Still trying to recover from my cold, I spent last night watching the movie Munich. I’ve heard some pretty mixed reviews of the movie, skewing slightly towards the bad side.

I loved it. It’s a non-standard movie that takes on the very touchy subject of terrorism. There’s no right or wrong in the movie…not even a protagonist or antagonist. Put simply, the movie falls into the gray area of reality, a space that most movie directors avoid and most audiences find uneasy. It’s so difficult because there is no happy ending, no sad ending, or hardly an ending at all. It is what it is.

Spielberg did a fantastic job exploring the gray area. The never ending cycle of terrorism…what it does to the people involved, where hunters seek revenge and eventually become the hunted, and so on. Each rev of the cycle, filled with emotions and experiences, are so hard to let go and forgive…they keep crying out for more. I’ve been thinking about this a lot today and the strength of character it takes for an individual to rise up against the tide of the cycle. Even greater, the strength of character it takes to lead a populace against the tide. Just like we all did when we listened to the stories of tragedy in history classes, I wondered if I have the strength to be a person that stands up the tides of darkness.

I wonder.

It’s all starting to blur together in my mind already. I woke up this morning in my own bed and found myself back in the office at my normal hour, dangerously close to my normal routine. That was a short jaunt…

I’m happy to pronounce the trip a complete success. We did what we set out to do and got where we wanted to go. We started in Vienna, went to Innsbruck, Munich, Budapest, and back to Vienna all according to the rough plan that we had left with. I came back with six bottles of wine, including three bottles of the prized Liszt Kekfrankos that I’d been craving since I left Budapest a year ago. Unfortunately, I came back with a bit of a cold and a voice that could sand down wooden planks (I blame the saunas in Budapest…going from a super-hot sauna stright into 16 degree celcius water is great for the skin, but horrible for the immune system).

It was really a mindtrip to be back in Budapest again, staying in my old hostel, wandering my favorite streets. As much as I wanted to, I never expected that I’d return to Budapest so soon. I didn’t get to see much more than I did last time though–most of my time was returning to my favorite spots and wandering around areas of the city to see what had changed. I really wanted to go Margaret Island, an island on the Danube sandwiched between the northern areas of Buda and Pest. I’d also love to do some day trips to some of the surrounding areas, including the beautiful Lake Balaton to the southwest that I had trained past at sunset a year ago on my first trip.

In other words, my trip was too short, but then again, aren’t they always? I could have spent another week in Budapest and after that, another two weeks exploring the countryside. Really, at the end of the day, the Earth is quite simply, big.

This was my first time traveling in a group and I was very pleased with how everything turned out. Lots of crazy and fun things happened that I never would have gotten traveling alone. Group dynamics and the effects of prolonged time exposure are always unknown quanities with any group and we all made it home alive without killing each other and on great terms. There’s definitely a few knobs to tweak if we do this again in terms of preferences and duration–I think in the future I’ll be sticking strictly with the smaller hostels (we did about a 50/50 split of big party vs. small cozy hostels) and trying to spend more time at any given place.

For now, it’s back to the grinding stone. I’ve got deadlines coming up fast. The pictures are pretty good and I’ll be triaging through them sometime this week to post them.

I’m baaack!

After a rather interesting night train experience where we were severely concerned about getting our stuff jacked (thankfully, no problems, though a lot of precautions), we arrived this morning into Budapest. Sadly, we were greeted by gray skies and 0 degree (celcius) weather.

Budapest still hasn’t lost it’s charm, though the city is definitely undergoing a makeover. It’s actually very interesting to me…I often speak about prioritizing destinations that I feel are likely to change heavily in the near future, leading me to concentrate my travels in the developing world. Budapest is the first city I’ve returned to since I started my travels and I discovered myself walking around shocked at the change I was finding. Former landmarks and shops had been replaced. Buildings were being gutted and rebuilt. New restaurants and cafes. Scaffolding and tarp covering the facades of beautiful buildings for remodeling work. It almost feels as if the city is undergoing a makeover in preparation for the bright and sunnier summer season.

This is great to see in many ways…economic development remains strong, Hungary remains an up and coming rising star in the world. I’m happy to see all this progress, but between remodeling and the weather, I also feel that the spirit of the city that I’m so fond of has diminished slightly. Perhaps when I return in a few years it will be back in force…or maybe I won’t recognize the city at all. It took me a fair bit of walking around to find my old hostel today.

I spent the day on my own, walking and wandering the streets of the city. It was a good moment of “solitude.” Met up with the group for dinner and gorged ourselves on amazingly delicious Hungarian food that continues to live up to it’s reputation. Ended the night by going to a local Milonga, something I’ve been looking forward to for the last two months. There’s some good dancers here, with most of them having about one year of experience. DJ could have been better though, all the music he played was the exact same tempo, +/- 5 bpm. It got pretty boring after awhile and everyone assured me that the dance to go to was in fact the Sunday night dance, where the music is far better. Unfortunately, by Sunday night I’ll be back in Vienna…*sigh* for short vacations…

Anyway, with that, I’m off to bed. It’s 1am here.

Today made the sixth Olympic site I’ve been to when we visisted the Olympic Stadium in Munich. As we wandered around the mostly empty (it’s a weekday) park, we poked our we browsed through the BMW museum, spied through the windows of a swimming pool, and my personal favorite, rented ice skates at the local rink. Yippee, that was AWESOME. The five of us took out hockey skates and plopped ourselves onto the ring, where David suprised all of us by flying around the ice with surprising dexterity, owed mainly to childhood pursuits.

We eventually ended up practicing slide stops and racing each other doing shuttle runs down the ice. It was the first time I’ve been successfully able to slide stop, thanks to a few pointers from David. Bram took the most falls out of all of us, his craziness leading to more than a few spread-eagle falls across the ice. Pictures to come soon.

Gotta head out now, but we’re headed tonight to BUDAPEST!!

T-Shirt Slogan of the Day: I went skiing in the Austrian Alps and I got 0wned.

The crew hit up the Axamer Lizum resort in the hills above Innsbruck, which officially made the fifth present and future Olymipic sites. Today’s dose of skiing was likely the best skiing I’ve ever done, with a combination of groomed runs, fine fresh powder, and challenging terrain. It was also cheap! I’ve had this notion for years that skiing in Europe has prohibitively expensive, but we discovered it to be quite a bit cheaper than our US equivelents…lift plus good rental gear cost 50 EUR, which is a far cry from the $100/day amounts we’re used to paying at Whistler.

I took an amazing spill today, the likes of which have not been since since I was learning how to ski as a wee lad. Two words: Yard Sale. Making tracks through some powdered streches, I started picking up some speed as I ran through a gully bewtween two sets of rocks. As I came around the corner, something happened, because the next thing I know, I’m faceplanted, snow down my back, skis five feet behind me, and a pole ten feet up the mountain. Hence the slogan, “I went skiing in the Austrian Alps and got 0wned.”

We’ve successfully plowed through the bionic part of our tour and we’ve made it to Munich, where we’ll be settling in for the next couple days before heading to Budapest. 

So a few posts down, I wrote about “Giving Vienna” and planning a trip with four friends to Europe. We arrived yesterday after spending about 13 hours in flight and we’re having an awesome time. This is my first real vacation since I’ve started working where I haven’t been checking email and keeping up with affairs in the office. Eating dinner at a nice restaurant called Huth near the center of town, we all commented how nice it was to relax and not thing about work (or anything) for the first time in months.

I’ve certainly felt a sense of homecoming and peace by slinging a backpack on again and returning to the hostel life. I’ve missed this sort of traveling more than I could ever explain here…it’s very refreshing to live life out of a bag again.

All of us got up pretty early…we walked out the hostel around 8:00a, rare and unheard of in the backpacking realm. Vienna has been a little colder than expected for us and Bo, Bede, and David spent time in the local REI-equivalent buying base layers.

Bram is kicking me off by countdown…more later!