I’m finding the longer I travel, the more places I know well enough to not have to think about too hard. It feels like Austria’s now one of those. Case in point: I was comfortable enough to book a train ticket from the Vienna airport to Graz 90 minutes after my plane was scheduled to land, even knowing I was going to have to get through border control.¹ And despite managing to fuck it up — I accidentally booked a ticket from the central train station — I had enough time to land, disembark, have my passport stamped, reach the airport train station, realize my mistake, and catch a train to downtown. And then I had to kill 30 minutes before the train to Graz left.

Even for the short time I’m here, it’s hard to overstate how nice it is to not really have to think about the mechanics of travel for a bit. The trains in Austria are sensible, comfortable, reasonably priced, and frequent. I can buy a 2-day pass for public transit and subsequently not have to worry about it. I know how to find an English-language movie and book tickets, and I don’t need to think about exchanging money² or navigating a menu that’s not in English.³

It’s occurred to me that maybe that’s the bigger reason you don’t see more US citizens traveling internationally.⁴ It’s not just that your vacations are limited and the cost of flights is prohibitive.⁵ Maybe it’s more that you’re chronically stressed out and overworked and just the thought of figuring out how to get from the airport to a hotel in the city someplace you doesn’t speak the language makes you break out in hives. Everything you might think to do — see a museum, or grab a bite to eat — is accompanied by a whole set of debilitating questions: Will they take credit cards? Is it better to take the tram or a cab? Does the cab take credit cards? Is it in a safe neighborhood? How will I get back to the hotel afterwards? Better just to book in for a week at a resort on a Florida beach and avoid having to think about anything for a week.

I still get overwhelmed by those questions from time to time. But I’m at the point where I get overwhelmed by them in Dakar or Ramallah, not Paris or Berlin. And places like Austria, where I’ve spent a grand total of two weeks in the past five years, is now familiar enough to feel low-key and low-stress. It’s nice.

I spent most of my trip here in Graz, the second-largest city in Austria. Graz is the capital of Styria, one of the constituent states of Austria known for its mountains and forests.⁶ I wasn’t thinking about the scenery when I booked the train ticket, but you’re traveling right through the heart of some gorgeous scenic wooded valleys that are really begging for some hiking boots or at least a small lodge with beer and a cuckoo clock.⁷

Styria is one of the strongholds of the more right-wing elements of Austrian politics, but Graz is resolutely liberal. The mayor of Graz is a member of the Communist party. An analogous situation in the United States might be Austin,⁸ although good luck getting even a Democratic Socialist elected in Texas.

Graz is nice, with a comfortable mix of historic and modern buildings⁹ and a lovely core to wander around. I visited a number of museums¹⁰ and hung out when the weather was decent in the Schlossberg, the park overlooking the city center. I was still recovering from the cold I caught in Bulgaria¹¹ so I stayed in a bit more than usual, meaning I missed the baroque palace on the outskirts of the city. Always a reason to come back, I suppose.

After Graz I came back to Vienna for a few days, mostly to spend time with a friend while I was here. So I saw a few things¹² but mostly took the opportunity to watch Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.¹³ Most German-language cinemas dub movies, so I’d learned to look for OmU next to the listings¹⁴ but mixed in with the screenings in German I was surprised to mostly find OV versions instead which are just straight up the English version. Without a doubt the best way to watch Across the Spider-Verse; every frame is so densely packed it’s a shame to lose any of it to subtitles.

I’m now on my way to catch a bus to Bratislava for a few days before heading on to a larp convention in Hungary. It’ll be more of the same, a little sightseeing, a little wandering aimlessly, a little crashing in my hotel and pretending the world doesn’t exist.

Next: Bratislava to Budapest
Prev: Sofia (SOF) to Vienna (VIE)

Footnotes

¹ It helps there’s a train station directly in the airport. Can you imagine how nice traveling through a New York City airport would be if any of the three major airports were on a major rail line? I guess that would require a functioning train system in the first place.

² Mostly because I can use a credit card everywhere, although I did need cash when I wanted to buy food in the Wiener Prater, the amusement park out in Leopoldstadt. But even then, I have some cash in Euros on me for emergencies. It wasn’t a big deal.

³ There’s always a menu in English. Honestly, my German is solid enough to figure out what has meat and what doesn’t anyway.

⁴ I know, sometimes it seems like they’re everywhere. But less than half even have a passport.

⁵ It’s about the same cost to fly from the East Coast to the West Coast as it is to fly to Europe.

⁶ Although there’s Alps covering half the country, so just about everywhere is “known for mountains and forests.”

⁷ This whole region, from Bern to Munich to Graz, is lousy with cuckoo clocks. They’re mostly known as a Black Forest thing, but they didn’t originate there and they’re ubiquitous in the more touristy regions.

⁸ Similar dynamics are in effect, I suppose. Rural folks tend towards “traditional” values, which young people escape by going to university. Conchita Wurst grew up in Styria and moved to Graz to finish school.

⁹ Both the Kunsthaus Graz, an art museum, and the Murinsel, an artificial island, were built when Graz was named the 2003 European Capital of Culture. And they’re certainly memorable.

¹⁰ The Landeszeughaus is a preserved armory from the 1600s still outfitted with hundreds of guns and breastplates and polearms and a particular highlight.

¹¹ For a whole day I basically had snot gushing out of my nose, but since then it’s just been a recurring cough to clear my throat.

¹² I was staying near the Prater my first night so ended up visiting the Republic of Kugelmugel, a (sort of) micronation declared by an artist in 1975, Edwin Lipburger. Lipburger was feuding with the government over building permits. The nation consisted of a spherical building — the shape apparently being forbidden and the source of the initial conflict — and a variety of street signs erected to make it feel more official. Lipburger eventually spent eight weeks in jail for putting up the unofficial street signs.

These things rarely end well for the secessionists, but Kugelmugel became enough of a curiosity to get officially moved, with the artist’s consent, to the public park in Vienna in the 1980s. Lipburger died in 2015, but not without making a reasonable living for a bit by issuing stamps and granting citizenship. The building is still there, still used as an occasional exhibition space, surrounded by barbed wire and with its official address (2.,Antifaschismusplatz) marked out front.

¹³ It’s absolutely stunning. It tops the original in just about every way. If you like superhero movies you need to see it. If you hate superhero movies, you still need to see it. The animation alone is worth it.

¹⁴ “Original mit Untertiteln”