Vacation-Vienna (Day 1)

Everyone wants to know how our vacation is going. We arrived in Vienna yesterday, and are still here today. But it wasn't easy (of course).

We flew free, so we had to go where American Airlines sent us, which means we started out by flying to Chicago. Our flight left National late, and the new AA attendant scared us by saying: 'Don't worry. You will have 45 minutes to change planes.' This was at o'hare, where we had to go to the International Terminal, so of course we worried. She meant, we think, that we had more than 45 minutes (in fact, an hour and a half), which would be the minimum transfer time. (She also put my boarding pass on Edie's ticket, and Edie's on mine), which caused great confusion later in the day.

At any rate, Chicago was fine, and we got on our Swiss Air flight to Zurich (Swiss Air = dull), hoping for a layover of a little less than two hours, BUT the flight from Zurich to Vienna was cancelled, so we got to spend 9 hours (remember, after a sleepless night) in the airport in Zurich. We arrived at 8:30 a.m. and we left at 5:30 p.m.

The Vienna airport was much livelier that Zurich (Zurich airport = dull), and we found a taxi driver from Tunisia who could not speak English (made us feel right at home; Washington taxi drivers are often from Tunisia and can't speak English), who took us to the Radisson on Parkring, where we arrived at about 7 p.m. or so.

Our room is small, but fine, and the hotel guests seem to come from many countries: Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. You get the picture. This is not the place to come if you want to look at women's legs. In fact, on the streets around here (a quite fashionable area, with boutiques, restaurants, bookstores and galleries), we saw last night mainly arabs and hassidic Jews. We figure that the Austrians are all away either for the summer or at the weekend houses where they go to yodel.

We were directed to a typical Austrian restaurant (casual) where typical Austrians serve typical food.........to typical Americans. Actually, it was just right, considering that we were so tired, and it was a 5 block walk from the hotel. Also, just right. I tried the typical Austrian mixed salad (think American salad with the addition of saurkraut), and the typical Austrian rump steak (not my usual, but I am trying things--in fact on our kosher meal on dull Swiss Air we had what seemed to be rump steak or something similar, that had been cooked under the supervision of Rav Binjamin Gruber, dayan of Monsey; he could learn something from last night's restaruant, which is Zu Den 3 Hacken, in case you are in the neighborhood). Edie had a vegetarian lentil dish, along with typical Austrian ewe's cheese. We tried typical Austrian red wines - I think they were Blaupunkt (ok) and Sankt Lauren (ok+).

Auf wedersehen.