I actually had a problem getting to sleep last night, didn’t nap all day, and barely ate until supper. Those are kind of good things given, that until about Wednesday, my body was wondering what truck it had walked in front of.
I took my final journey to the clinic feeling pretty chipper. The Goofies were off playing pinochle and drinking Jack Daniels for most of the day. Now and then they would rouse themselves, grouse onto stage, go through the steps of their dance routine and drag themselves back to the card table, but their hearts clearly were not into it. The Slows never appeared at all – until mid-afternoon.
After my final visit to the clinic, I made it back to the apartment in record time, and a good thing that was because check out is noon. But I’d been up early, packed well, put the dishwasher to run, and was out the door by 11:40. Yesterday I scouted the route to the bus station, so I could find one most comfortable. I arrived in time for the 12;10 bus to Vienna, didn’t anticipate having to buy tickets on the Flixbus app, but was able to get the app, buy the ticket, and make the 12:40.
Once in Austria, the bus passes vast wind farms. Quite beautiful.
The bus took us to Vienna Hauptbanhoff, brand spanking new, all corporate polished stone and glass. The place I’d rented was about a kilometer away, an enterprise called Smart Apart Living. Expedia sent me the itinerary. Check in hours are 14:00 to 05:30, and late check in was by special arrangement. Late check in after 5:30 in the morning? Okay. The itinerary also noted that there was “no front desk.” The place in Bratislava also has no front desk, but that meant you go to a central office for check in and they order a (free) cab to take you to site.
Here it meant a machine.
PD and stress are great pals. They encourage each other, egg one another on. Plus, operating on Ivanna’s liturgy – some things will be more pronounced, other things will fade. Despite my trying to push events in the direction of The Long Light Cue, there is still an element of Boston Rush Hour. Perhaps it’s a light cue in a play about a Boston rush hour? But I digress. My voice; barely audible today. I identify strongly with my voice, and hate when it gets like this. Oh, and yeah. Stress.
I will not go – cannot go – into the whole machine saga, mostly because I don’t want to relive it, not even for you. Enough to say that to sign in one needs a reservation number, and Expedia did not provide it. I printed out everything sent me, and saved it to my phone, and scoured both seven or eight times. They did send me a number for “customer service” at the “hotel”. If you think those quotes foreshadow, you are correct. Every cliché parody of a customer service rep from hell played out over the next half hour. The only reason the calls ended at all was because my phone’s battery gave up its charge and mercifully switched me off. What the episode did not lead to was my getting into my room. Some of it was dumb stuff on my part, but the stress came from a woman on line who knew more about what I was not doing right than anyone previously born.
I went across the street to a cafe, asked if anyone spoke English. The owner said he did.
– Any recommendations for a good hotel in the area? He pointed across the street, I cut him off. Any others?
– Go towards Hauptbanhoff.
– Okay. So I did, found nothing, circled around, tried using Siri (I somehow still had a 7% charge… that was a slip, I mean, my phone did). Siri suggested three places that didn’t, as far as I could discover, exist on the physical plane, all within 60 meters and under two minutes. At some point I decided that I was too hungry to keep this up, so went back to the cafe.
– English menu, please. I can’t hunt hotels on an empty stomach. Oh, and is there a way I could plug in my phone somewhere, it…
– No. No place. Sorry.
So, I took my theoretical business to a theoretical elsewhere.
Turns out I’d not gone far enough towards Hauptbanhoff. There is a sizable hotel directly across, so I went in. Just seeing an expanse of lobby with leatherette upholstered chairs made me tear up. There were actual visible people behind the counter, lovely people who did not blame me for not having found a room before they issued me a key card.
I arrived in Vienna at 13:50. I inserted the key to my room at 16:45. Stress and PD are pals.
One of the clerks provided me with a map and directions on how to get into central city; only three stops on the 1 line.
– Great! And how do you buy tickets?
– Tickets? Oh, well, there are machines.
I went up, tried to shower the stress away, partially succeeded. I waited for my phone to charge. The waterproof jacket I was burdened with all sunny day long while wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt underneath, now had slick/soggy sleeve linings, so I spend some productive time using a hair dryer on them. Then reeling from hunger, I headed into town.
Signs in German, tons of people, suddenly I’m at the gate area for the number one subway. I look around. Three ticket machines tucked into a corner surrounded by people with suitcases, maybe sixty of them. I couldn’t figure out which direction the three stops would be in, and after seeing the Viennese outer districts, had no desire to visit them further, so I went back to the square I’d entered from and to a restaurant across the street.
Is it the PD, or is a certain style of food served in ways that makes it deliberately difficult to maneuver into your mouth? A tiny bowl of salad heaped with things that need cutting, but no room to cut them in. That was the appetizer for three large pieces of batter-cooked chicken. Pick a piece up to eat it, the batter all falls off, try to cut it, you have chunks of meat too big for your mouth and the batter all falls off anyway. But my waiter was so dear I wanted to ask him to be my grandson.
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Scusi, niente d’italiano oggi. Troppo stress.