Escape from Wien

Vienna, the capital of Austria. It's city center was designated a UNESCO worldheritage site and Economist Intelligence Unit study of 127 countries has placed it at 3 in the quality of life... blah blah blah... and the worst time to go there, ask me! Dec-Jan.

Wien, as called by Austrians was not on my list, neither anybodys. Fear of spending christmas holidays locked at home, glued to my laptop screen without takinbg a breath of fresh air - and I was there Friday, the 28th Dec morning.

Two days of site-seeing - the parliament, hunderwasserhaus, stefan's dome, kahlenberg, naturalhistory museum, vitok's cathedral, UNO city, under the dark, dingy and dreary sky didnt do any good either. Coupled with these, a temperature of -7deg and winds did play well.. all in all, I WANTED TO GET BACK TO STUTTGART!

We finished our lunch at 8.40pm and got back to the Volkstheater stop. Our idea of staying warm was to board a tram, travel the ring route untill 10.45pm. We had to board out bus to Stuttgart at 11.45pm. All went well, until we boarded the last Tram. The guy took the tram to the last station and asked us to get down. We were hoping to get down at the station we boarded the tram on it's way back. why? simply coz it was lullaby time ! the tram had to go to sleep and the driver too!

I woke up! It was a dream... aahhh!! what a relief!! ' Alles aufsteigen', shouted the driver. (All getdown). OOPS! It was for real. At 11.00pm we are standed in an unknown city, with 45 min to get to the bus which will take us to Stuttgart! I looked at my friends and they looked back at me. 'Now what?', one of them asked. I didnt bother to look at the others', coz I knew it wont look any better.

I saw a bus stop ran towards it. The others followed. I recognised bus numbers which could take us to Volkstheater. And, luckily the bus arrived in under a minute. We boarded the bus and I counted the stops until Volkstheater. There were 19 stops. It would take a long long time. The clocked ticked at 11.05pm. I tried not to look at the other two souls. 'Are we gonna make it?', one asked. 'I think so! we don have a choice, do we?', i replied. she looked confused. 'Don worry, We will make it', I reverted. She was more convinced. She looked at her watch at everystop and just hoped that the bus could skip some of them. It did, coz there werent people getting down or boarding from these stops. And we reached Volkstheater at 11.24pm.

We had a whole 21min to get to the Bus stand. A Underground to Erdberg would take 10 min. So a total 11 min to run from the metro stop to the bus stop. Then we looked at the Metro arrival time. Due in 6 min. OMG! Before anyone could say a word, I said , 'I hope all of us can run'. We got down at Erdberg at 11.40pm and rushed towards the exit. Ahem! there were two of them! we chose the one on the right. The outside didnt look similar to the where we had got down the previous day. We went up the steps towards the 2nd exit. This, more than less likely looked like the right one. It was 11.43pm. The bus would leave in 2 mins. We went up the steps again towards exit 1. We got down and I recognised the bridge. 'There was a brid-d-d-g-g-e-e where we got down right?', i asked. No response. Then, THE moment arrived. The joy, surprise, shock, ecstacy, fear.. all at once. We saw the bus. No one spoke a word. We just ran.....ran.......and ran, until we produced the tickets to the driver. I looked at the clock on the driver's deck. It read 11.45pm. Thank god, we were on time!