Vienna and bix trax + resistance
After a good bit of wasted time with the accident on the way out of Freiburg, we continued on our way to Vienna, stopping only to watch the TdF at Mischa's mom's house. Hours of fairly dull driving ensued, but we did catch an amazing fiery sunset just after crossing the Austrian border, and before enduring miles upon miles of autobahn under construction/repair in Austria. Got to Vienna around midnight, called Maria, put the bikes together, and rolled down to Flex, on the banks of the Danube. It's a pretty cool club, a former squat that's not completely legal - something you certainly don't see much of in the states! It's always something I love to see in Europe - a truly vital squat scene that doesnt seem to shoot itself in the foot at the drop of a hat. There were about 20 messengers already in Vienna when we arrived, mostly Americans, if I remember correctly. Met up with H.nes, and moved my stuff over to his place to crash out on their pull-out couch for my time in Vienna.
The next morning looked as if the cloud cover we'd chased into Austria had blown past us, but that turned out to be wrong... Spent most of the day hanging out with people at the Hermes office, which is quite a nice set up. Hermes works as a collective, and seems like the place to work in Vienna. Found out that the had been an organ concert in St. Stephen's the day before I arrived, and there was due to be one the day after I was leaving... Argh! Spent the night at Flex, followed by a crazy ride home in rain and lightning at 2am...
Journal writing began to suffer in Vienna, as I was suddenly thrust into a large group of my friends, staying out late all the time, rather than sitting around by myself, reflecting on travel. It always takes a bit of an adjustment period to get used to hanging out in large groups again after you've spent the last month or so on the road, mostly by yourself.
The Vienna crew had hooked up a Goldsprints machine for the first round of events of bix trax & resistance, their CMWC pre-event - a marked contrast to the machines of Zurich and Amsterdam - this was a homebuilt job, of rollers bolted to plywood, and a mileage counter of 2 cyclocomputers connected to a videocamera. Remarkably enough, it worked quite well, hopefully providing some people with the impetus to make their own!
Much like Rotterdam, Vienna was plagued by rain for many of the events. On Saturday we were all supposed to meet up at the Nachtmarkt to go shopping for a BBQ, but that didn't really happen - everyone was still passed out from being out til all hours on Friday, and besides (yes, you guessed it) it was raining. We ended up doing a mostly Critical Mass kind of thing, joining up with a protest against the Italian reaction to the G8 protests in Genoa - we spent about an hour playing confuse-a-cop, riding all over town with an Austrian police helicopter following us around, trying to figure out what we were doing riding randomly all over the city. Quite entertaining, that. It was odd when I came home to the States to find out that basically nothing was on the news here about what went down in Genoa, especially after having heard first-hand some of the atrocities committed by the Italian Caribineri...
That evening, We had abig party at Arena, a HUGE ex-squat club near town. The place is just immense, completely, inconceivably immense. The room where the drum 'n bass dj was playing itself was as large as some nightclubs in SF. The idea that this had once been a squat still stuns me - just the idea of something that huge being squatted. Before we headed over there, though, a small group of us were looking for something to eat, and decided on one of the listings in the event program, Schwarzes Cafe, which turned out to be a 20-year-old anarchist cafe/bar, closely related to Arena! Man, what a fantastic place. Good food, good beer selection, and a wonderful atmosphere. Definitely a trip highlight. I bought the book they'd recently put out, documenting the history of the place, despite the fact that I can't read most of it with my meager German skills, simply to support such a great place.
Sunday came, and along with it, some seemingly nicer weather, which was then followed by Monday, and the HUGE alleycat planned for that day. The rain came back, on a smaller scale, and we all rode off to the first checkpoints to collect our 5 manifests, listing all the places we could go to get points. We had 5 hours to do as much as we could, and true to recent form, I got distracted after figuring out where all the checkpoints were, and ended up just sitting down to have lunch, and then exploring a bit. It was a fantastic alleycat, but I was a little distracted by being anxious to be back on the road the next day, headed to Budapest...
On to the next stage, Vienna > Budapest
