Without a Traceroute

I’m in Vienna right now. I had a lot of ideas for decent, interesting blog posts I was going to write. I still want to write about Christiania, the automated train system in Copenhagen and some stuff for Berlin.

But yeah, I just spent 15 hours on a bus. It wasn’t Greyhound-level terrible. (Note to Europeans thinking of touring the USA by bus: Don’t. Just don’t.) They had a bathroom that was mostly usable, and you could get tea and coffee for not-insane prices, but still, spending 15 hours on a bus is always pretty miserable and I’m totally burnt out.

I did finish reading Nabakov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which is easily one of the densest and strangest books I’ve ever read.  Tomorrow I’m going to try to get back down to Ljubljana to see some of the Kiberpipa people again, but also to check out Ljudmila, which I somehow missed the first time around.

The train to Ljubljana is like €80, and I refuse to get on another bus, so I’m going to try hitchhiking. Word has it hitchhiking is quite safe and common in Austria/German-speaking Europe in general, as well as the former Yugoslavia. The way I see it, short of being murdered, there’s no way it will suck worse than the bus. And if I am murdered, at least I won’t have to spend another 10+ hours on a bus. Don’t worry mom, I promise I’ll only take safe rides!

Edit: Oh,  almost forgot, somebody stole my ukulele! To be fair, they may not have known it was mine. I accidentally left it on a table in the common room of the hostel in Berlin and went to bed. In the morning, it was gone. I searched and asked to no avail. Strangely enough, I was staying in the same Berlin hostel where I was given the ukulele for free, so there is a certain karmic symmetry to losing it there.