Tuesday: German Class & Bike Ride

We got a couple of new people in class today. Actually, people who were enrolled but missed yesterday's class.

A young woman from Slovakia, a young man from Iran, and a young man from Nigeria.

And I learned my Polish buddy, Darek, might leave class to move up to the higher level class. No sense studying stuff you already more or less know...

There's a guy my age or a few years old from Cuba. I'd love to hear his story sometime...
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Guess what happened today? Sunshine. No rain. As I write this it's about 5:30 PM in Vienna and it's a comfortable 78 F.

Meantime it's 10:30 AM in Oklahoma and it's already 100 fuckin' degrees. Maybe it's time to sell my house and just give up on that place altogether, if this is what we can expect from future summers...

We took a bike ride along the Danube after I got home from school. Pleasant day for a bike ride, with no wind to fight (another reason to wonder how Oklahoma manages to hold onto its people...)

 "I have found swans' opinion of me is influenced by whether or not I have bread."

Line stolen from the late great Mitch Hedberg, and altered from the original "ducks."

A Buddhist temple on the banks of the Danube.

Close up of a hydrofoil crew preparing to enter a lock on the Danube.

Looks like a space craft to me...

People enjoying the sun and water along the Danube.
Some version of this pic was repeated hundreds of times along our bike route.

A guy being towed by an overhead cable. There were about ten guys doing this.

The U.N. City on the other side of the Danube.
Enlarge the pick and notice the hills at the far left in the far distance.
Those hills are just behind B's house.

One of the reasons I enjoy Vienna is because there are plenty of public spaces to enjoy for free. You can walk or skate or ride along the Danube, stop to take a picnic or go fishing, lay out in the sun reading a book, etc. Parks and public paths abound. It's called "Lebensqualitat," or "quality of life."

First Day of School

Up at 7 (!), out the door at 8:40. A bus ride, a subway ride, another subway ride, and then a short walk to the school, and I was standing in front of the classroom by 9:15. Which gave me fifteen minutes to size up my fellow "German as a 2nd language, beginning level" students as they stood around like me, waiting for the teacher to show up and unlock the door.

The teacher spoke only German ("You vill experience FULL IMMERSION!") but most of us got the gist. There were handouts with pictures on them, and lots of reciting the alphabet and simple words aloud together as a group, then separately aloud in front of the others, and some partnering up where you and the partner would ask each other a question in German like, "How are you, Darek?" and he'd answer back, "I am fine, John, thank you. And you?" in front of the class.

I thought I'd be the oldest guy there, but there were three other guys my age or older. One, a Pole, sat next to me. A nice guy. His German is about like mine, so we talked a bit to each other.

In our class we had a guy from Brazil, his girlfriend, a guy from Gambia, a woman from the Congo, a guy from Afghanistan, a guy from Canada (fellow English speaker!), a woman from the Czech Republic, and a few other people whose homelands I didn't catch.

Class stopped at 12:30, so I bounced down the stairs like I did decades ago when school was finished, and when I flung the door open I saw (what else?) rain. 

One class down, fourteen more to go.
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Back home, then B and I drove to the big shopping center. I don't know the name of this monstrosity, but they have a lot of big box stores. We went to Ikea looking for a light to replace one B bought there years ago, which had finally failed.

Didn't find a replacement, but we found every family in Vienna who was sick of being cooped up in the house with their kids because of this fucking rain that keeps them from enjoying a normal Viennese summer outdoors. So they loaded up the kids and took them to Ikea, so we could enjoy them. The place was jam-packed with people. It was like Christmas, in that way that Christmas has of being like a scene from hell.

Trying to squeeze past the crowds and the wailing children, I thought of my friend S. back home who loves screaming children, and how I wish she could have enjoyed this scene with us. I imagined the book she'd write: INFANTICIDE IN VIENNA, by S., (She Who Done The Killin'.)

A trip to the big-box building supply store, another trip to the big-box supermarket, and another to another big-box building supply store, and our nerves were shot. It was like being in a gigantic mall in America.

I made chili for supper, cooking it a long time so the flavors all mingled well.

And wished I had about ten screaming kids sitting at the table with me as I sipped my wine.

Socializmus

That's right, I said the "S-word." But Bill Maher says it better:


And here's one for you to chew on: the biggest anti-socialists in the US are almost always the biggest supporters of the purest socialist experiment in US history---the US military.

Go figure.