Vienna Day 4

A short day for J's work saw me interested in looking into the governmental high points of Austria. I started with an awesome Bittersweet-meets-Mozart breakfast

"Yum-liscious" as Blayne would say

and then off to the parliament building, city hall, and the embassies

City hall, appropriately called, in German "Rathaus"

Creepy...perhaps historical...but also creepy

Statues outside of the embassy of, I think, Italy

and then outside this one president's building (I seem to recall the label saying something like that) there were some photos and a news van or two, and I'm nothing if not a rubber-necking tourist, so I decided "heck, I'm not doing anything--I'll wait too!" too bad I didn't have my hat with me, so I'd really look like the press. "We" in the fourth estate (I'm more like 4.5) waited for 30 minutes at which point, I, being a child of "instant gratification takes too long" said "Nuts to this!" and started to walk across the street, FULLY EXPECTING the approaching car to stop or at least slow down...it did not. So I scurry out of the way to a flash of camera bulbs as whoever they'd been waiting for arrived!

Well, look at that! Closest I've come to an international incident in a few weeks!

But, even if I almost got hit, it was a reasonably famous person.

Jon was back with me in time to catch a lunch special form a waiter cranky enough to have given the Albanians at Nizza's a run for their money, and then we spent the afternoon trying to be productive. This was interrupted once by a 11 month old Austrian baby named Max who T. had brought for a visit. He's at that "cute" stage where they toss stuff on the floor and make multi-tonal noises to mean perhaps different emotions ("eeeee" and "ooooo"). He had a big fan in Jon, but I held off my judgments. If the kid isn't a family member (because we all know, DEM bebehs are a-door-bell) I'm on diplomatic terms only until it does something to place itself firmly on or off my black list

(yes, I have a Nixon-like black list for 10 month olds, get over it).

That night we went out to a bar next to the city hall (popular with the "maybe just got off working AT city hall" crowd) for the lightest beer they had (we met each other over Koelsch, but we're mostly wheat people).