Day 30 - Budapest

I suppose that the best way to start this email is with an anecdote. I forgot to mention the funniest thing that happened to me during my stay in Melk, if not over the course of this whole trip: a cleaning woman walked in on me as I was getting up and went bananas. I was sitting on my bed in my underwear when I heard someone unlocking my door; I could have made some noise or told the person, obviously someone from the hotel personnel, to wait a minute, but I did not really care if the person came in or not, and I figured that he or she should have knocked on the door if he or she had wanted to know if I was there or not. The woman's reaction to seeing me was priceless: she screamed and backed up so quickly that she almost tripped, her eyes bulging out of their sockets, and said "I'm sorry" in as many languages as she could think of, breathless. While I was sorry that I gave her such a fright, I have to admit to having enjoyed her reaction, as I had never seen such an unalloyed expression of terror on someone's face. Either the cleaning ladies at the hotel at which I stayed are trained not to walk in on people, or this particular cleaning lady had never seen a man with back hair.

 

My trip to the train station at Vienna was entirely uneventful. The landscape outside of Vienna (to the east) was painfully ugly, with nothing at all visible on the horizon and nothing in the foreground to look at; every miniscule hillock was a blessing. The view from the train grew much more encouraging as we approached Budapest. Hills sprung up to the right and left, and there was a giant variety of different trees, all in different shades of green, just like the trees in eastern Austria along the Danube. The most interesting trees that I saw were ones with white leaves, which could not have been more than eight meters tall. I saw trees with yellow leaves and whole groves of trees with leaves that were silver on one side, nodding their heads in unison to the wind. One needs only to look at copses like the ones that I saw today to be convinced that life is extraordinary; the stretch of land between Vienna and Budapest would be heaven for a botanist.

I immediately regretted having come to Budapest when I got off of the train. The train station looked like a Russian train station, leading right out onto the street instead of leading one into a central vestibule full of information, like in Germany or Austria; the day was mercilessly hot; and I could not find any streets corresponding to those on the Google map that I had printed off, which was, as usual, grossly inaccurate. It was obvious that I had stepped into a second-world country as soon as I left the train station: there was no information that might be of use to anyone but a local in sight; alcoholics stumbled around outside of the station or sat on benches nearby; the bus depot, a mere series of bus stops, was a miasma of heat, noise, and cigarette smoke; and the avenue in front of the train station seemed like a sort of heat trap, sucking sunlight in from all around and turning it into a liquid that, like puddles of melted budder, oozed all over everything in its vicinity, soaking through one's skin. People got on and off of the buses in front of me with their eyes trained straight ahead; they drove past the train station, honking and yelling at each other; and they walked all about me like a swarm of bees. I was completely superfluous to their world and did not speak a word of their language. I wished that I had never left western Europe.

 

I was lucky enough, after a few minutes, to find a railway worker in front of the station who spoke German and told me how to get to the station near my hostel. When I ducked into an underpass and bumped into a couple of people whose job it was to help tourists, I learned that I had to take a bus and then go two stops on the subway to get to the train station that Google maps had taken to be the main one. The rest of my trip went off without incident: a woman who spoke German told me where to get off, the man selling tickets at the subway spoke English, and I found my hostel within fifteen minutes of leaving the subway. I checked into my room, set out to explore the city, decided not to overdo it wen I started feeling tired and hungry, had dinner, and returned here to relax and write this letter.

Budapest is what happens when you take Vienna, fill it with poor people, and install a Soviet bus, tram, and subway system in it. The city has an incredibly-rich history but no future whatsoever: it is dirty and full of beggars and homeless people; it has cracked sidewalks and buildings that are falling apart; people in the city have the pinched, tense expressions that one can only attain after years of living in constant hardship; and the women here dress more provocatively than in the West and walk with a hurried step, as though they were desperately chasing after something. One wonders if the young people sitting and drinking beer on park benches know how bad a state their country is in. They look perfectly relaxed, and yet many older men have the blank, hardened expressions of criminals. Budapest is a city in which one holds on to one's belongings with both hands (While Germany is a country in which people will alert you if you drop a 20-dollar bill or overpay at the supermarket.); a sense of hopelessness permeates the air and hovers over the city - a sense that I thought only existed in Russia.

 

I have focused too much on Budapest's negative side, though. It is a very beautiful city, in its own way, and is full of surprises: one could spend several days here, like in Vienna, and not grow bored. Hungarian architecture so far seems to be an imitation of Austrian architecture, as the facades of buildings are just as decadent as in Vienna, and the city streets are just as wide, nearly-treeless, and full of cars (which makes walking through it much less pleasant than in many German cities). Budapest has a spectacular cathedral full of marble and gold, reminiscent of the cathedral in Wurzburg; I suspect that its design was inspired by Italian architecture, though I cannot be sure, never having been to Italy. The views across the water are nice; there are a great many buildings across the water (on the "pest" side of the city) that bear witness to its rich past; it has the most impressive synagogue that I have ever seen; and the city streets have the same gigantic, city-block-long cities as Vienna. Despite the pervasive feeling that one could be robbed or assaulted at any moment, Budapest is a fascinating city, and I wish that I had more time to spend in it.

I have one more anecdote to add - I cannot resist - before passing on to other matters. As I was walking along the river today I consciously heard Ukrainian being spoken for the first time ever. (I have surely heard it before, but I must not have realized it.) One would think that the most natural reaction to hearing people speaking Ukrainian would be to laugh at them, but I actually found the language intriguing. It has none of the softness and delicacy that even out the edges of the Russian language, but it does not sound like Russian being spoken badly - it is a language of its own. It lacks any pretense to musicality (Songs in Ukrainian sound hilarious. I have heard it sung before once.), but its similarity to Russian is intriguing, like that of a bonobo to a human being.

It turns out that I have one more thing to say about Hungary. The train tracks got worse as soon as we passed from Austria into Hungary (just as the roads are said to do when one goes from Switzerland to Italy), and I saw several women in the train who were dressed as expensively as possible. There are plenty of chic clothing stores in Budapest - like any other poor country, Hungary still has its share of citizens who are filthy rich - and it appears that people feel the need to show off their wealth here. This is true in many places, I suppose, but it showed up more saliently on the train ride here, at least to me. My plans for tomorrow are to explore the part of Budapest that I did not see today (that is, one of the other parts, a central and important one; there is too much of Budapest to see it all in two days, let alone two half-days) and go to Eger, which will only take two hours by train. Trains leave for Eger every half-hour or so, and it is said to be a very beautiful city. An employee at this hostel assured me that the people at my hostel in Eger would be able to tell me how to get to the Aggtelek karst caves, and the hostel employees emailed me today to find out when I would be arriving in the city. As usual, I feel that I thought of much more during the day than I ended up saying, but I guess that that is the way in which things go when one is travelling - one cannot record all of one's impressions. It is nice to be back in a city and to know that I am headed to a big enough city that I should have no trouble getting to Bratislava and, from there, to Brno, from which the rest of my trip should be smooth sailing. I have discovered, in addition to learning that one cannot visit every little town of historic interest and that many such towns are best seen from the window of a passing train, that jumping constantly from city to city makes it harder to shower (as one's things do not have time to dry), in addition to making it harder to eat cheaply and healthily. I hope to spend more time in central bases (as I did in Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne on this trip) in future, especially as it is inconvenient to spend half of a day seeing one city en route to another. It is best to leave one's luggage in one specific place for several days running and visit as many surrounding cities as one wants unfettered. That seems like a positive note on which to end this email. I do not know if I will have Internet access before Thursday, but time will tell. Goodbye!

 

Budapest: a city of former riches.

Day 29 - Vienna

I will have to keep this post short, both because I have little to say and for the oddest reason yet: while this hostel has spectacular Wi-Fi, there is nowhere comfortable to sit! This shortcoming seems specific to this particular hostel: comfortable seating has been a staple of basically every hostel that I have visited, as it should be, most hostels have had fairly average Wi-Fi access; it is odd for a hostel to have something unusual and special, yet lack something basic that one can find anywhere.

I composed a grandiloquent speech (or, rather, piece of writing) in my head as I inched towards the Tulln train station. My plan was to state that my arrival in Vienna was not a highlight, as there are no highlights to a bike trip along the Danube; I was going to state that finishing such a trip is like finishing a bowl of unflavored oatmeal while being punched in the face; and I was going to make some other complaint that I cannot remember, yet I am ashamed to admit - for I now associate any admission of enjoyment of anything having to do with biking with shame - that getting to my hostel was a little fun, like a treasure hunt. I arrived at the Tulln train station, aided by a local's spot-on directions, at around 2:30. I figured that it would be almost as easy to bike into Vienna as to take the train, as I knew that the trailer would make things difficult, but I had my heart set on taking the train and spiting the remainder of the bike path. I bought a train ticket from a supercilious ticket seller, who, to my good fortune, gave me a map of Vienna's subway lines that included a very detailed map of the city. As I rode into the train station at the edge of Vienna (for trains from Tulln do not go to the main train station), I met a middle-aged couple from the Netherlands, another piece of good fortune - they convinced me (with little effort, for I was already mostly convinced) that trying to take my bike and my luggage trailer onto the Vienna subway would be insane (or, as they put it, more difficult than just biking the rest of the way). The train was taking us most of the way to the city center anyway, and one could bike through the city along a canal branching off from the Danube. I opened up my city map, located my hostel, and decided that a few more kilometers of biking would not kill me. (I remembered the crowds in the Munich subway. I did not want to take my bike and trailer into such a place.)

The rest of the bike trip does not warrant much description. I found my hostel without much difficulty, as I stopped frequently to locate my position on my map, and I enjoyed seeing Vienna in a different line from that in which I had seen it last year. The bike path along the Danube abutted buildings covered all over with graffiti. Young people relaxed by the water and smoked cigarettes; the edge of the river was lined by trendy cafes; and one did not really get the idea that one was in a city of massive historic interest. It was only when I penetrated into the city center that I again felt Vienna's magical cultural pull. Vienna is a city in which one could spend weeks without getting bored - it is like Linz to two greater orders of magnitude. I enjoyed biking along the same streets along which I walked, watching bikers course past me, last year, and I liked walking through a local market before getting dinner, which is something that I did not find time to do last year. I have ditched my bike and all of the pain that went with it, and I am set to begin a three-day adventure through Hungary - I call it that because I do not speak a word of Hungarian (although I have a photocopy of two pages of a phrasebook) and do not expect it to have nearly the infrastructure of Germany or Berlin. While I have no doubt that every country in Western Europe, and many countries to the south and south-east (and in Asia), have much more cultural wealth than Hungary, I also expect that my trip will be worth it, as I should enjoy Budapest, see some pretty cool caves near Eger, and enjoy the experience of riding Hungarian trains and buses (which might not run at all - who knows?). I expect to have more to say about today over the next few days as my impressions have more time to crystallize; in the meantime, I am going to write down the names of the next few hostels that I plan to visit, as my Google maps only have their addresses, and start working on my course syllabi for next year. While I have no passion whatsoever for teaching, I also do not want to have a hellish start to the school year as I try to prepare for my lasses only a few days before they begin. My visit to Vienna has solidified my lack of regret about not having seen all of Salzburg's environs, as Vienna is also a city, like Linz, to which I could happily return; I still plan to make that winter visit here in four or five years. Goodbye for now!

Even signs have existential crises.

 

Day 28 - Krems

I realized today that I had not actually told you about my arrival in Melk, which was worth noting for two reasons. Firstly, I experienced something akin to happiness when I reached the actual town. I had been biking for nine hours; I had struggled with the bike trail's abysmal signage for some time; and I was not even sure if the reception area of my hotel would still be open. I did not want to mention this after the first day, as I initially thought that the failure might be on my end or that I might be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can now say with confidence that the signage along the Danube (for bikers, that is) is atrocious. The signs along the way are misleading, contradictory of one another, and, as often as not, entirely absent. One has to rely on them a great deal, as the path along the Danube often diverges from the river itself for long stretches, but when one is near the river, it is often better to follow roadway signs, which are sure to be correct.

I have, as usual, digressed, and I forgot to say what I was going to say. Despite being exhausted and in pain when I arrived in Melk, I was vaguely pleased - it is still possible to feel things when all of one's energies are spent. When I arrived in town, having chosen a direction in which to go based on the advice of someone whom I had passed fifteen minutes previously rather than the road signs (which I just called reliable), which had the work "Melk" on arrows in all three possible directions of movement (besides backwards), I arrived at a gas station and learned from a man there that the train station was only a short distance away - five or ten minutes at most, the man said. I rode into town, where I saw a church, and found that the information building had been destroyed in the recent floods. When I reached the nearest plaza, I found a street name that matched one on my map and pumped my fist in victory - I could already smell blood, so to speak. I asked a few more people which way to go, and the last group that I approached, having asked me for the name of my hotel, pointed it out to me. The crowning moment of my arrival in Melk was that the hotel's reception area was a restaurant occupying its first floor; reception was not only still open, but would have remained open for quite some time longer had I arrived in town later. I checked into my hotel, ditched my bags, and headed out for dinner.

The only notable detail to my getting dinner was that, having developed a taste for Austrian dumplings, I immediately asked for them when I wandered into a nearby restaurant. The waiter told me to read the menu myself, and, when I found dumplings on it, I saw that they came with deer heart. I thought that I must have misread what was written, but the waiter clarified that heart was, indeed, the accompaniment to the dumplings. I considered ordering them but could not bring myself to do it - while I tried both pigs' cheeks and, by accident, pig intestines in Chamonix (in 2010), I could not bring myself to eat heart. I owe my distaste for inner organs to the stolid prejudice that one eats cooked muscle, not other parts of the body, yet I have tried, in addition to accidentally eating intestines, fish kidney paste (or liver paste, or some other such horror), and I survived. Perhaps I should have grown bold and broadened my palate, but I took the conservative option of weinerschnitzel with potato and parsleys, which I had had countless times before. The twist to this dinner was that I was eating in a restaurant that featured plenty of main dishes that cost over 20 Euros, yet I ordered an enormous, and very high-quality, weinerschitzel with a first-rate side of potatoes and a half-lemon (I will take all of the vitamin C that I can get), for only 8.50 Euros! It was like spotting a pine tree amongst a forest of redwoods - one wonders how it got there in the first place.

 

My news for today is that I made it to Krems. This being a trip along the Danube, the day did not go off without disaster: while I made it to the outskirts (by which I mean one kilometer from the city center) of Krems itself at 1:30, two-and-a-half hours after leaving Melk, it took me another hour-and-a-half just to find my hotel, which was located in the middle of nowhere and was not even technically in the city of Krems. I have no idea why I booked a room in it, given that there were so many (i.e., dozens) better options lying right next to the river, but I expect that the other guesthouses did a bad job of advertising themselves online or that I immediately skipped over them in my search for the cheapest possible accommodation. (Note: do not always pick the cheapest accommodation available. You will pay for it in other ways.) Whatever the case, I arrived at the guesthouse exhausted and out of sorts, only to be shown indoors by a lady who thought that it was wonderful that I was biking along the Danube (She obviously did not realize how hard it had been to get to her hotel, which was up in the foothills and accessible only by a series of gravel side roads.) and showed me in to a nice enough room. The Wi-Fi here works well, I have my own bathroom, and there will be breakfast tomorrow, which was included in the cost of the room. I wanted to collapse onto the bed and go to sleep, but I knew that that would disrupt my circadian rhythm, so I enjoyed my Internet access for awhile and went out for dinner.

The dinner itself was a bit of story. The hotel manager told me that I could get very cheap food if I went a few hundred meters up the road and turned left. I tried to do that, more or less, and found a restaurant that looked abandoned and a cherry stand, the owner of which had no idea where I could find a cheap meal that featured local cuisine and, in particular, dumplings. I gave up my search and went back down the road to a guesthouse that I had seen earlier, one that seconded as a restaurant, and asked if I could eat there. It was a very small establishment - the only waitress there was sitting and chatting with the restaurant's only two patrons - and did not have a menu. The woman there said that they did not have dumplings and that they only offered one meal today - goulash, I discovered when she repeated its name. I said that it sounded good and was immediately bombarded with a series of incomprehensible questions - the waitress was trying to figure out what kind of side I wanted. When one of the patrons answered my question, "What is [whatever the woman said?]" with "bread," I said that bread sounded good and sat down. The waitress made a face when I declined to order a drink, and she looked at me as though I were crazy when I said that I was biking the Danube and wanted to return to Austria in the winter. When she came back out some time later, she gave me an enormous bowl of goulash, big enough to drown in, with big chunks of meat in it and a side of two slices of black bread. The food turned out to be of the highest quality and to cost only 8 Euros, and it had enough protein, I presume, to help my muscles recover as much as possible - they are starting to get sore.

It turns out that I have a lot more to say than expected. I will try to keep these notes brief, both for the sake of finishing this email and getting in the shower soon - I want to make another early night of it. If all goes well, I will get to Tulln by 1:00 PM, buy a train ticket, and arrive in Vienna by 2:30 or so; the nightmare will be over, I will have returned to civilization, and I will have learned never, ever to go on any trips involving biking. One has far fewer new impressions when biking than when travelling by train, as one is in too much pain to take much interest in the surrounding world; one's ideas, when they arise at all, come and go without sticking. While I saw a great deal of countryside and medieval-looking towns today, I could just as well have seen them through the window of a train or bus - that is, I would have been much more immersed in my surroundings if I had been on a train or bus, as one does not notice anything except for birdsong on a bike. The only time at which one can think of anything essential is in a position of physical comfort, and it is impossible to be in such a position while biking, which is like walking all day with blisters. One thing that I learned today is that I have fairly low pain tolerance and have no ability to cope with having to continue to exert myself despite being physically wearied. I never understood people who said that they get grouchy when they are tired or hungry until today: it turns out that I am at my worst in the aforementioned circumstance; if I had been with another person today, I would have done nothing but complain. I took my peevishness out by yelling at idiotic drivers who would not pass me and cursing the entire world in my head.

 

My only other real points are that I dislike Austrians and that long-distance biking is a little like hiking - one has to pace oneself and choose both appropriate times at which to rest and appropriate rest times. My dislike of Austrians is founded on their impenetrable unfriendliness. While Germans will eagerly greet one, smile at one, and even engage one in conversations, Austrians invariably smile (exactly one person has smiled at me in passing since I arrived in Austria). Austrian waiters are infinitely ruder than German ones, and, while Austrians are just as helpful as Germans when one asks them for directions, the haughtiness with which they otherwise carry themselves sours one's opinion of them. While it would be crazy to say that I look forward to leaving Austria for Hungary (My trip through Hungary and Slovakia will be the last adventurous part of the trip and my last trip, besides a few days in the Balkans, to Eastern Europe.), I keenly anticipate the last few weeks of my trip, in which I should be able to meet normal people again. I admit with shame that I will continue to ride my bike for pleasure in Vancouver despite having taken this bike trip, as that is a different (i.e., much less demanding) kind of riding, and that I will factor a non-negligible amount of hiking into a trip that I plan to take in three years. The hiking will be different from this bike trip, though, as I enjoy long hikes, unlike long bike rides, and have extensive experience doing them. Since I am rambling at this point and have nothing more to say, I had better cut myself off. I cannot wait to ditch this bike and never have to bike more than 40 km in a day (and that only if I accidentally go that far) for the rest of my life. I would throw my bike into the Danube as a symbolic gesture if I were into symbolic gestures and did not have to return it, but, alas, I am neither that audacious nor even able to do so if I want to get my deposit money back. I will have to satisfy my disdain for biking by finishing this trip by train rather than by bike, just to spite the bike route for its existence. Please do not go on any bike trips unless you are my worst enemy, in which case you should absolutely do it, as it will serve you right.

 

Oops. I forgot one final point, which is that one can go for up to half of an hour without seeing a soul on certain parts of this bike trip, which is odd. It is also odd that there are very few pedestrians on the streets of Krems, which made it harder for me to find this hotel. Perhaps that is because all of Krems' citizens spend their days in church praying that the people who are stupid enough to take this bike trip will hate it and dissuade anyone else from trying to do it. One never knows, though; they might merely have discovered that travelling by car is easier than travelling by foot. That is the actual end of this post.

 

I bought a bucket of cherries from this roadside fruit stand.

 

Day 27 - Melk

I will have to write this letter to myself, so to speak, as you will not be able to read it until I next have WiFi. I have endured another day along the Danube and am looking forward to biking for only two or three hours tomorrow. I have little to say about my bike trip so far except that it has been far less stimulating than any of my trips by train. It did not make sense for somebody of average fitness, who is ambivalent towards physical activity and indifferent towards cycling, and who travelled to Europe with the express purpose of coming into contact with different cultures to plan a bike trip as part of a broader trip through Europe. Plan bike trips if you are into biking; plan city trips if you are into visiting new cities.

I wrote down some notes earlier in the day, when I still had some energy, but I want to mention a few other things first. Firstly, I met a very nice group of travelers from England who were delighted to hear that I was from Vancouver, as they were planning to visit it in the near future - one meets the most varied and interesting people while travelling. Secondly, at one point in my trip I heard a thump behind me that sounded like my trailer's rattling, and, when I turned my head and saw something moving beside me, I thought, before I realized that it was another biker, that my trailer had detached itself from my bike and was propelling itself forward somehow, which caused my stomach to jump. The most exciting part of my day was again listening to the birds, which have continued to impress me.

My final note before I pass on to my actual notes is that I am experiencing what I thought, when I visited Austria last year and longed to see more of it, would be the magical countryside of Austria. I am, indeed, seeing the countryside, which is much like the countryside of any other country, but the magic is gone, as I am too exhausted to take much interest in anything around me. Again, I do not see this as a giant loss, as I have learned both to phase all of the biking out of my planned trip to Italy (for next year, hopefully) and that I could see more of the magical side of Austria by revisiting it in the winter (and travelling by train). I suppose that travelling always entails some discovery of one's own predilections, as well as the discovery of places that one is dying to visit, and about which one wished that one had known beforehand. I expect that everything that I am now experiencing is par for the course - I certainly took some missteps (if one could call them that) last year (and in my first-ever trip to Europe) that have guided my future decisions (such as to avoid Eastern Europe, on the whole).

My first real note is that Austrian cities have a peculiar and idiosyncratic smell. Unlike the Germans, Austrians do not tend to line their streets with trees (although I guess that Salzburg contradicts this theory; perhaps it is the case that a lower percentage of Austrian cities have lots of trees), which may contribute to the stale air that hangs in many of them. The smell of an Austrian city is a harmonious combination of that of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and, on hot days, warm asphalt. One knows that one is in Austria as soon as one detects that smell, for it does not exist in any other country that I have visited.

My second observation is that the French did not understand a word of Russian - I had forgotten to mention this earlier. While most Germans to whom I started speaking Russian turned out to be Russian or to have had the good sense to study the language at least a little, the French did not comprehend it one bit. Austrians seem to understand such ejaculations as, "Get the hell out of the way, you [blackguard]!", as my yelling them today made many of them stop trying to cause an accident. The pedestrians in Linz were the dumbest that I have seen in any city in the world. At least a half dozen of them tried to step right in front of me as I biked out of the city or to cross the street, having clearly seen me, at such a time as to arrive simultaneously with me at one and the same spot. Either these people's mothers taught them to walk wherever they wanted rather than looking both ways before they cross the street, or they think that there is no danger in getting crashed into by a bike. The fact that this behavior - that of completely ignoring the existence of bikers despite seeing them - seems to be limited to Linz and may have something to do with the prevalence of tramcars, which muddy traffic patterns a little, on the city's main streets.

I have noticed that many Austrian cities have free bathrooms, putting them a notch up on the humanity scale over France and Germany, and forgot to rate the railway stations of the cities that I visited before starting this bike trip. I remember only that Salzburg's rail station is tiny and is currently under construction, Augsburg's rail station was relatively small, and I was served quickly in both Freiburg's and Augsburg's railway stations; they may have made up for their size with efficiency, or I may have just gotten lucky. My final note was that I enjoyed learning to do hay wagon turns with my trailer early in the day and have gotten a lot of attention, mostly positive, from it. The Austrian people continue to impress me with their sternness and coldness; I have started to return their scowls in kind. Linz was a city of great cultural riches, almost like Nancy (though on a smaller scale), that it was a pity not to explore further, and Melk is a funny city, as it had enough cultural relevance at some point to have a giant, sumptuous castle built on a hill overlooking it, yet now its main streets are lined with almost nothing but hotels. Every restaurant here seems to be the bottom floor of a hotel; the word comes up on the awning of almost every building. I am going to eat a bit and go to bed now. I am showered and shaved and expect to sleep deeply. I do not have to check out of this hotel until 11:00 AM tomorrow.

This is what the Danube looks like.

 

Day 26 - Linz

I am going to have to keep this post, like the last one, short, which is a pity, as I have the best WiFi that I have had in weeks. I am staying in a hotel in Linz to which I would like to return for an eventual winter trip; having discovered that both Passau and Linz have, just like Salzburg, charms that deserve further exploration, and having wished for some time to see Christmas markets like the ones set up each year in Vienna, I have decided that I should come back here for a full two weeks during one winter rather than just seeing a bit more of the area around Salzburg next year. Rather than regretting not having explored Salzburg to its full potential, I have come to see this part of my trip as further reconnaissance into parts of Austria that I would like to explore in future.

I started out my day with a decent breakfast that was included in the cost of my room in the hostel, after which I got lost looking for a bus stop from which I could go to the train station. I did not get to the bike shop outside of the train station until shortly after 11:00, I think, and did not actually get my bike until almost 12:00, as the one employee working at the bike shop was busy with another set of customers. I took my bike for a spin around the block, following the employee's directions, and then was off along the Danube - more or less. I had to first find the Danube, being a little inland of it, and needed to get some lunch. I made my first stop at the trip at a bakery a few minutes later. I had travelled some three hundred meters.

Having found the bike path running along the Danube, I quickly discovered that it as worse than Slovenia. While I was moving at a decent clip, I quickly started asking myself, "Are we there yet?" inside my head, and I would often pedal as hard as I could for what seemed like hours and discover that I had gone three kilometers. One spends a substantial amount of time, perhaps half of the trail (from Passau to Linz), on roads barely wide enough for two bikers to ride side-by-side - roads which one shares with cars, trucks, tractors, and a surprising amount of construction machinery. Some pluses to the bike trip were that it was mostly downhill and that it would not last forever. The set idea that this would all be over in a few days, and that I had to get to my hotel in good time to avoid sleeping in the open, was what pushed me to complete this leg of the journey.

My advice to you is to never travel anywhere by bike. In fact, I not only recommend but request that you not bike along the Danube, as to do so is an insult to all of the wonderful things that one can see or do in Austria and other parts of Europe. If you like having an incredibly sore ass, getting bugs in your mouth, and getting drenched in sweat, then a bike trip along the Danube would be your type of vacation. However, there are much cheaper ways to get drenched in sweat, get bugs in your mouth, and have a sore ass than flying to Austria. Travelling by bike in general is the most hideous way of travelling that one could possibly think of: one spends the entire time in physical discomfort, wishing that one were doing something else. My rear end is sore enough that it hurts to sit down, and I have started walking funny because of the pain. Never, ever travel long-distance by bike; throw away your bike if there is a risk of your being tempted to travel on it.

I have complained enough for one post. The birds along the way were spectacular, at least as good as the ones in the last place, the birds of which I called amazing. I saw another deer and a ton of swans today, and I saw castles on the tops of a few hills. I passed through picturesque little towns and guesthouses with garish flowerpots on their windowsills. The bike trip was pleasant at various moments, but those moments only lasted for a second or two. I have another 100-kilometer day coming up tomorrow (which will be painful; by the end of today, every movement was painful), after which my trip will grow substantially easier. I will be in the Czech Republic in about a week - life could be worse! I would like to end this post now, as I have a headache, but I have a couple of funny anecdotes to relate to you.

Since the hostel in which I stayed yesterday was situated in a former castle at the top of a hill, I had a very hard time finding a place to eat dinner. When I asked the woman working at the reception desk where I could find a restaurant or beerhouse, she shrugged her shoulders, while a nearby man told me to head out of the castle's back entrance and keep walking for a few minutes. I took the man's directions and found myself standing next to an apparent sports complex; when I asked a passer-by where I might grab a bite to eat, he said, "Good question," thought for a moment, and told me to try going around the buildings nearest me and seeing what was beyond them. Beyond those buildings I found one that looked like a school and called itself something like a guesthouse for young people. I walked inside, found a woman who worked there, and said, "Is this a restaurant or beerhouse? I would like to eat here." The woman explained that it was a summer camp and that there was nothing to eat except from the vending machine. I decided that I had incorrectly followed the passer-by's advice, so I left the summer camp and continued walking. When I got to the place where the passer-by thought that I might find a restaurant, I found a giant field of very unripe corn. I ended up giving up, buying a couple of snacks from the hostel's vending machine and having the 500-ml carton of milk that I had gotten earlier; I was tired of walking around and mostly wanted to sit indoors.

When I got to Linz today, I asked a passer-by how I might find a well-known park next to my hotel, and it turned out that I was right next to the bridge that would take me into town. Unfortunately, I found the town very unamenable to bikers. There were tons of pedestrians, no lanes for bikers, and two tramway lines running right down the middle of the street. I decided to bike next to the tramway lines (and sometimes between them) and pray not to get hit rather than venturing onto a side street and risking getting lost. My ploy worked pretty well, though every movement of my legs hurt my butt, I almost fell off of my bike when my front wheel slid right onto the tramway track, and the street's cobblestones jolted me like a rodeo rider - that is, it worked well right up until I made a turn that was slightly too sharp, ran my trailer into the edge of a raise part of the sidewalk, and sent my luggage flying out of the back of the trailer onto the street. There were no cars coming when it happened, and two men immediately jumped out onto the street when they saw my predicament, but I was nonplussed to have ended my day with a small-scale crash.

Alas, for every day in Nancy or Heidelberg, one is bound to have one biking along the Danube - such is the way of travelling. When I castigated myself for having bungled my plans while talking to a (crazy, evidently, though he seemed pretty normal) man in my hostel who was travelling by bike, he pointed out that nobody plans things perfectly. After tomorrow, I will have much less biking to do each day, and I will get an earlier start tomorrow than I did yesterday, which might make the ride seem easier. I wish that I did not have a headache at the moment, but I slammed headfirst into the wooden frame of a bunk bed yesterday while looking for my own bed. I am always careful to wave my arms around when I am walking in the dark in order to avoid smashing into things, but I did not wave them enough yesterday, evidently. I do not think that I suffered any serious or long-term injuries by hitting my head, but it has hurt all evening, so I hope to get to bed soon and get a good night's sleep. I might wake up feeling better in the morning.

(I may not post an email tomorrow. As will be the case for the next two days, I have no idea if I will have Internet access. The Internet access today was an unexpected bonus.)

Oops. I forgot to mention that Austrians are incredibly unfriendly. That is, they are not outwardly hostile, and the help one when one asks for help (or, as in the case of the two men who were ready to help me after my crash, on their own initiative), but they walk around scowling all of the time. This may be more of a result of staidness than unfriendliness, but, whatever the case, it contrasts sharply with Germans' almost-universal bonhomie. That is my only cultural observation for the day. Rather, it is one of money, but one never has time to relate all of them. Goodnight!

 

The giant Danube and some nearby forests.

 

Day 25 - Werfen and Passau

 

I will have to keep this post brief, as I need to get to bed and am unable to both have my computer plugged into an outlet and use the WiFi here at the same time.

My trip to Werfen included the second-best train ride that I have ever had, better than any except for the one from Ljubljana to Salzburg, which was not that much better. We passed hills carpeted in foliage, rivers, waterfalls (including one that came out of a hole in the side of a cliff), and mountains shrouded in mist. The mountains were not more than a few hundred yards from the train tracks, rising up to the left and right like redwoods in that national park north of San Francisco. Craggy cliffs jutted out in areas where trees could not grow, and mountain peaks dusted with snow sometimes showed through the clouds, as though one were looking through a window at them.

The ice caves themselves were fantastically interesting; I do not know how to describe them beyond saying that they were caves that were full of ice. It turns out that the wind cools down the interior of the caves in the winter, which is what turns precipitation that is drawn in their into ice. Their structure has changed, naturally, over the past several decades, partly because of changes in wind patterns (it sounded like). While the caves themselves extend for 42 kilometers, only the kilometer-and-a-bit that we were shown on the guided tour today contain ice, as the wind cannot reach the other parts of the cave, as a result of which they are not cold enough for ice to form in them. The tour through the caves was well-planned and taught one everything that one would want to know about them.

The latter part of my day was a little more trying than the morning. I did not finish seeing the ice caves until something like 2:50 (i.e., I did not get back down to the train station until then.) and did not get back to Salzburg until roughly 4:00. This was much later than I had expected to return, as I thought that it would only take a few hours in total to see the ice caves. I rushed through Salzburg looking for a place to get some lunch and take some money out of the ATM, then I collected my baggage from the hostel, hurried over to train station, and managed to catch the last train to Passau that was on my schedule (not the last one of the day; rather, the last one for which I knew the exact connections to take). I got to Passau shortly after 7:00 and made it to the hostel roughly an hour later.

The most exciting component of my day beyond taking the train to Werfen and seeing the ice caves was my interactions with people today. I met a fascinating woman from Australia on my way to the ice caves and spent the whole of my excursion there with her, and when I got in to Passau, a whole group of people helped me to find my hostel. First, a young woman from Turkey personally took me to the bus station. Since German was our only common language, we had a fairly broken conversation in which she explained that she had left Turkey because of the political problems there and could not go anywhere except to Germany because of Visa restrictions. Once I reached the bus station, a pair of very beautiful young German women told me which bus to take to get to the hostel and which stop to get off at; since they were getting off at the same stop, they got off with me and pointed me in the direction of my hostel. I have continued to be overwhelmed by the goodness of German and Austrian people (and Australians, now) and have since met a young man who is partway through a bike trip from Venice to Denmark, and who explained some cultural differences between different parts of Germany to me.

I suppose that I would have a lot more to say if I had more time to write, but, alas, I need to shower and go to bed. My skin has gotten a lot worse today, probably because of my having worn a fleece jacket in the ice caves, and needs attention. My final point of the day is that I have fallen in love with Austria even more than I had done with Germany; I plan to come back to Salzburg next year for three days to see more of the nearby attractions, of which I only found out today, and hope to come here for the winter markets in four or five years. If I had planned things appropriately, I would have spent longer in Salzburg to begin with and would have planned a whole separate day just to get to Passau and get oriented, but, alas, I crammed too much sightseeing into too small an amount of time. Passau itself has a lot of wonderful sights, of which I got a good view from a lookout point near the hostel (and on the bus ride over). I forgot to mention that I saw (separately) a deer and a fawn today and that there was a view of the castle and the surrounding valleys from the mouth of the cave in Werfen. I look forward to my next post!


Smoking is good for you. Who would have guessed?

This is part of Passau from up above.

 

Day 24 - Salzburg

The title of this email may be a little misleading, as most of this day was taken up by my trip to Salzburg - i.e., by the process of getting there. I got up a little later than I should have, tired and confused. I left the hotel in which I was staying with barely enough time to make it to the train station and onto the train that I was taking. I went to Strasbourg without incident, got to Stuttgart with some incident, and spent most of my time sleeping on the train from Stuttgart to Salzburg. The scenery as the train approached Salzburg was spectacular: the nearby hills, thickly carpeted with green, rose to low-lying mountains lost in tangles of cloud and mist. I was reminded, coming in to Salzburg, of having approached it from the opposite direction, the south, and seen it as salvation coming from the ravages of Slovenia. The towns leading up to it each had at least one of the churches that I love so much. I consider it strange that I find them so attractive, as it turns out that we have plenty of churches back home, but I suppose that the ones here are more architecturally impressive. Salzburg itself, in all of aesthetic glory, unfolded before our eyes as we pulled into its train station, a sort of crescendo to the last few minutes of the train ride (of which I saw too little; I wish that I had been awake to see more of it!).

I should relate the incident to which I referred before continuing to describe Salzburg itself, as I have little to say in this email and do not want to keep you hanging. At some point or other, either a few days ago (but, alas, after I left the Freiburg train station) or this morning, I noticed that the itinerary that the railway personnel had printed for me in Freiburg differed, at least outwardly, from my railway ticket: the railway ticket covered trips from Nancy to Strasbourg, Strasbourg to Offenburg, and Offenburg to Salzburg, while the itinerary had me going, instead, from Strasbourg to Stuttgart and Stuttgart to Salzburg. I decided not to worry too much about it as I took the train to Strasbourg, figuring that I could deal with it when the time arose, but, when I got off at Strasbourg, I only had seven or so minutes to transfer trains. I figured that I would incur big enough delays to miss the train from Strasbourg to Stuttgart if I showed the railway personnel my ticket and asked why it differed from my itinerary, so I decided to step on to the train to Stuttgart and explain the issue when the ticket collectors came to see my ticket inside the train. As it turned out, they were unimpressed with my ticket, explaining, saying to one another, using a crude French swear word, that the railway personnel in Freiburg had screwed up my ticket. They let me make the trip to Stuttgart as an exception, and, when I got to the train station in Stuttgart, the railway personnel there told me that I would have no problem getting to Salzburg with my extant ticket. I expect that the cause of confusion was that my railway ticket was made to cover a distance rather than a particular city-to-city connection, though the ticket might honestly have been misprinted. By a "distance," I mean a certain stretch of railway track rather than particular stops. Let us say, for example, that a ticket covers all regional German trains between Offenburg and Stuttgart. With such a ticket, one can legitimately take any number of different regional trains along that stretch of track, as one is not bound to follow any specific route. It might have been that my ticket was supposed to generally cover rail travel between a city close to the border with France, Offenburg, and Salzburg, but, given that we did not cross through Offenburg itself, I expect that it was a misprint in this case.

Enough about the particulars of railway travel! My trip to Salzburg went fine, and I found my hostel without difficulty thanks to a Google map that was, for once, accurate. I was very glad to get hear, as I immediately felt that it was an excellent hostel (I have since discovered that the bathrooms are subpar and the WiFi connection is weak - no matter.). I do not know exactly what it is that clearly distinguishes good from bad hostels, but it must be some combination of the alacrity with which new guests are greeted (at the check-in desk), the apparent level of organization of different rooms in the hostel, the number of services offered, the degree to which hostel personnel are willing to inform one about the city in which one is staying, and a certain intangible vibrance that some hostels lack. This hostel immediately appeared to be at the top of the spectrum of all of the aforementioned measures; while I waited for a long time to get checked in, as a giant group of students had just arrived, the man working at the desk offered me a ton of information about Salzburg, the nearby ice caves at Werfen (sp?), Austrian cuisine, the German language, and a pleasant-sounding walk that I could take through the nearby hills. I went upstairs, got drawn into a conversation with a woman in the bunk below me who had been sick all day with a hangover, and finally made it out of the door of the hostel at 6:00 PM, later than I had wanted to leave.

While I had been planning to take a walk through the hills when I left the hostel, it was too cold and rainy for me to want to do so, and I was starting to get hungry. (Aside: While I complained about the heat in Freiburg just a week ago, it turns out that I do not like rain, either. The only reasonable conclusion that one can draw here is that I do not like any weather, which is probably accurate.) I decided to check out a restaurant that one of the hostel employees had recommended to me - a beerhouse, to be more precise. I will cut this part short, as I want to finish this email, brush my teeth, and go to bed. The food at the beerhouse was exceptional but overpriced - perhaps everything in Salzburg is a little pricier than it is in much of Germany (or, maybe, the hostel worker unwittingly sent me to a pricy restaurant like that idiot in the Frankfurt hostel). I ordered a dish of incredibly-fatty pork, an unequalled dumpling, and a cabbage dish prepared with bacon, which makes all vegetables tastier. The dumpling was unlike any that I have had in my life except in Salzburg last year (While I could swear that my meal last year (at a different café - I know vaguely where) was cheaper and that I got a better meat dish, my memory might be wrong.). Austrian dumplings are like mazzo ball dumplings, only vastly denser and richer with flavor. I do not know how they are made, but I suspect that one cannot get them anywhere except in Austria; I am going to ask for them at every restaurant that I visit along the Danube. The pork chops that I ordered were very flavorful (they though tasted a little like salt marinated in salt, more salt, and worcestshire sauce), and they really teach one to eat around the fat, as failing to do so would cause one to throw out the baby with the bathwater - one would miss all of the meat! Overall, I got decent value for my money, given the quality of the food, but would not want to eat in Austrian restaurants very often.

 

I will have to keep my final notes brief in order to finish this letter. I am planning to see the famous ice caves at Werfen tomorrow, which cost on the order of 20 Euros but are a unique geographical treasure, as I understand it. (I think of those outreach trips that I do in Arkansas every time I shell out that kind of money. I hope to remake much of the money spent here on expenses unrelated to transport by participating in several outreach trips next year.) I am not going to explore the historic city center of Salzburg, as I have already seen it, and I will probably not have time to make that walk through the hills, though I wish that I could. I should have skipped Luxembourg and spent an extra day in Salzburg, but how was I to know? I am going to try to visit a couple of bakeries tomorrow, as, besides being the most beautiful city that I have ever visited, Salzburg has world-class food. One does not regret a single calorie of the pastries that one consumes here, as one cannot get them anywhere else in the world (as far as I know); this is one of the places in which I was planning to gastronomically indulge. I do not know what my internet access will be like for the next five days, but I hear that the flooding along the Danube has passed, meaning that I will at least be able to make my trip. If I disappear for a few days, then you can await several posts in a row when I make it to Vienna!

Finally, I forgot to mention that French people actually wear their scarves in bizarre and sophisticated ways, including wrapping them backwards around their necks, just like we learned in our French 8 (basic high-school French) class. They also like kissing each other on the cheeks when they greet each other or part ways. Some cultural lessons are dead-on accurate!

 

This is one of the hills along which I wanted to walk.

 

Day 23 - Luxembourg

I am afraid that I am going to write my second scattered email in three days, as, while I took notes today, I have forgotten some of the things that I wanted to say and did not manage to write down, and I am a little tired. I woke up having slept poorly yet again despite having aired the room out nicely before going to bed and having left the window ajar all night long; I am not sure what the problem is. It is possible that my having reverted to being a bit of a night owl over the past several days has disrupted my sleep patterns, while it is also possible that sleeping poorly and dozing off during the day causes one to sleep poorly again, prolonging the cycle. Whatever the case, I felt like a sack full of cement when I woke up, so I lay in bed for awhile, unsuccessfully trying to fall back asleep, and finally got up when I decided that I had to start doing something.

I got the train station later than I had been planning to do and therefore left for Luxembourg later than I had expected; I had assumed that a train departed for Luxembourg every hour, but there turned out to be a two-hour break between the 10:22 (or thereabouts) train and the one that I took at 12:22. I sat down to read and forgot to look at that church that I mentioned the other day. I paid little attention to the landscape as I rode the train, as, while there densely-wooded hills and large rivers (or one winding river) near Nancy, there is little else to look at through the window. One sees some attractive churches through the window, like in Germany, and some of the villages that one sees climb up the hills, which is a nice effect, but the areas near the train tracks in France tend to be extremely banal, unlike those in Germany. They are often cluttered with junk that must be used for manual labor or walled in on both sides by factories. The fact that French regional trains are very fast might also detract from the experience of looking out of the window, as it clearly makes getting to one's destination much more the point of going there than enjoying the ride itself.

Luxembourg turned out to be a fairly normal (albeit affluent) city attached to a fascinating historical area. When I got off of the train, I was disappointed not to have been cast into a fairy tale, just as I was disappointed when I first visited Europe; I had to ask a couple of locals how to get to the historical section of town, as, just like any non-German city, Luxembourg had no useful tourist information. I started walking according to the directions of the people with whom I had talked and soon found myself in a fairly small neighborhood of buildings overlooking a part of town located in a gully: Luxembourg is a city built along a series of ravines. The city had a lot of placards, most of which I had the misfortune of not bothering to read, and its bridges overlooked great swaths of forests, making for picturesque shots of old churches and government buildings against a seemingly-untamed background. It has an old castle, the placards of which explained that Luxembourg was created as a buffer between France and Germany, and it has many buildings relating to law and government, showing the centrality of those institutions to Luxembourg(ian?) culture. That more or less sums up my impressions of the city (and country): while the views from the top of the ravines were gorgeous, it did not look like there would be much to do down below, discouraging one from descending to the older sections of town. After an hour-and-a-half or two hours in the city, I felt the most terrifying of all feelings for a tourist - boredom! I found an unexpected way out of my boredom, which I will relate a little later below.

I have a giant number of scarcely-related impressions that I should relate to you before moving on to today's main story. The first of these is that Frenchmen clean up after their dogs much less reliably than Germans; perhaps the fines for not doing so are too small to motivate dog-owners or are too leniently-enforced to matter. I have so far found the French very polite and generally cheerful, excusing themselves when they get in one's way and thanking one for holding the door for them. The only exceptions to this rule, beside one or two of the railway personnel, have been a Frenchman with whom I collided the other day as I rubbernecked the scenery around me and a Frenchman who answered me in English despite my speaking passable French, as if to say, "Your French isn't good enough to warrant your hearing my French" - it was the traditional Parisian treatment, which is, evidently, present to some degree in every city (I also got it once in Colmar.). While the Frenchman with whom I collided looked at me angrily, as though it were my fault that we had run into each other (it mostly was; I have very poor peripheral vision due to my fit-over sunglasses), most other people - the ones who do not look like criminals - have appeared affable, and they take well to compliments about their dogs.

I have discovered that the easy way to eat French food without paying too much for it is to go, like to the beerhouses in Germany, to cafes. One has to choose these carefully, just as one has to choose between beerhouses, but if one picks well, one can eat enough good French food to fill one up for 10 Euros, including a tip. (It would not make sense to do this more than once per day.) Yesterday, I had some sort of fish with ratatouille, while today, at the same café as yesterday, I had the best quiche of my life, a green salad, and a real French crepe for 8.50 Euros. The quiche was made so fluffily that the egg part was almost like softened cream cheese, and, while I am not a big fan of quiche, I had to admit that it was objectively better than any other than I had tasted. The "green salad" was exactly as advertised: it was green. It consisted of lettuce doused in vinaigrette. While the crepe was good, it was no better, surprisingly, than the pancakes that Russians make. I am sure that there is not a single chef in Russia who can make any French dish as well as the average cook in French café, yet Russians make crepes, a supposed specialty of France, just as well as the French themselves - go figure. I still have not tried any French pastries (except for a croissant about a week ago), as they are much worse and more expensive than German pastries.

I think that I had a few other things to say about the past few days. French trains are air-conditioned, interestingly; they are very high-tech. French ticket collectors, on the other hand - that is the name that I have given the people who come to verify one's tickets - are the worse-dressed that I have ever seen. The first time one came up to me, on the train from Strasbourg to Nancy, I assumed that he was a beggar when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, as he was dressed seemingly at random, was hovering over my shoulder, and appeared to want something from me. I tried to ignore him, pretending that I had not seen him, until he asked pointedly for my ticket, which I showed to him, suspiciously. Over the past few days, I have seen several other atrociously-dressed ticket collectors, who do not appear to have any uniform whatsoever. That is what bothers me about this whole thing - not that the ticket collectors are supposed to be dressed like the conductors of orchestras, but that they should have a standardized uniform and very obviously appear to be on the job; one should be able to pick them out from a mile away. The fact that they look just like any other passenger on the train makes it very difficult to trust one; they could just as easily be imposters who want to steal one's ticket and run away as they could be employees of the railway system.

One of my final two points is that, while I enjoy the privacy that a room of my own affords me, it turns out, interestingly, that it is not really necessary for one to have one's own room while travelling. I might be saying this because I have only been travelling for 23 days, and I might be saying it because I have gotten lucky (since Cologne) with my roommates, but it seems to me that one gets so used to being surrounded by people that one writes and sleeps just as well in shared rooms as in single ones. I have no more trouble showering or making lunch in a shared room than in a single one, and I take my valuables with me when I leave the hotel despite having my own room, meaning that the (theoretically) increased security of having one's own room is of little use. The only thing that I have done here that I cannot do in a shared room is to exercise a little (I brought a couple of resistance bands with me), but I have only done that once, and I found time to do it in a few of my shared rooms anyway. There are no more outlets here than in a shared room (that is, access to them is not any better; shared rooms tend to have plenty), and, while the bathroom facilities at a few of my hostels have been inadequate, any reasonable hostel will give one the same access to a bathroom that one can get in a single room. My only other observation, which is short enough that I can tack it on here, is that there must be a serious difference between churches that have one steeple and churches that have two, though I cannot for the life of me tell you what it is (except that they represent different systems of belief).

Oops. I forgot to tell you that the last few days have gotten progressively colder and that there were even brief showers in Luxembourg. I have never been so happy to be cold as I can remember. While I was not cold for long today, as it was warm enough, for periods, for one to wear a tee-shirt, I was cold enough to remember that one is not always a walking torrent of sweat. By contrast, it was so hot in Freiburg that I took my glasses off for dinner on my first evening there, as I was sweating so profusely that I wanted to freedom to wipe sweat from my face onto my shirt sleeves every minute. I recognize that reports about the weather probably are not too interesting to people back home, but changes in weather make a giant difference to the traveler himself. My advice to you is to stick to Northern Europe as much as possible in your travels (which is more or less impossible, as there is too much interesting stuff in the south) and not to travel for any reason whatsoever in August. The heat here is brutal enough as is in June; I would not want to experience it at its worst.

My most interesting tale of the day started in Frankfurt, when I stepped in to an Asian grocery market and found mochi cakes for $2. I should have bought them right then and there, but, looking at their calorie count, I decided against it (and almost surely went on to eat something even more caloric). I decided to get some for the train ride the next day, but when I passed by the store in the morning, I discovered that it was not a real Chinese store - it was not open on Sunday. I left, disappointed, and decided that I would have to satisfy my craving for mochi cakes at some other time.

My next venture into a Chinese store also proved that it was fake, as everything there was over-priced. This was just a couple of days ago, in Nancy, where I had the pleasure of seeing a woman wearing shoes with soles that were four or five inches thick and had white-and-black zebra stripes on them. I did not buy anything, alas, as I refused on principle to overpay for food in an Asian market. I figured that I could find an actual Asian market one of these days and buy some Asian food, which I did not realize that I missed.

When I stumbled upon an Asian market near a church today in Luxembourg, I was not hopeful that it would be any good, as experience had sapped my enthusiasm, but I decided to step inside and take a look around, having learned to walk around stores without feeling obligated to buy anything. The store was super-heated, as though it were the heart of winter, and had poor pickings. The fruit out front appeared to be rotting; its shelves barely reached one's waist; and its range of merchandise was limited. When I got to the mochi cakes, I thought to take them to the cashier and ask for their price, because I could not see it at first, but then I saw it listed below them: 3 Euros. This will not mean anything until I put it in perspective. I was being asked to pay 3 Euros for 6 mochi cakes weighing a total of 200 grams. Fearing that they would continue to get more and more expensive with each new city that I saw and that I would eventually break down and pay 10 Euros for one mochi cake out of desperation, I left the store, resolving not to buy any Asian food until I reached Vancouver.

That would seem to be the end of this story, but at around 3:00, when I started to feel bored, I also started dying of starvation. I had been planning to sample Luxembourgian food, having brought enough lunch to last most, but not all, of the day, and really wanted to buy something for 2 or 3 Euros that would tide me over. I realized that the mochi cakes would have fit the task perfectly, as they are dense and often more filling than they appear, but I could not remember where I had found the Chinese store. I knew only that I had walked right to the end of some road or other and found it near the corner of a crossroad. I decided that the chances of my finding the store were low, and I set out to find anything cheap in the whole city of Luxembourg.

My task proved difficult, as, besides incredibly-expensive restaurants, Luxembourg did not appear to have any establishments for eating of any kind. I walked past various stores that were closed, probably in connection with the national holiday that someone had mentioned to me (and that explained all of the live music being played) and a ton of hotels, where everyone else was probably eating. When I finally came to a Turkish doner place and discovered that I could get a bulky-looking wrap for only 4 Euros, I gave in. I decided to eat there, as it was going to be no more expensive than taking my food to go, and, when I mentioned to the shopkeeper, at his prompting, that I was from Canada, a nearby man perked up and said that he had recently been there. We ended up falling into conversation, and he told me that he was from the Netherlands but was working a dream job as a professor of civil engineering at the University of Luxembourg. The man was supercilious but fascinating, and I ended up wiling away some time with him as we talked about travelling and world culture and he showed me photos of mountaineering trips that he had taken. That was how I ended up spending the time between starting to feel bored and going back to the train station to read for awhile (I like to be early for trains.) before returning to Nancy.

That was not all, though. As I was walking back to the train station, I remembered that I had seen the Chinese market early in the day, when I went off of the main road to the train station to look at a nearby church. I went back that way, went back into the store, and decided to buy the mochi cakes after all. There was not any real justification for this decision except that I would have to buy something for the train ride (as I only had enough food left for half of a lunch) and that I had a craving for Japanese food. Someone in one of my hostels mentioned having a craving for sushi, which was incomprehensible to me, as one has sushi stuffed down one's throat 365 days a year (or, more accurately, every time one goes out with young people) in Vancouver, but I came to understand this person's feeling when I realized that I missed Japanese deserts. (Oddly, I do not miss dim sum. I suppose that one does not have to have it often to enjoy it.) I also bought something called pineapple cake that appeared to be of shortbread-like consistency - I am sure that it contains negative amounts of sugar and fat, and it will be easily portable and not spoil. I will offset these dietary choices with a sandwich made out of my remaining groceries and some sort of fruit juice that I bought that has vitamins coming out the wazoo. (Also, I have been eating mixed vegetables with a glass of milk on the side for breakfast, which might be influencing my choices during the day).

That more or less sums things up for now, as I am fond of saying. Tomorrow will be mostly a travel day. I regret that I do not have more time for France, as I would like to see the south of the country as soon as possible, but it was not fated that I do so in the immediate future. I hope that the Roman ruins that have help up for two millennia there last for another two years so that I get a chance to see them in the summer of 2015.

 

Goodbye for now!

 

Governmental buildings set against trees.

 

Day 22 - Nancy and Metz

The French and Germans follow different denominations of Christianity! At least, that is what it seemed like to me when I stepped inside Nancy's cathedral today. Its first distinguishing feature was that, unlike almost all German churches that I had seen, it did not have pointed arches meeting at its ceiling. By "pointed arches," I mean the decorative stacks (usually, of a separate color from the rest of the ceiling) of brick (or plaster, or some other material), shaped like rounded triangles, that adorn the ceilings of all churches (I presume) of some or another branch of Christianity. Not only did the cathedral at Nancy lack those; it also had very thick supporting pillars, more than two yards wide and almost three yards deep, that were almost completely unadorned until they reached a higher storey of the cathedral's interior - while most German cathedrals have statues, plaques, and other adornments running along their main columns, the cathedral at Nancy had those only up above its columns. A recording of Bach's Inventions, done on a clavichord, was playing when I entered the cathedral. It had no stained glass at all, if my memory holds, and its massive columns created an illusion of vastness that I had only experienced in the much bigger cathedrals of Worms and Speyer. Also unlike most German cathdrals, it was full of paintings - again, if my memory holds - that depicted very scenes from Christ's life. I have seen so many churches today that my memory of this cathedral has both dimmed and, probably, blurred with that of the other religious edifices that I visited.

I have jumped ahead of myself, though, and should tell you how I got to the cathedral in the first place. I started yesterday out, as you know, with a train ride to Gottenheim. On the way there, I saw a wading bird the size of a blue heron, with a white body and black hindquarters, and I saw a great many houses that had roofs plastered with solar panels, even in miniscule villages. Germany is at the forefront of everything!

An entirely-bald*, fit-looking man in a white shirt and white pants greeted me when I left the train. I quickly realized why Dr. Liebermann, my oral surgeon's friend, had told me to meet him on the platform: there were only two platforms in total, one for each direction - he could not possibly have missed me. He drove me to his office, explaining how he first met my oral surgeon and how dental practice differs in Germany and in the United States, and set to work on my gums.

*I have decided that people who have hair grow it out for the express purpose of making fun of bald people. Dr. Liebermann therefore had an easier time gaining my trust than a non-bald dentist would have.

The appointment at Dr. Liebermann's office was a little interesting. First off, the office was empty save for the two of us and Dr. Liebermann's assistant. The second interesting thing was that I was immediately aware of the intensely-professional environment of a dental office. Five minutes earlier, I had been on vacation in Germany, and I was suddenly in a reclining chair with a bib around my neck and a dentist probing my mouth. Dr. Liebermann deftly cut stitches that I could barely even see, removed the brackets from my teeth, and explained post-procedural care to me. He changed into regular clothes, suddenly ceasing to look like a doctor, and took me back to the train station, telling me that he would tell my oral surgeon that he had seen me and that everything was well.

As usual, the train ride to Nancy showed me somethig of note. Since it was my first time taking an intercity train, I was surprised when an enormously-long, sleek-looking train, sliding forward like a dolphin through water, pulled up to the platform in Freiburg. Regional trains, in comparison to the intercity ones, look like they are fifty years out of date; the intercity trains, for their part, must be like a low-rent version of the Japanese bullet trains. Intercity trains coast noiselessly along the tracks, hardly ever stopping (they probably only stop at the start and end points; I did not keep track), and feel almost like airlines in their quiet and organization, as though they were neatly-packaged for passengers' maximum comfort. I did not see anything interesting through the windows, but I did note, as I got onto the train for Nancy in Strasbourg, that French trains are designed worse than German ones from the point of view of sightseeing. A German (regional) train has two columns of two seats each, one on each side of a central aisle, like a city bus. Sitting in any of those seats, even an aisle one, one has a good view of what is going on outside and can, if one cranes one's neck, see essentially anything that one likes (as the windows are big). A French regional train - at least, the one that I got onto - has little cabins of eight seats each, with walls between each cabin and an aisle next to them. Because of this, onl the people sitting at the window seats can see much of anything, and even their view is limited, as the windows afford viewers a small range of vision.

As I said yesterday, my arrival in Nancy was marked mostly by confusion, as I was very tired, for some reason. I went to bed later than I should have and, having failed to open my window for the night, did not even sleep that well, with the result that I woke up just as tired as I had been. I took a very long time to get up, just over an hour, and set out for the day with a mind to see Nancy as quickly as possible and try to get back on schedule.

Before describing Nancy in further detail, I should tell you a few things. One of them is that ten minutes in Nancy would be enough to fill one's head with innumberable new impressions. The city has an incredibly-rich cultural heritage and opulent architecture, like the kind that I saw in Vienna (and, to a much lesser extent, Vienna). It was built with a mind for splendor and elegance, such that even its pharmacies have filigreed roofs with scalloped awnings. Its city center is small enough that I saw all of it, save for a church that I just remembered to check out tomorrow, over the span of about two hours, and yet the city is so densely packed with objects of cultural and architectural value that one's head spins. The most interesting things that I saw today, I should think, were a palatial former residence of sorts and a giant park next to it, which had billy goats, a peacock, and all sorts of woodworking displays set up. The statuary in Nancy is as impressive as its religious architecture, and the city is filled with the kind of plaques that I love, which strengthen a city's ties with its past and show an obvious pride for the people who helped to build it.

I left Nancy for Metz at 12:21, I think, and got there at 12:49, or thereabouts. Since it lacked any sort of city map, unlike any German city that I visited except for Baden-Baden, I started wandering through it at random. At first, I was disappointed, and I wondered why every second city that I visited had to turn out to be a dud, but I came to find it a pleasant city in which to be lost, and, halfway through my stay in Metz, I stumbled upon its cathedral and its tourist information center, where I obtained a free map. Metz turned out, like Nancy, to be a city of refinement and inordinate cultural wealth; it was full of museums, churches, former rich people's residences, and buildings celebrating things like its history in industry and its administrative importance. I liked that its cultural heritage was not one solely tied to famous composers, painters, and writers, as it is only with the help of bankers, scientists, engineers, statesmen, doctors, entrepreneurs, and a wide variety of other people that the work of artists ever comes to exist. The idea that a city's being an administrative center could be celebrated via the same arts through which issues more ethereal and metaphysical are typically channeled was a new one to me, and it intrigued me.

This post turned out shorter than I expected, which is a boon to me; I still have to get a little exercise, shave, shower, and go to bed. I am going to visit Luxembourg tomorrow, which should be relaxing, as it only takes an hour-and-a-half or so to get there by train, and it is a small enough city (the only important city in the country, really) that I will not have to spend more than a few hours there to see all of it; I am again going to get up at around 9:15, as I will have to get up at 7:00 to catch the train to Salzburg on Monday. I should have mentioned to you that I had a decent dinner for 8.50 Euros at a French cafe today. My dinner came, interestingly, with potato chips as a free appetizer (like bread in most resturants and tortilla chips in Mexican restaurants), and I was able to get free water, unlike in the Netherlands or Germany, though it had bits of particulate floating in it. My impression of French cuisine is that it is based on sophistication and a sort of fragile interplay of flavors: while Bavarian food is hearty and dense, a French dish will have one sixteenth of a pinch of cumin in it that is supposed to draw out one of the lesser-known flavors that potatoes carry so that the sole that one is eating (or halibut, or whatever - I had some sort of fish) tastes a little more tart. Or something. This is not a knock against French food at all, as I like it very much, based on today's meal; rather, it is an attemp to describe its characteristic differences from southern German food. I get the idea that the French produce a broader range of dishes than the Germans and that they use a greater variety of vegetables and other ingredients in each given dish. If I had a month to kill in France and a lot of money, I would sample as many different restaurants, cafes, and patisseries as possible in order to try to fully flesh out what French cooking is. I expect that it is divine if one has deep enough pockets (while Bavarian food is always solid but not spectacular and is uniformly relatively-cheap).

Finally, I have a bunch of scattered impressions from the past two days to share with you. Train stations are vastly worse in France than in Germany. They contain more mendicants, for one thing, but, more importantly, they are not nearly as streamlined as their German counterparts (though they also contain fewer shops, which is nice). While there are electric displays everywhere in a German train station that tell one from which platform every single train for the next hour or two will be leaving and where it will be stopping, one only knows twenty or so minutes in advance of a French train's departure (at least, based on the train station at Nancy. I am sure that the one in Paris is more sophisticated and much, much more hectic.) from which station it will be departing. There are no visible clocks in French train stations, while one can find them anywhere in German ones; I did not see any information desk in the Nancy train station; the displays on French platforms are much smaller and less prominent than those on German ones; the railway personnel do not print out schedules for one in French train stations as they do in German ones; and the railway personnel themselves are much more rude and less helpful than their German equivalents. The woman who helped me today wore a look of disdain, as though talking to me were like biting a lemon, and seemed glad when I left the counter, while the people who have helped me in Germany have been invariantly polite and very often cheerful. The only advantage of French railway stations over German ones is that, if a French person sees that the train is going to be fifty feet from where he is standing when it comes to a stop, he starts walking towards it in advance, rather than standing around and picking his nose as Germans do. This alone was not enough to counterbalance all of the downsides to a French train station, but it at least mollified their inferiority.

There is much more broken glass on the sidewalks of French streets than in any city that I saw in Germany, and the walls of buildings seem dirtier. French cities often have gigantic buildings that seem to stretch for an entire city block, while German ones have row after row of different-looking buildings sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with one another. French cities, unlike German ones, have straight roads, as I have mentioned, and they have maps that correspond to the reality that they represent - a big improvement over German maps. French people smoke just as much as Germans, as it turns out, and Strasbourg is the only city in which there are large numbers of free bathrooms. Finally, Frenchmen often have very beautiful dogs, just like Germans. I noticed that Germans - unless I was improperly judging their treatment of dogs, as I have no idea how to treat a dog myself - ignored their dog's thirst for a drink of water on hot days, failed to adequately train their dogs to follow directions, and, as a result, jerked their dogs' collars when their dogs attempted to go anywhere. This is probably an exaggeration and too broad of a statement, but it was a pity to see people - if I was correctly judging their actions - mistreating their dogs for ignorance of the proper way to treat them. I do not know if people in France treat dogs any differently from people in Germany, but I have noticed that there are many large dogs here, which either breaks the stereotype that the French all have lapdogs or goes to show that I have not yet been to Paris. One nice thing about dogowners here is that they do not dress their dogs up in sweaters or treat them like needy babies, which is a nice change of pace from North America.

My final two points are as follows: I discovered, on my way to Nancy (yesterday), that not all Frenchmen have discovered deodorant (or else that they consider armpit smell fragrant), and I heard music everywhere that I went last night. A band was playing some very obnoxious music in the train station, and, in the city's central plaza, another band was playing very loudly and seemingly moving, as though there were a parade going. It turns out that I arrived in Nancy on the Day of Music, which is observed in many French cities. Who would have guessed!

I have broken tradition by showing you two photos of Nancy, rather than one, as I took a very cool shot of the moon last night, of which I am rather proud. Although I felt tired a couple of days ago, my visit to France has proven one of them most stimulating parts of this whole trip. I look forward to seeing more of it in a couple of years!

Oops. I forgot to describe the inside of Metz' churches and its cathedral. While I might be kicking a dead horse at this point, it is important to try to determine the different forms that worship takes in Europe (though doing so without any knowledge of religion and without having seen any religious ceremonies here is probably philistine). Metz' cathedral had an interior that was too complicated to be worth describing here; its most interesting feature was that some of its stained glass panels looked almost Expressionistic. The stained glass panels in one of its more prominent churches, on the other hand, looked like early Renaissance religious paintings, suggesting either that the role of stained glass windows in churches has changed over time, or that accepted styles of representation in them have changed. Finally, I forgot to mention that the ceiling of Nancy's cathedral had all sorts of paintings on it, just like the ceiling of the cathedral in Wurzburg. I do not think that I had seen anything else like that (outside of Wurzburg) on this trip!

This is a really cool photo of the moon.

 

This peacock probably thinks that it looks normal.

 

Metz is a city of great cultural wealth.

 

Day 21 - Gottenheim and Nancy

It behooves me to start this post with the unfortunate news that I do not have much of an idea of what I did today or what I wanted to say in this post. I may just be tired from a long day of travel, as I continuously thought of things to write until I sat down at my computer, at which point my ideas evaporated. I know that I got up rather late and unhurriedly left the hostel at which I was staying; I know that I arranged my train travel for the next several days and read a book for awhile; and I remember meeting my periodontalist's friend at the Gottenheim train station and having my sutures and brackets removed. I will have to try to piece the rest of the day together from the scattered snapshots that have stayed with me.

I did not see much on the train ride from Strasbourg to Nancy, which may explain my current condition: I spent most of the train ride dozing off. My first impression of Nancy, when I got off of the train, was of its citizens: every second Frenchman looked like a potential murderer or thief. I expect that Frenchmen comport themselves (and dress) differently from Germans and are, as such, merely unfamiliar to me: perhaps the faces that I saw as hardened and suspicious conveyed a Frenchman's ordinary expression. My invitation to the city was exceedingly warm. Since I could not figure out which way to go to get to my hotel based on my map, I started walking half at random and asked someone where a central plaza was. While that person pointed me in the right direction, I ended up asking another person some ten minutes later which way to go. The second person did not know for sure, but, having taken some time to try to figure it out, she asked a further couple if they could help me. Together, the three of them directed me toward my hotel, while another couple helped me to find it in the end.

I have made three main observations regarding Nancy so far. First off, my rather slow (on the scale of countries), thorough style of travelling is fully justified: I am too old, in terms of Eurrail passes, to rush from capital to capital, and that kind of travel hardly lets one engage with a country anyhow. I say this because my train ticket from Nancy to Salzburg cost an embarrassing (but not totally surprising - it is quite a distance, and to do it in a day requires the use of the more expensive, intercity trains) amount of money, which was enough to convince me that one does better to stick to one country at a time than to jump from place to place when travelling. As long as my next few years of graduate school go as planned, I will have plenty of time for travelling and will not regret having spent so much time in each individual country rather than trying to see as many countries as possible at once.

My second major point of the day is that walking into a grocery store again gives one an oddly-liberating feeling; one forgets, when travelling, that one can buy food cheaply. I bought enough food today for two breakfasts and three lunches, all for less than ten Euros. I really do not have much to add to this except that the renewed realization of one's ability to get large amounts of healthy food for small amounts of money induces a sort of minor euphoria in one. You should try eating out for several days in a row and then visiting a grocery store just to experience this - or, if you are rather more niggardly, like me, then you can take my word for it. Buying food at grocery stores is great.

My only other real point is that Nancy is a city of immense cultural wealth - every second building here is a theater, museum, park, place of higher education, church, former palace, or government institution. I am going to explore Nancy's city center tomorrow morning and see Metz in the afternoon, which will be easier than I expected, as Nancy's historic center is not so large; it has, rather, a high concentration of cultural heritage in a fairly small space. I may treat my trip to Luxembourg as my chance to relax a little more, as I will have to get up early on Monday to catch the first of several trains and will want to get up early the day after that to see the ice caves south of Salzburg. I remember having wanted to say that my planning my trips out so thoroughly in advance of setting out on them can lead to inflexibility, as, if I had not had plans from Monday onwards, I could easily have continued travelling through France and left the rest of my trip off for another year. Alas, that may not have proven any more economical than what I have done, as booking hostels at the last minute might have been sufficiently more expensive than booking them in advance as to nullify the gains made by eschewing long-distance travel by train. I suppose that one key to travelling is to choose a certain style - rigorously-planned, off the cusp, or something in between - but always remain open to some degree of change.

In short, I am sorry to have written such a brief and uninteresting letter today, as my readership has recently reached new highs, and I would like to award readers with increasingly-interesting posts. My next few days should be full of new impressions, and, since I have my first decent Internet connection in days, I will be able to write to my heart's content. I think that my once again having a decent Internet connection may be what made me write so laconically - I put this post off, surfing the Internet for awhile first, and now want to go to bed, as it is almost midnight. I am sure to become more coherent over the next few days.

Food in France is way too expensive, by the way, which will drive me to eat fewer sweets for the next few days. Ice cream and pastries just are not worth the money here! I may not end up eating much French food at all over the next few days, as I am afraid of its cost, but I will try, when I visit France in earnest, to choose certain days on which to stint money and certain days on which to open my purse strings a little and try the local cuisine. I sure am tired! I wish that I had the energy to write more!

This is what my mouth now looks like.

 

Nancy has much wider boulevards than many German cities.