souvenirs

During the day, we walked around the cold streets of Vienna, the clouds still hanging low over us.  It was the coldest day yet, our hands barely able to snap pictures of the beautiful city streets as we kept stuffing them back into our pockets.  We started at Stephansplatz, mainly because on the metro map there’s a picture of a bunch of buildings and the writing, “The City of Stephansplatz”.  We figured it must have been something big.  When we got there, we found that it was a square with the large cathedral of St. Stephan’s.  St. Stephan’s is a Gothic Romanesque church, its uniqueness lying in the green tiled roof, which from the front looks like an emerging period in between the two spine-like spires.  On the side of the green tiled roof, the tiles change colors to make the seal of the Hapsburg emperors.  Underneath is a complex of catacombs that can be toured, the entrance can be found inside the cathedral.    

Cathedral of St. Stephan

Much of the architecture of the downtown area of Vienna looks similar to Prague, both are imperial and baroque.  Vienna is larger though, but not as expansive in its sprawl of old, historic buildings, having a much larger range of new towers and modern apartment buildings.  Vienna offers a lot of cultural activities, from some of the best opera and classical music in the world, the city responsible for the fame of Mozart and Beethoven, after all, to museums, fine restaurants, pubs and wine bars.  However, coming from Prague, where the beer costs a little more than a euro, Vienna struck me as the rich man’s playground, where Prague was much more for the commoner.    

We wandered around the town until we met up with my next host, Carolyn, who lived in one of the mentioned modern apartment blocks.  Carolyn met us on a street nearby, later explaining, “When people ask me about accepting strangers into my house from couchsurfing, I tell them that if the people look too strange, then I’ll just keep walking and tell them that something came up at work and tell them where a good hostel is.”  Yet, she still accepted us to come up to her apartment.  The apartment had wood floors, a hidden refrigerator, automated ventilation and heating systems in the bathroom, automatic lights, alarms and so forth.  It was an onslaught of domestic technology that I hadn’t envisioned since I was back in the States.  But with the automatic vents in the bathroom that detected changes in humidity and the lack of manual switches, I could only wonder what would happen if the sensors broke.  

We sat down in Carolyn’s living room, handing her a beer and chatting with her for a few hours about life, economics and politics.  Carolyn worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency doing exactly what I’d like to do one day as a career.  She did ad hoc logistics organization for specific contracts – basically, seeing that the contract gets fulfilled from A to Z.  We invited her to come out with us to a couchsurfing meeting out at a bar in MuseumsQuartier, but she declined since she had too much work to do. 

We found the place after walking up and down a few streets in the Quarter.  The streets were lined with stalls, each with Christmas lights hanging from their frames and often selling hot wine or cocoa.  The streets were packed, even as the evening and the cold wore on, Austrians braving the cold to talk with their friends over their steaming hot drinks. 

At the meeting, I met people from all over.  Mostly I talked to some Mongolian ladies in Russian, and a half Albanian Turkish girl who also spoke Russian.  “I love Russia!  I think Turkey would be better off if it was owned by Russia.”  I also met a man from Latvia and an embassy worker from Azerbaijan.  The embassy worker spoke very carefully, catering his every word to show that he represented a free and democratic Azerbaijan, no matter how the truth is opposite.  When we finished the event hours later, we went to a restaurant to finish my search for some wienerschnitzel. 

“I hear you still have the sniffles,” Pavlos said, as he and Karen walked alongside of me. 

“Yeah, it’s from my cold,” I said.  “Not from my cheese intake.” 

“I’m telling you, it’s true,” Pavlos said.  “You shouldn’t eat dairy.” 

We sat down at the restaurant, only to discover that they had closed their kitchen.  I had to resolve my wienerschnitzel fixation at a restaurant next to the train station.  The schnitzel was a bit dry, but it was still good, served by an old lady who was quick to say what I wanted.  “You want wienerschnitzel?” she said right when I walked in the door.  Pavlos had been there earlier.  He was trying to write in a postcard earlier, but his pen dried up.  A neighboring old lady saw his pen malfunction problems and said something in German to him.  “I don’t speak German,” Pavlos said.  “But how about English, Greek or French?”  Then she reached into her purse looking for something.  He went back to his food.  She came over and handed him a pen.  When he was finished eating, he tried to give it back to her.  “No, no, it’s a souvenir from Austria.”