Next stop, Vienna

Vienna didn't remind me as much of Before Sunrise as I thought it would. I didn't meet any dashing strangers on the train there. But one of the roommates of the girl I was staying with (Resa, a friend of my friend Ina, an Austrian Udubber) showed up at the exact moment I got to their door and tried to figure out which button to push. Which was kind of like a miracle. Or at least a convenient coincidence.

Resa was REALLY sweet and a very nice host. She gave me some Austrian lemon flavored beer that first night, and it was by far the best beer I have ever had. It didn't taste bitter or crappy at all, the way beer usually does, to varying degrees. It was just sweet and lemony and delicious.

I think I was in Vienna for three nights and two days, but it's all sort of a blur now. I walked around a lot, and even had a companion for the first day of it! Which was kind of a nice change of pace. She took me to this crazy Austrian art museum though, full of these messed up Expressionist painters, and it was great at first, but after an hour or so it made me hate life. Then I went to an Opera, which was a totally great opportunity and experience and all, but I got a standing seat in the balcony, and I'm too damn short, so I was climbing on the rails and supporting my weight in all kinds of bizarre and inappropriate and acrobatic ways for the entire 3.3 hour event, and there weren't any likeable characters in said opera (Lady Macbeth von Mzensk, which incidentally, has nothing to do with the Macbeths you Shakespeare buffs might be thinking of), so I went on having a rather depressed, bleak and Russian view of the world for the rest of the evening.

However! I also got to go to a cool Viennese cafe. The waitresses were really inattentive, rude and unpleasant, but that's part of the experience. Actually, I found rude to be kind of the shtick in Austria, and it was the first place I have been where I wouldn't want to live, just because most people are very rule-bound and unfriendly. People kept getting mad at me for STUPID stuff. Like I wasn't wearing/holding my backpack in the right way in the museum, and five different guards tried to get me to do it differently. I'm still not sure why it mattered or what the most correct position for my backpack would have been. Also I tried to pet a horse and got yelled at. It just made me kind of angry. Also in the cafe some dude started smoking a CIGAR at the table right next to us. That's when I remembered I was in Europe...

I really enjoyed Vienna, even though a lot of the people were douches. I even stumbled upon this random military festival, where I got to climb into a tank, and they were sending people on huge zip lines and kids were rock climbing and music was playing and there were all these army dudes in uniform everywhere. Very bizarre. But I saw the pretty buildings, and I relaxed a little bit, and Resa and her friends were super nice to me. So that was good too.