God Must Be Happy (1 cent)

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Holocaust Memorial Museum attending a two hour session on the implications of the recent discovery in Vienna of 800 boxes of Jewish community records from the Nazi years. For many reasons, it was a fascinating afternoon.

After the session ended, I drove home and we decided to go out for dinner. We have a gift card from Filomena, a restaurant in Georgetown that we had never used, and where we had never been. So, very unusual for us, we drove to Georgetown for dinner. We got to Filomena at about 6:45 and were told that the next available table would be at about 8:30. We decided to go elsewhere.

Filmena is on Wisconsin Avenue, south of M Street. For no particular reason, we walked up to M Street and, again, for no reason turned left and walked west. We wandered a while (restaurants that used to be there are now mostly furniture stores) and saw hidden in a window that boarded a passageway that went to a set of steps that went down to a courtyard a small sign calling attention to a restaurant called "Leopold's", and another sign that said that it had won a Washingtonian Magazine award in 2006. We had never heard of Leopold's.

We walked down the steps, found ourselves in a spacious courtyard with outside tables, and saw Leopold's Kafe, a very contemporary looking place (much glass, much plastic, no wood) that looked exactly that it had stepped out of contemporary Vienna (having seen places last year that looked precisely like that). Then we looked at the menu, which included Austrian wines, schnitzels, and sausages, as well as more universally continental dishes.

Leopold is the name of one of Vienna's new museums in what is now known as the Museum Quarter, and there were Leopold posters on the interior walls.

So, what chance would there be to go from spending an afternoon dealing with Vienna to a restaurant that looked like it was Vienna? This is too much of a coincidence, so I conclude that it was at God's direction.

God must be happy. For once (and maybe only for once), his plan worked out just as he wanted it to. I am happy to have played a part.

Auf wiedersehen.