Loading ...Never look like a tourist: no parkas, no pouches and no plans. In Vienna I am carrying only a book; I ask my hotel man, do you know the Café Central? Mogogo has recommended it, with no descriptions. My hotel man briskly unfolds a gargantuan tourist map, circling the hotel and the café. But carrying a loud, obvious map is against the code of traveling; it is a stupid huge map, more advertisements than street grids. I line the spine of the book against the folds and tear off the fat, leaving a slim plan that folds into my book. Now I look believably local, and I walk.
The café is grand. The ceilings enclose high above in an array of folded arches, rosy marble forming the pillars and vaults. The volume is murmurs that are just short of being chatter, music filtering throughout; as though a filmmaker has wheeled his camera into a jazz bar between sets. I order some lunch, I order coffee; I read V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, a travelogue of Islamic countries. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate in literature, he is a preening intellectual whose biography photo includes his cat. The prose is slow: you can see Naipaul’s posturing emerge in the white spaces between the words. But he has insights, and I am forced to wade in further.
An American man reminds me of me in thirty years: he has longish hair, a grey trim goatee and is a cool academic, soaking his Austrian friends in catchy, fascinating ideas. His red t-shirt is vivacious, and I wish I could remember the graphic on the front; it was an aboriginal-style stick figure, but the figure was doing something: what? I become convinced that the man is Californian. Across the café are locals arriving: the man sits down and rests his straw fedora on the couch, folding his legs beneath him in a yogic pose.
But as with all cafés always - excepting thus far Mondegar in Bombay - it is an experience that ends in itself, with no revelations. It is probably impossible to crack cosmic riddles in old Europe: once Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wove great things north of Vienna; once Mozart was a genius here; Hesse worked in a Viennese bookstore, so that I might later read Narcissus and Goldmund, Siddhartha. They were searching for something; today, the Neocrats believe that the meaning of life is readily available: what we need are new approaches; new ways of living the obvious code. Vienna has opera singers for buskers, Mozart, and there is a vibe I didn’t have time to place; a vibe of candles and philosophical arguments, coffee and beer: a vibe of holding off communism just a few feet away. Today it is a charming experience, pleasant and restful; but it does not offer a new approach to the meaning of life.
Bookmark: 
Sal, who are you kidding, you stick out as a tourist even in London.
Just last night he was “dying” for a frappochino, *left* Soho (where arguably you can find the better coffees in town), walked through half of the West End to find a closed Starbucks in Leysester Square. Fate, and this humble reader, mocks him.
/I’m reminded of the kid in year 8 who lighted firecrackers in the bottom of a concrete staircase. The crackers never damanged any thing, but the noise they made was enough to scare the bejesus out of every student that happened to be walking down that staircase when they went off.
Good point about nothing new coming out of Europe though. It’s all happening in Shanghai and Mumbai nowadays.