Archive | October, 2026

Is it something in the water?

28 Oct

Actually, I expect it’s something in the air. Brisk, dry, bright.

It’s not even 8 a.m. and I’ve already had several cheerful exchanges with people. With Viennese people. No sign of the Wiener Grant (Viennese grumpiness) this morning.

The nicest was with a man from the MA 48 (city sanitation department). They came driving along in one of their big orange garbage trucks just as I was taking this photo. One jumped off and said, with a big smile, something like “Be careful, we have to back up here. Wouldn’t want to ruin your beautiful photo.” I looked at the truck and at him in his orange uniform and said “The color fits right in.” He laughed and said “True. Wouldn’t stick out at all.”

This all in fairly broad Viennese dialect, which gave me added pleasure.

It’s almost like living on “The Truman Show”. 😉

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Wien 1927

17 Oct

In every Saturday supplement of the Kurier some name of the moment tells about the “book of their life”. Today it was opera singer Thomas Ebenstein telling about a guidebook to Vienna published in 1927. More than the sights, the book explains the quirks of the Viennese, for example, that the Viennese eat well and stay slender (no longer!), go from the great Burgtheater to a striptease, and from the Philharmoniker to the Heuriger (wine tavern). Yup. That just about sums it up.

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Hot and dry

4 Oct

The temperature table here is from my Fodor’s Vienna 1988. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently as drought and heat persist in Austria. I’m off to the Vienna Woods today for a walk in what (the forecast tells me), about 40 years ago, would have been the average maximum afternoon temperature in July.

While my brother sends me photos of trees in Northern New England sporting their reds, oranges, and yellows, many trees here are showing a lot of brown.

Sometimes it breaks my heart what we are doing to this beautiful planet we have the privilege of living on.

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