Today is Day Five in Vienna. My mind is processing a new
reality where most of the language circulating around me is unintelligible. My
senses are processing a new reality where the landscape and architecture are
wholly unfamiliar. And my body is processing a new reality where it is sore and
aching from walking, climbing, more walking, and more climbing in a nonstop pursuit
to go everywhere and see everything.
I’m calling a halt. We just can’t do it all, even in a
month. The goal of this program, The Good Life Abroad, is to live like a local.
I’m a local in Houston. I do not cram every moment with things to do and places
to be. Sometimes I just veg out, laze around, read a book. Don’t you?
The TV hasn’t been turned on since we got here. Programming
is in German and our three months of German tutoring didn’t give us the
foundation to get much out of German language TV. It has helped with person-to-person
interactions, but not as much as you’d think.
When I asked one young woman in a shop if she spoke
English, she looked at me like I’d lost my mind and said, “Of course.” It seems
that people start English language lessons in primary school. Imagine that. The
people who we’ve had a harder time communicating with are older Austrians and
ones who seem to be from other countries themselves.
Google Translate is a handy app and it helps. Rummaging
around in our recently acquired German vocabulary turns up odd tidbits that
unlock puzzles, too. And it’s comforting to be in our travel group from time to
time and have the buzz of English going on around us.
The group has regular gatherings every week. Tuesday is a
group lunch and Thursday is a group happy hour. Our hosts cover the costs of
those. They also offer us one or two local excursions each week. Today we went
to the Schönbrunn
Gardens for a stroll, where we saw the incomparable Neptune Fountain.
Afterward, we had a tour (that we paid for) of the Schönbrunn Palace.
I have quite a few lovely photos, but I am incapable in
my present state of exhaustion of showing them to you. Looking up the palace
and fountain on the internet would be fascinating and worthwhile.
I can’t give you actual mileage of how much walking and
stair climbing our day involved, but you’ll get the idea from this blow-by-blow.
From our apartment, we walked three blocks to the tram stop, caught our tram and
off we went. At the tram station, we disembarked and walked a ways to an underground
train station where we hopped on for a short ride.
When we got off, we hiked to another station to get on a
different underground train for a lengthy ride to our destination. After
climbing a long flight of steps up from the train, we found ourselves at a vast
parking lot full of tour buses. Off in the distance were the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace. (Ok, maybe
they weren’t that far, but it seemed like it.) The grounds encompass over 400 acres.
We walked in through the main gate and around the huge
palace complex to the gardens, then across an enormous expanse of shrubbery,
gardens, and lawn to the Neptune Fountain. After that, we walked all the way
back around to the front of the building, then to the wing on the opposite side.
That took us to the beginning of the tour, which wound through the first floor
of that wing, up a very long flight of stairs, and around the Emperor’s family
quarters on the second floor. Even the gift shop at the end was a warren of six
rooms!
To say we were exhausted is such an understatement. We left
our building at 9:30 am. It was 1:30 pm by the time we finished the tour. We still
had to find lunch and start the long trek back home. We did finally get back to
our apartment around 4:00 pm, barely functional. And, you know, we had to go out again if we
wanted to eat dinner.
I am not complaining, exactly. I’m just recognizing that
we have to get a lot more realistic about what two people who are closer to 80
than they are to 70 can do in a day. We need some quieter days and the
realization that this is not a competition to see who can do the most in 30
days. I’m looking for a lot more balance, literally and figuratively!
When have you tried to do way too much and paid for it
with aching knees and hips?
Auf Wiedersehen
