Linz

Can a place be haunted if you don't know the ghost is there?

I boarded the train in Bratislava without knowing where I was going.

I mean, I knew I was going to Austria; I just wasn’t sure where in Austria. Ever since I had conceived of a two-part trip that would allow me to take advantage of the Vienna airport’s proximity to several different countries, I knew Bratislava would be stop #1. But Stop #2? I was torn between Salzburg and Linz. (And, briefly, maybe Graz.)

Salzburg, obviously, is Salzburg. The Alps. Mozart. Those little foil-wrapped chocolates named after Mozart. The fricking Sound of Music. I knew the place was supposed to be cultured and charming and beautiful enough to induce at least one headstrong nanny to burst into song at every turn. In fact, I had heard Salzburg described on several occasions as the most beautiful city in the world. The latest had happened just two nights earlier in Bratislava, as I eavesdropped on an awkward dinner between some visiting Korean factory owners and the florid-faced Slovakian businessmen trying to woo them.

Linz is…what? Home of the Linzer torte, I assumed, though I did not know this for sure, and had learned, in similar situations, that it was just as possible that the cake had been invented by a certain Frau von Linzer who had come up with the recipe for a 1960s baking contest sponsored by a jam manufacturer.

I could make some further assumptions. Even with high season over, Salzburg, I suspected, would be jammed with Mozart-loving, chocolate-eating, Hills Are Alive twirling tourists, and after my run-in at the Bratislava konditorei, I didn’t think I could tolerate just then another place emptied of meaning. Linz, I assumed, would be largely free of the hordes, but what if that was because it was one of those horrid industrial cities that no one in their right mind would visit? I didn’t think I was up for a serious bout of depression either. Also, it felt kind of arrogant to purposefully choose against a place that so much of the world had decided was exquisite.

I’m not sure why I was having such a hard time making up my mind, but it felt existential somehow: beautiful and touristy vs. presumably less beautiful and less touristy. The semi-known vs the entirely unknown. In any case, the two cities are on the same train line which allowed extra time for tormenting myself with indecision. At Bratislava Central Station, I bought a ticket to the farther destination in order to keep my options open, and then continued to put off making up my mind as the train crossed the border back into Austria, and, about an hour later, as it pulled into Vienna station.

Here, great hordes of people boarded, all of them headed to Linz or Salzburg or even Innsbruck, which was a possibility I hadn’t even contemplated and now had to push quickly from my mind so as not to become undone. A young couple who were–I am sorry to say this, but it is true–markedly unattractive threw themselves and their abundant outerwear into the seats next to and across from me. They each put on headphones and as the train pulled out of Vienna’s Hauptbahnhof, I went back to staring out the window and trying, as we gathered speed, to make up my damn mind.