Oh-la-la… opera season isn’t until September. The missing portion of Austrian and German tourists could be found shopping their way through Vienna.
Ornate town, lots of grand boulevards, good opera houses… and (where the hell did summer go?!)… rain!
Hmm, tourist watching was high sport here. Lots of tourists makes for lots of people running into each other…. backing into each other, bouncing off each other, stepping on feet. Gambling as to whether someone will be cut off as they dive for an exit from a storefront or, silly them, are trying to weave through the crowds on the boulevard.
Did you realize that people reading a map or standing considering what to do next have a three feet proximity sensor? The scene plays out something like this… man stops in the middle of the pedestrian boulevard and stays there for a solid five minutes looking aimlessly around, people flow around him on both sides, AND THEN!, someone comes within three feet of him thinking they will walk around him, BEEP BEEP BEEP!, the man MUST walk in front of the offending party LOOKING AWAY from the oncoming walkers (usually at a GLACIAL creep to maximize time spent disrupting those trying to get around him). Amazing, it really is.
Food was back to the meat swimming in goo variety, but we did find a sushi restaurant to reduce our greasy meat intake.
We had an overly hot hotel despite the rain. No airconditioning, too loud if you opened the windows, next door tourists up and shuffling through drawers at an unseemly hour of 7AM, all served up with a three secondhand cigarette breakfast of hard bread roll with unidentifiable meat slices (is that bologna or ham? what’s with that olive thing embedded in the rubbery slice?) and good coffee. Dang, did we ever need the coffee.
Vienna, ho-hum… although there is a greasy schnitzel of a chance that it could be a good wallow in opera season.
