I have zero travel plans :( but love posting travel photos, so I’m going to mine some past trips. Two years ago this summer, I went to Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Italy, departing the day after I had quit what I now realize was a cushy job, the likes of which I will surely never have again.
My first stop, after being grounded by COVID for a year and a half, was Vienna, where I stayed in a recently (and only partially) rehabilitated flophouse with a heart-stopping view:
My first trip to Vienna coincided with what was—at the time—central Europe’s worst-ever heat wave. My memories of that trip are cast in the bleached-out white of sunheat and cavernous black of the city’s few shadows. But the first week of August was exquisite.
I suppose I also recommend meeting a beautiful Ukrainian who rolls his own cigarettes and knows Joseph Brodsky off by heart, but I realize these things can be hard to arrange. I also met up with a fellow Twitter TERF for the first time in real life, which is much easier to organize and also lovely.
There was one sour experience, though: the Secession Museum. Turns out the Secession Museum doesn't really concern itself with art history but claims instead to present contemporary art movements that are as revolutionary as the Secession was in fin-de-siècle Vienna. But if such a movement exists in contemporary art, the curators didn't find it:
This would be a sad note to leave one of my favorite cities on, so here are few photos I took in Vienna the first time around:
There are cities that are sheer delight to explore whether you’re alone or traveling with a friend (Vienna) and then there are cities where you feel awfully lonely traveling on your own (Salzburg).
I’d been to Salzburg years ago, with my whole family in tow. Going back alone wasn’t nearly so much fun (for one thing: my dad wasn’t there shamelessly sampling landjäger!). Salzburg is beautiful, but throws itself at the feet of the luxury traveler and, in particular, the luxury shopper. And, I’ve got to be honest, all the women in niqabs—looking as though they’d been censored from the life of the city they silently roamed—depressed the hell out of me.
There’s also the second-city effect where you go first to a city that you love insensibly (Vienna, Lisbon, Paris, Venice), and then whatever city you go to next, no matter its merits, suffers by the comparison (Salzburg, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Florence).
So, whenever I'm feeling uninspired, I switch over to black-and-white photography and take more of a street-photography approach.
I don’t know which is your more profound talent -- writing or photography.
When I saw the caption photo of the cyclists I was convinced you were going to say that the one in the voluminous frock was a man...