Manchester note: though I'm obviously publishing this some days after the mass murder in Manchester, the intro to this was written beforehand and I've decided to leave it as is. The few days in Istanbul that I lost to paranoia are, self-evidently, as nothing to the crime committed against young people - mostly women, this was an assault aimed directly at women and girls, as a friend rightly helped me recognise - that stole lives, physical and mental wellbeing - from so many people. I'm keeping the intro out of fidelity to what I'm trying to do with this blog, which is to tell a story for those who are interested, but also for me to look back on in 40 years and think 'yes, I really did this, and this is how I did it, and why I did it that way', and I'm not sure I should be retrospectively re-editing that sort of thing. It's just so profoundly unfair that those kids will never get to write and look back on their own self-indulgent travel blogs. So unfair.
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There's a hole in my bucket list. The plan for this trip always included Istanbul, right from its earliest sketches through to early this year. Along with Athens and Rome, it's one of the cities that founded Europe, that turned a peninsular at one end of the world into a continent - not geographically, perhaps, but certainly culturally. To do this trip and not include it feels incomplete. It wasn't going to be just Istanbul, either: I wanted to go to Ephesus and perhaps Pamukkale, and I'd resolved that a balloon ride over Cappadocia was going to be one of two outrageously expensive special events along the journey.
I tried to ignore the buzzing sound in my ear - that perhaps I'd missed my window to visit, that discretion is the better part of valour - for a long time. Each time there was a new incident I'd pull out a calculator and rationalise that even if there was an attack every couple of months, on average, that the odds of being in a terrible place at a terrible time were still minuscule. Last year's coup attempt came and went and still I refused to accept that it wasn't going to happen. Discretion as the better part of valour felt a lot like letting fear win. Fear isn't supposed to win.
The first dent in my resistance came when DFAT downgraded Istanbul to 'reconsider your need to travel'. My preferred travel insurer would no longer cover me, but still I reasoned that I could always buy a second policy to cover me if I still decided to go. After yet another incident around New Years, somebody I trust, who's in a position to make informed judgments about these things, told me it was time to call it. Even then I partly demurred, but rearranged the planned timetable: I'd strip back the time I'd allocated for Turkey, surrender Cappadocia and park a few extra days in Sofia, pending any changes in Istanbul. From Bulgaria it would be easy enough to sneak across the border for a couple of days, even if just to see the Hagia Sophia, if the situation seemed calm.
It didn't happen. Partly that's a function of the fatigue that set in back in Florence and hasn't yet fully subsided (and probably won't). Partly it's that I enjoyed Transylvania a lot and ultimately added a couple of days there, shaving some of the hypothetical Istanbul days back from Sofia. And partly it's because I knew I wouldn't enjoy myself if I spent the whole time jumping at shadows. The maths was on my side - it always was - but understanding that the odds are low and acting as if the odds are low are different things. Thankfully the days where I might have been in Istanbul have come and gone without any further horrors there, as they were always likely to. I can only hope the city's luck, such as it is, continues to hold. Maybe the window will open again one day.
If you can't be with the one you love, then, love the one you're with. Admittedly I didn't love either of Bucharest or Sofia, but we got along well enough. They were both relatively small cities, by European standards, until only 150 years ago and their adolescence was scourged by the wars and Communism. They haven't had the charmed run of it that Melbourne has, and it shows.
Bucharest is the most car-heavy city I've encountered since way back in Dubai. It's still walkable, but parts of it are choked with traffic, something that I'm increasingly not used to and that will feel positively alien by the time I'm back home. Strangely, though, drivers here are more respectful of pedestrians than anywhere else I've been in Europe. It took me far too long to understand the first rule of zebra crossings in Europe, which is that there's really no such thing as zebra crossings, and whoever gets there first has right of way. It's a confidence game. Drivers in Romania actually stop to let you cross, unprompted by your daring them to run you over. A pleasant change. It's not all fun and games for pedestrians, though: there's something about finding exposed wires lying on the footpath - twice - that encourages you to watch your step.
The hostel was an improvement on Brasov, insofar as the bathrooms didn't need sandbagging, but at least the one in Brasov was honest. I booked a six bed dorm, but upon arrival found myself in a room with eight beds. Correction: I found myself in an annex to a room with eight beds: one end didn't have a wall, only a curtain between the room and the main hall. Hmm. I questioned the extra beds - six is the maximum I'll book - and was given an improvised explanation that they'd had a big group the previous week and two of the beds were temporary, and not in use. A few hours later, sure enough, all eight beds were occupied. I considered remonstrating but couldn't be bothered: I'd paid my money, so was unlikely to get anywhere, and I didn't have the energy to find somewhere else even if I could.
My forbearance was at least rewarded by having the entire space to myself on the third night, and before that I got to enjoy the company of a quartet of Romanian guys, in Bucharest for a Deep Purple concert (did anybody know these guys were still around? Turns out they are 80% alive and 60% still touring). They were obviously heavily into music and I asked if they were a band, because they looked the part. This got me into trouble because one of them pointedly asked which of them I thought was the drummer. Luckily only three of the four were in the room, so I said it was clearly the other guy. They seemed happy with that assessment, but then I'm unsure if they told the other guy.
Although I had two and a half days here, there was really only one significant item on the agenda. The Palace of Parliament was the pet white elephant of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in the 1980s. It's the second largest administrative building in the world, coming in behind the Pentagon: I can only assume nobody told Nicolae until too late, because it's hard to imagine his megalomania could accomodate being bested by the US military, of all institutions.
The building is a grotesque, but admittedly awe-inspiring monument to unbridled hubris. It's a Communist-era Palace of Versailles, built not for an absolute monarch but an absolute dictator. Indeed, Elena saw Versailles on a state visit to France - I bet she didn't have to line up for three hours - and was entranced by the chandeliers. Thanks to that visit the Parliament now has 8200 chandeliers: more than Versailles. Some are so big that maintaining them requires climbing inside from the floor above. The electricity bill is so enormous that less than half of the lights are turned on, and so the interior exists in a permanent state of gloomy twilight. Because of that and the fact I was allowed to take mobile phone pictures for free, but had to pay $12 to use my proper camera, my photos are even worse than usual. But hopefully these give an idea of the sheer absurdity of it all:
There are over 40 major meeting rooms, each decorated in their own sumptuous style. There are curtains that are six stories high and weigh 450kg. There are chambers for the Senate and Council of Deputies, and then there's a near identical replica chamber of the latter that was intended to become a theatre for Communist party grandees. Monumental halls lead only to more monumental halls: at one point four of them converge in a central atrium, and the doors of each can retract away so that, the guide told me, a semi-trailer can be driven through the building. I suspect they might have had tanks, rather than trucks, in mind though.
Building this Potemkin palace must have chewed up an enormous proportion of what was an already small economy in the 1980s, and I couldn't help but think back to the single room shacks in rural Transylvania. It still wasn't finished when the Ceausescus were literally taken out the back and shot during the 1989 Revolution, and the new government was faced with the question of what to do with the damn thing. Some wanted to knock it down as a symbol of dictatorship: wiser heads pointed to the unfortunate truth that too much money had been wasted on it to tear it down unused.
It now serves as the Parliament, and, though it'll never earn its keep, they raise some extra cash by hosting conferences in what was the theatre for the apparatchiki. I was quite taken by one of the proposals from the 1990s, though: apparently Donald Trump tried to buy it and turn it into a casino. I suggested they give it to him in return for resigning as President and moving to Romania to run it personally. My tour guide just gave me a look.
I'd given myself an extra day in Bucharest so I could watch the Swans play the next morning and WE WON ANOTHER ONE! The Swans have never lost a match while I have been in Romania. If only the visa waiver period was long enough I might well have settled in for the duration, forgoing such cities as Rome, Prague, Moscow, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and London for the cause. We've now beaten Brisbane and North Melbourne and I can say with confidence that we are at least the 16th best team in the competition.
Now. You may have noticed that I am starting to fall behind on this blog somewhat. I've always warned that I struggle mightily with writer's block, and after receiving quite too many overly generous comments about the blog my inner perfectionist screams at me to go back, to re-write, to tinker, to second guess. But that's not been the biggest problem so far. No, my problem has been that whenever I set aside time to write I meet people to talk to instead.
I had a nine hour train journey from Bucharest to Sofia, which had been assigned to finishing off my Transylvania piece and writing the first half of this one. Then I met a fellow Australian named Ash, who was at Melbourne Uni at the same time I was and lived about 50m from my old home (though he left just before I arrived). We hit it off immediately and my nine hours of writing became nine hours of talking. So if there's any hint of staleness in this post - as if I'm writing while looking in a rear view mirror - blame Ash, not me. He's an enabler. Hopefully we'll see each other again when we're both home.
I kept taking it easy in Sofia, a city where I had very few plans and several days in which to plan them. I set out on my first day for a walk, and with little idea of what I wanted to see I grabbed a map from the hostel reception with a suggested sight-seeing route. It lasted about 15 minutes and half a dozen wrong turns before I gave up. I can't explain it - it's not as if the city has a particularly complicated layout - but every time I'd set out in the direction indicated by the map, and a few minutes later I'd cross-reference on Google Maps and find I'd gone in the opposite direction. So I returned to my tried and true method of aimless wandering until I found something interesting.
The first thing you notice is the footpaths - or at least, they'd better be the first thing you notice. Cobblestones have been trying to kill me ever since Lisbon, and have almost succeeded a number of times (forming an alliance with the snow in Madrid was particularly sneaky), but cobblestones have nothing on Sofia's footpaths. Potholes, broken concrete, raised tram tracks, crumbling phone wire pits, rocks and twisted roots: if you can think of it, Sofia is trying to break your ankles with it. Never mind sight-seeing: I was fully pre-occupied just scouting out the ground in front of me. There are so many broken tiles that in the early evening the entire city chimes to the beat of peak hour. It's quite musical.
Eventually I found my way to the main subway station, where I spotted some oddly Russian-flavoured souvenirs, considering Sofia is in Bulgaria, not Russia:
I may have been tempted, if I were not expecting to have my bags searched on the Russian border in a few weeks.
From there I stumbled across the Sofia History Museum, and given how little I know about Sofia I paid eight leva (about $6) to check it out. They wanted another $12 on top of that to take pictures, though, so I politely declined. The museum isn't very good, unfortunately, consisting mainly of old dresses and furniture, and it somehow completely ignores World War II or Communism. They have staff standing guard in every room, which is normal, but here they get up out of their chairs and follow you from exhibit to exhibit, which is not normal.
Mostly they were just silent, vaguely intimidating presences looming behind me, but one was very eager to show me their new, prized exhibit. It's a tram, and the most exciting part is that you can climb inside and sit in the tram. I told her that where I live we have trams too, and she nodded and told me again that I could sit in the tram. I said it reminded me of home, where I catch trams to go to work each day. She nodded and repeated that I could sit in the tram. I gave up and sat in the tram.
After being washed out the next day, I eventually made it to the most interesting museum in Sofia: the Museum of Socialist Art. I'd been expecting a bunch of Socialist realist paintings, propaganda posters and statues. There were plenty of the latter, at least, and my old mate Vladimir was looking a little hot out there in the sun so I offered him a drink. He didn't seem impressed by the choice:
Inside, though, I found a surprisingly fascinating museum. Rather than endless heroic farmers and foundry workers, the art was quite modern and sneakily subversive. A favourite topic of the regime was the Communists' struggle against the fascist government during World War II, and so there was plenty of scope for artists to depict interrogations, government brutality and executions that ostensibly represented what the regime thought they did, but that could just as easily be read as commentary on what the artists themselves lived through.
I hadn't planned to go to the Sofia Zoo, anticipating that it wouldn't be any good. But I had time after the art gallery, and it was within walking distance so curiosity got the better of me. It is, indeed, no good and, and then when I turned to leave I realised I didn't know any of the bus routes. So I just went to the stop and hoped I'd be able to communicate to the driver that I wanted to get to the centre of town. The driver of the first bus I boarded - the 93 - simply grunted at the words 'city centre', said a loud 'NO' and used his thumb to indicate I should get the hell off his bus. Fair enough.
The next bus - the 65 - arrived mere seconds later. 'Centre?', I asked. 'Town'? The driver grunted, said 'NO', but this time was helpful enough to give me the bus route I needed. '93!'.
"Oh!", I complained, and pointed at the 93 that was still only 50m up the road. "He said no!"
65 grunted again, shrugging his shoulders, suggesting there was nothing he could do. But then he looked ahead and seemingly reconsidered our options. Pointing with his thumb at the nearest available seat, he closed the doors and the bus took off, waving away my wallet when I attempted to buy a ticket. I had no idea what was happening. If this was a kidnap attempt it was poorly thought out: I knew the bus number and the time it was at Sofia Zoo, so we could rule that out. But where was he taking me? I didn't know what the plan was, but from the way we stuck on 93's tail, barreling through a couple of stops in the process, my best guess was that he was trying to overtake our quarry and get me one stop ahead so I could catch the 93 after all.
This continued for a good ten minutes, the driver grunting and muttering to himself every time a car got between us and 93. This was all very exciting - if a touch baffling - but I still didn't know whether 93 was the bus I needed to get into town. We could very well reel in 93, only for me to board the bus, shrug my shoulders at the confused driver who'd told me to go away back at the zoo... and then end up somewhere out in the suburbs. So when I spotted a subway station out the window - subway stations have maps of subway networks, and I could find my way home - I started madly gesticulating for my driver to let me out. He was enjoying the chase, I think, and so he was a bit reluctant but he eventually opened the doors.
That was the high point in Bulgaria. I'd been planning to use the next day for a bush walk: there is allegedly a nice waterfall somewhere on the Vitosha mountain, on the outskirts of Sofia. I'd been battling inexplicably low blood sugar all week, though - on one night I had 1.5 litres of soft drink in the space of 12 hours - and I reluctantly concluded that it was a bad idea to go traipsing around the forest in a foreign country with no rescue service and a limit to how much sugar I could carry. So as much as I'd like to say diabetes doesn't stop me from doing anything, it's not strictly true.
Instead I just bounced around Sofia, hanging out at the hostel until a fellow guest started murdering a ukulele, and then fled to a hipster vegetarian cafe (which are everywhere here, by the way: an unexpected bonus). The power went out just after my meal arrived. If you want a perfect metaphor for an unequal society, look no further than a restaurant where the stoves aren't working, and those who arrived first are happily eating away while everybody else watches on, hungry but literally powerless.
I wasn't able to book my hostel for the last night in Bulgaria - not unless I wanted to shift to an 18 bed dorm - so I decamped to Plovdiv, a small city a couple of hours away. It was billed, quite rightly, as having a lovely old town and an impressive Roman theatre:
There's now a road tunnel directly underneath that theatre, which I'm sure the conservators were just thrilled about. I wandered about the old town for a while, including finding my way to a lookout on a site that is apparently a contender for the oldest settlement in Europe. But frankly my heart wasn't in it. Tired, and with an exceptionally long commute due the next day, I wish I'd just changed hostels in Sofia and kept lazing about there.
I needed to eat, so I tried the only restaurant near the hostel with vegetarian options. Upon asking for a table I was told there weren't any by the waiter. Then I found one anyway and spent 20 minutes being ignored before I managed to obtain a menu. Then another 30 minutes of being ignored before managing to order. A Bulgarian man on the next table eventually interceded on my behalf when a waiter spoke to him, but also told me my treatment was "normal". I don't subscribe to the offensive notion that the customer is always right, but surely we can agree that the customer is always at least present?
That meal felt like a tone setter. Plovdiv, nice though it was, was the jumping off point for the worst week of the entire trip.
I thought I'd win intrepid traveller points for going to south-eastern Europe. Sure, it's not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I have a 24 hour curfew before I need access to a fridge so places where running water and electricity can't be relied upon are effectively off limits. And most people, if they get as far as Budapest, turn around and retreat back to Vienna or Prague. I was going to go to Romania, land of vampires and megalomaniacal dictators: off the beaten tourist path and into the relative unknown.
Not so much. I doubt there are any vampires in Transylvania, but there are Australians. Australians everywhere. More on them later.
I wasn't primed for a great start in Romania. I'd developed a cold in Budapest, and I had an overnight train to Brasov (Brash-of, the 'h' is invisible) that night. Remembering my miserable sleep-depriving, head-crunching, insulin-losing experience on the ride from Florence to Vienna, I was braced for a disaster. I was particularly concerned about coughing, spluttering and sneezing my way through the night with another person in the cabin: sick people in dorm rooms are not exactly popular. So I made a last-minute dash into a pharmacy in Budapest and asked for some cold and flu medicine. "No problem", the pharmacist said. "Is ephedrine okay?"
Ah... yeah? Sure. If you're offering.
With symptoms suppressed more aggressively than a President trying to shut down an FBI investigation, then, I had a pretty easy night on the train after all - almost too easy. As I was leaving the Schengen zone, I had to go through passport control. I'd been nervous about this, but it was remarkably uneventful. The train stopped on the border, a Hungarian border guard walked up and down the carriage stamping passports, then the train moved a couple of hundred metres and a Romanian border guard walked up and down the carriage stamping passports. He took a little longer than he might have liked with me, though. I'd fallen asleep between Hungary and Romania, and been woken when he knocked on the door. Then I fell asleep again as he checked my room mate's passport, and he had to wake me up to show mine. Then I fell asleep and had to be woken again before he gave it back, and I was so groggy that I just put it who-knew-where. Ephedrine is awesome.
My room mate was a fellow whose name I'm quite sure I didn't get right, but it sounded like 'Elsibio', and that's vaguely Shakespearean enough that I'm going to run with it. Elsibio is from Moldova, studied in Brasov, lives in Budapest and works as a Hungarian and Romanian to German, Italian and Spanish translator. Add in the English he used to speak with me and he has six languages at his disposal: a new record for this trip.
English was very much the sixth of the six, so he used mime to fill in the gaps. At some point the conversation turned to how there are many Hungarians living in Romania, and he explained how this came to be - Hungary lost territory to Romania after World War I - by holding an invisible map of Hungary in front of him and using his other hand as a pair of scissors to cut parts off if. Later he was trying to provide some directions, which involved pointing left, miming walking with his hands, pointing right and walking again, a bit longer this time to indicate that I should go further. I could visualise his map of Hungary a bit better than his map of Brasov, alas.
The first thing you notice when you arrive in Brasov is that it has its own Hollywood sign:
It certainly puts the 'Brash' in Brasov. There's a ski resort somewhere behind that mountain called Poiana, and Elsibio had recommended it as a place for a bushwalk. I jokingly asked if there were bears in the woods and he said "bears, yes, of course, there are bears!". Perhaps not Poiana, then.
I suffered a minor heart attack upon arriving at the hostel and finding that my passport wasn't where I routinely keep it. At least this time it was nothing that frantically throwing everything all over the reception room floor, only to eventually find it in the next pocket over from the one it belongs in, couldn't fix. Don't try to store important documents when under the influence of Ephedrine. But I checked in safely enough and headed off to to use the bathrooms.
Oh dear.
I'll start with the showers. They were clean enough, but the hot water only worked part-time. You have to run the water for a good two minutes before it would start to get warm, at which point you have maybe two minutes. If you want to take longer - if a shower is perhaps a valued little luxury in an otherwise spartan approach to travelling - then you needed to start the cycle over again. Meanwhile the drain was entirely overwhelmed by the task demanded of it: as you're showering the basin at the bottom of the shower is filling up, and after three minutes or so you're in ankle-deep water. If you're conscious enough of this you'll turn the water off in time, but inevitably people either didn't notice or didn't care, because the bathroom floor was routinely flooded by over-flowing shower basins.
The water made drying and dressing oneself a delicate task. A good hostel bathroom will have a little changing cubicle directly next to the shower, so you can dress in privacy. If they don't have that, they'll usually at least have segregated bathrooms, so you can still dress without causing too much of a stir. My Brasov hostel had neither, so there was nothing for it but to hang your clothes over the door of the shower - carefully balanced to avoid them falling into the lake forming around your ankles - and then waiting for the lake to drain away so you could dry yourself and get dressed without leaving the shower. Quite a painstaking and time-consuming process.
Better than the toilets, though. Each one had a sign warning that the plumbing was bad, that there was a risk of blockage and over-flowing (quote, "on your sexy ass", unquote) and directing guests not to flush toilet paper but to use the bins provided. I won't bother describing the accompanying smell. It's not that I doubted the severity of the threat - witness the showers - but this was an edict with which I could not in good conscience comply, on account of its ickiness. Frequent flushing was the order of the week.
Bathroom horrors aside, I enjoyed my time at the hostel well enough. The people I found here were a very different crowd to those I'd met previously: in a Western European hostel, with their tight visa restrictions and high prices, everybody knows where they're going next, when they're going and what the plan is for each day they have available in their current city. There's a few other people who are roaming at length, but most are on short trips numbering in the days or weeks.
My Brasov friends, by contrast, were free from the constraints of working around horrifying Western European living costs, and weren't much ones for planning. They had nowhere in particular to be, no particular time to be there and weren't particular about how they were going when they did go. They might go north, to Timisoara, south, to Bucharest, east, to Moldova or west, to Belgrade. They might go tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe the day after that. They'll probably get a bus, but they might try hitch-hiking first and see how they go.
A good third of them were Australians. Georgia and Eddy, two girls from Sydney, were on their way to Ukraine for a rave party. They were preparing to get a bus to Kiev - it was going to take about 30 hours - until I asked if they'd had any trouble getting their visas. "Visas?" They looked blankly at me. They looked blankly at each other. Nobody had mentioned visas, not until I mentioned visas. So maybe not Ukraine, then, and besides, Eddy hadn't figured out how to tell Georgia this but she'd recently found out the rave they wanted to go to was actually in Warsaw, not Kiev. And when they had time to sit down and reconsider their next move, it wasn't to Poland but to Prague, because why not Prague? Sarah and Callum - I thought his name was Tom until I learned it was a nickname, short for tomfoolery - also from Sydney, were lingering in Brasov until they decided where to go next, and finally discovered they could go and volunteer on a reindeer farm inside the Arctic Circle in Norway, with 40 sled dogs there to play with.
I also met a fellow Melburnian named Liam. Liam is also a Victorian public servant and is also on a leave of absence from work as he bumbles around Europe. Liam had the bed next to mine when I first arrived, and meeting him here, in a small town on the other side of the world, well and truly punctured any lingering illusions I had of winning intrepid traveller points. Luckily he compensated for my loss by being excellent company, and I was delighted when we tried to talk shop and I couldn't remember half of my department's portfolios. I've successfully suppressed even the most basic details of my job.
I haven't really been prone to hanging around the hostel for a drink, but the mood took me on my first night in Brasov. And when I went shopping for some scotch, I found a first clue to why so many Australians were in Romania:
Yes, that is a three litre plastic bottle of beer. It cost $2. My whiskey was a lot more expensive, coming in at about 60c per standard drink.
Along with Liam my drinking companions were Evan from Ireland, who eventually conceded that the International Rules series is unfairly tilted towards Gaelic rules and Jess from New Zealand, who is currently between working visa and facing the daunting prospect of having to go home. Present but not drinking were Shaun and Neil, Mormon brothers from Utah, who are travelling in between missions and medical school. Eastern Europe is the third leg of a trip that has already encompassed South America and West Africa, and may move on to Central Asia next. A fun group.
The Swans were playing the next morning at about 6:15. Suffice to say that between the scotch and the cold I had resolved - for the second straight week - to sleep in and watch us be humiliated at whatever time I woke up. And - for the second straight week - I woke up anyway, and obviously couldn't ignore the fact we were playing. And it worked out okay because WE WON ONE. We won! I'm not making it up. I saw it. Check the scores, if you don't believe me. I checked them multiple times, just to be sure. We won one and now we're making a late run for the top twelve. And I'm free to watch Swans games in Europe, after all. I was starting to worry it was my fault, but it's okay as long as I don't watch any games in Spain, France, Italy or Austria.
With just three hours sleep on top of being sick and maybe just a little bit hungover, exploring Brasov would have to wait until after I'd been back to bed. In truth, I didn't do much in Transylvania: across six days I really only went exploring for three of them. Partly that's because distances are long - Brasov is a good base, but most of the best things to see and do are in the wider region - and partly it was because after a packed schedule for the last couple of months I needed a break, and I took it. All I did in that first couple of days was walk around the old town and read a book.
There's something of a tale of two cities going on here. The outskirts, including the area around the train station, is all Stalinist-era concrete blocks. They're caked in graffiti, I suspect not because Romanian kids are more prone towards vandalism but rather that the city has more pressing demands on its budget than cleaning it up. The Old Town, by contrast, is pure postcard fodder:
No building has the same pastel colour as those next to it: I gather it simply isn't done. The whole area - which is Brasov's administrative, shopping and dining precinct, as well as home to its hotels and hostels - feels like a rapidly gentrifying Australian country town. Like Daylesford, perhaps, but without the pretentiousness. You can eat truffle oil pasta in a dark restaurant with a man playing the piano, but the pasta costs $6, not $36.
I eventually roused myself to make at least a half-day trip out of town on day three. The Bran castle - supposedly home to Dracula - is about a 45 minute bus ride from Brasov (passing through the village of Rasnov, which despite being a tiny fraction of Brasov's size refuses to be outdone and has a Hollywood sign of its own).
The previous night I'd been talking to a Romanian uni student, Katrina, and her mother (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten). They were on their way to Corfu, a 24 hour bus ride away, for what would be the mother's first trip outside Romania. She's been teaching herself English by watching television, and every time she reached for a word and I confirmed it was the right one she would pump her fist in the air in triumph. She and her daughter wrinkled the name of my blog out of me and... they didn't really get any of the jokes. Awkward.
Anyway, I asked them if it annoyed them, as Transylvanians, that the only thing anybody knew about Transylvania was...
- "Dracula?", Katrina rolled her eyes.
- "It isn't true!", Katrina's mum.
- "The guy who wrote it never even visited Romania!", Katrina again.
I guess it annoys them.
The historical inspiration for Dracula is Vlad the Impaler, a 15th century ruler whose name hints at his reputation for bloodthirstiness, but is also somewhat ironic because vampires ought to be very, very careful around sharp instruments. Bran Castle was already around when Vlad was sinking his teeth into the region but there's no evidence he ever visited, let alone lived there. The castle is living on its infamy, rather than its intrinsic interest: it's less a castle than a reasonably big house, with furniture belonging to the time when it briefly housed members of the royal family in the 1930s, and aside from climbing up a secret passageway hidden inside the walls it was all rather boring. The only suckers here are the tourists.
I had a more satisfying, if very long, day trip the following day to Sighisoara (Sig-a-shwar-ra), mostly because of the look of utter delight on Katrina's mum's face when I mentioned it was a powerful recommendation. The train takes two hours and 40 minutes to cover the 120km from Brasov: all the trains in Romania are this slow, though you wouldn't pick it to look at them:
Many of the stations require people to walk directly on the tracks to reach the train, and toilet facilities on board varied from dubious to you don't want to go there. On one train I went to lift the seat only for the entire bowl of the toilet to start lifting up with it, so I decided the seat could stay down. The sedate pace left plenty of time to watch rural Romania go by outside the window. Every little village has a station and a stationmaster who would stand outside at attention as the train passed, regardless of whether it stopped. Many of the houses in the villages were single room brick cottages; some had partially collapsed at the back but had tarps up and were evidently still inhabited. Farmers use horses and carts to transport produce or tend to crops, and there's no fences so shepherds have to watch over their flocks of sheep. It's all very quaint and picturesque, but I refuse to romanticise poverty: I have no doubt those farmers would dearly love to have utes to help them sell vegetables further afield.
Sighisoara itself is much like Brasov, with Stalingrad slowly crumbling around a medieval inner core of cobblestone streets and pastel buildings, this time within a walled citadel built on top of a hill. On the way I followed a bustling crowd into a small produce market that was roughly half vegetables and half flowers: the people here might be poor but I suspect they get their five serves of fruit and veg in rather more often than I do. I bought some almonds and went on my way. Vlad Dracul (father of the Impaler)'s house is here, and you can visit the room where his infamous son was born: the rest of the building is now a pizza restaurant. I didn't go in because I suspected the room looks like any other room. The Old Town is almost entirely given over to tourism, with two out of three shops either restaurants or souvenir stands. But it's very pretty. I went up the clock tower, where I was reminded of just how far from home I am:
My final day trip was to Sinaia, a village in the Bucegi mountains that is home to the Peles Castle, the former summer residence of the Romanian royals. Unlike Bran it's actually an interesting building, in an incredible setting, and well worth the trip:
After getting there I bumped into my dorm mate Hati, a young Korean woman, whom I'd gotten to know in trying circumstances the previous night. Before she arrived we'd had a mouse in the room, so we all promptly threw out any food we had and tried not to think about it any further. But Hati screamed when she first saw it, and no amount of reassuring her that it wouldn't climb into her bed could calm her down. Eventually it disappeared into a small hole in the wall, and I stuffed my sock into it so it couldn't come back and Hati could relax. I washed that sock very thoroughly.
We were told that we couldn't roam the castle on our own but had to join a tour, and somehow or other we got tacked onto a group of Italians. What is it with me and getting mixed up with Italians? The tour was tedious: the English-speaking guide would say a sentence about how the heating worked, or where the stained glass windows came from, then the Italian tour leader would repeat what he said in Italian before they moved onto the next uninteresting factoid. I ranged ahead as far as I thought I'd get away with. I don't like tours.
After finishing in the castle Hati and I began walking down the hill, me to the train, Hati to the bus she'd booked back to Brasov. Except she didn't know where the bus left from, or what time it was going. She didn't seem too perturbed, but I talked up how unfortunate it would be to end up stuck in Sinaia and how cheap the train was, and she eventually followed me to the station. Along the way we took a wrong turn and set a dog off barking. Hati squealed and fled. "At least it wasn't a mouse", I said, by way of comfort. Not sure if it helped.
Transylvania was a relatively late addition to this trip, and I'm glad it made the cut. I might not be the most intrepid traveller, but I think us Australians are in the vanguard, and that the region is about to become immensely popular. It's like Provence without the prices. I want to go back: though hopefully by the time I do the locals are much richer, and the truffle oil pasta costs $16, not $6.
Well, this is a dilemma.
As I've somehow persevered with this project - I really didn't think I'd get this far - I've settled into what amounts to a formula. There's some silly gambit to open with that then segues clumsily into a chronicle of each day. I tell stories about the people I meet and about the things I've seen, and I sprinkle in some bad puns and observe the places I visit with an air of general bemusement. It seems to be working, but it relies on something that isn't necessarily reliable: I need to find things that are bemusing, meet people that are interesting and, for a story to really work, ideally something should go wrong and derail the plan a little too.
I had a very satisfying, rather too short time in Budapest. But bemusement was scarce, the interesting people were all staying somewhere else and it was only on the last day, when I developed a cold, that something went meaningfully wrong. So what to write about? I've wrestled with the question, searched for an angle, toyed with and rejected ideas, started and deleted intros. And I've realised I need to do something that's most out of character for me.
I'm going to talk about politics.
First, though, I'm going to do something even more unusual and talk about food. Specifically, I'm going to talk about langos. Langos is perhaps the world's worst sounding super-food. Take some flatbread dough - enough for something the size of a small pizza, but twice as thick - and fry it, brush it with garlic, smother it in sour cream and bury it under a thick layer of grated cheese. The finished product is an unhealthy, unwieldy, impractical street food tour de force. The Greeks gave us democracy, the Italians gave us humanism, the French gave us liberty and Hungary gave us langos. I kept meaning to take photos, only to forget until I'd already started eating, so this is what most of a langos looks like:
I first discovered this bounty at approximately 9PM on February 8th, 2014. I know this with such precision because it was at the Canberra Multicultural Festival, on the night of the Griffith by-election. Because I'm a well-rounded individual with only a casual interest in politics I was out with a friend, and I was only checking the count for updates every three to five minutes or so. Labor held the seat, we found and destroyed Kevin Rudd's last horcrux and I discovered langos. It was a good night.
Until I arrived in Budapest, that Canberra langos was the one and only langos I'd ever eaten. There wasn't anywhere close to me that had it when I moved back to Melbourne, and when I decided that Budapest would be part of this trip eating this mystical street food of kings at its source was one of the highest priority items on the agenda. It loomed so large in my imagination of Budapest that when a cafe opened just two doors down from my apartment building, with a Hungarian menu that included langos, I couldn't bring myself to go in. It was tempting. So tempting. But I was only about three months away from my trip, and it felt like cheating for something so anticipated to be so easily obtained. So I waited for Budapest, and to make up for lost time I ate four of the things in four days. It might have marginally reduced my life expectancy, but it was worth it.
These is, of course, much more to Budapest than langos. I didn't have any expectations of the city at all, but it reminds me of a slightly dishevelled Paris: once down on its luck, but making its way in the world after a big break. It has Paris' big wide boulevards and some of its grand architecture, especially on either side of the Danube:
One thing that Budapest has that Paris doesn't, though, are thermal baths, which were imported into Hungarian culture when it was occupied by the Ottoman Empire a few centuries ago. I've been lugging a pair of bathers around with me for the last seven weeks, but apart from a swim way back in Dubai, the only use they'd gotten was for wearing while I washed the rest of my clothes. In Hungary I made up for lost time. After visiting the zoo - a disappointment, to be frank - I went next door to the Szechenyi Baths. Unfortunately I neglected to take photos, but the building is close to a century old and ornately decorated inside and out.
There are pools inside that range all the way from uncomfortably cold to scalding hot, and there's some sort of convoluted sequence and timeframe in which you're supposed to move from one to the other. I didn't come here to sit in cold water, though, so I rebelled and just soaked in the warmth for hours. After spending some time inside I moved to one of the outdoor pools, which was set at 38 degrees. After seven weeks on planes, in trains and sleeping on hostel beds it was delightful. I can move all my muscles again!
I could have happily stayed in the pool for longer but - and how's this for logic - while the pools remained open until 10, the building that housed the change rooms and lockers closed at 7. If I wanted to stay longer I'd just have to entrust my wallet, phone and passport to the decency and integrity of a few hundred strangers: decency was also going to be hard to guarantee if I wanted to be able to change. So I begrudgingly left.
Now. Politics.
Apart from a brief foray into Slovakia, Budapest was my first experience of post-Communist Europe, and given my interests this was always going to become a theme of the visit. I was curious to see how the legacy of the Communist period is remembered and represented.
So what do you do when life gives you Lenins? You make a Lenin Park.
Memento Park is a tourist trap, devoted to Communist kitsch, situated a few kilometres outside the city. They've collected about 30 or so statues that were evicted from their original locations following the fall of the Communist regime, along with a Trabant for good measure. It's mostly Hungarian party officials and symbolic representations of workers and soldiers, but there's also three Lenins, such as this:
A larger than life Soviet soldier:
And Stalin's boots:
The boots are all that were left standing after Budapest's main statue of Stalin was torn down during the 1956 revolution. In the 2003 Hollywood adaptation of this event, American soldiers naturally take the place of Hungarian freedom fighters, and the statue being demolished was of Saddam Hussein. Stalin's hand and Stalin's ear, meanwhile, are in the Hungarian National Museum.
A rather more serious attempt to grapple with history is Terror House. It might sound like a cartoonish theme park attraction, but it's a genuinely horrifying museum devoted to documenting the history of totalitarian Hungary, ostensibly in both its fascist and Communist incarnations. The museum is built inside the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross - a Nazi party installed in power by the Germans in the dying days of World War II - and after that the building housed Hungary's equivalent of the KGB until 1956.
I am a social democrat. I believe in using the power of government to support the disadvantaged, to fight inequality and advance the interests of workers and the underclass. But I remember when Fidel Castro recently died and my reaction - satisfaction that a career criminal responsible for the death, imprisonment and exile of thousands was finally in the hatground - caught some people by surprise. I was surprised that they were surprised.
At the end of World War II the Soviets issued quotas for people who would be kidnapped and marched back to the USSR as forced labourers. At Terror House you'll see videos of elderly men, recalling that as they were marching, those who were toothless or too small to fight for a share of the bread thrown on the ground in front of them starved to death. Or you can listen to their wives, left at home, often without ever being told where their husbands had disappeared to. The Hungarian Communist Party - supposedly a workers' movement - aided and abetted the enslavement of their own people. The regime murdered or forcibly evicted peasants who owned a little more land than their neighbours. They trained children to inform on their parents for thought crimes. They tortured people in search of confessions to crimes that didn't exist. They executed teenagers who fought in the 1956 revolution. I stood in the basement where they did it.
If these people stood for anything it wasn't any ideal, value or principle that I share.
If Communism had been the only terror to befall Hungary in the 20th century I'd call it a wonderful, if devastating, museum. It pulls no punches. It even has a room that features names and photos of people who committed crimes against humanity and some of them, at least, were still alive when they were added to the wall of shame. But as I wrote above, while it 'ostensibly' covers both Communism and fascism, it gives remarkably short thrift to the latter. The museum almost exclusively covers the period from the fall of the Miklos Horthy regime in 1944 until the Communist political police moved out of the building. The Arrow Cross regime - the 'fascist' part of the museum - covers only three months of this time and takes up one room out of four floors. Very convenient.
Miklos Horthy was Regent - effectively dictator - of Hungary from 1920 until being deposed by the Nazis and replaced with the Arrow Cross Party, for trying to make a separate peace with the Allies. Under Horthy's regime Hungary allied with the Nazis, annexed parts of Czechoslovakia following the German invasion, and participated in the invasions of Yugoslavia and the USSR. The museum waves all this away as 'symbolic' actions to appease Hitler. As for the Holocaust, both the Terror House and the National Museum claim that Horthy 'resisted' sending Jews to the extermination camps. Partly true: they refused to surrender Jews who were Hungarian citizens until 1944, but sent 18,000 non-citizens - mostly refugees - to their deaths. And eventually Horthy did comply with Nazi demands to send Hungarian Jews too, handing over more than 400,000 people. 400,000.
Why does this matter? Because past is prologue, and because the things we choose not to talk about, the inconvenient truths we don't want to tell, help determine the decisions we make and the actions we take. The current government of Hungary is of an authoritarian bent and the country is being described as an 'illiberal democracy': it still holds elections but the government is clamping down on judges and the press, and back-pedalling on human rights.
The Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is rather like a more competent, less preposterous version of Donald Trump, with a similar platform and eagerness to demonise foreigners. He is less dangerous only because he was born in Hungary and Trump was born in America. While it suits the government to highlight the crimes of Communism, Horthy's legacy is being rehabilitated. Statues and monuments to him have been popping up: hopefully one day they'll find their way to Memento Park too.
With all of this in the back of my mind, I left Terror House deeply upset not only by what it displayed, but what it didn't. How was a country that has all of this horror still within its living memory not learning from the past? How could it flirt with the same mistakes? But then I found some hope.
I stumbled upon this 'memorial' to the victims of German aggression on an aimless wander through the city:
Apologies for the crappy photo - the light was working against me. The eagle represents Germany, sinking its talons into an innocent Hungary represented, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, by the Archangel Gabriel. Erected by the Orban government, it's a classic of the 'playing the victim card'. That slur is usually deployed by the right to wave away any grievances of minorities that they'd prefer not to think about, but it's appropriate here because the purpose of this statue is to re-position Hungary as an innocent victim of World War II, rather than an Axis power that invaded neighbouring countries and committed war crimes against its own people.
So why did I find this monstrosity a sign of hope? Because I found this unofficial, unauthorised addition at its base:
Hungarian liberals have been conducting this protest ever since the memorial went up. The personal effects are mostly heirlooms from Holocaust victims: they are occasionally removed - stolen, effectively - but they keep replacing them. The protesters apparently hold vigils every night: I'd intended to attend one before I got sick.
I'll finish my rant there. I shall return to general befuddlement and bemusement in Chapter 12, which features a mouse, a bottle of beer and toilet humour of the 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry' variety.
They say pride goes before a fall.
As with any writing project, I've been kicking possible ideas around in my head for a couple of posts in advance. A couple of weeks ago I'd been all set to pat myself on the back for this piece about being in Vienna, which takes me up to the milestone day 50 of the trip. I was all set to write a post where I expressed amazement that not only am I still writing - I really didn't think I'd keep it going this long - but also that I'd gotten this far without anything going badly wrong. Without making any big mistakes. Then I lost my testing kit, which was bad. And then I lost my insulin kit, which was worse. A lot, lot worse. A very big mistake.
I had prepared for this. I came with two sets of two pens (because I take two types of insulin) each: one stays in the shoulder bag I take with me everywhere, and the other is in my backpack. Except when I am moving from hostel to hostel, then, I always have injecting kits in two different locations. It's really only the moves from location to location where I feel vulnerable or exposed on this trip: the nightmare scenario is being mugged and having both bags stolen, for which there's really no possible mitigation strategy other than being alert and avoiding dark alleys.
Having the spare set is what enables me to go out and enjoy my day without constantly looking over my shoulder. I can lose my wallet, my phone and even my passport and I can get things back on track after a couple of days and a few hundred dollars. But lose my insulin and I'm in immediate, very complicated trouble. It's not simply a case of buying new pens at a pharmacy: I use a rare type that can only be purchased directly from Novo Nordisk, and they're an old model so I wasn't even sure they could be replaced. So when I went to inject my lunchtime insulin in Vienna and found that my primary set was missing, it wasn't quite a catastrophe, but it was certainly a disaster. I could still take my insulin, but my safety blanket was gone.
I assume all the colour drained from my face. I hadn't actually checked into the hostel yet, but I'd used the luggage room and the showers, and I frantically raced to reception and pleaded to have the keys to each room back so I could retrace my steps. Nothing. I'd gone to the supermarket around the corner an hour earlier, and dashed back there, tearing up and down the aisles hoping they had fallen out of my bag there. Nothing, and while the staff didn't know what I was talking about we established that they hadn't collected any lost property. I must have left them on the train.
I couldn't believe I was so stupid. With help from the hostel staff we contacted the Austrian train company and asked them to check the train - I was able to tell them the exact spot I'd been sleeping in - but they said no, sorry, it wasn't possible. Lost property is updated once each morning. No, they would not contact the staff working on that train directly. I would have to try tomorrow.
So that was at least 24 hours of anxiety and self-recrimination I could look forward to, then. And assuming they didn't turn up my chances of actually enjoying being in Vienna were shot to pieces. I divided the remaining kit into two - that is, I separated the two surviving pens, thinking I would simply have to switch between using the different cartridges whenever I was out of the hostel. I couldn't risk having none left, if something happened to the spare set, so one would have to stay with my backpack. It was going to be a pain in the proverbial, but it'd just have to do. And I emailed Novo to ask about getting more.
Suffice to say, my appetite for going out and exploring was gone. Once they let me check in I went to the room, curled up in the bed and tried to not hate myself for making everything so complicated. I just kept running through it over and over in my head, both because I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid, and because I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid. I started mentally replaying the entire day.
This was on day 44 of the trip, and that's long enough for habits to form. And one of them is that I never get on or off a train without checking that I have my supply of insulin cartridges, wallet, phone, passport and injecting kit. My testing kit was part of the checklist too, since the mishap in Italy (it really should have been all along). The evidence might have suggested I'd left it on the train, but I *knew* I hadn't left it on the train.
There'd been five of us in the compartment. Myself, three Slovakian women who said the best thing about being in Florence was that their husbands and kids were in Slovakia, and a retired Austrian teacher named Peter. We'd eaten breakfast together in the compartment, and I'd obviously injected my insulin then. And I couldn't have left the insulin on the bed after that, because the train staff had come in and converted it back into a row of seats for the last hour of the trip. I had gathered up all my stuff, and even if I hadn't the staff member would have picked it up and asked whose it was.
My insulin wasn't on the train.
Peter the ex-teacher is a lovely fellow and wanted to help me find my feet in Vienna. He ignored my mild protests that he should go home and get some rest while I sorted myself out (and maybe sat for ten minutes on the station wifi and caught up with the world, too), and so I duly followed him to the information desk and on to the tobacco shop where I could apparently buy the ticket. I had my credit card ready, but they only took cash so I had to rummage through my bag for my wallet to find a €20 note, taking out a couple of items and sitting them on the counter while I found it. As the shopkeeper was issuing my change I turned towards Peter, but he was already heading off so I quickly raced after him, to thank him for his help and -
Ah. There was a good chance I knew where my insulin was.
I half-walked, half-ran back to the tram station and headed back towards the central railway station. It was past 4PM and I didn't know when the tobacco shop would close, and I was a touch breathless in my haste when I found my way back there. The man who served me was gone, replaced by two women. Had anybody left any lost property behind that morning? A black pouch with two insulin pens in it? Something that looked vaguely medical and important?
The older of the two women didn't answer, but turned and said something in German to her colleague. She didn't say anything either, but crossed the room, ducked below the counter and, sensing the drama of the moment and enjoying every second of it, slowly raised my insulin up in front of her.
I could have kissed her, but that would have been wildly inappropriate. I could have kissed the insulin, but that would have been just plain weird. So I just held the insulin in front of my face and smiled at it for a few seconds. With hindsight I must have been doing my best impression of Rafael Nadal, holding the Wimbledon trophy aloft. Nobody judges *him* as being weird for kissing his prize.
****
So Vienna got off to a rough start. And there were more setbacks to come. But my walk around the centre of town that evening, with my insulin safely back in my bag, was probably the most triumphant march through Vienna since the Soviets arrived in 1945. Speaking of which, this monument to that very event must infuriate the Austrian right:
The Austrian flag is of course red and white, and the world's best colour combination pops up everywhere, literally out of the ground:
When I turned for home I used the train system for the first time and was prompted to validate my ticket. If I didn't mind. Only if it was no trouble. No pressure.
I'd wonder how they ever actually sell a ticket, since I saw no ticket inspectors all week, but this is one of those countries, like Japan, where people wait at pedestrian lights even when no cars, let alone police are in sight. I don't think breaking the law ever occurs to your average Austrian.
Back at the hostel, I found myself in rarefied intellectual company. The six bed dorm had two PhD students - Christina from Czechia and I-forget-his-name from Lithuania who were in Vienna for the same climate change conference. Becca from Hawaii and Ivan from Bulgaria are both Masters of International Relations students in Moscow. The fifth dorm mate, Ja Shin, was from Taiwan. I'm not sure what her academic history is like, but she speaks five languages so it hardly matters. I got along wonderfully with Becca and Ivan, and we've made tentative plans to catch up again in Moscow. I had the pleasure of introducing them both to Tim Minchin, but they seemed a little lost when I was describing footy and asked them to imagine a cross between rugby and basketball, in which you get a consolation point for trying but failing to kick a goal.
The next day I headed out to the Schonbrunn Palace, somewhat hesitantly after my miserable experience at Versailles. It was the summer residence of the Habsburg emperors of Austria, though you have to wonder why they bothered moving at all: it's only 5.6km away from their main residence. It's a similar size to Versailles, but less gaudy - the Habsburgs had a more subdued, dare I say more tasteful, style than Louis XIV - and it has approximately six billion fewer people trying to visit on any given day. The visit was a relaxed, well managed delight. The only disappointment was not being allowed to take any photos inside.
I had my second setback on day three. It was another cold and rainy day - my delusions of having skipped winter for a year are long gone - and I spent much of the morning vacillating over whether to go to the zoo. What I hadn't realised at the time I had planned the week in Vienna was that May Day is a public holiday, which meant bigger crowds for whatever was open over the long weekend, but also that a lot would be closed. So my choice for the zoo was dreary weather on a quiet day, or clearer skies but too many pram jams.
Having decided on the rain, I ducked into the supermarket near the hostel for some supplies. An elderly gentleman with a trolley stood back to allow me to go through the entrance gate first, and, as a pointless gesture of thanks I turned to hold the gate open for him behind me. A painful mistake. Unprepared for my pointless gesture of thanks, he was using the trolley to push the gates open, and he was being forceful about it. The result: one badly smashed dominant left hand.
The pain worsened rapidly as I rushed around the shop, trying to buy enough snacks for what might have become a long wait in a hospital ER. By the time I was at the checkout I was struggling so much that the lady working there - she was accustomed by now to my Viennese travails, having assisted with the frantic attempt to find the insulin two days earlier - felt sorry for me and gave me one of those Lindt Easter bunnies to cheer me up. It didn't reduce the pain at all, but it turns makes grown men feel that little bit better, not just small children.
For a while I feared at least one finger was broken, which would have caused all manner of problems from having to find a doctor and wrangle my travel insurance, to not being able to fill out immigration and customs forms at borders, to the most pressing of all: not being able to inject my insulin. But after consulting my learned friend Gemma via a hasty Messenger video call (thanks again, Gem), we established that it was very swollen but *probably* not broken, and I'd best get some medical tape and painkillers. By the time that was done and I could think through the pain enough to want to do something with the day it was 2PM. The zoo would have to wait.
Wanting to salvage something of the day, I turned instead to the Vienna Museum of Natural History, an old-school museum full of meteorites, fossils and thousands of stuffed animals, and from there to the Haus des Meeres. It's the weirdest aquarium I've ever been to, because it's built inside a World War II anti-aircraft tower. It's ten stories high, but because the building is so narrow each floor only had a couple of small exhibits. I read some signs detailing the history of the building, and it said they had put the aquarium there in the 1950s after deciding the tower couldn't be demolished safely, so they wanted to use it for something 'peaceful' to counter its violent origins. The signs referred to 'the forces of fascism' as opposed to 'Nazi Germany' or anything else that might be mistaken as a synonym for 'Austria'. Perhaps just a little bit of distancing from uncomfortable history is going on.
As much as I wanted to sleep that night, my over-sized purple hand had other ideas, and so Friday became a light day. I wandered about the Naschmarkt - essentially a small Queen Vic Market - and discovered that the world's best falafel balls are sold there and that they only cost 20c each. I was coming to the conclusion that I would very happily live in Vienna, if only it would stop beating me up and hiding my insulin.
The real point of the day, though, was the Vienna State Opera. A seat would have run to about €60, but if you're willing to wait for a couple of hours every single performance here has standing room tickets, open for sale that day, for just €4. Because I was there early and got into the front row, this was my €4 vantage point for The Marriage of Figaro:
A better view than most of the stalls, and no frippery tuxedo required. The show was wonderful, but I was so tired - and so lost, given I could understand nothing of the story - that I left at intermission, feeling I'd gotten my €4 worth.
My weekly ritual humiliation - this time against Carlton - was scheduled for 6:10AM the next morning. Having had virtually no sleep, I broke with the habit of a lifetime and didn't set my alarm. The AFL app has a feature where you can switch off the scores, so I figured I could watch our horrible loss unfold from the beginning without spoilers to tempt me not to watch. Unfortunately I still woke up at 6:15, and while sleeping through a game is one thing, going *back* to sleep when you know your team is flailing hopelessly across the MCG is another. Sleep would have to wait for another day.
I finally made it to the zoo later that day. It's in the grounds of the Schonbrunn Palace and dates back to 1752, making it the world's oldest continually operating zoo. And unlike the one in Paris, Vienna has managed to combine its legacy of historical architecture with some genuinely cutting edge design, making it one of the best zoos in the world. And I may have my poor purple finger to thank for how much I enjoyed it, too. Several of the best parts of the zoo had been closed for weeks before my visit to control an outbreak of bird flu, and after contacting the zoo for details about when they would re-open, I'd largely given up hope. They would test the birds in 'late April', I was told, and they could reopen only if the results all came back as negative. But when I arrived all of the quarantined sections were back operating, and I suspect the delay caused by my crushed finger might have made the difference. In a week where little seemed to be going right, this was a welcome change of luck.
I made one more zoo stop the next day, but this one involved popping over to the next country. Bratislava - the capital of Slovakia - is only 70km from Vienna, so it's an easy day trip. As soon as you get off the train you can see you're somewhere with a very different history and experience to Vienna: roofs that would be tiled there are instead covered with corrugated iron here. Concrete replaces bricks, and the buses are at least ten years older on average.
I'll have a lot more to say on encountering the legacy of Communism in my next post, but this was a helpful early introduction to post-Communist Europe, where I will be spending much of the next three months. I'd planned to visit the zoo and from there head for a walk around the old town, but the zoo took longer than expected and I couldn't make much sense of the bus network, which isn't yet covered by Google Maps. Deciding not to get lost in Bratislava after dark, I issued a mental IOU to Slovakia, which probably deserves more than four hours of my time, and retreated back to Vienna. The zoo, by the way, has an admirable level of dedication to scientific rigour in its work. Either that or they are really concerned about a rush of complaints that it took 21 steps to get to the baboons:
My last day in Vienna was May Day, and with little expectation that anything would be open I just caught a train into town to see what I could find. I ate some chocolate cake from a bag, in homage to John and Yoko (doubt I'll be spending a week in bed at the Amsterdam Hilton, alas). Then I walked past the imperial crypt, which was open, and the people in front of me were a group of nine who had mistakenly bought ten tickets, so would I like to join them for free? The Habsburgs must have had a sideline in piracy, because many of the tombs had skull and crossbones carved into them.
Once done with dead royals, I followed the sound of a loudspeaker to a May Day rally. Not the sort that I could summon much solidarity for, alas. These guys aren't even your garden variety, middle class-guilt-ridden Trots. That's Lenin, Stalin *and* Mao on the banner.
I mean, Trotsky's war crimes aren't particularly well known and there was the unfortunate incident with the ice pick, so I can at least imagine how naive wannabe revolutionaries might be drawn towards him. And Mao had a bestselling book of clever quotes. But Stalin?
Later that afternoon, walking through a garden, I was interrupted by a New York accent saying 'excuse me, sir?' I turned around to see a man walking towards me, away from his wife and a gaggle of small children. At first I thought I'd dropped something, but there was nothing on the ground, and he kept approaching. I asked if there was something wrong, but he just kept coming closer and so my left hand darted into my pocket, ready to grab my phone, and I put my right arm across my bag as he got too close for comfort.
"Hey, buddy", he leaned in and whispered, "do you know whereabouts you can buy some weed here?" He seemed a bit put out when I burst out laughing. You grow one little beard and everybody thinks you're a stoner.
