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.
If you heard that loud 'thud' don't worry. It was only me hitting a wall.
I arrived in Italy on day 38. My previous longest time away from home was in the US in 2015, when I was away for 23 days; it's fair to say that's one record that's going to get not so much broken as smashed, mashed and pulped. I didn't really get over-tired or jaded at all on that US trip, but I certainly did in Japan (22 days), where by the third week I was ready to come home. That was at least partly because Malcolm Turnbull - perhaps fearing my campaign skills - scheduled a double dissolution for the time I was away. It didn't take long before my competitiveness, fear of missing out and guilty conscience at not being there for the cause started to gnaw away at me, and undermine my enjoyment of the trip just a little. Thanks Malcolm.
None of that applies this time. I was just plain exhausted. Two pre-6AM starts for trains in the space of three days will do that, and the drunk Germans more than played their part too. I was running on vapours, and mistakes were starting to creep in - some just minor annoyances, and some major headaches.
I thought after getting off the Bernina Express that I was done with spectacular scenery, but no. The regional train that runs from Tirano to Milan spends a good half hour or so running down the length of Lake Como, an outrageously stunning place, with mountains rising up almost directly from the water, that was inexplicably off my radar entirely when I was planning this trip. I assume it's expensive to visit, as it's a playpen for the rich and famous: international lawyer Amal Clooney, for instance, has a house here with her husband, who is an actor. Unfortunately I was on the wrong side of a train with dirty windows, so I didn't get any decent photos.
I'd allowed a good six hours to get from Tirano to Genoa, where I was staying the night, because the connecting train from Tirano to Milan left only eight minutes after the Bernina Express was due in. So I rushed off the train, bidding adieu and happy fascism-resisting to my American friends, bought a ticket and literally forced the doors of the train back open so I could get on. Had I been 30 seconds later I would have been stuck in Tirano for two hours, by which point I would have already used up my allowance for Italy's famous train timeliness and efficiency.
As it happened, my train ran more or less to schedule, which left me with three hours to kill at Milan station. I made a beeline for McDonald's: between free toilets and free wifi Maccas amounts to a public utility in Europe, but not in Italy: the toilets were locked and, because I didn't possess a European phone number, the wifi wanted my credit card number to register instead. Very funny. If Italian McDonald's didn't want me to sit around in the dining area, mooching off their internet connection without eating anything then, well, they only had to say so.
So I moped about at Milan station with nothing to do, and discovered the first big mistake. I went to test my blood sugar level... and there was no testing kit in my day bag. It was either halfway back across the Alps on the Bernina Express, or somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Como en route to Tirano. Either way, my chances of getting it back were slim to none.
I knew the prospect of getting through 200 days without losing something as important as this was remote, so I have a spare kit, as well as a spare set of insulin pens. But because the chances of getting through another 162 days without losing something important are still pretty low, I've already got a replacement testing kit en route from Australia. Carelessness is expensive. Still, better that than the much more difficult to replace insulin pens. If I didn't have a testing kit I could still manage my diabetes for at least a little while by dead reckoning, but it's pretty hard to dead reckon insulin into your body without an injecting device.
I went to Genoa for two things - the Genoa Aquarium and, more importantly, the Cinque Terre. It's a short stretch of coastline - probably only 10km or so - along which are five villages that range from obnoxiously pretty to downright fantastical. Case in point, Vernazza:
There are walking trails that connect some or all of the villages, depending on where there have been recent rockslides that they haven't gotten around to fixing yet, and there are also trains that regularly run between them all. How it works is you buy a park pass - the entire coast is a national park - for €16, granting access to the villages and unlimited use of the trains. Or in my case, €32, because I fairly quickly lost my ticket and no amount of pointing out that I had a receipt would convince them to replace it. My choice was between sucking up my indignation, or leaving the Cinque Terre unexplored and wasting the day. I chose to explore.
I spent most of the afternoon hopping from town to town by train, having lunch in Riomaggiore, the furthest village from Genoa and then working my back towards Monterosso, the closest. I stopped in Coniglia for gelato: the more I exercise the more my beard becomes a greater impediment to eating ice cream than the diabetes. I decided to tackle one of the walking tracks, from Vernazza to Monterosso. There was far too much climbing involved - the track rises to almost exactly 200m above sea level - but whenever I questioned my sanity I only had to look out to my left.
Worth it.
On the approach into Monterosso I came across an Italian farmer using ambush marketing - literally, you don't see him until it's too late - to sell his limoncello at the farm gate. This was, he promised me, much better than the limoncello I would get in the village below or in the city, which are full of chemicals. This was so authentic it wasn't just a drink, it medicine. When I asked what healing properties it had the answer was non-specific and all encompassing. This stuff was just good for me, and if I paid €3 I'd find out why.
I'm not sure how you're supposed to say no when a farmer takes you by surprise outside his farm with medicinal limoncello, so I bought the limoncello. I'd never tasted it before and, not being one for bitter tastes in general, it turns out that the stuff is horrible. But he was watching, a proud father sending his lemons out into the world, and so I of course drank every drop and declared, quite truthfully, that it was the best limoncello that I'd ever tasted.
That night at the hostel a winery manager from Adelaide and I provided a crash course in American cultural hegemony to our dorm mate, Darcy, a 65 year old, louder than life woman from Florida with no sense of boundaries and no comprehension of America's place in the world. Darcy spends three months of every year roaming about overseas: she's retired but her husband (he's eight years younger than her, she told me at least twice) still works, and I rather suspect he will keep working for as long as he gets three months of peace out of it each year.
Despite spending so much of her time outside America, Darcy couldn't understand why people were interested in what Donald Trump was doing. Because he's the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and we're scared the demented old carrot cake will get us all blown up, we explained. Then the conversation expanded out into why the world is interested in what happens in America more broadly, and Darcy was shocked to learn that most of our most popular TV shows, movies and music are made in America. 'But why don't you all watch Australian movies instead?', she wanted to know. Fair question.
It was hard to get her to stop talking, but I couldn't help liking her. Loud and oblivious, she was a bit of a caricature of an American tourist, except that she wasn't. A genuinely curious woman, she is ploughing her way through a number of books on Trump and especially his relationship with Russia. He's up to something, but she just doesn't quite know what. And wouldn't we all like to know. I confess, though, to being a little taken aback when she saw me testing my blood sugar and promptly climbed the ladder up to my bunk. 'Err.. what are you doing?', I asked. "Watching", she replied. Rightio, then.
After a day spent around Genoa's old harbour - the Aquarium, followed by a blissful few hours lying in the sun by the water and trying not to fall asleep, I moved on to Renaissance Land. Theme parks are not usually my sort of thing, but this one is built directly on the site formerly occupied by the city of Florence, and it incorporates some of the original art and architecture from that city. So as far as theme parks go it's really quite good. I stayed for three nights.
I despised my hostel at first, with its rickety beds that made movement without disturbing other residents impossible, and what I initially took to be a heater broken in the 'on' position. But I eventually sorted that out, and everything was forgiven when I discovered the next morning that the free breakfast included scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs!
This was doubly exciting, because not only do hostel breakfasts rarely run to more than white bread, cereal and maybe orange juice, but I had also been cruelly, cruelly robbed of a scrambled eggs breakfast back in Antwerp. The hostel there didn't provide breakfast for free (though their German guests did, as it later turned out), so I had bought eggs and milk for Easter Sunday: I was going to have Easter eggs and it was going to be the most satisfying breakfast I'd had since two continents ago.
It was only when I had set out my ingredients, gathered my utensils and greased the frying pan for this most eagerly-anticipated of breakfasts that I attempted to break my first egg, and learned that they sell pre-hard boiled eggs in Belgian supermarkets, instead of it being a normal country and only selling normal eggs. I was crushed - or far more than the egg was, at least. Not even the fact that my replacement breakfast came courtesy of German reparations was enough to cheer me up.
Long story short: I had scrambled eggs three days running, and it was close to the best thing about being in Renaissance Land.
After sticking around the hostel long enough for my weekly ritual football humiliation, I finally headed out for a walk around the theme park itself. And I realised very quickly that I was not going to enjoy myself here. Renaissance Land is incredibly popular, but the park is quite small: most of the attractions are very close to each other, so everybody is in more or less the same place, circling around in a constant maelstrom of impatient, frazzled tourists.
One thing that comes with the territory in theme parks is overpriced food and drink, and Renaissance Land is no exception, I treated myself to a restaurant meal, where I thought I was paying €10 for a plate of pasta. Then I got stung a further €2 for a 'coperta': a fee for sitting down at a table to eat a meal that you can only sit down and eat at their tables. It's like sales tax in the US: just telling me the price I have to pay straight up would be much too simple. Later I went past a gelati shop that had a sign saying there was no charge for sitting outside. There weren't any tables or chairs outside, but they wanted me to know that I could sit on a footpath they didn't own without paying them money for the privilege. Very kind.
Another thing one finds in theme parks is, of course, overpriced souvenirs. Antique Tuscan etchings and watercolours can be made to order. You can buy the Duomo on a fridge magnet, a postcard, a jigsaw puzzle or a t-shirt. His and hers aprons feature Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Venus, respectively. If that's too impious for you, perhaps Papa Francesco is more your style:
I saw the queue for the Duomo, and mentally scrubbed it from the list. It wasn't just one queue: there's a line for tickets, then a line for the main part of the church, then a line for the baptistery, then a line for the dome. I wasn't going to spend the bulk of a day queuing to go in and out of church. It was a similar story at the Uffizi: I could have booked ahead for another €4, but I was ambivalent enough about going - I've seen my fill of Renaissance art for a while, and it was clearly going to be massively over-crowded - and in the end decided that I simply couldn't be bothered.
The Ponte Vecchio - an old bridge with jewellery shops along both sides - was one big seething, amorphous mass of people walking up and down along a set of over-priced jewellery shops, trying to figure out why they were there. There's an evidently famous panini shop near here: I know this only because there was a line of over one hundred people waiting to buy a sandwich.
I just didn't have the energy for all of this. This is still the shoulder season. I can't fathom what high season is like, much less how people who actually live here cope.
So I had three days in Renaissance Land - otherwise known as Florence - and I did very little of the standard touristy stuff. I did go up to to the Piazzale Michelangelo, for a commanding view of the town centre:
I also checked out a couple of the slightly less trafficked museums. The Galileo Museum follows the scientific revolution, from the improvements in navigation technology that enabled Europeans to take over the world through to early experiments with electricity. It takes its name from the four telescopes it has that were made by Galileo himself. It's a small but interesting enough museum, and it was made all the more significant by the fact I visited the day after the March for Science. I was particularly taken by exhibits that were used to perform science experiments by scientist-entertainers at dinner parties in the 18th century. Science as a fashionable pastime, rather than as something scary to be pushed back against. Who'd have thought? I also went into the Palazzo Vecchio, which is now in its second stint as Florence's town hall, having served in between as the palace of the Medici dukes and as the Italian parliament.
Apart from that, though, I let myself take a break - a holiday from my holiday - and do things I knew I'd enjoy, rather than things that I'd be doing only because they're the things one does in Florence. I bought a book, finished reading it and bought another one. And I played with the hostel's resident bear:
He really is a bear. His name is Kuma - Japanese for bear.
I don't regret visiting Florence at all: you have to go somewhere before you can decide if you like it or not. But, apart perhaps from in the dead of winter, I won't be going back. The place is overwhelmed and overwhelming, and the three days here validated my decision not to go to Venice, which would have been more expensive and, most likely, even more crowded. I guess I'm not much of a Renaissance man.
From Florence, then, it was time to head back north to Vienna, via overnight train. I slept moderately well on my last one, from Lisbon to Madrid, but this was a nightmare. I drew the short straw, which in this case meant having a bunk on the top level of the compartment, right up near the roof. So close to the roof that I hit my head every time I sat up. The pillow was about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, but thinner, and even if I were comfortable enough to sleep the bed (more of an ironing board, really) was so high, without a guard rail, that I feared I'd roll over and fall to my death. So in my defence, it's fair to say that I was still very far from well-rested when I opened my bag later that morning at the hostel, only to find that my insulin kit wasn't there.
