Category: Vienna Chapter

Vienna

November 1st, 2024

Part 5

The train lurched forward, the snaps running down its length like the crest of a wave as coach couplings tightened, and we accelerated first in shadow and then in the morning’s glinting sunlight once out of the station. My day had started hours earlier, rising with the sun to eat a quick breakfast of accumulated snacks, then to stuff my camera, more of the snacks and a water bottle in my pack, and then to walk the four miles or so from far north to far south across the city, through familiar streets to the Institute and then onto the Rathaus, and then veering right off the Ring, through a posh neighborhood adjacent to the Belvedere and thick with embassies and consulates representing countries throughout the world. I had had the spontaneous idea that, given my current proximity and that I was unlikely to travel to eastern Europe very often, I should take this opportunity and a train to the capital city of some neighboring country, and had rather randomly selected Hungary and Budapest as my destination. I dozed off and on, as much as the upright molded plastic second-class seat and an elbow on the window sill would allow, but was awakened around the stop at Györ by a ticket check. A few seats in front of me was a complicated discussion in Hungarian between conductors and a newly boarded passenger, with passports out and open, more conductors arriving from the front or rear, exchanging words, and then rushing on to consult someone or something in a far away cabin. The terminus of this train was Budapest and we had already started on again and though I knew no Hungarian, it seemed like the passenger with a conductor or two hovering over for the duration of the ride had not paid, but there was nothing to be done until we decelerated and the couplings slacked and again rang out.

Over the next six hours, I walked down the boulevards of Pest, past the birthplace of Theodor Herzl just a few blocks from the train station, across the Chain Bridge and up the hills of Buda, taking in the view and panoramic pictures of the Danube, the spires of the parliament building and the technicolor tiled rooftops that lie below, circling the top of the hill, from the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, its façade riddled with bullet holes seated in the bombed stone plaza to the courtyard of Buda Castle up to the Fountain to King Matthias and the open-air excavation of an ancient, ruined church. Down I went, crossing the Chain Bridge back to Pest, and turned upriver toward the parliament building, but paused at the abandoned, empty iron Shoes on the Danube Bank and then with my back to the river, headed inland, arriving at St. Stephen’s Basilica as a newly married couple first exited the open doors in a rising, drifting halo of iridescent soap bubbles and then descended the steps, surrounded by clapping and cheering friends and family, and where I snuck to the side entrance to climb to the balcony for a view back to Buda. This entire time, I was never tempted to enter a restaurant for lunch and only stopped in one shop on the ramrod-straight Andrássy Avenue, a ceramics store where I found a cute mug on which a frazzled cat was painted, and once enough tissue paper surrounded and cradled it, gently tucked it in my pack, and marched on, a mile further due northeast and entered the City Park at Heroes Square, greeted by the bronzed Seven Chieftains of the Magyars.

Time until my train was now running short, so I turned from Városliget to walk the few blocks back to the train station. I kept my feet moving while I slung my camera and backpack from my shoulder in one move, unzipping the pack to tuck the camera in, but in doing so obscured the view of anything directly in front of me on the sidewalk, and just as the camera slid in, bang went my knee and up went a scream from below. I had inadvertently kneed a child, by their size, no more than four years old, thankfully not hard enough to get hurt or fall, but sudden enough to get startled. Louder came the screams and tears erupted from the child’s eyes, and I asked in vain in English about “Mom” or “home”, but the response was only more pathetic sniffles. The sidewalk was far from deserted but no one stopped, and it even seemed that they avoided me and this child, sped up their gait, or turned their gaze away, as if we and the air around us carried some sort of infectious curse. Still no one came to the aid of this child, no one acknowledged the child’s whimpers, and as moments stretched to minutes, a panicked sweat dripped from my temples as anything I was doing was in vain, neither calming nor raising the faintest sympathy from strangers, so I left him there and continued to the train station, and at the next crosswalk looked back, but no sound was to be heard, nothing for the crowds to evade, the child had vanished.
Vienna

October 25th, 2024

Part 4

I never had graduate students of my own, as a post-doc one is not presented with such a responsible distraction, and then later, teaching at a liberal arts college, there were simply no graduate students to be had, though still plenty of overeager undergraduates desiring to do research. By now, the problem had sharpened, the goals defined, and I knew what needed to be done, but I couldn’t do it alone. One collaborator was natural, a fellow post-doc at MIT with an expertise in precision calculations that could ensure that the edifice was sound, through whom I could learn and whose hammer would complement my strength of identification of the right and most interesting nail to strike first. We had shared some notes back and forth on the initial framing of the problem and some preliminary calculations and in doing so, isolated the remaining issue: we needed one more person in this collaboration to do all of the calculations. The organizer from MIT had a couple of graduate students just starting their third years, the time when, finally, graduate students become useful, and give to a project more than the effort of teaching and hand-holding takes from an advisor. I asked about one student who I knew and had chatted with a bit this week, but he was already engaged in a huge, open-ended, multi-year effort to extend results first published in 2010, and with no clear deadline on the horizon, whose time was completely filled. However, the organizer’s other student had no such prior engagements and further was new to the whole theoretical physics business, having made the extremely rare and nearly practically impossible jump from admission as an experimentalist but qualified to Ph.D. candidacy as a theorist, so was in need of a project on which to cut their teeth. So, after lunch one day, I had my first conversation with the student who came the closest to being my only graduate advisee.

Theoretical physicists publish papers throughout graduate school and because we don’t use that time to construct an experiment and analyze data, a theoretical physics Ph.D. thesis is usually little more than a collection of these papers, and all that needs to be written at the eleventh hour of the graduation deadline is a short but sweeping introduction to tie them together. To do this requires really no more than a couple of papers, and a successful student that correspondingly fields a couple of post-doc offers may have half a dozen or so, and I myself had seven published papers in graduate school of which I chose three to highlight for my moderate 116-page thesis. Then there are off-scale students, with well more than 10 highly-regarded papers published in graduate school and theses that require the better half of a ream to print, and this effort and accomplishment never goes unnoticed. By 3 years in the future, this student, my student, had published eight papers with me of his 14 total, stapled the three most influential into a 500 page thesis, which was subsequently awarded the prize for the most outstanding original research in theoretical particle physics in the country. During the winter of his final year, on the awkward 9 month lead time prior-to-job academic schedule, he was sorting through an embarrassment of post-doc offers from each of the top eight places to do particle physics (exclusive of his graduate institution), and then a few years later, joined the faculty at an Ivy League. Globally, my part in all of this was tiny, my letters of recommendation were strong, yes, but they could say no more than what was already there in his papers, but I hold tight to whatever little influence I had as my most proud academic achievement. And it all started with a mere nudge, a suggestion, to meet with this student.

From the front door, stairs led down, into the cellar of the 12 Apostles, tables spread throughout the centuries-old vaulted cavern hewn into the rock, then bricked over, the various parts of barrels augmenting the medieval aesthetic. The ambiance was by far the most intriguing aspect of tonight’s dinner, with the beer and the goulash merely passable, but our group of graduate students and post-docs maintained lively conversation, reflecting on the week or two since arriving. Someone at the table suggested dessert, and even only ok apfelstrudel à la mode is still apfelstrudel à la mode, so soon a symphony of spoons were clicking on the ceramic plates, but in parallel, others were pulling out Euros and doing some quick estimates of their required share. As we were about to hail a waiter, the coda from another table ended and fiddler and accordionist stalked their next prey, but we were as helpless as sitting ducks, midweek and late, late at night already so few other tables were occupied, they pounced and for some reason picked me off, planted to my left and right. I was stuck, I couldn’t push my chair back because the fiddler’s bow hand trapped me in, and the threatening, smug wise-guy face of the accordionist scared me into a smile, thin and emotionless, but stretched beyond the edges of my nose enough that I could fake enjoying it. The worst part was yet to come, as once the music stopped, they lingered, and the longer they lingered the greater the guilt, and a few at our table passed a Euro or two their way, but I was able to drop my glance, avoiding eye contact, and didn’t look again until ascending the stairs, the musicians’ backs to us, ambushing another table.

Of our dining diaspora, I alone walked northwest toward my hotel, past the darkened door of the Institute, and then connected back with that tram-line street, long since deserted but made somewhat hospitable every block or so where the warm amber glow poured down from the excited sodium vapor above. Where the road ascended slightly here now was that corner, nudged right by the ancient, stoic tree, and, unlike previous nights, all was too quiet so my consciousness was lost somewhere in my thoughts and memories and dreams. I didn’t see the car with its headlights off idling ahead, creeping in its lane as I continued to step unconsciously forward, I didn’t hear the passenger’s window roll down, nor did I notice the muzzle that just peeked out of it, but the stream that hit my chest, the howling, cackling laughter erupting in the night, and the revving engine and squealing tires jolted me into the present, and all I could manage to coax out of my throat was “Hey!”, though any audience was already a block behind me and moving away fast. My shirt was drenched, I had been sprayed by a water gun from about 5 yards, a perfect bullseye hit from that would-be sniper, and, though late, the heat had never really receded even after the sun had set, but I was now refreshed and cooler, and a smile grew across my face along with a couple of head shakes and chuckles. I suffered no bodily harm and could change my shirt back in my hotel, but at least it wasn’t cat pee.
Vienna

October 18th, 2024

Part 3

Lunches went typically like this: as a junior colleague of the organizer from MIT, I was among those regularly selected for a meal off campus, at some favorite place of the organizer from UWien. Our cohort, relatively small and some days even small enough to fit comfortably at a four-top, would head out following our local guide and arrive at the restaurant that was, midday and midweek, almost always otherwise deserted. If today’s group was on the larger size, a crowd-pleasing menu and long booths were called for, but a small group could sit outside at a bit fancier place and a favorite returned to a few times during my stay was informally referred to as the French academy, not because of the style of cuisine, but because of its proximity to an immersion school. We would enter through a door that opened to a garden or park, tables set under the cooling shade of beeches, and request free Leitungswasser while the younger of the group chose a beer and the elder a Clausthaler, lest a full stomach and the heat of a summer’s afternoon lull them to sleep. Physics specifically was rarely the topic of conversation, a mere hour’s break during the whole day, but instead recommendations for Viennese entertainment, places to travel on the weekend, or the state of regional politics were discussed. At the request Zahlen, bitte the organizer from MIT would always wave off my attempts at pulling out my wallet, as Simons would be covering lunch.

Another evening saw me back in the Institute after dinner, the sun having long since set, back again writing at the blackboard, pacing to and fro, or just staring at it seated at the edge of my desk, hypnotized, thoughts unfocused and hazy, tumbling around in my brain but going nowhere. A cursory glance at my watch revealed that a respectable time for departure was long in the past, so I gathered my things and hurried down the stairs and out the door, walking at a brisk pace on the radiating pavement through the finally-cooled night air. This night was no busier than previous, I was still all alone on the tram track street’s sidewalk, though behind I could hear a car speeding up and then passing me, its illuminated scarlet tail lights and rooflight fading as it turned a corner ahead. Though it had seemed to be in a great hurry, once I had turned that corner, there the car was, parked, hazard lights blinking, and the driver’s door open and just off the sidewalk, at those same bushes into which that badger had waddled, I could make out the silhouette of a person, standing slightly hunched facing away from their car, legs astride of some invisible saddle, with the unmistakable sound of drizzling water. My hotel would be on the other side anyway, so I thought this as good a place as any to cross the street.

As with several times since I left, this Skype call had turned silent, staring, longing for each other, lonely and confined in 800 square feet with just blank pages of her thesis glowing from her screen. I could tell her about the food I’ve eaten, or the research projects that I had made progress on, or the baroque architecture of palaces and cathedrals and museums, or that opera is piped into the public bathrooms of the Wiener Staatsoper, but it made the chasm deeper, the rift wider. I was here surrounded by everyone in my field, days filled with busy lunches and talks and gossip with coffee and felt more alone, more that I was faking, putting on a face and acting to be excited by what I was doing around a hollow inside missing that part that inspired and motivated. Now long after midnight here and dinnertime there, I had to saw goodbye and a weak, resigned goodbye was echoed, miss yous exchanged, and with a kiss closed my laptop. The still air had done little to cool the room through the cracked window, so all I could do was lie in the dark on the springy double bed, a few inches too short for me so my feet hung over the edge, and stare at the ceiling until exhaustion succumbed to sleep.

I had scoped out a nice five mile loop for a morning run through a combination of MapMyRun and Google Maps that would take me north, away from the city center to quieter neighborhoods that hugged the base of the grapevined hills, and had woke early with plenty of time to enjoy the crisp morning before the sun had aroused the ground from its slumber and into its humid, hazy hypnopompic state. A few turns into the run, I had reached a waypoint, running adjacent to a stream, and jumped into and off of the road as the width of the cobbled sidewalk waxed and waned. Next, I should turn right at a major intersection, but the name of that street had dissolved from my memory, so I had to trust that my subconscious had internalized the route and would just tell my feet the way. My legs formed no such divining rod, however, and I was left to guessing, and this right seemed as good as I could expect, so away I went. I had not noticed that my path north had drifted significantly west to become nearly parallel itself with the base of the hills, so a right turn started gaining elevation and the road I was on shrunk and shrunk, rather unlike the behavior of major thoroughfares, and soon I was on a one-lane path, the shoulder overgrown with brambles, and that transformed abruptly into a flight of concrete stairs once the pitch had become too steep. Now certain I had missed my turn, I nevertheless beat on, with a certainty that a right turn would appear and transport me back to the familiar.

Enough right turns had eventually bore me back east, but not before gaining more and more and more elevation, the trees and brush had thinned down to tightly trimmed grass, and I had reached the pot-holed farm road that orbited the summit. Just higher now was the farmhouse, but I turned away, and there below lay all of Vienna, filling my view but silent, the sounds of the city waking up had not yet permeated to these heights. An emerald carpet of stringed vines rolled down and away, and stretched to the base of the hill into which the blanket of trees was tucked, quilted with the alleys and streets and avenues and boulevards. The majestic Danube, broad and blue, cut the western bank and drew the eye along a line southeast into the heart of Vienna, to just where the domes of palaces and spires of cathedrals peeked above the apartment rooftops. Farther yet, the haze had already started its morning meal, making its slow march north, devouring buildings and roads and leaving behind a formless, milky nothingness. This sight soon required a more and more extreme twisting back while running forward, but then mercifully the path cut steeply down and into the darkened forest, growing broader as tributaries rejoined until its delta spilled into that street I had missed, now almost an hour ago.
Vienna

October 11th, 2024

Part 2

Erwin Schrödinger, by some reckoning the inventor of quantum mechanics or at least of the equation that carries his name, posthumously leant his name to the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics as the most famous scientist from Vienna. The ESI was founded about 20 years earlier as a place of contemplative retreat and intellectual stimulation, hosting workshops and conferences, programs and summer schools on anything related to mathematics or physics with a sufficiently defensible amount of mathematics in it. This month, the topic was of Jets and Quantum Fields for LHC and Future Colliders, a grand and sweeping enough name to justify its place there, but specific enough for essentially the entire world community of a couple hundred people whose research interests fit snugly under the title’s umbrella to be invited for a stay. From the front door labeled solely by a faded sign lacking capitalization, stairs rose steeply to the main hallway, where each step with any gait and with any shoe on the stone tile floor echoed off of the blackboards lining the wall and the marble bust of the namesake, and to the right was the door to the main seminar room, straight ahead to the toilets, and left, where I turned, to the workspaces. In the theme of promoting conversation and collaboration, any personal offices were basically non-existent, instead, broad, open rooms each with three or four desks, a bookshelf, and another wall of blackboards, and here, tucked in a corner with a view out the narrow window, I set down my backpack and settled in.

Coffee was slowly beginning to grow on me, and being in Europe, free coffee, and the socialization that a huddle around the carafe provides encouraged me to join in the conversations and introductions already in progress over sips and around blowing away the wisps of steam. However, as coffee is also wont to escape rather quickly, I excused myself for the bathrooms, around the corner, then through a swing door that didn’t quite shut completely, to the landing that lay in front of the couple of steps up to the row of stalls. With now a few trips to Europe behind me, the privacy afforded one in public toilets as compared to the half-door with both excess leg room and inch-wide gaps in the stall corners familiar in the US, was no longer surprising but had yet to cease to amaze. The toilets at the ESI were no exception, with hermetic, floor-to-ceiling doors and rubber weatherstripping in the jamb for a double layer of protection for each personal stall, and then inside, an immaculately clean head, several rolls of multi-ply toilet paper, and even a brush off to the side for clean up afterward. This all was more or less consistent with the standard I had now come to expect, but what elevated the experience to the heavens was that on the wall to my right was a blackboard with a few pieces of chalk on the ledge, so that there was no inconvenient time for inspiration. By the afternoon, once everyone had passed through at least once, the toilet boards were the talk of the coffee break.

The informal and unstructured nature of the workshop encouraged unfocused drifting from one’s desk, to spontaneous, interjected questions thrown out to the two or three office mates, to eavesdropping on the calculations or scratching of chalk on board that had floated over the low dividing wall. Sometimes the distraction would be intolerable enough that action was required, to set down your pen and walk over to stare directly at the mathematical expression that had already confused two others. My own discussions had encouraged a visitor, just a couple years my senior and someone I had worked with when I was an older undergraduate and he a younger graduate student, and I started again, to explain the baby steps of a calculation I was setting up to just begin to understand a toy example of a problem that had been sharpening in the past couple of years. He had also thought about some proto-cases and further had developed much of the necessary techniques to actually complete the calculation, so in my stilted explanation and terse, slanted board work, I eventually regurgitated all of my thoughts on the problem, and hints and suggestions for next steps were added by my my neighbor, who, at the same time, identified the leaps in logic that would need to be overcome. With nothing more to contribute now, he excused himself, and I sat back down in my chair, copying the boardwork into my notebook and returned to staring out the window, my mind racing in confusion.

Rather quickly, the groups and subgroups of us that had naturally divided up had relaxed to standard, comfortable dinner choices, initiated by whoever was first and most hungry and then, like a snowball, more and more of us capped our pens, closed our laptops, and zipped up our backpacks and set out. Each night, we would be flung to some other corner of Vienna, to either a biergarten out back of a pub, long wooden tables densely packed in a courtyard between brick buildings, open to the sky save the broad leaves of an ancient chestnut, or for schnitzel, though budgetary constraints restricted us to the schwine version and not the local delicacy Wiener variant with fried veal. Our beers drained as the sun set, and we would be on the move again, some ending the night and walking to their hotel rooms, and others such as myself, back to the Institute for a few more hours of work before a Skype call to the States and bed. Dark afforded a contemplative silence that was absent during the day, a chance to focus and distill and process the conversations into an equation or two to write on the board, left for tomorrow’s work. My walk home mostly followed the tram line north, away from the center of the city, tracks along the center of a wide boulevard, and just beyond a stop adjacent to towering pines to one side and flats on the other, I saw a badger waddle by across the deserted road, disappearing into the sodium-yellowed shrubs underneath the ground floor apartment windows.

Sprinkled throughout the unscheduled discussions and spontaneous meetings was a touch of regularity, with a few participants selected each week to present a talk during the morning’s coffee break. I was one of the lucky ones this week, and chose to discuss a recent paper I had published with my post-doc advisor on a strange and surprising feature we had identified in the process of performing calculations for predictions of physics that would be observed at the LHC. Ample time was allotted with the suggestion that a small fraction would be for presentation and a larger fraction for the inevitable arguments that would and should arise in any good and sufficiently controversial talk. So, standing in front of the rows of green sliding chalkboards, I kept my goals limited, pledging some motivation verbally for why the calculation was interesting and that, naively at least, should make no sense whatsoever. Perhaps the thing that was hardest for the audience to grasp was its simplicity, as all I did next was calculate the area of a couple of triangles, relate that to the probability of observing a particle, and then with a swish of my hand to push a board up, revealed the turn on the final board. I had hidden nothing, every step had been completely transparent and obviously next in the logical series, but the prestige was that from the answer, there was no going backward, there was no way to return to the start again as the process had washed away the footprints in the sand. Complaints and whataboutisms rained from a pair of people seated in the back row, this was just some special case, what if more realistic effects were included, and I initially tried to respond but was soon drowned out by rebuttals from the other side of the room and piling on from the front, and silently gained a renewed determination to understand this better.
Vienna

October 4th, 2024

Part 1

I stared out into the void, or as much of the void as provided by the view of the upright and locked tray table in front of me, squished in the center row of seats on a trans-Atlantic flight after dinner and once the cabin lights had been dimmed for a precious few hours of sleep. I had left my wife home, alone, working on writing her dissertation in a city 3,000 miles away from where she was still a student, her patience and focus of typing and typing and typing from a corner in our apartment wearing thin, and my absence for these two weeks further straining our rather complicated living arrangements for the past year. We had lived apart on opposite coasts for four months, her finishing her Ph.D. and me starting a new job, though my flexible position afforded a visit every few weeks, and then she moved with me in the new year, but was far from her lab, her colleagues, and her advisor, so deadlines seemed to keep drifting for actually finishing and moving on. Nevertheless, she was excited for me to go to this conference, but deadlines for accepting invitations and planning had been months in the past, and as the departure date neared and the prospect of two weeks away became more real, some doubts began to arise if now was indeed the best time. Moments before we kissed goodbye on our apartment’s threshold, I had slipped the thin book into my backpack, something I had always been interested to read and was short enough I could finish it on the flight, but now, the closed book on my lap alone under my seat’s spotlight amongst a raft of snoring travelers, questioned the intelligence of bringing Camus’s L’Étranger.

One year into my post-doc, my personal research portfolio was beginning to slowly grow. Casting off projects assigned to me by my Ph.D. advisor had been relatively easy and something I had already done three years ago, in favor of a project I had started with a fellow student that had since taken on a life of its own. This co-student project tapped into a burgeoning subfield of particle physics whose inaugural yearly conference had actually taken place in an adjacent building to where my graduate school office was, and now only a few years along regularly had over 100 attendees and strong representation from all of the large experiments at the LHC. My first presentation on this project at this conference had been unique and impressed the community enough that the following winter, I had been offered multiple post-docs in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, alone, accepting MIT as my intellectual home for the next three years. Essentially on my arrival to campus, I vowed to put aside those graduate school projects, to start something brand new, something original that would be indelibly identified as my own intellectual creation. This was, by contrast, not easy and progress on anything was slow, indirect, and sometimes frustratingly failure-prone, seeing the tiniest of light rays peeking through a hole only to calculate and calculate and calculate and realize that what you had been doing that whole time was not logically consistent.

The intellectual support and environment of the group at MIT at that time was definitely the most magical experience I have ever had and was perhaps the most special place to be in the entire world at the time for what I was doing. My post-doc advisor was merely two years into tenure track and publishing at a breakneck rate, his office across the narrow hallway from mine and stopped by each morning he arrived to chat about the new papers that appeared on the arXiv preprint server last night, or to see how a calculation was going, or to show me a mysterious and confusing plot that would then occupy my daydreams for the next several hours. His door was always open, and I returned the favor, dropping in unannounced numerous times throughout the day, to sit in his square high-walled pleather chair across from his desk, and at least puzzle over something together verbally, or one of us would walk over to his floor-to-ceiling blackboard to write an equation that we could then stare at in pensive silence. Each week, there were at least three topical seminars on particle physics to attend, in addition to the physics department colloquium, so everyone who was working on the great problems in the field were continually passing through, dispelling their wisdom in their formal talk, and then the truth would actually come out during the hosted dinner. There would have been no way that I could have learned what projects were interesting, useful, and impactful by merely sitting in my room all day, door closed, head down, hunched over my desk.

Two major ideas had been born in this environment and had correspondingly resulted in papers by the following spring. While both broadly addressed physics relevant for making predictions in particle collider experiment, they were otherwise relatively unrelated, which troubled me. At one level, they were obviously deeply connected, and I could imagine the first glimpses of nearly bottomless research potential if I could marry them successfully. Some conversations with others in the group at MIT had helped broaden my perspective, but something was still lacking. Another professor in the group had recently won funding through the Simons Foundation, the philanthropic arm of billionaire mathematician Jim Simons who left academia to found Renaissance Technologies, and helped organize a relaxed, discussion-focused workshop in Vienna, Austria, with a long-term collaborator and faculty at UWien. One was required to spend at least two weeks there, but, as members of the MIT group, Simons would be graciously covering our expenses, so saying yes was all too easy. This would be the place to have those conversations with global experts, to stare at equations on a board, to find and recruit new collaborators, or even to just convince the community that this was a question worth thinking about.

The Rathausplatz was converted into a summers-long festival setting, thousands of seats arranged in rows facing the city hall’s façade, itself covered with an enormous white curtain for the nightly film screenings, and then lining the promenade and spilling into the bounding park were dozens of food stands, serving a sampling of every cuisine imaginable, at least through Viennese interpretation. To ward off jet-lag for the night, I had walked the mile or so from my stifling greenhouse of a hotel room to observe the party, making a slight detour from the geodesic path to find the front door of the Institute and where my office for the next two weeks would be. The door was nondescript, but across the narrow gasse faced the US Embassy in Austria which, at the time anyway, had garnered minor celebrity status as the place that Edward Snowden would have been taken if he had actually been on the Bolivian president’s plane. Capturing a selfie with my laptop monitor’s camera, I then continued on, drawn along by the growing noise of the crowd and wafting smells of classics like pretzels, schnitzel, sausages, and kraut, truck-stop diner recreations of greasy burgers, fries, and a Coke, yeasty, malty lagers sloshed sloppily into masskrugs, and even ice cream carts offering the Vermonter staple of Ben & Jerry’s. For my first meal off the plane, I chose boldly, asking for ein burrito, bitte, with all the fillings, and over the counter it was passed, tucked snugly in foil and cradled it while moving over to a vacant standing table. It was stuffed to bursting with ground beef, black beans, corn kernels, something passing as sour cream, maybe some iceberg lettuce, and probably white rice and was perfectly, ideally, flawlessly flavorless.

Category: Vienna Chapter

Vienna

Part 5

Vienna

Part 4

Vienna

Part 3

Vienna

Part 2

Vienna

Part 1