I walked by a river in Vienna, while the chords to Strauss’s most famous waltz were playing through my earphones. “You wanted to walk along a river, right?” asked my brother as he bent over to tie his shoelaces that had come undone during our short tram ride from the hotel. “Well, here you have it.” “Are you sure this is the Danube?” I asked, looking out at the walls covered in graffiti. I tried to imagine what it looked like decades before, without the graffiti. That was our last day in Vienna, and while the rest of the family were resting at the hotel, my brother and I decided to go out to see more of Vienna and to search for a memorial we hadn’t yet seen. My mother, aunt, cousin, and I had watched a live orchestra only the night before, and it had ended with a performance of By the Beautiful Blue Danube. How music can describe what words and photos cannot, I have already written about before. I think travelling and music go hand-in-hand, which is perhaps why I prefer to travel alone, so I can walk around a new place with my earphones in place, trying to find a song that can fit it. Vienna is a walking city, much like the rest of Europe. But this felt particularly distinct. I have come to find that other cities can be traversed using its underground metro system, and you would miss very little of it, so long as you reach the main attraction. But while there were specific sites we wanted to get to—the Belvedere and Schonbrunn were only some—it was the small streets in between, the ones you would love to get lost in, that made Vienna a city that even a war couldn’t destroy. On our first day, we found the city closed, the Viennese in the middle of celebrating St. Stephen’s Day. So, while we searched for an open restaurant to eat at and the nearest train station to purchase tickets, my family and I found ourselves in what we guessed was the Jewish neighborhood. The amount of men we saw in traditional attire only proved it. That and these markers we saw along random sidewalks. Seeing them felt like an odd awakening into the reality that Vienna, so well-known for art and music, is also marred by an era of history the world should never forget. I know parts of Vienna’s history from two films--Sisi, which I had watched on the Lifestyle Channel years ago and The Woman in Gold, which was why I wanted to go to the Belvedere to see The Kiss. It remains amazing to me how much of the history I only thought I could read in books or see in movies remains perfectly alive up to this day. This can be said of Europe more than most other places. Even my own history felt more alive there, oceans away from home. The final memorial we were looking for we found only minutes away from the hotel we were staying at, above a street sign and at the door of what are now apartments. But it was once a hotel that Rizal stayed at. And so, on my last day in Vienna, I found Rizal with my brother, ate at an American grill, and walked by a river that I later found out was not even the Danube. But it didn’t matter, because I think I had come even a little bit closer to understanding Strauss and his waltz.
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