Props to Columbus

Note: Sorry, this is a long one. I promise I'll tone it down in the future!

What a weekend! Aditi, Alexis, and I arrived in Vienna on Friday and eventually made our way to my cousin Kathy’s apartment. Let me tell you, traveling around in a city that you haven’t even seen a map of is incredibly disorienting. I literally had no idea where I was at any given time until Sunday.

The adventures started as soon as we got to Kathy’s place. She lives on the fifth floor of her building, so being lazy and carrying heavy backpacks, the three of us decided to pile into the closet-sized elevator while Kathy took the stairs. Well, this is a ghetto-fabulous elevator and there’s no interior door, so there’s nothing between you and the moving wall of the elevator shaft. Being a five year old, I decided to reach out and touch the moving wall. Big mistake. An alarm sounded an the elevator jerked to a halt between floors. We were frozen in panic when Kathy’s voice floated like the voice of God from somewhere in the building: “Push five again!” So we push five, and the elevator starts moving, but as soon as we get between four and five, the elevator jerks to a halt again. Well, the floors aren’t very thick, and the exterior elevator door has a glass panel in it, so we could see a little bit of the fourth and fifth floors. While we’re standing around unsure of what to do, we see Kathy’s head appear in the little window at our feet. “Huh,” she says, almost amusedly. A split second later, a pair of legs shows up on the fifth floor, and whoever those legs belonged to was very angry with us. So there we are, four and a half floors off the ground in a freaking closet, being yelled at in German and trying to follow Kathy’s instructions.

But it doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Kathy suggests that we press other floors, and every time it stops halfway between whatever we press and the floor below it. Alexis decided that we should press the ground floor, because logically, you can’t go through the ground. Great idea! So we press the button, head down, reach the ground floor, and watch helplessly as the lobby disappears above our heads. Finally, the elevator reaches some kind of bottom, and there’s a door, but beyond the door is nothing but blackness. Alexis said something along the lines of how she didn’t want to go out there because it looked like hell, but Aditi was brave and opened the door. It was literally the blackest darkness you could imagine, but we managed to find a light switch using our cell phones. Turns out we were in some sort of storage cellar that Alexis rightly compared to a Nazi bunker. Welcome to Vienna!

Friday night was really fun- we went to a beer garden (because we haven’t done enough of that already) in some awesome amusement park. Delicious, delicious food. I had seen this thing called “pork knuckle” on menus in Prague, but it sounded too gross to order on my own. Boy, was I wrong. It’s this massive pork drumstick, deep friend in awesomeness. There was other food involved, but hey, I really don’t remember much beyond the knuckle. There’s even a picture of me gnawing on the bone willingly. I’m not ashamed.

On Saturday we did all the touristy things- cathedrals, Habsburg palaces, and plazas, oh my! In my quest to drink my way through Europe, I’ve decided to have a traditional beverage in every country that I visit. In Austria, that would be Radler- half beer, half lemonade. It sounds disgusting, but trust me, it’s probably the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I normally hate extra flavors in drinks- coffee, tea, and especially beer. But it’s just this incredible combination of sweet, bitter, and tart all at the same time. As I write this, a half-empty six pack of Radlers is sitting between Alexis and me on the bus, and we intend to educate Machova about the wonders of mixing beer and lemonade.

We met up with our friend Nolan, who was also visiting Vienna this weekend, at an Australian bar where Kathy was meeting a friend of hers. We were sitting around the downstairs bar, enjoying our Radlers, when suddenly “Wonderwall” came on the stereo. I had no idea that this song was so popular with the Central European crowd, but the entire bar just busted out singing. True, there were a fair number of ex-pats there, but there were definitely a lot of people who didn’t speak English and were simply making sounds similar to the actual words. But hey, I do the same thing when I’m singing along and I don’t know the actual words, so fair is fair.

We met up with Kathy’s boyfriend Jim that night and he made me buy a cheese-filled sausage from a stand. I did not regret it.

On Sunday morning Jim made us all crepes. It was so nice having an apartment to stay in instead of crashing in a hostel- I can’t thank Kathy and Jim enough for taking us in like that! After a fattening breakfast, we rented some bikes for a Euro apiece and biked around the historic area in Vienna. We only had an hour to kill because we were going to a wine festival in the afternoon, but it was so worth it. Europe is so bike friendly and the bike path took us past some of the most beautiful buildings in town. We returned the bikes and managed to get back to Kathy’s place on the tram all by ourselves! We’re such good travelers.

Sunday afternoon was magnificent. We met up with some of Kathy’s friends from work and headed out into the Austrian countryside for a wine festival. Kathy works at the UN, so her friends are all international and really, really cool. The wine festival was in this tiny, historic town full of family-owned vineyards. You paid 9 Euro for a glass and got to drink as much wine as you wanted. The food was “authentic” Austrian cuisine, and while I’m gung-ho about drinking in the local culture, I don’t really want to eat some of the stuff that people consume in Europe. But Kathy’s friends had other plans. One of them handed me a piece of bread with some sort of meat on it, and when I asked what it was, she said “If you like meat, you’re good to go.” So I ate it, and it was pretty good. I asked what it was again and went in for a second bite. “Blood sausage!” she said with a laugh. Yuck. Somehow, it didn’t taste as good after I learned what it was.

Even though I call myself a “beer guy,” I’m starting to really appreciate a good glass of wine. Dad, you must be so proud. The wine was really, really good, and Jim made sure we drank as much as possible since we had to leave early to catch our bus back to Prague. When it was time to go, we said our goodbyes at the festival and the three musketeers braved the train system (no English translations… damnit!), figured out where the bus stop was back in Vienna, and headed home. Oh, and remember the guy who smelled like a stink bomb on the ride to Vienna? Well, he’s back, and this time he’s sitting next to Nolan. Poor kid is dying up there.

Closing story: Less than a minute after we departed Vienna, I decided to bust open a Radler. I’d never had a bottled one before, so I smelled it before I took a sip to make sure it wasn’t gross artificial. It smelled like plain beer, and Alexis suggested that maybe the lemonade settled to the bottom and I should shake it up. Well, it was already open, so I did what I thought was the next best thing and put my thumb over the opening and tipped it over a la Corona with lime. Bad, bad, bad move. As soon as it was tipped over, I felt the pressure increasing on my thumb and a little bit shot out onto my arm. I immediately flipped it back over and tried to slowly let some of the pressure out. Instead of that happening, a stream of beer shot out across the aisle and hit the woman sitting across from me IN THE FACE. She proceeded to yell at me in Czech and called me a stupid American. Alexis was practically dying with laughter the entire time, but I was too shocked by how quickly everything went to shit that I couldn’t really speak for about five minutes. Go me!