I don’t know who decided that Vienna has good coffee, but he didn’t drink what I drank. I think, particularly, I’m going to be difficult to please with espresso after Italy and Paris, though.
After a quick breakfast, we hopped on a tour bus that took us to the Wachau area of Vienna, which is actually both a city and a province (or I think that’s what the tour guide said – it was something besides a city, some sort of broader area). We rode along the Danube to Melk, passing the cemetery where Motzart was buried (in a group grave, because he was poor from gambling at the end of his life, so no one knows exactly where). The tour guide told us that the Danube in Vienna is clean to swim in and eat fish from. He was actually very impressive – you can go to college and major in Tourism here, and I guess part of it is that you learn several languages, so he spoke German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian. He smelled really bad, though. I guess deodorant is optional in Austria, because there were a couple people who obviously never wore it and probably showered sparingly. And even though he was smart, he was also very ignorant. He told Holly and I about trips he took to places in the states and made some weird comment about black people. Not outright racist, but it was clear he wasn’t used to black people in Austria and had some uninformed views.
There were lots of hills and fields on the way, and a lot of the fields were just covered in some yellow flower, which the guide said was canola. It looked pretty cool.
We went with the group on a an hour-and-a-half boat ride down the Danube. We passed some really old buildings on the way, but it was hard to keep track of what they were.
At the end of the boat ride, we got back on the bus and went to a monastery in Melk, Stift Melk. They had some old stuff on display, but their oldest thing, our museum guide said, was a piece of Jesus’s cross. Okay. I wonder if this is one of those Catholic things, like the Communion wafer and wine magically turning into Jesus’ blood and flesh. If you will to be so…
They had a big library that we could only see part of, but the room we were in had books from the 16th to 18th centuries. There was also a pretty church at the end.
We were pretty exhausted when we got back, so we rested for a bit and then grabbed dinner in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, Holly went upstairs to rest and pack, and I went to meet my Alice and Hillary, two of my friends from the program, at a bar in the “Bermuda Triangle.” This is where a lot of the good bars are, and it was luckily very close to the hotel so I could walk there. Vienna is apparently a very safe city, and I definitely felt that. I walked there and back by myself in the dark and didn’t feel at all threatened; no one bothered me.
We just went to a bar called Excess, which my MTV tour book said played American music, so the bartender spoke English. We stayed and talked for about and hour and a half, and then I walked back. I passed a little store for kinder clothes, where they had those stereotypical German dresses and overall-things for boys, but in kiddie sizes. Very cute. There was also a “J.F. Kennedy Hous,” which is funny because I feel like there’s something for JFK everywhere I go. There’s a street named after him in Paris, I think, and Alice said that the Germans just love him.
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