I’m learning Austrian. Georg enlightens me: Heurigen is not the wine, Heurigen is the wine tavern that serves it. So Heurigen is not the continuation of the eternally yesterday and is politically more in the moderate centre. Yesterday we definitely went to a Heurigen outside Vienna. It was almost as unhealthy as it was fun.
It’s quite funny to constantly learn something new in the same language and a similar dialect very close to home. I learnt more new words in five days in Vienna than I did in three months in New Zealand. Which certainly doesn’t help me to memorise anything better. Just one thing: the online lamperl from the Heurigen is out.
The last two days I visited Georg, a good fellow traveller from Fiji and New Zealand. He lives at the top of the hill in Vienna-Döbling. We cook up a good meal and drink EM beer. He works a lot in the hotel, I work on homepages. Day four in Vienna. Still no time for tours. Just work and buying a new digicam.
For the first time in eight years of search engine optimisation, a client’s website crashes. Even though I’m sure it’s not my fault and that Google tweaked the evaluation criteria at exactly the wrong moment, I can’t prove the opposite. That gnaws at my ambition. I spend hours and hours looking for evidence, analysing, chatting with other SEOs and trying to gather arguments. I can’t find any definitive evidence and earn nothing at all.
After a two-day battle, it’s quiet for a while. I go back to Sabine. The four of us take the train 40 kilometres out of Vienna to Schönborn-Mallebarn. The Malle part of the name says it all. A quaint little village pub under vines. The sun is setting, the wine is flowing. We have a snack: broccoli dumplings with seed oil on rocket, ham, melon, boiled beef with horseradish, “Blunzn” with plums. Everything to sink your teeth into.
Sabine’s best friend is the owner’s daughter. She serves us a lot and for a very long time. So long that we miss the last train. Around midnight, she drives us to the very last suburb of Vienna, where we catch the last SBahn. On Sabine’s table is a reprint of the Prague press from 13 March 1938: “German troops in Austria”. Good night.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.