Vienna

Overnight trains: they’re not overnight buses, but they’re also not great. On a scale of sleeping-on-a-bus to sleeping-on-(and with)-Ryan Gosling, I imagine a sleeper train falls somewhere in between...although Ryan Gosling is mighty fine, so it’s probably a little closer to the former. Regardlessly, this is how we got from Krakow to Vienna. Our little compartment slept three people, its configuration consisting of three beds on top of each other. My absolute worst nightmare behind Isaac Brock pro-creating with a woman who isn’t me is to be buried alive, and this is what sleeping on the top bunk would have been like. Fortunately, I was on the bottom. They also gave us breakfast – a really gross, cardboardy, fake croissant-style thing, filled with really gross, floury chocolate stuff. They were disgusting. We still ate them.

Vienna, Wein. I have always had a soft spot for Vienna – family connections, childhood memories, etc. And I now have even more fond memories to add to the collection – they merely don’t extend to Hostel Huttledorf (although, I concede, they had excellent breakfasts). Not moments after we booked in, a friend of Kaitlyn’s, who had recently been to Vienna, commented that we'd ‘better not be staying at Huttledorf’. Why? Is it horrid? ‘No, it’s fine…if you like Grade Five camp.’ And it is impossible to think of a more apposite description. The average age of guests at Huttledorf was twelve, eleven if you took the teachers, Kaitlyn and me out of the equation. It certainly lacked the party-hostel feel of Greg and Tom’s, but it also eliminated the over-share of vile sexual exploits. Although, on some level, being exposed to such painful (and painfully visual) dialogue is a lot less disconcerting than being pointed and giggled at.

By the time we made our way from the train station to the hostel – a trip which involved swapping metro lines approximately 2,000 times – we arrived at the hostel at about 7.00am. Before we even got to the door, we had to ascend a hill which I am quite confident has one of the steepest gradients in the world. I’m serious: it’s on an angle of at least 80 degrees. Probably more. We successfully dodged the crèche gauntlet, only to find ourselves at the front desk and face-to-face with the most crotchety, churlish woman I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. I asked to store my luggage, not for your kidney – drop the attitude. Forget “service with a smile”, we were just hoping to avoid “service with a slaughter”.

We couldn’t check into our room until 2.00pm, so we decided we’d hit the city and find some coffee, first taking a moment to brush our hair and try and look a little more presentable. And it was here, in the hostel bathrooms, we had our first Viennese tantrum. Kaitlyn dropped her hat in a small pool of water, and it got a bit damp. Although, you'd be forgiven for thinking someone had gone to it with a pair of scissors, and then attacked me and broken my jaw. 

‘F@%$!’

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘I just dropped my f@%$ing hat in the f@%$ing water. For f@%$’s sake. And now I can’t f@%$ing go anywhere because my hair looks like shit and I don’t have a hat to wear. So I’m just going to f@%$ing sit here all f@%$ing day. But you go. Go out and have fun and see this f@%$ing city for me.’ She turned around, slammed it down into the rubbish bin, and made to leave. As was often the case, I could see there was a fairly easy (and, I thought, obvious) solution to the problem and decided to take my chances and proffer it. ‘You could always use the hand-dryer...?’ She brushed back past me, snatched it back out of the bin, and made her way over to the dryer. ‘Whatever.’ Then we headed off to see the “f@%$ing city” of Vienna.

It was as we made our way into the city we first became aware of a weird Viennese phenomenon: creepily staring at Claire. I am used to people staring at me. I used to think it was because I’m so freaking attractive, but I’ve come to think it’s more likely to be because I am so tiny, and also because pale skin, dark hair, light eyes are an usual combination. Also, I fall over a lot, which is eye-catching in its own right. So, while people  look at me everywhere, I was unprepared for the level of scrutiny I received in Vienna. And it wasn’t just once, but constantly people would just stare at me. As we sat on the train heading into town, a man hopped on and sat in the chair opposite me. And stared. At first I was too embarrassed to even look at him because it was incredibly awkward. Instead, I chose to look out the window, occasionally looking around the compartment and seeing that his gaze was still unblinkingly fixated on me. After a few minutes, I looked at Kaitlyn. ‘Are you seeing this?’

‘Yeah. How can I not?’

‘I don’t know where to look. I’m scared if I look into his eyes, I’m going to wake up somewhere else. Like a windowless-room in his basement.

‘Do you want to move? Do you want to get off?’

‘I don’t know. Yes. I think...’ I had no idea whether or

not he could understand us, but I really didn’t care at that point because it was incredibly creepy - sinister almost. Fortunately, at the next stop he got off. ‘That was f@%$ing weird.’

‘Do I have something on my face?’

‘Nothing that wasn’t there yesterday.’

That evening, however, what I did have on my face was Super Dickmann's! When foraging the supermarket shelves for dinner supplies, we found our beloved Berlin sweet-treat. We may or may not have polished off an entire box with our Mozart liqueur.

Vienna is full of amazing sights: Schönbrunn Palace, Belvedere Palace, Stephansplaz and St. Stephen's Cathedral. I, however, have two absolute favourites, the first of which is the Prater amusement park, specifically the Wiener Riesenrad – or Giant Wheel. My love for the Wheel comes from my love of The Third Man – both passions I have inherited from my dad. I can’t imagine many people reading this will have seen The Third Man (which is a shame as it really is one of the greatest movies ever), but all you really need to know is that the Wheel features prominently in the film. The first time we went to Vienna when I was little, I distinctly remember my dad being so excited about seeing it for the first time, he nearly wet himself. Kaitlyn has never seen The Third Man, but has spent so much time with my dad, probably feels like she has seen it in its entirety countless times, and could probably spout off a Wikipedia-entry-like description of the structure. Despite her fear of heights, Kaitlyn was determined to ride the Wheel to make me happy (and probably because she would be unable to ever face dad if she didn’t). While the Wheel definitely dominates the Prater (dad would argue it dominates the entire city), the whole place is pretty rad. And with all those rides, attractions and bright, colourful lights, it was the perfect setting for a wanky photoshoot.

My other favourite thing in Vienna is the Hundertwasserhaus. Designed by artist-turned-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, it is an apartment complex constructed around

Hundertwasser’s notion that architecture should be designed and built in harmony with nature. I have mad love for Hundertwasser, and have been in love with his work for as long as I can remember, particularly this complex.

There’s also another place I love in Vienna – Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery). A cemetery probably sounds like a really odd place to like, but Zentralfriedhof is not a normal cemetery. One of the largest in the world, it’s almost two and half square kilometres in area. In what I think is the greatest “Cemetery Catchphrase” ever, it is referred to as „Halb so groß wie Zürich - aber doppelt so lustig ist der Wiener Zentralfriedhof!“ – which translates into English as “half the size of Zurich and twice as much fun”. How great is that?! All cemeteries should have catchphrases. Many people visit Zentralfriedhof because several famous people are interred there, including Strauss, Schubert and Brahms. And, no doubt, because it’s twice as much fun as going to Zurich. We certainly had fun, especially enjoying some of the most ridiculous headstones you could possibly imagine.

So we did a lot of culture which, of course, needed to be balanced out with some partying: pub crawl time. The meeting point for the pub crawl was an Australian bar and, as we were the only people of age in our hostel, decided to head there early for some adult conversation. In hindsight, we could have definitely had better conversation with the minors at Huttledorf. The combined IQs of the people at the bar might have just managed to enter double-digits, although I make that observation with considerable reservation. Not long after we turned up, one particularly nauseating individual approached us. He claimed to be Australian, but he had a really bizarre accent which made me highly suspicious.

We talked for a few minutes about Australian things (so, basically, just the footy), and then our respective travels. We mentioned that we’d come to Austria from Poland and, completely out of nowhere he went, ‘I have a joke. Do you want to hear my joke?’ Kaitlyn can’t explain why she thought to ask this, but she enquired, ‘It’s not about the Holocaust is it?’ Completely unabashed, he replied, ‘Yeah...?’

‘Then no, we don’t want to hear it.’

‘Why not? It’s really funny.’

‘Nothing about the Holocaust is funny.’ We bluntly told him where he could take his Holocaust jokes and, thoroughly unperturbed, he wandered off to offend some other unsuspecting people.

Next we were approached by a group of American guys who were drawing on fairly limited stores of intellect. They were also incapable of saying a single sentence without adding the word “dude” onto the end of it. Before Vienna they had been in Budapest, dude. And before that, London, dude.

They couldn’t tell us all that much about what they had done in these places, because they had been ‘so, like, completely retarded’ the whole time, dude. I’m quite certain they were using the word “retarded” as a (fairly offensive) synonym for “drunk”, but I couldn’t help but (fairly offensively) consider it an ironic acknowledgement of their mental underdevelopment. We managed to get away from them, and headed over to the bar where we struck-up a conversation with two British guys. Much like us, they had become apprehensive about doing the pub crawl and being forced to spend time with the cretin in the bar. So, the four of us decided to ditch the official tour and conduct one of our own.

We successfully (although slowly) navigated our way around the city and to a number of establishments that had been recommended to us, the evening passing pleasantly by. Luke, one of the English gentlemen accompanying us, and I shared a mutual love of Twitter, so we had great fun hashtagging our tipsy conversation, a lot of which was (justified) mockery of the fellow patrons. We also shared another mutual love, this one of Michael Fassbender. Not quite sure how this even came up in the conversation, but I remember us both gushing about him during our hashtagging interludes. In one of the bars, I went to the toilet only to discover there was very limited toilet paper left. Of course, I took all that remained and put it in my bag, proudly displaying it to Kaitlyn when I returned to the table, reminding her to grab some from me if she need to regulate her kidneys at any stage. #goodfriend #experiencedtraveller.

As much as we were enjoying our Amaretto Sours, we had always planned to head back to the Australian bar as they had a 1.00am Happy Hour and an abundance of shots we wished to try. It was quite hard to pick from their extensive menu, a number appealing to me, including “Snickers”, “Black Forrest Cake” and the “Pan Cake Shot”. I also can’t pretend I wasn’t tempted by “Pink Shit” or the delicately named “Red Headed Slut”. However, hands down, the award for best-named shot would have to go to the “Cock Sucking Cowboy - in memory of Heath Ledger”. Inappropriate and, probably, a bit too soon, but highly amusing nonetheless. #rotfl

Not long after we returned, the legitimate pub crawl reappeared to take advantage of Happy Hour. It didn’t take long for the Brains Trust to see us and mosey on over to engage us in more riveting conversation. ‘Where have you beeeeeeen, dudes?’

‘You, like, totally missed out on seeing the hottest Swedish chicks ever, dude.’ How devastating. More inane commentary followed, and then the Anti-Semitic Oxygen Thief spotted us too. He sauntered over and, without even waiting for a lull in the “conversation”, launched straight into his horrifically odious “joke”. I’m never at a loss for words, but I had absolutely nothing to say to this moron. If my glass hadn’t have been empty, I am almost positive I would have thrown the contents all over him. Except that would have been a perfectly good waste of alcohol. #wastenotwantnot

Thanks to Happy Hour, that’s about all I can recall from the night. Although, there is one thing which I still feel a little bit guilty about it. Andrew, the non-Tweeting Brit, was either the weakest drinker ever, or had imbibed a lot more than the three of us had because, by the time we arrived back at the travellers' bar, he was completely trashed. It didn’t take too long before he wasn’t even able to stand up unassisted, so we found a stool and plonked him on it. A somewhat older lady – who seemed completely out-of-place in the bar – started to engage him in conversation, so we left them to chat.

His inability to stand eventually progressed into an inability to stay conscious, but he seemed quite content slumped over with his forehead on the table. I noticed the older woman go over to him and try and make him drink some water. He was attempting to push her away, so Luke and I went over and tried to talk him into drinking it. He was slurring things to us which sounded like “too much”, “no more”, “be sick”, but between the two of us we managed to get him to have about two thirds of the glass. As I went to put the glass down, I noticed that it looked a little carbonated. I took a sip, and it turns out it wasn’t water at all – it was a G&T. And it must have been 95% gin, 5% tonic. This lady was totally not a friendly, concerned fellow-drinker, but a Cougar hunting for some younger prey. When she realised we were onto her, she disappeared very quickly. And it was at this point we all decided to call it a night. #terriblepeople #hopehewasok

Advice From an Objective Foreigner: if your city has a population of almost 2 million (plus tourists), you should probably have more than four supermarkets open on a Sunday. Yes, the wonderful city of Vienna has only four supermarkets which are “allowed” to operate on a Sunday. We discovered this ridiculous fact the day after the pub crawl. We had a pretty easy day that day. Tourist-attraction wise, hardly anything operates on a Sunday, but it was a beautiful day so we spent it wandering the streets. I am terrible when it comes to water consumption (unless it’s “Czech water”) and, as a general rule, often don’t realise how thirsty I am until my mouth and throat are drier than my sense of humour. We had lunch at McDonald’s (curly fries - they’re amazing) and then, I realised I was really quite thirsty. We were making our way towards the train station to check the timetable situation for our journey to Salzburg the next day, and I thought I’d just wait until we got there.

By the time we were walking through the station I was parched as (bro), and I commented , 'I don’t care how much a bottle of water is. As long as it’s less than €3.00, I’m buying one.' In what I can only assume was bad karma from my forcing Andrew to scull pure gin the night before, the cheapest bottle was €3.00. This outraged the backpacker in me and I refused, saying that I would wait until we got to the supermarket later. From our research, we knew that the supermarket near the Prater was open on a Sunday, and we had planned to fetch dinner supplies from there.

By the time we arrived, I was so thirsty I was starting to feel quite ill. I had to stop myself from pinching the juice box from a toddler in a pram I walked past. As we walked into the supermarket, I was aware it was busy, but it wasn’t until I snatched a bottle of water from the fridge and went to pay for it that I realised just how busy it was. I could exaggerate and say there were a million people in the queues waiting to pay for their groceries, but I won’t. There were, however, at least 200 people dispersed across the queues in front of us. And this is not an exaggeration. It took us over 45 minutes from the time we joined the queue until we were served. I was feeling so sick and dizzy, and very nearly passed out. Much like I imagine the guy in front of us would have later, seeing as he consumed an entire magnum of wine during our wait.

After I re-hydrated, it was time to conquer the Wheel. Even though it was my third time riding it, I saw things I had not seen before, namely the myriad facial expressions of scared Kaitlyn, and her bizarre half-crouch-half-walk (crwalk). She is apparently of the opinion that if she crouches down and makes herself shorter, she isn’t up as high. Or something. It was quite hilarious to watch, as she made her way around the compartment looking like she was in labour or had just emptied her bowels. One gentleman was watching her and asked me, ‘Is she okay?!’

‘Yeah! She’s fine!’

‘Vat is vrong vid her?’ Oh, where to begin? #jks #lol

As you’ve probably assumed, we both survived the Wheel. And we both survived Vienna.

Precipitation-covered petals, feline facial hair and fawn-hued parcels fastened with twine await – next stop: Salzburg.