Still in Vienna …
Posted: October 21, 2007
Our plan was to get back here from Venice and do some bike riding. As it stands, it's hard to keep your fingers free of frostbite and pain by only walking, so riding a bike through town is right out.
There are some people who do it, riding bikes around Vienna in this season, but they're a hearty German stock with thicker blood. Ron and I are steeped in the San Diego sunlight, bleached and tanned. The weather is out of our range.
The Viennese breeze around town in the crisp air wearing only thin sweaters and maybe a pair of boots with fur lining the ankle. Ron and I look like we are mounting an expedition to some base camp, we've both bought scarves and gloves, and we're each in knit caps and all sorts of woolens, and we still shiver curse and creep along when we walk, with our necks and shoulders pinched up in a very Frankensteinesque hobble. We can see our breath and we drool and run from shop to shop like this and we curse, "Holy shit it's cold!" and wonder how 12-year-old Viennese girls walk around in fleece pullovers, no gloves hats or scarves. "They must be used to this or something, I'm about to die!"
As it stands, we don't have much to do. We don't want to spend much more money, walking is painful, we're all museumed out, and we have two days left. Biking would have been a good activity, something to do, but you've got to be kidding. I'm not making any more cold wind around my body than already exists.
I'm catching up on reading. We walk and ride the subway to the center of town once a day or so and we have a couple beers in the hostel, by the grace of god, there's a good bar in this one.
