Jack Goes to Europe

It seems like a no-brainer to say that you haven’t really
visited a place if you don’t have at least 2 or 3 nice, long conversations with
someone who is from the place you are visiting. 
But I think it happens fairly often. 
There was a danger of this in Vienna — traveling alone I get much more introverted
than when I have a companion, and I nearly went a whole day without having a
conversation with anyone.  But by the end
of my visit I ended up having a bunch of interesting ones. 

There was the hipster in the subway station who had just
been to a Johnny Cash tribute concert (which I had attempted to attend but been
way too late, and which he said was pretty lame considering that the singers
couldn’t shake their Austrian accents – think “I Valk De Line”).  We started to get into some really
interesting stuff – what makes Austrians Austrian and all that – but I had to
get off the train.

There was Mali, the warm and articulate host of the
Judenplatz Museum, who told me all about the Jewish community in Vienna and why
she thought they were worse than the Germans. 

Then there is my bunkmate Peter on the sleeper car from
Vienna to Rome.  We talked for a long
time about the Austrian national character, history, and some politics.  (I’m telling you, ALL the Europeans dislike
Bush.  They think rationally over here.) 

The conversation turned to World War II, as it seems all
conversations about history and politics eventually do on this continent.  Peter’s father was sent to the Russian
front.  Peter’s grandfather was secretly
a Nazi, had been injured in WWI also fighting the Russians, died in a Russian
camp after he came down from the hills where all the people in their town in
Austria were hiding from the occupying Russians.  He wanted to see what they had done to his
house.  Peter’s mother, 16 at the time,
had barely escaped being raped by a Russian soldier when her 9-year-old cousin
stood in the soldier’s path and would not move.

I finally found free
wireless internet access in Vienna!  Where else but the
MuseumsQuartier, a cluster of modern art museums.  In the middle
of the cluster, there are a bunch of cafes.  So I’m sitting here
at 7:22pm under a pink sky with a glass of red wine next to me and
dinner on the way, still very happy from the Third Man walking tour I just took!  Young Viennese are all around me drinking
coffee and wine, talking, and smoking.  And I am doing the same.

Apparently, walking around Vienna at night alone makes me a “mark” not for muggings, but for wily women.

The next night, I passed a guy and two girls walking down
Mariahilferstrasse in the same direction as me.  The guy was
clowning around a bit and waved to me.  I nodded and walked
on.  He then tried to get my attention but I tried to ignore him. They definitely didn’t look dangerous, just… I didn’t want to be bothered.  Finally,
he became impossible to ignore, and I turned around.  He came up
to me and said something I couldn’t understand.  Then one of the
girls walked up to me and began to totally grind against me.  I
was like, thanks, but I saw this in the Munich train station 20 years
ago when a lady “bumped into” Dad and went for his privates and his
back pocket at the same time.  My hand went to my back pocket and
sure enough, a few seconds later there was her hand on mine.  “You
want to go disco?” she asked.  No thanks, I am going to sleep.

To the American who stood right in front of me at the Fine Art Museum while I was looking at that painting:  just because someone is sitting down doesn’t mean they aren’t looking at the art. 

And thank you for pointing out that the cherubs in that painting, Rubens’s Festival of Venus, are “well-fed.”

UPDATE:  So far fully half of the Americans I have seen have been wearing Teva sandals.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

UPDATE 2:  Some dude — I highly doubt it was an American judging from his overall appearance, which included a bald head and two “pirate” earrings — stood right in front of me while I was getting ready to take a picture.  Clearly we aren’t the only rude ones (what was I thinking?). 

Today I arrived in Vienna — it is beautiful here!  There are ornate statues and buildings pretty much everywhere you look.  Probably because it is smaller and more compact, this city shows its history as a former imperial capital much more palpably than other capitals I have been to (e.g., Amsterdam, London, Paris, Berlin).  It is just dripping with 18th and 19th Century wealth. 

And it’s crawling with tourists.  I have already heard Arabic, Swedish, French, Spanish, and of course, English spoken here.

Tomorrow I will be visiting St. Stephen’s cathedral, the State Opera House, the Art History Museum, and (if I still have any stamina) the Hofsburg’s palace in the old city.

Meanwhile, I am staying in a Frau Ildiko’s old apartment building with a spiral marble staircase with an ancient elevator in the middle, super-high ceilings, lots of character, and lots of must.

Just because I’m leaving Berlin doesn’t mean I can’t keep posting about it…

Over the past 5 days we spent a lot of time walking and taking the train.  This led to invention of the song game.  Next time you and a pal are walking along together, you can play too.  Here’s how:

1. One person thinks of a band or singer and says its name.

2. The second person has to sing the very first song of this artist that comes into his head.  The title of the song is irrelevant — it has to be sung.

3. If the second person doesn’t know of any songs of this artists, the first person has the option of naming another band, or making the second person go.

4. Yes, we are nerds!  Shut up!

5. We discovered that with three or more players, the song game becomes a moving karaoke party.

Well, tomorrow morning I head out.  Taking the 7:07 train to Regensburg, way down in Bavaria. Melanie is going to pick me up and I’ll be there until Saturday morning.  There will be lots of “traditional Germany” happening there:  beer houses, bratwurst, pastoral hills, ladies in the “St. Pauli Girl” outfit, you get the idea.  I’m told it’s like a different planet compared to Berlin, and I have no doubt that that is true. 

But best of all, it will be really great to see my true friend Melanie’s home state and to meet all these friends of hers I have been hearing about!

Meanwhile, I am sad to leave this amazing, vibrant, pulsating city.  There is so much that I didn’t get to do here, like see all the great art museums here, visit the “Story of Berlin” history exhibit, go to the top of the angel in the Tiergarten, and don’t even get me started on how much more of the nightlife I still want to see. 

But still, I did a lot.  Highlights that I haven’t written about elsewhere include:

Checkpoint Charlie, a checkpoint between the US and Russian zones, and later the most important crossing in the Berlin wall, where US and Russian tanks had a historic faceoff at the beginning of the Cold War.

The Brandenburg Gate, a several-hundred-year-old symbol of German unity — and triumph — that was made inaccessible to all by the Berlin Wall death zone that East Germany set up. 

The Arkadenplatz Market, easily the best flea market I’ve ever been to.  One of the coolest stands was this guy with all these DDR (East Germany) relics.  He had pins with slogans on them, old DDR flags, and similar stuff.  He had been in the East before the wall came down and told us about the role of flags there.  On Independence Day or whatever the national holiday was called there, everyone was supposed to put out a flag.  Each apartment building had one or two designated people who would go around to all the people in the building and make sure they were going to hang up their flag. But the guy hosting this stand said he never put one up. He said that if you didn’t do it 2 or 3 years in a row, they would come and talk to you and ask if everything is okay, etc.  Yuck.

The Tacheles art center, which was a ruined building after the war that was “taken over” by artists and made into studios while leaving the bombed-out structure essentially the same.  From afar, it still looks like a ruin.   Man, they hate Bush over here!  There was this huge stairwell there and the bottom portion was COVERED in anti-Bush posters.  There are even movements to get him un-selected, despite the fact that they can’t vote or give money over here.  My favorite poster showed Bush and read, “Ich Bin Kein Berliner.”  Special Berlin party favor goes to the first person who gets the reference there.