Austria: A Year by the Numbers

Number of cows I've been chased
by on a bike: 2

A numerical summary of 243 days in Europe. 

Countries visited: 12 (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, England, Liechtenstein) 

Bordering countries visited: 7/8 (damn Switzerland!)

Austrian provinces visited: 8/9 (damn Carinthia!)

Degrees Celsius when I went swimming in the Danube: 5

Liters of beer consumed (est.): 170 (based on national average of 108.3)

Average number of ice cream cones per week: 3

Bikes ridden: 7

Reflective moments spent
overlooking Innsbruck: 1

  Metro systems used: 9

  Airplane trips: 2

  Train trips (est.): 86

  Trips to Vienna: 20

  Balls attended: 4

  Public restrooms begrudgingly paid  for: 1

  Number of hostels visited: 10

Number of nights spent in a hospital: 1

Number of nights not spent in a hospital: 242

Classes visited: 28

Lesson plans created: 90.4 MB

Students murdered: 0

Number of blog posts: 64

Books read: 11 German, 10 English

Free time during the week: lots

Number of chickens in my backyard: 3

Kilograms of stuff I'm allowed to bring back: 46

Fon in London

About two months ago I spontaneously booked an irresistibly cheap round trip fair to London with Ryanair - the preferred airline of tightwads, people with very low standards, and the Irish.  The many luxuries of flying with Ryanair include walking across the tarmac to the plane, qualifying a newspaper as "carry-on luggage" and holding your pee, but the price is just unbeatable. 


I was excited to go see this painting as I once
taught a lesson about this topic, despite
being majorly unqualified to talk about art.

After arriving at Stansted, I took a shuttle into the city, which I found to be astoundingly modern and multi-cultural in comparison to Austrian cities, despite the UK's alarming adherence to driving on the left.  The weather in London was uncharacteristically unbad, so we spent most of our time outdoors, walking from site to site rather than checking out the over-priced and over-hyped indoor attractions.  We did stop by to see the Tate Modern, home to the famous Roy Lichtenstein painting Whaam! (see right).  I also ran quickly into the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.  The museum described the latter set of statues as more or less "protected from the careless Greeks", although I remembered that in Athens they were essentially described as "stolen by the greedy British".  Museum politics are rarely so interesting.

Other than one English breakfast and a scone (sadly without clotted cream), I mostly stayed away from English food, which is often boiled and infrequently praised.  However, although England has a less-than-sterling culinary reputation, I thought that London was a great place to eat as there were restaurants serving food from just about every ethnicity imaginable.  And if you forget about the crushingly unfavorable exchange rate, the prices almost seem cheap!

Other than one English breakfast and a scone (sadly without clotted cream), I mostly stayed away from English food, which is often boiled and infrequently praised.  However, despite England's less-than-sterling culinary reputation, I thought that London was a great place to eat as there were restaurants serving food from just about every ethnicity imaginable.  And if you forget about the crushingly unfavorable exchange rate, the prices almost seem cheap!

I've always had an odd interest in massive, nineteenth-century department stores, so naturally I also checked out Harrods - the UK's largest shop and once home to one of the world's first escalators (which apparently caused such a stir that distressed ladies were given smelling salts and cognac to calm their nerves).  Having seen both Harrods and Buckingham Palace, I admit that it's hard to say which is actually grander.

My short trip was rounded out with a trip to the West End to see Wicked, which is even more fun than the reviews suggest. 

 

The Land of Oil, Wine, and Delayed Trains

View from a monastery in Monterosso -
Italians love the Lord almost as much as
they love smoking cigarettes while riding
Vespas.

I've just returned from two full weeks in Italy and, although I enjoyed myself thorougly, I think that I'll be taking a long break from pizza, gelato, and Catholicism.

Unfortunately, I cannot say that I really recommend visiting urban Italy.  I thought that Rome and Florence, though full of sites, lacked the charm and culinary delights that they are known for internationally (Pisa, which thankfully I visited for just one afternoon, has roughly zero redeeming qualities).  Rome, where I spent the most time, is certainly the place for grandiose fountains, archaeological treasures, and very wide steps.  However, outside of the city's many UNESCO sites and other tourist hellholes, it looks and feels a lot like New Jersey, but with fewer Italians.  I actually prefered Genoa, a city I visited right before Christmas, perhaps because it is relatively removed from the tourism radar, perhaps because I was staying with a real-live Italian at the time.  

The rocks were no match for me in Riomaggiore

I'd say that the best thing about my trip to Rome actually had nothing to do with Italy at all.  The highlight of the trip was really practicing German and celebrating my birthday with my students and teachers from Austria.

After a jam-packed week in Rome, I destressed for four days in the Cinque Terre, an increasingly-popular-but-not-quite-yet-dominated-by-tourists slice of the Ligurian Coast with my friends Katie, Taylor, and Jenni, as well as a New Zealander named Simon.

We hiked between the five small villages that compose the Cinque Terre, relaxed on the beach, rented bicycles, sampled every different combination of gelato flavors, and religiously followed the Rick Steves guided tour of each town (whose passionately-written guide is often held responsible for the increasing prominence of tourism here).  We stayed at an atypically clean and uncharming hostel in Corniglia, the smallest of the five towns.  The village was a good place to stay because of its strategic location and the 382 steps between the town center and the train station, which helped us in the daily struggle to burn off the oily and over-priced focaccia bread that sustained us.  Leaving our village behind was a real tragedy, although it's good to be back in Austria for the tail end of my travels.

Taylor and I searching for the train station

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A anecdote and fun fact about the Italian work ethic: One time I needed to wait 19 minutes (I clocked it) to buy two stamps at an Italian post office even though I was the only customer in line and there were approximately five employees behind the counter.  It's really no surprise that Italy has the world's sixth largest gov't budget for the world's twenty-third largest population.   

Easter Itinerary

Since Italy and work/productivity are more or less incompatible concepts, I may not be able to update the old blog very frequently in the next two weeks, however anyone who's curious parties can always consult the following travel schedule.

At least eleven trains will be ridden in the
next two weeks.  Time will tell what
percentage of the Italian ones will be on time.



April 12 - Overnight train to Italy
April 13 - Rome (Colosseum, Circus Maximus)
April 14 - Rome (Vatican, St. Peter's)
April 15 - Pompeii/Subiaco
April 16 - Rome (Catacombs, Spanish Steps)
April 17 - Rome (Pantheon)
April 18-21 - Corniglia/hiking in the Cinque Terre
April 21 - Pisa
April 22 - Florence
April 23 - Florence
April 24 - Klagenfurt
April 25 - Vienna
April 26-May 4 - Waidhofen
April 29 - Innsbruck
April 30 - Bregenz
May 1-4 - Waidhofen
May 5-May 8 - London

Then just 17 days and I'll be back in America!

The Danube

Swimming in the Danube - I'm the one
on the right.

I spent the last weekend in the Wachau wine valley town of Krems an der Donau, which as the name suggests, is an der Donau - on the Danube.  During my stay and at the suggestion of my impulsive and lightly-unhinged friend Luke, I even went swimming in the river, which was about as warm as the frosty Wiener Eiskaffee I had the day before.  In honor of this foolish undertaking, I recount here a brief history of the Danube River:

The Danube is Europe's second-longest river, behind its pompous and overbearing competitor - the Volga in Russia.  It flows through ten countries along its course from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea in Romania.  It has been an important trading route for centuries and often provided the northern border for the Roman Empire, before they gave in to the excessive drinking and overt laziness that has since characterized that part of the world.       



Earlier in the day I enjoyed a poppy-seed
ice cream cone, another activity for
which the weather was not appropriate.

Culturally, the Danube has featured strongly in Austrian, and more generally, Central European works for centuries.  It figures prominently in the Bulgarian national anthem and lent its name to Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz (German: An der schönen blauen Donau), which is arguably the unofficial national anthem of Austria.  The waltz, incidentally, is played ad nauseum in all major tourist traps, especially the Prater amusement park, where it is played in a maddening loop that park employees must really hate. 

After the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated in 1918, Austria's control of the river was reduced from 2,840 km to just over 300.  Austria, now a landlocked country, shed its navy save the intrepid, if silly, Danube Flotilla, which continued to sail up and down the river protecting nothing until it became too comically irrelevent to maintain, in 2006. 

The Danube has since become a major destination for international tourists as well as Austrian bathers allured by both its beauty and the utter lack of bathing alternatives.  I'm told that, in the summertime, the oddly California-sounding Vienna City Beach Club is extremely popular with Austrians both clothed and nude.  The Donauradweg bike path runs more or less the entire length of the the river and Austrian portion of the route is supposed to offer a fabulous ride, especially when done downhill, from west to east.  I have ambitions to one day bike the 340km portion from Passau to Vienna, although I may not get to it this year, as my bike is about half the size it needs to be for me to use comfortably. 

Overall, the Danube offers a number of enticing activities, although these do not include March skinny-dipping, which remains ill-advised...

Ljubljana - Not Just for Spelling Bees

After returning from Greece, I also made a short jaunt to Slovenia and Croatia, which thanks to the breakup of Yugoslavia twenty years ago means I get to add two countries to the list of places I've been (lifetime total up to fourteen, from just four one year ago).  Slovenia being one of Austria's neighbors, I also got one step closer to my arbitrary ambition of visiting all eight of its bordering countries (6/8=75%).  I look forward to being done with that list so I can cross it off my list of lists to cross off.  "Obsessive tendencies" remains on my list of character flaws to work on.   

Like many small cities in Austria,
Ljublana is almost to cute to function.

Well as for the trip, I had fantastic weather and a fantastic time.  In just one day in Slovenia I learned what the capital city is called (Ljubljana), how to pronounce it (loo-bee-lanja), and even a few words of Slovene (Hvala = hello).  An interesting note about the Slovenian language, which by the by is not the same as Croatian, is that its one of very few languages that have different declensions for the singular, plural, and dual forms of nouns.  Ordering beer in Slovenian is good practice: pivo = 1 beer, pivi = 2 beers, piva ≥ 3 beers. 

But outside of that boring stuff, Ljubljana is really purty (see right).

The hostel/former prison where I did
not stay.

Whilst there I met two Slovenians at a Slovenia v. Albania soccer match party who introduced me to a Ljublana hotspot they claimed was the world's most famous hostel - Hostel Celica - on the grounds of a former Yugoslavian prison.  This area of the city was like a city in itself, with >10 bars, people who appeared to live in said bars, other squatters, artist workshops, etc.

I also made friends with an itinerant Australian (they seem to be everywhere here), with whom I travelled to my next destination: Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.  He hitch-hiked while I shelled out for the train, but I think it goes without saying that I won that race.

Although Zagreb is a lovely city with plenty of culture, history, Dalmatian chard, bargain beer, nice architecture, and Eastern Bloc architecture, I think I would have preferred a trip to the Croatian coast, which I hear is absolutely lovely.  Another downside of my trip to the city was my narrow, harrowing escape from a 200 kuna ($40) fine for black riding on the Zagreb tram system.  Not speaking a word of Croatian helped.      

Greece is the Word

Birthplace of the  Modern Olympics.
Rocky-style workouts were sadly
forbidden by stadium edict.

Semesterferien (term break) is over and I have just returned from my trips to Croatia, Slovenia, and, my favorite, Greece.  Outside of the public restrooms - where a mysterious and malevolent injunction against flushing toilet paper down the commode leaves you with a rather unpleasant alternative - I found Greece to be a tremendously agreeable place.  In fact, I think February was the perfect time to visit, as the weather was warm enough to wade in the Aegean, but cool enough that the cafes did not necessarily double as Turkish baths.  Plus it was even possible to wander about the Acropolis without swimming through a sea of fanny-packed tourists with substandard walking skills.

Acropolis with the calorie-burning
Lycabettus Hill in the background.

During my stay in Athens I hiked up Lycabettus Hill, met with hunger-striking refugees, and ate about a kilo of feta - atop salads, in gyros, on crepes, and straight out of the package.  I enjoyed other culinary delights, including olives, ouzo, tyropita, and Mythos beer.  Although I highly recommend sampling all of these things, I caution that the thick Greek coffee requires an unusual amount of chewing, which makes sense as it is often all that the Greeks have for breakfast.  

I suspect that Greek coffee may be
responsible for the short stature of Greek men,
which was quite obvious from my
conspicuous perch at 1.93 meters.

I left Athens one day to visit Sounion, a remarkably beautiful cliffside that hosts the ruins of a temple to Poseidon that was once tagged by the English poet Lord Byron in a vandalistic fit of enthusiam.  Later that day I also got to sit in on college application interviews with two Greek-Americans aspiring to the class of 2015 thanks to my host and fellow Brown alum George.  Then, sadly, I had to leave Greece with just a jar of honey and a bottle of olive oil to remind me of my stay in Hellas.

Fortunately, the Athens metro workers held off their inevitable daily strike until after I had reached the airport.  The Greeks, it turns out, really like their strikes. 

       

The Budapest of Times



Rubbing his belly brings
good luck for dinner

The final stop on my winter holiday tour of Europe was Budapest - recently voted one of the 41 places to go in 2011 by the New York Times.  The number 41 seems arbitrary, but the summary of the city was spot on.  To summarize what we learned from our self-effacing tour guide Anna: 
One of the first stops on our tour was by the statue of a cheery, chubby policeman, whose bulging belly has been rubbed shiny by tourists wishing themselves good luck for their next meal.  The lawman's physique, Anna informed us, is typical of Hungarian men due the abundance of meat, lard, and paprika in the local cuisine.
 
We then moved on to Parliament - a beautiful neo-gothic building that looks remarkably similar to London's Westminster Palace.  The resemblence is no coincidence and in fact it was deliberately made a few inches longer than its more famous peer just to one-up English.  At this stop we learned about the workings of the Hungarian bureaucracy, whose employment rosters are more bloated than old Hungarian men.  Anna was not exaggerating, as every metro stop was staffed with 4-6 fairly indifferent controllers - one to check tickets, one to keep him company, and four to supervise.

Hungarian Parliament - Neo-Gothic Rip Off



We also visited St. Stephan's Basilica, an attractive church best known for hosting the severed hand of St. Stephan (his forearm and elbow are in Warsaw and Vienna, respectively).  Tourists can view the hand by just throwing half a euro in the severed-hand automat.  


Our final stop was a flea market in the city park, where homeless people on tarps sold stolen goods and collected refuse at an unbeatable price.  I was creeped out by many of the merchants - including the lady selling opened bags of breakfast cereals - but Maggie found a nice leather purse for 100 Forints (about 30 cents).  The flea market and the nearby Heroes' Square were overall quite representative of my impression of Hungary - half granduer, half filth, a touch of paprika and a real bargain.

Mugs, Memories, and Munich

Maggie and I have returned to Waidhofen and my travels sadly are over.  Fortunately this means that I can devote more time to blogging.  Although I doubt I'll ever be able to describe all of the places I visited, I'll start with one of my favorites - Munich.

On a edutaining tour of the city, I learned that that everything in Munich is somehow related to beer consumption - from the famous Rathaus Glockenspiel (recently voted the second most overrated tourist attraction in Europe) to the city's oldest church (reconstructed after WWII with beer proceeds). Our tour guide also informed us of a beer-themed tour taking place that evening that promised to be less "edu" and more "taining."


Holding a Maß by the handle is only
appropriate for toasting.  In all other cases
it is taken as a sign of weakness.

At the beginning of the Munich beer tour I was very interested in learning more about Bavarian beer culture, although I must admit I became less and less diligent about collecting and retaining facts and even memories as we progressed from pub to pub.  One of the most interesting pieces of information that I did retain was the proper way to hold a giant one liter mug of beer, called a Maß (see right).  The handles attached to the mug are meant only to prevent finger-crushing collisions during a toast.  Outside of toasting, you're meant to hold these beers as you would a handle-less mug, with your hand directly on the glass.  Although this hand-to-glass contact might theoretically warm your beer, showing concern about your drink's temperature indicates to Bavarians that you are not drinking fast enough.   

This glorified pub crawl resulted in a number of great photos - some more compromising than others - on my mother's camera that I promise to post if she emails to me.

Another fact I retained from the beer tour is today's vocabulary offering - Reinheitsgebot.  It means "purity law" and it refers to a long-standing rule that all beer in Germany be made of only three ingredients - water, barley, and hops (and yeast, once it was discovered).  It is largely responsible for the lack of variety but abundance in quality of German beer, especially compared with the US.  Although it is no longer on the books due to whiny Dutch competitors, many German brewers still abide by it. Our beer guide informed us that this level of purity protects Bavarian beer consumers from hangovers - something that, through research, I have proven false.

Holiday Itinerary

 Although I may not be able to update the old blog very frequently in the next three weeks, curious parties can always consult the following schedule to figure out where I am, what trouble I may be in, and which consulate to call in order to post my bail.



Train tracks with an unrealistic
amount of snow



December 18 - Vienna
December 19-21 - Genoa
December 22 - Vienna
December 23 - Waidhofen an der Ybbs
December 24 - Salzburg
December 25 - Salzburg
December 26 - Munich
December 27 - Munich
December 28-31 - Vienna
January 1 - Hamburg
January 2 - Hamburg
January 3-5 - Berlin
January 6 - Vienna
January 7 - Budapest
January 8 - Budapest
January 9 - Waidhofen an der Ybbs

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And today's word, just for fun, is der Dudelsack - bagpipes.

Braving Bratislava



Body heat from the mass of Slovakians
at the Christmas market raised the temperature
to a nearly bearable level.



The weekend before last I made a trip so brief that I nearly forgot to make a comment about it on the blog.  During a weekend visit to Vienna, I took advantage of the fact that European countries are packed onto their tiny continent like sovereign sardines in a multi-cultural tin can and decided to check out Bratislava - a completely different city with a completely different language just forty-five minutes away!   


Admittedly, the timing for my day trip was less than ideal as the temperature was creeping down toward zero (Fahrenheit!) most of the time we were out and about and it finally reached that frosty barrier after the sun went down around 3 o` clock.  The bitter cold surprised me as Bratislava and the comparatively tropical Vienna are at roughly the same latitude.  Seemingly, just crossing the former Iron Curtain reduces the temperature by ten degrees.  Nonetheless, I wanted to cross Slovakia off of my list of Austria's eight bordering countries and I'm happy I did so, even if my fingertips and nose were not appreciative of my efforts.

The so-called UFO Bridge is one of
the worst mistakes I`ve ever seen.

At its core, Bratislava is like a Mozart Ball candy with a minature marzipan center surrounded by unsweeted Soviet chocolate and served in a bowl of hideous architecture (left).  But to be fair, the city's tourist-laden center was truly beautiful and its charms were reminiscent of, but also unique from, those of its more-celebrated neighbor Vienna (fun fact: the two metropolises are the two of the world's closest capital cities).

Funny characters such as this smiling
sewer worker are spread around
the city center.

My friends and I spent less than four hours in the city including frequent thawing breaks, but we managed nonetheless to see all of the sites represented in the first twenty Google Image Search results.  Of these my favorites were the many bizarre characters cast in bronze to be found in and around Hviezdoslav Square (right).  We hustled from site to site and overall the trip had a very "we came, we saw, we photographed" feel.  The city would make an ideal day trip during nicer weather, but doesn't really warrant much more attention.
 

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Today I've picked two of my new favorite wintery German words, both of which are in today's frontpage headlines in Austria.

Der Vorweichnachtsstress is the pre-Christmas stress familiar to many anxious Americans, less prevalent here.
Erfrieren means "to freeze to death," which felt like a real possibility in Bratislava.

A Prague Promenade

The Historic Charles Bridge (and other
less historic rivals) over the Vlatava River

After visiting Prague many Americans feel compelled to title their recollections and Facebook albums with those irresistable Czech puns ("Czech-ing in from Prague" or "Czech out how drunk I got in Eastern Europe," etc.).  To set my blog apart, I opted instead for some illogical alliteration that vaguely describes what I did this past weekend.

Last weekend was a national holiday here in Austria, so I did indeed cHecK out our neighbor to the north - the Czech Republic.  The capital city reminded me of Disney's Fantasyland, minus the exorbitant prices and basic rules of friendly interaction, transported behind the Iron Curtain along with blue jeans, Coca-Cola and the English language in 1993.

With my American tour guide (and friend of a friend) Jesse, I visited all of the obligatory tourist attractions, including the Charles Bridge (worthwhile), the John Lennon Wall (cool idea, lame art), and Prague Castle (site of the Second Defenestration of Prague, a tragic, yet hilarious occassion in European history).  Inside the castle, which is more of a district than a specific building, I found my favorite view of the city from the top of St. Vitus Cathedral.  It required a exhausting hike up an enormous spiral staircase from the 14th Century, when the average staircase climber was apparently about a foot shorter than I am.  My companions and I counted the number of stairs to the top and, although none of us was accurate, I was the closest with 234 out of 237 steps counted.

The Kafka Museum was terrifying.

We also visited the Kafka Musuem which was bizarre and unsettling, but truly "Kafkaesque" and certainly worth the 120 crowns ($5) admission fee.  Upon entering the museum's courtyard I was greeted with a statue of two grown men peeing into a small pond with functional penises that are adjustable by hand or by SMS.  I tried neither.  At the entrance to the museum, it was nearly impossible for me to actually buy a ticket because there appeared to be no employees, or at least none that were interested in selling tickets or interacting with guests.  When I eventually secured assitance, the cashier insisted that I pay in exact change and refused to break my 200 crown note, approximately equivalent to a $10 bill.  When I finally entered the museum, the images and artwork varied from baffling to nightmarish and the impressive views of the Vltava River were deliberately obscured with electrical tape.  All in all, I think Kafka would be proud.

As for souvenirs, I returned to Austria with a few postcards and several days worth of indigestion from greasy Czech street food.  Nonetheless, my trip was affordable, educational, and exciting and I heartily recommend Prague/Praha to any European tourist.    

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In honor of Kafka's vision of the modern state as a terrifying bureaucratic hellhole (nowhere more accurate than Austria and Germany), my word of the day is Amtsdeutsch or "office German."  It means something along the lines of "legalese," but it refers to the indecipherable language used in German applications and forms.