Austria 2018

The first time I was in Vienna I was stateless, although I was too young to know what that meant. There is a plenty diaspora literature that will give you a sense of what it was like to stop in Vienna on the way to Italy on the way out of the Soviet Union, so I'll spare you. I just want you to notice that I dated this travel-notes post in a way that I tend not to label others, because they don't generally need a year. I don't need to distinguish my trips to Singapore (yet).

The first time I was in Vienna I was stateless. The second time, I was a broke student. I stayed in a youth hostel outside downtown and got student-standby tickets for the ballet--literally standby, in that we had to stand. I didn't care for the city, still don't. It's my least favorite of all the Hapsburg cities I've been to. That appraisal didn't change the third time I was in Vienna a few years ago on very official business, nor the fourth time, which was just this past month. But I had changed.

A few days before I left for this fourth trip to Vienna, I shopped for countertops, so for the first time in my life I was hyper-attuned to marble and granite. I worked in a marble building last year and knew it was beautiful and expensive, but didn't give the matter much thought. But when I checked in a week ago tomorrow to my own personal hotel room smack downtown, I noticed what must have been very expensive countertops all over the room. The massive, flat-screen TV greeted me by name when I turned it on. I ironed and hung up my suits and went back outside into this city I keep coming back to, not as often as some, but often enough for me. Here are some pictures from it.

We watched the world cup final at Sand in the City 

This is one of the few things I remember liking from my first trip to Vienna.

I'm the one who wrote "under construction"

The Coburg

After the work week, I flew to Innsbruck to see a friend.