Leaving Bratislava right after dinner, we could see the modern outskirts of the city pass by as we picked up speed. After warming up a little, for the first time after that face-to-face meeting of the Slovakian version of myself and all early vendors, I asked my friend for the itinerary. I was now fully engaged, whereas before, I was merely tagging along on a free trip. Everything about being there made sense since I’d contacted the homeless, which had given me an alternative mission, a reason to anticipate the upcoming stops. A song from long ago popped into my head. But why that song?
As I thought about our next port, the song made me think about another life I once led. It seems so far back now that I must work very hard to get in touch with it, because so much has happened to me to take me away from that world. Sometimes I forget, as all who have experienced homelessness often do, that once upon a time, I had a good life, and it wasn’t a fairy tale either. I was working in a top rock radio station as a twenty-something. I was an anomaly, a young urban Black guy labeled a whiz kid. I’d fallen in love with a certain Long Island artist’s music and a song of his about a city, which I now know I was too young to understand, but still, I was captivated by the hidden meaning of the words. And because of another Random Act of Kindness, here I was, about to finally decode the song’s meaning for me. The title of that song, Vienna, was our next stop on the Danube.
I started to think about my former life. The cars I drove and the nice house I was buying. I strained to recall what the house looked like. It seemed so long ago I was constantly told I had so much promise, but hearing that song again and knowing “Vienna was waiting for me” had me up most of the night.
As we awoke, we couldn’t see much of the famous Austrian capital. Vienna doesn’t sit on the Danube. It was built as a Roman garrison along a Danube tributary a short distance away. We pulled up alongside a pier and came to a stop at a place that looked nowhere like the Vienna I had envisioned. It was in an isolated area, unlike any of the previous stops, which had put us right downtown. We were tied up on a lonely pier waiting for what was next. All the while the Piano Man’s music still playing in my head, “Vienna waits for you.” “Where is it?” I was thinking.
Vienna is an old city. Boarding buses, we made our way through its newest parts as we headed towards the historic center. For centuries, it was the crossroads for East-West chicanery, from the Roman Empire right up to the Cold War. It’s been featured heavily in spy movies, books, and comics, including everything from Tom Clancy’s “Jack Ryan”, Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible,” to “Spy vs. Spy” in Mad Magazine, to Boris and Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” All had used Vienna as the backdrop for mystery and intrigue. And here I was, about to unravel a little more of my own mystery.
As we moved through modern developments of housing and apartments, we started to see glimpses of the old Vienna. Park after park was spread across acres. One park even had a giant Ferris wheel that would shame the National Harbor’s. And let me not forget to mention the traffic circles in this city. I can see how Washington’s planners got many of their ideas. So far, they’ve been a staple of the old European cities we’ve seen, serving two purposes: controlling traffic and adding a beautiful green space. Think Dupont Circle, but five to 10 times larger. It was just grand in scale, as was everything we saw.
By this time, my mind was starting to calculate the cost of this grandness. The Austrian Empire was rich and mighty, with noblemen who didn’t care to build anything small. “Anything you can build, I can build bigger” seemed to be how they thought in that period. Vienna was home to a lot of famous people in history. We saw Mozart’s home as we moved down avenues with once tall mansions now hotels, apartments, and office space. We headed towards the two attractions we most wanted to see, the opera house and the palace.
Even from the bus, it was easy to see the opera house was huge. We pulled up to what I thought was the front, only to find out it was just a side entrance. It takes up a city block, and its exterior footprint is bigger than some NBA arenas I’ve been to. During those times, building opera houses was a competitive undertaking where one monarch had to outdo the other, or city pride caused one city to want its to be the best and biggest. The current Vienna State Opera never performs the same opera on back-to-back nights, never. It is a huge undertaking, but it’s what is expected. And just from the size of all this, I’m sure it delivers.
We didn’t go inside the opera house because it had taken 45 minutes to get us through the town to its old center. Vienna had waited for me; the real city of folklore was right here. And as I looked up, I couldn’t see what other attractions people were talking about. But we sure could tell in what direction Schönbrunn Palace was by the flow of the crowds.
Our group marched down the city’s wide streets until we found ourselves on a road that narrowed into one barely wide enough for a car. Then I got one of the many surprises of that cold day. As we were walking in what became a covered passageway, I looked to my right and said, “Wait a minute” to my friend. “This is it, isn’t it?” Yes, it was. Without the guides mentioning it, I had just walked up on the world-famous Spanish Riding School barn that features the Lipizzaner horses’ practice facilities. I only noticed when one, then another white horse head peeked out of its private stall as I passed them. I put on the brakes and called out, “Hey,” but they all kept going, and I was the only one who saw them.
I’d heard this palace was one of the biggest ever. Before I got to Vienna, I would have thought you were kidding, but these people would have built a 7-11 the size of Costco during this period. So big today, 400 regular citizens can win a lottery for apartments in a surrounding courtyard bigger than RFK and its parking lots. Looking up at the apartments, I thought about how much that kind of living would cost in, say, New York City. I just can’t describe how vast the open space of this one of 17 courtyards was. Finally, standing beside the gates and looking back over the distance I’d covered gave a sense of how grand the scale of this place was. It was like walking from the U.S. Capitol building to the Washington Monument. And we weren’t finished walking. The reason we came in first place was the famous Vienna Christmas markets.
There were people of all ages and races out there enjoying themselves like they didn’t even feel the cold. By now, the sun was bright and high, in the sky, but it was unbelievably cold. Hundreds of people walked towards the markets in MuseumsQuartier, a huge open space between government buildings with green roofed huts as far as you could see. They were filled with handmade crafts and arts along with regional foods and drinks we knew nothing about because none of the signage used English.
We waded in the thick crowd, holding hands for fear of being separated. In one of our finer moments, my friend told me she knew I was tired and if we got away from each other, she’d wait up ahead, shopping, of course. How she shops like that without speaking a word of German is a mystery to me, but she had bags for her grandkids and mine. And off she’d go again, with a new plan for us to meet in the main circle where I could sit for a while.
At about the same time, we suddenly noticed the sun was fading. We could feel the temperature begin to drop, and she took one for the team. She sacrificed her shopping, and we started our way out of Vienna’s largest Christmas market. But in this feel-good moment, we got to the pickup spot over an hour early, and our mistake was starting to make us pay dearly as we had no decent gloves on. Every bus that showed up looked like ours, but it wasn’t. Then another freezing couple showed up and another group from the boat and we’re all like “Where is the damn bus?” It was our longest day, and we were at our limits when my friend shouted, “Is that it?”
It wasn’t. So, we leaned against the wall of this huge building only to discover the stones were fake. It made me think about how much of what I saw was similar. It made a lot of sense because during WWII, the Allies bombed Austria daily and destroyed Vienna. A lot of the city was reconstructed, and what a great job they had done, because I had been there all day and was just finding out Hollywood magic existed here. It made me want to go retrace my steps and touch every wall. But I was gassed, legs gone, and I didn’t want to spoil the fantasy of finally being in Vienna.
And just as this group of seniors, strangers to each other from all over the world, were at a point where we were ready to hijack the next bus, my friend said, “Is that ours way down the street?” Thank God it was. The local driver started in on what time it was before reading the faces of his desperate mob and said, “Come on and get warm.” And an international incident was averted. As our coach slowly filled, I wondered what was taking people so long? Probably any number of hot drinks that include alcohol. The real source of all this Christmas market cheer.
Some of us were sleeping while others, like my friend, were just resting. I was wondering why this feeling of calm came over me as I was looking out at a place I’d never been to or cared to go to a week ago. But somehow, something happened on this journey to this city. The city’s past beauty, its terrible destruction, and its amazing resurrection. With its three lives, this city mirrors my life. As the boat appeared, I put my head back, closed my eyes, and started to hum the song’s words, finally getting their meaning for me: “Vienna waits for you.”
