If you take stock of everything in your life and think, “Wow, this is exactly where I want to be.”
Then you are a truly blessed person.
If you take stock of everything in your life and you’re not where you want to be, there really isn’t anything in the world keeping you from doing it. Any obstacles are in your mind.
But, if you take stock of everything in your life and you realize that you can just be okay wherever you are at the moment and that’s completely okay.
Then you are a traveler.
But sitting in the Vienna State Opera House listening to Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” from the loge… there is no traveler – no matter how jaded – that would not be moved by such an experience.
Walking through, taking the tour of the operahouse? That’s a tourist. Finding tickets of a sold-out opera 4 hours before (chalk one up to my sister) and seeing an actual opera? That’s a traveler. There’s a big difference.
But anyways, its just good to be in a German-speaking land once again.
Full of windmills and full of hard consonants, this is once again in a very familiar land. I’m more at home with the train system here than even back “home” in Greece.
But, in general, they’re just great cities to explore. Get lost and go.
We HAD one of those RoughGuide books, but – as I mentioned in a previous post – it was horrible. Now we’ve replaced it with a LonelyPlanet guide for its really really great maps. But honestly, each and every time we have purposefully left the book at the room and gone out to find something to eat, we have found the most extraordinary places… way off the beaten path and better than almost any restaurant in America I’ve ever been.
Lesson #2 for this post on being a traveler and not a tourist: go eat. Go find the food away from the main roads. Make your eating experience an EXPERIENCE and not just a pit stop for fuel. McDonalds is a pit stop. Your food in a foreign country should not be.
Oh well, we still have a while in Vienna but the next chapter of the trip won’t be far behind.
(I love the natural contrast in that one.)
…and I need some socks.
Stay tuned,
-Noah D.
