Wein

Guten Tag from Vienna! We have been having a wonderful time here. (However, our Internet access is quite slow and unreliable, so you will have to wait until we return for pictures or extended updates.)

We had only been in our apartment for about an hour – long enough to unpack a bit and walk around the block to get our bearings – when the phone rang. Erika, Georgia’s distant relative, was downstairs! She whisked us off to her apartment for a delightful meal of wienerschnitzel, potatoes, and cucumber salad. We met her boyfriend, Walter. We visited for a quite a while, and did fairly well considering that they know only a few words of English and we know only a tiny bit of German. Thank goodness for those library tapes and the German-English dictionary! I think the only big mix-up was when Mike tried to ask Walter what his job had been, and looked up the German word for occupation. Well, Walter then told us about the Nazi occupation of Austria!

Today we walked around the old part of the city (Schwedenplatz to the Opera House), took a bus tour including the Schoenbrunn palace, and ate a delicious traditional Austrian dinner.

Tommorow (“morgan”) we head out for Salzburg, and we will spend the night there.