A Very Expensive Practical Joke
“Freud was medically trained in Vienna.”
–My college Social Psychology instructor, Dr. Barbara Banks, starting another boring lecture.
By now, most of my friends knew how I got a detention in college, something unheard of in normal circles.
It was my last semester, I was taking a class I thought would be great because it combined my favorite disciplines, psychology and sociology, but it wasn’t; and the only thing that kept me going to class was my classmate Golda Mantinband. Despite her presence, I skipped as many classes as I attended, but I had to go the day the instructor started a unit on Freud because it was the last section before an exam. I arrived just as the professor was finishing the previous unit and I was in top cynical form because I didn’t want to be there. So, when the professor started the unit in her strange Julia Child-like sing-song voice by saying “Freud was medically trained in Vienna,” I couldn’t resist whispering, “…And hermetically sealed somewhere else” in my best Groucho voice. We both roared with laughter, which prompted the teaching assistant to order us to stay after class.
As a result, we never sat together again, I sat behind another woman, fell in love with her neck, began dating her on the last day of classes and began a chain of events in my tragic love life that later prompted me to stop dating for four years, but that’s a story for another time.
Consequently, I thought it would be funny if I popped over to Vienna for the day, called Golda and, in my best Barbara Banks voice told her I was calling her from Vienna to let her know Freud said hello.
Hey, no one said in-jokes had to be amusing to anyone other than the people who shared them, and I thought this was pretty damn funny. Of course, the thought of another day in Bratislava may have colored my judgment. When I learned there was a “Believe It or Not Hostel,” my fate was sealed.
The problem with elaborate practical jokes is that they count on so many factors falling into place: the time zone difference must be considered, the recipient has to be awake enough to get it and she has to be home. It also means that the joker has to have a good sense of timing.
My timing was imperiled from the start. The hostel I wanted was full, but the owner referred me to another one nearby. I got the key to the six-person apartment at a building across the street, went to my building, took the elevator up and stowed my stuff. As I did so, an irritated resident knocked to tell me I’d left the elevator door open, but didn’t close it himself. It wasn’t until the door shut behind me that I realized my keys were on the other side of the door and I was locked out. As a can-do kind of guy, I figured I could run back down the street, tell the manager I was an idiot, get help getting in and everything would be fine. Just one problem: I couldn’t get out, either. Since it was a security building, residents needed a key to get in and out. This seemed strange, but I’d spent so long in the third world that I wasn’t altogether sure there wasn’t some sort of twisted logic at play.
My only hope was to go from door-to-door praying someone would answer and let me out. A good plan in theory, but it was 3 p.m. on Saturday in a country where English is the not first language. I’m sure the people on the other side of each door were debating whether or not to answer someone they didn’t know, who didn’t speak their language, and shouldn’t have been in their building in the first place. I lost every round of this fight until I came to an apartment with odd sounds emanating from it. I listened for quite some time, trying to figure out if it was a fight or a couple engaging in odd sexual practices involving yelling and, maybe, pain. I didn’t want to interrupt this special moment, but the only other option was knocking on a door next door to theirs that would have aroused (maybe that wasn’t the right word) their suspicion anyway.
So I rang the doorbell….
And the screaming stopped.
I suddenly felt like I was on “Let’s Make A Deal” and that I had foolishly allowed myself to be enticed by the curtain lovely Carol Merrill was standing near.
A shirtless man looking none-too-happy answered, heard my explanation, took me downstairs, showed me the button I needed to push to get out of the building, grunted in response to my thanks and stormed back upstairs.
As I left the building I passed a group of people speaking Australian accented English as they headed into the building I had just left. It turns out the group, all from Melbourne, was headed to the apartment I had gotten locked out of, so they let me back in and I got my keys.
Having spent more than an hour getting settled in, locked out and let back in, I knew it was too late to call, but I found a phone booth just down the street and tried anyway. I don’t know if Golda was asleep or not home, but there was no answer. Not wanting to give away the surprise, I hung up and resolved to try again later.
I would have spent the time between calls roaming the streets ducking into shops in the area near where I was staying, but none were open. Nothing was. Although it was only 4 p.m. on a Saturday, the streets were as deserted as downtown Des Moines, Iowa on a Sunday afternoon. Pedestrians were few and the only cars passing through the neighborhood appeared to be piloted by lost travelers who seemed to have taken a wrong turn on a weekend drive through Normandy and had resolved to keep driving until they saw something that looked familiar. After seeing most of the neighborhood on the edge of downtown and finding nothing, I went back to the apartment and joined the Australians in a two-hour game of “spoons,” the card version of musical chairs using utensils instead of chairs.
I went out again around 7 p.m. in search of something to do and heard drums in the distance. Puzzled by percussion in a city known for classical music and decomposing composers, I ran through the neighborhood searching for the source. Five minutes later I found a drum and bugle corps competition. No small affair, there were six or seven bands filled with adults beating their brains in to the amusement of 400 onlookers. It was a larger crowd than I would have expected to attend such an event, even if their kids were playing, but then again I forgot that Austria isn’t just a country known for classical music. Its record from World War II shows it’s also Germany lite, a third less militaristic than the regular Germany.
As for the call to Golda, I finally gave up after three tries and left a message on her answering machine.
It was an expensive, failed practical joke because Vienna is a pricey place, in comparison to the Eastern European cities where I’d stayed. A bed in an apartment for $18 may sound cheap, but it was frighteningly high compared to the $4 I had spent for a bed in a dorm room in Bratislava or the $9 I had paid for a triple room in Brno two nights earlier. Food costs so much and my budget was so tight I couldn’t eat in most of the city’s restaurants, even the supposedly cheap, fast food places. Although I only ate at McDonald’s when I was truly desperate, I always visited the golden arches in each country to get a feel for the cost of living in a particular place. At $4.50 for a Big Mac, Vienna had the distinction of having the most costly chain burger I saw the whole trip (I was told the burgers are even more expensive in Salzburg, however). Even the architectural museum I visited Sunday was a budget buster. All visitors had to check their backpacks and it charged $8 to do so. Admission was twice that.
One of the museum’s previous visitors was so upset over the cost complained in the visitor’s signature book saying museum administrators should be ashamed. In a way, the complaints reminded me of graffiti I saw on the wall outside Elvis Presley’s Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee, which said, “Elvi$, your price$ are too high.”
To be fair, Vienna looks pricey. The streets are clean, the old buildings shiny and well maintained, and even when everything was closed it still gave off an air of efficiency, which explains why everything was so much more expensive than in Eastern Europe. One of the many things I’d learned on the trip is the countries that have their shit together are expensive because they have national industries to help bring in money, supplies are plentiful and their residents have a higher standard of living so they can afford consumer goods. Those that don’t have their shit together are cheap because they don’t have any national industries to speak of to bring in money or foreign investment, supplies are limited, the standard of living is low and the prices are low either because the government has to provide subsidies or the citizenry wouldn’t be able to buy anything.
The best measure of how expensive the country is was its impact on my wallet. During a visit that lasted less than two days I spent more than $100. Again, not much, but in most countries where I traveled that would have covered room, food and incidentals for four or five days.
I did find one attraction that wasn’t expensive at all: the Composers’ Cemetery. After all, there’s nothing like dead musicians to brighten up your day: and Vienna has plenty including Lizst, Schubert and Beethoven. Since it also appeared to be the burial place of the city’s most important people (“Welcome to Death Styles of the Rich and Famous”), I thought there was a chance that Freud might be buried there. I’ve rarely been one to stop flogging a dead horse until someone takes it away and this was no exception. I figured I could salvage the visit if I could find Freud’s grave and have someone take a picture of me posed in front of it. Then I would mail it off to Golda and give her a laugh. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it. I did find a rickety old Jewish cemetery and spent an hour roaming from headstone-to-headstone trying to find out if anyone famous was buried there. The day wasn’t a total loss. Since my sister is a classical music fan, I took pictures of the graves of some of her favorite composers.
I closed out the day by going with my roommates to see a free opera movie in a city park, showing Leonard Bernstein directing the Vienna Symphony. The film lasted two hours and then we went home. I couldn’t believe I called these places home, but what choice did I have? If I didn’t I’d have to think of myself as homeless.
Now, that’s a cheery thought.
Maybe I really needed to see a familiar face more than I ever realized. I took the Orient Express to Budapest the next morning while marveling over one of the strangest joys of traveling in Europe to an American like me. If I didn’t like the country I’m traveling in, I could hop a train and know that the next country and language were just hours away. Unlike the US where, even if the border of a nearby state is close, you still have to travel far more than a few hours to get out the country.
And that’s so cool.