I left Vienna by train this morning, and my time in Austria drew to a close. I feel like I should have something to say about this, and about Austria. I managed to write two posts on Croatia, after all. And I stayed in Austria longer.

Maybe I just can't tease apart all the things I might say. I spent my last afternoon in Austria in the Wien Museum, a museum dedicated to Vienna and its history, and it reminded me of how little I know about Europe. I was supposed to take A.P. European History my senior year of high school, but because of a scheduling conflict I ended up in A.P. U.S. History instead. Not that I regret that or think a high school history class would've remedied my deficiencies, just that--well. I'm learning a lot about these countries and cities just by being in them, walking the streets and stumbling upon what I stumble upon. But the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

Wandering around Vienna's city museum, browsing artifacts and reading the English explanations, I was reminded of what I don't know, and also of what I should've known already: these places are old. That city has old bones, and over the years it has been many things, in one place: a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, occupied by Hungary, under siege by the Turks--twice--and that's all before 1800. A handful of days is hardly enough to get a handle on all of that. Instead, about all I did was find an ice cream place I liked and eat a lot of street food.

Honestly, though, I'm okay with that. When I visited Croatia I touched on the fact that there's a surfeit of experiences I didn't have, things I didn't see, but that's not where I want to dwell. There will always be more. The world is more. I'm pretty sure there's a song about this in the Lion King, actually. But I'm not trying to do everything--instead I'm trying to do something, to throw myself into each place as I visit it and get a bit of a feel for what makes it tick, even if I haven't got the time to learn the precise workings of the clock.

What's the purpose, though? Every so often I pass other Americans, travelers, on the street. Overheard in a crush of people, someone's saying: "And that's when I learned to love Nutella." I've talked with a few other backpackers, sitting on the floor in train stations, and it leaves me wondering--is this whole thing, American-in-Europe, purely self indulgent? What does it accomplish to leave the country only to find your countrymen on the other side of the ocean?

Oh, it might be self indulgent, and it might not accomplish anything at all. It's okay for a vacation to just be a vacation. Sometimes I think we try to collect experiences like talismans, like the process of collecting them is its own end. I'm not sure that's quite right. But every process is a learning one, or might be, and we never know when we might find something that we've been looking for for a very long time, or when we might learn something that helps another piece of knowledge click into place. There is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' that I first encountered on a plane bound for Alaska, what, now, seems like eons ago: 

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rilke, I feel like I should note, was an Austrian, but he was born in Prague, which is the city the train I boarded this morning brought me to. So. I guess that's something.