2006.08.24-28.

I visited Austria with my family - they deserve to spend some time with me after an exhausting summer as well. As they know me as they should, we went to a place where I could cool the sparkling of my railfan's vein by a graphic ÖBB branchline, the world-famous Schneebergbahn and the grades of the Semmering were as close as thirty minutes of driving. It's a decent place for hiking, mountain-climbing and pilgrimage as well, but my pictures of the now so-called Salamander Zahnradbahn will be placed in a separate gallery, as I upload my summer memories in a reverse order of the difficulties of writing texts to them. My one week monstre tour in Helsinki will be last.

So about Austria: I've been many times there before, so it caught me unprepared that communication with natives was so light-mindedly difficult. Finland is an autonome country only since about fifty years, joined the EU the same time as Austria and was virtually closed out from Western circulation because of the closeness of the Soviet Union in the Cold War years, but still, everyone in Finland now speaks English as if it had been sucked during breastfeed. Here I had t rely on my poor German knowledge only enough to read the railway-related newspapers. It may be my fault that I visit restaurants that are too posh for comparison in Hungary, but in the last few years, I haven't encountered a place where an English menu and a waiter with some madly accented language was present. Here no menu, English-speaking waiter only slightly more. I don't know which is more embarrassing: stupefaction when you get something different you thought you ordered, or when the waiter is trying to explain you the dishes with his poor English while half the guests stare at you dumb.

I'm not sure if it's normal in a region where hosting is one of the (if not the) most important industry, or at the Reisecenter of a busy railway station. I may have visited the wrong places, or I may never cure from my curse that I compare everything to the divine and joyful Finland, but still: in similar regions of Hungary, it's not like this. You can ask for an English menu at the Balaton.

One illusion is gone, not the first, probably not the last one. Anyway, the Austrian railways are positive surprises. I knew that there was no extra fee at ICs, but that the highest level ÖBB-ECs have the same pricing as a CityShuttle caught me pants down. And my fav: the timetable software at the ÖBB homepage makes a use of simple SQL queries: you can list all the trains that come to or leave a particular station in a time interval, that here in Hungary I have to do by pen and paper (analogue database handling). I want that!

High quality photos