Volume 4: Pete in Europe Part 6. A young balding mans journey through 10 countries and back
Day 13 – Venice to Vienna
As we were leaving the hotel today, and I had little confidence in my ability to open my room once I locked it, I took my luggage down with me to breakfast. The hotel owner was at reception, counting the money he’d won in yesterdays bet, and informed me I couldn’t take my luggage into the dining area. I was still tired from a lack of sleep so I didn’t answer back with “You looking to try to find extra room given the huge serving of cornflakes you’ve served up today?”. He informed me it was fine to leave my luggage at reception, as it is “Fine, I’m here. Only Contiki in hotel”. It’s hard to trust a man who attempts to serve 40 people on half a box of cornflakes, so I reluctantly left my luggage at reception, and went and enjoyed the fastest breakfast of my life (so fast I didn’t have time to count the cornflakes). After I’d polished off the 90 odd corn flakes I rushed back to reception to ensure my luggage had not fallen into someone else’s possession. That lack of trust was soon justified as I sat in reception and watched him leave the room for extended periods at least twice and saw two hotel guests exit the building that weren’t from my tour. Let that be a lesson to the kids; only trust a man as much as the serving of cornflakes he serves you.
Today we were leaving the “Embrace the chaos” tour philosophy of Italy and entering the “Follow the rules” tour philosophy of Austria. The peoples of the Germanic region are renowned for their rigid following of rules and interesting sense of humour (read, none). It was a way of life that had served the Austrian people well as they lived in a beautifully clean country and had achieved a level of wealth in Vienna where 90% of the cars are younger than five years of age. The people were so honest that newspapers were just hung on poles and it was accepted people would leave money when they took a copy. There was just no fear of theft, which was to make my stealing of a number of steins the next day all the more easier. However, I preferred to look at it as “buy a drink, get a free stein”.
After driving through the sensational scenery of the snow capped Dolomite mountain range, coupled with the crystal clear rivers at the foot of the mountains, we had our first stop for the day at an Austrian truck stop. It felt like some sort of special homecoming when I saw all the locals were drinking beer with their meals at 11am. It was a feeling I suppose can only compare with what Muslims feel when they see Mecca for the first time. Although it was my first time in Austria, I for some reason felt like I’d lived there since the beginning of time. Some people found it un-easing that there were men there having a few beers for breakfast that would soon be getting behind the wheel of a vehicle that weighed a few tons, but I say embrace the cultural differences. Although, the differences weren’t that great in my case, as I’d finally found another country where the people loved beer as much as me. I had only been in Austria a few hours, but I had already fallen in love with its people and way of live.
Another great thing about the Austrian truck stops is the tremendous range and quality of food. That coupled with the fact they didn’t have the stupid (sorry cultural difference) of the Italian truck stops where you looked at what you wanted to order, went and paid for that food, then went and collected that food, then looked at the drinks, then paid for the drink you wanted, then went and collected the drink you wanted. Purchasing food and a drink in an Italian truck stop was a six step process. In Austria you took what you wanted to eat and drink, and just went paid for it. To put the icing on the cake of greatness that was the Austrian truck stop, you didn’t have to pay to use their toilets.
My love affair with Austria was strained, and my hopes that the place was Utopia were shattered, when Stu pointed out to Todd B and I that the beer we purchased at dinner that night was ALCOHOL FREE!!! It was like a Christian being told that the whole bible was just a made up piece of fiction and none of it was true (which is probably the case anyway). BEER WITHOUT ALCOHOL! No wonder they lost the war! If a nation can’t succeed in getting alcohol into its beer on a regular basis what hope does it have? What was even more annoying was that everyone from the tour was rubbing it in that I had purchased alcohol free beer by questioning my manhood.
After dinner a handful of us went and saw some classical music, while others went to an Aussie pub called “Crossroads”. Yes, you read that correctly, I went to see classical music when I had a chance to sit and drink beer. I think the alcohol free beer had rattled me, but while I was in the former cultural centre of Europe that had punched out such greats as Strauss, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert I thought I should take some in.
When I got back on the bus it turned out 75% of the people on board were pissed after a few hours at the Aussie pub. One of the things I truly hate is being sober and being surrounded by a bunch of pisspots who find everything unbelievably funny. I’m always tempted to see how funny they would find me attempting to touch the back of their head by forcing my fist through the front of their face.
The bus took us back to the hotel where a bunch of us agreed to let a few people get changed before we headed off to a club in about half an hour. I was already dressed to go out, so I sat down with Glenn at the hotel bar and enjoyed a few beers with him while I waited. It turned out the exceptionally skinny guy serving us was named Muhammad Ali according to his nametag. Naturally, Glenn and I informed him he’d lost a lot of weight since he’d retired from boxing. In fact he was so skinny Glenn suggested he had to be gay. I suggested he was so skinny because he probably was a marathon runner. I think we both decided in the end to settle for the fact he was a gay marathon runner. Muhammad Ali had the same charm as his namesake, as illustrated when he handed Tara her drink and said “Here you go, a big drink for a big lady”. Surprisingly, Tara didn’t jump the counter and make wild passionate love to Muhammad Ali after that comment, but I’m sure she would have told him the room she was staying in.
Aalok, as the unofficial night spot guide, had done some research and led us to a hotel nearby that had a bar and a dance floor. Once you paid entry to get in you received your free drink, which in this case turned out to be straight turpentine. A wonderful thing about nightclubs throughout Europe is that many of them don’t have a cash register, just a big ass bag full of coins. That coupled with the lack of light in nightclubs means you can be waiting ages just to get change back. I think most patrons just give up, or die from old age, and just say “keep the change”. A very clever way for the bar staff to get tips. The woman serving behind the bar that night was so hot and wearing a low cut top, that she could have given me magic beans as change and I wouldn’t have noticed. She was blonde with classic Scandinavian looks, a woman so attractive you had to second guess whether god had rested on the 7th day, and he had instead been out in his back shed putting her together.
We all had plenty to drink that night (and seen proof of Gods existence). The fact that you had to pay to use the toilet I think was were the club was making most of its money. As it turned out, Brad H, had a little bit more to drink than most. He spent much of the night eyeing some Austrian girl, than eyeing a fight with the Austrian boyfriend of that girl. At one stage he went up to Brad P and asked him “Will you back me up if I get into a fight?”. Brad H sensing the tension, pulled out his copy of the road map to peace, which must have stated buying an angry Austrian a drink would bring peace, as that is was what he did. The crisis was averted and apparently they were best of mates after that. At least, that was his version of events. It’s hard to believe a guy who comes back to a hotel at 4am and can’t remember his room number. At about 4:30am he was banging on Super Steve and Leonie’s door asking to come in. Super Steve obliged, and then watched Brad H urinate with the toilet door open. When, after about 10 minutes Brad H was still there just staring at the toilet, Super Steve threw him out of the room. Brad H then spent the night sleeping in the corridor. What was so special was that the hotel we were staying at was the classiest place we’d been all tour. It was a four-star resort hotel with two lagoon style pools, sauna, gym, and indoor badminton court. It’s a shame he didn’t make it to his bed, as they were so comfortable you would spend the last few hours in utter comfort if they were your deathbed. The pillows were almost indescribably soft, the closest I can think of would be oven fresh marshmallow.
As for me, I checked out some of Austria’s late night porn, wasn’t overly impressed and fell asleep around 2am.
Day 14 – Vienna
Today we got to spend time in the home of confused people who want to kill their father and have sex with their mothers. Okay, that may not be true, but Freud spent a large amount of time in Vienna so I figure there must be a lot of nutters.In fact nothing could be further from the truth. This day was a Sunday and Vienna was quiet and relaxed, with the locals no doubt just walking around thinking how great it was to live in such a clean city with no street hawkers hassling them or the tourists. Yes, the only problem for people in Vienna that day was avoiding the purchase of alcohol free beer. The city had plenty of Porches, Mercedes, BMWs and the occasional Lamborghini, all with plenty of car parks in which to put them in when the driver decided he/she had reached their destination. I figured with such a large range of expensive sports cars in the one city that there must have also been an equally large number of men with small penis’ to drive those cars. For the first time in the tour diary I’m actually feeling sorry for taking the piss out of the locals, as Austria was a country I fell in love, and but for the alcohol free beer I’m sure it’s a country I would be happy to call home. The people were nice, the beer was plentiful, and unlike Italy the cars actually stopped when you crossed at a zebra crossing.
As soon as we crossed the border into the beer-drinking frontier that was the region that encompassed Austria and Germany, Todd B and I by instinct starting hanging out together, drawn together by a mutual love of beer. This probably wasn’t the most comfortable situation for his touring mate Carmen, who was not a beer drinker, but we had reached the promise land and we were going to sample as much of the local product as possible.
We spent the first half of the day at the Naturhistorisches Museum, that’s the museum of natural history to you and me. The museum is located in the Maria Theresien Platz, the only female Austrian empress, and judging by the face on the statue of her in the platz she didn’t sleep her way to the top. It’s safe to say the museum of natural history was doing its part to promote the extinction of every animal on the planet and at the same time keeping a large industry of taxidermists in business. Inside the museum was pretty much like Noah’s arc, if he’d said I want two of every animal, stuffed and mounted to act as buoyancy on his boat. There was also an interesting exhibit dedicated to the tapeworm. There was a video of a camera up a cats butt showing tapeworms in full action. I’m assuming it was a cat because there was a photo of a cat next to the TV, but I can’t read German so I don’t know “Cat butt” in German.
At around midday we were a bit peckish, so we headed out of the museum of stuffed animals and went and got something to eat. It was at lunch that Todd B and I were both admiring the steins our beer was served in. We admired them so much we decided they would look even better in our houses, so we did a quick look around for staff, and when the coast was clear we promptly placed the steins in our backpacks. It would be one of three steins that would find its way into my backpack that day.
After lunch, we went back to the museum of now extinct animals, as there was an entire floor we hadn’t seen. With about half an hour’s time left before we had to get back on the bus, Todd and I decided we’d seen enough dead animals and decided to find a pub for “a traveller”. Our beer came in a nice stein, but some little voice in my head I’d only heard a few times before (I think some people refer to it as a “conscious”) told me it would be wrong to apply my “buy a beer, get a free stein” philosophy.
Once on the bus, it took us to the Schönbrunn Palace. Construction for the palace begun in 1695 and was completed in 1713. Apparently Emperor Leopold I choose the most simple version of plans for the palace presented to him by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (simply known as “Bernie” to his mates). If that was the “most simple” version of plans, I’d hate to have seen the more complicated ones for the 1441 room palace. Apparently there is a great garden out the back of the palace the Hasburger’s used to call home. I say apparently as Todd and I found a little snack place at the front gates that sold beer. After thirteen days of excessive amounts of walking, we thought it would be nice to just park ourselves under a tree and watch the people walk by. The woman serving me the beer must have known I was Australian and pointed out the initial beer I choose was alcohol free. I made a note to include her in my will and then proceeded to purchase a beer that included alcohol. These Austrians really should look into putting big warning labels on their beer, similar to the “smoking is a health hazard” label you see on cigarettes. Something along the lines of “WARNING: EXCESSIVE CONSUMPTION OF THIS BEER WILL NOT GET YOU PISSED”.
From the palace, it was off to the happiest place on earth; the Friedrich Fischer Schnapps Museum. The guy giving the tour had refined his spiel so well he had everyone laughing, even before we’d sampled the schnapps. One of the fine products they made contained an 80% alcohol content. Essentially, you can own the one bottle for the duration of you life because you’re bound to pass out as soon as you take the lid off and get a whiff of the fumes. I enjoyed many a free sample of schnapps as part of my learning experience at the museum, as did everyone else, and not surprisingly everyone was quite jolly when they got back on the bus.
Dinner tonight was served deep in a forest, the sort of place that’s so secluded killers take their victims there knowing full well no one will ever find their bodies. At dinner we were entertained by a guy with a piano according singing traditional Austrian songs like “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”, “New York, New York”, and the Canadian national anthem. The guy was as funny as alcohol free beer and I longed for the chance to bludgeon him with his own piano according. Schnapps saved that guy’s life that night as I was still in a happy place from visiting the schnapps museum. What was entertaining that night was listening to Louise pay out on the guy.
It ended up being an early night, with the clock on 12am the last time I looked at it.
Day 15 – Vienna to Munich
Today I was happy to only receive the one wake up call, as opposed to the five I’d received the day before. The morning before the first wake up call came while I was in the shower. That wasn’t such a big hassle as we were in a quality hotel that had phones in the bathroom (lord knows, you always want to make important calls while you’re on the crapper, and people are always interested to hear sound pass out your sphincter at a loud and great pace), so all I had to do was stick a hand out the shower and pick the phone receiver up and down. At least it wouldn’t have been a hassle if it didn’t happen three times while I was in the shower. The fourth time came when I was shaving, with the fifth time coming when I was getting ready to go have breakfast. As the wake up calls in the other hotels were from a machine, I was a little embarrassed when I picked the phone receiver up in rage for the fifth time and said “For f*#k’s sake”. The guy on the other end was a little taken aback and said he was just calling to make sure I was awake. I would have thought the other four times I picked up the receiver would have been a big enough hint to the fact I was awake, but apparently not.
Our first stop today was at the former Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. I was a little concerned that my tour mates might not pay the place its due respect, but everyone spent most of the time reflecting on how fucked in the head the human race can be. It was a cold, cloudy, wet day and you couldn’t help but think that those rain clouds hung over the place every day of the year. We watched a video on the camp, and the fact that an American GI who had helped liberate the camp couldn’t help from breaking down when talking about what he had seen 50 years earlier gives you an idea of the incomprehensible atrocities that had happened in the camp during WWII.
Our next stop was a lot more cheery, and was in the small Austrian town that had the church that appeared in the “Sound of Music”. Having never seen the movie before, I was far more impressed by the supermarket that was selling half litre cans of beer for only 39 cents. Naturally, Todd B and I stopped into the supermarket to purchase this cultural difference. We were never going to get beer that cheap in Australia as there is at least 39 cents in tax on any beer you purchase. While I enjoyed my lunch, Todd went and played basketball with a local. Todd expressed his love of the region to the local, somehow holding himself back from hugging the local, and was surprised to hear the Austrian say it was “too hot” to drink. Given the air temperature was only 20 degrees we were absolutely dumb founded when we heard that comment.
Our first stop in Germany was at a truck stop. I was absolutely bewildered by the toilets at that truck stop, which as it turned out seemed pretty standard for public toilets in Germany. The main hole in the toilet bowl was positioned under your penis, meaning any attempt at “number twos” meant arching your back and aiming a number if inches forward. Thankfully, I was only doing “number ones” and wasn’t forced into the contortionist move known in yoga as the “shitting tiger”.
We reached our hotel just after 5pm and our tour manager gave us just twenty minutes to drop our stuff off in our rooms before meeting downstairs for a quick tour of Munich. Once again my room lacked enough space to swing a cat (but enough room to bruise a cat’s head) which made my ability to shower and get changed into different clothes inside twenty minutes all the more impressive. I think I clocked the shower at 90 seconds, gaining valuable time through not having to shampoo my baldhead or do my hair.
20 minutes later I was fresh and ready to take on Munich, with my tour mates impressed by my quick pit stop. Much like Austria, the Germans are obsessed by following rules, and thankfully hitting a pedestrian with a large vehicle is not a rule, so the drivers are just as polite as Austria. In fact, it appears the only rule the Germanic people are yet to follow is the one where you’re supposed to beat your opponent at war, especially if you start it.
After a quick tour of Munich, including a quick viewing of the Glockenspeil (more about that in tomorrows entry) we were left to fend for ourselves for dinner. My small group opted for some sort of wurst from a small shop in the market region. It was suitably tasty and more importantly lined our stomach for a big night at the beer hall, the Hopfbäuhaus. On the third day of the tour during our official introductions on the front of the bus we had to say what we were most looking forward to on the tour. I said something along the lines of “I’m looking forward to sampling the local ales, culminating in a religious pilgrimage to a German beer hall”. Everyone found that quite funny, but I was deadly serious. For a man like me whose anti-organised religion, the Hopfbäuhaus was my Mecca, my Vatican City, my holy lands. Todd B shared similar thoughts and we hit the Hopfbäuhaus straight after dinner for a long session.
Early on in the night some scrawny, sleazy middle aged German had sat himself down at the two tables we had commandeered for our tour mates. He was showing us what the Germans called the correct way to drink beer from a stein, namely using three fingers. As the guy was pissing me off greatly, and I was about two litres in when he questioned my technique, I in no uncertain terms told him “win a war and I’ll drink like you”. That shut him up promptly and I didn’t hear a thing from him for the rest of the night. In what would turn out to be one of the wildest nights of the tour, I downed four litres that night. What impressed me greatly was that I was almost three litres in before I had “to break the seal” (but once the seal was broken it was like a dam wall being blown up and the flood waters left to terrorise the local village). But the most impressive thing was the fact Todd B drank six litres that night, then went out and drunk a few more beers in a moshpit in a German club with two locals he nicknamed “Bon Jovi” and “Limp Bizkit”. It was that night I made him my adopted brother. It was that night I spent a small fortune paying for the privilege to use the toilets in the beer hall. It was that night I spent large periods of time with my face in Mojo’s breasts. It was that night a bunch of tour mates stripped down to their underwear and ran through a fountain. It was that night I almost created an international incident by shouting “You nazi bastards” when we found out the club we went to was closed. It was that night I spent my first time in a Mercedes taxi. It was that night I somehow got home, thanks to Nic and Bear.
Brad H, in his compulsory accidental way to become a topic of discussion at breakfast, tried walking home from the Hopfbäuhaus on his own. He took a wrong turn somewhere and when he asked a local where he was, the local told him it would be easier to catch the metro back to the hotel. Given the hotel was only about 1.5kms from the Hopfbäuhaus one can only imagine how far he walked that night given a local told him it would easier to catch a train than walk back.
As for me, it was proof that the Hopfbäuhaus was a religious experience because it was an absolute miracle that I got home that night. I have no idea what time I got home, with the last thing I remember being falling asleep on Nic’s shoulder in the taxi.
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