Bosch was the last thing we did in Vienna.

It was the last thing we did in Vienna, after mass at Stephansdom and one last café of significance. The mass was conducted in the local language, leaving me ample uninterrupted time to consider two major questions: exactly how many statues are there in that one cathedral? (Well over one hundred, but an exact count would require binoculars and moving around.) And how to keep my nose warm? Stick it into a bowl of nuked raw rice, which is how I warm up my fingers? Or create a knitted nose hat, not unlike the beaky nose-cones filled with sweet herbs worn by doctors during the Black Plague? Not unlike something that might be worn in a Boschian version of hell? Having solved neither question we headed to the Café Sperl. In 1988 and again in 1999 it was rated the best coffeehouse in Vienna, whatever that means, but I still preferred our Café Grienstadl. The plan was to walk back from Café Sperl to our Airbnb on Langskongasse and then take an Über to the airport, getting us there ridiculously early for our flight back to Frankfurt, but we were still traumatized from having missed our flight to Vienna five days earlier, necessitating an eight-hour train ride. A perfectly fine train, but still.
And still, we had not seen Vienna’s Bosch. Had we not seen Klimts and Schieles beyond count, and Bruegels, Arcimboldos, Rubens, Titians and a Vermeer? When is enough art too much art?
Not yet.
I realized I couldn't bear to leave Vienna without gazing on the Last Judgment. We ran around the corner to the Gemäldegalerie. We paid our fee and and ran through the galleries to the one and only Last Judgment. And there it was: the turbaned man with no torso and a lizard’s tail; the dragon leering at the naked Eve; red devils cooking and being cooked; the pierced egg with two legs; heads with feet and only feet; blue creatures playing flutes. It was all there, and so much more. Nobody could imagine the creepiness of Hell quite like Bosch.

Bosch was the last thing we did in Vienna.
Of course we got to the airport too early. We could have spent much more time contemplating the tortures that await us in the afterlife. We could have spent time in the gift shop where they sold ingenious figurines of assorted Bosch creepy creatures. (I already have one, and I know that Reine covets it.) At the airport there was time to finish the final pink pussyhat for Anna in Berlin. And eat Mozart chocolates filled with praline. We even made the plane.

Getting to know Sissi

Before going to Vienna last week with Bine, I had never heard of Sissi. Nor had I felt the lack of Sissi in my life. Before Vienna, I knew about the irascible Thomas Bernhard, and the sad exiles Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, about Freud’s couch, about Schiele and all his extraordinary, bony hands, about Bosch’s cracked eggs, webbed feet, fallen angels and impaled sinners, about Wiener Werkstätte.
Nothing about Sissi or any Hapsburgs at all.
Now I know that Sissi - real name: Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Queen consort of Croatia and Bohemia - was very beautiful and, to understate the case, obsessed with her beauty. Little girls growing up in Austria and Hungary watched the Sissi trilogy with Romy Schneider, and dreamt. Now, while admittedly I still don’t know much about Sissi, I know who she is and that she matters very much indeed. I have checked on Netflix for any of the many Sissi movies and mini-series, to cheat on my research, but sadly none are available on Netflix. My computer’s spelling program does not recognize Sissi, or its alternate spelling, Sisi.

I discovered Sissi via her sarcophagus. I had no idea about the Hapsburg predilection for fabulous monuments to their dead. Inside the Kapuzinkrypt, or Church of the Capuchins, I came to know a few Hapsburg tombs. As Bine predicted, Sissi’s had fresh flowers. So what that she died over 125 years ago. Bine told me how Sissi was born in Bavaria to a duke obsessed with circuses and his princess wife. Her childhood was, by noble standards, relatively rustic and unstructured. Sissi liked to catch frogs, ride horses and make daisy chains. Then she married Emperor Franz Joseph and even worse, acquired the formal and controlling Archduchess Sophie as a mother-in-law. Sissi often escaped the humorless rigidity of the Vienna court by heading to Hungary and parts beyond. And throughout, the maintenance of her beauty, her wasp waist and cascading hair, became her life’s work. Her beauty regimens are too painful to even describe. Poor Sissi was assassinated, almost by accident. The Italian anarchist was planning to assassinate the Duc d’Orleans that day, but when the duke changed his plans, the flexible anarchist went after the next noble to present herself, Sissi. There, on the promenade in Geneva, he stabbed Sissi with a sharpened file. Initially, her tightly laced corset staunched the blood flow, but she died just the same.

After making her acquaintance, after letting Sissi into my life, there was nothing to do but repair to the PalmHaus café (the second café in what would be a 5 café day) and drink pink wine in the sunshine.