AUSTRIANS

David said the best thing he remembered about our trip to Europe was the little places we stayed, small hotels or bed and breakfasts. He told me, “The people were friendly everywhere we went."

Cities had railroad stations with tourist bureaus, which booked rooms for us in small hotels with rates I could afford. More often we were in the countryside, traveling through small villages. Then it was up to luck and serendipity.

Before we left for the trip, I talked to a friend from Germany who married a guy from Downers Grove. I wish I knew someone here in Texas who could tell me how to spell German words. She told me to look for a house with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering “zimmer frei” (“free room”). Not free, of course, but inexpensive. Then I was to ask for “ein zimmer mit swei bedden (a room with two beds).

That worked most of the time. The only time we had trouble was that night when we drove all over Bavaria from village to village where every little inn and hotel had a sign in the German equivalent of “no vacancy”, following that stranger who found the home with that one extra room not occupied by Russian pipeline workers. All the places we stayed in Germany, in homes or small hotels, were clean, modern, with comfortable beds, where we slept under fluffy comforters.

In Innsbruck I told the attendant at the tourist bureau that David and I were traveling as cheaply as possible. She sent us to a large, multistoried hotel which looked like it had been built in the 1890's Gilded Age. In the elegant, paneled lobby the desk clerk, whose suit and tie looked as starched as his shirt and face, literally looked down his nose as he read the note from the tourist bureau.

David and I rode the elevator to the very top, where we found ourselves in the attic. The large room had sloping ceilings and exposed beams holding up the roof. Heat rises, but if there was central heat in that hotel, it did not reach our room under the rafters. Yet I slept warm and cozy under a typical German eiderdown.

That’s not a mistake. The Austrians are hyper German. They speak German. The proper name for Austria is Osterreich or “Eastern State.” (my spelling again), meaning it is the eastern part of the Germans. Yet surprisingly, in spite of what our bombs did to them in World War II, the people we met in Germany were nicer and kinder than the Austrians.

As David said, most European people were friendly and gracious. Not in that hotel. From the straight-backed formal desk clerk who registered us to the waiter who brought us tea and bread for breakfast in the elegant dining room, the entire staff served us with grim faces and haughty manners. Maybe they disdained us as American tourists seeing their wonderful country from the cheapest room in the hotel. Or maybe the Austrians dislike anyone who was not lucky enough to be born in Austria.