Tales from the Niland Kitchen Table

I have one more paper to write, and as usual, I'm dragging over it. I checked out 'one day loan' books from the library, though, which means it'll need to be finished by tonight unless I want to pay a fine, so therefore miserly nature will hopefully win out over the procrastinator part.  But now before I get to that, I'm long overdue on writing about the last wonderful days in Vienna. I originally wanted to write this from the airport and call it 'Tales from the Vienna Airport' as a play on the famous Strauss song, but didn't, so here you are now, with my belated report arriving from the mundane but comforting center of my life in Galway.

On Monday morning, as a substitute for a far flung Austrian day trip or excursion to one of the neighboring countries, Alexa and I trekked out into the Viennese countryside after being inspired by a photo that had popped up on my Facebook feed a few days previously, courtesy of the very arbitrarily decided Places to See Before You Die. Called Burg Kruzenstein, the photo lured us in with the promise of a fairytale castle, complete with sweeping turrets, thick stone walls and a drawbridge, all situated neatly atop a mountain just a half hour away from our home base for the week.

Just as beautiful as the photograph prepared us, the castle was located in a little suburb town we reached by train, but then had to hike about half an hour to properly reach. The one catch to it's fantasy architectural structure was just that: it's literally a fantasy castle, reconstructed by someone very wealthy after the original was destroyed by age and warfare. Taking influences from fortresses around the world, it's been used as numerous movie settings, the one they're most proud of now is Nicolas Cage's Season of the Witch. I've never seen it, and heard its kinda laughably bad, but will probably now look into locating a copy to bask in happy Kruzenstein memories.

Because it was really cool, albeit kind of fake. I meandered around pretending I was in Winterfell, got yelled at by our Austrian guide we nicknamed Igor who had an evil twin working in the shady half-open bar next to the castle, and really just enjoyed being in a full castle and taking in the experience, which was quite different than the crumbling ruins of old Irish edifices. My favorite find of the day was also fitting with the fantasy element of the place. I found it in the hunting trophies room, which was all constructed as it would have been in real life, although like in the armory, none of the actual old artifacts were in anyway protected with glass- there were a lot of stuffed dead things the guy who bought the place keeps around for company or something. Anyway, on the mantle right above the door we exited through was a unicorn. Or...a sheep with a disproportionately enormous narwhal horn mounted on the front of it's head. I wished SO badly I could have taken a picture, but I did attempt to draw it for my friend yesterday to explain, so enjoy that accurate pictorial representation.

Another fantasy sort of experience we had but couldn't photograph was on the last day in Vienna, when we went to a morning practice of the famed Spanish Riding School, fancy white horses who do tricks and 'dance' to music. Tickets to the actual show go for hundreds of euro and sell out months in advance, but the daily training session was also pretty cool. While most of their horses still seemed to be in the beginning levels of training, they were beautiful and already doing difficult walks and maneuvers I've never seen any animal do before in real life.

During that last day, we also finally indulged in the ubiquitous Viennese coffee in an outside cafe. I sipped on a Wiener Melange and nibbled on Apfelstrudel (Apple Strudel!) while Alexa had a fizzy fruit drink and sachertorte, which I also tried and is now my top favorite dessert. (Did I mention we had ice cream almost daily?) We stretched the afternoon coffee experience well over two hours, followed by people watching in the shadow of St. Stephen's Cathedral, which became a major beloved landmark of the week.

Sitting in front of the cathedral with our ice creams is probably one of the major memories I'm going to take back from this spring break trip. It was a wonderful, relaxing week spent in a classically beautiful and refined city. Having my uncle as a host made everything that much better, and even though I was very far from home and my Irish 'home', it didn't feel so foreign. The world gets smaller each time I go a bit further into a new corner, and I quite like blurring the lines like that. On my return to Dublin, I remembered to say 'cheers' to the boy who sold me my sandwich, but almost thanked the bus driver for my change with 'danke'. Back to Galway was very much coming home from a well enjoyed vacation.