National Day, DT & Clothing, plus Halloween

This week saw three new blog posts. The first one on Monday, which was the National Holiday here in Austria, was another one in which I was able to recycle some material from my archives compiled from my purged Facebook page. I reused photos from the festivities that used to take place on Vienna’s Heldenplatz (literally ‘Heroes Square’) where the Austrian military showed off some of its hardware (tanks, artillery, aircraft, and lots of guns), gave instructions (especially to kids) and there was also food & drink and speeches and so on. This year it was much scaled down, in size as well as duration. We walked into the city centre but as we arrived at Heldenplatz at a bit after 2 p.m. we just saw workers dismantling a small stage and there were just a handful of olive-green military trucks and two soldiers with machine guns standing guard. I didn’t take any photos.

On Wednesday I then fulfilled the promise made after the latest poll result and uploaded a substantial, originally written post on the theme of “Dark Tourism & Clothing”. It turned out the longest and most richly illustrated post on the DT blog so far, featuring a full 25 photos. These showed clothes of various types and with a plethora of dark associations, from prisoner outfits to military uniforms, from protective NBC suits to clothes worn by famous dead people and even some film prop items worn by actors in “Titanic” or James Bond movies. The historically most significant item of clothing in the series was probably Franz Ferdinand’s bloodied uniform which he was wearing when he was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 (an event that is usually seen as having triggered World War One) and which is now on display at the Military History Museum here in Vienna. If I had to choose a personal favourite, though, then I’d probably pick the photo I took of an abandoned clothes shop in the exclusion zone of Fukushima.

Yesterday I added another shorter post, namely on the topic of Halloween, lamenting the fact that, due to the ongoing pandemic, no Halloween party could be thrown this year, but I gave a brief account of the dark-tourism-themed Halloween parties of previous years. And I illustrated this with three photos of pumpkins adapted to the themes (Americana, Russia, islands). In the post I said that we thought about having just a little Halloween party for two but abandoned that idea … well, we kind of cracked after all, at least as far as the pumpkin was concerned – see the photo above! So we bought a little Hokkaido pumpkin and prepared it to fit in with our times. Sorry if that’s too black-humoured … (I always think it helps, though). Instead of polenta or cheese fondue, the food in front of the pumpkin was part of a different speciality in Swiss cuisine: morels a la crème, served with rösti and spinach. Very tasty. The pumpkin and blueberries will be turned into some form of dinner tomorrow.

Stay safe - and have as good a week as is possible under the circumstances ...

Peter