The hills are alive
Vienna marked the first place on our trip that I hadn't been before. There is always some trepidation when you arrive in a new city/country -- what if they don't speak English? What if we can't find our hotel? And what if they don't speak English?
Fortunately, we found Vienna to be remarkably friendly and easy to navigate. Or at least we did after we spent 3 rain-soaked hours walking around cursing at unintelligible street signs (I curse you, random German B letter!) trying to find a cafe a friend recommended to us. After that though? A delight!
Travel is about many things to me: exploring history, observing different cultural norms, obsessively scouring for pickpockets. More than anything, it is the extrapolation of my general outlook on life. Namely, if you allow natural twists and turns to take place, sometimes awesome things will happen. For every fruitless 3-hour search for Babette's Cafe (they weren't even serving food when we got there Richie, you sonofabitch), there are the two memories that stand out for me from our time in Austria.
Memory 1: Exhausted on our second night, we decided to head to bed early after dinner. On our way back to our hotel, we happened to hear what everyone goes to Austria for - the sound of music (eh?). Hilary and I aren't big concert-goers, and we had to get up early the next morning for a bike tour (more on that shortly), but our curiosity led us to investigate. We followed the sound for several blocks then came upon a free concert, where a band was finishing up a cover of "Folsom Prison Blues". It was the last song of their set, but we decided to stick around to see if any other bands were going to play. As we were deciding whether or not to call it a night, we noticed the band that had just played leading a group of people, Pied-Piper like, into an alleyway to perform a more intimate encore.
We joined the group and formed a circle around the band, who proceeded to sing a song we'd never heard of but were certain was a cover of some popular Alt-Folk-Rock band like Avett Brothers or Mumford and Sons or Maclemore. It was an awesome performance, and a great song, and if we'd just headed home we'd have missed the whole thing.
Thanks to the glory that is the internet, you don't even have to imagine the performance in your head. Someone posted the whole thing on YouTube!
Here's a different version of the song, "Nine-to-Five" by Nowhere Train, which will forever be the soundtrack to all my memories of this vacation.
Memory #2: The next day we went on a bike tour of the Wachau Valley, a famous wine region of Austria.
Sidebar: My friends and family most often make fun of me (to my face anyway - I can't vouch for what they say behind my back so much, at least not until I finish bugging all of their houses) for never being properly dressed for any occasion. If everyone else is wearing coat and tie, I'm in a dress shirt at best. What can I say, I like to be comfortable.
I assumed a bike tour in June would make for a lot of sweating, so I dressed in a dry-fit shirt and mesh shorts. Little did I realize it would be 50 degrees and rainy, allowing me to fulfill what I like to call Yanover's Law: No matter the weather, there will always be one idiot in shorts. In this case, idiot = me.
Repping Texas. Always repping Texas.
Our tour was scheduled as an all-day affair, with our group riding between several different villages along the Danube to sample various wineries. However, one village/winery into the trip, we were informed the river was starting to flood (it turned out to be the start of the worst flooding in Central Europe in a decade). We were going to have to cut our trip short and turn back.
This was disappointing news to be sure (even though I was freezing my tits off), but what could we do? You can't fight Mother Nature.
And so our wine and biking tour ended, but a new one soon began: Wasting Time And Getting To Know A Bunch of Strangers While Stuck At A Restaurant And Then On A Train Back to Vienna. They really should come up with a better name. There were 12 of us, comprised of 4 Americans, 2 Russians, 2 Norwegians, 2 South Africans, and 2 Hong Kongians (Hong Kongites? Chinese?), plus our Dutch tour guide.
I would love to recount the hilarious conversations we had, but as is typical with these things, you had to be there.*
*Hang on, let me check YouTube. Nothing ... yet.
Oh screw it, I'll recount one. One of our Russian compatriots spent about 30 minutes of the train ride back trying to convince us that there were kangaroos in Austria, based on having seen signs in some stores that said "No Kangaroos Allowed".** I'll assume they were joke signs playing off the similarities between Austria and Australia, but either way he could not be talked off of it, getting more and more exasperated at our unwillingness to believe him as time wore on.
** Internet check again and bam. No Kangaroos.
So, life, lemons, lemonade, and all that.
What I took away most of all from the unexpected change of itinerary was a general feeling of brotherhood with my fellow man. It is so easy to become depressed when watching, oh, all of the news, but actually spending quality time with people from other countries is a great reminder that we really do have a lot in common, and can get along pretty easily when given the opportunity. I was freezing and soaked, yet I felt warmer than at any other point on our vacation.
Also, it is awesome that everyone else has to learn to speak English, it's a real perk of being American.
