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Tuesday |
| Language, signs, and borders are all pretty funny & mysterious. It's strange to travel through a country observing the subtle shifts in architecture, agriculture, & culture, all of which are influ- enced by the (usually) gradually changing land- scape and traditionally slow drift of ideas. The last place looks pretty much like the next, with more in common than different. But then you cross an imaginary line into an entirely new language, an abrupt and arbitrary transition which is especially pronounced when going from Austria to Hungary, where the origins of the language remain a source of mystery and beguilement to linguists. I had ignorantly assumed Hungarian to be a Slavic language, and so thought I could get by, but it's more like Finnish (and no one knows why). I was helpless and kept wanting to respond, "I'm sorry, I don't speak Gibberish." (This isn't meant as an insult to Hungarians but more as a joke on my own cluelessness.) To make things more fun, street signs seem to be regarded as optional here. In Sopron, we went by blocks and blocks of cross streets without seeing a single name. Elsewhere, redundancy ruled, with several signs within sight of each other marking a short stretch of bike path. Then nothing more for great distances. Not a problem once you're on the trail, but very confusing when you get to a fork in the road too small to be seen on a map. So we took a wrong turn, rode haphazardly through swarming horseflies along an almost impassable muddy dirt road until by luck we found pavement again and followed it to a dead end at the "open" border between Hungary and Austria. We chanced upon a historic spot--the place where the border was first opened in June 1989 after liberation from the Soviet Union. A larger-than-life marble sculpture of open doors was contradicted by the presence just beyond it of a group of 4 machine gun wielding Austrian soldiers who were shocked that our travel companion Momo had the nerve to go around a barrier and approach them. They were friendly but told us no way could we cross there, or even use the clearly marked bike trail running parallel to the border to our destination, the Neusiedler See. Maybe someday they'll really do away with borders between EU member nations, but for now the souvenir barbed wire remnant and watchtower aren't quite yet the memorials to a bygone age that they pretend to be. |
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