Munich to Vienna: "...we understand them."

(Vee reporting) 4/23/06: Bear with me, and the title I chose for this blog will make sense in just a minute.
After packing, paying and arriving to the station we were very happy (once again) to learn that we would travel totally for free to beautiful Vienna, Austria. We were already 1 hour on the train, when a young austrian fellow joined our first-class (private) cabinet in the train. To break the awkward silence he asked us where we were heading to. From there, a fantastic 4 hour-long conversation began with Nikolaus. An austrian electrical-engineer who just returned to his home-country after living for a while in Luxembourg.
We talked about everything! From the different cities we had already visited, to the cultural differences between europeans and americans, about history, social issues, our personal lives a bit, sports (football vs. fussball, the world cup), Vienna (where to go what to do), food, and...and the US goverment foreign-policy of course. It's enough to say that we were not too suprised about his personal thoughts on this, and the impressions he and possibly many austrains have about the US and the people. As of now there is definitely a feeling of "I don't want to go there" among people his age. It seems to them that America is quickly isolating itself and creating an unfriendly image as a country. A few years ago, Nikolaus had a chance to go to the US and decided not to, he didn't feel like being treated like a "danger".
Anyway, when I finally asked him what he thought was the main difference between germans and austrians, since they share an almost common history, language, culture, etc he simply said that he knows of a joke that explains this: "German people dont't understand Austrians, but like them. Austrians understand Germans." (brief silence, then riotous laughter from the 3 of us)
There's no way to accurately re-create the moment, and the way in which he said it; but it was sooo funny that we laughed and giggled for a good minute or two.
Afterwards he called one of his friends to find out for us if there was a "fussball" (soccer) match we could go and watch that night, and later he invited us to go out to dinner with him to this really good brewery-restaurant outside of Vienna that has an interesting story.
His train-stop was one before ours, and we said our good-byes not before he explained us the best way to reach our Hotel using the metro.
When it was our turn to get off the train, we followed his intructions, and sure enough 20 minutes later were finally at the "Pension Andreas"; a georgeous old building with very high ceilings and a lot of charm.
We were exhausted and took a quick nap. After we awoke we found under our door a message left by Nikolaus who faxed the Hotel to let us know that unfortunatelly this restaurant was closed, but made sure to specify his cell-phone number to call him anyway if we felt like it.
Starving and quite tired we decided to call him the following day and made our way to "Siebenstern Brau" a Brewery-restaurant that was recommended in our book. We scored big time! Food was awesome, place was awesome, the BEER was INCREDIBLE!! Even I loved it and had 2 of my own! Cliff of course tried every single one, while enjoying our delicious dinner of salads, soups, cheesed-dark bread and dessert, we were also happy to see that the prices were very nice and that they had free wireless Internet! Too bad we didn't have our laptop with us, but we made sure to keep this place in mind to maybe come back the next day.