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Reporting From Vienna

I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything it people wanted it enough, and had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs. You know they, can't stay the course like a professional. Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: American, British, Russian and the French. But the center of the city, that's international, policed by an international patrol, one member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had. All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language, except of course a smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole. Did their best, you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit. Oh, I was going to tell you, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American came all the way here to visit a friend of his - the name was Lime. Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him some sort, I don't know, some sort of a job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap…
The Third Man - 1949

How was the flight? Unbelievable and by "Unbelievable", I mean bad. Seat 40k – that’s the last seat in the last row in an Airbus 320. What’s worse? There are no vents for the passenger on the A320. The fine folks at Airbus Industries consider that cooling stream of air you get to direct to yourself a luxury. Every seat on the plane is full. So needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep on the flight. I don’t think there’s much left that they could do to make the experience of air travel like that of riding in a Greyhound bus in 1952, the only thing missing on this flight was the acrid smell of urine from the passenger sitting next to me, with that exception it was like riding in the back of the bus to Miami for 15 hours with Ratzo Rizzo and Joe Buck.

Vienna seems to be the entrance to the European 3rd world - the Slovakian and Serbo-Croatian areas, so this is who you see on the flight. Babushka, Babushka, Babushka, Muscle boy, Babushka, elderly man, Babushka, Babushka, child. Repeat it 40 times and that’s what every row on the plane into Vienna looks like. There was a family seated next to me who were going to attend a funeral for their departed father, they were Romanians who moved to the United States back in 1989. After getting to Vienna, they had a 5-hour wait while one of their relatives drove up from Romania to drive them back. In total, they were looking at another 18 hours to go after they got to Vienna. I wish them well.

Passport control is a laugh; you get more scrutiny coming in and out of “Best Buy” than you do coming into Austria. I think I watched 500 people clear customs in less than 5 minutes; the stamp in the hand of customs immigration officer was just a blur. Osama himself could come through with a nuke under one arm and a couple of harem girls on each shoulder and I doubt they would even look up from their desks.

I’m in the industrial part of town and its not fair to judge the whole town from what I’ve seen so far because what I’ve seen so far is like Detroit only without the heartwarming cackle of gunfire out in the distance. Vienna is an industrial city with many refineries surrounding it and at the center are all of the palaces and sites that tourists see. Since I’m traveling on business, I’m nowhere near the pretty palaces and churches that everyone sees in all the tourist guides. Once again, the world of Road Warrior travel is different from people who travel for fun. It’s a gritty working class town that seems fascinated with suspension bridges and I'm in the part of the city that pays the bills. Apparently, not every European city makes its living selling t-shirts and taffy to tourists, to which I can only say "thank god!"

Like all cities in the modern world except Singapore, Vienna has graffitti. The graffiti in Vienna is less about “tagging” and more about whining about capitalism and the inequities of life. Graffiti in Europe seems to be about the need to say something pithy, where in the US it’s more about saying “mine”. Perhaps I should get a can of spray paint and write "get a blog" on one of the city walls? I’m sure there’s an anthropology thesis in this observation if you look hard enough. I’ll take pictures of some of the better comments left on the walls by Austrian graffiti artists and post them as they come along.

How am I holding up? Not bad really. I took a walk today down to the Donau and the Danube rivers. I had a small nap and a snack here and there and so far, no signs of jet lag at all, which is a complete blessing for which I am ever so thankful.

Oh, and people smoke here. They smoke everywhere, all the time and as much as they can even while riding a bike. It isnt until you return to the "world of the smoker" that you realize just how different the world was before we started making smoking into the new "social pariah" it has now become.

The smell of cigarettes is in everything everywhere and everything you touch. Mix it with the smell of diesel from car exhaust, and make everything concrete and that’s the general ambiance of the place. All post war industrial glass with the occasional socialist paradise apartment block to break up the dull monotony with more soul killing monotony.

And whats the funniest thing I've seen so far? Someone riding a bike while talking on a cell phone and smoking, which takes my dislike of cell phones to a whole new level and watching Spongebob Squarepants in German(Plankton!, Du Doch Nicht!).

More to follow...

Posted @ September 25, 2005 11:29 AM | Current Affairs