An American in Vienna, An Apocalypse in Bulgaria

Part 1: Travels

The thing I have probably enjoyed most about this year has been the degree of mobility afforded me by living in a part of the world with such small countries. In the States, you travel for a while, and you may or may not even be in a different state; the people still speak English; you can still walk down the road and get a pizza; your money is still green (or blue or orange or any of the other myriad colors in which legal tender in the US now comes). Traveling is just simpler, cheaper, and more accessible in the Balkans, where a completely alien culture is just a bus or plane ride away.

So to put the finishing touches on my œuvre of warmup travels that has presaged the biggest trip of my life, coming up next month (!), I took a long weekend to Austria to visit fellow Los Angeles Fulbrighter Andrea and to see Laura for a few days. Last month, I had the opportunity to be whisked through Vienna for an apocopated two-hour tour of the city (never mind that more than half of that time was spent on the U-bahn), but, that short time hardly having counted, I wanted another chance to visit for reals. So on Thursday, I made a little jump over a couple mountains and some other quasi-important stuff to go stay for a few days.

After meeting my two governesses at the airport, we scampered off to get some of the best ice cream known to man. No, seriously, hyperbole has no place in this blog, and my word here is bond. Finishing this nirvanic treat off well before we reached the safety of Andrea's apartment, we took the long S-bahn, U-bahn, and Strassenbahn ride to catch up a little and take in the Viennese scenery. Upon getting home, it being nearly 6 (my original flight having been cancelled, pushing my arrival back), we made some dinner, got settled in, and opted to chill out for the night.

The next day, us having crashed far earlier than the usual post-PM times to which I've grown accustomed, began bright and early, but with the added bonus of a decent night's sleep under our belts. We had a rather pleasant, leisurely breakfast (replete with tea and toast), and then headed out to be obnoxious American good little tourists about Vienna.

Our first stop was Schönbrunn, the summer home of the Habsburgs during their extravagant reign. To paint the most simplistic picture I can of the place: It is large, and the courtyard is huge, and it's got a lot of ornate stuff in it. Just look:

The fountain and gloriette up the hill

Looking back down, Vienna in the background

After reveling in this opulence for a few sunny hours, we made a brief foray through Karlsplatz, which included reflective, digital counters of all sorts of interesting items, like this one that was counting worldwide "armaments expenditures," AKA defense spending, since January 1st (in Euros):

€ 512 billion = A lot of money.

This being merely a transit point between where we had been and where we were going, we declined to linger, and made straightaway for Vienna's 1st District. In our jolly hours wandering around this, the city's oldest and most central part, we happened upon a large collection of Really Neat Stuff, including the Burgtheater, Vienna's most prestigious theater, the Rathaus--Vienna's city hall, all decked out for the imminent Life Ball, at which Bill Clinton was to give an address--the Austrian Parliament, the Volksgarten, and Hofburg Palace.

Burgtheater

Rathaus

Parliament, which begs the question of why our government buildings don't have stuff like this in attendance.

Hofburg Palace

While we were ogling these Old World wonders, having seen a great many cool things that day, evening fell and we moseyed back to Andrea's apartment, from which she scurried off to rehearsal, while Laura and I made dinner.

Exhausted from another long day, we feel asleep rather early that night, and awoke not-late-ish on Saturday, first to go to Yamm--a vegetarian pay-by-weight buffet that was nothing short of damned delicious--and then to go to Vienna's huge, historic cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. As it spans more than 2 square kilometers, we didn't nearly have enough time to see all of it, but we did hit some of the more important parts. First up was the composers' section:

Beethoven

Monument to Mozart

Schubert

Johann Strauss

Brahms, in all his perplexed glory

Wolf

After that, we wandered over to what was nominally the "President's Section," though it mostly contained non-presidential, though otherwise notable, people:

Julius Raab - actually a president of Austria

Arnold Schönberg - not a president of Austria

Zemlinsky - also not a president, but cool anyway

Finally, we headed over to the Jewish section, which, to my surprise and sadness, was overgrown and in disrepair. Having somehow escaped the destruction that befell so many Jewish cemeteries during the Holocaust, it has clearly not been maintained, either by virtue of the interreds' families having permanently fled the former Reich, and so being unable to pay for maintenance of the graves, or simply through negligence on the part of the caretakers of the cemetery. Whatever the case, it was a sad and telling reminder of the recent history of the country.

Overgrown

Broken down

Needing to get home, as Andrea had a performance of Die Schöpfung to get to, we left this sobering site and took the Strassenbahn and U-Bahn back to Schwedenplatz, where, before heading home, we chilled out with some good drinks and casually overlooked the Danube.

Pretty

Andrea went running off, as had become her wont over the course of this trip (busy singer that she is and will continue to be), and Laura and I made dinner, as had become ours, and watched FC Bayern's heartbreaking loss play out to Chelsea FC on penalty kicks in the Champions' League finals.

The next day would be our last in Vienna, and while Andrea was at church, Laura and I went spazieren gehen in the Augarten, which happens, conveniently, to lie in the shadow of Andrea's apartment. It was a warm, pleasant Sunday morning, the idyllic setting of the park being broken only by the bizarre specters of antiaircraft towers, built by Hitler in the waning days of World War II, looming over the entire place.

Bizarre, ominous

After Andrea returned, we three went out for a last tour around Vienna before it was time to go, including a trip to a little outdoor restaurant where I got my first taste of Kalbbratwurst (it was delicious). I got back to Sofia late Sunday night, a different person from all that had transpired on the trip, but there was no time to ruminate on it; as Ben Folds almost said in what is undoubtedly one of the greatest songs ever written, life was calling, and wouldn't hold.

Part 2: The End of the World

I arrived back in Sofia to the welcome of fellow Fulbrighter Michael waiting at my apartment, as he had been staying the weekend in my absence. Going to bed far too late on Sunday night--the result of our lengthy discussion of my trip--we woke up Monday morning, I organized some notes, and just like that, with no time to pause and catch my breath, it was time to venture out into the world again and continue with my daily slog to fulfill the raison d'être for my continued presence here, the writing of my rapidly-ballooning thesis. So Monday passed in a whirlwind of writing and editing (Michael similarly being occupied, in his case by LSAT preparations), ukulele playing, and running.

Friend of the Fulbright Program Chris showed up in time for dinner, and after all was said and done for the evening, we three occupied my kitchen until the wee hours of the morning, me finally giving up on my work for the day as the conversation about the state of the American economy and worldwide financial policy became too interesting for me to resist. We continued in our heretofore fashion well past the hours when all but the most ardent of night-owls would be abed when the unexpected happened.

At first, I thought it was the vibration from the nearby elevator shaking the floor, but when it lasted far longer than a second, I knew this couldn't be the case. And as I nearly lost my balance from the lateral back-and-forth of my apartment up on the top floor of my Gd-be-praised-structurally-sound apartment building, ukulele still in hand, Tupac lyrics still hanging on my lips, I knew: We were having an earthquake, a big one.

My first instinct being to bolt for the doorway (the wisdom of which, as it turns out, is not entirely based on fact), I shouted, "Door!" and the other two followed me, huddling inside the doorjamb for what were 30 seconds of the 5 scariest cumulative minutes of my entire life. Finally, the shaking subsided, and we were left to slow our racing hearts and sort out what had just happened.

I came to Bulgaria fresh off of 5 years of living in Los Angeles, and I somehow managed to be out of town for both of the substantial earthquakes that struck during that period. I felt a couple of smaller ones when I was there, maybe 3.5's or 4's--just large enough to rattle some windows and shake some things around--but never before had I experienced any seismic activity as strong or lasting for quite as long as that which struck at 3 AM that morning. The official word coming out of Bulgaria's geological service is that it was a 5.6 quake, followed by two aftershocks at 4.6 and 4.3, both of which we felt and somewhat-less-fearfully reacted to.

We took it as a sign that our night should probably have ended, so we went to bed, waking the next morning to repeat our routine of LSAT preparation (Chris and Michael being identically occupied) and thesis writing. While out at the coffee shop into which we had settled, the apocalyptic phenomena continued to hound our lovely city of Sofia when large hail began to fall, leaving us to stare out the plate glass windows and wonder just what was going on and what it could mean. It made sense to me, in that moment, why ancient societies, without the benefit of scientific knowledge and skepticism, sometimes went so crazy over phenomena like these--ones that we now know to be unrelated and caused by natural forces--and assigned them supernatural, cosmic meaning. It was an interesting perspective-generating moment.

Today, on this rainy Wednesday, I've had much to do, and accomplished nearly all of it, so while I go to finish the rest, I'll leave you all to enjoy your lives, hopefully enriched by this, the tale of one of the more bizarre pages out of my own. Until next week, when we'll talk about a few visitors I'll be having this weekend, as well as the continuation of this less-fun-by-the-day process of academic pontification I find myself in the midst of, be happy and fulfilled.