Here are a bunch of impressions, many of them influenced by my experiences in Eastern Europe.
There is an abundance of electronics shops in Vienna with red, white, and green-striped signs saying 'We speak Hungarian' in Hungarian. I remember seeing them the last time I was here, but I didn't realize they were a permanent fixture. Last time I was here, it was a long weekend in Hungary, and people had just been paid their annual bonuses. The town was flooded with Hungarians, and every Hungarian car I saw heading back to the border seemed to have a refrigerator or an air conditioner strapped to the top.
There's not a single good book on Prague to be found here in Vienna. One shopkeeper tells me they've sold out.
Another perspective on the Prague celebrations, from the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, January 2, 1990 (translated by Yours Truly):
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Prague Celebrates New Freedom
A Canon of Joy for the New Year
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PRAGUE. The New Years' Eve galas at all the better Prague hotels have been booked for weeks. Fancy dining is firmly in the hands of the tourists. 700 crowns - about half a month's salary in Czechoslovakia - gets the tourist a New Years' Eve dinner at the best table in the house at the stylish Forum Hotel.
It's been that way for years, but never before has the demand been so great as this year. Revolution tourism is in, but reality in Prague at the end of 1989 isn't here at all. The real action is elsewhere: on Wenceslas Square, the Old Town Square, and the Charles Bridge.
On New Years' Eve 1989/90, half of Prague is on its feet. There, where just in November demonstrations were bloodily beaten down by policemen, thousands celebrated their newly won freedom.
At least a hundred thousand people were on Wenceslas Square. That night they celebrated 'their victory.' Only two days ago, their hero, Vaclav Havel, became president of Czechoslovakia. It's a New Years' Eve for the new man in the Castle. 'Long live Havel,' keeps sounding through the giant square, and 'Long live the President!'
The change from the old to the new year, at the stroke of midnight, was celebrated by Praguers on the Old Town Square, beneath the famous astronomical clock of the Town Hall. Trombones traditionally sound in the new year, but this year the trombones could scarcely be heard. Fifty thousand people streamed into the square, and the chorus of their voices drowned out the fanfare.
'Svobodu' ('Freedom') is the word of the night, and the Praguers celebrated their victory singing, laughing, and kissing. On every corner, the national anthem was being sung, but in contrast to the giant demonstrations of the last weeks, this time the crowd was not united in a single chorus. Hymns, 'Svobodu' and 'Havel' choruses blended together with fireworks, clinking glasses, and popping champagne corks into a canon of joy over the victory.
Twelve hours later, the debris from the giant party had already vanished. Just like after the protest demonstrations, no mountain of litter remained behind in the Prague city center after the victory celebration.
Strange day. Here I am in Vienna, coming up for air after a week in Eastern Europe. So what do I do? I go to see 'Back to the Future, II.' In English! Tomorrow I submerge myself back into the East. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, and will probably delay it as long as possible, waiting until after lunch to leave. Mark took the train back to Zurich this morning (had no more vacation left) and I miss having no one to talk to. The man at the hotel desk started a conversation, but I didn't keep it up. 'Are you from America or England?' I said, 'America,' and that was that.
Mark and I got along pretty well, but in a lot of ways, we were an odd couple. I'm amazed by his refusal to learn German, and his inability, which I'm sure was deliberate, to properly pronounce words, both in German and in English. It drove me up the wall sometimes, and it was all I could do not to correct him, or at least to correct him without being rude about it.
I'm feeling traveled out. If I hadn't paid for Budapest already, I might not go. Will I continue to Yugoslavia, since I have no reservations? Probably; things are happening there, too, and I don't know when I'll get another chance to see it.
Vienna is a city with a lot of contrasts. The main streets are as dynamic as anything in the West, but the side streets can be as quiet and dingy as the East. Quiet anyway. Vienna has the air of being more important than it deserves to be as the capital of Austria. It's hard to remember that we're farther east than Prague. I wonder if Vienna would have looked like Prague if it had found itself behind the Iron Curtain after the war. (Actually, it was behind the Iron Curtain in a sense; Vienna was partitioned like Berlin.) Looking at Vienna, it's easy to imagine the whole city looking like some of its older streets. It's actually encouraging for Prague; Vienna was in worse shape than Prague after the war, and in a few years it was rebuilt. (See the movies 'The Third Man' and 'Welcome in Vienna' for an idea of the shape Vienna was in after the war. Prague, on the other hand, was almost entirely spared during the war; the only damage came just at the end from American bombs that destroyed two buildings.)
Austrian movie theaters have reserved seats - a nice touch. The cheapest seats are up front; the seats get more expensive towards the back. This is reasonable, to a point. There are lots of ads before the movie, mostly interesting because I've never seen them before. (The ads in Zurich theaters get tired very quickly, but new ads are always entertaining.) Ads for movies seem to show no movie clips - just stills at most. There are lots of newspaper ads. It sounds like Vienna has lots of newspapers, including ones I haven't seen at the newsstands. One claims to be the oldest daily paper in the world, having been established in 1703. I really like that aspect of Vienna, along with the great cafes, the lively wine cellars, and the great desserts. In general, I think I could live in Vienna, although my life would be more sedate than if I were to live in Berlin, for example.
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January 3, 1990 - Vienna/Budapest
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I didn't drink the tap water at the hotel in Prague. I suppose the fact that all the water glasses in the hotel room had tooth brushes on them had something to do with it. Likewise the fact that Jan told us the tap water would kill babies, and a number of protest signs against polluted drinking water had pretty graphic drawings. Since we almost exclusively drank beer and coffee while in Prague, we must have been pretty dehydrated.
At the head of the Kaerntnerstrasse (the main shopping street) in Vienna, there is a small bus with Czech flags on it. I originally thought it was Czechoslovakia tourist information, but I saw that all the signs were written in Czech, and none in German, and I realised it was information for Czechs visiting Vienna. I guess it's a little version of the wave of East Germans in West Germany, although it's probably not the same sort of love-in, and the Austrians don't have the same sort of ties to the Czechs as they do to the Hungarians (I don't think). Also, the Hungarians have been crossing the border for years.
In the Vienna city center, there are big green signs with the silhouette of a mobile home and a slash through it, and underneath saying NO CAMPING in English. It's hard to imagine hordes of Americans in Winnebagos descending on Vienna, but I suppose it was once a problem if these signs are here now. I didn't see a single Winnebago while I was there.
Driving out of Vienna towards the Hungarian border, the houses start to assume the eastern style they had in Czechoslovakia. They don't look like the Swiss/Austrian wooden houses you get in the western part of the country, but have a faceless, square, plastered look, and are usually painted white, gray, or yellow. The ones on the Austria side were generally clean, the ones on the Hungary side less so.
The last town in Austria is Nickelsdorf. It's a town of at most a thousand people, but it must have at least a dozen electronics shops, plus several stores selling jeans, and a few roadside stands selling chocolate, bananas, and pineapples. All these stores have red, white, and green stripes on them, and most of the owners seem to have Hungarian names. The border crossing takes no more than ten minutes. Last time, it was a Hungarian holiday weekend, and it took an hour.
[I took a different route to Budapest than the last time. Then, I took a side road and followed the Danube. We didn't get far, though, before a policeman waved us over to the side. There were a couple of cars stopped in front of us, all with foreign (i.e., non-Hungarian) plates. We had been caught in a speed trap.
[The policeman came up to us, and in bad German told me I had been going too fast, and that the fine was 500 forints (about $10 at the time). I had just come over the border, and since it was difficult to buy forints abroad, I had none and told him so. 'What do you have?,' he said. 'Austrian schillings,' I replied. 'Then, it's 500 schillings,' he said. This came to about $40, and I paid it, not wanting to get into trouble with the Hungarian law, but it's a good thing I didn't tell him we had dollars.
[We drove down country lanes, through old villages where my car attracted lots of attention, actually passed horse-drawn wagons, and drove along the Danube, which was incredibly pretty. Across the river was Czechoslovakia, which seemed like a forbidden land at the time. We stopped in the city of Esztergom, where the main cathedral of Hungary is, turned south, and stopped for the night in the little artists' colony of Szentendre. Szentendre was settled by Serbians, and the architecture has an eastern feel. The town is a fairly well-known resort in Hungary, and I've heard that it is being rediscovered by the west. If so, I hope they don't ruin the peaceful atmosphere.
[We got into town, and sought out a restaurant that had been recommended by a friend: the Arany Sarkany (I believe that was the name; it translates to Golden Dragon), which I've heard was almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving Hungarian cooking. The proprietor, who spoke some German and English, quickly removed a 'reserved' sign from the table and served us a wonderful multicourse meal. Soup, appetizer, main course, wine, dessert, and liqueur came to US$7. I realize that this was expensive by Hungarian standards, but it was a wonderful meal. We paid in dollars. We mentioned to the proprietor that we had no room for the night, and he made a few calls and got us a room at the inauspiciously named 'Hotel Party.' The room was fine, though, with an unorthodox arrangement with the sleeping quarters in a loft above an entranceway. Later we took a walk along the Danube before turning in.
[A few days later, we came back to the restaurant again, and the owner recognized us and greeted us enthusiastically. We had another dinner that couldn't be beat, and to top it off, he sold us a large bottle of fine Vilmos pear brandy for $5.]
Anyway, that's what we did then. This time I was travelling by myself, but that route required navigation, and it was getting late. |
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