It’s a heatwave. I haven’t been this hot since the last time I had sex. It’s so hot that raising an eyebrow cause me to break into a hot sweat. I’m writing this from the main station in Salzburg, Austria. I never intended coming here but it’s an interesting story.
My plan was to go to Prague but I got up a little late in the morning and couldn’t be bothered changing money so I decided to head to Austria instead. My route would take me through Nürnberg and Munich on the way to Salzburg.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wouldn’t make it in one day so I decided to stop off in Nürnberg and check the place out. I don’t know if you’ve ever carried a large backpack around in 35 degree heat but it’s as stupid as setting up a treadmill in a sauna. It didn’t take me long to lose my cool as the worst map ever drawn led me to where a youth hostel might once have been but was there no longer. At this point the overheat trigger in my brain melted so I went to sit by the canal and cool down for a while.
In the midst of my cooling, as the sun began to go down and the temperature didn’t, I considered sleeping rough. Walking was not a good option at this point and the longer I waited the more it appealed. A glance at the temperature board revealed 29 degrees and it didn’t get much colder than that.
I headed down to the park which was full of layabouts such as myself. There is a canal running through the centre of town fed by a lake. As with a lot of European cities there is a new town that has sprung up around the original. It seemed like a nice place full of stupid people with too much money.
I prepared for my outdoor vigil by starting a fast. Nothing passed my lips during a 20 hour period apart from water. This was simply a case of waiting and not doing much, something which I had plenty of experience of from working in an office.
The native Nürnburgers are a funny lot. The sun went down at ten pm but that didn’t stop them riding bikes and roller blading around the lake till two am in the morning. The strangest thing about the whole experience was that the lake reminded me a lot of one in my hometown of Canberra, especially the bike track going around it. If I had been on LSD I think I might have started looking for my parents house but instead I just started to look for a place to have a lie down.
The park was lit up like day, as were most comfortable looking spots. I needed a place to hide my shame and avoid any local vagrancy laws. I wandered along the canal through little tunnels until I came to a large square full of light and rats. This didn’t seem like an ideal place for a kip so I backtracked until I found a beaut little spot. Behind me was a 12 foot high concrete embankment, in front of me a small stretch of grass before the bike track and canal. I was hidden from the glare of the light and could wait for the station to open in relative comfort.
It was still warm and humid and I had sweated my way through half my t-shirt supply. One of the last things I threw in my pack before I came was a sheet. I’m not sure why I packed it but it was proving as useful as Arthur Dent’s towel. With the sheet protecting me from the evening dew and my backpack doing a passable impression of a pillow I was far from comfortable. For an hour I was in the kind of sleep a dog is in when on guard. If my ears were capable of it they would have been twitching and swivelling.
I made it through the night and got up because the birds were so happy it filled my heart with an unrestrained joy. As I enjoyed a pre-dawn hobble to stop my joints seizing up I had a look behind me and staring at me from over the embankment and across the road was the PrinzRegent hotel. It was a lovely spot.
When I made it to Salzburg I found that it suffered from the same new/old town syndrome as most of the places I’ve seen in Europe. When you get out at the station the immediate impression is that the place is a shithole, but you know that’s not true because you’ve just come over a gorgeous mountain river with a castle perched above it. I don’t recall being in a city with such contrasting architecture. Ugly office blocks and hotels give way once you cross the river to what you imagine a small Austrian city would look like. You could take postcard shots for weeks.
The great advantage of the river is that it stays ice cold even in the extreme heat. The locals lined the banks of the river downing beers. It’s a bit like sitting in front of an open fridge. It’s a beautiful setting with mountains I h’ven’t seen the likes of since I was seven. I can hear the alps calling me.
Dave out.
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