Little joys

Brief break from the catching-up posts: Vienna is making me happy in small ways that I want to commemorate here. Last summer, I arrived here heartbroken, jetlagged, culture-shocked, and sick (with a nasty chest cold that would hang around for a month, possibly this was psychosomatic but either way I'm glad to report I have not been this sick since then). I'd since forgotten a lot of the things that made me happy, or that I hadn't even realized at the time made me happy! Here, then, post-jump, a compendium!


1. DIRTBAG MOZARTS. (I don't always use the term dirtbag, depending on the company.) These guys are great. Flaks sent to drum up audiences for touristy mediocre concerts of Mozart or Strauss music, they're clad in silk trousers and vests and sometimes powdered wigs, but what's great about them is they could not care less. It's that great thing you get with some European waiters, the sense of "I'm doing this for money and will not pretend I enjoy it." So you tend to see them slouching around, smoking, and grumpy, and the disconnect between the touristy come-on and the total eyeroll of their execution delights me. This I rediscovered on my first trip into the Innerstadt last week, walking through a massive Habsburg gate to see my first Dirtbag Mozart of the summer picking his nose. Never change, Dirtbag Mozarts!

Sadly, neither of these Dirtbag Mozarts were smoking, which is my favorite thing that Dirtbag Mozarts do, but I think they both nicely capture the "Yeah whatever you gonna buy an authentic experience or not" vibe.

2. The glories of European liberalism! Specifically, the little things: the streets here are shockingly clean, especially coming from Boston (probably other American cities too!), because they literally pay people to sweep them on a daily basis. Or perhaps the free gyms in the parks: exercise equipment out in the open for anyone in the public to use, and people use them all the time, mothers and their kids as much as anyone. It's a delight. (Also, as I'll post about sometime later this week, alllll the cheap art!)

3. Things Done Well. German cultures basically worship bread, and Vienna has a whole host of bakeries doing just their thing, and doing it exceptionally well. This, as I'll write about in my Useful Post on Vienna, is one place you want to get outside the grocery store for cheapness and quality - €1.90 at a local shop will get you a full loaf of fresh-baked bread: seeded, dark pumpernickel, rough whole-grain, whatever. My strategy has been to get the heartiest-looking fare possible, and I have yet to be disappointed.

4. Rhubarb yogurt. Yogurt over here is amazing generally, but in Austria there's a company that does a seasonal rhubarb flavor, and I'm obsessed. I actually had to suppress a yip of delight when I saw that I hadn't missed the season for this.

5. Biking heaven. I posed about this last year, but Vienna has an incredible, well-posted biking system, and drivers are amazing about working around cyclists when the road is shared. It's not Copenhagen (still the greatest bike city on earth as far as I can tell) but between the infrastructure and the free city bike loaners, it's a dream come true.

That's a solid top five for now - more to come soon!