Joe Lapp is a senior English major at Calvin College. He toured Europe for two weeks in August and is now studying in Oxford. This column is taken from the journal of his trip.

Leaving Venice in its sunset glow, I ride the train through nine hours of darkness to Vienna. A woman in her mid twenties sits across from me. She speaks fluent English; I find out she conducts a small orchestra in Vienna, the city of music. We try to sleep on the dirty train seats.

My friend picks me up at the station at 7 am. After days of train travel, strange hostel bunks, and miles of walking through unfamiliar European cities, it’s great to be with someone I know in an apartment that feels like a home. I immediately take a four hour nap.

In the afternoon we walk through the village of Perchtoldsdorf. The small town feel — the butcher, the baker, the vegetable stand (and no Wal-Marts!) — still exists here.

The sense of history is acute. A centuries-old monument remembers the townspeople who died in the plagues. My friend tells me how, close to here and many years ago, the men of the town had been held captive by an opposing army. When the townspeople collected money to free their men, the enemies took the ransom then killed the captives anyway. I walk and wonder how it feels to live in a country where war is not just a distant vocabulary word.

Vienna is classical music, so my friend takes me to a Baroque concert with period instruments. Afterward we go to an open air food court. Hundreds of people eat and watch a movie projected onto the wall of a palace nearby. The movie is a recording of an orchestral concert that happened years ago — only in Vienna would people come out for this.

The next afternoon my friend takes me to a “patchwork” castle in the hills outside the city. Some rich guy trucked in parts of three different castles built in three different styles and wedged them together – sort of a Lego concept on a grand scale. They do these things in Austria, I guess.

We stop at a small family-run restaurant, a “gasthaus,” in the woods. After lunch, we cross the river on a one-car ferry, my “Danube cruise.”

I am tired of Renaissance art from being in Florence, so we go to a local modern art museum. The large canvases splashed with color and the mixed media installations revive my artistic sensibilities.

In the evening, I go into downtown Vienna by myself. End up in the Stephensplatz, where I sit and eat the obligatory sacher torte and wait to feel lonely. The melancholy comes as I see the night huddled around the tops of the buildings, sift through the swarm of languages around me.

Unsettled and restless, I realize again that there is no perfect travel experience, that no ideal Vienna exists. What happens when I go to another city, another country? What do I go there to see? Foreign people? Old buildings? Perhaps I go to see myself.

What happens when I sit down to communicate with someone and find that we cannot understand each other? We utter sounds without comprehension; appear baffled (because we are); try signs; give up.

Out of my inner thoughts, St. Stephen’s Cathedral calls to me. Its grimy facade attests to years of standing upright, hearing confessions. Organ music escapes the stone walls, strains of Bach a counterpoint to the music of the break dancers in the square.

I walk into the cathedral, hold my hands over a bank of votive candles and feel their warmth, see the golden glow of the candle illumine the edges of my outstretched fingers as if they glowed with internal light.

I sit to pray, wonder how I can make my life an extension of this place of penitence and quiet glory. Touching water to my forehead, I walk out of the church. The skies confirm the baptism with drops of rain. I feel a deep sadness and a peace, and hope that others see the light in me.