I have completely fallen off the exercise wagon. While I knew it would be impossible to maintain any sort of regular gym schedule while traveling, I did manage to go for some runs and even buy a day-pass or two at a gym the first week or so abroad. No more. My curls are limited to raising the pint glass from the bar surface to my mouth; bench-press reduced to a single push-up in the morning to lift my weary and haggard body from the bed. I am a useless beer-guzzling troll, and the (nearly) nightly inebriation has also precluded any blog updates. I did manage to abstain from the sweet sauce anoche and caught a late-showing of Watchmen instead, so this afternoon I find myself lucid and motivated enough to recap the last week or so. Also, it’s snowing and miserable outside, so piss on going outside until it’s absolutely necessary.
I caught a bus from Prague to Vienna (four hours, 580czk ~ $28) arriving around 9:30pm and greeted by the hail storm of the century. My umbrella never had a chance, crapping out (thankfully) just a few feet from my hostel. With the weather dashing any prospects of venturing outside, I retreated the hostel bar downstairs where I met Leoni and M.P, Aussie and Quebecois girls who calmly informed me that a Jenga block told them to buy me a shot of Jagermeister because I wear size 10 shoes. Or something. I closed my eyes that night praying for better weather the next day and providence mocked me with a 10-day forecast of heavy wind, rain, hail, and every combination of inclement conditions in between. Fucking hell.
I spent the following afternoon hungover and observing the world from the rain-streaked windows of Wombat’s, which is a chain of McHostels located in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna. If you’re in any of those cities you can count on Wombat’s for its breadth of facilities, cleanliness, accommodating staff, and hordes of young drunk CanAusEngIcans peppering you with the same three questions. That night I went out to Volksgarten with Christiana, one half of the Viennese duo Max and I met at last Oktoberfest in Munich. There was a VIP guest-list, but Christiana had recently broken up with her boyfriend and told me to use his name, because, well, fuck him. I was Friedrich Matuska for the night, just barely passing the spelling and pronunciation test for the bouncer at the door.
“How do you spell that?”
“M..a..t…u…?”
“Fine, go in.” whew.
The following day I went to stay with Nicole, a genial if cloyingly verbose Couchsurfer studying in Vienna. She was German but had studied in both London and Australia, and as a result possessed the most bizarre German-British-Australian-fusion accent and lexicon. It was actually the couchsurfing-that-wasn’t, as I never actually slept in her flat. That night we went to a flat-party at one of her friend’s where the theme was the rather longwinded “dress in the local attire of your last holiday destination” — there were people dressed in Spanish bullrunning clothes, wearing French berets and armed with baguettes, German leiderhosen, and so on. I was douchebag American guy in jeans and an unfashionable button-up. At the party I met Ida, a Norwegian who immediately caught my eye due to her costume, a lifesize Gambrinus (Czech beer) bottle. About 3 minutes into our conversation I’d decided I wouldn’t mind spending the night with her, but her decision was much more gradual. Sometime around 7am we came to an agreement and she led me back to her flat. I woke up just a couple hours later remembering that I needed to move my luggage from Nicole’s to my next Couchsurfing destination, so I hastily (and still drunkingly) gathered my belongings without waking Ida and vacated her flat. Over the next week I managed to get her number from a mutual contact, but she never returned my call. To love and lose in 24 hours.
6:59am.
After collecting my things from Nicole’s flat I met up with Lara, my next Couchsurfing host. Lara was born in Sarajevo, but fled to Austria with her mother and brother in ‘92 after the fighting broke out. It was fascinating listening to her recount the details of her family’s escape. When the first shots were fired they were initially convinced the war would only last a couple weeks. As the fighting dragged on and it became apparent it was to be a long-term conflict, they began searching for ways to escape. Returning from the market one day her mother saw people cramming into a bus with suitcases, and was told they were heading to an Austrian refugee camp. She managed to secure room for her and her two children, and within the day the family (their father stayed in Bosnia for another year) was in Austria. Lara and I spent much of the next couple days engaged in conversation on a variety of topics, and her and her brother enlightened me about the state of Austrian politics, something I’d only had topical exposure to prior. They told me how in the recent election the majority of people under 25 had voted for the openly racist and anti-semitic far right party, and how recently someone had wrote in huge black letters on the walls of Mauthasen concentration camp “MUSLIMS ARE TO US WHAT JEWS WERE TO OUR GRANDPARENTS.” A couple nights before Ida had explained her theory that Austrians had never come to grips with their hateful ideologies after World War II, instead always considering themselves the “first victims” of the Nazi regime, and Lara corroborated this view. She told me how she frequently sees evidence of prejudice and racism against the increasing numbers of black and Turkish immigrants in Vienna, and that neither side has figured out how to integrate themselves into new, multicultural Austrian society. When I recently returned to Prague and took a look around on the metro, the faces I saw were virtually all white, bearing no resemblence to the contrast one sees on the metros of Vienna. I wondered if the Czechs would fare any better when confronted with a massive influx of immigrants, or whether it was a sad inevitability of human nature to fear and discriminate against those who are different. The track record certainly isn’t good.
On a lighter note, Lara also taught me the Austrian slang word bobo
“Do you use this word in America?”
“Yes, but probably in a different way than you do.”
“Well, for us it means bohemian-bourgeois. For example, we would say the 7th district of Vienna is bobo, because it’s full of poor students living in the most expensive part of Vienna and spending all their money on rent and the latest trendy fashions.”
Bobo. I like that.
After another night back at Wombat’s, I met up with Anna, a med-student who had studied abroad in New Orleans last year and can’t wait to go back. Anna and I had an immediate connection, and my three nights with her were like hanging out with an old friend. The first night we met up with her sister Lisa, who hooked us up with two free-admittance tickets to U4, a popular club located down the road from the Mariott she worked at. We arrived sometime around midnight, dancing and drinking for the next four hours.
Lisa, having a smoke in her uniform.
Anna
Drunk and sweaty after 4 hours of dancing.
The next night we drove to their family’s house in the countryside, about 45 minutes outside Vienna. The following afternoon we went to their grandparent’s farmhouse, where their grandma cooked up a huge and awesome Austrian feast. After overdosing on Kebabs in Vienna all week, this was a real treat.
roasted turkey, potato salad, dumplings, roasted pork, homemade apple juice..delicious.
Anna's nephew. The image is so dark because I hadn't realized there was condensation on my lens.
We took it easy the last night and watched the Austrian art-film “Megacities: 12 stories of survival,” which is a portrait of how 12 individuals survive in squalor in cities like Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Mexico City, and so on. The portrait of Gloria the cabaret dancer in Mexico City and the New York City street hustler were particularly shocking. The point of the film, I think, was that our humanity is not innate, and people born in the physical and social depravity of these Megacities can’t be judged using the same morality we use otherwise. Their environment has reduced them to animals, and like animals, will do whatever is necessary to survive.
Anyway, here are a few other pictures taken in Vienna. Like Prague, the weather was relentlessly awful, and the pictures suffer as a result. It’s too bad because it seemed like it would have been a beautiful city in the sunlight. This view was confirmed when I returned to Prague and looked at Kristin’s photos from Vienna. In her words: “against the sunlight, the colour of the buildings simply sings” — If the buildings sing in the summertime, they chant in the winter, dull morose chants that lull you to sleep with their melancholy.
Church at Stephansplatz.
Museumquartier.
Under-constructed, had to stick my lens through a chain-link fence.
Schonbrunn Palace.
Palace grounds.
Despite the terrible weather and aforementioned social negativity, Vienna had a magnetism about it. All the students I met thoroughly enjoyed studying there, and after visiting the University of Vienna’s Global Studies department, I’m encouraged about the possibility of studying there next year.