August 13 - Vienna

Jez and I woke up later than the 4 other people in our hostel room. This was basically due to the fact that we were also the last ones to go to bed the night before. By the time we rose from our slumber, the Finnish girls in our room had already gone for a run, showered and were ready to attack the day.

We received a nice little compliment when one of the Finnish girls remarked how quiet we were coming in last night. She was a light sleeper, was not wearing ear plugs and didn’t wake up when we barged in at 3am in the morning. Jez and I must be quite good at it by now. This is even more of an achievement as (I’m told) my snoring is significantly worse when I’m drunk. It appears that miracles do happen.

For the day we had to get Jez’s camera fixed. Even though he got a top of the line Olympus, it turns out that’s its not water and/or shock proof. He can still take photos, but the screen is completely blank. He therefore cannot see the photo he is taking, nor whether it got my best side or not (something of great concern to me).

With one broken camera in hand, we trekked to the outskirts of Vienna. It honestly was a dead ringer for some of the commercial suburbs in Sydney. If I didn’t know it, I could have sworn we were in North Ryde.

We arrived at the address given on the warranty, which turned out to be Olympus’ Austrian headquarters. Unfortunately, they couldn’t help us out but they directed us to a Mega Markt just across the street. The Mega Markt people at least knew what they were talking about; but, they told us they would have to send it to the Olympus store, which we had just been to, and it would take a few days. In short, we weren’t going to get the camera fixed in Austria.

In order to cheer ourselves up, we decided to head to the Sigmund Freud Museum to see were the father of psychoanalysis did his work. It took a while to get there, and once we did we realised we had made a huge mistake. The Sigmund Freud Museum was under construction. Instead of books and lounges, we found hammers and scaffolding.

We grabbed some really nice Indian from a place recommended in one of the guide books. Whilst we were doing it, something strange started to happen. It started raining. I cant remember the last time it rained when we were out and about. We had planned just to cruise around the city for a while but then decided to head back to the hostel and just chill.

That night we stayed in the hostel bar and ended up playing some more cards with the Dutch girls we met the night before.


Peace out,

Monty