When they resuscitated the famous Orient Express train or at least the Paris-to-Venice section I was offered a free trip
When they resuscitated the famous Orient Express train, or at least the Paris-to-Venice section, I was offered a free trip. One of the stations it stopped at is St Anton, where Frau P and her family spend the winter “Bring me some sausages I’ll meet you at the station,” she said It was February. There had been heavy snowfall and avalanches in the Alps and there was talk that the tunnel at St Anton had been blocked. Ours was, in fact, the last train to get through for five days, during which time St Anton was effectively cut off.
We stopped briefly at the station, which you could hardly see through the snowstorm. “We won’t be picking any passengers up here,” said the guard. “There are 30ft drifts on the roads.”We were in the middle of dinner and I’d brought the sausages to the dining car just in case, though I fully expected to still have them with me in Venice. The waiter was leaning over the table, silver serving dish of partridge stuffed with foie gras reflected in Lalique lamp and marquetry wall panels, when suddenly there was a frantic banging at the window.
Outside on the platform, swathed in hood, face mask and goggles, stood a figure on skis. “Whatever you gave her must have been mighty important,” observed the Americans beside us as the train pulled away.My one regret this year is that we had not been able to get tickets to the new production of Don Giovanni that everyone agrees is the highlight of this year’s Salzburg Festival. All the critics say that it is the most brilliant and most profound interpretation of the opera that Salzburg has ever seen. Frau P saw the dress rehearsal, the woman who designed the costumes is renting their flat in the Goldgasse and managed to get them in. You don’t pay for dress rehearsal tickets, but Frau P said it’s had so much publicity that if she’d wanted to sell her pass to the queues of hopefuls waiting outside she could have got €100 for it.The curtain opens on a huge blow-up of a Palmer’s Unterwasche poster for sexy underwear as familiar to Austrians as the Gossard Wonderbra is to us.
