Vienna or Where are the sausages?

I can’t really say much about Vienna.  We did spend two days there, but we really didn’t do much.    In Vienna we all started to feel the weight of the trip.  We had covered a lot of miles, seen countless amazing things, and eaten numerous amazing meals, and in many ways we were just completely full in every sense of the word.  Plus, living like a gypsy out of a backpack takes its toll.

That’s not to say that we did nothing.  Doris, our couch surfing host, suggested a food market, an ice cream parlor, and a place to swim in the Danube river, and that’s pretty much all we did while we were in Vienna.

If I were explaining that to a non-travel weary version of myself, the fresh version of myself would probably say something like, “It doesn’t matter if you are tired.  Go see a classical concert.  Go to the Hapsburg palace.  Go see the Breughals paintings, for heaven sake.”  And it might sound crazy to you as a reader, but we were dead tired, and in travel there really is a law of diminishing returns.  You really can see too many churches, museums, historical sites, or whatever.

In this way travel is a great reminder that you can’t live life at full tilt.  A life of constant stimulation is ultimately futile because the stimulation that used to invigorate you is the same stimulation that exhausts you later on.  You need space.  You need distance.  You need rest.

Or to put it this way: I need space.  I need distance.  I need rest.

I was thinking about this idea of diminishing returns in terms to my approach to a particular place like a museum.  After a museum visit I was telling Joey how much more satisfying it would be to me if I had a membership to that museum, and visited it throughout the year to see a particular piece or a particular group of pieces after I had studied them on my own.  Then when you see the thing it isn’t about consuming it as a tourist, but enjoying it as an appreciator.  When you travel this way, so many places in a short span of time, you see most things as a consumer.   Honestly, the places and things I have enjoyed the most on this trip are not the surprises, but the things that I already knew something about, things that I already loved, like the Ghent Altarpiece or The Oath of the Horatii in the Louvre.

I went into this trip having down a minimum amount of research compared to previous trips.  This was for two reasons.  The main reason was that I had been to a large percentage of these cities before, and I already knew what to see and why it was important.  The second reason was that I thought being a little underprepared would add to the spontaneity of the trip.  I don’t know if that has been true or not, but either way, I wish I would have prepared myself more in terms of research.  For me enjoyment doesn’t come from just being in a place, but from understanding the place from a historical or artistic or philosophical perspective.  I have to have context, otherwise it is just a pretty place that feels strange and that I feel alienated from.

Anyway, I would like to go back to Vienna some day on the front end of a trip.  It really is a beautiful city.