Austria – Old Lady Writing

I always assumed that if I made it to Vienna, I would have to add a day for Bratislava. Fun fact: Vienna and Bratislava are two closest European capitals in terms of distance, so I understand that it is a common side trip, but that was never my reasoning. I generally do not like to “gallop through Europe”, as the saying goes. I learned to not overplan from experience (although my consequential plunge into underplanning has resulted in some unintended and occasionally hilarious jams—but that is another story for another time). I like to take in the sights and go at my own pace, and I dislike leaving a place without exploring it fully. So short story long, if I am going somewhere, I am not also going somewhere else. However, what led me to Bratislava was not its proximity to Vienna, but that Trip That Never Happened 42 years ago.

To be fair, Bratislava was never going to be more than a train connection on our original journey. We always knew that we were not going to see the town. It was an almost unimaginably different world back then. Europe was still divided into East and West, and getting from East to West was complicated even with a passport. A moot point, in any case, because we had no passports. We no longer had passports because we no longer had citizenship of any country, none at all. We were put on a train heading out of the USSR, and the first stop was Bratislava. Czechoslovakia was still united, and Bratislava was not a national capital of anything.

We disembarked in Bratislava and waited for the train to take us into the *real* West, to Vienna. On that cold and lonely platform in December of 1980, I do not remember any other passengers. It was just the four of us, my mom and grandparents and I, and we stood there with our two suitcases per person for what seemed like hours. This might be an invented memory, but I remember going into the train station itself and seeing chewing gum for sale (if you ever heard how prized it was in the Soviet Union—it’s all true!). Could we have just walked into the city? Were there any guards who would have stopped us? It is impossible to know now, because the only tangible goal was to get on that train heading to Vienna. These days, the hour-long trip between the two cities is almost akin to a suburban commuter ride. Back then, one travelled from the Eastern Block to the Capitalist West in a fancy sleeper compartment, and I remember it taking hours—probably because of border control. My mother remembers red velvet upholstery; I do not.

But there IS a vending machine selling dairy products

And so Bratislava remained something I never even pictured, just a footnote to a trip to Vienna. The only part of a this visit I could envision was arriving at that train station and walking past that kiosk selling gum and sundries out into an unimaginable town. Medieval? Baroque? Modern? The important part was the station, the kiosk, the sunlit town square. None of them turned out to be real in 2022.

My persistence in going to Bratislava in the face of my mother’s mild opposition; my brisk realization that in this century, trains to and from Vienna connect to Bratislava via a suburban station and not the main one, preventing the recreation of that long ago voyage; brief panic about having to also get on a bus to get to city center—none of these are worth recounting. Well, maybe the briefest of mentions—repeatedly seeing the words “Bratislava Petrzalka” instead of “Bratislava Central” or “Bratislava Hlavna” led this sophisticated traveler and polyglot to feverishly search the interwebs for a route into the city (get on the bus in this area, alarmingly advised the web, never take the taxi). Otherwise, we would be walking out of the train station into a somewhat grim peripheral disappointment and then right back to Vienna, as per tradition.

Ultimately, I feel like I gave Bratislava a short shrift. We walked around a bit, enjoyed the most lavish meat feast I could ever imagine (allegedly for two people, but there were six meat servings), encountered another Christmas market (again, mostly meat), saw some charming medieval sites, and hightailed it back to Vienna before dark. But I think Bratislava deserves more than just a couple of hours. It seemed like a lovely town I would like to get to know better. I would have liked to visit its castle high above the city, its churches and museums, taste the local wine at a very cool cellar by which I walked, and learn more about the effect the decoupling from Czechia had on Slovakia. I could have researched and planned prior to going, but I think the existence of this town was simply too fantastic to contemplate. Now that I know that it is real, we need to be properly introduced.

***I simply could not allow the last entry for this year to be the one from February 12th. It is almost impossible to imagine now how different the world was then. And while #oldladywriting is not chronological, I do occasionally respond to current events. The trouble is, the events of the past ten months have altered my life in ways invisible but irrevocable, have killed my soul, and have not yet been processed to the point where I can write about them. At all. And yet, the pre-war post must not stand at the last one. So here we go. And for the record, we here at #oldladywriting are, and have always been, against wars of aggression.***

Almost 42 years to the day I was first supposed to come to Vienna, I finally did. I was trying to imagine what it would have been like to have seen it back then, but it could have been like my first encounter with Rome, chaotic and no-budget. https://oldladywriting.com/2021/01/18/roman-holiday/ Vienna was supposed to have been our first stop out of the Soviet Union, and it actually seemed more real than Rome, the planned second stop that ended up being the first. For me, the main reason was that shortly before our departure flight, I saw a segment on Vienna on the TV program, Cinema Travel Club. Why “cinema” travels? Because the vast majority of Soviet citizens had no realistic hope of seeing any of these sights in person. But I did. I knew we were going to Vienna. I think the program was careful not to show any capitalist sights as too enticing, so there were no videos of stores or restaurants. I glimpsed the famous statue of Johann Strauss in the city park, and that was enough. I held on to that image, exotic yet relatable, and the arch under which he elegantly held his violin was going to be my personal gateway to the West.

What happened instead in December of 1980 was the first of the many shocks and disappointments of the journey as long as life itself, because instead of allowing a handful of Soviet refugees to roam freely in its stadtpark and look at the gilded statues, the Austrian government preferred to hold us in a detention facility until we could be shipped off to become the Italian government’s problem. And thus, for the next four decades, my only memories of Vienna consisted of an empty train station platform, a terrifying nighttime bus ride to we knew not where, and a crane that was visible beyond the tall brick wall surrounding the courtyard where we could promenade.

Coincidentally, once I got out of a cab at my hotel when I was finally let loose on Vienna, the first thing I saw was a crane on the other bank of the Danube. Surprise—it did not trigger anything. Too much time has passed, and too much has changed. I was mentally and emotionally ready. It was my fifth and finally successful attempt.

Yes, incredibly, I was foiled more than once! The second time was when I was spending my summer in Paris, and after crisscrossing Europe for a month, I planned to swing by Vienna as my final stop. Exhaustion prevailed. I literally got on the train in Amersfoort, realized that I could not face another night on the train, disembarked at the next stop, and returned to my Dutch family for a couple of weeks of playing board games and going to bars. It was what I needed.

The third time was when my son went to Austria as an exchange student, and my mom and I figured we could meet him there. I went so far as to buy a Lonely Planet guide, which I ended up finally using this month. Then my beloved grandfather was diagnosed with cancer and given just weeks to live. All plans for the immediate future were cancelled. He lived another year; no regrets about any missed trips, just gratitude for the time we had. My son brought me back a statuette of Strauss, and I still treasure it.

Finally last year, I came the closest, buying airplane, opera, and Spanische Hofreitshule tickets, and reserving a hotel for a week in Vienna with mom, to celebrate her half-milestone birthday and enjoy the grandest Christmas markets in Europe (and I am nothing if not a lover of Christmas markets). Just days before the trip, the plague closed down Vienna, and the refunds for everything I bought and reserved trickled in.

And so we tried again, a year later. And we succeeded. And ultimately, who knows if me at twelve, with my first Western European encounter, or me at nineteen, with my last backpacking-through-Europe adventure, or me at closing in on forty, with enough to spare but still focused on the career that was in the ascendant, would have enjoyed this city as much? On the flip side, would it have touched me in some more remarkable way than it did now, after decades of semi-luxury travel?

As one gets older, sees more, experiences more, those thunderbolts out of the sky experiences are fewer and far between. Vienna is a lovely city, but it is just another beautiful European capital. Its museums are grand, but I have been to the Louvre, Prado, and Zwinger—not because I am so fancy, but because I am now so old. The food is delicious, but eating in an expensive restaurant is not the event of the decade that it would have been, well, decades ago. At that detention facility, I was impressed with the miniature butters (being fully aware of the fact that these were not, in fact, holdovers from the Olympics, but were how people in the West ate every day) and Manner wafers. OK, so I still bought several bags of those, but that’s because they were the seasonal kind. I grab everything that’s labeled “seasonal” or “limited edition”.

It was still a gorgeous trip, because, well, look at these museums, palaces, restaurants! For a Euro-centric traveler that I am unashamed to be, there are no complaints here. And the piece of the proverbial resistance—Christmas markets! As much as my allegiance will always rest with the one in Paris, Viennese merchants have pitched tents in literally every open square and alley, so one could basically engage in a punsch and sausage tasting as a progressive walk through the city. As shocked as I was to finally make a trip to a location colder than the one where I live, this experience was absolutely worth it.

And since I am not a travel writer of even the humblest kind, I can only conclude with a brief record of what impressed me the most in the City of Music:

Statue of Strauss – pure nostalgia for me, but in any case, you cannot miss The Waltz King if you come to his town.
The food – everywhere, but especially at the Twelve Apostles, which was recommended by a friend and serves delicious black currant wine. I do not know what a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, would do in Austria, however.
Kunsthistorisches Museum – on par with any great art museum in the world. I was ever so pleased to run into my childhood “friend”, Infanta Margarita.
The Jewish Museum – if you are Jewish, it will confirm your worst suspicions. If you are not, hopefully it will open your eyes.
The Vienna Opera – we saw “Tosca”. I thought “The Magic Flute” would have been more appropriate, but it was my mother’s birthday, and she is the opera connoisseur. I loved it; she less so. I maintain that a live experience is always greater than the televised one, so we agreed to disagree.
The Belvedere Palace – we came for the Klimt, but left completely mesmerized by this 15^th century carved relief altarpiece. How come it is not more famous? (Or is it, and we just don’t know?)
Oh, we also went to Salzburg, which is exactly what you would imagine—quaint, cute, picturesque, and full of Mozart. Definitely worth a side trip.
And Bratislava – to be continued.