Austro-Hungarian Empire Revisited

Traveling solo is certainly its own experience. It’s like a quiet secret you can’t reveal. No one else is taking quite the same path, no one is there to keep track of you or roll their eyes at you or laugh with you.

I’m a pretty secretive person anyways, I suppose, and the incessant candle you hold only to yourself can be alternatively illuminating and disturbingly revealing. Left alone with your actions and thoughts, devoid of excuses or people to blame, your days (for better or worse) are entirely dependent on you.

In this sense traveling alone can feel like throwing yourself to the wolves and hoping you can fend them off. Or it can be a drinking binge. Or anywhere in between. It can be unnervingly up to you. Observe:

With all my friends departed for the holidays, I took four days to peruse the capital cities of the former Hapsburg Empire, Budapest and Hungary. The initial night train was not the most favorable of starts. I nestled into my own compartment only to find that the heating didn’t work. Well shit. I figured the heating was out for the train until I was asked to move compartments (they were splitting the train) and the new one’s heater was stuck on full blast. Well shit.

The Portuguese girl across the way was sweating bullets from under her goth get-up, but I told her I was a Texan and welcomed some heat.

That is, until the Hungarians came.

A man tapped on the door asking if he could enter, to which I nodded assent. Only it was him and his wife.

And their teenage son and 5 year old daughter.

And Grandma.

And Grandpa, struggling on his cane, liable to go down like a house of cards at any moment.

Bloody hell. The room that was 80 degrees surged up to unfathomable discomfort. Add to this that Grandma over there decided that the lights need to come on. Grandma, it’s 5:45—go to your deathbed sleep, damn it! But Grandma proceeded to work on fixing her coat’s zippers for the next two hours. Ye Gods and little fishes!

I should mention here that I was using my buddy Tim’s “Rick Steves’ Best of Eastern Europe 2006” as a guidebook. Tim calls it his baby and it really does go a long way towards telling you what’s unnecessary, what’s overpriced, when to get the audioguide, etc. But one thing that I realized is that the book is certainly geared towards middle-aged American tourists. When it says Budapest is huge and unwalkable, that means if you’re an SUV-driving-upper-middle-class-fat-ass then it will indeed be difficult to cross a bridge on foot. If you’re an Avimaan, well. Did some one-armed Goddamn pushups on that bridge, then I kissed my biceps. At least I’m pretty sure I did that…

But anyone who strays from the path can tell you that walking across cities is a far, far better way to pick up its pulse than only hitting up the main attractions. In both Budapest and Vienna I started feeling sort of overwhelmed and unattached until I just hit the streets.

You’re never really going to feel a city till you live there, I guess, and I think I’ve learned that the key to any vacation is to give yourself time and freedom. When I first got to Budapest, for example, I found that two of the places I wanted to visit were closed on account of the holidays. So I wandered around till I started heading up Gellert Hill, the highest peak of the city. It was a darn good look and it was a damn gorgeous day, and I never planned to do it. It’s really funny how easily you can forget you’re on vacation and supposed to have fun, you know?

The “Budapest Card” was a great extension of this mindset: the card provides you with a two day travel pass and gets you in free to a lot of museums and exhibits around town. With my trip to the House of Terror cancelled in the afternoon, I was meandering around the vast City Park when I came upon a mammoth rock structure fenced off from the street. On investigation, I found it was the zoo. Did the Budapest Card cover the zoo? It did.

(Half-second Pause)

I’m going to visit the zoo. And for a half hour, it was a root-tooting good time. Three thoughts from the Budapest Zoo:

1. Of all the animals I’d ever wished being, I never really considered the seal. But what other animal gets to do barrelrolls just for the hell of it? Seals are show-offs and love to swim, and they’re either doing one or the other or both. Or snacking on some fish. I like seals.

2. They had an American bald eagle in a tiny, tiny habitat. Aren’t we, like, supposed to have them? Why does Budapest have one? What?

3. Pro-Timberwolf over here. These guys kept hoofing it around this long, rocky track the whole day long. Other animals sit around and arbitrarily lick their genitals clean. This is why those animals are prey and the timberwolves hunt them down. Yeah, T-wolves and seals moving up Avimaan’s Big Board.

After the zoo and some roasted corn, I decided to hop into Budapest’s main attraction, its natural baths. Although the air was frigid outside, the water was hot and relaxing. I floated about for a couple hours, idly watching the old men play chess while floating. I think it’s nice that the “must-do” event in Budapest involves hanging out in a steaming pool and looking at beautiful Europeans and fat tourists. Good times.

That night I went to a restaurant that Rick Steves called the “best Indian food on continental Europe.” I haven’t had any since I’ve been here; there’s an absolute dearth of Indian restaurants in Prague unless you want to drop 50 bucks. I’ve been missing Saag for much, much too long, and though their texture was creamy than my mother’s, it was sure nice to get a taste of something from back home.

The next morning, after conquering the Great Market Hall that had been closed on the 26th and munching on some tasty langos (think funnel cake sans powdered sugar), I took a shuttle bus to a place just out of town called Statue Park.

Now, ok, clearly this place involves a park of statues. But they’re all commie statues from Hungary’s time as a Soviet satellite country. They were all constructed as part of the communist propaganda machine and I have to say, that machine knew how to churn out some pretty sweet statues. Here's one of the highlights.

Upon returning to the city, I dawdled in a Pest café before trucking back over to Buda to see the castle. Well, by dawdling I mean that I waited thirty minutes to get a flipping sandwich that I could have made myself in two minutes. That kind of dawdling.

The inside of the Matthias Church was the highlight of the castle complex, its wall vibrantly covered in crests and crosses making it decidedly more Eastern than any of the other inspiring churches I’ve seen in Europe. The other highlight was the giant statue of a mythical bird said to have helped the Magyars come to power in the tenth century.

Time for Vienna. Well, time for me to panic about potentially missing my train to Vienna. Cause I got on the metro, got off at the train station, looked around and recognized nothing. I was at the train station on the other end of town…Shit. Shit shit shit—and only 25 minutes to go. Lucky for me Budapest’s trains were running late, so I arrived with 2 minutes to spare—technically: the train didn’t actually leave for another 35.

I arrived in Vienna in the late evening and headed straight for my hostel. While my hostel in Budapest was no-frills, Wombat’s in Vienna was a through and through backpacker’s hostel. After a shower I hopped down to the bar for the free beer every guest is afforded and to mingle with these, these…

Backpackers and the backpacking culture is strange, y’all. These young travelers thing they’ve found i-t IT, you know, that while everyone else is slugging out a job or in school they are L-I-V-I-N.

It’s mainly the superiority factor that gets to me—look, these people have just as little clue as to what the hell they’re doing with their life as their more settled contemporaries, only they have a credit card (or more often a parents’ credit card) to allow them to get shit-faced every night in the beautiful bergs of Europe. All they have more of is dirty underwear.

I’m not trying to discredit traveling, or traveling to gain experience about the world. Clearly that’s a part of what I’m doing. It’s just these backpackers think that the drunken adventures they’re having far away from home are the end-all be-all. Hell, maybe for them, twenty years from now, maybe it actually will be. As for now their smugness smacks of misappropriated arrogance.

I struck up a good repore with a couple from Seattle and a loud-mouthed Kiwi girl until I decided to pass out.

So: Vienna. The thing about Vienna is that it just bleeds money out of you. There’s heaps of worthwhile museums and they’re all ten euros a piece—after the relative cheapness of Prague, I was losing cash everywhere. “Et tu Kunsthistorisches Muzeum? Et tu Haus der Musik? Then fall Avimaan’s wallet!”

There’s too much to list here from the museums, but Vienna is certainly a music lover’s hotspot. One exhibit housed musical instruments from the middle ages and Renaissance, with an accompanying audio guide that would play samples. If and of y’all want to get me a belated Christmas present, I really, really, really want a hurdy-gurdy.


The Haus der Musik was also really amazing not only for its in-depth look at Viennese composers (you know, Mozart, Haydn, Strauss, Beethoven [sorta]), but for their analysis about how we experience sound and music. One exhibit used a special scale to explain why we naturally hear common intervals instead of less common ones ( hearing A and B as a root and major 2nd as opposed to a root and minor 7th, for example). Another exhibit showed how technology allows us to combine sounds based on their sonic qualities, so I could recite a Shakespearean speech that was half my voice and half a swarm of bees. Good times. I’ve always thought of myself as half-Indian and half-swarm of bees anyway.

All during my time in Budapest it had been exceptionally cold. I mean, I was used to Prague’s low 40’s, but that had been very manageable. I hadn’t once needed my gloves. Suddenly I wished I had them every damn moment in both cities. Where did this come from? In fact, when I came strolling out of the Great Market Hall in Budapest I was initially confused by this fine white dust whirling about me. Snow what?

But wait: there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Doesn’t snow, like, come from clouds? Can we get a ruling on this? Eventually a foggy smear of clouds seemed to form, almost as if the snow had been sucked up in reverse.

That same barely-there snowfall continued in Vienna until the second night of my stay, when I exited the Haus der Musik into a winter wonderland. Vienna under two inches of snow…I bought a Doener Kebap (the German/Austrian equivalent of a taco, so to speak, since it’s Turkish), and strolled the gardens. I still needed gloves, so I got the next best thing—hot wine. Hot wine is like an alcoholic pair of mittens.

But that night, after another inch or two—I used to call certain plays in Ultimate Frisbee “premature ejaculations.” This is when a guy would only need to make one smart throw to set someone up for the easy score, but instead went for the blaze of glory…and, well, went for it too early. This befell Vienna and its snow. Europe has been pining for snow for months now: the skiing industry’s been put over the rack due to the complete lack of snow up till now, it’s been dry as a bone for a while.

And it was as if Vienna was trying to will its winter magic out, to save the ski season. But by midnight the snow had regressed to a freezing rain. It could not be sustained. Vienna had shot its messy white load out too early, and by the next morning most of the snow was gone.

In conclusion, traveling alone is like cooking for yourself: you can add whatever ingredients you want, you can follow the recipe, you can be an absolute mess. Eventually I wished someone like Tim was there so the jokes I made were to someone else instead of to my own brain. Oh well. My brain always thinks I’m funny at least.