Thanksgiving

Perhaps a good indicator of how "at home" you are in a culture is how much you care about its festivities. Thanksgiving is probably the most American festivity I know. It has not been imported into this country in any way. Which is too bad, in some ways, because isn’t “being grateful for what we have” a pretty important concept in a time where many of us live in (what most people in the history of mankind would view as) unashamed luxury, yet the commercial infotainment around us constantly suggests further unmet desires and needs? Trick-or-treating rode across the Atlantic on a wave of commercials and media, and so did Valentine’s day and the figure of Santa Claus, but Thanksgiving is conspicuously absent. Most Austrians are only very dimly aware of it, and certainly have no concept of its importance in the US.

Consequently, when I first moved to the US, I was very much an indifferent observer. I got invited to something like three Thanksgiving dinners in Seattle, all by nice people who were eager to show us international students what the day was all about. I felt honored to be invited, and clearly it was an important part of learning about American culture, but on a personal level, I would have been just as happy goofing off by myself that day.

Some things about these Thanksgiving dinners struck me as confusing. In particular, the part where everyone walks off after the meal and watches TV: you got your entire extended family together just to watch TV? TV and family gatherings don't go together very well in at least this Austrian's mind. And wouldn’t it be a much nicer prolonged meal if it was served in several courses, instead of one big pile of everything? Another thing I found strange about Thanksgiving dinners was the way people would not care at all if the food got cold. When I cook, I try to minimize the number of things left to do between taking the food off some sort of heat source and people digging in. But at those Thanksgiving dinners, people took their sweet time putting the food on cold serving platters, then calling everyone to the table, then someone would ceremonially carve the turkey (perhaps with precious time wasted before, figuring out who’d get to do the honors), then everything got served onto cold plates (the most illustrious guest first, meaning he/she would end up with the coldest food in the end), then maybe a toast or a prayer…and all the while, I would sadly watch the food equilibriate with its surroundings and the cold plates. Then, after half an eternity, we would finally eat, and the food was usually very good, but boy, it would have been excellent (quite) a few degrees warmer.

I got invited to two very fun Thanksgiving dinners the first two years in Tucson, involving large crowds and having more of a “party” feel, but Thanksgiving did not become “real” to me until the third year in Tucson, in which the rapidly cooling plate of food looked like this:

It was cooling rapidly because we, a group of adventurous friends, were eating it on a campground, which can be a chilly affair in November, even in Arizona. We had just returned from a two-day backpacking trip through the (waterless) Superstition Mountains. We were hungry and wiped out, but we cooked the entire Thanksgiving dinner on two gas stoves and a campfire - except for the turkey, which was not a turkey, but a rotisserie chicken bought in Superior, AZ. The rotisserie chicken proved two things to me: 1. In a pinch, it is a perfectly fine substitute for a turkey, and 2. A chicken with all the Thanksgiving sides is a perfectly filling meal for five to six. With the chicken, we had sweet potatoes, stuffing (with the rest of the trailmix thrown in), cranberry sauce, tomatillos, green beans, a grilled squash, wine and lots of fun and we surely were very grateful for the good food. There is something wonderful about eating good food after two days of backbreaking physical work carrying gallons of water through the desert.

Thanksgiving 2010 was a dinner for two, prepared by Steve. The meal was excellent and involved an appropriately sized piece of turkey, home-baked dinner rolls and a cranberry dessert. I had many things to be grateful for: I had just pulled out of some difficult times, found a new position and an apartment and I was starting a beautiful new relationship. Thanksgiving 2011, Steve and I hosted together. Everything, including the cranberry sauce, was made from scratch. I stuffed a squash with a filling containing dried mushrooms from Niedere Tauern and wore my Austrian outfit. We made sure the food stayed warm, and the TV-watching was replaced by a constitutional walk around the neighborhood. Our two guests were Erika and Zhen, a Chinese student who would have been just as happy goofing off by herself that day. I think it is safe to say that I have arrived “on the other side”.

I thought that this year, I would do a Thanksgiving dinner for my friends here in Vienna. I would tirelessly run through Viennese stores to find all the necessary ingredients and spend the Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving preparing the meal. Now it is Sunday. I have tirelessly run through Viennese stores for completely different things. I am proud of finally having bought groceries and made some sort of plan of cooking basic food for myself. I am finally, today, getting round to cleaning up the apartment for the first time since moving in, but am still way too disorganized to even buy a rotisserie chicken. I completely missed Thanksgiving, save for a very late night skype call to Steve’s family.

It does feel like I truly missed something. It is the first Thanksgiving-less year in six. I have many things to be grateful for: I wrote a dissertation and graduated, found a new position and an apartment, and Steve is coming over here very soon. All my loved ones are doing well. Leaving Arizona was very sad, but at the same time, I had so many wonderful experiences, and I received so much friendship, love, and appreciation from people there that gratitude is at least as important of a feeling these days as sadness. And I miss Thanksgiving to express my gratitude for these things in an “official” setting.

And, of course, a decent, home-cooked meal wouldn’t hurt either.

Wö®§t M&xik@n €v@®!

So, this last week has been more or less a nutritional disaster. One that I had seen coming, but still. Between being away all last weekend, and busy every single evening from 7 to 11(+), I had no time whatsoever to buy food and cook it. I also did not want to spend a whole lot of money eating out, because I knew I would be doing it all week. So, lots of visits to the well-known lunch stops around my workplace (cheap and decent), bakeries (cheap, decent, but somewhat lacking in variety), McDonalds (cheap and crap), one of those ubiquitous noodle places (cheap and ok-ish), and some late-night grub at after-orchestra-beers (moderate and decent). But at lunch today, my string of boring-to-questionable culinary experiences hit a low of epic proportions.

Part of my problem with the lunch places around my building is that I grew sick of them years ago and to my dismay, the 5 years away seem to have made no difference: I am still mostly sick of them. So, interested in checking out a new place within walking distance, I came across this café with an all-American menu. It featured burgers, a Philly cheesesteak, cesar salad, and some “Tex Mex” options - burritos and tacos, served with “nachos”. Now, don’t get me wrong here, the moment I walked through the door, I knew I was asking for trouble. The place did not look either Mexican or American, the server was from Eastern Europe, and there was nobody else there having lunch. But I stayed, partly out of curiosity, partly thinking, “Well, how bad can it be?”

I had no idea.

I ordered a beef taco and a coke. The coke was good. But what I found on my plate was so far removed from Mexican food it would have made Taco Bell look authentic. The “nachos” were just a pile of tortilla chips with nothing on them (in retrospect, that may have been a good thing). Not that there is anything wrong with chips and salsa, but it took two dips into the salsa for me to recognize its base flavor and main ingredient: ketchup. The taco was a flour tortilla clumsily half-wrapped around a pile of cheese-laden ground meat that was closest to a cheesesteak in consistency and flavor, but would still be a little bit of an insult to a cheesesteak. I am still trying to figure out whether the cheese was Emmental or Gouda…but I digress. The point is, that taco filling wasn’t even a cheesesteak, let alone anything from anywhere near Mexico. Needless to mention, nothing on the plate had ever been in the same room with anything hotter than a bell pepper.

I figured this abomination of a taco was so thoroughly un-American, there was no point in even trying to grab it, so I pretended I didn’t know any better and ate it with knife and fork. I tried my best to make a dent in it, but had to give up after two thirds of it (that’s pretty whimsical for European portion sizes), paid, fled in terror and wanted to forget the whole thing.

Except that I had to set eyes on the place again when I took the tram back from work (yes, this means I will have to look the other direction twice a day from now on), and got angry. Not because I spent too much money on a bad meal, that's my own darn fault, but because the place is such a disgrace. To Mexico, to the US, and to Vienna. Even if they know nothing about Mexican food (which they clearly don’t), and don’t bother to ask the interwebs at all (which they also clearly don’t), heck, we are in the center of a European metropolis! With the Sacher and the Imperial two miles away as the crow flies, don’t they have any sort of intuition that melting cheese over ground beef and throwing it onto a cold tortilla might not be good food? Are they thinking that “American food” means you HAVE to make it as bad as humanly possible? I mean, no wonder people here think that American food is garbage, if places like this, along with McDonald’s, Hooters, and TGI Friday’s are the culinary ambassadors!

I want this place to go out of business, asap!

Train travel

One thing I always missed in the States was train travelling. I missed anything on rails, really. I can count the times I have seen a passenger train at the Tucson train station on one hand. There were something like three trains going to LA and three trains going the other direction – per week. Nevertheless, the Tucson train station is beautiful, and I would love to get off a train there one day. There was also the Old Pueblo Trolley - it was so old it made me feel like I was in a technicolor version of “The Third Man”, but unfortunately it was also completely impractical, so I almost never took it.

I think trains are great. They are powerful and elegant, even the most crummy of them. If they are too crummy to be elegant, they instantly transition to cute and nostalgic. There is something about the slow and steady acceleration, or the way they wind themselves through a mountainous landscape, or the torpedo-ish speed with which they fly along a suitably long and straight track. Austria does not have much in the way of real high speed trains, like France or Germany, but along the Danube valley, even the not-so-high speed trains can ramp up pretty impressively, certainly beyond anything you could legally do on an (Austrian) Autobahn.

There is much to be said for train travel in terms of the comfort, in particular on the not-so-crowded routes. Here I am, feet up on the seat opposite, typing this entry and getting more and more distracted by the gorgeous Alpenvorland landscape going by. I don’t get sick, I don’t get impatient, I don't get bored. I can read, type, sleep, walk around, eat, drink, you name it, all in as much comfort as you can really get while travelling (oceangoing cruise ships notwithstanding). And sometimes I meet very interesting people and have inspiring conversations with them. It’s easy to get talking on trains, especially in cars with those opposite seat arrangements. It’s not like on planes, where you and your neighbor are just too close and too stuck for real talking comfort. On the train, you are spaced just right, close enough that you can start talking, but just far enough that you can also quit talking again. And should you for some reason really need to flee, you can always pretend it’s your stop and find a new seat two cars down.

I can take two train routes from Vienna to Admont. One is longer, and the trains running on it are fast, the other is shorter, but the trains on it are of the “crummy” and “winding themselves through mountains” category. Ultimately, they both take roughly the same amount of time.

I LOVE the slow route. It begins at Wien Westbahnhof (the architecture of which is worth an entry by itself) with an Intercity train, the fast and elegant kind. Separate compartments for 6 people each, little brochure listing all the stops and connections, snacks & beverages cart, worldly long distance travellers. An hour later, at Amstetten, I change to the slow Regionalzug. No more brochures, no more compartments, no more beverage cart. No big train stations, either, but instead pretty views of small farms. As the train travels into the foothills of the Alps, the towns, houses, and farms grow progressively more picturesque, at first still perched on slopes and hills, then nested into small valleys. Eventually, the farmland is largely replaced by forest, and the mountains grow higher and higher. At the stations, you see people on the platforms dressed in the traditional outfits. As of, let’s say, Waidhofen an der Ybbs, I am the only person on that train typing on a laptop. Not because people don't own laptops, but because the pace of life is sufficiently slow that they don't feel the need to type on them while on the go. Then, after Weyer, the tracks turn into Ennstal, and the landscape starts to feel like home, childhood home, that is. Now there are no more villages: the valley is cut deep and there is only room for the train, the river Enns and a small road. The villages are on a terrace some 50 - 100 meters higher. It feels like time has stopped. The river is the same, the landscape is the same, there is that same little boat tethered to the shore at that one spot that was already there when I first travelled this route consciously, about 20 years ago. Only the seasons change on this part of the route, and no matter the season, the landscape is amazing. A blue, green, or turquoise river going through forests and by rocky cliffs, interrupted only by the occasional small run-of-the-river hydropower station. The mountains grow higher and higher, the train takes a turn and we enter Gesäuse, a narrow, rocky gorge with high limestone peaks towering over it. The river has turned into whitewater. As I am writing this, I am travelling through that very part. This time, everything is coated with a bright snow-white furry frosting of rime. It looks enchanted in the evaporating fog, with the sun slowly breaking through. (Unfortunately there are too many reflections in the window to take any pictures). Admont, on the other end of Gesäuse, will look like a respectably sized town, after all this lonely landscape. That whole slow transition from busy, metropolitan Vienna to the Alpine countryside happens so smoothly, it just makes me think: “This is how travel should be”. 

Of course, time has not stopped. The route used to run several times a day when I was a kid. No more. There’s a special train Saturday morning and another Sunday late afternoon. Which happens to work alright for me right now, but I am sad about the change in schedules nevertheless. The buses that have replaced much of the route at other times just are not the same thing. They are small and uncomfortable. If you have luggage, you have to open a disgustingly dirty trunk and cannot wash your hands afterwards because there is no bathroom. I can’t read lest I get carsick. They have a radio going (usually Ö Regional - if you don't know what that means, just rest assured: it's bad). And they don’t go through the empty valley, but up on the terrace, where the villages are. (I must begrudgingly admit that that makes sense.) So, I am treasuring every opportunity to travel the route by train.

I am sort of regretting never having taken the train from Tucson. It must be just as wonderful to see the desert landscape go by. But I am only sort of regretting it. I did look into it, and it turned out just a tad impractical: From Tucson to where? El Paso? Been there, seen no reason to return. LA? Perhaps, but what to do there without a car? Rent one, when you can drive your own there faster and for cheaper? Go just somewhere, for the sake of being on a train? For about 60 bucks, I could have gone to Lordsburg, NM, and returned the same day, provided it was a Thursday, or I could have gone there on a Saturday, and returned on a Sunday. Do not ask me what one can do in Lordsburg without a car to get out of there. The various stories of the unreliability of Amtrak’s passenger trains weren’t encouraging, either, so one may end up spending even more time in Lordsburg. So, I never got round to taking the train to or from Tucson. Too bad...

Heartbroken

If you had asked me what I expected out of playing music in Tucson, back in early 2007, I would have answered: “I am sure I’ll play somewhere somehow, but it’ll probably be on the backburner and I’ll be happy to keep it on life support while I work like horse for my doctorate.”

It turned out VERY differently. My “musical career” (if you want to call it that) did not take a dip, but a climb. In the five sometimes chaotic years in Arizona, music was the one thing that always worked out very well. I played in a wonderful group, the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra. Not only did I play, I was fortunate to also lead the viola section and coach sectionals. The repertoire was interesting and challenging, the atmosphere was usually excellent. I felt that I was making the best of my musical education by having plenty of opportunities to pass on what I learned. I also learned a whole lot myself, about playing, about teaching, about contributing to a good thing. Preparing for and playing 5 – 6 concerts a year for a paying audience meant I was part of a regular concert cycle the way professional musicians are, and thus effectively practicing the profession I once trained for. Also, I loved being part of the community. I found wonderful friends there. Some of these friends have been my emotional support through many a rough time. Heck, I found my boyfriend there. I could continue singing the praise of SASO and eludicating the meaning of that particular “musical home” for me, or I could write about how nothing is ever perfect and that SASO had its rough edges, too, but you get the idea. I had a place and it was a good one.

Returning to Vienna unfortunately also meant leaving SASO. I could get into that, too, but that’s a whole other entry. Let me just say: it was very hard.

In past major moves I have run into the following issue: Everything is new, everything, even the smallest mundane task (see “shopping inconvenience”), is challenging, music has never been my breadwinning career, so, typically there were more than enough science-career things to worry about, and all of this would result in music being on the backburner for a little while. In the case of the move to Arizona, it took 6 months and a visit to a counselor for me to remember that I am, at my core, a musician, and that putting the viola aside for an extended period of time is nothing less than forgetting a part of my very identity. “Not this time”, I thought before this move, and started to be proactive. I researched amateur orchestras in Vienna well ahead of time and spread word among my (very small and professional) Viennese musical network. And lo and behold, last week on Tuesday, I sat in the first rehearsal of an amateur orchestra associated with one of the city’s (non-music) universities, and today I got a phone call from another group.

It do not want to write about what I think of this new group after just three rehearsals, not because I don't have any thoughts, but because it's not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is that I am starting to doubt my decision to make finding a new group a high priority item on my list of “things to figure out asap in Vienna”. I have not been able to play in this new group without fighting tears during rehearsal, or bursting into them afterwards. It does not help that we are playing Tchaikovsky’s 4^th symphony, the SASO-sound of which is still in my ear. In all three rehearsals so far, there were quite a few instruments missing, so it was easy for my brain to replace the missing instruments with the sound of the respective SASO players. There are many things I instantly started to miss about SASO, within the first ten minutes of that first rehearsal last week, and today, for the first time, I had a deep feeling of “ok, time to go back to Arizona”. The question “Why on earth have I left SASO behind?” forced itself into my brain, demanding an emotional (rather than rational) answer, and I couldn’t come up with one. I miss having my place and I miss my friends.

I am fully aware that no new group can live up to this at the moment. In a way, I feel like someone out on a date, who is nowhere near getting over the last breakup. Perhaps I am too heartbroken to be playing music right now. I was worried about being punished with insanity if I don’t play, but now I am worried about being punished with insanity if I have a major crying fit after every rehearsal. Should I give it a break? Then again, it still holds that I am a musician and need to play, SASO or not. I have to set myself up somewhere somehow, and in this city with its giant music scene, it might take a little longer, so perhaps I should just suck it up and plough ahead...

Shopping inconvenience

Steve left to go back to Tucson a week ago, and since then it feels like time is racing, and I am racing, and yet I am not getting anything done. The city is exhausting, which is completely expected. I am trying to gain momentum at work, meet old friends, catch up with family, play in a new orchestra, unpack boxes, do various administrative things, run errands, and everything seems to take forever.

Some of it actually does. I am wasting a lot of time shopping while not buying anything. Whenever I enter a supermarket, I am completely lost. Instead of buying reasonable stuff to eat during the week, I find myself checking out the international beer selection (Lagers. Sigh.) while fighting leftover childhood urges to raid the chocolate/candy section (it was quite convenient to be in a country without any of the junk food I remember from childhood!). It takes me forever to find essentials like toilet paper. I get frustrated over the produce (I don’t exactly know why), plus by then it's typically getting too late to chop vegetables for dinner anyway, so I buy more cold cuts and bread. And 50% of my time in the store I am fighting complete overload. Where is my Trader Joe’s?

Another part of the problem is that shopping is SO INCONVENIENT. Yes, I used to say the exact same thing about Tucson when I went there. And I still think it is inconvenient to shop in Tucson if you don’t have a car. But at least I could make an evening of biking to the mall. Here, all the stores are just around the corner, and all it takes is a little walk or a little stop on the way home from work. But here’s the problem: half of them close at 6 and the other half close at 7. None of them are open on a Sunday. And here I am, in need of a long woolen winter coat, shoes, food, house shoes, printer paper, daylight spectrum lightbulbs, a desk lamp, refills for my pens, sheets, and towels, just to name a few. To the best of my knowledge, I need to hit between 5 and 6 stores for just those things. Last Saturday was shot for the purpose of shopping because my father, brother and little sister visited me (which I am perfectly happy about, don’t get me wrong here). So, I am currently taking off from work earlier than I want to every day, just to race to perhaps one or two stores before they close. If I am lucky, one of them has what I need, and a sufficiently small selection of it, such that I am actually capable of making a decision. I am not good at making decisions over 50 kinds of winter coats, none of them under € 200, when I am hungry, tired, carrying my laptop and an umbrella, and rushed because they may kick me out in ten minutes. So I end up looking at things and not buying any. But most of the time I am actually on the street, I see the shops closed.

Did I hear you say “Just buy it online!”? Yeah, that's what I thought, and went onto amazon.de for those daylight spectrum lightbulbs. What I did not realize is that things don’t get dropped off on your doormat if nobody is home. You have to pick the packet up at the post office (hours, you guessed it, 8 am – 6 pm). This morning at 8:30, I waited for 20 minutes at the post office to pick up one of the lightbulbs I bought. There are two more on the way. Now, that might still be better than racing to a store that may or may not have what I need, but it does take some of the fun and convenience out of online shopping.

So what to do? I need a housewife! Because, clearly, that’s how these kinds of structures have worked in the past. I need a wife to buy the mundane stuff during the work week, so I have some time to look for a winter coat on Saturday, instead of trying to get to 4 stores, together with the rest of Vienna’s full-time employed. Oh, wait, now I remember, I already made plans for this Saturday. Clearly, I am not granting shopping the priority it deserves.

Probably, in the end, it’s all about getting used to it. I had my routine set up for “Tucson by bicycle”, and I cannot remember how my Viennese routine worked, back in 2007. Even if I did, it might not be much use, because I am on a different schedule and on a different budget. So I am probably just doing it all wrong. You go somewhere new, none of your routines work out any longer, and everything, the tiniest bit of everyday life logistics, is kind of abrasive. So, I guess, in that sense, “convenience” is mostly about what you are used to. But boy, would I like to go run errands after dinner instead of before!

Noodlekebap

When I left in 2007, Vienna was knee-deep in a pan-Asian food (and, with limitations, culture) craze. Sushi places were opening their doors at every street corner. Chinese dresses could be found in main street stores. People were crazy about Feng Shui, “Zen” this and “Zen” that, “Asian” spas and other true or perceived bits and pieces of “Asian” culture. Old Chinese restaurants decorated with generic imperial-looking paraphernalia that used to offer little more than chopped up meat on rice (with perhaps a few forlorn bamboo sprouts) felt compelled to ramp up their game. Instead of dirt-cheap lunch specials of sweet and sour pork, the word “Wok” appeared on signs in their windows and they changed their names from “China-Restaurant zum Goldenen Drachen” to things like “Lotus Asia Küche”.

Having lived in Seattle, and having travelled to China itself, I felt (for a change) well ahead of the fashion. I researched Viennese Chinese restaurants that offered dim sum, deplored the lack of Thai and Vietnamese food and was suspicious about the rise of the “Lotus Asia Küche”-category. If a host culture is clearly interested in your continent’s cultures, why would you move from more to less specific? Why go pan-Asian instead of being more daring and authentic with the spectrum of Chinese food offered? Off to Tucson I went, which was, admittedly, not the best ground for the various Asian cuisines, but nevertheless, there was “Gee’s Garden” for dim sum, “Sushi Yukari” for authentic Japanese food (as assured by several Japanese and experienced travellers to Japan), and several good Thai and Vietnamese places.

Preparing to go back to Vienna after 5 years, I was hopeful. Maybe the Asian craze had matured, maybe Austrians, living in the center of a small continent with 30+ languages and cultures, had gotten more informed about “Asia” and maybe one could now have a good green Thai curry in this town.

At first glance, I am a little taken aback. It looks like the happy mixing has continued uninhibited. The “Lotus Asia Küche” places seem to thrive. The menu of a Korean restaurant in my area of town also offers Thai and Japanese food. The lunch buffet at a “Wok” place near university is an unholy mix of Chinese and Sushi, with a deep-fried banana dessert that I recognized from the old-style Austrian Chinese restaurants but that I have never encountered in an American place or during my ten days in China. Chopsticks took a little while to find. A somewhat more upscale-looking place called “Chang” right around the corner from my apartment on one hand specializes on Peking duck, and the staff spoke Chinese to each other, on the other hand, much of their menu looked rather Thai. However, Thai or Chinese, the food was definitely good enough for a neighborhood round-the-corner place. To my knowledge, there is no specific law that says that no human is able to cook both good Chinese and good Thai food. Perhaps the mix places aren’t all that bad. Buuut…mix places somehow always make me cautious. And, of course, the search has only begun. Maybe the “pure” places are waiting to be found in the urban jungle.

On the other side of the spectrum, finding crazier mixes than Chinese-Thai has been no problem. There is a new fast food on Vienna’s streets: “Asian noodles". Noodles everywhere, in holes in the walls of tube stations, in booths together with pizza slices, at the traditional Viennese Würstelstand, at McDonalds (“McNoodle”, no joke!), and in döner kebab stands. Yes, döner kebab stands. No, I could never have imagined it either. Also, kebab meat can now be had in the to-go boxes (“kebab box”) familiar (to me, at least) from American Chinese restaurants. No, I have not tried it, or the noodles from the kebab stands, I have not yet been desperate/drunk enough. 

Some of these booths go the whole nine yards: kebab, pizza, sausage and noodles. Look no further, we’ve got it all right here.

What else is new on the “Asian” food front? Now, this I am utterly excited about: Bubble Tea! During my stay in Seattle, I developed a serious addiction to that stuff and could not find it for saving my life when I returned to Vienna. I was seriously contemplating cooking up my own tapioca. The better part of a decade later – voila! Boy, was I ever ahead of the fashion! Even better, the Austrian version is not catering to the American palate, i.e., I do not have to order it “half as sweet as you would normally do it”. And the best (worst?) thing: there are two Bubble Tea places right within a 3 minute walk from my office.

Fragrances and Cigarrettes

Given that this is my second return to Austria from the United States, I find it quite interesting to see what cultural differences I completely missed until now. Fragrances, for instance. Going shopping for shampoo, soap, candles and other smelly things in the US was always a bit of a lengthy process for me. I often ended up with Burt’s Bees or something equally pricey, such as artisan soaps from the farmers markets, and even there I was quite picky. I never grew fully conscious of why that was, but now it is completely clear to me. It was because the typical fragrance spectrum of your average CVS selection of cosmetics/home fragrances ranged from “sweet strawberry” to “candy store” with a little stop in the “baked goods” department (“carrot cake”, “pumpkin spice”, “vanilla cinnamon”….). On my very first visit to a “dm” drug store in my new/old home I immediately suffered from a complete overload of products I was actually prepared to buy. Everything seemed to smell like ridiculously expensive French imports (to the US, that is): flowery, moderate, not sweet or overwhelming, and far, far away from edibles. No raspberry-peach, no apple pie. Violets and calendula. I love it!

On a somewhat related note: Something has changed dramatically in this country, for the better. It took a couple days to sink in, but one day last week, Steve turned to me and pointed out that we had had four or five meals in restaurants and in none of them were we bothered by smoke. Apparently, the laws have changed to the extent that designating three of 20 tables in one room as “non-smoking tables” is no longer deemed sufficient. Halleluja, lawmakers have figured out convection and diffusion! Granted, smoke is still around a whole lot more than in the US. Some more traditional bars and restaurants seem to make sure that the more attractive/cozy/stylish front area is the smoking room and non-smokers get a good dose of smoke while finding their way into some less representative back room. If the place is small enough that it cannot physically be split into two sections, it may keep its “20^th century ambiance”. You see smokers on the street and on the balconies of buildings. Certainly complaining about getting a second-hand whiff here or there will not do you any good. But Austria has come a looong way from its turn-of-the-century definition of “non-smoking” (“Nobody is forcing you to light a cigarette, what’s your problem?”) to creating some actual refuges for people like me and most Americans.