Fast times in the Eastern Kingdom, Part One

It’s always amazing to me how quickly strange, out of the ordinary things become normal after a while. With enough repetition things like speaking German all day, taking the U-Bahn to work, measuring temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, become so second nature that you don’t even stop to consider how completely odd it is that you’re actually out here doing these things. To keep that delightful sense of strangeness alive you have to take a second look at everything and remind yourself how unique it all is. Last Wednesday I had a moment like that: “Wait a minute Andy, right now you’re on a train to Innsbruck to visit a bunch of Austrians. We’re in the middle of Bavaria, and this fall weather is exceptionally gorgeous. This isn’t exactly a standard day in America."

View from the train.

It was the train travel that was the familiar, normal part. I took a total of seventeen train trips when I was traveling here two summers ago, so all of the familiar sights and sensations of train travel—little villages and the occasional castle zipping by at 200 kph; the gentle rumble of the train on the tracks; bilingual travel announcements over the loud speakers every half hour—lulled me into that sense of normality. Despite the familiarity, it was still great to travel by train again. Just being able to toss all your stuff into a backpack, jump on a train and go is so liberating. The scenery is gorgeous no matter where you’re headed, there’s plenty of legroom, and you can get up and walk the whole length of the train if you want to stretch.

Anyway, as I was saying, this past week I went down to Innsbruck, Austria to visit my friends Markus and Andrea, who stayed with me and my roommates last year in Ithaca. It was great to see them again, and Innsbruck was absolutely gorgeous. Somehow the fact that Innsbruck is smack dab in the middle of the Alps managed to escape me, so when these huge, craggy peaks exploded out of nowhere between Munich and Innsbruck I was quite taken aback. Everything is completely, totally flat for hundreds of miles around Hamburg, so it was awesome seeing mountains again.

Essentially the Austrian Arc de Triomphe, with the Alps in the background

The ski jump from the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics.

Andrea had class for the first couple days that I was in town, and Markus had a short trip that he had to go on that weekend, so for the first couple days I was on my own. The downtown section of Innsbruck is very pretty, so I spent a lot of time just bumming around the city, exploring, reading and writing in the shade of one of those classic European statue-on-a-pillar things. Austria is particularly famous for its coffee, so of course I checked out the coffee house scene quite a bit while I was out on my own. I've been searching for THE coffee house in Hamburg for weeks now: something with a good vibe, good coffee, comfortable furniture, etc. That was pretty much every coffee place in Ithaca, but after a long search I've yet to find something that can compare in Hamburg. Every place in Innsbruck was absolutely stupendous, which has made up for weeks of watery coffee and stiff couches up here in HH.

My first espresso and the most delicious chocolate muffin I've ever eaten in my life.

On the second day I actually chatted up a Korean guy who happened to be snapping photos of the previously mentioned statue-on-a-pillar while I was sitting there. He had a bicycle with two big side bags packed with camping gear and a little South Korean flag flying from the back, so I decided to get up and investigate. His English wasn't particularly good, but he could communicate the basics at any rate. He said he was doing a bike tour of Europe. He started in Paris, went all the way up to Brussels, came back down through Germany to Munich, was currently in Innsbruck, and planned to travel south and east to Bulgaria and then back north to the Czech Republic to finish it off. Quite a trip to say the least.

(Part 2 forthcoming! Because nobody likes a long-winded blog post.)