Foreign Parts
Delmenhorst, Germany

Foreign Parts.

On Tour from New South Wales.

[By F. E. Rieck.]

Delmenhorst (Bremen), May 18, 1899.

The journey from Gratz in Styria to Vienna leads through the most remarkable and wonderful of landscapes. The railway is a series of zigzags over the Alps, with every now and then lovely views of snow lying on the mountains, deep gorges and rocky precipices. The Semmering is the mountain whose highest peaks are pierced by a great number of long tunnels, and then we descend again. At all the Alpine stations along this route were girls and boys selling Edelweiss and other pretty flowers, which grow amongst the snow-covered clifts of these regions, and we purchased two bundles of Edelweiss. The boys and men of the mountains always wear birds’ feathers and also flowers on the back of their hats. At first this seemed to me very funny, but now it appears quite stylish. The Croatian women, of a Slavonian (not Teuton) tribe, living between Trieste and Styria, are only 3½ and 4 feet high, and very big round the hips. They wear top boots and (also the oldest women) very short dresses.

There are many kinds of bread on the European Continent. In Naples it was very good, with plenty of hard crust but no salt, as this article is heavily taxed by Government. In Rome the bread was good plain, soft wheaten, in big loaves, and had always to be weighed to the people by the bakers. In Venice it was made with butter and milk, and therefore did not require further buttering. In Trieste it had carraway seeds, and also brown rye-bread with carraway seeds was used; white bread containing butter and milk and also bread with a little sugar and raisins was eaten here with the coffee. I am wondering what kind of bread comes next.

We have had wet weather ever since we came to Vienna, but as we hear there is snow in Trieste and Gratz we are content to be away from there. Here it is not very cold but disagreeably wet, and the air is cloudy, sultry and dull even when not raining. We have visited most of the museums and picture galleries. Here, for the first time, I noticed many Greuses, so often read of, also magnificent paintings by Van Dyk, Michael Wulky (including a perfect painting by this master of the Solfatara volcano near Puzzuoli, Naples), Jan Davide, Ostado, Rubens, Tintoretto, Hamilton, and many others. We greatly enjoyed looking at the old celebrated Dutch paintings.

Venice is the best built town I have ever seen and is wonderfully clean. The gardens and parks are spacious and beautiful, especially the Prater or Folks Garden, several miles in extent, and having every kind of amusement, including “Venedig in Wien,” an imitation of Venice with gondolas, a wheel-about 200 feet in circumference, etc; also a waxworks, snow and ice mountains, shooting gallery, circus, etc.

We also went to see the great Danube river, where my husband in his early days, 33 years ago, by his own little jolly boat (here called shenacle) on his journey to Odessa and the Caucasus mountains, went to the far plains of Hungary. The Danube is a big river, but not so wide here as further down. We saw a number of timber rafts, and all along from Gratz to here we noticed timber in lots and floating rafts waiting to be sent or floated down the smaller rivers into the Danube. There are some splendid bridges here, but this great river does not run through the main part of the city, and therefore we did not see many steamers going to and fro. There are in many of the streets of Vienna an immense railway and electric tram, but traffic is so great that loaded omnibuses follow one another in rapid succession from early morning till midnight.

St. Stephen’s tower, the highest point in this city, is said to be about three times the height of the Campanila (steeple of the St. Marco church) in Venice. This gigantic tower was built by the ancient Goths (a Teuton tribe) in their special style, which is very grand, but although highly artistic and ornamental, looks dark and gloomy, and the inside is as cold as charity. The Rathhaus (town hall) and the Vitiv Kirche—the latter with two tall steeples—built by the present Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph—are also grand buildings.

In the Schoenbrum Gardens we visited the Zoo, but as it was rather cold the tropical animals—lions, tigers, monkeys, etc.—did not appear till about 2 p.m. There were a large number of animals, but nothing very remarkable except a good-natured funny bear and birds. In a grand pond of cold water a couple of seals appeared to greatly enjoy this climate, and they appear to be intelligent animals. The large botanic Glass Palace in this immense Schoenbrum Castle Garden—with palms a hundred feet high, pandanas, orchids, figs, lilies, azaleas, and hundreds of queer-looking and beautiful plants—are among my happiest recollections; also the long, straight, broad linden-tree walks, lakes, fountains, castles, grass plots, flower beds, etc., have been frequently visited during our stay in Vienna. One special feature of Vienna is its Ring Strasse, a very wide promenade, completely encircling the old city.

I cannot say that provisions or clothing are cheap in Vienna; in fact, I thought it more expensive than Italy, in spite of the grumbling of the Italians that they are so heavily taxed. For one sovereign in English money we get 12 gulden or florins in Austria, but the gulden seems to stretch out only about as far as a shilling in New South Wales. Meat is dear, also cheese, bread, tea, coffee and kerosene; other things, such as eggs, butter, etc., rise and fall in price. Firewood is horribly dear, so that cooking—done in Rome by charcoal—is done in Vienna by spirit-lamps, gas, and unhealthy kerosene-stoves, rooms also being heated by the latter means. Most public halls, post offices, schools, etc., are most miserably ventilated, and people appear to think that fresh air is poisonous, and the drumming and flapping of carpet-beaters is heard on staircases and at open windows, wrapping the morning air of this town in a miserable atmosphere of yellow cloud. No wonder that the population look unhealthy, depressed and miserable, quite different to the dwellers in villages amidst green fields and mountains.

After a visit to the magnificent Opera House, and having seen the lovely moon pictured highly artistically there, and heard grand old French Roccocco music in “Mignon,” we took our departure for Dresden at 7 o’clock on the 11th of May, but when we saw late in the evening the beautiful waters and the mountainous shores of the Upper Elbe River at Leitmeritz in Bohemia, my husband regretted having taken passage as far down as Dresden, as this landscape is of the greatest charm. So we stopped in the middle of the night at the pretty little town of Texhan in Bohemia, where, at the railway station, we stayed wrapped in our Australian furs till 4.30 in the morning, when we partook of a good breakfast of coffee, etc., and rambled about the woody mountain shores till a shower changed the blue sky into a muddy-grey water-sponge, and drove us back to the railway station and into the train for Dresden.

We tried to get lodgings for a week or two, to explore the countries of the Upper Elbe River, but the rain coming down very heavily, we were soon back at the railway station, in dry clothes, in the train for Leipzig, Hanover, and Bremen, and will at a more favourable time visit those places, where we were determined to stay longer, later on in the year.

With my husband’s home here in Delmenhorst I am most agreeably surprised and pleased, as I expected to see cold, bare unhomely plains. Flat this country certainly is, but everywhere there are beautiful forests of oak, beach, pine, birch, poplars, etc., growing; apple and pear trees of immense size, plums, cherries, damsons, etc., all in full white and pink bloom, amongst vegetable and flower beds. The sweet nightingales sing during the long mornings and evenings in the shrubberies, and swarms of larks flutter over the green young grain fields, which stretch in all directions to enormous distances; but best of all my dear husband’s relations and friends have given us such a warm and hearty welcome that I am really touched by it, and already feel as much at ease—being now pretty well practised in the German language—as if this German land near the North Sea was my childhood’s home.