Do not remember when I entered Austria, whether morning or afternoon. Passport was stamped Spielfeld. Do not know when Slavs exited train — before Graz? after Graz? My train arrived before sunset in Vienna, a tidy city inside a clinical culture. No more spontaneous acts on sunburned beaches. This was a land that admired discipline and was as anal as I. Found an adequate thicket of brush near the train station and made a small deposit to the land showing my appreciation. Throughout the remainder of the day, I wandered about humming my version of Analweiss. This is the city that gave the wiener its name. This is the city where the Ottoman Empire was stopped from further gobbling up the Holy Roman Empire, where Freud invented psychoanalysis, where young Adolph was born and raised, where Alma Maria Mahler Gropius Werfel put the kink into kinky. I felt right at home.

vienna slides


Something about people who aim for perfection and purity. Everyone else, but they, can see their incongruities oozing out the other end. For example: The human comedy is an eternal sit-com.

schonbrunn


Towards evening, I found a neat and orderly room in a baroqueish boarding house with a walkup of 3 or 4 flights. The landlady did not speak much English, at least not to a bohemian ragamuffin like me.