Vienna Wieners

Gutentag, everyone! It's another language, another country again. Actually, another TWO countries!!! Whew! What the hell happened these past few days? It went by so fast. Man, my head is spinning from all the stuff that's happened. I've got to sit down, take it easy and collect my thoughts. Wooooo......slow down, Brian. There we go. Nice and easy.

All right. I'm ready to spill the beans on the last few days. Who knows where this diatribe is going to go, so bear with me.

Our remaining days in Prague were filled with the drunken revelry that we had been hoping to experience in this city. If you recall from the previous posting, our first night in Prague was pretty lame. Playing Czech Monopoly with a snarky Canadian, a spacey Mexican, and a depressed Texan do not make for an exciting evening. I felt as if I had somehow been sent back to church summer camp.

Our next evening was only slightly better...Eric and I couldn't find anyone at the hostel to venture out on the town with us, so like Lewis and Clark, we went out into the unknown, blazing our own pub trail. In the process, we did happen to run into two 22 year-old girls from Arizona who were also at the hostel. They had just graduated from school and were trying to see all of Europe in a month, which is a pretty idiotic thing. First of all, it's impossible, and second, jumping around from city to city every other day leaves you no time to enjoy your travels. Anyway, we were trying to find a good pub to go to, but they got impatient and forced us into having a beer at an overpriced restaurant. I got rather annoyed by this...and their snobby spoiled attitudes got on my nerves after an hour. Thankfully, they split from us and took off to find a dance club. We just went back to the hostel, feeling screwed out of our cheap beer. You come to Prague for the cheap beer. If you miss out on it, it's such a tragedy. At least that's how us guys see it.

The third night was an awesome night. The dynamics of the hostel changed with some new arrivals. After dinner, the dining room turned into a massive card tournament with about 20 people drinking cheap bottled beer and trash talking. We learned a new game, but since it's name is vulgar and there might be a young audience reading this blog, I'll refer to it simply as the "Game That Must Not Be Named," or GTMNBN for short. The GTMNBN was a crazy bizarre game with rules that had to have been made up by a bunch of drunk frat guys. At first, it makes no sense. But then after a round of it, it's actually quite a blast. For example, 2's start the deck, 3's force another person to take all the cards, 5's are invisible, 7's make the numbers go backwards, 8's skip the next player, 10's clear the deck, and then you have face down cards that you have to play without getting to look at them (this probably makes no utter sense to you, but I guarantee, come and visit me when I get back home and we'll have a grand ol' time playing GTMNBN). Another great thing about the game is that the winner gets to decide upon a punishment for the loser. In our first round, we made the loser go around and hug everyone in the room, which was rather amusing for those who didn't know what was going on. In the second round, Eric actually lost, and for his punishment, he had to wear a party dress during the next round of the game. One of the Canadian girls brought out her dress for Eric to wear, but it was too small. So she brought out a stretchy dress and made Eric get into it...but like O.J.'s glove, it just wouldn't fit. So, Eric was off the hook, which is probably a good thing, because I think he'd make the ugliest, hairiest girl I've ever seen.

After the cards, a massive group of us went out into Prague to go to a dance club. We had a contingent of Americans, Canadians, British, and Irish in the group, which made for an interesting evening. Throw in some Australians and some Kiwis and it would have pretty much completed the entire Anglo alliance. The ride on the tram into Prague devolved into chaos when noone knew where the tram was taking us, so after getting lost, we somehow bumbled our way to "Central Europe's Largest Dance Club," which doesn't say very much if you think about it, because Prague IS central Europe. Anyway, Club Latzke was a 5 story towering inferno of lights and loud music. On each of its five floors, there was a different type of music playing. Floor 1 had that freaky European techo Sprockets stuff. Floor 2 was all 80's music. Floor 3 was modern butt-grinding music which I somehow never heard before (dang, I'm getting old). Who knows what was playing on Floors 4 and 5...I didn't make it up that far. After two hours of this, it was suddenly 4 am and I was ready to call it quits. So I skipped out on the group of young 'uns and took a tram back to the hostel so Old Man Brian could get some rest.

The fourth evening was more subdued. Eric and I joined the Irish contingent (with a Liverpool straggler and some new guy from Portugal) and hung out at Double Trouble. Double Trouble sounds a lot worse than it really was...it was just some hole-in-the-wall dungeon where people drank. I kept looking for the "trouble" but didn't seem to find it. It ended up just being a couple of guys talking about football, which I have no clue about over here. The Irish kid who looked suspiciously like a young Jack Black was a riot to listen to. He would just jabber on about the stupidest things...it was like listening to a live version of Wikipedia. I split at 2:30 because we had to get up early to catch a bus to Vienna.

The next morning, I found Eric in a catatonic state on his bed. He did not look good from practically staying out the entire night long after I had left. The Eurobus ride to Vienna was rather quick and painless, but once we arrived at the campground, Eric was knocked out in the tent for hours. We ventured into Vienna that evening to check out the sights...

...and that's when the rain began. It rained. And rained. And rained. We sought shelter in a Greek/Turkish pizza place and ate there, then ventured over to the 1516 Brewery to wait out the storm. But the rain kept on going. Back at the campsite, my side of the tent was completely flooded, soaking everything I had. I have a name for that tent, and that, too, cannot be posted in this blog, so we will simply refer to it as the "Tent That Must Not Be Named," or TTMNBN. I was frantically using my wash towel to bail out TTMNBN, like it was a sinking ship. The sleeping bag was like a sponge, so I had to throw that outside and try to make due wearing warm clothes and sleeping just on my mattress. But my clothes were soaked, too. And the temperature in Austria started dropping. So around 4 am, I was a miserable, shivering mess.

That's when a vision of Bear Grylls (host of Discovery Channel's "Man Vs. Wild") suddenly came to me and kicked me into survival mode all of a sudden. I could hear Bear telling me how having wet clothes was the worst situation you could put yourself in, and you had to do something quick to get warm. I would have built a fire, but all these European countries don't let you make fires, which is pretty lame (and I don't see Smokey Bear anywhere around here, so it can't be THAT bad a thing). So I was thinking and thinking of what to do. Then it hit me: this campsite has a dryer...a real working clothes dryer. But I had no Euro coins to plug in! Crap! I rushed over to the dryer anyway at 4 in the morning, admidst the torrential rain...and to my surprise, those foolish Austrians hadn't installed a coin machine on the dryer. It was free! I couldn't believe it! So like a madman, I hauled everything I owned over to the laundry room, and camped out there into the morning hours shoving everything into the dryer until it was toasty dry. I finally got back to bed about 6:30 am and crashed for the next 4 hours as the rain started to dissipate.

We spent all day Friday wandering the city of Vienna, checking out the massive buildings and crazy statues that they have there. They have a lot of violent statues, I've noticed...statues of people clubbing each other over the head with big sticks, poking each other with long metal rods, and strangling and fighting each other to the death. Unlike the French with their plain graceful statues of Greek gods and goddesses, the Austrians like their gory violence and show the actual stories of the gods and goddesses taking place in their statues. Austria is a tough-feeling country with a lot of male machismo all around. You ride Vienna's underground, and you've got the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger yelling out all the stops for you in German: "STEPHENSPLATZ!!! KARLSPLATZ!!! HESSENGASSE!!!." It sounds really tough. I made sure I got off at the right stops or else I felt the train would come and kick my ass. Even the handles on the subway doors require brute strength to get them open. You've got to turn the handle and yank really hard, all within a few seconds. No wonder why this country produces so many tough men (and women). It's a workout everyday just riding public transportation.

But Vienna is a beautiful city. Seems like half the people there are dressed up as Mozart. Either there's a Mozart impersonator convention going on in town, or Vienna is trapped in time and hasn't picked up the latest copy of GQ to figure out what current fashion trends are. With all these faux Mozarts walking around, I felt that the REAL Mozart was getting slighted here, so I jumped on a tram with Eric (who was like the walking dead at this point) and found the cemetery where he and all the other decomposing composers were buried. Dumb luck reared its head again. After an hour wandering around lost in this cemetery, unable to find the titans of classical music, I gave up, and on the way towards the exit, I just happened to run into the whole entire lot. Beethoven. Mozart. Brahms. Shubert. Strauss. The list kept going on and on. Man, there must be a curse in Vienna that kills off all these composers once they arrive. If I was a composer, I wouldn't want to live there for fear of dying. It's like those silly horror films with the dumb white people going into the haunted house...and staying there despite all the ghosts and creepy stuff trying to kill them. Get the message, people: Get out!!!

Eric kept deteriorating, so he split for the campsite and I spent the evening wandering around Vienna. I bumbled into a film festival outside their main town building. They were showing a film of Placido Domingo singing opera, and they had people eating and drinking in the grounds around it. I then hopped on a tram and found a restaurant called Centimeters that bases the price of its food on the length of the sandwich you order. Pretty clever. They had metric rulers all over this restaurant. I opted to get some strange pancake thing filled with meat and covered with au gratin sauce. I love the German language...it makes me laugh. Reading a menu in German is a riot for me. Every word sounds like a sound effect.

On Saturday morning before we headed out of Vienna, I grabbed some strudel at a local bakery to eat on the bus. We then went to Cafe Central, which is a coffee house/restaurant. I read about it in my travel book and figured it would simply be some regular coffee house with students and the regular intelligentsia hanging out on couches with their laptops. Oh my gosh...stepping into this place, I was suddenly transported back in time. Inside I was greeted by a grand palace with gothic arches. It was so beautiful. I sat down and got their Viennese Breakfast, which consisted of Julius Meinl coffee (I love that stuff), a hard-boiled egg that I got to crack with a dainty spoon, and a big plate of assorted rolls...all for about €5,90, which is awesome!!! The Austrian waiter was a hoot as well, dressed in his dapper red jacket and going "Soooooo" before everything he said to us in his broken English. Cafe Central was such a pleasant surprise, and a great way to end my brief Vienna experience.

But now we are in Budapest, and this place confuses me even more. The language is even screwier, and I can't even begin to pronounce anything. This is the farthest east I'm heading, because I've got to start heading back west in a few days to travel back home. I'll be spending a few hours working on the final itinerary today. Looks like a trip to Munich might be in the works. Eric is finally looking back to normal again, so we'll probably check out some of the former Communist sights here and try not to get suckered by the locals. I'll give you the low-down on Budapest in the next day or two, so stay tuned.