From The Highlanders and Back To the Flatland

Our trip to Braunau has come to an end, and I must say that it has been beautiful and memorable to the last minute. I don’t have Trish’ talent to make a lovely recount of a trip – as that has been made quite obvious in my last two posts... and any other posts I’ve ever written thought a travel – so I’ll refrain the most dignified way from even attempting again to do so. We’ve got a lot of private jokes and the sour realization from my side that I can’t play jokes on Phil: he’s immune to my sense of kidding. I guess he compensates for Trish’ outstanding reactions to kidding.

Today we checked out of our lovely hotel, where to my disheartening amazement I found out once again that generic, hotel shampoo/shower bath is much better for my hair than the overly expensive shampoos I hunt down often at exclusive stores. My question now is, how can I get some of that stuff for myself? In the worse of cases these supplies can only be bought at stores that cater only to hotels. This gets me thinking: “maybe I should get in contact with the owners of my favorite hotel in Vienna and explain my situation and ask them to help me get my hands on some of the stuff. I’m a frequent customer with them; sure they would like to help me, right?”

Still on hair, today we saw only one of the brunet kids of Austria, which according to the local source, is the 80% of the population. The rest of the kids were blond, but that still doesn’t explain the over exposition in the media and advertisement, of ginger kids. Ginger kids seem to be the local Children of the Corn… and there are plenty of cornfields around Braunau! It’s so weird… I still think of corn as an American product, that’s absolutely native. and it’s quite weird to see huge tables of land packed with corn around little, typically countryside Austrian houses, and knowing that this people don’t do tortillas, pozole, tamales or even chicha from it. Really, what do they do with so much corn? Biofuel?

Me - being the economist I am - suddenly think that there might be a weird "international trade" crap going on, like it takes less units of wool to produce a unit of corn in Austria than in Mexico, or something like that... but still, really, if corn isn't a main staple - or at least a visibly main staple of Austria, why would they bother growing it? (Hazards of reading economical magazines)

We walked around in a town that was dead because it was Sunday and nothing was open. Nothing. The whole idea that you’ll have to drive to a gas station in the middle of the day to get a carton of milk was bewildering. I guess it gives you sense of peace and allows your body to really rest – since you can’t run errands or do any of the things that you’d normally do on the weekend – but come on! What if I’d like to spend my weekend getting a haircut or having a professional facial, or just at the mall window shopping? Nope, the quiet, and truly lovely town becomes a veritable ghost city on Sunday. I still wouldn’t mind living there, truth to be told, provided that I get impeccable access to the internet or a car that can take me to the next living civilization.

Braunau is a quite beautiful location, peaceful, artistic, historically rich, and aesthetically breathe taking, but please don’t go there! J Well, you my very few readers can go there as long as you swear eternal secrecy: I’d hate to have it crowded with tourists. (Though that might inspire the population of the town to translate some of their stuff to English, so I can understand them too.)

Our last touristic location was Salzburg itself, where we went to a museum village, which was really exciting with the traditional clothes and old fashioned houses and equipments, traditional crafts and a beer garden where we learned about the rejected, and most delicious sausage ever. We’ve got so comfortable around each other that we were eating from each other’s plates, like a group of laid back college students. It was so awesome!

We are on our way home now, with a heart filled with warmth, good memories and brand new friends, and stronger penpallship. If it will come to happen, we will Trish and Phil will be our guests in Budapest. I’ll prepare, so I’ll try to match their superb hosting skills, but if that doesn’t work, at least they’ll leave Budapest knowing as many pubs as it would otherwise be not possible. It is needless to say, that they are – of course – warmly welcomed to visit Costa Rica whenever they want to. :-D There are plenty more of pubs to visit, and certainly many more beaches.

Gathering up my thoughts about this trip, I've come to experiment again, that meeting your penpals shouldn't be something you should be afraid of. If anything, a meeting can pepper up an already smoothly working penpalling relationship. I can imagine my letters to Trish now, full of comments and common references to these days and the shared experiences. It will be different now to talk about food, since we have shared meals together, and her praising of Phil's cooking skills will bear with an extra weight, since now we know that he's an Iron Chef living incognito in Sleepy Town, Dreamy Austria.

Indeed you may not be able to arrange a meeting with all of your penpals, with time and money getting in the way, but if you can, pack up your camping gear and meet them! Penpallig IS, after all, about reaching out for  friends and getting together to share bits and snipets of our lives, so, if you want their letters in your life, why wouldn't you want THEM also in it?