From the travel journal: Vienna

I woke this morning thinking of sitting at the Starbucks on Koenigsstr. in Stuttgart, laughing over cheesecake and coffee while the sun beat oppressively down on the summer thoroughfare outside. The moment seemed important because of what we were laughing about: Was it boys? A prospective fairytale? Plans for the future? I don't remember anymore. I do know that, chronologically, it was definitely before any of us had boys or prospective fairytales (unless you count the German to whom I'd been introduced once that summer who, out of the blue, sent me a dozen roses across the Atlantic the next winter.) 

Anyhow. I went looking through my journals for the answer, but no luck. I found this instead, this pair of entries about Vienna:

23. August 2009
Wien doesn't call to me like Berlin does. The streets feel cramped and crowded and tourist-filled. Fewer people speak German with us, and things feel more staged--more commercial. People come here from all over the world looking for Europe, and the city exists to give them what they're after. I remember feeling this way about Salzburg, too. 

24. August 2009
. . .In the evening, we took the U-Bahn one stop past our hotel to find dinner; what we found was Wien. Suddenly, the streets widened, the houses pulled themselves together, and the light--oh, the light: pouring in sheets over facades of pastel and marble, making the cobbled streets glow ebony by contrast. We bought bread and cheese and chocolate and picnicked beneath the sun-gilded dome of Karlskirche. "This is Europe," we told each other, watching bicyclists pass, letting the breeze dipping away from the fountain brush our faces. 

And, "This is Europe," we told each other again, later, when we rounded a corner and found ourselves at the end of a broad, white avenue, luminous in the dusk, with a fountain of crystalline blue and purple and green and gold in the distance, flaming up towards the dark sky.

Our disappointment with the city, the dust and frustration of the train station, tiredness--all of it was swept away by the sudden, overwhelming sensation that we had arrived.

 We could call this: Vienna delivers, with irony. We found what we were looking for; in a sense, we created it. And that rounding of the bend, the awesome, flaming light, remains one of the most startlingly beautiful memories of the trip.

Karlskirche in the evening (Vienna, 2009)