What an ugly way to say butterfly.

I am a blatant racist. I can't help it. I flat out hate Germans.

This is not a holdover from the last post, although, let's be honest, that doesn't help. In my travels both before and on this trip so far (not in America, before you all get offended), maybe two of the eighty or so people I've met from Germany have been decent. At best, decent. The Eurotrash stereotype of the guy in acid-washed zippers-everywhere jeans, horrid sunglasses and constantly listening to techno, or as Corey Irwin would say "the douff-douff" music? He comes from Hamburg. Frankfurt. Berlin. And as far as women, they gave us Heidi Klum. That's about it.

And so they've collectively fucked up in general, annoying but no one thing overly egregious. I've given the Germans another chance and, following the pattern of the early 20th Century, then they really dick you over. I'm up at 5:30 am in Paris. And it's not to watch the sunrise, or beat the queue at the Louvre. Its because I confusedly woke up to the sound of retching, and still groggy thought "why does it smell like awful wine?" Oh. Because there's a lake of vomit on the floor of my hostel room. Right in the center of all the beds. Not even an attempt to make it to the bathroom, where if the guy failed on the way you could at least applaud the valor. No, he was already back asleep, the smug smirk of accomplishment on his face. And this degenerate of a flatmate.... he comes from Dusseldorf. Cologne. Stuttgart. I still have 3 days in Berlin on the horizon, and a return to Munich for Oktoberfest to change my mind, but we're not looking good at the moment here.

You know the really hot girl at the bar with the complete douchebag? You want to try to rescue her, give her an intervention, but she's insecure, has a long history with him, is a little too far down that road to see reason..... Yeah. That's Vienna. It deserves so much better.

Austria has been home to some of the greatest composers in history: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms (ignore Falco for a second). Even if they came from somewhere else, it was in Vienna that their talent bloomed. And so one walks the streets of Vienna as if the architecture were amplifiers, the streets and buildings evoking such wondrous music to match the opulence of their edifice. It has inspired not just classical music, but a bit more recently the quirky score of The Third Man. Mandolins and accordions and staccato improv, and that somehow produced one of the great accompaniments to a film ever. This is what Vienna should sound like. But begin to immerse yourself in the city's people, interact with the locals, and you get the AM radio static that passes for the German language. These are the very lips of grandeur, and they're forced to spew cacophony, the letters g and f by the dozen.

If not for this tragedy of linguistics I could see myself living in Vienna. It's majestic, still touristy but nowhere near as bad as Paris, and in some ways even more beautiful. But it's saddled with one of the most horrendous languages to survive the tumultuous centuries of European history. Latin is dead, but we still have "geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung" as a way to say "speed limit." Juliet's lament about a rose by any other name: disproved.

Now, about that queue for the Louvre......


(Vienna):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101472&id=35804394&l=dc4d0dcfae