About where highschoolers in Melk get drunk

Last weekend IKI, my Deutsch school, organized a bus tour to the Wachau, a region along the Donau about an hour’s drive from Wien. It’s a lush valley filled with quaint little towns that grasp and reach for tourist money, a sincerely beautiful stretch of the river.

We came primarily for the semi-ancient abbey which stands in Melk, of which we were given a tour in German. It was incomprehensible to me for two reasons. First, the entire thing was auf Deutsch, which I still can’t understand well enough to make sense of a historical account of the Refirmation, even if I recognize that’s what he’s talking about. Second, the museum portion of the Abbey was, in a word, bizarre. The whole works was remodeled in the last five years, and I think that in reaching for a modern look they may have overlooked taste. Each room you enter has a theme: one is lit entirely by bright teal lights and features perhaps-profound German phrases, projected in yellow onto the walls and table, which periodically change; one has a bridge down the center and enormous metal letters on the walls behind various artifacts (maybe I would have been more impressed if I could have understood more); one has various vestments of religious office suspended inside tiers of lucite cases, with a Pope-hat-type thing dangling from the cieling; one has twelve concrete figures of a man on the walls, each in gradual states of emerging from said wall, and onto these is projected an “educational” video reel whose purpose was lost on me entirely – people walking down a hallway, hands opening slowly to divulge a flower or a handful of sand, a summer landscape, more pope clothing – and which I’m not convinced would have been any more impressive to a native speaker. It was a little disconcerting to walk into a room in the centuries-old building which resembled nothing so much as a gay disco. After the first few “this is where the monks got down on Saturday nights” type jokes I made stopped being funny, the novelty wore off and I wished for a stuffy museum experience like I was used to.

After the tour concluded, we had around 45 minutes to wander Melk before the bus left for the next stop, so Jennifer, Kelly and I decided to look for some caves under the Abbey we’d heard rumors of. We found them without much difficulty, but there wasn’t much to explore – just a few simple rooms carved into the side of the hill, through which we carefully stepped guided only by the light of my keychain LED. The ground was littered with the type of waste you’re used to seeing in underage drinking squats: beer cans, plastic bags, hideously soiled jackets, that sort of thing. We found three such caves, the last of which was the largest and the only one we failed to map completely. Jenn said she thought she saw glowing eyes in one of the back chambers, where the daylight penetrated the least, and she repeated this belief again as we were looking around. We stood at the doorway to that dark place, from where Jenn swore the eyes had glowed at her, all of us more scared than we were admitting, me trying to probe the darkness with my little red LED, when I finally allowed, “OK, this door scares the bejeesus out of me”. “Yeah, me too,” both the girls chimed in, and thusly did our underground adventure end.

On the way back to the bus we hailed several other members of our group, who were on the way to a classic car show which happened to be in town. We strolled among the old Jaguars and Ferraris and such for a while, getting later and later for departure, until someone (perhaps me) pointed this fact out. We stopped at the grocery store to supplement our lunch nevertheless, and arrived back at the bus ten minutes late (number 1).

We drove across the Donau for a picnic lunch, where we ate bread and cheese and other vaguely European dishes for a while. I skipped some rocks quite well, I thought, some of the girls played piggyback frisbee for reasons they understand best, and as the bus was loading to leave, Big Mike (as opposed to Asian Mike, which is another story), Amelia, Kelly, and I had the sudden inspiration to take a quick dip in the river. It was very cold. Despite my protests to the contrary, Jenn snapped a picture of my man-parts as I was getting dressed again, which hopefully will never find its way onto the Internet. I went to the bathroom to dry my hair with paper towels, and as I was walking towards the bus it started to pull away in jest. Turns out I was around five minutes late for departure (number 2), and even though Kelly had mounted the stairs only two minutes before me, everyone on the bus yelled at me: “Way to be late again, Zach! You held up the whole group again! Etc!” They were joking – if only they were better acquainted with my record on punctuality.

Next we examined a replica of the oldest man-made artifact in the world, an 11 cm statue of a hugely fat woman which apparently represented fertility. The original was off limits, being 25,000 years old and all. I’m not sure how they determined the statue’s meaning. It seemed just as likely to me that some hunter was bored around the campfire some night and was like, “hey guys, check out this fat chick I carved!” We’ll never know for sure. Back on the bus, Herbert, the owner of IKI and primary tour guide, announced over the PA the time the bus would leave from the next stop, and indicated that I was to arrive ten minutes earlier than that just to be safe. People laughed again, but I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard that joke in my life.

Next we stopped at a castle high above the river where the English king Richard Lionheart (Löwenherz) lived whenever it was that he lived – a long time ago, as I understand. We climbed some 250 m above the river, up a long winding path, to the ruins. Once at the summit, the view was spectacular, and we kept eachother amused for some time posing for photos on top of various tall objects we were able to scale, and of course scaling walls of rock which the path neatly bypassed and switchbacked around – but as I’ve alway said, paths are for pansies.

We hit a heuriger on the way back, but sadly no one got the least bit blasted. I left to return to the bus when Herbert himself did, and not a moment earlier.

That was Saturday, the day I learned that Chacos chafe when they get soaking wet.

You people have given up on me, haven’t you? Let’s have some letters, or, failing that, some email contact. I like to pretend that there’s a life waiting for my return, like a still photograph, on the other side of the Atlantic. Help me delude myself. Specifically, to the kids at 5220 20th Ave and its surrounding principalities, I believe you are long overdue with a certain letter. Kelly cries every day when she asks if it’s come to my apartment yet and I have to say no. You don’t like making Kelly cry, do you? Do you? Seriously though, we leave the city in like two weeks, so make with the mailing! Mach schnell!