Beginning of the semester

I can really tell, where I live, that the semester started today (always much later here than in the USA). Suddenly there aren’t any seats free on the tram, the supermarket is packed at lunch time, and the free newspaper is gone before I get to the tram stop. I still remember my first two months in Vienna, August and September 1988. I thought I had found the perfect city–a spectacular selection of concerts and museums and no need to make one’s way through masses of people. That illusion ended at the beginning of October, when the universities started up again. 😉