Schönbrunn Palace

  The next day, the 26th, we went to a spot I never managed to get to during my summer in Vienna: Schönbrunn Palace.  Like the schloss in Laxenburg that I've been working at, Schönbrunn was a summer palace for the Habsburgs, but Schönbrunn is much fancier.  We started out walking around the gardens surrounding the palace; it was a viciously cold winter day, and I'm sure the gardens are much prettier in summer, but here are a few photos nevertheless:

  The third of those five photos is of a fake Roman ruins they had constructed in the garden, to lend atmosphere.  Nothing like the aristocracy, eh?  Can't imagine why we ever got rid of them.

  The interior of the palace is ornate beyond belief.  I wasn't supposed to be photographing, so these are surreptitious grab shots:

  The cabinet on the left in the next-to-last shot belonged to Marie Antoinette, who was one of the daughters of Maria Theresa.  Mostly the decor was simply over the top, but I have to admit, I wouldn't mind having that inlaid wood floor in my apartment.  :->

  There was a Christmas market outside the palace that had a particularly wide assortment of food; we tried maybe five different things, of varying degrees of yumminess.  I thought Keewi had taken photos of all that, but I can't locate them, so I will just leave you with a picture of Schönbrunn at night, as we stumbled back to the U-Bahn, cold but happy:

Brunch and Ballet

 On Christmas Day we plunged headlong into Vienna.  Here's Keewi at Steffl (the Viennese nickname for Stephansdom), with the Christmas tree there:

  We had a nice brunch at a restaurant called Palmenhaus, in an old converted greenhouse that probably used to be an orangery for the royals or some such (it is right next to the Hofburg palace):

  Really a beautiful place.  Keewi took photos of the food, which was a bit fussy and only pretty good:

  However, the dessert was phenomenal (still Keewi photos):

  That's their house dessert, called Palmentorte if I recall correctly; a bit like tiramisu but cakier.  Absolutely heavenly, one of the yummiest desserts I think I've ever had.  We also got a chocolate mousse sort of thing with maybe gooseberries around it, and a hot drink with coffee, Baileys, Kahlua, etc. in it.  Do I look like I'm having fun?

  So, Palmenhaus summary: skip the food and go straight to dessert.

  A bit of wandering, during which I discovered a statue of one of my heroes:

  Here's Keewi next to the famous statue of Mozart, with her trademarked "it's really really cold and I am barely tolerating you taking this photograph of me" expression:

  Then we walked over to the Vienna opera house (Wiener Staatsoper) to see a ballet, Die Fledermaus (music by Johann Strauss II).  It started off a bit boring, but the second half or so was really wonderful.  I didn't take photos during the performance, of course, but the opera house itself is quite a remarkable building:

  That last is the stage, with a curtain by Cy Twombly that seemed more than a bit out of place in the ornate, baroque surroundings.

  Possibly the best thing about this ballet performance was the little girl in the seat directly in front of us, perhaps five years old, who was clearly obsessed with ballerinas and completely over the moon.  She would lift her arms in the air and dance in her chair, while her parents embarrassedly tried to calm her down.  Wonderful.  Eventually we convinced them that we didn't mind, and they relaxed.  She loved Keewi, and insisted on borrowing her father's camera to photograph her.  When I tried to be in the photos too, the little girl got very grumpy, glaring at me filled with suspicion.

  All in all, a perfect Christmas!

Christmas markets

  My wife Keewi arrived in Vienna just before Christmas, for a two and a half week visit.  The first thing we did, immediately after dropping her suitcase at the apartment, was to charge off to the Christmas markets.  This is a lovely Viennese (or probably generally Austrian, perhaps even broader) tradition, in the days just before Christmas, and in some cases extending to New Year's.  A street or a plaza is filled with stalls selling yummy street food and hot spiced wine ("glühwein"), and then it is filled with people consuming those things.  Some stalls also sells arts and crafts, often Christmas-related but often not.  Here are photos (all on Keewi's camera) from three different Christmas markets, actually; in the downtown area they are so close to each other that they practically connect:

  That's the Spitalgasse market (the best crafts stalls), then Maria-Theresenplatz (big and open), then Museumsquarter (the hip Christmas market).  I bought a pair of knitted wool mittens at the Spitalgasse market that are pretty nifty; they have a fleece liner so they're warm, and the part that covers the fingers and thumb can be flipped off and back and buttoned away so that they become open-fingered gloves.  I've been wearing those a lot.  Keewi got roasted chestnuts, I got a potato and garlic patty that was extremely yummy, and we split some grilled sausages with mustard and sauerkraut.

  A lovely way to start what we eventually decided was our long-delayed honeymoon!

Long live the blog!

  Rumors of this blog's death have been greatly exaggerated.  It's been almost two months since I posted; that just means I have a lot of catching up to do.  :->  I see my last entry ended with a photo of a very yummy aperitif, so perhaps to get things going again, I'll start off in the same vein:

  This is a Polish honey liqueur.  Very smooth and sweet, very honey-flavored.  I had it on a cold winter day, and it warmed me down to my toes.

  This is a neat thing about Europe, all the regional drinks.  However, I can't seem to find a good liquor store in Vienna that stocks these unusual and exotic types of hooch.  If anybody reading this knows a good place, please let me know.

Speciation 2010

  This past week I attended a conference at IIASA, Speciation 2010: First European Conference on Speciation Research.  It started early in the morning, so each day I had to get up well before dawn in order to take the two U-Bahn trips and then the half hour bus ride to get to IIASA.  Here's a photo of a lovely dawn over Donaukanal, quite near where I am staying:

  The conference was held in an old ballroom (or some such) in the Schloss in Laxenburg.  The acoustics weren't great, but you couldn't ask for a prettier room for a conference (especially compared to the drab boxy buildings conferences are usually in):

  The conference was organized by Ulf Dieckmann (who I am working with in Austria) and Åke Brännström:

  There was quite a good turnout for it, somewhere upwards of 130 people I think:

  There were almost 80 poster presentations, and three days full of talks by all sorts of luminaries.  I was the photographer for the conference, so I've got photos of all of this, but I'm not going to post them all here.  (I think Ulf plans to post photos of all the posters and speakers on the IIASA or FroSpects website eventually.)  Instead, I'll just give you a photo of Andrew Hendry, my advisor, doing his talk and sporting his new beard which is the envy of all at McGill (well, OK, mostly of Fred Guichard ;->):

  I went for a walk in the park one afternoon, between talks, with Andrew and Dan Bolnick.  We walked to the castle on the lake at the far end of the park:

  The evenings were mostly occupied with food and wine and good conversation.  One evening we went to a heuriger, another evening, to dinner at the fancy restaurant in Laxenburg, Gallo Rosso.  (We also had lunch at Gallo Rosso every day during the conference; it's really the only decent restaurant in town.) No photos of those events, except for a bottle of very yummy digestif that I was introduced to at the last night's dinner:

  Semi-sweet, semi-bitter, very yummy.  I shall be hunting it down for further investigations.

  The talks at the conference were mostly quite interesting.  A lot of discussion of the role of sexual selection and assortative mating in speciation, a lot of discussion of magic traits and sympatric speciation.  Andrew has done a post about the conference on ecoevoevoeco, if you're hungry for more information.

  I gave a talk on Speciation in Complex Habitats, based on the research I'm doing here in Austria.  Those of you who attended my QCBS talk saw this talk already.  I'll probably do it again, with more results, when I get back to Montreal, as an EEL seminar, I imagine.  It was well-received; I got some nice compliments on it afterwards.  I believe Ulf plans to post videos of all the conference talks, so you might be able to watch it online eventually.

  All in all, a very fun and educational time.  And now, back to work!

The IIASA Ball

  So IIASA has a Christmas Ball, every second year I gather; it was last Thursday, and I was here for it.  Laxenburg is gearing up for Christmas too; here's a photo on the walk over to Gallo Rosso, the restaurant where the ball was held:

  And here's the dining room at Gallo Rosso, just starting to fill up:

  The best part was the food.  To those who were at the YSSP awards dinner, this will look familiar:

  And that's just the cold food; note the silver servers lurking behind, which were empty when I took these photos, but which filled with several kinds of fish, tortellini in a pesto cream sauce, chicken, beef... and they carved a whole roasted pig.  Sadly, I was too busy actually eating the food at that point, and forgot to take photos.  Anyhow, it wasn't amazingly unusual or original food; but it was very good.  Gallo Rosso does a nice spread.

  Here's the folks at my table:

  That last one is of me with Sheila and her boyfriend, who I sat with.  Thank goodness they were there, because I knew hardly anyone else in the room.  (Most of the rest of the people I know at IIASA were also at my table: Jose and Monika.  But I didn't get to talk to them much because they were at the far end of the table.  I don't think Wolf or Olli were at the ball, for those who are wondering.  Ulf and Gergely sat at the next table over.)  It felt weird to be at a IIASA event without all the YSSPers being there!

  The downside to the evening was the music.  Mostly it was one guy on a synthesizer with a drum machine track, playing cheesy renditions of songs that would better have been forgotten decades ago.  My friends Ariel and Suchi tried their best to rescue it with their lovely singing on some Christmas carols, but even there, I'm afraid there is a limit to how many times I can happily sit through Frosty the Snowman, Jingle Bells, etc., and that limit is zero.  My limit for Jingle Bell Rock is, in fact, -1; it makes me unhappy that that song exists at all, even when it is not being played in my vicinity.  No doubt I am a grinch; but why does Christmas music need to be so saccharine?

  All in all, though, it was a fun time, and we staggered off full, intoxicated, and happy.  Can't argue with that!

Back in Austria!

  The blog was dead; long live the blog!  I'm back in Austria for the winter, working on analyzing and writing up the research I did over the summer.  Since it isn't the YSSP any more, it's probably going to be a lot more boring than my summer was.  Nevertheless, I shall do my best.

  When I got here, I was surprised to discover that there was more snow on the ground here than back in Montreal!  I gather Montreal has since remedied this.  This much snow this early in the winter is apparently rather unusual in Vienna; someone I spoke to said they hadn't seen it in the fifteen years they have lived here.  It's all melting now, since today was warm, but I took photos yesterday.  Here's Donaukanal near where I'm living now:

  And here is beautiful Sudtirolerplatz bus station, where the 566 (seen at left) leaves for Laxenburg:

  I have no idea what all those cranes are doing in the background; it was the same way last summer.  Here's the schloss where I work in Laxenburg, which looks nice with the icing on top:

  And the church opposite it:

  Doesn't that poor statue look cold?

  I got here Sunday afternoon, and went in to IIASA for my first day of work on Monday.  Today (Wednesday) is a holiday; I'm doing some work at home, but I also went walking around a bit, exploring my new neighborhood.  I'm quite close to the big park called Augarten; I believe I posted some photos of its marvelous WWII-era flak towers in the summer.  I would have photos of Augarten in winter for you, since I walked there briefly today, except that I didn't bring my camera on my walk.

  Next week I give a talk at Speciation 2010: First European Conference on Speciation Research, which ought to be quite an interesting conference.  Well, to me, anyway.  :->  I may or may not do a bit of live blogging from the conference, we'll see how busy I am.  Those who saw my talk at the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Studies 2010 Symposium, or indeed those who saw my end-of-YSSP talk last summer, would be utterly unsurprised by the talk I will give here.  I've got to get some new material.  :->

  OK, that's all the news that's fit to print.  Until next time, this is Ben, saying... brrrrr!