Baubles, bangles, bright shiny beads

As I head into the last third of my time in Berlin (oh, how it's flown, and oh how far behind this blog got), thought I'd post on a rather niche topic, but one that people have asked about in various ways this summer and last. I don't really know that it's "useful" per se, but since this blog is more "a window into the dusty 1920s circus ride that is Pat's brain" than it is "a monetized travel blog," it might be as close as we get. After the jump: how do you manage souvenirs when you're on the road for months at a time?

I didn't get these novelty bottle stoppers, just so you have a sense of the kind of DIFFICULT DECISIONS that my method leads to.

I should start by saying that I'm not a huge souvenir person per se. When I was a kid I used to collect commemorative spoons from different states on family road trips, proof of the effectiveness of truck-stop-store logic: "If we put out a random object that looks collectible, somebody will buy them." But while I've often kept ticket stubs or other ephemera from my travels as an adult, I've never really been the "has a model Eiffel Tower on his desk" guy. Particularly in a post-Marie-Kondo world, tchotchkes and keepsakes haven't been my jam. So, that's the qualifier: this works for me, but that's just me.

That said, the same impulse that leads people to photograph compulsively or buy a t-shirt saying "I ATE THE GRANDE PLATTER OF BBQ CHICKEN WINGS AT THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE" is pretty universal, an in-the-moment urge to grab something tangible as a talisman to bring you back to that day, that moment, that place. And I'm only human, so I do go after keepsakes in a fashion, while reminding myself that travel is the mode in which you're likeliest to hemorrhage money on stuff you don't need.

TO BE FAIR though you do need these ducks. ALL OF THEM though, don't be penny wise and pound foolish here.

For me, there are a few layers to keep myself disciplined about this. First and foremost, I try to limit my souvenirs to the useful - not just the useful, but the things I actually, actively have been looking for in my life back home. I keep a list of things (that doubles as a wish list come the holidays) to keep me honest on this count, so I don't start telling myself that what I really need is a giant ceramic turtle from Barcelona. So that's thing one: usefulness of the item.

If I got rid of most of my coffee mugs in the past couple of years, then a coffee mug or espresso cups might make the cut. Clothing applies here too as I rebuild my wardrobe with an eye toward a professional look. Decor is a fine line - this is where clutter can creep in, via hand-waving "I'll find a place for it" justifications. So in that sense I try to be very specific: I know I'm setting up this room to look this way and this is how this gigantic ceramic turtle will fit into that. (Pinterest boards are helpful to mentally map this stuff, as both of my trips have come during gaps in my housing back home.)

In this sense, the best kind of keepsakes are the ones that become useful on the road as well as home. In the spring, in London, I found myself without an umbrella; when a rainy stretch hit, rather than grab a £10 plastic one at a Tesco, I hoofed it to one of the oldest umbrella-makers in town, where they had a range from bespoke umbrellas carved from a single stick down to collapsible commuter umbrellas, and for just a bit more than I'd have paid at a Target I came home with a remarkably lovely full-length umbrella. You can plan ahead for this a bit; I didn't have a dopp kit/toiletry bag, having shed my old one over the last move, so rather than buy one back home before leaving, I picked up a great canvas-and-leather number at a flea market in Vienna.

I cannot think of a more solid business model than "selling poncey umbrellas in London at any time of year."

As a categorical rule, I try to only pick up things that were made in the place that I'm traveling. Again, while I don't judge anybody for buying what they can afford, I know I'm privileged enough that I have no business personally buying clothes made in third-world, likely slave-labor conditions, and the same is truer for anything I'm getting as a keepsake. It's also a quality choice - a lot of places have local traditional strengths, so in keeping purchases local I'm typically finding a better price on a high-quality item, whether it's ceramics or leather in Tuscany or shirting in Vienna or shoes in England. These things are useful in their own right, but they also tell a story - which is my favorite kind of keepsake, one that has a story but doesn't advertise it.

As for where I pick things up, I aggressively avoid the heart of tourist zones; with the exception of exhibition catalogues or art prints, buying keepsakes near Museuminsel in Berlin or the Tour Eiffel is going to make it a needle-in-a-haystack job to pick up something that meets my criteria, and in many cases that money will go to some mass-chain corporation or another. It becomes key to find the neighborhoods with independent shops, of which there are many in every major city over here, with well-curated goods that are locally made. I used to target thrift stores a lot, but by now I mostly reserve that for the UK's incredible charity shops, as most other European markets are slim pickings for menswear, and hit-or-miss on home goods. Far better on the latter count, though still pretty dodgy for clothes, are thrift markets. In most European cities, on a Saturday or Sunday morning you can find those perfect items that will serve you well (a tin for looseleaf tea, say) for chump change because it's not especially remarkable for where you are.

SOME flea markets are PERHAPS more geared towards tourists than locals, but if you know where to go and when to go there you can still find the odds-and-sods sort of finds that make it a fun ol' venture.

The next concern is portability, obviously. I take these trips with a single Osprey Farpoint backpack, carry-on sized, usually with a smaller day bag (man-purse or backpack) that starts the trip packed in the larger bag. That keeps me mobile, able to hop Ryanair flights for cheap, helps to not feel clumsy when navigating cobblestoned walking cities, and (crucially) acts as a counterweight to impulse purchases. This tends to skew purchases again - lighter clothing items tend to be negligible, and you can pack in and around some items pretty effectively. Again, a light tin for tea becomes kind of ideal in a case like this, as would a giant ceramic turtle that was hollow enough to fit, I don't know, socks into?

Finally, timing within the trip also matters. In the first few months of the trip, I've got to be incredibly rigorous about avoiding most things, because anything I grab has to move with me for the rest of my travels. Heavy stuff is hard to carry, and light stuff risks breaking (or in the case of artist prints, getting torn or bent in transit). Shipping back to the states can run about $40 at a minimum, so unless I'm already sending something back, this is mostly to be avoided. As I head into the last month or so, the math alters a bit: I may have a better sense of the place I'm moving back into, I know I'm not lugging purchases on my back for thousands of miles, I know more precisely how well I've come in under budget. I learned my lesson years ago when buying LPs at the start of a multi-city European trip not to pick up things that will worry me in my luggage; fragile items make a bit more sense when I'm only thinking about how to carry them onto a flight back home.

Ultimately, travel is about experience; there's no photograph or object that I own that feels as deeply emotional as my memories of walking along the banks of the Seine at night, seeing kids playing soccer in a piazza in Rome, or befriending strangers at a bar in Budapest. But as I found this last year, it is nice to think about London whenever you're heading out into the rain in Boston. And it is nice to know that the cup of coffee you hand to your friend took a trip from Florence to get there. So, yeah, I'm a sucker for stories and I'm not as austere as Marie Kondo wants me to be. But I rather like this approach; it works for me, keeps me pretty restrained in my purchasing, and leaves me with functional keepsakes that all matter a lot more than they would if I picked them up because they happened to be for sale near a pretty thing I saw. I like that plenty, you knobs.

CUPS AND BLURRY PALS: THE STORY OF A LIFE ABROAD WITH AN ANNOYING PHOTOGRAPHER

More on Berlin to come in the next week or so as I head into the home stretch here. It's been at times logistically infuriating and frustrating, but the city itself, and what there is to find in it, remains a marvel. All that: soon!

Salzbyeeeeee

Salzburg! For having spent so much time in Austria, I'd not yet set foot in one of its most famous destinations, so when I mapped out my route to Berlin and noted that it would be something like twelve-plus hours from Lake Bled, I decided to make an overnight stop here before finishing the trek the following day. After the jump, the lightest possible skimming across Salzburg's surface.

It's a very nice town, y'see.

First: that trip. I didn't pull out my camera for it, but boy are the Julian alps (I think - maybe technically these were Austrian? whichever alps!) stunning. Hung in low-slung mist and topped at the peaks with churches that nobody, it seems, could ever feasibly climb to... this area reminded me of Norway's atmospheric fjord country like few other places have. It was swell scenery to have rolling by on my way to a town that... well. That I very briefly saw.

Experimenting with long (15 second) tripod-free exposure for this church. Check that half-ghost lady on the left! I aspire to play more with this when I have equipment and also an idea of what on earth I am doing.

The usual caveats: being in town for less than twenty-four hours, there's no way I was going to really get under the surface. I was already starting to run into the homesick/exhaustion that more or less overtook me once I arrived in Berlin, and so even by the standards of my frenetic Balkan sprints, this one was a little light. And, the biggest caveat of all: Salzburg in July is already in the early swing of the silly season, so it was eight inches thick with tourism. That said, it was a ril cute spot that, if anything, suffers from the heavy dose of "MOZART! THE SOUND OF MUSIC! ONLY THESE TWO THINGS!" that tends to pervade.

But look it's not like Salzburg is commercial or anything! This ancient burger-purveyor, for instance, has been here since... well look at least the sign is extremely nice, by order of city ordinance, ok?

But the old town is cute, with great ambience and historic signs dangling over cobblestones, and there's a lot of actual local culture still around if you poke for it. Visiting the Augustiner Bräu, you'll be surrounded by German speakers in an enormous and pleasant shady beer garden, eating fairly overpriced food (pro tip that I did not follow: you can bring your own if you're buying their beer) and soaking in the late hours of the day.

I cannot tell you how to get into that brewery in the sky, as only your noble spirit's struggle can reveal the path to you.

Really, my big takeaway here was that my usual habits - staying more than a night at a time, hitting places like Salzburg or Dubrovnik out of season and migrating to the big cities or less-central destinations come July - is pretty much the way to do it. In July, on this short time, it's hard not to feel a bit conveyor-belty, and ultimately I have less to say about Salzburg than I do about my own inability to settle in and take it in. Which, hey: nobody bats a thousand!

Do try to find your way off the conveyor belt long enough to see this amazing figure, about which I know nothing except that I love him and want to keep a replica of him with me the way some people carry statues of religious figures for luck.

Following my breakneck drive-by visit here, I headed off to Berlin, stopping at Munich for lunch about a third of the way through the trip. It was my second year celebrating Independence Day in Bavaria, with German sausages and beer making it feel apropos, even if this year felt very different for all kinds of obvious reasons. (I've written and deleted a very long post trying to articulate how it feels to be an American abroad this year that I may revisit someday if I can figure out how to talk about it without getting excessively shrill or too sanctimonious, which may very likely never happen.) But it was a nice revisiting of a pleasant spot, marred only by my having shattered my phone's screen on the way back to the train station. It's holding steady for now, but... suffice to say, we're keeping fingers very tightly crossed that all things hold together until I'm stateside again.

More Salzburgian delight from a more innocent, "my phone will live forever" phase of life.

And now, I'm here. (Have been for almost two weeks by the time this post goes live, actually.) It feels great to be anchored again, for what will be my longest stay of the summer, in a friend's gorgeous apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, my favorite neighborhood in the city. I'm settling into a good routine of morning work followed by afternoon exploring, and while I don't know that I'll have a ton that's worth sharing, I'm sure I will blather about some of it before my time wraps up here at the end of July and I make my way to the UK (with a quick "I never learn my lessons" stopover in Belgium). Til then: keep slowing down, taking it in, and being mindful of all you have and all that surrounds you! It's a LOT, gang.

It may not be entirely evident from this photo that the horse is shooting water out of its nose. Insanely, nobody has started building Salzburg bus tours around THAT. Come on. "The Sound of Music" or "The Nose-Spitting Waterhorse," which would you want to spend hours learning about?

Lake Bled: Where where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average

Lake Bled put me in mind of my Minnesotan childhood growing up around summer lakes. It's absolutely a bit more posh than the lake-going I remember from growing up, but there was something perfectly calming and centering about it, and I finished my two days there exhausted but content and happy and urgently emailing all my European friends to tell them to start taking their vacations in Slovenia. After the jump: madness!

YES it is the most touristy possible shot imagineable (the church on an island in the middle of the lake, the castle, the made-for-photo-ops heart) but guess what it's still beautiful you snobs.

I got to Bled at the start of July, before their high season really kicks in; I'm told that by mid-July it's pretty well swarming with tourists from Slovenia and beyond, and August can be a madhouse. This is why a lot of Slovenians will tell you they prefer Lake Bohinj, a little further away; I know that I want to return to Slovenia and check this wild assertion out, but in the meantime, Lake Bled is charming beyond belief. As a bonus, I stayed in Jazz Hostel, which seriously was one of the nicest hostels I've ever encountered. Incredibly clean and pleasant, with no pronounced party atmosphere but a lot of activities (most of which I missed out on oh well life is complex and rich and imperfect) and supremely friendly owners. I don't do a ton of recommending in this space, but I'll recommend them until the cows come home, I will.

Some of these little guys had, honest to god, whipped cream on their beaks from stealing bites from the cream-cakes tourists ordered at the lakeside cafe. I saw a swarm of them descend to dig into a fellow patron's slice when she went to the restroom and her dining companion wasn't paying enough attention to ward them off. It is my theory that these birds all have health problems.

The lake itself takes a couple of hours to stroll around, leaving time to sit and relax or duck up off the path into a few side spots if you'd like. You can, though I did not, hire a boat (file under "things I'd do with a travel companion but was too cheap to take on solo") or pay to be rowed to the island-church that is the lake's icon. You can hike up to the castle atop its bluff for commanding views, as I did my first morning there, or you can climb up an increasingly-insane slope on the other side of the lake, wondering the entire way if you've taken the wrong path as trails give way to a safety rope to pull yourself along a narrow ridge above a steep drop, and eventually a near-vertical staircase made of metal that seems designed less to keep you up and more to remind you of how fragile the human body is, and how prone to falling endlessly. It's outdoorsy fun all the time in Lake Bled.

Not quite yet to the summit; apparently I stopped taking photos around the whole "hang on to this rope so as not to fall" point, though the video gets you a bit more of a vertical vantage.

There's also a lovely national park nearby, featuring the Vintgar Gorge, a slice through the mountains with a thoroughly pleasant boardwalk leading through its cascades and waterfalls. You can snag shuttles there or, if you are especially lunatic, you can do the above hill-climb, descend, and then decide to hike to the gorge (another hour and change) and back (same) on account of "I woke up at 4 AM and if I hike twenty miles I can probably justify having cake for breakfast." PRO TIP: you will feel like death for a little while thereafter, but otherwise this plan TOTALLY WORKS.

The temperature in the gorge also drops something like 15 degrees (F) from the rest of the world, so if you are somebody who struggles a lot in the heat like some of us writing this blog do, it is a haaaaven.

 And it turns out, the breakfast-cake is a thing worth insanely hiking for! Kremna rezina is the main local specialty, a layering of whipped cream and creme patissiere cradled in puff pastry that is insanely heavenly and not overly sweet. As Iva told me in Ljubljana, Slovenes love their dairy, and the why and the how both show in this decadent treat.

I CANNOT OVEREMPHASIZE HOW BADLY I WANT TO LEARN HOW TO MAKE THIS BEAUTY.

In short, it was wonderful. A great place to be active and relax, to have a few treats and also take great joy in the quiet and peace of nature. It fed a big ol' part of my soul after the largely citified adventures of the past few weeks, and left me eager to return. That's one of the joys of these travels, I've found. After a few really rough years, between the "you shouldn't seem to be enjoying your life" pressure of (some corners of) grad school/academe, and the not-super-healthy last chapters of the relationship that ran alongside my time there, it's pretty wonderful to have the space and, more importantly, time to patiently figure out what makes me tick, what I need, what gives me joy, and what balances with the urban energy and productive mindset that tends to take the steering wheel in my day-to-day life. I don't kid myself: it's a stupid luxury to get room to work this out, but after some rough years I'm grateful for every opportunity I get, and glad that I'll be going into the future marginally wiser and, hopefully, more generous for it. Dig.

OK BUT I WOULD LIKE TO GO FOR A ROWBOAT RIDE NEXT TIME OK GANG LET'S DO IT

Ubu: Le Roi s'Amuse!

After the jump, a quick post on the Deutschestheater's production of König Ubu (Ubu the King), which I saw tonight, woo hoo for drammer.

Er, mom and dad, don't translate the text on this program.

I hadn’t been feeling up to theatre this week - dealing with some insomnia, a little exhaustion, some homesickness, you know. Had a ticket to Marat/Sade that I returned over the weekend because I was running on three hours of sleep, and sitting in the front row of a German production of Peter Weiss's brilliant/brutal play seemed... a bit much. But I got myself out to see König Ubu (Ubu Roi, Ubu the King, or what you will) at the Deutschestheater tonight and was reminded anew how much theatre energizes me, and how I love it even (especially?) when it's messy and wild.

The production was almost a parody of German art theatre: pitched in that stereotypical fantastic guttural rasp, all bold design choices and effect-driven performances. It was scatological and inconsistent, manic and grasping: everything a production of Ubu violently needs to be. Three performers took on the world of the play (very 500 Clown in energy and style, if not their equal in constant risk of injury). Over and over, they lunged into self-gratifying bits, the kind of stupid things actors do to crack each other up (or kids do running rampant around the house), playing all sides of a violent conflict, voicing eight or nine characters in a scene, or just going for broke as they howled, slapped, made obscene gestures, vomited, and worse. (No really, you could play German Theatre Bingo with this production.) And the thing is, this was GREAT. It was lively, it was all playing to the audience, and it was exactly the crude, vaguely incoherent blunt instrument that Jarry wrote.

But there was a moment in the back half, as Ubu, having seized the throne, confronts a pair of recalcitrant peasants (played by foam dolls voiced falsetto by the other two actors), where their quiet and totally hapless optimism in cheering for the rightful heir met with an atypically bored, affectless, quiet Ubu. The foam dolls threw wadded-up paper at him, chanted slogans, and tugged on his shoelaces as he methodically soaked them down with a spray bottle and kicked them off the stage. It was funny, it was cute, and it was weirdly harrowing, a fable-like picture of innocent idealism crushed by the banality of evil. For all that the following scene dragged out puppets of Trump, Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Norbert Hofer, and other right-wing nationalists I didn’t recognize, this was the one that felt the most connected to Now, the audience locked into the moment with the actors, a crackling feedback loop that you sometimes get in that moment of communion.

Sooooo yeah. Make-em-ups! Go see a play! Even when they’re a mess they can be great! Goodnight!

Ljubljana: Best and Brightest

Ljubljana is a little marvel of a city. Just 300,000 residents, but a national capital; part of the Austrian Empire back in the day, and more recently part of Yugoslavia, but emerging from those chapters of its history without the deep scars of many of its Balkan neighbors; it’s got what felt, at least to a weeklong visitor, like a perfect balance of small-town friendliness and familiarity and big-city culture. After the jump: Slovenia!

My Instagram followers were plagued by about 20 photos that all looked basically like this. It's pretty, is my point.

I spent my week in Ljubljana holed up in a micro-apartment (the kind of “shower in the toilet” setup you’ll find in a few corners of Europe) at the edge of the largely-pedestrian Old Town core. It’s an idyllic place, with a lazy river running through it and a castle on a bluff overlooking the city. As a tour guide put it, the Old Town is something of the city’s downtown, someplace that locals tend to go out for a good time but somewhere that few Slovenians live full-time. Still, there’s a good mix of tourists and locals and you never have the sense you get in smaller places like Kotor or Mostar of a Disneyland-esque fabrication.

There was a street art festival right after I left, but the City Hall had already put up an exhibition on street art that was open to the public! COME ON GUYS THAT'S SO GREAt.

There were dozens of ways that Ljubljana charmed me. Its bike loan system is actually nicer than Vienna’s in the smaller details – lighter bikes, a quicker interface to unlock them – and while there aren’t as many marked lanes, the cycling culture is just about as pronounced and friendly. There’s a bit of touristy pricing, but it’s really easy to find your way around it; you can spend €8 on breakfast alongside the Ljubljanica river, or you can walk a few storefronts down and pick up a coffee for €1.50 that comes with free bread and housemade jams. There is, as I found in Lake Bled as well, a nice emphasis on Slovenian-made products; I’m sure there are many Made-in-China exceptions, but a lot of shops and produce stands were proudly local, whether selling souvenir trinkets or strawberries.

An artificial "rain" installation in the square leading to the city's famous triple bridge (Tromostovje), one of approximately ten thousand pieces of the city designed by Jože Plečnik

And speaking of food, the food tour/experience company Ljubljananjam is superb. My parents had given me a little cash for my birthday with the caveat that I was to use it for something fun on this trip that I wouldn’t have done otherwise (they are great and know that I can sometimes cheapskate myself out of things), and so I spent an afternoon with Iva, the company’s founder, and a couple from Indiana embarking on a longer bike tour through Slovenia, Italy, and Austria. It was a great experience – we sampled dishes from probably a half-dozen different restaurants, picked up some snacks from the local market, and learned a lot about not just traditional Slovenian cuisine, but the current culture – food and otherwise. (We also learned that there is a 24-hour vending machine to dispense raw milk in bulk quantities, Slovenes love their dairy and they are correct in doing so.) It was social, it was informative, it was tasty – it was, in short, a great afternoon introduction to the city. And, consequently, I desperately want to find a long-term supply of pumpkin seed oil (a local product that is superb).

Our final stop: an awesome little "time cafe," where you pick up a clock on your way in, and are charged on your way out based on how long you stayed. There's an espresso machine, teas, drinks, a piano, books, just a ton of things you can use to make an afternoon pass, and frequent events. Not to be too hyperbolic, but I think this was: VERY GOOD?

And speaking of culture… I arrived just at the outset of the Ljubljana Festival, their big summer fest featuring concerts and performances for weeks on end. Being there the first night meant getting to see a performance of Carmina Burana in Congress Square – for free, perching just outside the gates marking the entrance to the ticketholders’ area. Iva ran into me while I was reading a book waiting for the performance, and said “This is what I love about this city, is there’s this big performance and it’ll be sold out, but you can also see it for free sitting right here.” Same here. The city really has a nice lack of pretension while producing a huge amount of culture for its size, and while it has a national symphony that can rock out a solid Orff concert, if you have breakfast outside you’ll spend most of your morning seeing people run into their friends on the street and chat away like it’s Small Town USA (Slovenia).

There's dragons on the Dragon Bridge, of course, but I prefer these cute li'l babydragons, midway down. In the far blurry distance you can see the hill the castle is on! It's an okay castle, but it's not as good as b a b y d r a g o n s

After the week, I embarked to Lake Bled for a weekend before making my way (slowly) to Berlin. More on that in the coming days. Til then, stay lovely, you delightful li’l capital.

AND HOW, shop window display, and how.

Vienna: parting thoughts

After the jump, some thoughts on Vienna - a city I still feel I haven't gotten under the surface of even after two monthlong summer visits, but a swell ol' spot in her own right.

Oh just a collection of canes and walking sticks at this gorgeous shop in the city centre that sells fabrics and arranges for meetings with bespoke tailors and no you're the one who was daydreaming about a more affluent and bespoke lifestyle it was you all along.

Oh, but first, a video: scored to the song that underscored a lot of last summer here and came back to me as I left it this summer. A song whose meaning has shifted a ton in the year and a half since a friend first sent it to me!

So. As I keep suggesting here, I still haven't gotten as deep into Vienna as I'd like to. I'm sure there are good ways to find the younger/less mainstream bits of town (tours, a greater affinity for going into bars and chatting up strangers, not working on a dissertation most of the time) but I was most glad on this trip to have gone to an art/craft festival at Ottakringer Brewery my first weekend there. It was like a breath of fresh air: street food, tons of local artists and craftspeople showing off the cool work they do. This is the kind of thing I need to remember to go to more often when I'm back home, as it makes me outrageously happy to be around that kind of creativity and energy.

As always, street art hits me right where I live and makes me glad to be alive and around

That said, Vienna to some extent has the same problem Boston has for me, which is that it's associated with a pretty tough chapter in my life, and that I'm almost always in worky, less-fun-than-I-like-to-be mode when I'm there. This is fine! I don't need life to be a party all the time. But it does mean that, for budgetary and scheduling and focus reasons, I just don't have as rich or wide an appreciation of the city as I do other spots, even places I've spent less time, or places where I've also been working full-time.

It is genuinely and seriously surprising to me how many statues the Habsburgs commissioned that convey the aesthetic idea "I don't know how to handle this horse, this horse is crazy why did we even buy this horse"

As a rule, I try to assume that when I don't feel like I "get" a city that it's my fault; any sizable city has millions of people who live there, many of whom enjoy living there, and all of whom find a way to make it work for them. But there's also that thing of knowing yourself and your own truth, and the truth is that Boston and Vienna both are just not my kind of city. They both have glorious histories that can at times make it hard to find the cutting-edge nowness of them (though surely that exists in both), they're both expensive in a way that makes innovation harder (weirdly evident in both cities' food scenes), and they are both totally gorgeous and relaxing and idyllic in their own ways that mean that when people tell me they love Vienna or they love Boston, I genuinely get it. They're not for me, but they are for many, and that's fine for everyone. Hooray for self-knowledge and embracing the things that matter most to you!

Oh, and the last week I was in Vienna I caught a cold whose cough didn't go away for over a week, so you know: external factors may have played a role too.

Up next: a city I found idyllic and wonderful! Ljubljana, in Slovenia, a country which - while allowing for my tendency to be most excited about where I've been most recently - I just told a good friend would 100% be my regular vacation destination if I lived in Europe. Food, culture, friendly small-town style sociability, and much more in the days to come!

Homesickin' it up

A navelgaze as I pass the halfway mark of this summer's grand voyage! After the jump: homesickness, travel-guilt, and thoughts of the future.

THIS DOOR LEADS TO... THE FUTURE??? Or somebody's house outside of Bled, Slovenia, it is hard to say for sure.

There's a weird thing about long-term travel, which is that you tend to feel a little guilty when you have a bad day or feel gloomy or mopey. For all that this trip involves a lot of work, I'm keenly aware of the privilege that I enjoy in traveling like this, in having this last glimmer of geographic freedom before I lock back into whatever the next gig is, and I'm aware that for friends day-jobbing back in the states, there's a limit to how much I can grouse before the eyerolling commences. (Though I hasten to add that I'm lucky to be surrounded by empathetic and wonderful friends whose compassion allows me more room to process my feelings than is perhaps reasonable!)

In any event, it remains odd - as I told friends after last summer's trip, it felt weird to have moments of thinking "I'm being sad in Rome!" but obviously humans gonna human, and it's struck me lately that the quickest way to ruin any kind of travel, any kind of vacation or working trip, is to impose the expectation of fun and perfection. There's a reason I talked about my recent weekend in Vienna as being "ideal" and not "perfect." Perfection is as illusory on the road as it is at home, and while there may be plenty of perfect moments, every trip of any length is going to have rough patches and downturns.

For me, right now, that's about homesickness.

THIS lady knows where her home is cos she's SITTING on it! (It's at the market in Ljubljana, now you know how to find this lady's home, don't be a creeper about it)

Last summer I accidentally ended up on a schedule in which every two or three weeks I'd run into a friend, which I described to friends back home as a kind of emotional strength training: "go feel your feelings and process by yourself, then see people you love and let them help you bolster your sense of self and remind you that you're loved." It was a great tempo, allowing me lots of space but keeping that sense of connection alive. This summer, while I've had a couple of friends join for stretches (Cinque Terre/Milan and a run of the Balkans), I'm now in the middle of a months-long stretch without pals, and it's coinciding with the midpoint of the trip.

I miss my friends and routines - knowing that I'm going back to Chicago is tremendously hope-granting and exciting, but also means I've got some tantalizing memories that I long for, of people and places and habits that always serve me well there. Add in the job search - some strong leads but nothing definitive yet - and there's a growing sense of "when are we gonna get to the fireworks factory" to it all.

A reminder from the streets of Ljubljana

Anyhow, it's all odd. It's odd to see friends post on Instagram from a park in Lincoln Square and immediately think "aw, I'm jealous!" while on a stopover in Salzburg. It's odd to finish a twenty-mile hike in Lake Bled and find yourself looking at Craigslist apartments in Chicago. It's odd finding that balance between a present-tense, here-and-now awareness/openness and looking to the future.

But as I say, and remind myself: it's okay to feel the grit along the way. I am blessed in my friends, blessed in this journey, and earnestly, unhashtaggedly, blessed to be aware of what specifically I miss and am longing for in this moment of "what comes next." That's more than enough, and enough to keep me trekking on.

Useful Posts: Vienna

Another in the (very) occasional series on here that attempts to provide useful information for fellow explorers bound for cities I've spent time in! This time, after the jump: Vienna!


Vienna's an odd spot for me; the fact that most of my research archives are here has meant that my time here (almost two months by the end of this second trip) has been spent in more daily-work patterns than in other places, even spots like Florence where I was getting work done in fun spots across town. And of course last year I was also using Vienna as a base to side-trip on weekends to Budapest/Prague, and generally struggling with depression, so I feel like I'm still learning. In some areas (museums and art, say) I'm basically pig-ignorant. That said, here are some basic thoughts to get you a leg up on your own travels!

Food

You may find yourself in a courtyard eating simple but flavorful and healthy dishes with wine and it may make you very happy, be warned.

Vienna's no bargain, especially compared to its neighbors. But you can make it work, and to fairly tasty effect! The first thing to know is that if you want to save some cash, you want to eat Austrian food or you want to cook for yourself; the instant you get a craving for Mexican, Italian, etc., you're mostly gonna pay a premium. (Though it bears pointing out that if you have been in Europe for two months and are going crazy craving Mexican food, Los Mexikas will absolutely do the trick as they are legit great.)

That said, your secret weapon here is (again) lunch specials! Check out places like Silberwirt or Hass Beisl for delicious daily menus, the schedule of which are usually posted on the restaurant's website at the start of the week. Strategize accordingly. Generally speaking, you'll be able to get a salad (sometimes a soup) and a generous entree with a glass of wine or a beer for €10, including tip. Check guidebooks or Spotted By Locals for good value spots. Consider visiting Trzesniewski in the city center for tasty open faced sandwiches and beers - they're a great and relatively cheap option if you aren't feeling up to wurst.

For dinner, prices jump, but it's easy to keep eating out on the cheap if you opt for wurstelstand sausages (käsekrainer is the local specialty and it's lethal) or grab a dönner kebab (thin shaved meat in a pita with sauce and veggies, an incredibly satisfying fast food option).

Otherwise, the grocery store will be your friend, especially if you want to leave Austria behind; bear in mind that most neighborhood groceries will skew pretty German/Austrian in their offerings, so you may want to head to the Naschmarkt or other street food emporia if you're craving Asian or South American flavors. Also - use your local bakery. Even the chains are good here, and in any case the bread you get at even an Anker will be way better than grocery store bread and often as cheap or cheaper. Not all goods are best-valued at their specialty shops, but bread for sure is.

It's strange to me that a major city like Vienna hasn't really globalized its flavors in a prominent/across-the-board way (and acknowledge that it's probably there unbeknownst to me) but for a shorter trip, odds are you want your schnitzels, goulashes and dumplings anyway!

Drink

Oh! While I don't talk about this below, definitely check out anybody making their own schnapps or fruit-based liqueurs, especially at neighborhood or cultural festivals, as they tend to be Tasty and Fun.

I wrote last year and earlier this week about heurigen, the vineyard buffets/wine gardens. They're great, and most guidebooks will suggest a few; I've tried Zawodsky, Weinhof Zimmerman, and Schübel-Auer; the first two are very much "among the vines" in ambience, with Zawodsky more off-the-beaten-path in location and tourist trade. Schübel-Auer is friendly, tasty, and convenient, and Zimmerman sort of splits the difference, with big ambience and a bit more familiarity with English-language visitors but a slightly more complex bus trip to get there. In any event, if the weather is nice, get out to one of these.

Other than that: in general, Viennese tend to drink with their meals; you'll usually be able to find very serviceable table wines (sometimes finer wines!) for about €2. Craft beer is starting to make its effect known, though a lot of beisls and traditional restaurants will tend to have more established, bigger brews on hand; they're all cheap by American standards, though again, not Czech/Hungarian/Slovenian cheap.

Entertainment

AVOID THE SIREN SONG OF THE DIRTBAG MOZARTS

This is where Vienna becomes a major value if you're looking for one. To be clear: you can definitely pay through the nose for everything; this ain't Berlin, where subsidies make it pretty easy to buy tickets in advance at reasonable prices. But standing room is magic. As I mentioned earlier this week, you can see a lot for very little money if you do your homework and accept a little hassle..

The quick rundown: Staatsoper standing room goes on sale about 90 minutes before curtain; there's a line to the west side of the theater. Bring cash. €4 gets you a parterre standing room ticket, €3 for a balcony spot. When the doors open, make a beeline for your designated area and tie a scarf around the railing at the spot you want; then go get your drink, check bags, whatever.

The Philharmonic is complicated depending on where they're playing, but in most cases you can visit the orchestra's box office on Monday for that weekend's concerts. €5 gets you a standing room ticket; get on line at the concert hall about an hour before the performance (earlier to guarantee a good spot) and head in when they open doors. If you manage to snag a spot by the railing, again, scarf marks your spot.

All the theaters in town have some variation; Burgtheater is about €3.50, Josefstadt about the same. If you're willing to be spontaneous and kill a little time reading or chatting strangers up in lines, this is a great way to fill your evenings.

Transit

I had a great photo of a tram flying a pride flag, as they all were this month, but I cannot find it anywhere so here's this steam train I saw on the ride up from Zagreb, hooray for steam trains anyways.

If mobility isn't an issue, my strong recommendation, whether you're staying in or near the Innerstadt (the city center, what was once the walled city) is that you take advantage of the city's loaner bike program. It's an insanely good value: you register for €1, and for basically the rest of your life (as long as your registered credit card is valid) you can ride a bike for free for the first hour, and not much more for subsequent hours. This is more than enough to get you just about anywhere in Vienna, even spots further out. Use one of the bike station tracking apps to make sure you'll have empty slots at your destination, or to find a bike to pick up.

While the city's public transit is quite good (certainly compared to most American cities) biking is the way to go unless the weather is especially rough. The routes are well-signed, and even if you stray from the cycling paths (as I do at least once per trip, catastrophically) drivers are really good about sharing the road even with dumdum tourists.

Neighborhoods

If you stay outside the city center you are more likely to find adorable and/or fascinating signs, street art, and neighborhood features! I recommend this strategy.

The Innerstadt is incredibly walkable and close by all the major sights, but it'll be pricey, and you'll very much be in the touristic core. Probably ideal for a short/fast trip, or if you know that what you want to see will all be right there. But know that, so far as I could tell in my two summers here, it's hard to find a part of the city that feels unsafe, so be brave with your AirBnBs - I'd pay far more attention to the quality of your lodging and the proximity to either bike stations or tram lines than to the immediate neighborhood, personally. One of the reasons I keep thinking of Vienna as a bit stolid is that I still haven't found its "ah, the counterculture or its commercialized offspring!" neighborhoods (its Wicker and Logan Parks or Pilsens, if you will). But in general, on a longer stay where you're hoping to do more than check off the (admittedly huge) cultural sights in the center, feel free to venture beyond!

Connections

Hauptbahnhof: gateway to further adventures

Vienna is grand. But especially given its imperial history, I think it's great to link it with other places that the Habsburgs ruled. You get a fascinating sense of ripple and echo, as the empire tried out ideas in remote spots before bringing them to the capital, exported its icons and values, and appropriated culture indigenous to other spots. The easiest and best connection to make, I think, is Budapest, the energetic and inventive yang to Vienna's classical yin. At only two hours and change via train, it's an easy weekend away from a Viennese base. Prague, about four hours away, is also good if you're looking for a few bonus days nearby, though it's not as cheap nor (I felt) as thoroughly into its own culture as Budapest. Further away than these spots, you're probably looking at assembling a long-range string of spots; I'd definitely look at Ljubljana and Zagreb as places the Austrian empire once touched and that are fantastic on their own, and you can take a sleeper train to Krakow, and it will be great. (Krakow is also probably the city that most lives up to Budapest's value in how far your dollar will stretch.)

So: that's Vienna, as I see 'er! Hope it's of use to somebody; and if you happen to be reading this space for ideas or recommendations, feel free as ever to get in touch with me and I'm happy to go further down the rabbit hole!

An ideal weekend: Vienna

I'll have a video up in this space in the next few days with some thoughts on Vienna - not much new, but I finally did start to get a sense of the cultural life that isn't built around "Alt Wien" (Old Vienna), the nostalgic/imperial and somewhat stuffy/distant stuff of the city center.

But first, I wanted to mark a delightful weekend that was built very closely around that kind of culture - and one that, thanks to generations of expectations of affordable art and state subsidies, worked out to be eminently affordable on a grad school budget. After the jump: a jam packed weekend o' Vienna!

I mean yeah it's a bit stuffy and pricey but I am pointedly not saying that Alt Wien isn't stunning. It's, uh, pretty stunning!

Saturday morning I woke up quite early, as I've been clocking in to sunrise lately. I like this a lot, though it's usually robbing me of sleep since sunrise here comes around 5 AM. (Midsummer and very far east in the one time zone all of continental Europe shares...) Figuring that once I was up I was up, I decided to head to the Flohmarket (flea market) at the Naschmarkt, the city's major market street.

I could probably learn to play these instruments and also transport them around Europe for another two months, right? RIGHT?

I didn't pick anything up - having one backpack for a summer-long trip is a great incentive against excessive souveniring, and in any case I tend to only pick up things that I actually need back home these days - an odd article of clothing, a few dishes here and there. But I love flea markets if only to see what people scrape together for them and/or what they figure will sell. It's a place where tourist kitsch (so many porcelain statues of Alpine cherubs) meets Austrian practicality (tons of dishes and cheap clothes). Getting there early meant being there with the deal-shark locals, so it was fun to watch haggling and the greetings between vendors who knew each other as they set up.

I moved on to the food section of the Naschmarkt; this early, the prepared food stalls were still setting up, and the dried fruits/nuts/spice shops were doing the same. (Pro tip: show up this early and you'll see who's literally dusting off their wares, maybe a sign that they don't turn over as much as you'd want them to.) I picked up a family farm's cherries, another farm's lettuce and radishes, and a quick breakfast of homemade biscotti, then headed home and dropped off my spoils. Up next: a street market I'd seen advertised a few days earlier in a neighborhood that I dug, and one that crucially (and possibly insanely) was offering street haircuts.

WHO WOULD NOT TAKE UP THIS OFFER?

My thinking was, it's always a bit of a crap shoot getting a haircut while in a strange city, and this way I'd at least have a great story if it went south. Joke's on me, nerds, as this turned out to be one of the better haircuts of my life, sidestepping the usual traps of my cowlicky, overly-fine, poofy hair. Street haircuts: I very confusingly recommend them!

After this, I hustled across town to the Musikverein, where the Vienna Philharmonic was performing one of their final programs of the season (Mahler 8, a Strauss piece and the Firebird Suite). I'd picked up a standing room ticket on Monday for €5, and lined up outside the concert hall with an increasingly large crowd of fellow standees. The doors opened an hour before the performance, and we filed in to a second line at the base of stairs up to the concert hall; at half-hour they let us in to the doors of the space, and at ten minutes til, the doors themselves opened. There was a mad rush for the railing - the standing gallery is pretty unforgiving if you're not at the railing or at the very back - and I managed to land near the middle for a beautiful performance. The symphony's sound is clean, very well-blended, not too aggressive but rich and full. For less than $6, a steal.

This concert hall is nice enough I guess

I doubled back home to wolf down a late lunch and lie down, tuckered out from the early morning start. After a breather and a few "keeping in touch with the people I love" odds and ends, I bounced back out the door and headed to the Museumsquartier, a huge cultural complex near the Innerstadt, where legendary theatre director Peter Brook's newest production, Battlefield, was playing at the Festwochen, a monthlong festival of theatre, performance, and installation art. The show was beautiful, though perhaps better-calibrated for a smaller space and a more attentive audience. (Though in fairness to the smoking-happy Viennese, there's a decent chance that the choral coughing throughout this very short play was more about emphysema than lack of investment.) I'm glad to have seen one of Brook's pieces in person, and it had a couple of moments that were truly transporting, pulling off that magic trick of suspending time and uniting its audience, even if on the whole I wish I had seen it under different conditions.

Also great to be at a cultural event with buzz - it didn't pull off the "am I in Chicago?" energetic trick that the Volksbühne in Berlin did, but it was a great energy.

After passing out at home post-show, I rose Sunday morning and headed to church. In this case, the Augustiner Kirche, one of the imperial churches in the city center. Foregoing the Vienna Children's Choir mayhem at... I forget the other church's name, I went here instead as they build their weekly mass out of the performance of a classical mass, in this case a Schubert composition. The space was gorgeous and the choir and orchestra quite stunning. It's a full mass, so if (like me) you're a mostly-stupid protestant, you'll have a lot of "oh we're kneeling, oh you all know what to sing here, oh I'm the dummy" moments, but if your life isn't a constant series of moments in which you realize you don't know what's going on, how is that possible who are you and do you ever leave the house

It's possible that the Habsburgs had some money to throw around, though it's hard to say for sure.

After church I headed for the hills - specifically to a heuriger, one of the wine gardens that fill the hills around the city. I wrote about this last summer, but these are a real treat, and I'm told even more so in the fall as the new harvest comes in. You get cheap wine from the vineyard, you pick out food from a buffet (a menu at the higher-end places that don't seem nearly as fun) and settle in at picnic benches among the grapes, though some heuriger are less "AH NATURE" than others. This was a pretty swell lunch, and a nice break from the city.

I don't know what ended in 1979, but it started less than 40 years after Columbus "discovered" America, so uhhh good job whatever you were! Now you're a vineyard, which seems plenty nice! You should be proud of yourself.

Hauling back into the city, I headed to the Staatsoper, the gorgeous opera house, where they were performing Pelléas et Mélisande. Having done the standing-room thing (a great deal at €3-4) in the past, and having spent so much of the previous day on my feet, though, I felt like taking a seat, and so decided to take in the opera al fresco, on the piazza to the side of the opera house, where select performances are streamed for free. Now: sonically, this is not ideal, and atmospherically you're balancing the fun of the experience against the distractions of an active city center, but as a one-time shot at a new way to see opera, I thoroughly recommend it. (If you're visiting Vienna for the first time, though, do standing room, I promise it's worth it.)

To get a seat for the outdoor livestream, you gotta show up early, and hang out in a chair reading a book and relaxing. Ugh! Who could possibly enjoy something like that.

So! That's a weekend, and a monstrously full one at that. What's more, of all those performances - four total - the total tally came to €13, with the most expensive ticket I bought all week being a €10 ticket to Wonder Woman at the Haydn Kino, which also included a free beer to celebrate opening night.

Vienna: sometimes you are a little grand for your britches but holy moly you come by it honestly.

Up next: video, some parting thoughts, and (later) (probably) a useful post for people who are looking to make their own visit!