We like to party

Vienna has museums everywhere, and most of them sound really interesting. I scrawled down my shortlist on my pocket notepad and asked the hostel receptionist to circle them on my map. I know that reading about somebody visiting museums is ridiculously boring, but I must oblige myself for as briefly as possible. If you’re not interested skip down a few paragraphs and the party will start.

So, my memory is really foggy from all the…stimulus overload…and the drinking, but mostly the latter. One day I went to the modern art museum something at an art school. It usually has two rotating exhibits. I visited it, but I’m not exactly sure if it was actually the museum I was trying to find. It cost about $10 admission to see one exhibit called “shooting into the corner” and another about stolen stuff from the Jews. I walked in and saw a huge air cannon pointed into the corner of a big white room. The corner is smeared with a crimson, greasy, chunky substance oozing down to a massive pile of sludge at the bottom. I’m reading about it, it shoots 20 lb wax plugs into the corner, and was made my Anish Kapoor, who also made the famous shiny Chicago jellybean in Millennium Park. Then a guy starts walking around in the exhibit near the cannon, moving some cardboard shells. Then he turns on an air compressor and loads the cannon……..BOOM!!splat. This is the only sound that, aside from the humming compressor, has disturbed the still air. My jaw drops. “haaaaa Holy shit” I say to myself. That was well worth the price of admission, and thankfully, because the Jew stuff upstairs was incredibly boring.

I also found a small museum of medical history. It was hidden in a university med school. It had great stuff, bloodletting instruments, early prosthesis’s (I’m not sure how to say the plural of prosthesis. It rarely comes up, and only in very sad stories I imagine.), super detailed and old wax models used for teaching doctors, and the original hand washing stations used by Semmelweis, who discovered that hand washing in the hospital delivery room decreased infections and infant mortality. OK, so I may be the only nerd who likes this. It was tricky to find and nobody else was there. It was badass though.

At my hostel I met a girl named Anna from South Dakota who teaches English in Cairo (so strange I know, because I didn’t realize people came from South Dakota). Together we went ice skating in a park. It was in two outdoor rinks with a path connecting them. On one side of the park was a massive and beautiful gothic building called Rathaus, on another was the Austrian Parliament. This was so perfect. I think it will long be one of my fondest memories of Europe. Afterward we went to a huge art museum full of Flemish and Italian paintings, mostly scenes of religious stuff and Greek mythology. There was some Egyptian stuff that was really cool, the best being a mummified crocodile!!! The fusion of two of the most badass things, crocodiles and mummies, really made that museum almost worth the 3 hours of wandering through works that all looked similar to me. I enjoyed Anna’s company more than I enjoyed most of the art. Apparently I’m an uncultured stupid American. Oh well. Let’s party.

We rounded up whoever we could at the hostel, played some cards and drank some beer while deciding how the evening should proceed. An Australian guy said he thought he knew a place nearby. I waited in the lobby while a couple people had to go get ready. I saw a Japanese guy (named Masa) quietly reading in the corner occasionally rolling another cig with American Spirit tobacco. He had already been doing this for two days straight, so I was determined he must join us. I thought it was odd to see a Japanese guy smoking a cheap, American hipster brand of tobacco. It turns out it was the cheapest stuff he could find in Germany.

We set out with a party of about 10 or more. It was snowing as it had been doing continuously for at least 3 days now. Of course a snowball fight erupted in the street. I hung back with the Masa. His quiet confidence and long hair gave me the impression he had something interesting to tell, and of course he did. He had worked himself to death in Japan for a couple years saving money for a 15 month voyage to everywhere (in Asia, Africa, and Europe at least). He was on month number 13 and had just come from Germany, where he missed his bus and hitchhiked, alone in the freezing cold with his own thumb. Damn. I had hitchhiked the easy way. I commended him doubly. I was even more amazed that he managed to get around so well because his English was really poor.

We made it to the place and it wasn’t what we expected. It was an empty pub. So somebody else said maybe they knew a place. Let’s take the train. So along the way somewhere, and this is where my memory begins to degrade, one of the French guys in our posse overhears some young Swiss guys speaking French. He quickly befriends them and asks where the party is. They say they were on their way there “just follow us!” So it takes at least 45 minutes on the train, that’s far and I don’t know where we are or where we’re going (this will be important later). There are more young people on this train drinking beer and laughing. Everybody gets off at the same stop. It seems we have found the right party. It turns out to be a club in a basement in some random building. The entrance is in the courtyard and it is packed with people trying to get in. We go to a grubby little pub nearby to have a drink while we wait for the queue to thin out a little. Eventually a couple of the girls with us get antsy and go on a recon mission to see if they can get in and find out if it’s good. Their simple instructions are “if we don’t come back then the club is good.”

A half hour or so later without hearing back we decide to go for it. There is still a crowd trying to get in so it takes a while. I enter, pay the cover of 6 Euro and have a look around. Then join the queue for coat check with my Japanese pal. It takes ages. While we’re waiting in the disgusting stairwell to get to the coat check upstairs a girl behind us starts dancing and singing to her friend in English “we like to party, yeah we like to party.” I start talking to her and we hit it off. She’s an Austrian student name Aoifa. We finally dump our coat and make our way to the packed bar. I ask what they like and her friend says tequila shots. “They do like to party” I think to myself. We have shots and a beer and I’m off dancing with Aoifa for a couple hours (maybe more, as I said my memory is a bit foggy). So, eventually 3 or 4 am rolls around and we must get going. But after glancing around it seems my group had ditched me. I couldn’t find anyone that looked familiar. I went to retrieve my coat and hope for a brilliant idea, because I had no idea where I was after all.

“Ahhhh, thank goodness!” I saw a Canadian girl that had come with us. She had also budded up with a person she met in the club and lost our group. We agreed to try to make it back to the hostel. After we walked about 2 blocks back toward a train stop we realized that we didn’t know where to go and the trains don’t start again until 5am anyway. We’re on an empty street, tired and intoxicated, holding up our map against a road sign when two young guys approach. One looks very familiar. “Yes, he is the one who struck up a conversation about Barack Obama with me in the restroom,” I think to myself.

He tells us where to go, but reminds us that we have some time to kill before the trains run. He coaxes us to join him and his friend in their flat across the street to have a beer while we wait. It seemed a little sketchy and was probably not a wise decision, but whatever. I’m in Europe.

I make sure he knows we can’t stay long, only one beer. We talk about music and he blasts some 90’s brit pop loud enough that we have to shout to converse and the neighbors came to tell him to turn it down. We talked about traveling. He spent a considerable amount of time in Africa and had written a book about it, which he showed us. Unfortunately, it was in German and therefore useless to me. The Canadian girl gave me look so I knew she wanted to go. She went to the restroom to pour out her beer while I chugged mine so we could be on our way. We stopped by a street meat vendor on the way to the train and had a raucous fun time with some young people, joking about the quality of the food and Borat while the vendor cooked up some sausages. Mine wasn’t fully cooked and I choked down half of it as a hangover prevention technique. I was wobbly and covered in bread crumbs while eating on the train. The man across from me was wearing a suit and reading a paper.

We made it to the hostel by 7am and I showered and checked out because I had to do it before 10. Then I lied down with my pack on a couch in the common room and did my best passed out wookie impression until noon.