Vienna

11/12/14, “Vienna”

New York, New York

When people see my passport, they always ask the same questions.  “Do you meet any interesting people?” (“Not if I can help it.  I travel to observe culture and see natural and historic sites.”) “What were your favorite places?”  (“Oh, there are too many to choose from, so many favorites.”)  “Any place you’d want to go back to?”  Now, that is the more interesting question, and it is one that bears a thought out answer.  While places like Quebec and London never get old, that is not the answer.  No, the answer would be to go somewhere I briefly visited and visit it in a new and different way.

I’d love to go back to Athens and spend a week there, working on my philosophy, sitting in the agora every day, drinking wine every night, finding the intellectual heirs of Plato and Aristotle, engaging in a symposium with those who still know what that word means.  I would like to go back to an island in the Caribbean, a small one like Antigua or St. Lucia, and write a short novel, interact with the locals, and not spend a single minute on the beach.  I would like to go back to one of my favorite National Parks and camp out for a week.  I would like to go to the woods and live deliberately as Thoreau did.

However, now, as I sit in my chair, listening to my Music History CD, puffing on a Dunhill and sipping some wine, I have come up with another idea.  I want to go back to Vienna and spend a week there, experiencing everything the city has to offer.  I want to go to every musical performance I can find.  I want to see operas and concerts and listen to Vivaldi and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven with headphones as I walk around the city.  I want to fall asleep to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and wake up to Beethoven’s Fifth.  I want to go to bookstores and pick up books and CDs about lesser known composers and go back to my hotel room to read their biographies and listen to their music.  Then I want to drink Vienna coffee and eat sacher torte every night.

I want to play The Blue Danube and waltz down the street for no reason at all.  I want people to look at me like I’m crazy as I pretend to conduct Haydn’s symphonies.  I want to fly home with a clear vision in my mind of 18^th Century Vienna when it was the capital of the world.  I don’t want to take a single picture.  When people ask me if I enjoyed my trip, I want to honestly answer that I loved every minute of it.  I want to be able to be able to play my favorite pieces as clearly in my head as I can my favorite Taylor Swift songs.  When I get back, I want to go to Avery Fisher Hall and listen with fond memories of my time in Vienna.  I want to never be able to hear one of those pieces again without remembering the exact moment I heard it in Vienna.

So, when people ask me my favorite places, I do have set answers.  Favorite city in the world: New York.  Second favorite: London.  Second favorite in the US: Philadelphia.  Favorite city in continental Europe: Vienna.  I am already in love Vienna.  I just to want to fall as deeply in love with it as I am with New York.