Monday, Oct 16, 2023 at 1:30 p.m.

I'm heading to Bratislava today from Vienna. Since I last wrote, here are some cool things I've done:

• Visited Cesky Krumlov - a small medieval town with a castle (with live bears) that is one of the few places not bombed during WWII.

• Visited the golden hall in Vienna for a symphony of Mozart and Haydn's music using period accurate instruments

• Drank in one of the oldest continuously operating beer-halls in Europe in Prague.

• Ate currywurst, trdelnick and lots of roast meat.

• Met people from Germany, Czechia, Croatia, Algeria, France, China, Australia, the US, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Canada, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, Israel, New Zealand, and more.

• Read Khafka in Prague.

• Visited the Berlin wall, Brandenburg gate, checkpoint charlie, and holocaust memorials.

• Clubbed in Berlin.

My hostel in Vienna was huge. It was on top of an IKEA and had huge events every night. There was a drag show in the lobby while I checked in and stand up comedy later. The rest of it felt like a large hotel. Extremely industrial with concrete everywhere and endless hallways of rooms. On the second day when I woke up there was 15 middle schoolers chasing each other around the commons area. My ears are still ringing. The concrete design meant that everything in my room was super loud. On my first night, I woke up to someone packing at 6:30am. The second night people started packing at 7am but someone was trying to fish something out from the side of their bed with a coathanger for about half an hour by scraping it against the wall. This morning, someone was packing at 4:30am. It took them half an hour to finish. Maybe I was just unlucky with noisy roommates because this is the first time I've been woken up every morning.

Vienna was great. I didn't have a lot of time there but I got to visit lots of cathedrals and palaces. The symphony I mentioned earlier was very cool as well.

Yesterday evening I decided to listen to a podcast with lex Friedman and Jordan Peterson on a whim. By chance, Peterson was talking about how beauty is good and mentioned a cathedral in Vienna that had moved him with its beauty. Just as he was saying that I happened to be walking by that cathedral. It was beautiful inside. I noticed mass was just starting. The guy guarding the gate was doing his best to turn around tourists. I asked if I could attend the service and he let me in. Even though it was in German, I enjoyed the service and was able to follow along a bit because it was similar to most other church services I've attended. On of the things that was different was there was a ball on a string that spouted smoke everywhere. They swung it around a lot and it gave the church a really cool atmosphere because you could see the light better.