4.30.07

bratislava, day two

i woke up on nicole's floor, still on the same side i went to sleep on, hips all out of joint. uncramping limbs, thinking about the slipperyness of my pajama pants (actually workout pants) and feeling like already i'd lost weight. travel diet. starvation diet. she put tea in my hands, a reddish, fragrant kind full of flowers and berries representative of tea over there. i ate yogurt and grapefruit on her tiny, precarious kitchen table while she bustled about with morning things.

as far as i remember, we walked around bratislava all day. more time-stamping tickets on the tram, little machine teeth biting into the slips of paper. i saved most of my ticket stubs. we walked on cobblestone streets and took pictures by the danube and got beer in little caves of bars and ate marzipan cake with delicate cups of tea in the viennese pastry shop. winding streets, dilapidated, patinaed roofs, a black cat sneaking around shrubs in a garden. everything grey except the buildings in the old town; those, red, yellow, blue, pink. monolithic churches that looked like people died in them. i took pictures of the wooden crosses outside.

later that night we met niki's friend jon ("math jon") for dinner at an upscale argentinian steakhouse. we inadverently ordered a hundred dollar bottle of wine (who knew you could do that in slovakia?) and it was a luxurious happening. the walls were urban brick and we were deep underground and niki developed an instant crush on the waiter. we said goodbye to jon outside the national theater and giggled our way home on the bus, drawing ill looks from the post-communist denizens of slovakian public transit.

that night i got more inventive in the arrangement of my comforters. wedged them between my legs, stuffed them under my head, wound them around my arms. the floor was didn't get softer, but became familiar.

vienna

we started the next morning early. more yogurt, more tea. niki's mugs she inherited from the last fulbrighter, mysterious brown stains ringing their insides. we took the bus to the train station at petr�alka, the nerve center of communist architecture in the city. grey, grey, and grey, with squares of solid color skipping up the balconies of the buildings. the train station was incongruously clean, filled with stainless steel and cobalt blue. it took a windmill-filled hour to get to the s�dbahnhof in vienna. while niki read her guidebook i took pictures out the streaky windows, marvelling at the incredibly visible border between the two countries. building blocks; rolling green. split histories.

vienna was shopping. we stayed in the area around the hapsburg palace compound, walking around the same four streets in a panicky, indecisive search for food. we settled on an out-of-the-way pub(?) with walls covered in trompe l'oeil. a mischievous cat in a window, an apple tree in the yard. we drank unfiltered beers as big as our heads and, as our waiter jovially informed me, i ordered something that amounted to "mixed fried." fried sweetbreads, it turned out. we shared venison carpaccio with fresh parmesan, truffle oil, and aged balsamic, launching nicole on a lifelong love affair with all things truffle.

i lumbered through h & m, searching for (and finding) the perfect present for rachel. a tiny, thin cotton tank top with a thin pastel geometric print. my skin prickled, too hot in my wool coat amidst the racks of clothes. i paced around the store, the first wave of travel exhaustion overwhelming. with a little desperation i told niki i'd wait for her outside.

i leaned against the face of the building, looking at my feet on the cobblestones near a gutter grooved into the street. people streamed down the thoroughfare, all trim jackets and exuberant shopping bags. when nicole came out, we bought pounds of chocolate and found a sculptured metal bench, wrapped around a tree, to eat it on. i popped little round balls of marzipan into my mouth and we shared a little package of mozartkugeln, biting through layers marzipan and caramel and chocolate and pistachio. we struggled with my burgeoning, irritated overstimulation. it passed with a slow walk in the cooling evening air.

walking through parts of the hapsburg compound, taking pictures of pink buildings like cake. sunsets, statues of rearing horses, spiky silhouettes of foreign trees in the spring. we sat on wooden benches in front of the old town hall at night, filigreed spires lit gold against midnight blue sky.

we talked about people from bowdoin we vaguely knew as we walked back to the train station, emerging from the iced buildings and cutting through the real, right-angled city, sidewalks stuck with gum. it felt like any conversation with nicole, walking home from any dinner under yellow streetlamps, but we were in vienna, and we were going home to slovakia.

the next morning, we took a train to poland.