, but it was for Thursday. Below is the update for Frietag, or Friday.
We woke up at 8 am to hike to the monestary, despite a late night at the Herginlokal and then the Goldenen Krone. There were a few hurt faces, and a few absent people, but most of the gang came along. The hike was pretty strenuous, but completely worth it! I have created a photo gallery, with notes about the monestary in the captions. I must say, the main chapel in the monestary was absolutely fascinating, with a baroque style. I have never seen anything quite like it in my life. Think Louis XIV... wow. The smell of incense was in the air, and even though you all know I'm not necessarily a religious person, i found it all somehow comforting and safe. I could see how people would be moved to spirituality by the immensity of it all. There was a little place where you could, for 1 Euro, light a candle, so I lit a candle for my sister, and said a little something for all the people I care about. There's your aw shucks moment for the week! ;0>
We then went to rehearsal, where I took more pics of the band practicing (the ones from the day before did not turn out, one of my cards went bad, so I had to take more!). It's fascinating seeing how the band members interact, they are so hilarious with each other, as there is some creative tension in the group. But as Gary the Monk says, creative tension is paramount to a good punk band! They are all quite affectionate towards each other, and even after 40-some years of not playing together they can still rock!
We didn't have much freetime that afternoon, as the first night of the festival was taking place, so we had a drink at a cafe and people-watched for a little while (and had our first rude Austrian experience, our only one, in fact), before heading back to the hotel to change. Our waiter seemed very annoyed that we had to speak some English to him, in fact, he seemed annoyed with everyone, not just us Americans, which is not such a good attitude in a job that has to deal with tourists all the time. Whatever, everyone else we have met in Krems is just wonderful.
This whole time, we have had a series of young (and very handsome!) men acting as our drivers, taking us back and forth between Furth and Krems. They were all locals to the area, and had these amazing stories of the town, history, etc. I wish I had written more of them down. One story, which Peter told us (there was Martin, Peter, Rainer and Toby - alas I took no pic of Rainer), was about a little village called Mautern, which we drove through each day to get between Furth and Krems. Apparently Mautern was built on the site of an old Roman town, as the Romans used the Danube (or Donau) river as part of their main transportation system. It is quite common in Mautern when they try to build houses, if they dig down to build a cellar or something they will run into old ruins from this time period. You would think, oh how cool! Let's all dig to see! But the locals see it as supremely annoying, because if they run into some of the ruins, then by law they have to call in the government, who then sends in a team of archeologists to examine and excavate the ruins to see what the function was. This can take up to a year, which means your construction is completely halted. So people just refuse to build cellars! All this history, simply amazing.
Friday night, we went back to the Klangraum Krems Minoritenkirche (Minorite Church) for night one of the music festival (the Monks play on night 2). We ate at Filmbar, a restaurant on Campus Krems, or the local university campus. It was very modern, with exposed piping and extreme lighting, just as you might find in NYC or most major cities, and they played top 40 American music, with some of the songs' videos projected on a wall. The place was pretty packed with students, who all dress very stylishly and seem much more grown up than college kids in the USA. In fact, most people here seem more grown up than Americans. There is this air of confidence and indifference to many of the people, I cannot quite put my finger on it. Style is extremely important to the mainstream, though the artists and production people we met through the festival (artsy types) are very similar to the artsy types I know and love so well back home.
At the music festival, the act we watched was this experimental music group called Silent Block from France. They had this huge table set up in the middle of the room, with all kinds of objects set on it, like metal balls and cellophane and weird, self-made noisemakers and instruments. There were three members of the group, and they all set up around the table and made this incredible amount of noise that was actually interesting and rhymthically easy to listen to. I will have to show you the video I took on my little camera. It’s fascinating. I wasn’t sure if I would like it, but I actually did. And they were all quite nice, I met them after the show. I met a lot of nice people associated with the Klangraum group. As it turns out, a lot of their productions are paid for by the Austrian government (or so I understand). The Austrian government is apparently very interested in encouraging and maintaining a very healthy cultural community, and are big on these types of festivals and centers such as Klangraum.
That’s it for Friday. Afterwards, we went back to the hotel and crashed. Tomorrow is Monktime!
Oh, and one very interesting thing I have discovered about both Austria and Germany, all of the toilets in public restrooms (I do not know about private), including hotels, have TWO different buttons. One is little flush one is for big flush, for …. You get the idea. How efficient, and ecological!! There are so many things like that here, like the way hotel room keys work (there is a magnetic button attached to the key, which you can use to get into the building late at night). And the wall light switches, more like buttons, less chance of getting shocked. And at a lot of the stores, you have to pay if you want to take a plastic or paper bag, which encourages people to either carry their few items, or bring their own canvas shopping bag. And almost ALL the cars are smaller to save on gas. I could go on and on…. Just more examples of why Europeans probably feel superior to Americans. Maybe they should….. ;0>
End of part four. On to part five --->