Day Trip to Graz

Because Ivana and I will not see each other on my birthday she decided to treat me to a day in Graz as my present. I knew very little about Austria, but she had been to Graz a few times and knew the city well enough to show me around without getting lost.

The bus took us through the Croatian, Slovenian and Austrian country side, and was really a beautiful bus ride. Unfortunately the bus left at 6 am and we had managed to get no sleep the night before, so I could hardly hold my head up to the view. As I learned last time, the houses of Europe are such a contrast to American homes. Almost all of them are concrete, with orange tiled roofs (like the ones in my Dubrovnik photos). I remember in my French class the teacher told us a story of her mother coming to America and saying "All the houses are on the road." And while that is a bit of a stretch, most houses in America are really close to the road, or lack the giant metal fence or trees blocking out all the noisy hoo-haw of the cars.

The sunrise made a nice little purple hue that really made Croatia look magnificent and even the most boring buildings had life in that morning. The leafy green trees lumped over the houses and made the community look friendly and welcoming.

When looking for things to see in Graz, Ivana found a self mocking trip. One part that was especially good was when they mentioned the 14 km of Slovenian high way. A route which the Slovenians spent so much money perfecting and so much time cultivating that it now costs to drive on it. While it was a decent view, it was a bit over done.

We arrived in Graz around 9 and already were reminded of Croatia, because the bus let us out at Dubrovnik Avenue. In fact a lot of Graz had these Serbo-Croatian reminders. We found a Serbian pub, with the menu only in Serbian, serving Serbian food and beer. We heard several people speaking Croatian and the touristic signs were wrote in German, English and Serbo-Croatian as well. I guess during and after the war a lot of people just wanted to escape, and Graz was close enough.

After reading and looking at map for some time we decided on three main spots: The Bell Tower, The Friendly Alien and the random places along the river side.

We also did some shopping at H&M because they had some really cheap deals. Sweaters for 9 euros and such, shirts for 5 and some things for less.

Some things about some things we saw while doing some things in Graz: The clock tower required a hike, a hike up several zigzagging staircases that leg in strange directions. The clock tower was multipurpose in the day. One bell was for the hour, another for fires and the last one was to warn the public for hangings taking place that day. The Friendly Alien is that crazy building and is actually the modern art museum of Graz. It was quite impressive and never holds a fixed exhibition. When we visited it was Pop-Art. Not exactly what I expected but it was really intense. The last piece was a giant inflatable fun house that was made into a quasi-S&M porno show that rapidly played scenes from pornography videos and looped high pitched, droning, noise rock. And a few years ago Graz was named the cultural center of the world and with such a title they decided to build a bizarre cafe on the river....this is the cafe we drank at and took pictures of.

After getting lost a few times in the street and running to our bus we made it back home and didn't manage to fall asleep until around 12 am...

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Part of trip: Europe Trip 2

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