Ein mächtige Festung ist unser Gott

A mighty fortress is our God... which might be appropriate here, if Graz hadn't pretty-much rebuffed the Reformation. But the Herz Jesu Kirche made me think of it, anyway. This from my journal, as I sat on the steps of the church pictured here:

This morning I got pleasantly lost in Graz, and I still am. I found a street market where vendors sell everything from fruit and vegetables (Obst und Gemüse) to meat, cheese, bread, (Fleisch, Käse, Brot) and pots of fresh herbs (Kräuter)... and something I could swear was Chantrelle mushrooms (Funghi). I bought some Steierkäse, a mild cheese with flax seeds in it, and a bundle of lavender to hang in my room. As I walked around the city looking for a place to buy a disposable camera (they seem a bit obsolete in the digital age), I stumbled into a used bookstore, where I asked the lady who worked there for "Kinderbücher," which she obligingly showed me. I selected a book of fairy tales with some pretty pictures that seemed to be about on my German reading level, with some new vocabulary. I've read one story, so far, about a poor prince who poses as a pig hearder for the Kaiser in order to disgrace the princess through magical wiles, and get her thrown out, so that she would marry him.

Sometime later, I realized that i was actually somewhat turned around, but it's hard to worry too much about that on such a gorgeous day in a city where all the houses are painted different colors and roofed in red tiles. Right now I'm sitting on the steps of an enormous church. It may actually be part of a seminary- I'm not sure. I can't open the doors, which are twelve feet high at least, and dark wood, ornately decorated with iron leaves and grapes. With my lavender, I feel like Agnes in Milan Kundera's Immortality- she said that when she could no longer bear the ugliness of the modern world, she could walk through the streets of Paris carrying a single flower, and stare only at it, smellign it and takng refuge in its beauty. (My beloved Milan wrote it much mre eloquently, of course). Well, there is still plenty of beauty left in Graz.