We have a day off.
Scott and I get up late, and have lunch at the nearby Café Hummel, one of the old Viennese cafés. Then we set off for the city center on a quest, he to buy gifts for friends and family, I to acquire a fountain pen.
One Friday morning earlier in the trip, a group of us had met up with Tate, and he had showed us some bookstores and pen shops of interest. According to Tate, Vienna is the only city where you can find brown ink. Also, during one of our classes, he spoke of taking things back with us to remind us of the mindset we are in now, to guide us in the right direction, to bring back things we see and make us think like we are thinking now. I decide a fountain pen is an appropriate treasure.
We hop on the J, and get off at the Opera as usual. It takes Scott all of ten minutes to find gifts. Then it’s pen time.
We wander for a bit, trying to find shops at first. The only shops we find are along the main drags, Mont Blanc vendors who sell pens at prices way beyond practicality. It seems hopeless. Then we realize we are near Tate’s apartment, so we call up and he buzzes us in. He tells us of two good shops, and the quest is on.
The first shop is cluttered, full of boxes, stacks of paper, old packaging, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. There is hardly space to move, except from the door to the counter. I walk up and greet the lady who runs the shop, a frail old woman whose hands are literally skin and bones. Her movements are as delicate as she is; slow, careful, deliberate. I inform her of my quest. She rummages under the counter in boxes, trying to find my holy grail. There is no such luck here. Scott and I move on.
The next shop we visit is more of a paper store. On one wall, there is a good size display case full of all sorts of pens—Pelikan, Mont Blanc, Balligraph, Faber Castell. World class. I tell the lady my needs. She picks out three pens, all Pelikan. One is out of my price range. The other two are a beautiful blue and black instrument with silver accents. The other is green with gold, and it’s out of production. I am tempted by the rarity of the latter, but go with blue instead. I buy two bottles of ink—brown and blue—and a Moleskine datebook.
I spend the next few hours finding excuses to write.
Jeff’s friend from the Netherlands, Jab (pronounced “yob”), has come into town to stay at Jeff’s place for a while. Tonight Scott and I are hitting the town with him. When we return to the apartment, he is playing Oasis. We get to talking about music. It turns out we like a lot of the same stuff. He recommended some bands to me that I will have to check out when I get home—The Stands, Tosca, Jacques Brel, Kane, and Marillian.
At 7, I meet Kevan at the Loos American Bar for drinks. The “Loos bar” as it is known amongst the group is a bar by, obviously, Adolf Loos. A sign in the window says “NO GROUPS OR SIGHTSEEING.” Intimacy is clearly something the current owners wish to preserve. In fact, the first thing I notice when I walk in is how small the space is. Loos uses a few signature elements, such as lighting fixtures draped in cloth and a certain type of marble. He employs mirrors to make the space look bigger. A stairwell goes down to the restrooms below. I must go down them. At the bottom, a waiter asks what I’m doing down there. “Trying the stairs,” I say.
After Loos Bar, Kevan and I have dinner and stop by Tate’s apartment. Drew is there, and he comes with us to go meet Jab and Scott. We move on to a bar done by Gregor, First Floor. It is a classy sort of place with jazz music playing, reminiscent of an airplane hangar, with an extensive (as well as expensive) cocktail menu. We have some drinks, then go on to one more bar that is right alongside the Danube Canal. It is half outdoors, half indoors, and reminds me of the sort of place that street toughs in a Ninja Turtles movie would haunt. It is cold, and after an hour or so we go home.
I don’t know what it is about Vienna that I will miss the most. The things I am most upset about missing are the little things that I am apt to forgot right away and never remember—things like the walk up the stairs to the apartment, or the signs for the tram stops, or the way the overhead wires crisscross in a web at intersections. The night at the karaoke bar. What I was wearing the day we visited Rataplan. Overcoming a slight wave of panic swimming across the Danube, and how I wore shorts swimming because I didn’t have a swimsuit, and how I didn’t have a towel and my things got wet and getting ice cream on the walk back, but all that mattered besides my sketchbook was that I was surrounded by so many wonderful people. The great feeling I get during our times together will likely never be felt again, at least not in this context, and perhaps that’s what I will miss the most.
Scott and I get up late, and have lunch at the nearby Café Hummel, one of the old Viennese cafés. Then we set off for the city center on a quest, he to buy gifts for friends and family, I to acquire a fountain pen.
One Friday morning earlier in the trip, a group of us had met up with Tate, and he had showed us some bookstores and pen shops of interest. According to Tate, Vienna is the only city where you can find brown ink. Also, during one of our classes, he spoke of taking things back with us to remind us of the mindset we are in now, to guide us in the right direction, to bring back things we see and make us think like we are thinking now. I decide a fountain pen is an appropriate treasure.
We hop on the J, and get off at the Opera as usual. It takes Scott all of ten minutes to find gifts. Then it’s pen time.
We wander for a bit, trying to find shops at first. The only shops we find are along the main drags, Mont Blanc vendors who sell pens at prices way beyond practicality. It seems hopeless. Then we realize we are near Tate’s apartment, so we call up and he buzzes us in. He tells us of two good shops, and the quest is on.
The first shop is cluttered, full of boxes, stacks of paper, old packaging, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. There is hardly space to move, except from the door to the counter. I walk up and greet the lady who runs the shop, a frail old woman whose hands are literally skin and bones. Her movements are as delicate as she is; slow, careful, deliberate. I inform her of my quest. She rummages under the counter in boxes, trying to find my holy grail. There is no such luck here. Scott and I move on.
The next shop we visit is more of a paper store. On one wall, there is a good size display case full of all sorts of pens—Pelikan, Mont Blanc, Balligraph, Faber Castell. World class. I tell the lady my needs. She picks out three pens, all Pelikan. One is out of my price range. The other two are a beautiful blue and black instrument with silver accents. The other is green with gold, and it’s out of production. I am tempted by the rarity of the latter, but go with blue instead. I buy two bottles of ink—brown and blue—and a Moleskine datebook.
I spend the next few hours finding excuses to write.
Jeff’s friend from the Netherlands, Jab (pronounced “yob”), has come into town to stay at Jeff’s place for a while. Tonight Scott and I are hitting the town with him. When we return to the apartment, he is playing Oasis. We get to talking about music. It turns out we like a lot of the same stuff. He recommended some bands to me that I will have to check out when I get home—The Stands, Tosca, Jacques Brel, Kane, and Marillian.
At 7, I meet Kevan at the Loos American Bar for drinks. The “Loos bar” as it is known amongst the group is a bar by, obviously, Adolf Loos. A sign in the window says “NO GROUPS OR SIGHTSEEING.” Intimacy is clearly something the current owners wish to preserve. In fact, the first thing I notice when I walk in is how small the space is. Loos uses a few signature elements, such as lighting fixtures draped in cloth and a certain type of marble. He employs mirrors to make the space look bigger. A stairwell goes down to the restrooms below. I must go down them. At the bottom, a waiter asks what I’m doing down there. “Trying the stairs,” I say.
After Loos Bar, Kevan and I have dinner and stop by Tate’s apartment. Drew is there, and he comes with us to go meet Jab and Scott. We move on to a bar done by Gregor, First Floor. It is a classy sort of place with jazz music playing, reminiscent of an airplane hangar, with an extensive (as well as expensive) cocktail menu. We have some drinks, then go on to one more bar that is right alongside the Danube Canal. It is half outdoors, half indoors, and reminds me of the sort of place that street toughs in a Ninja Turtles movie would haunt. It is cold, and after an hour or so we go home.
I don’t know what it is about Vienna that I will miss the most. The things I am most upset about missing are the little things that I am apt to forgot right away and never remember—things like the walk up the stairs to the apartment, or the signs for the tram stops, or the way the overhead wires crisscross in a web at intersections. The night at the karaoke bar. What I was wearing the day we visited Rataplan. Overcoming a slight wave of panic swimming across the Danube, and how I wore shorts swimming because I didn’t have a swimsuit, and how I didn’t have a towel and my things got wet and getting ice cream on the walk back, but all that mattered besides my sketchbook was that I was surrounded by so many wonderful people. The great feeling I get during our times together will likely never be felt again, at least not in this context, and perhaps that’s what I will miss the most.
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