Travel in a world gone by and the poignancy of A Time of Gifts

As Patrick Leigh Fermor arrives at what he'd thought was approximately the mid-point of his trek from London to Constantinople - Vienna - he settles in for his longest stop in the journey so far (he recognizes while in Vienna that he'd been proceeding at about 10 miles a day, less than he'd thought, and he lets readers of his travel memoir, A Time of Gifts, know that he'd underestimated the difficulty of the 2nd half of his walk and that the journey took him about 11 months). PLF spends three weeks in Vienna and has some weird adventures and many observations - some of the reflections and conversations (particularly, before entering Vienna, w/ a man he dubs the polymath) about the many tribes, migrations, revolts, plots, battles, and assassinations throughout the course of history in central Europe are obscure to at least this reader, and I expect to most. His description of some of the Viennese neighborhoods and famous churches are fantastic - his vocabulary on military items alone defies belief - and a particularly amusing character is a Quixotic man from the Frisian Islands (off the coast of Denmark/Germany) whose English is mostly derived from his reading of Shakespeare and is therefore quite hilarious. This Quixote encourages PLF - dead broke as he waits for a delayed mailing of 4 pound notes - to knock on doors in a prosperous neighborhood and offer to sketch portraits, a scheme that works surprisingly well and also affords us views into various typical Viennese households. After a few days of securing his finances, he says farewell to the Quixotic man, who boards a train and heads off for some scheme smuggling sugar across various borders. It's amazing how these people pass in and out of his life and how easily PLF adapts to the adventures and hardships of life on the edge, traveling in harsh conditions w/ no money - in winter, no less, in a time before Polartek and down clothing. But his spirits and his health seem OK throughout, and his recollection is extraordinary as is his mature (he writes this memoir about 40 years after the travels) reflections on youth  and on the world gone by give this narrative a special poignancy.