In vain I begged him to tell me more. “You will hear and see enough before morning,” he answered. “We have three years of the past to discuss. Let that suffice until half-past nine, when we start upon the notable adventure of the empty house.”
And it was indeed like old times when, at that hour, I found myself seated beside him in a hansom, my revolver in my pocket, and the thrill of adventure in my heart.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House”
When I finished my first European journal back in the winter of 2020, I had every intention of following it up soon: perhaps another trip to the Continent that very summer, or 2021 at the latest. After all, there was so much to discover, and I’d only really just scratched the surface by going to two countries — surely there was more writing material to be mined by doing it again, by going farther abroad?
Well, we all know what happened next. COVID arrived, and my dreamt-of excursions kept getting pushed farther and farther back, became more and more distant as time went by. There was a brief spot of hope in the summer of 2021 when the pandemic seemed to be clearing up and I began planning in earnest for a trip to the Dubai World Expo (with two days’ stopover in Qatar, no less!) but then the Omicron variant reared its ugly head and all that became a moot point.
Three years down the line, though, it’s became reasonably safe to go travelling again: masks are coming off, cities have been filled once more with hustle and bustle, and the week before I left town, the WHO officially announced the end of COVID as a global health emergency. With that in mind, my 2019 travel mate Dennis and I began to plot and scheme once more, thinking of places we could go to celebrate the end of what has been a very long and exhausting pandemic. The original idea was to pick up where we’d left off four years ago and start from Berlin, but then a coffee-loving friend of ours came aboard (of whom more later) and we switched out Berlin for the even more wonderful city of Vienna.
The results were, as one might expect, quite intriguing. For ten days, my friends and I walked, talked, and photographed our way through a dizzying array of sights and scenes; we met loads of lovely people, and my friends also met loads of lovely animals. (I, meanwhile, met loads of not-so-lovely viruses.) We ate our way through quite a variety of cuisines — we were even able to tear Dennis away from his beloved pasta carbonara a couple of times — and we rode our way through an even wider variety of landscapes, seascapes, and escapades to last an entire lifetime. And so it’s only natural that this series makes its long-overdue return, and I serve my readers an unsolicited twelve-week (?!) series of ramblings once more.
The ground rules set during the previous two go-arounds still apply: no real in-depth musings, lots of monologuing on my part, shameless butchering of conversations even with my friends. (I did make an effort to write down things as they happened or at the end of the day, but by and large this will still be pretty me-centred and filled with variations of “and then we went THERE, and it was LOVELY”.) I will say, though, at the outset, that there were fewer revelations this time round: not a lot that inspired to go “whoa, I am wasting my life back in Hong Kong” or “I really don’t like how miserable I am now”. This was a much more evenly pleasant experience than 2018/2019, some of which I attribute to having matured a bit, and also due to me being able to voice out my thoughts and feelings to my friends a little more — so if you’re looking for a BIG EMOTIONAL NARRATIVE, one that provides a whole journey of (re)discovery or character building or whatnot, you’re going to be disappointed. However, what I can promise are a lot of wonky photos, occasional jokes, and of course some heavy harping on historical context. As I said way back in my first entry in November 2019: if even one single person has fun reading these ramblings, I’ll die a happy man.
Right, practical editorial stuff: this series will run weekly on Fridays, with each entry (however long it is) describing the action of one day — with one exception. We took a sleeper train between Vienna and Hamburg, a first for any of us, and I thought that the experience warranted its own entry between days 4 and 5 — maybe that won’t be the case when I come down to writing it, but if there’s one thing I know I’m good at, it’s piling up the wordcount. See you all for the first post next week! 🙂
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 