Posts by Christina Feyerke

A Fiaker carriage in Vienna: as typical of the city as its many coffee houses.

The science of coffee-brewing in Vienna

3.10.2025

Coffee is not just an invigorating brew but rather a scientific field of expertise worth being explored. Barista Schools popping up the world over bear witness to the cognition that a cup of coffee is not something to be prepared in one’s stride. It is a challenge that deserves care and devotion at least as deep as is granted to the meticulously performed Asian Tea Ceremony.

Here in Vienna, each type of coffee is honoured with its individual cryptical name – the least one could have done for a treasure accidentally left by the Ottomans after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Apart from war and devastation, the Turks had brought along with them a culinary novelty Viennese citizens had later discovered in an abandoned Turkish camp: bags full of precious coffee beans. Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, a Polish-Lithuanian nobleman, had claimed the lot and opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse in the same year.

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The Doppler Effect: Mysterious wavelengths

29.09.2025

Zzzzzzzzzzp! Flash! There you go! A spiteful and cowardly camouflaged radar trap has lashed out at you once again, and another costly and questionably handsome snapshot is on its way into your post box. Fuming traffic offenders are said to have clandestinely returned to the place of crime to take revenge – fortified by a bunch of best-friends’ hercules’s and in order to punish the wicked contraption out of its wits. Ignoring, that there’s sure to be another invincible clone around the next corner. Instead of adding up on the offence front, avoiding speeding and/or respecting red traffic lights may actually do the trick fairly well and entail far less trouble: It allows short tempers to lie dormant just a little longer and lends bank statements a so much more encouraging appearance. Similar to police records …

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Oktoberfest Munich: O’zapft is’!

9.09.2025

On Saturday, September 20th, 2025 at high noon sharp Munich’s Lord Mayor will once again ceremonially exclaim: ‘It’s tapped!’ The Oktoberfest, a festival recurring for the 190th time, has been exerting its magnetism on the crowds since 1810. It means huge fun for regular folks, works as an illustrious place-to-be-seen for celebrities of all shapes, sizes and financial prowess and could even enhance or jog a career of one trade or another. And it serves as a welcome runway for the presentation of suitably traditional garb (such as Dirndl, Lederhos’n or Lodenjanker) – or for a rare species of couture whose daring crossover creations are at times hard to swallow for the more conservative.

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A curled blurr of colours in blues and pinks

TED Talk: How to beat stage fright

1.09.2025

Phobias: A Plague or Mutations of the Basic Instinct?

Phobia is Greek and means to be afraid of something. In the non-Greek world, it is mainly used in psychological terms, signifying severe fear as in: terrified and: neurotic and: in need of professional treatment. Those in the grip of a veritable phobia are panic-stricken and paralyzed when it comes to tackling certain situations. Phobias are relics of our evolutionary past and were quite useful back then. Should a ferocious sabre-toothed tiger – teeth bared – spring up inadvertently from the undergrowth with an intimidating roar, the primitive brain would switch to red-alert and reliably signal to the short-legged homo erectus: RUN as fast as you can! It was a matter of survival, and the same basic instinct takes control over us in perilous situations until this day.

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The Corones is the sixth Messner Mountain Museum in South Tyrol. Architect is Zaha Hadid.

Messner meets Hadid: The Corones Museum in South Tyrol

12.08.2025

Admittedly, it takes a bit of an effort to get there, especially from far-away countries. But then again: Who says that the good things in life are to be had in passing? Ask Reinhold Messner: If there were more „eight-thousanders“ to be conquered, he would most likely have done so and still always have chosen the most challenging variety of ventures. Similarly extraordinary and not seldom daring, are Zaha Hadid’s († 2016) architectural structures which reliably become prized icons one by one – wherever and for whichever purpose they may have been established. The intriguing element uniting the random duo seems to be that reaching for the skies is an inborn ambition, and that achieving the utmost a natural consequence. Both personalities’ visions and disciplines merged, result in remarkable projects such as the Corones Museum, submerged into the South Tyrolean peak of Mount Kronplatz 2,275m above sea level.

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