Tag Archives: travel

Dancing Horses: The Lipizzaner Stallions

April 16, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

For Easter vacation we went to Vienna. There’s so much to do there that we barely got started; we’ll definitely have to go again.

The highlight of the trip, fulfilling a 30-year dream for me, was seeing the Lipizzaner stallions perform at the Spanische Hofreitschule. The event fully lived up to my hopes and expectations.

For my non-horsey readers: the Lipizzaners are the famous “dancing” white stallions who perform highly skilled and specialized dressage, in a tradition dating back 400 years.

They generally perform only twice a week, and there aren’t very many places for spectators, so you need to book well in advance – I wandered onto their website in mid-February and snapped up the last three tickets for the Saturday before Easter. The site is confusing; had I realized at the time how much those seats were going to cost, I might not have booked. But then the email confirmation arrived saying that the reservation could not be canceled, so we decided, what the hell – once in a lifetime, it’s bound to be worth it. And it was.

It’s a beautiful show of acrobatics and athletics, but it’s also about the relationship between man and horse. At the Lipizzaner museum and in the show program notes, we learned that riders begin at age 16, first learning to ride on an experienced stallion. After four years or so, when and if he’s judged ready, a rider is given his own young horse to train, which will take another four years. Later still, he will be expected to train other riders and help them train their horses; part of the selection process includes an assessment of the rider’s ability to pass on what he knows. Throughout his career, a rider will be responsible for the same small group of horses ideally, a horse is always ridden by the same rider, for up to 20 years.

So what you see is the result of a long-term partnership in which man and horse know each other very well. So well that the horses appear to perform their magic entirely of their own will the rider’s signals are so subtle that you don’t see him move from his ramrod-straight position in the saddle. The most we observed was a twitch of the heel here and there.

The riders also keep very straight faces, almost never displaying any emotion or even a well-deserved sense of accomplishment. At the end of each exercise, the only sign that anyone’s been working hard (and they have been!) is that the horses are foaming at the mouth and the riders are red in the face.

There was one exception to the poker-face rule, one of the senior riders, who didn’t quite smile, but nonetheless looked kind. And Ross swears that, when his young horse was acting up (slightly) during the show, she saw him giggle. We agreed that he looks like someone you’d want to take riding lessons with.

Unfortunately, that’s a dream that Ross could never live, without a revolution: the Hofreitschule is totally a guy thing. The horses are all stallions, and the riders all men. As far as we could discover, there has never been a female rider. I’ll have to dig a little deeper and see whether the notion has ever crossed anyone’s mind.*

* Aug, 2006 – A reader wrote to point me to an article showing that women do indeed ride Lipizzaners – but in South Africa, not Vienna.

photo above: the performance hall, rightly called the world’s most beautiful manege

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Taking It All Off in the Caribbean

August 20, 2003 Deirdre Straughan 1 Comment

A couple of years ago, we were headed for a New Year’s party on St. Barth’s, an affair for which we had had to make reservations in April. As we got closer to the date, it turned out that I was in California and my family in Italy, and we’d be flying from opposite directions to meet in the Caribbean. We had a couple of extra days, right at Christmas, and decided to spend them on Sint Maarten, the next island over, where we had previously had a very pleasant vacation.

When you’re trying to reserve a hotel at the last minute in high season, you take pretty much what you can get. But when my travel agent quoted $500 a night, I winced.

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Cultural Assumptions

August 7, 2003 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

What You Think You Might Know About Somebody… Might Be Wrong

Years ago, before we were even living in Italy, Enrico and I spent a night in Courmayeur, on the French side of Mont Blanc, on our way to somewhere. Our hotel included breakfast (most of them do), eaten at large, bare wooden tables with benches. We were asked what form of coffee we wanted, then crusty rolls, croissants, jam, butter, etc. were brought, and we began eating, scattering crumbs all over the bare table just like everyone else.

The waiter overheard us speaking English.

“Are you American?” he asked.

She’s American, he’s Italian, we explained, as usual.

“You’re American!” exclaimed the waiter in horror. “Then you want this!” And he rushed to set the table with paper placements.

I wonder what traumatic encounter he’d had with an American to fix that notion so firmly in his mind.

*******************

I picked up some pictures that had been framed, and remembered at the last minute that I should have told the framer to put two hooks on the sides, rather than one hook on the top as Italians always do. With the two hooks, I can run a wire between them and have the picture hang from a hook behind it, rather than seeing a hook in the wall at the top of every picture. This seems an obvious improvement to me, but Italians prefer a hook at the top, perhaps because that way the picture lies flat against the wall.

The framer was happy to do what I asked. “You must be English,” he said. “The English always want the two hooks that way.”

Once Enrico and I were on vacation in the mountains. He would go off hiking all day, I was working intensively and happily on my novel, but would go for brief walks to stretch my legs and enjoy the scenery. To amuse myself on these walks, I collected wildflower seeds, to try planting them at home. I strolled along a level path that had once been a railway line, and found a huge meadow full of flowers. I was in there, collecting seeds, when a young man passed by, supporting his aged mother on her daily constitutional. Half an hour later, when they came back the other way, I was still there, intent on the plants.

“Crazy Germans,” the man muttered.

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Oct 21, 2003

Last October we drove to Munich for a friend’s birthday. On the way, we stopped in Vipiteno, a town on the Italy side of the German border. We’d been looking for an enoteca (wine shop) to buy Markus some wine, and found a very good one there. We sampled several good wines, and had selected two or three bottles when the shop owner asked us: “Who is this for?”

“A friend in Germany, it’s his birthday.”

“Oh, then you don’t need to spend so much. Just get him this [pointing to the six-euro stuff in the window]; he’s German, he won’t know the difference.”

We still got him the good stuff; Markus does know the difference.

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Frequent Flier: The Strange Perks of Business Class

May 15, 2003 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve lived in Italy, I’ve ended up travelling to the US far more than I ever expected, mostly for work. The first such trip occurred soon after Incat Systems moved to California, in late 1993. I was the technical writer, so I had to meet with the engineers from time to time, and later with other sorts of colleagues. I got into the habit of flying to California four times a year, sometimes staying for extended periods and visiting other parts of the US as well.

My first day at the US office, Whitney, the new American vice-president of the company, asked me if I’d flown business class. The idea had occurred to me, but I didn’t think the big boss would want to pay for it, and had been afraid to ask. “Next time, fly business,” said Whitney. “I’ll take care of Fabrizio.” I was nervous about this, but no one complained when I booked a business class ticket for my next trip.

When I saw Whitney, he immediately asked: “Did you fly business class?”

“Yes.”

He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “Good. Never look back!”

And I didn’t. I continued to fly business class on long-haul flights (Europe to San Francisco is at least ten hours), which meant that I was more likely to arrive in working order than if I had spent the trip with my long legs cramped into a cattle-car seat. I racked up the frequent-flier miles, initially on KLM, which we had habitually used for family trips. One of the perks of KLM business class is a gift: a little Delft china house full of gin. I have a shelf of them (still full of gin), but we never figured out how you’d get the big palace (half a litre’s worth) that we saw on display at Schipol airport.

Sometime during all those years of flying, I responded to a piece in theInternational Herald TribuneÂ about business class service on various airlines. I was trying to be funny, something about how on Alitalia there’s no personal video, only a single big screen, so they had to edit James Bond for the family audience – which made the film quite incomprehensible. This letter was printed in the paper. I hadn’t mentionedÂ whyÂ I travelled, merely that I worked for Adaptec. So they quoted me as “an executive for Adaptec, a California company.” I guess they figured that anyone who flew that much had to be an exec.

Just as I was beginning the (later aborted) move to California in 2000, British Airways put fully-reclining seats into business class. I have never been able to sleep on my back, and in a partially-reclining seat it’s very difficult to lie on your side. On BA, I was able to really sleep on a plane for the first time in my life – and I needed that sleep. So I became a BA frequent flier, and made so many trips that I shot to Platinum level within six months.

The California thing went sour, and I made my final flight home to Milan in late March, 2001. I was so physically and emotionally drained that, driving my rental car to San Francisco airport, I was seriously afraid that I would have an accident. But I made it, dragged my 200 pounds of luggage to the BA check-in, and collapsed in the lounge. I was grateful to crawl onto the plane, where I wouldn’t be responsible for any person or task for at least 12 hours.

The purser came to greet me: “Ms. Straughan, we see that you’re a very frequent flier with us, and we want to make sure that you’re happy. If there’s anything at all we can do…” I was impressed with this display of customer relationship management, and didn’t tell him that this flight was probably my last, through no fault of BA’s.

I haven’t flown much since quitting Roxio, and never business class. I’ve used up the mileage I’d accumulated on various airlines (not only on myself and my family), but haven’t acquired much new mileage. BA has steadily demoted me; now I’m at plain old Blue level, so I no longer get preferential check-in (I’ll miss that) or lounge access.

Received by email:

â€œHi Deirdre,

Just stumbled upon your site whilst reading about travel to India (LP thorn tree) and ended up spending half an hour browsing the various sections! It was very interesting to read your travel experiences but also the Op/Ed pages. You must put in quite some time, my compliments. The reason for sending you a message is this:

“…we never figured out how you’d get the big palace (half a literâ€™s worth) that we saw on display at Schipol airport.”

A friend of my parents used to be a board member of KLM (now retired). He told me once that this special bottle/house, depicting the royal palace on Amsterdam’s Dam Square, used to be presented to KLM business class passengers flyingÂ on their birthday! Of course I don’t know if this is still the case but I thought you might like the answer to your mystery.

Keep up your web site, best regards,

[name deleted for privacy]â€