"I Think You're Nice, But You Scare The Shit Outta Me."

Thus spake James, referring to my profession (the Big Girl one) and martial arts prowess. I responded with, "Why do you think I'm still single?"  Perhaps simple truth, but I took it as a compliment.

Saturday we went to the city and James showed me around.  He took me to a record shop, turns out there're even European Hipsters.  They look much the same, down to the skinny jeans and flannel shirts.  Not as many beards.  I found some great stuff that I would totally buy, if I still had a record player.  (...And half of my Denver audience just decided I'm not worthy.)  I love this city.

I have no idea where this was taken.  There're about a million parks in Vienna.

Take a book, give a book.  Did I mention I love this city?!

 This place actually exists.

Then James took me to a cafe with CATS.

So, that totally happened.

We walked around all day and ended up in Prater, which is an amusement area.  It felt uncomfortably similar to a carnival at home, which I'm not sure if I appreciated very much.  There were a lot of kids, therefore a lot of crying and a lot of strange smells.

Really, German?!  How many "r's" do we need now? This is just ridiculous.

We rode the Ferris Wheel right around sunset and were able to see a lot of Vienna.  It was beautiful.

Get used to the selfies, I'm doing a lot of traveling by myself and have trust issues.

I met Christian and Kerstin's neighbors, Victoria and Adi (short for Adolf- he's pretty old and can't use his full name.  For obvious reasons.).  Two very sweet and active individuals, they just got back from biking through Germany.  We sat around after Frida fell asleep and consumed an insane variety of alcohol: 3 kinds of wine, 2 bottles of different champagne, grappa and limoncello.  Victoria has a different glass for every alcohol.

Seriously.

Yesterday I took Armande (my big-ass Canon 40d, for those of you whom haven't been introduced) into the city, accompanied again by James.  I'm still trying to figure out how Photoshop works, so y'all'll have to wait until I figure that out and have some time before seeing those, because I'm shooting in RAW now (which apparently means something to some of you).

Last night, Christian, Kerstin, Frida and I drove out to the middle of the field and tried to watch the Perseid meteor shower.  I love that they think special outings like this trump the need to get to bed early on a Monday night.  However, the effort was somewhat in vain.  We had cloud cover moving in, temperature dropping, and a 4-year-old who decided it was time for bed around 10.  Not a single Sternschnuppe in the sky.  She gallantly made it home, but today was not so easy; she was tired and a little angry about it all day long.  I've learned that she's viciously independent when she wants to be; she broke down in tears today because I insisted on getting toast out of the hot toaster for her (apparently there's a towel-trick her dad taught her, and she really wanted to use it).   So she put the toast back in the toaster, and tried again once it was retoasted.

Tomorrow I venture into The City alone for the first time, wish me luck on not getting lost in the massive spiderweb of public transportation.  At least, not getting irrevocably lost.  Not having a cell phone and instant communication can be intimidating sometimes.  But I think that sometimes, the best experiences are the unexpected ones.  Although, sometimes the worst experiences are the unexpected ones, too.  Na ja, que' sera sera (Like that?  Suddenly I'm tri-lingual!)