Vienna/Amsterdam

So I just wrote a huge blog post on a stolen (ok, borrowed) computer, and HTML deleted it. I hated HTML in IT 101 and my opinion of it has not changed. I will now attempt to recreate the brilliant blog post which got eaten by cyberspace.

I have been on more tours in the last 2 1/2 months the rest of my 20 years combined. (Not including tours given at Bentley University). I used to think that I hated tours: stuck with a bunch of strangers, snapping photos of things you won't remember, being glared at by locals. Not true. I LOVE tours. I love all of the obscure facts and dates. I guess I should've suspected my hidden love for tours when I decided to be a tour guide at Bentley.

Many of the tours I've been on have been called "City Walks." I think they put the work walk in the title because they don't want you to expect a convertible Skoda or horse drawn carriage. So, in a City Walk, you spend 1-3 hours hobbling over cobblestones and avoiding piles of horse shit while being told about neo-gothic architecture this and Medieval Tower that. Vienna is a cool, cool city, so we have started taking city walks into our own hands.

The walk I went on last night I will entitle "Vienna: the Amsterdam of Central Europe." A trio leaves Erasmus, takes a small detour to the Turkish bakery, and heads out for a walk. We walk past cool store fronts, hole in the wall bars, cozy, cafes, and of course, tons of specialty stores. In Vienna, there is a store to buy the left shoe and a Turkish store across the street where you can buy the right shoe. It's not that bad. But, we did walk past the Billa (grocery store) that has two stores across the street from each other. One sells produce and the other Billa sells everything else. Two Billas, two sets of products, same street.

After awhile we end up getting lost. Not a big deal, Vienna is a safe city. We're walking around, looking for landmarks, and a bathroom, and we see bright lights illuminating the sidewalk ahead. As we get closer, we see 4 full grown marijuana plants sitting under grow lamps. We had stumbled across Bush Planet: a head shop and grow shop. At Bush Planet you can buy smoking paraphernalia and everything necessary to grow marijuana, from fertilizer to plastic sheets. When I picked Austria to study abroad I thought of the Danube River, The Sound of Music, goat herders, Mozart, chocolate, NOT head shops.

We stop, we gawk, we take pictures, we move on. Eventually we end up on MariahilferstraBe. MariahilferstraBe is a 2km long shopping street that starts in Museums Quartier and ends between the 7th and 15th district. That area, right next to the U6, is the red light district of Vienna.

I'm walking, enjoying the warm weather and good company, by this point totally numbed to all of the brothels we are passing. I look into a shop window where to heavily done up mannequins are lounging on the ground inside of a shop window. One of these mannequins blinks at me. It scared me so bad. I totally forgot that brothels do that. Two girls were sitting in the front window likes puppies at a pet shop waiting for some John to lay down 25 euro for a lay. It was disgusting. Apparently Amsterdam's window shopping is pretty similar. And this is why, if I were ever to give this tour, I would entitle it the Amsterdam of Central Europe.