New York/Vienna/Brussels
April 15-16, 2011

Distance Today:  4816

Distance So Far: 7336

Very Nice Flight

Thank goodness for an exit row!  When you’re a big, claustrophobic person like me, extra leg room is everything.  I am truly a business-class sized traveler with a coach-sized budget.

True, my exit row was completely full and it was three steps from the bathroom, so I had people on top of me the entire flight, but it was worth it.

The flight even took off on time and landed in Vienna early.  Quelle concept.

The airline was Austrian, and it was run with Teutonic efficiency.  The flight attendants’ uniforms were very reminiscent of the Swinging 60s look.  The service was polite but chilly.

The seat right next to me belonged to a nice young woman who, before takeoff, went and fetched her husband and made him sit there instead.  “It’ll be better for your long legs.”  Nice wife.  In fact, they were so cute to watch because they were very young and almost painfully in love.  At one point the husband was negotiating with someone else near us to switch seats “so I can have my wife.”  I thought it was sweet that he put it like that.  Periodically during the long flight she’d come over from her seat in the next cabin and crouch in front of us and they’d hold hands and stare with idiotic infatuation at each other.  They’re lucky.  I hope their passion lasts.

Each seat, even in coach, had a “personal” video screen.  I never even opened mine.  I was busy finishing Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi, which turned out to be just amazingly good.  Scalzi gets better and better with each book; he is becoming a science fiction voice to be reckoned with.  That and dungeon-crawling my way through the candy-colored Dragon Quest V on my Nintendo DS kept me busy.

After eight hours we landed in Vienna.  What a drag that I didn’t have a direct flight to Brussels.  At least on Austrian I get 50% of the miles credited to my frequent flyer program.

Austria cracks me up.  It may just be me, but I swear you can smell the old-fashioned anti-Semitism there in the air.  It kept expecting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” to be piped out of the sound system at the airport.  I remember the last time I was in Vienna, five minutes into a taxi ride to the airport, the taxi driver was already complaining about the Jews.  This was in 2006.  Yeah, they’ve really processed the lessons of World War II in Austria.

Because of the long flight and the six hour time change, I basically lost half a day, the second half of Friday.  After a 90 minute layover and a short flight to Brussels, it was almost noon (Saturday)local time when I landed.  Keep in mind that I had been traveling since noon on Friday.  To say I felt tired and gross would be  akind understatement.  As I posted on Facebook, I felt like a banana peel left out in the sun on a steaming New Orleand afternoon.  The only thing that kept me from being really miserable was that I knew the drill.  I am, after all, an expert traveler.

I checked into the exquisite Hotel Montgomery, a boutique jewell on the edge of the “European” District.  “European” District?  In Brussels?  As opposed to what, the Afghan District?  Turns out that means it’s where lots of the foreign consulates and offices are.

I was delighted with the room, easily twice the size of my room in New York, with a huge beautiful and openable window facing the beautiful boulevard circle.  At first I worried that the proximity to the busy street would make the room loud, but the windows in the hotel are brilliant:  When you close them, all is silence.

Despite wanting to, resisted the temptation to go right to sleep.  I knew the only chance I had to get acclimated to the new time zone was to stay awake for several more hours and go to bed as close to a normal time as possible.

There’s a metro station 100 feet from the hotel, so I popped on down and was at the Grand Place in a couple of minutes.  The Grand Place is the tourist center of Brussels, and it had just the right amount of bustle and eye candy to keep me awake.  I made my way a few blocks to the Magritte Museum. 

I have always loved Magritte, even before he helped me win Ben Stein’s money on “Win Ben Stein’s Money” in 1997.  I had two big Magritte questions on the show, which helped me secure the win.   The Magritte Museum is similar to the Dali Museum in Tampa, in that it’s a large exhibit that nevertheless contains very few of the artist’s most famous pieces.  Didn’t matter.  I saw lots things that were new to me, and several of his cutout doves and images of dark houses under brilliantly lit skies were there.  Plus, due to the fact that I hadn’t slept in almost two days and was in practically an alpha state, it seemed appropriate to be viewing all of the crazy-ass Belgian’s surrealist images. 

After the museum, a nice long walk back to the neighborhood my hotel was in, a nice dinner, and then blissful collapse in my room.  

My Current Favorite Science Fiction Writers

• John Scalzi
• Robert Charles Wilson
• Peter F. Hamilton