More Vienna

Whew; now safely back in France, and it is time to describe my Vienna and Prague trip. And my unexpected detour to Slovakia; that was fun.

So on Wednesday I shook off my legarthy and actually started sightseeing in the city I picked for myself to visit. I know, I don't know how I do it, either. I've been getting very late starts, and it's sort of against my personal belief system to force myself to get up early while I'm supposedly on vacation for my own pleasure, so I do most of my wanderings between the hours of noon and 6pm, at which time it gets dark and everything except the bars starts to close down, and I start to get hungry and tired and cold and paranoid.

Wednesday, I spent the timeframe at the Wittgenstien-Haus and then the Tiergarten. For anyone who's never been to Vienna, you can translate those respectively as Empty-Shack and the Zoo.

I wanted to go to Wittgenstien's house not for any architectural significance I am told it has, but because Wittgenstien caused me a great deal of grief for a good six or eight weeks senior year of college and I wanted the option of spitting on his piano or something. He's one of those people -- like Kirkegaard, Homer, and Anselm -- who I wrote a bad paper about, trying to understand what they were getting at, and failing completely, because while I find them interesting I do not understand their way of thinking at all, and a paper doesn't change that, only exposes my ignorance for a tutor to see and criticize. So on the one hand, I have very bad memories of this guy, and would sort of like to see him burn in hell for causing me that grief. But on the other hand, I don't exactly blame authors in this category. I mean, I totally blame the guys like Kant and Hegel, Goethe, Marx, who I just straight up hated, didn't understand, and disagreed with on principle. Them I would totally spit on (or at least point and laugh, in an attempt to fill them with shame) if I saw them on the street. Wittgenstein, though... I mean, it's not exactly his fault that I couldn't get a handle on what he was saying at all, just like it wasn't exactly Kirkegaard's fault that I tried to write a paper on him in six hours and it turned into a five page failure. I blame him a little, because other six hour papers that I wrote turned out okay, (uh, just ignore that sentence, Mom), but I know plenty of people who devoted sufficient time to a Kirkegaard paper to have it turn out well.

Anyway. I did not spit on his piano, although he had one; the house is very cool architecturally, but also kind of empty and boring. It wasn't on my map, and I think I spent more time wandering around looking for it -- asking people for directions, going the wrong way, trying to read street names in German, stuff like that -- than I did actually in the house. There are lots of stairs, circling themselves around an elevator, which is the coolest thing. There are also a lot of paintings, but since I don't know German I don't know why they're there or if they have any significance, and since I'm bone stupid when it comes to art I don't even know if they were good paintings or not.

Anyway, after that was the zoo. I wasn't sure about going, since I virtually never go to the zoo anymore, but what the hell, I figured, asking for advice, receiving it, and then not taking it makes you look like a very stupid main character in a novel of some sort, and those kind of people inevitably come to bad ends. So I went. And I'm really glad I did, because the koala bears alone were worth the price of admission. Seriously, they were completely and totally adorable. There were also pandas, who I wanted to hug, giraffes, giant turtles, little mini penguins, lions, tigers, and cheetahs, and fish. The best part though, was that since it was February in central Europe, all the animals (almost all, anyway) were inside. So you'd walk into a room, and there would be giraffes standing there, eating out of a high trough on the wall. It cracked me up. That renewed my zest for life.

Trying to get out of the public park where the zoo is and find public transportation then killed my zest for life, but it was renewed for awhile, so you know, take what you can get.

After that, I broke with tradition. I've traveled enough to have certain habits at this point, one of them being ignoring guidebooks. This is not a smart thing to do, or a particularly good idea, or something I'd recommend, but nevertheless, I hold to it closely and rarely deviate. Consequently my preferred method of finding a restaurant is to wander around until I am so hungry that I am no longer picky about what I eat so long as I eat something, and then I go into the first restaurant I see, order something that looks vegetarian, and quietly try not to faint. Shut up, it generally works just fine. But Wednesday night I actually consulted my map for a restaurant recommendation, took public transportation over there (gotta love the Vienna card) found it, and ate there. It was a new experience. Not bad, although not quite up to the hype the map gave it. And I had a pear cider, which was stupid and gave me a wicked headache. But I deserved it for drinking pear cider, so it didn't upset me too much once it was gone by the next day. (Big internet thank yous to the girl who was staying at the hostel with me and gave me an Advil when I needed one, since I hadn't packed mine.)

That was Wednesday... stay tuned for the House of Music, Prague, and my unexpected trip to Slovakia. And some Veronica Mars reviews should be up soon, talk about renewing my zest for life.