Wandering Clouds

Some cities just speak to you. There is something about the architecture or the quality of the light (or the abundance of baked goods and the navigability of the subway system) that makes you think, yes, I can see myself living here for a while. 

Vienna is that kind of city for us. It doesn’t happen immediately, but it happens—a few days into our visit we are already talking about coming back to stay for longer. It’s not just the beauty of it, though Vienna IS a very beautiful city. It’s the atmosphere and the pace of the city. It’s calm, clean, inviting. It’s a great mix of the traditional and the innovative, the relaxing and exciting.

Except next time we go to Vienna, it cannot be in the summer!

When planning this trip, we tried to take the weather into account and we looked up average temperatures in Europe for the summer. Vienna, Prague, and Berlin seemed like a safe bet in July, but apparently Vienna did not get that memo. Our time there can be divided into “the heat” and “after the heat.” During “the heat,” we spend our days hiding inside the apartment and taking hourly cold showers, venturing outside only after sunset. It is too hot to even go out in search of air conditioning.

We still have a good time though. We go to a bar called Barfly’s where Justin has a flaming absinthe from Bulgaria. We explore our own neighborhood, Meidling, which is mostly residential and not super photogenic, but it’s diverse and has lots of bakeries and cafés. There is a little outdoor market near our place and we walk around the stalls choosing produce. At the meat market, using gestures we manage to communicate to the lady behind the counter that we do not want her to remove the skin off the chicken thighs. The small detail lost in translation is that we think we are buying chicken thighs but discover later that we’ve bought chicken breasts instead.

(flaming absinthe)

(market in Meidling) 

We take the train to Stephansplatz, take one admiring look at the cathedral, then scurry away from the tourists and wander around by the Donaukanal, where young kids (were we ever this young?!) sit in groups by the water drinking beer. This is not the real Danube, just a skinny relative, but it has character. The city has imported sand on one side of the walking path, for a more authentic beach feel. No one is fooled but the café patrons still take their shoes off and bury their feet in the sand.

Vienna is refreshingly international. On the streets and on the subway we hear all kinds of languages, and there are Turkish bakeries, halal markets, and restaurants from all over the world. One evening we stop for gin-and-tonics in a very hot bar and end up getting recommendations from the Bulgarian bartender for places to visit. 

After a delicious dinner at Ulrich’s, we end up at Rathausplatz, which is currently home to a music/film festival. A huge screen is installed right in front of the Town Hall, and on the night in question Orpheus and Eurydice (the opera) is being projected. There are a few dozen food vendors offering all kinds of deliciousness. Justin gets a Greek lamb gyro that’s truly fantastic. The food is served on real plates, the beer is in real glasses, and there is actual silverware. Apparently even street food is classy in Vienna.

(Rathausplatz and yummy gyro)

We go to the schnapps museum. It’s open only by appointment, and over email we make arrangements to join a larger group for a tour in English. When we arrive at the museum, we’re told that the group came early and already left, but if we want we can join a different group that’s just finished the tour and is already doing the tasting. Since we’ve missed the tour, they wave our admission fee, and thus begin our adventures in the land of schnapps.

We try apricot schnapps, chili schnapps, hazelnut schnapps, a couple of gins, a couple of vodkas (including one that supposedly won some kind of award last year), bitters, absinthe, an orange liqueur with gold flakes, and several other sweet liqueurs. We are the last people there, and the two girls who are pouring the tasters are determined to make us try everything they have, including an apricot whiskey that the distillery has discontinued. Miraculously we escape only slightly buzzed and with only one bottle—the chili schnapps, which is delicious mixed with orange juice and a dash of soda.

(absinthe, chili schnapps, gold flakes)

Our last three days (aka, “after the heat”) we stay with my friend and her husband. With the weather’s permission, we finally walk around during the day. We go through the Museum Quarter, stop by the Votive Church, then make our way along the Donaukanal to the Hundertwasser House.

Dinner that night is at Neni in Naschmarkt, and it’s delicious. Eggplant and chickpea ragout over polenta, falafel, babaganoush. It’s raining, but we are not complaining.

(graffiti at Donaukanal)

(Hundertwasser House) 

(polenta with chickpea ragout and chicken; falafel)

The next day (after an amazing breakfast of slow-scrambled eggs, avocado, and smoked salmon) we finally go to the Schönbrunn park. We are not interested in the palace itself, so we just walk around the gardens and slowly make our way up toward the Gloriette. The place is magnificent. It makes me intensely jealous to think this was actually someone’s house. I want geometrically pleasing flowers too! And fountains! And a Gloriette from which to admire the scenery!

The view from the top of the Gloriette IS spectacular. All of Vienna is spread out before us. Justin and I act like proper tourists and take some selfies. It’s quite windy, so in between trying to contain skirts (me) and hair (both of us), we end up with some priceless expressions.

(I mean, look at this beautiful plate!)

(gorgeous coffee pot and gorgeouser panna cotta, made by our host)

(beautiful Schönbrunn and dramatic clouds; the sky was also pretty :))

After some lovely cake at the Gloriette café we make our way back to Naschmarkt in search of lunch. The market is a beautiful sight, a colorful study of abundance. What I don’t understand is how any of the vendors make money, as we see the same merchandise over and over again: spices, dried fruits and candy, olives, occasionally a cheesemonger or produce stand.

We pick a fish restaurant and settle in for more deliciousness. Meanwhile it starts raining again, and by the time we leave, we are shivering, which is an absurd thing to happen after the heat insanity from earlier in the week, but I guess Vienna likes to keep it interesting.

(butterfish tartar, prawn salad, scallop salad; our friends sharing a scarf in the cold evening)

We’ve been to the Klisura Monastery three or four times now. Last year when Justin’s mom came to Bulgaria with us, we took her there too. The monastery is small but very pretty—the courtyard all greens and silence and cobbled stones, the church standing tall in the middle of it. It’s an active monastery and monks still live there, but they also rent out rooms to tourists. My family stayed there for a night some years ago. Every time we visit, I have this wild moment when I fantasize about renting a room for a month or more. I picture myself sitting out in the yard and watching the roses climb up the porch, or hiding inside the dark church to breathe in the incense. 

The monks have a lot of land, and from their orchards they make fruit wine. We’re not interested in their jams, but we’re very interested in their wine. The first year we went there with Justin, they only had the raspberry wine. The second year they had added sour cherry and plum. This year they also have blackberry. We buy one bottle of each. They are exquisite.

(Kilsura Monastery)

We stop at a trout farm after the monastery. It’s now an annual tradition: light candles in the church, buy dessert wine, go eat grilled trout. It’s Friday and the place isn’t very busy. We sit outside, near the pool. Across the driveway there is a garden where they grow vegetables for the restaurant, and also big lilies that make my mom jealous with their productivity.

The fish is delicious as always, so satisfying in its simplicity. We feed two fish heads to a dirty cat. We look at the trout swimming. Clouds roll over the mountains. Up here the possibility of rain is never far.

(trout farm; not pictured: delicious trout)

In our two weeks in Lom we eat more raspberries than we’ve eaten in the past eleven years in the States, combined. It feels vaguely illegal—washing a few handfuls and scooping them up with a big spoon rather than picking just one or two from a tiny expensive plastic container.  

(raspberry extravaganza)

One afternoon before dinner we go to visit my godparents in a little village just outside of Lom. I haven’t seen them in years. They do look older than I remember them, but a more striking indication of the years that have gone by is when they talk about their grandson and his job in Sofia. “Job?” I ask. “Isn’t he twelve?” Apparently he’s 25. Time runs away from us when we aren’t looking. 

On the way back we stop at a sunflower field because the sunflowers are too pretty not to, even though they are facing away from the sun rather than toward it. It’s yellow yellow yellow everywhere from your feet to the horizon, waiting for you to look, to touch. It’s hypnotizing—so many suns!

We eat more. Tutmanik (a cheesy, eggy bread with lardo), zucchini fritters, moussaka, thick chicken soup, roasted lamb shoulder, chicken livers sautéed with onions and tomatoes. So much of traveling and spending time with family and friends is about food. So much of life is about food! 

At every meal we worry about how we are going to fit the leftovers in the fridge. My dad begins to talk about eating as a battle. His strategy is to go slowly and wear down “the enemy.” Overdoing it (cooking too much, putting too much on the table, eating too much) is not an act of gluttony. It’s an act of gratitude for having this delicious food and the opportunity to enjoy it together. 

We go to my dad’s childhood friend’s house for dinner and it’s a feast that begins with rakia and two salads and salami and cheeses and boiled eggs and ends five hours later with baklava and ice cream. In-between there is rice with tuna fish, homemade bread, roasted carp, boiled hen with a strained-yogurt-and-mayo sauce, pork chops. Stories are told about my dad and his friend from when they were in middle school, studying German, playing the accordion. Toasts are made about family and friends and hospitality. When we finally get up to leave, it’s raining heavily, and we all shiver while we wait for my dad to turn the car around. It does not feel like summer.

(Shopska salad; bread; carp; baklava with homemade ice cream)

The next day we stop for breakfast at my aunt’s house (banitza and salami with yoghurt and wine), and then last night’s hosts come over for lunch at my grandparents’ house. While I hide to do some work, Justin works the grill. A bottle of rakia comes out at one point as the men chat around the fire while the women shred cabbage and beets for salad. 

Everyone’s favorite treat are the skewers with lardo, onion, and green pepper. It’s something Bulgarians would make in the winter, on St. Trifon’s Day (the patron saint of wine and winemakers, celebrated on February 14). If you have a vineyard, you invite friends over, or you go to someone else’s vineyard to cut the first vine (a blessing ritual of sorts), and there is (usually) snow and (always) rakia and wine and a fire to roast meat on. 

(pork chops; grill and grill master; heavenly lardo skewers)

My mom brings out a bottle of rakia she found some weeks ago forgotten in a cupboard. It’s not labeled, but thanks to its anise flavor, and—more obviously—the ladder inside, it is recognizable as a gift from a particular friend from Hissar, and it’s at least 30 years old. The joke about the ladder is that when you reach the bottom step, it’s time to go to bed, because the sun is probably on its way up. 

Dad takes me out for my first driving lesson. (Yes, Justin and I are in our thirties and neither of us has a license.) In an abandoned parking lot we sit in the car and Dad tells me about the gears and the clutch and the wipers and all the gauges on the dashboard, then I make slow terrified circles around a patch of grass. The car is reluctant to do what I want it to do.

Before we know it, two weeks have gone by, and we pack our bags again and go back to Sofia for a couple of days. Leaving Lom is always complicated. What is the word for the emotion of leaving a place where you’ve lived for many years but don’t live anymore? What is the word for home-but-not-home? 

In Sofia there is more working in pajamas, more starting to plan dinner during lunch, more late-night wine stories in new places with old friends. 

We go to a rooftop bar in a hotel in the center of the city and have cocktails with a great view of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral and its golden domes. In this part of town I’ve only ever been on street level, so it’s amazing to look out from above the trees. 

(ceiling of the hotel lobby; St. Alexander Nevsky) 

On our last night in town we have dinner at an Armenian restaurant, Egur Egur. We went there last year and loved it, and our second visit does not disappoint. We have olive soup and keshkeg and stuffed cabbage leaves and chicken with Armenian pilaf and sweet salami and chocolate soufflé and cognac. There are five of us and we pass our plates around, sharing forks and dessert spoons when we give up waiting for the server to bring the utensils we’re missing.  

We decide we need a nightcap and go looking for a hidden barn that’s been turned into a bar. (A barn in the center of Sofia!) We walk down several windy unlit side streets until we find the right one. In a dark yard we knock on an unremarkable door that doesn’t open. We are close to giving up but try the next yard with a similarly ordinary wooden door with no signs anywhere, and voila—the door opens and we walk inside the bar(n).

It’s all darkness and wood and stone and cigarette smoke. The bar and a few tall tables are on the first level. A railing-less staircase leads to a narrow second level with a few tables, and that’s where we sit. Instead of chairs there are crooked benches and tree stumps. Through the cracks between the beams you can see the lower level. There is a ladder going up into the attic space, which is presumably bat territory.

The only light in the whole place is provided by candles, which are balanced onto mountains of hardened wax (from their dead predecessors) straight on the tables, the bar, the staircase. The dingy sign above the bathroom (also lit by candles) reads “РЕДАКЦИЯ,” which means “Editorial Department.”

It takes a while for our eyes to adjust and for the smoke to stop stinging, but after the initial shock, we’re all about it. “I feel like we’re plotting an uprising against the Ottoman Empire,” I tell my sister. “Give me a document to sign with my blood!”

(bar Hambara)

We were always moving to Europe. Even ten years ago when Justin and I first met, we were talking about leaving Boston and moving across the ocean for a while, but it was never the right time. It’s never the right time to do something scary.

This year too we could have found reasons to stay, but a couple of things fell into place, and here we are now, starting the second decade of our relationship on a new continent, without a permanent address or phone numbers or full-time jobs. 

We’ve been in Bulgaria with my parents for over a week already, and, as always when traveling, it feels like we’ve been here for months and we’ve just arrived.

Justin’s Bulgarian is getting better. My English is getting worse. Constantly switching between two languages gives me brain hiccups, and nothing makes sense. Like, what even is saline solution? Is it salty? What is девесил and do they have it in the States?

It was very hot here until yesterday, the kind of cruel dry heat that makes you fall in love with basements, with elevators that have mirrors because doesn’t it feel so good to lean against cold glass? My mom has put aluminum foil between the two panes of our windows, to keep the sun from moving all the way in. We take many showers. The tiny ice cubes melt in our glasses before the second toast.

At my sister’s in Sofia we eat my favorite Bulgarian chocolates and I’m amazed how good they taste. I’ve brought boxes of them to the States before, but I always try to make those last, so by the time I eat the last chocolates, they are inevitably expired and taste like sweet cardboard.

We go to a folk festival in Chuprene, near the Serbian border, and for hours we stand in the sharp smoke of street vendors selling grilled meats. We eat pleskavitsa, a Serbian meat patty. We drink cold beer. We watch dancers and singers from Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania take the stage in traditional folk costumes that look so thick and uncomfortable it makes me sweat just to watch them. When we get back in the car to drive home, there are fireflies everywhere, tiny pricks of light chasing us down the mountain.

(Chuprene festival; silliness)

We go to my grandparents’ place, where my parents now raise rabbits and tend to a garden. We pick sour cherries, blackberries, raspberries, zucchini, cucumbers, herbs. I’d forgotten how hot vegetables are when they are still touching the earth.

(peppers; berries)

I pick the pea pods from the plants my mom pulls out. Justin and my dad kill one of the rabbits and skin it. Justin cooks it for dinner that night, with garlic and herbs and potatoes, and it’s perfect.

(butcher; bunny before and after)

We go for a walk to the Danube, and as always I see both the street we’re walking down now and the street I used to walk down, when I was 8, 11, 16, 19…  New shops, old shops. Cafes where I used to nurse a long espresso while skipping class with my girlfriends. Crammed stores I’ve bought jeans from.

(Lom center; the Danube; monument of дядо Цеко войвода)

After lunch I work while my dad naps. Justin and I do yoga on the living room floor, then we look at airfare, apartments on AirBnB, things to eat in Vienna. Yes, you could travel without doing research, but if you do your homework, you tend to enjoy it more.

Dinner starts with rakia and salad and lasts for hours. Banitza and meatballs and garlic bread and chicken soup and cake and roasted zucchini and and and. 

(roasted zucchini with yogurt; banitza; Justin’s кюфтета)

We were hoping to lose weight here but so far all we’ve lost is the willpower to say no to delicious food.