how to hitchhike from Vienna to Laura's place.

London is becoming dreamy with the sunny weather. I almost have the desire to do nothing but sleep. 

Day 6.

OK I was cheating a bit; the last leg of the journey I took a train, although in retrospect I just picked the 
wrong road to hitchhike on.


That morning I embarked upon the quest of crossing Austria in a few hours. It was at the hitching hot spot near Hütteldorf where I met Vlad the Romanian. First time hitching two together, I was pondering rate of success while Vlad went on pounding the unwillingness of Austrian drivers to stop.

"They have to be exact, you see. If you put on a sign to go to a certain place, they won't stop even if they will pass by that place if they're going somewhere else."

He was going to Innsbruck, and then down to Bologna, taking a longer route because "the scenery is nicer." Hitching with class. His almost sole motivation for hitching was because a train ticket was too expensive.

Anyhow one and half hours later, after rejecting a car going to St Polten, we hopped on one that dropped us in a gas station resting area near Linz, took no time to find another car Salzburg and Innsbruck bound. Two cars, two couples, and lovely conversations.

Salzburg was Salzburg, no time for "The real Von Trapp exhibition." The word Glockenspiel was in fact a bell tower structure. And discovered the Nordsee chain, where that fish sandwich I had earlier in Estonia was called Bismarck. Castle was stunning, so was the cathedral. Weather was grim and swarms of tourists killed any appetite of appreciating the colorful city. Plus time was running as I had to find a way across the border.

Good news: lingering around the bus stop to study maps of where I was, I managed to discover Bus 24 from Salzburg went straight across the border to Freilassing, which was few towns away from the town Laura lived in.

Map said there was Route 20 that brought you up along the Austrian border. I was waiting on a road heading north, but no one seemed to be going that far. At first I thought it was the holiday problem, but a nice driver told me later most preferred the highway. Highway I didn't know of?

Improvisation moment. A moment of lack of faith. Wanting not to reach the destination too late, and not failing the promises made on a phone call for a friend's parents on the other end, I opted for DB instead, this being the one and only time in the entire trip. 13 Euros for a train route that had a rather awkward turn! When I later realized how a German state road really looked like, I could only laugh at these moments of failure, only to reassure myself by never repeating the same mistake ever again, keep calm and always hitch on, no matter how uncertain the road seemed.

So in a nutshell: to reach Laura's place, hitch from Vienna to Salzburg, take bus 24 to cross the border, walk to entrance for highway 20, defy road regulations and hitch to S town. 




Stay in Vienna was calming. Nightfall brought me to Laurenszgasse on the tram, suddenly reminiscent of German names. It was that rhythmic but almost monotonous language, spoken with such cool rapidity, demonstrating an efficacy linguistically almost exclusively German. I remember a few months earlier in Berlin, I just couldn't stop myself from repeating the word Oranienstraße, imagining that funny letter representing double s that I had not known previously, the word always sounding so rough but in order. Now in Vienna, the ending double s of gasse sounded so much more abrupt than the Berliner one; the lady repeating location names on the tram seemed to be hurrying off to another more important affair, perhaps sick of hearing her own voice, ingrained in the minds of so many Viennese people.

Finding Sophia's place was not difficult, but still took a few questions worth of time to late night frequenters of Viennese cafes.

A warm welcome with a hug, and I made my way into a very European apartment. Can't quite describe what it is, but it is that very spacious feeling rid of any modern influence. Living room had a big Serge Gainsbourg Je t'aime, moi non plus poster, and a bunch of other postcards. Artsy and old school, or at least my conception of old school.

Sophia was just, very, European, or at least very fitting to my romantic conception of what Europe is, perhaps not a single bit related to the tangible reality. But in an intersubjective world, what matters what reality is? She dressed in folded jeans with Converse-like shoes, a white linen shirt, not quite typical that I cannot place due to my limited vocabulary of shirts, which she buttoned up till the top. Put very simply, she was hipster, as Nagy would put it later. But the so very word hipster has perhaps lost its power of designation because the group of people the word is meant to represent is so varied and vague. Hipster, I guess, is different but cool, as opposed to geeky. Sophia was an actress.

The next Viennese morning was bike ride around the ring road after a good morning discussion of various topics over coffee. There was almost no better way to explore Vienna, riding with a Viennese actress couchsurfer, being explained significance of different sites. Tried mastering my skills of photography on the equivalent of Boris bikes in Vienna, which came in yellow frames. The Danube that went through Vienna was a canal; to divert floods perhaps? Passed through Heldenplatz where there was an Anschluss announced at a certain space and time.

Names escape memory now, but at least managed to spend two hours at Leopold Museum, reading depressing stories of the Secessionists, had a coffee at Cafe Sperl where Sigmund Freud once used to frequent.

One indication of leaving Eastern Europe and entering the German-speaking world was the numerous stares you would draw upon j-walking across a street. I learned later that apparently if the police catch you j-walking four to five times they would send you to the psychiatric hospital, as they would not understand why one can fail to learn not to j-walk, even by conditioning in case one does not understand the sheer existence of social conventions. If this were true, it informs a certain conception of social norms where obeying what was agreed upon in a social contract is assumed to be natural behavior of any "normal" human being. Stereotypes are there after all not without reason.