Sports and Travel

High above, atop a slender column is Archangel Gabriel. Perched, both hands are full. In his right, the Hungarian Holy Crown of St. Stephan – the first king of Hungary – in his left the king’s two barred apostolic cross, awarded by Pope Gregory VII for ushering Christianity into Hungary.

As the train from Brussels pulled into the station, I struggled with my over-stuffed backpack and lumbered awkwardly down onto the platform of the dark train station. This was Bruges. It looked abandoned, as if time had stood still for centuries. I took a deep breath, the icy air shredding my throat. Under the dim lights, you couldn’t see a meter past the pool of illumination, giving a shine to the frosted ground. I could already see why the tiny city was considered a fairly tale, although the winter cold made it harder to give in to it.

It’s little more than a huddle of farmhouses - a satellite village of a glitzy Alpine ski resort. You’ll find the ski bums at night if you go through the low door into the village’s only significant drinking hole - a cavernous cellar bar which profits from the lack of better alternatives. The bums are lined up along the bar, rosy-cheeked from the wind and the altitude, and buying beers with the paper tokens the bar sells at reduced cost to workers.

Nearest the door, clasping his glass with obscenely large hands, sits a huge Russian in his mid 30s, his shaven head slightly reddish from the sun. He says we should call him Franky “because you fools wouldn’t be able to pronounce my real name.”

There were great Austrian success stories at the Vancouver Olympics, including glorious team golds for the ski jumpers. But, for many Austrians, the relative failure of the men’s Alpine ski team has been a dominant theme of these Games.

Thailand. Fall 2009. The plane lands on time, the doors open and the climate controlled tunnel guides the passengers into Bangkok’s Suvarnbhumi airport. This airport is a monster – the world’s third largest after Dubai and Beijing – with metal limbs and glass skin, pathways that move even if it’s not going uphill. Making my way through to the baggage claim is no small task, nor does time fly by traveling on and off the kilometers of moving pathways.

For snow lovers the call of the wild is getting ever louder as more and more of us seek respite from the madding crowds. During the upcoming high season of the Austrian ski winter, congestion on the groomed ski pistes can sometimes resemble rush hour in Tokyo.

My first experience of the ancient town of Dürnstein in Lower Austria was via a grainy old home movie shot in the 1960s. The film was of a wedding, where the bride and groom move awkwardly through a church courtyard overwhelmed by well-wishers and a polished brass band, trumpeting the ceremony in grand Austrian tradition.

As an increasingly disaffected city office worker, I had come to the farm near Mondaino with the vague instinctive notion of a need to get “closer to the soil.” But as it had turned out was I balancing perilously high above the ground, deep in the innards of a scratchy olive tree in the autumn browned-hills where the region of Emilia-Romagna melts into Le Marche in central Italy.

The first thing we saw was the top of the red and white Tyrolian flag, standing tall and rather proprietorial in the luminous mist. At last a mountain hut! I was feeling exhausted and light headed after an exhausting two hours of winding climbing up from the East Tyrolean village of Matrei on my mountain bike.

Arriving at Südbahnhof with minutes till departure time, we boarded the train for Budapest in high spirits, Ferdinand (my accomplice in this daring venture) and I on our first trip ast together without a plan. We missed the connecting train from Györ to the spectacular Budapest Keleti pályaudvar (Eastern train station).

So it was nearly 22:00 when we arrived in my native land.

Walking through the streets of Budapest is a breathtaking experience at any hour, in part because of the genuine beauty of the city, but also to see the morbid reality of how decayed some of it is.