Welcome to Vienna!

Well, we’ve been in Vienna almost two weeks, but most of that has been busy settling in and figuring out how to order food in German. It’s pretty amazing here. The dessert selection…intense. Just a land of cakes and tortes. And food here costs half what it does in New York, so we are eating well.

Half the price…

Twice the size.

We were actually surprised to find there are a number of comic book stores near us. We weren’t aware of a comic book culture in Austria…at least we didn’t know of comic book publishers/creators coming from this area so we didn’t think there was much fandom. But we’ve already visited two stores and mapped out three others nearby. If you sell comics in Vienna, we’ll be visiting you!

You can learn touristy things about Vienna anywhere, so I’ll tell you some of the things I’ve personally found interesting as an American adapting to the city.

Marijuana (with THC) is not legal here, but CBD is, and they sell it in vending machines. Everywhere. You can even order it from your food delivery app, like the equivalent of UberEats. We’ve also seen vending machines that sell full-sized bottles of alcohol.

One of my favorite things here is that restaurants have a huge list of non-alcoholic drinks. It’s very common to have fruit juice with a bit of soda water, and the selection of fruit juices available is huge: strawberry, raspberry, apricot, pineapple, apple, grape… It reminds me of being in Central America or the Caribbean and is an unexpected treat.

One of my LEAST favorite things: a lot of the toilets here are “shelf toilets.” I guess this is popular in Germany too. Instead of a big pool of water at the bottom of the toilet, it’s like a flat plate, and then just an itty bit of water. So when you poop, it all just lands on this…shelf. So you can see it. The idea is that checking your poop lets you know if you’re healthy. But seeing a pile of your poo sitting there served up on a toilet plate is wild, let me tell you. Thankfully we do not have one of these in our apartment.

Not pictured: Your poop

What we do have in our apartment is a fantastic window, which has gone a long way toward helping our cat, Babboo, warm up to her new home.

We’ll be back soon with more Austrian adventures!