My scenic view at the top of a staircase behind an Austrian wine tavern was evidently private property. The man who I was sitting next to on the front patio - who I assumed was a crusty but benign local - appeared next to me.
"Enjoying the view?"
"Yes, I am," I said, looking over the rounded hills and the Danube River valley as the sun began its pink descent.
"I always do. I live here."
I apologized for trespassing, and used as much German as I could to be polite, which meant that I just said "thank you" a couple times. The ornery proprietor eyed me from behind black semi-circle glasses, his chin and cheeks dressed in a silver beard. He knew I spoke English, but now my flustered manner betrayed my American citizenship, and he was skeptical.
He asked if I was a student, and I told him I was studying at Charles University and FAMU, the film academy, in Prague. His eyes widened slightly and he assumed a stance and countenance with which I was all too familiar: the Historian Pose. I had said I was a student, and that admission, I have learned, is an automatic invitation for a history lesson from any native European, even from a man I'd just met, even in the sleepy provincial town of Neulengbach, Austria.
Pointing to the hills with great ceremony, the man described how hundreds of years ago the Turks came down the valley right before us, crossed the Danube, and assaulted Neulengbach's castle, which still looms over the tiny town. Neulengbach thwarted the Turks that day, he said with such deliberation that I assumed his own ancestors took part in the defense.
In Europe, there is no escaping history, academically or physically, because Europe IS history. The United States is a baby country, just as North America is only a toddler, in regards to its discovery and population by Anglo-Saxons. We go to school in a city where Lincoln lived and died, where Martin Luther King Jr. enlightened a nation. But our country's history is no older than 300 years. The American University was chartered in 1893, Charles University a scant 545 years earlier in 1348.
It is an entirely different experience to be in a city, in a country and on a continent which have such an amazing depth of history. The Charles Bridge, which spans the Vltava River, throbs with the history of events which have taken place on it, like the execution of St. Jan of Nepomuk in 1393; or via it, like the battle with the Swedes in 1648.
Our program's residence, the Kolej Komenskeho, is a short walk from the Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral, which is the ultimate manifestation of the city's epochal architectural and religious traditions. Yet all of this history - the cobblestones, the Baroque facades, the countless statues - is mingled with today. Trams 22 and 23, the lines to school from the Kolej, run through the antique neighborhood of Mala Strana, flirting with archaic walls and ducking under ageless arches. McDonald's and KFCs are squeezed between churches, T-Mobile billboards, obscure Renaissance architecture, a teenager skateboards through Old Town Square listening to rap.
The old man and I watched the sunset together for a while, and it was, I dare say, historically romantic. From the passion and precision of his earlier descriptions, I began to imagine the Turks charging down the hills in front of me, crossing the Danube, heading straight for the town. But they were thwarted again, this time by the man's cell phone, which rang and snapped me back to today.
