Vienna, Via Escalator

The Amadeus movie. Mozart. The slow realization that all of the people I thought were the interesting Germans were actually Austrians who happened to speak German.

That Vienna was the original Paris, and Paris is a stinky knockoff.

That Marie Antoinette was Austrian, not French.

Everything I loved about history, and aesthetics, and music had been leading back to Austria for decades before I understood that was what was happening.

So it is not an accident that I ended up with a pen pal from Austria in the mid-nineties.

We wrote for years. Then less. Then life happened, as it does, and the advent of social media made individual correspondence feel redundant when your day-to-day life was already public with all your friends.

We stayed in contact, loosely, the way you do across decades and distance. And when I finally had a chance to take another European trip, Vienna was going to be on the stops.

Not maybe. Not if it works out. On the stops. And I was going to meet her.

I planned the whole journey to make sure we arrived in Vienna by train, via Salzburg.

Some things are not negotiable.

I expected Vienna to match the version I had been building in my head for thirty-something years. I did not expect it to exceed it. Those are not the same thing and the difference matters.

We came into the city at Hauptbahnhof, which is on the edge and not particularly attractive, and immediately got on the U-Bahn. Took the escalator up. Not stairs. An escalator.

Out into the plaza of St. Stephen's Cathedral.

I do not know if there is any other place in the world that does that for you. To go from deep underground and dark and come up an escalator into absolute glory.

It was crowded. I did not mind. The shops, the people, the cathedral, all of the alfresco dining, the street music. Sights and sounds that flooded us with emotion I cannot describe.

I was there. I had made it. A goal in life achieved on a step off an escalator.

Our place at the Elaya Hotel was around the corner. Affordable. Sophisticated in the quiet way that good European hotels manage without trying.

It introduced me to Nespresso, which is not anything earth-shattering or unique to Vienna, but that is good coffee out of a machine and I had been drinking it wrong my entire life.

My pen pal met us. She took us to the Schönbrunn.

As a lifelong resident, she's done the tour countless times. And she enjoys taking her friends to see the glory every single time.

I have the goofiest happy grin on my face thinking about it now. How many decades had I dreamed about seeing the Gloriette in person.

The facade. Right there. In front of me.

It is the living proof of greed, and exuberance, and a waste of funding that could have helped other people. I am still in awe of it. I was still so happy to see it.

That is incongruent with how I feel about royalty and concentrated wealth, and I am making peace with the fact that both things are true simultaneously.

Some things are beautiful and wrong at the same time. Vienna knows this about itself. That is part of why it works.

We could not stay long enough. We never can.

I wanted to accommodate my teenage son, expose him to the world, expand his horizons, without pressing the music and history I knew would not fit him yet.

What he found instead were a lot of wealthy people. We both found the city unexpectedly affluent in a way that reads on people's appearance before you consciously register it.

I missed things. I always miss things. That is the contract you sign when you travel on a timeline with other people who are not yet as invested in a place as you are.

I signed it willingly. I would sign it again.

What I know is that Vienna was not a disappointment dressed up as a triumph. It was the actual thing.

Thirty years of wanting something, and then it being as good as you needed it to be. That does not happen as often as the travel influencers would have you believe.

I am not a travel blogger. I am not going to give you the ten best coffee spots in Vienna or a ranked list of Instagram locations near the Ringstrasse.

That is not what this is.

What I am is someone who spent thirty years building a picture of a place, then spent three months researching how to actually get there, then got on a train, then stepped off an escalator into the thing I had wanted since I was young enough to have a pen pal.

And I want to help you do the same thing for whatever your version of Vienna is.

Not by planning it for you.

Not by holding your hand through it.

By showing you the logic of how I think about it, so you can apply that logic to the trip that has been living in your head for however many years you have been waiting to take it.

That is what this is for.