no. 93: 2km at 11pm

Perhaps inevitably, our first meal in Vienna was at a würstelstand, at midnight. We’d planned to land 8 hours earlier, to walk around this most walkable of cities, then sit down to dinner at a restaurant with actual cutlery, but instead we joined the uncounted legions of Ryanair’s victims, and spent the day in Catania’s unedifying airport before staggering off the plane at 10pm. By the time we got to the city, even the bars were putting stools up on their tables – this was Vienna the orderly, after all. So we walked to what we were told was one of the finest sausage slingers in the city, the Bitzinger Würstelstand, a freestanding structure in the shadow of the palace that looked like it had been folded together, grills, fridges, and all, from a single rococo sheet of stainless steel, then topped with a giant statue of a hare, cast from bronze and Albrecht Durer’s nightmares. 

Dinner was two cans of Ottakringer and a pile of würst, eaten standing, off paper plates with birchwood forks. I don’t sound Viennese, so the lederhosen-clad attendant, getting grease on his t-shirt between cigarettes, must have understood my pseud-deutsch to mean “more würst” rather than “less würst,” which I imagine is a rarely made request. Waldviertler, sacherwürstel, käsekrainer gently oozing cheese onto our plates. We ate next to two women chatting in Russian between sips from their single serve bottles of Möet Imperial; a couple groomed for the opera; a rotating crew representing every immigrant group and subculture and every stage of inebriation acceptable in public. 

A week earlier, our first meal in Palermo was also grilled meat eaten standing in the street, our necks crisping in the noonday sun. That meal was a revelation, a set of textural assertions. Stigghiole, lamb intestines grilled over charcoal, fizzing with lemon juice and bouncing pugnaciously. The linings, almost custard,  set off the crackle and char of the exteriors. Beef spleen was poached and slicked with lard, then folded into a stiff, plain sesame roll for pani câ meusa. The spleen was vaguely meaty with a soft, clean bite. A smooth, dense, textural nothing, a mouthfeel like cold butter, emerging hot from a pan of lard. 

This abundance came from a guy just off the main drag in the Mercato Ballaro (by most accounts the less touristed of Palermo’s historic markets), sweating over a grill in the street. Or maybe it was a square, a place where two alleys broadened and braided together, a place, at any rate, where the smooth lines of stalls gnarled, so his grill faced a neighbor’s empty table, a mound of empty boxes and forgotten fruit. He ran three stations on his own, dashing from the grill on the cobbles up three steps to a chopping board and cauldron behind an empty display case, then up another step and through a bead curtain to some interior space where all his meat was actually stored, from which he’d emerge with a fistful of skewers for the grill like Edward Scissorhands, then up to the chopping board and out into the street with plates of food and back again, wearing an expression of kabuki intensity the whole time. 

We’d fought our way there from the plane, through the airport scrum onto the obstacle course highway then into a fractal warren of two way streets that should have been one way streets, a maze of swaying walls and tiny vans reversing out of each others’ way. Signage was tacit at best. In the first piazza where we tried to park, a helpful group of young men insisted they’d watch our car for a minimal fee. Eventually, we left the car in a space defined by a rubbish heap, a motorcycle, and a retaining wall, and started walking. 

The mercato was both unmissable and completely unannounced. We were following our feet, letting the city guide us, but the alleys were a cipher and the sandstone walls directed all sound upwards, so we turned a blind and silent corner and the market exploded upon us, street carts and awnings and dining tables sprawling into the street. Olive sellers and fishmongers and spice merchants and butchers and grocers all yelling at each other and at passersby across great heaps of everything, a cathedral of the heap, the heap as great god and organizing principle. I have no idea what was being said, perhaps they were simply talking about the weather, but it all sounded like a polyhedral declaration of blood feud, a recitation of grievances so long and complex the list required a song to remember. It was all being called across sacks of spice and oranges, olives in buckets, platters of sardines dressed like birds, lamb heads, swordfish heads, the plastic toys that emerge from China like pollen, and everywhere, grills shrouding everything in an incense older than myrrh. 

And of the knots of people shunting their way through the market, propelled as though by peristalsis, it was obvious who belonged: they were the ones who didn’t reek of fear. There were degrees of belonging – denizens of Palermo, Sicilians, Southern Italians, then everyone else. We’re not nervous travelers, but in this place we were clearly fodder. The grill cook had no prices posted, so when we handed him a twenty we received a deep bow as change. Everyone else was speaking Sicilianu. 

To be clear, I wasn’t upset. Our exchange was a friendly, wordless conversation about overtourism and global inequality. But it was also a statement that this place had clear boundaries, and that “belonging” had a specific and narrow meaning here. 

So Vienna, with its frictionless efficiency, its broad sidewalks, its humming trams, was quite a contrast. A city that filled us with the immediate, overwhelming certainty that things just worked, and moreover, that it was safe to be a stranger here. The airport was bright, signage was clear, the drive from the airport to our apartment was smoother than the flight. There were no potholes and no daredevil lane changers to dodge. The highway led to a city of boulevards, where even the side streets were lined with beeches and maples. 

It was 2km at 11pm to our würstelstand, but the walk felt short and the city compact, not darkened but illuminated.  Quiet trams with inviting interiors hummed reassuringly alongside as we walked, people chatted quietly at the last tables lingering outside bars. Everyone waited at crosswalks for the light to turn on empty streets, standing clear of the bike lanes laid out on the pavement. Even the trash cans looked clean. Signage over a public water fountain, a stainless steel pillar in a sculpted square, cheerily encouraged passersby to drink more water. Women waited alone at tram stops. No one hurried or seemed on guard or even to have a care in the world.  ¹

I know this is all context dependent, and I know my experience as a traveler with a passport and a credit card is different from that of a refugee with a backpack and brown skin, and I know Ballaro might feel more like home to someone from Jakarta or Nairobi or Ashgabat than it did to me. But I also think the friction – the dynamic pricing, the parking attendants, the navigational free-for-all – reads as an inconvenience in any language, a universal “keep out.” A familiar inconvenience still grates. 

And conversely, sometimes you land somewhere and even if the culture is unfamiliar and you don’t speak the language, it’s still clear that there’s  sufficient wealth and governmental capacity and social cohesion (and these are substitutes for each other) that means most days aren’t a struggle for most people, so they’re maybe less likely to try running a low grade protection racket over parking spots in the piazza. 

I’m struggling to find a good word for this quality. It isn’t just “safety”, but the specific feeling of safety that comes with feeling like you’re in a functional society. But “functional” isn’t right either, because most places are functional in their own way, and if you grow up in a system you can usually navigate it just fine. Similarly “livability,” that neological summum bonum, is inherently subjective. And “openness” is wrong because  it’s not just about whether a place is welcoming to strangers. In English we most commonly speak of its absence – Palermo is a rough place, Vienna isn’t. 

The only reason this is on my mind at all is that I’ve been thinking about this post from Chris Arnade for months, a minor salvo in the culture wars in which he, an educated, wealthy American, tries to understand why Europeans would want to move to the US. 

I stand by the intended larger point, culled from years of talking to people all over the world, which is, what the US is selling (space, freedom, meritocracy), has a lot of buyers across the globe, including in Europe. Or to put it another way, the rest of the world (other than academics) really really love the US. Or, at least they love the idea of the US.…

I think the deeper answer is that the image the US projects and represents to a lot of the world, and in many ways provides its residents relative to other places — opportunity, material wealth, safety, independence, space, convenience, and lots of immediate pleasure — is a lot more appealing than what I’ve believed before, or want to believe. So appealing it breaks across cultural boundaries and life-long preferences.

That is, maybe most people really do want an American style transcendent-free lifestyle, especially if it comes with the conveniences of a huge dyer, powerful AC, two large cars, and a ranch house on a plot of land that couldn’t ever hold a heard of animals larger than rats.

The US has a lot of problems, but people not wanting to move here, isn’t one of them, and that shouldn’t be forgotten. [sic]

I’m not sure people specifically want an American style transcendence-free lifestyle. Instead, I think there’s an assumption that a lack of roughness, a low-friction societies, so to speak, is a prerequisite for mass SUV ownership, so any place where SUVs are as common as they are in the US must be relatively friction-free. But roughness is a public quality, which can coexist with private wealth, and the dryer and AC and two large cars are all private goods. Walk from the West Village to Harlem, or try to deal with a health insurer, or fight through a daily commute, or live in a neighborhood where there’s only one grocery store that someone in head office decides to shut down. It seems like America is getting rougher, in exchange for more SUVs.

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1. A couple of days after we landed, we took ourselves on a walking tour of Red Vienna, the historic public housing projects built in the 1920s and 30s. This took us to the new city, far outside downtown, through places that in any other city I’d guess were the rough parts of town. Not once did we feel at all on edge.