19 October 2008: Vienna, Austria

Ike woke me up at 9:00 for the moment I had been dreading for over twelve hours. Except, to my surprise, it was even worse.

He spoke for about 15 minutes, but the only way you can decipher what he says from the stuttering and mumbling mumbo-jumbo is by paying strict attention, and I was much too tired to pay any attention at all. When he finished talking I said something like "I don't want to go to church," and he replied "Not church. The Catholic Charity."

Well, that woke me up. I'm sorry, but going to the Catholic Charity crosses the line, it really does. I told Ike there was no way I was going to the Catholic Charity, and he said "You must go so you can go back to America." I told him for about the tenth time that I am in no rush to go back to America, and he said "But they will buy your plane ticket."

Uh, now I'm listening.

Ike just about picked me up off the bed and made me a bowl of rice, and as I ate he got my things together. I really didn't want to go to the Catholic Charity, for many reasons, but Ike was practically making me. I swear, he literally must have thought I was 13 years old. Just let me make my own choices.

But, of course, he didn't, and so we were on the tram heading for the Catholic Charity. And when we got there, Ike showed me how to ring the bell-- really, Ike?-- then apologized for not repaying me for the cigarettes and left. The end.

Since I was there, and since I figured what the hell, I went to ring the bell. And the second after I did, I noticed the sign above the door-- "Asylum for Refugees."

Ha!

And, wouldn't you know, no one came to the door because the place is closed on Sunday. Unbelievable. The place is freaking closed on Sunday.

Well, I was back on the street. And, additionally, still unemployed. So I went to the main hostel area that I hadn't gone to the previous day. The first place I tried didn't have any job opportunities, but the guy at the desk said I could store my stuff in the luggage room for the day. I accepted the offer.

At the second hostel, the girl at the desk called her manager to ask for me. I spoke to the manager-- a woman from Seattle-- and told her I was looking for hostel work in Vienna. She was as nice as could be, she really was, but she explained that since the summer was over she was actually already beginning to cut her staff, and so hiring a new worker was impossible. She did say that she could use a night porter, but that I would have to speak German so I could deal with the neighbors. Not going to happen.

I asked her, then, if there was even any work that I could do just for a bed to sleep in for the night, and she said she couldn't think of any. I asked if I could clean the coffee cup that was on the table where I was sitting in exchange for a bed, and she laughed and said that she would try to think of something and, if she did, she would call back to the girl at the desk and tell her.

That was that. I didn't have a job or a bed or anything that would help me, but at least the manager had been nice and tried to think of something-- since she said she usually likes to give people work for a bed, if they need it, but just at this point there was nothing.

(Although it was a bit discouraging to hear that she's in fact reducing her staff for the winter. I hope that's not the case everywhere.)

When I hung up, I handed the phone back to the girl, and a guy who had overheard me starting asking about my adventure. I told him that I've been traveling around and looking for work. And I mentioned off-handedly, as I had told the manager, that I would even be willing to work for a bed and nothing else if it was possible, since I needed a place to crash.

The girl at the desk overheard me, I guess, and said that if I needed a place to crash I could just stay at her place. She said she lived next door and was already letting one person from the hostel, whose money had run out, sleep on her floor. So one more wouldn't hurt.

That was good enough for me, and I told her I'd be back at 7:00.

The day was mine. And, as I learned, the thing about Sunday is that it is the best day to be in a city because things are free.

But I didn't learn this immediately. I first went to the Museum Quarter and popped into a couple museums, but they all cost between €6 and €8. I even went to the Spanish Riding School, just to see what on earth was going on there, and considered getting a ticket for Morning Exercise until I realized that it cost €12. Yes, twelve euro to watch horses go through their morning exercises.

(Although, when you consider that the horses lay golden eggs, maybe €12 isn't so much after all.)

I went to one more museum in the Museum Quarter and it, too, was €6, but it was here that the woman at the ticket counter told me about the free museums.

The first one I went to was the Wien Museum, which is the main national museum of Vienna. I don't know what the price would have been normally, but there was a lot of art and some interesting history. A cool place, for sure, although only about one-third of the pieces in the museum had English descriptions to go along with the German ones. So it probably wouldn't have been worth paying to go in if you can't speak German and can't "understand art" without knowing what's going on. And I can't do either.

Then I went to the Beethoven's apartment museum, which is where he lived while in Vienna, and which is really just an apartment with some pictures of Beethoven on the walls and a fake keyboard that has headphones playing his music. That's it. No furniture, no personal items, nothing. I mean, it's listed under "museums," but it really could have been any apartment in the entire world, just if the person who owned it actually lived somewhere else and liked to keep pictures of Beethoven in his empty apartment. It was nothing at all like Beethoven's apartment in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"-- I don't know why the museum curator decided to change it, but it wasn't anywhere near as authentic as I had expected.

When I left Beethoven's digs most of the museums were about to close and I had to go back and get my stuff, anyway. I found the first hostel pretty easily, but had a bit of a time locating the second. When I did, the girl was forunately still working. And still offered me a couch.

Except it wasn't a couch. And it wasn't, as I had actually expected, just the floor. The girl literally went into one of the closets in the hostel office and came back out with a mattress. I didn't really have any spare hands, and anyway the mattress probably weighed four pounds, so the girl carried it up for me.

When we got up to her flat the other couch-surfer was making dinner. She is a Portuguese girl named Riquel who is studying at the University of Vienna but hasn't found her own flat yet. Although she's been in Vienna for a couple months, so I'm not really sure what the hold-up is. Maybe she's just going to move in.

Anyway, Riquel had made an omelette, sort of, and she gave me half of it and made me a cup of tea, which was lovely of her. She also told me that the hostel girl's name is Astrid, which was good to know. Astrid said I could stay a couple days and that, if I ever needed to find her, she would either be in the flat or at the hostel. One of those two places, and nowhere else. I asked her what she was doing that night, and she said she would be hanging out at the hostel. Because "that's what I always do."

Now, my ideal job on this adventure would be to work in a hostel, I admit that. But I don't think I would like it if hanging out at my workplace was "what I always do," no matter how fun that workplace might be. I asked Astrid if that was really all she ever did, and she said yes; she's literally always around and knows everything that goes on and knows everyone who's staying there and that's one reason why she often lets people crash at her place-- because they always see her around and so they ask her.

And that, my friends, could have been my life if I had gotten a hostel job. But lord I hope not.

After talking for a while Astrid went down to the front desk-- not because she was working, just because she was hanging out-- and I took a shower and then went down myself. I went to the hostel bar and made a joke to the girl next to me, asking her just how bubbly she thought the soda water was-- because it said "VERY bubbly"-- and then asking her if she thought it was so bubbly it would get me drunk, because it was two euro cheaper than the beer. She laughed and bought me a beer. Good going, Zach.

I kept talking to this girl for a while, an English girl named Marion, and we were hitting it off swimmingly although she wasn't really in the least bit cute. But she bought me two beers and then a bottle of wine which we split. So it was all good.

I met another girl, an Australian who was staying there, who asked me if I was using CouchSurfing.com when I told her how I'd been travelling. I told her no, that I've been meeting people, and was about to say "using the website is too easy" when she literally beat me to it. I mean, she literally said those exact words and added "the challenge is the fun part." I couldn't believe it, I told her that was EXACTLY what I thought.

So I started telling her some of the stories from my adventures, and she was loving them-- the one about the Hobo Brawl was her favorite, understandably. She said that she had wanted to do her trip on couches but that her friend, whom she was traveling with, had absolutely refused. I told her to meet me in Italy at some point, and she instantly told me it was a plan. But her friend overheard and said it was out of the question. Damn, girl, shush your mouth.

Anyway, the whole thing was really pretty fun, and when the Australian girls left Marion and I went with an Austrian dude to a bar down the street and had another drink-- although I paid for this one. Astrid had told me to be back at the hostel at 12:00 so she could let me into the flat, which was fine by me, and so we went back and I was asleep by 12:30. Again. But at least I was back on track.

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The best part about this night was that I was able to have all the fun of a hostel without any of the commitment. Or the "hosteler" tag. Or the hostelness. Or knowing that I was paying to sleep in a hostel and paying to be a hosteler. I was just hanging out in the hostel and hanging out with kids who were staying in a hostel, but I was still kicking it on the couches and doing it my own way. Which was sweet. And, most importantly, I can't even begin to explain how nice it was to be able to be funny again. Or, at least, to be able to make jokes again, whether or not they were funny. That's the main problem of crashing on couches-- the fact that, other than Tomi or Charles who speak nearly flawless English, the people I've been staying with typically miss subtle jokes and irony. So it was nice to be able to make people laugh again.