Exploring Vienna

When I arrived at the Vienna Airport Thursday night, I had no problem getting euros from the ATM in the arrivals hall (Cai was unable to do that because the ATM was out of order). I got a taxi, and although the driver spoke only limited English, I had the address for the hotel printed out so he understood where to go. The first part of the trip we stayed at the Hotel Liechtenstein Apartments, where Cai had been staying for a week already for the conference. The area actually reminded me of Boston, with the funky way the streets connected and the many one-way roads.

Our suite had a small space with a couch under the stairs with a TV in front of the staircase, and then a kitchenette with a dining table. Next to that was a shower stall and sink, with a separate room for the toilet. I was amazed that Cai was able to fit in these spaces at all, since even I banged my elbow on things like the door frame and the shower knobs.

Even though I was tired after a 19-hour travel day, I was also hungry. I got in around 10 p.m. so our choices for dinner were limited, but we found a pizza place within walking distance that was still open. The waiter spoke pretty good English and the pizza was delicious. It was a thin crust with the toppings spread out, so it was a knife and fork meal to start. But the thing that stood out to me the most was the takeout box. It was a cartoon of a pizza jumping out of the box and scaring a boy. Not really the image I would think of for tasty leftovers. J

On Friday, Cai went to the last day of the conference, so I walked to a local bakery called Meisterbackstube and got an apple strudel and an apricot doughnut for breakfast. I watched a couple shows while eating and then wrote my first blog of the trip. I did a double-take when I opened up my laptop and saw the Google page in German. Cai got back in the afternoon and we set out on a walk around Vienna. We took the Metro to the Rathaus area, where they were hosting the Eurovision Singing Contest. This is an annual competition that is televised, and each invited country has a singer who performs a song to be voted on by the other countries. The country who wins the previous year hosts the event the next year; last year the winner was a drag queen, Conchita Wurst, from Austria. Her picture was on advertisements all over Vienna.

This competition is a huge deal, and there were pictures and billboards all over the place with symbols and logos from the competition. Even the Google homepage on the Austrian network had a cartoon for it. We heard it’s one of the largest televised and most watched competitions here that’s not a sporting event. When we went to dinner Saturday night around 6 p.m., the host asked if we were going to be watching Eurovision or some sporting event. Looking around, all of the tables were reserved for 8 p.m. Cai was like, “Um, we just want to have dinner.” So they sat us at a table with the understanding that we would be gone by 8. And by the Rathaus they had a huge stage set up with a colorful globe and screen to see all of the pre-performances Friday night.

We also walked through the University of Vienna, which was unlike any other university I’ve ever been to. The architecture alone was breathtaking, and there were busts and statues dotting the landscape everywhere you looked. Cai spent most of his time there for the conference and I can understand why he enjoyed it so much. I was in awe just wandering around the courtyard! Here’s a statue of Eve with the serpent at her feet. On the back of the statue was a carving of Adam strangling the serpent. This was something I noticed all over Vienna — there were many, many, MANY religious icons to be found.

Afterward we wandered further downtown and hung out behind the palace, at the front entrance of the Museums Quartier, and walked the length of the Parliament building. I couldn’t imagine going to work every day at a place like that! We ended up at the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera) where we heard they had set up a huge viewing screen outside to watch the performances. I was amazed that they had chairs set up for a free viewing of the shows. I don’t know if they have anything like that anywhere in the U.S. By the time we got there we only got to watch the last five minutes of the opera (I don’t even know what show it was!) but we can officially say that we saw the opera in Austria.

For dinner that night I had my first meat dumpling, which I didn’t realize came out as just one large dumpling. I assumed it was a plate of smaller dumplings! But it was very good and more filling than I realized. Cai tried tafelspitz (boiled beef in broth) with apfelkren (shredded horseradish, sour apples and cream with chives). When they brought the apfelkren out on a plate, Cai asked the waiter if there was a certain way to eat it with the tafelspitz. I was wondering the same thing because it didn’t seem like those individual ingredients would go well together! But Cai mixed it all in and said it was delicious.

Outside of the opera house we stopped at a sausage stand to get bratwurst, and it came in a sort of hot dog bun cocoon. I have to say, that was the best way to eat such a thing! It held in the toppings quite nicely while not being too much bread as to overpower the brat. All other hot dog buns will be forever inferior. :)

Saturday we got to sleep in, but still woke up in time to go to the outside market that was just a couple blocks down from our hotel. There was SO much food! We bought two different kinds of cow cheese and then a Berner Alpkäse (mountain cheese). We also bought regular salami, spicy salami, smoke-cured pork loin, bread, vegetables, and pumpkin seed oil. The best part was, there was usually at least one person who spoke English behind each table. And if there wasn’t, there was a customer standing next to us who would translate. It was really enjoyable learning about the food and the culture from the people who work and live there.

After we had breakfast at the Tewa Karmelitermarkt, we took the Metro to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The building itself was stunning — just the design of each room could be its own exhibit. People told us we had to look for The Tower of Babel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, so we wandered through the first three floors, working our way up to the Netherlands 15^th-16^th centuries. But while I admired the amount of detail in the Babel painting, it was a couple of his other works I found more moving and memorable. It was a good place to rest and admire the artwork.

That night was when we ate at a place called burg.ring, where all the tables were reserved for either the Eurovision or the sporting event. It was the first place I tried knoblauchcremesuppe (garlic cream soup), which became my favorite Austrian food. I know, it’s so boring compared to the stuff Cai ate! He had mushroom cream soup and beef goulash, and we shared a plate of various sausages with different mustards. As usual, it was quite tasty. In fact, everything I’ve tried so far has been great, which is unusual with my picky taste buds. But a lot of the food is meat and potato-based, and I’m a meat and potatoes kind of girl! 

The Trip Began Like So

I made it to Vienna.

It’s been 16 years since I’ve traveled overseas (shout-out to my Marist crew who went to Italy) so I’d forgotten how tiring a 12-hour flight can be. Add to that a 4-hour layover in Moscow and another 2 ½ hour flight to Vienna, and you’ve got two days of traveling. But if nothing else, it usually offers some interesting stories.

I left at 5:30 pm from LAX, after a 45-minute delay for baggage loading technical difficulties. The plane’s captain said he didn’t think anyone who’d flown through LAX would be surprised about such a delay (to which most people on the plane nodded). Since I flew on the Russian airline Aeroflot, the announcements were in Russian first, then English. The plane did have TV screens in the headrests though, so the safety video was in Russian with English subtitles. I think my favorite part was when they talked about potential emergencies, such as “in the event of ditching the plane.” I thought that was such a fun translation for having to evacuate.

And that seemed to be a theme for Russian translations. I noticed the emergency exit for some businesses in the Moscow airport were called “Emergency Escapes,” and the image for the stairs was a person running. Apparently Russians are always at the ready to flee whenever necessary. J Although I have noticed that the running man symbol is also used here in Austria to signal stairs.

Another thing I noticed, and this was something many people mentioned to me, was the flight attendants were quite friendly with other people who spoke Russian (which was a large portion of the passengers). But when they got to me and I started speaking English, I was immediately placed on the shit list. They would be chatting with people along the aisle, and then when they got to my seat they just looked at me expectantly.

The first time they got to me I had no idea what the food choices were, and when I asked, they very curtly told me beef or chicken. And when I said chicken, they handed me the beef cubes tray (I’m sure it was an honest mistake, I just thought it was kinda funny). I didn’t notice until I went to unwrap the main part of the meal, and by then they had already moved on. But at the end of the flight, the choices they had were chicken or salmon. And for those who know me well, you know I made sure to check that they gave me the chicken option that time!

Something I was not expecting was the attitude of my flight neighbor. He was maybe 20 years old and spoke both Russian and English. When we first boarded I was walking right behind him, and I mentioned I had the window seat when he was about to sit down. I was looking for a place in the overhead bins to put my bag and he said, “There’s a place here.” Then he took my bag out of my hands and placed it in the bin for me. I thanked him, but was a bit surprised that he just grabbed my bag like that.

It happened again a couple hours later when I was watching TV. They had remotes attached to the headrest by a wire, and after I was done using mine I tried to put it back in the holder. But the wire got stuck and I had trouble setting it back down. So the guy took it out of my hand and snapped the wire to get it back snug in its place. I thanked him again, seeing a pattern. The third time, I had trouble opening the plastic top on my dessert and, same thing happened. He also handed me my bag when we landed. The only weird thing was, he didn’t talk to me that much. I tried some small talk but he didn’t really respond. So it was kind of strange to me to have that kind of interaction with someone, but not even hold a conversation with them. When explaining this to my parents I was trying to find the right way to explain his attitude, because he wasn’t rude about it. My dad used the word “assertive,” and I would agree. He was assertively polite. J

One of the more fun things on the flight was the Russian TV show I watched. They had a number of channels on the TV, including movies, documentaries, Russian sports, and shows. They had one Russian show called P.E. Teacher (Fizruk in Russian), and the American ones were The Knick, Chuck, and Game of Thrones (only a certain number of episodes from earlier seasons). Because they had English closed captioning, I was able to watch 12 episodes of P.E. Teacher which was pretty funny.

It was a half-hour sitcom about a guy named Foma (who looked like an older version of Vin Diesel, with a leather jacket and aviator shades) who was trying to get back into the good graces of a big Russian businessman. After he’s fired, he becomes the gym teacher at the school where the businessman’s daughter is a student. She gets into an argument with her father and leaves home, moving in with Foma because her friends can’t take her in. At first her father is unaware of this, and he calls Foma in to keep tabs on his daughter’s whereabouts. And in the end, Foma brings her back to her father and she is PISSED.

But one thing that surprised me was that they spoke openly about gay students, which is something I would not have expected from a Russian show. In general, Russia is pretty strict against gay people and often violent towards them, but I’ve heard that the younger generation doesn’t feel the same way. Although the translation for some of the dialogue pertaining to a student (who is actually straight but the main character thinks is gay) was not exactly politically correct. He’s directing a play with a lot of imagery in it, and the main character tells him, “You homos always have so much symbolism in your plays” and “You homos make the best directors.” So there’s still a ways to go there. At one point, when some of the kids get into trouble, one of them shouts, “You can’t do that! This is almost a free country!” Still not free enough for me to wander around outside the Moscow airport without a visa though.

Coming into that airport was a trip (pun intended), because the plane kept twisting and turning. At one point we dropped kind of suddenly and my stomach lurched. I started to get a bit nervous, but looking at all the other Russian passengers no one else batted an eye. Either they would go down in a plane crash with their heads held high, or this was a normal entry for the Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO).

And it was just like every other major airport I’ve been to, except with the Russian language above the English words. And unlike LAX, which is in the middle of freeways and general city hubbub, SVO was in the middle of trees and a rural setting of homes with large backyards. But you could also see the tall city buildings from it. And holy crap, is it expensive! They know they have you stranded in-between flights and they use it to their advantage. It cracked me up to see Armani and Hugo Boss children’s T-shirts for $45. And a small Lego set that I’ve seen in Target for $15 was $38. Needless to say the only Russian souvenir I brought back from there was a water bottle that came with my dinner.

And I totally chickened out and ate at the TGI Friday’s that was near the first currency exchange place I came to. I was so tired I didn’t feel like searching for anything else. On the way back I have an 8-hour layover there, so I’ll probably wander around more then. Plus, it will have only been a 2 ½ hour flight to there from Vienna, so I probably won’t be as exhausted! Anyway, I had a burger and fries, of which the fries were good and the burger was awful. I think they microwaved it rather than cooked it. But that’s what I get for choosing an American chain restaurant in Moscow.

Leaving on the second flight the announcements took even longer, because they began in Russian, then went to English, and ended in German. I did notice one of the flight attendants was very friendly to everyone, regardless of what language they spoke. But he was about it. The funny thing is, people told me that having grown up in New England I would probably be used to that kind of brash attitude, and honestly it didn’t bother me one bit.

Other random observations:

      1)  The flight path to Moscow was basically over Canada, Greenland, the Norwegian Sea, and the country bundle of Norway/Sweden/Finland. Flying over Greenland was awesome. I wish my camera got a good picture, but the sun was kind of blinding off of the snow.

2    2) The bathroom on the first flight was GROSS. It was wet everywhere — I had to roll up my jeans so they weren’t resting on the pee-covered floor as I hovered. I did see a flight attendant go in there and I heard them spraying something, but later on it was back to GROSS.

      3) The dessert was the best part about the meals. The first meal had some sort of lemon square, which isn’t usually my thing but I liked it. The second meal had a delicious chocolate brownie.

      4) I was glad the bathrooms at SVO had the same male and female symbols, although the women’s rooms were marked by a figure that had on a round fluffy dress, rather than the triangular dress. My first thought was, “Ah, yes. This must be the bathroom for Russian ballerinas.” J

      5) Apparently the only time I’m a functional adult at 7 a.m. is when I’m jet-lagged and my mind and body are confused as to what’s happening. I got into Vienna around 10 p.m. and Cai and I went to bed at midnight. I woke up with him and his alarm he had set for the last day of the conference, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I can’t remember the last time I started my day that early (without going back to sleep at some point!).

      6) Most of the people I came across in my travels spoke English, and so far everyone we’ve spoken to here in Vienna does as well. I still have my German dictionary though, just in case!