SeanTerrill.com » austria

Vienna

webmaster — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 14:45:09 +0000

Something I noticed in Salzburg seems to be true here as well: Austrians take their weekends very seriously. When I got into town last night, at 5:30 on a Saturday, the grocery stores were all closed. Today (Sunday) the hot dog stands are shuttered up.

Vienna is huge. Just the downtown area has a radius of something like 6 km. Despite the length of the walk from the hostel, which is near the train station and therefore, I assume, in a touristy area, to the city center, though, every other person I passed was American. Literally half the population of Vienna, or at least half of the population that’s out and walking around on a Sunday, is a tourist.

Some more relevant observations, then: there’s a lot of old stuff here. I realize that’s a sort of European non sequitur, but in Vienna even the fast food joints are in 200-year old buildings, or at least buildings that were designed to look 200 years old. The effect is really pleasant, and makes it a nice city just to walk around, which is nice, because the other things for which Vienna is famous (opera and theater, e.g.) are sort of out of the reach of a backpacker’s budget. In sort of a nod to culture, I am going to a screening of The Third Man this afternoon.

Vienna also has a fantastically wide (50 to 100 m), tree-shaded ring road from tearing down the old city walls. This is obviously good for navigation and for providing a way to get out of the sun, but also seems to function as a sort of bike/jogging trail/park.

Bookstore

Pretty sweet public pool

Anachronism

Ostentatious enough for you?

Lipizzaner stallions

Concert at the Rathaus

Parliament (Funkadelic)

HUGE mosque

Inventor of the automobile

Since... 1978?!

Austria

webmaster — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:44:25 +0000

It seems I have heretofore unexplored abilities to lose things. I left my camera case, memory card, and spare battery at the hostel in Dublin, nearly lost my sunglasses on the flight to Germany, had to go back to a train station in Amsterdam for my contacts, and now I’ve left my remaining battery at Ronny’s. I think I’ve found a store in Prague that sells them; if not there will be no pictures after Italy, at least not until I can get back to Bern. Salzburg is very much a “postcard city” anyway, so the puctures probably wouldn’th have been anything unique. For some reason we were just pulled off an Austrian train, driven a short distance on a bus, and put back on a another train. Barring any more mishaps, though, we will shartly arrive in the Czech Republic, a country where I speak literally none of the language. The prospect is terrifying.

Salzburg

webmaster — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 15:40:33 +0000

I’m alone, in a biergarten, and bored. bad combination, but something about Salzburg makes it hard to be too upset. Maybe it’s the postcard-perfect skyline (seen in all its glory courtesy of the 550 m climb up to the castle overlooking the city). Or maybe it’s just that there’s something great about a country – a continent, really – where public squares have chessboards, and perfectly acceptable way to spend a Saturday is drinking beer and accepting all comers. I’m finding it very hard to miss the US. Life here just seems so much more eventful, more connected to other people. I suppose that could be true of cities everywhere, but Salzburg isn’t really any bigger than Lafayette. And yet it somehow seems that life is better here. The rosy glasses of vacation, maybe, or could it just be that they have a 1000-year head start?