How Not To Attend A Conference

Tags

conference, facepalm, fail, get it together, what not to do

First, don’t read the invitation e-mail carefully. Just skim it, like you normally do with e-mails, and assume that the address for the conference just isn’t written down. Do look up directions to where you assume the conference will be, though. You are trying to be conscientious.

On the day of the conference, don’t mention to anyone that you are basically just guessing about where you’re supposed to go. You’ll show up after French, and it will be fine. Repeat: IT WILL BE FINE.

Do not rush out of class to make sure you arrive on time for the second session. Don’t run over cobblestones in heels, thinking you will break either a shoe or an ankle before you arrive. Do not proceed to run up four flights of stairs at full tilt, still in heels, because the elevator is broken. If you did, though, do take a moment or two to fix your Professional Grown-Up Hairstyle before ringing to be let in.

Do not be startled by the fact that pressing the doorbell turns on a video camera. Do not proceed to awkwardly talk to said camera, flashing your almost-expired driver’s license as proof that you are not, in fact, insane.

Don’t repeat this process for twenty minutes, becoming convinced that everyone is just so enamored of the panel discussions that they have forgotten that there is a doorbell in need of answering. Do not proceed to curse everyone involved in the conference, especially since you are still in the stairwell and your voice carries down all four flights of stairs.

Do text people who are supposed to be at the same conference. Do not expect them to answer, because they are sensible adults, who have almost certainly turned their phones off so as not to disrupt the conference with texts from crazy people like you.

Do not run home to check the first e-mail, or at least don’t repeat the same mistake of not reading it carefully. Do not repeat the rest of this process, until you are back on the fourth-floor landing (barefoot this time) and feeling pretty stupid.

So, what should you do?

Do decide to call it a day. Do go to McDonald’s, and discover the miraculous “Easy Order” kiosk that lets you just insert your debit card and order via touchscreen–without having to talk to a person! Do go home and eat a burger while wearing a bathrobe, because there is not a single godly reason to wear Spanx and heels a minute longer than is strictly necessary.

And for the next day of the conference, do go with someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

Sometimes, I should just quit while I’m slightly less behind.

 

You Need To Watch “The Bletchley Circle”

Tags

1950s, Anna Maxwell Martin, Bletchley Park, feminism, mystery, PBS, postwar life, television, The Bletchley Circle, women, WWII, You Need To Watch

From left: Rachael Stirling, Sophie Rundle, Anna Maxwell Martin, Julie Graham.

During the Second World War, the code breakers at Bletchley Park did invaluable work for the Allies, interpreting German coded transmissions to uncover their plans. It was demanding, life-saving work—and after the war, those involved could not talk about the work they had done to save their country.

Susan (Bleak House’s Anna Maxwell Martin) was one of these code-breakers. In a tense opening scene, we see her and her co-workers discover that a series of coded transmissions about someone called Dietrich are doubly encoded, making a discovery that gives their forces a decided advantage over the German troops. Nine years later, Susan is a housewife, mother of two, married to a man who has no idea what kind of work she did in the war. As far as he knows, she simply “has a head for puzzles”.

It’s this head for puzzles Susan puts to use when she hears a news report on the radio about a young woman who was found murdered in an abandoned bomb shelter. Her attempts at talking to the police fruitless, she turns to her old team from Bletchley—maps expert Millie (Rachael Stirling), Lucy with the photographic memory (Sophie Rundle), and their former boss Jean (Julie Graham). Each has moved on from the war: they work in libraries or restaurants, have husbands. More importantly, each has been trying to pretend that their new lives are as satisfying as the ones they had to leave behind—lives where they were useful, where they felt like their skills were needed and valued.

This is particularly the case for Susan, our heroine. It’s clear she loves her children, and her husband, but none of this alleviates the fact that she is painfully bored. In a conversation with Millie, she talks about her life. “There’s balancing the books, making the meat last the week…” Small wonder our entry into her present life is the furious clacking of her knitting needles.

The Bletchley Circle isn’t just an entertaining mystery; it’s a powerful examination of how the women who fought the Second World War, having experienced the joys and hardships of work outside the home, had to come back to those homes and make themselves fit inside roles that seemed ever more confining. Susan’s marriage is largely a happy one, but it’s clear her husband’s ignorance of her skills impacts things negatively. He loves her, yes, he might even admire those of her capabilities that he sees—but because he doesn’t really know her, know what she can do and just how brilliant she is, he’s always just a bit patronizing, a little condescending.

Maxwell Martin gives an excellent performance as Susan. She’s no stranger to playing intelligent women—her performance in South Riding was easily the best part of the series—and her skills are particularly on display here, as you see the wheels turning in her head, the millions of small calculations that go into seeing the patterns most people miss.

The Bletchley Circle creates a satisfying mystery in a fully-realized world with an engaging cast of characters. Not only that, it is a show about women and women’s relationships that doesn’t fall prey to reductive thinking and lazy stereotypes—something that is all too rare in television. I would urge you to give it a watch.

The Bletchley Circle airs on PBS Sunday nights. Please check your local listings. 

Airports I Have Known

Tags

airports, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dulles International, flying, human connection, planes, Salt Lake City, travel, Vienna

On Friday, I flew back to Vienna from Brussels. It was a bit of a drawn-out affair—bus to the train station, train to the airport, flight to Amsterdam, flight to Vienna, train into the city, subway back home. Needless to say, it gave me some time to think. About airports.

I have spent a lot of time in airports. I first started flying when I was twelve, and my mom took me and my sister to Boston for the Fourth of July. I flew to visit my father as a teenager. When I went away to college, I flew back and forth between North Carolina and Utah, and later between the US and Europe. At a rough estimate, I’ve flown more than twenty times, and I would consider myself something of an expert on the various gates, terminals, and overpriced sandwich shops you might pass on your next journey. So here are a few of the highlights.

• Salt Lake City International: home base. While the drive to this airport never feels that long, the trip back is always interminable. Are we sure it took this long the first time? However, the SLC airport has its advantages, mostly in familiarity and using the dollar (I’ve gotten really sensitive to airport prices in Euros). Also, there’s a Cinnabon! How can you not love that?
• Vienna International (Schwechat): mixed feelings. On the one hand, this is the gateway to Vienna, city of my heart and dreams. That said, it feels inconvenient to get to (multiple trains, or else a 40 Euro taxi ride), and it has a really loose layout. Most importantly, VIE lacks an essential airport component: moving walkways. Seriously, you have to get everywhere entirely under your own steam, which is as best monstrously inconvenient. When you are running to make your flight (because the one time you need the *$%^ trains to run on time, they can’t be bothered!), you would like all the help you can get, please and thank you.
• Amsterdam Schipol: an unexpected pleasure. I think it’s because they have lined their hallways with lush green plants. You don’t even register immediately why it feels so much more restful; it’s just a little wave of well-being that hits you, suddenly. Airports generally tend to be quite sterile, efficient sorts of places; they need to be, transporting all those people every day, and yet it can be so wearying. The harsh light, the gleaming floors, the fluorescent neatly-lettered signage—it’s a bit soul-killing, which makes the sight of these avenues of full, dark, glossy leaves such a necessary (yet unexpected) pleasure. Fun fact: they also have charging stations for your electronic devices that are powered by bicycle! Even though my own products were fully charged, it was tempting to set down that oh-so-heavy carry-on and do a bit of pedaling.
• Dulles International: hell on earth. My sole experience here was wandering through its shiny interminable corridors while having to wait seven hours for my flight the next morning. The shops and restaurants were all closed; I was starving and very tired. I had hoped to get some sleep, but the banks of seats at the departure gates aren’t really conducive to rest. Besides, I had no pillow, no blanket, no way to stop shivering. It was just miserable. Until I heard someone talk to me. “Miss?” I raise my head. It’s one of the night janitors, a man I guess to be in his fifties, from Indonesia, I think. He’s left his mop and rolling bucket somewhere down the hall, and in his hands he has a blanket: it’s thin, dark blue, and wrapped in plastic, the sort they hand out to first-class people on their flights. I have no idea where he got it, but I accept it gratefully—tearfully, even. Eventually, I get a bit of rest; the restaurants open up again, and I can grab a muffin and some tea before my flight finally departs. We move on.

The act of travel, of simply getting from Point A to Point B, has been stripped down to its barest parts: stand in line, bags on the table, keep moving, stand to right, walk to the left. Airports, then, are spaces outside of our normal conceptions of space and time: you’re somewhere, but also nowhere in particular. You need to be on time, and yet the minutes and hours bleed and blur into each other, and you lost track of how long you’ve been waiting and queuing and sitting. It makes the brain fuzzy.

Which is why it’s all the more precious to come across those things that pull you from the airport fugue state, that connect you to something concrete and connected. The bicycles, the wall of full green plants, the man on the late shift who can offer a blanket to a tearfully exhausted nineteen-year-old—they ground us, and in so doing make the whole process of getting somewhere a little less hellish, and a little more human.

Reading Recommendations: Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

Tags

Case Histories, Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Reading Recommendations, second chances

Special Note: Today’s post comes to you from my hotel lobby in Brussels. Photos and write-up to follow. Enjoy!

What if you got to live your life over and over again, until you got it right? This is the intriguing premise grounding Kate Atkinson’s stunning new novel, Life After Life. Ursula Beresford Todd is born in a country house in 1910. The first time, the doctor doesn’t make it; the roads are closed with snow, and Ursula dies before she ever really lives. The next time, the doctor arrives in the nick of time, and she makes it. This idea of small tweaks leading to big changes permeates the novel. For Ursula, the question isn’t always whether she lives or dies, but how she does these things. Does she go to secretarial school, or university? Does she marry the English schoolteacher, the German lawyer, or live in sin with an admiral?

Because of this, the novel has a cyclical feel, looping back around to the last big decision as you wait to see how things will be different this time. This structure also allows Atkinson to introduce multiple fascinating characters, who themselves change in the various retellings of Ursula’s story: her sister, Pamela, warm-hearted with a keen scientific mind; Benjamin Cole, the cute Jewish boy who lives next door; even her mother, Sylvie, whose nature is so shaded and difficult to predict.

Not only is Life After Life a fascinating story, it benefits immensely from Atkinson’s telling. Best known to the Masterpiece Theatre set for her Case Histories (adapted starring Harry Potter’s Jason Isaacs), Atkinson is a confident storyteller, with an eye for character and ear for prose. Her writing style is lyrical without being pretentious, elegant in containing no unnecessary parts. Even if she weren’t telling such an interesting story, it would still be a pleasure to read.

As to the ultimate question—how do you know when you’ve finally gotten it right?—Atkinson provides no easy answers. In fact, you might say she shows how that is the wrong question to even ask. Instead, she shows the trade-offs and compromises inherent in any life, and asks us to decide which ones are worth it in the end.

You can buy Life After Life in bookstores, or at amazon.com. 

Day Tripper: Altenmarkt im Pongau, Salzburg

Tags

Altenmarkt, American Studies, Brussels, Eurovision, Fulbright, Salzburg, travel

For the past few days, I’ve been out of town. Not for my class trip to Brussels—that’s tomorrow—but for another enjoyable adventure. Last week, we had the Fulbright’s Altenmarkt Seminar in American Studies, held in the adorable little village of Altenmarkt in Pongau, in Salzburg (it’s both a city and a federal state, in case you were wondering). And when I say this village is little, I really mean it—the whole place was basically just two streets and the surrounding hiking paths.

Don’t worry, I also have my Fraulein Maria shot, as required.

The purpose of the seminar is to get together all of the Fulbright grantees studying or researching in Austria, with those Austrian students who are about to head off to the US, as well as Austrian students in American Studies that may be interested. The whole seminar took place in Haus Burgenland, which used to belong to the government of Burgenland (another federal state), to be used for their schoolchildren’s annual ski trips (because this is Austria, and ski trips are part of the curriculum). Sadly, we were the last group to stay in Haus Burgenland, as it’s closing down now. It was a lovely little place, very Germanic in a 1970s sort of way, with great views of the surrounding countryside and really good food.

The seminar lasted for three days, with lectures by several of the American scholars on a variety of topics, like marriage and migration in America, gender and race in Berstein’s use of the blues, and why Eurovision never really caught on in America (which included the wonderful line “Eurovision: It’s not gay, it’s European!”). It was a great opportunity to meet the other scholars and Austrian students, as well as catching up with the other American grantees from my orientation. We had a great time hiking the nearby hills, eating junk food, accidentally getting locked in bus bathrooms that we apparently shouldn’t have been able to use (Peter).

This was basically how the bus driver acted when he found out someone had gotten into the bathroom (via Flickr)

Now I’m back, and it’s a couple of days of resting up (I picked up an unfortunate cold the second day of the seminar) and getting ready for the trip to Brussels tomorrow. Laundry, dishes, charging my cell phone…it’s all terribly boring for you, so why don’t I just leave you with a couple of lovely photographs while I begin my Belgian-themed cultural binge? (Note: it involves chocolate, waffles, Hercule Poirot, and the movie In Bruges.)

Shots from around Altenmarkt

(Multi)Day Tripper: What to Do When Family Comes to Visit

Tags

belvedere, cake, costumes, Day Tripper, demel, Easter, family, Hofburg, Holy Week, jewish museum, Karwoche, naschmarkt, oberlaa, opera, orchestra, sisi, tourism, Vienna

Until last week, no one in my family had ever been to Vienna before. More to the point, none of them had come to visit me in Vienna before. That all changed when my mom arrived on Palm Sunday. She was here for all of Holy Week (what the Austrians call Karwoche) and it was so great to see her, and hang out, and show her this city that I love so much. So what to do, when you have family or friends in from out of town?

First, get a good hotel. If, like me, your space isn’t up to holding guests (or you just don’t like sharing your space), this is key. You want something comfortable, well-located, and ideally not too expensive. We went with the Hotel Johann Strauss: high ceilings, great breakfast, and near an U-Bahn station. Added bonus: it was really close to my place, so we could use either location as needed. Double added bonus: bathtubs! I really am a bath person, and while there’s nothing wrong with showers, I was just so glad to really just revel in a nice hot bath.

Just swap out tea for chocolate ice cream.

Second: develop an itinerary! To a certain (large) extent, this really depends on the personality of the person who’s visiting. In this case, my mom likes museums, classical music, knitting and handicrafts, and cake. Coincidentally, these happen to be things I like, so I figured this would go rather well. Even though I’m technically a local by now, we still purchased the Kindle version of Rick Steve’s Vienna, Salzburg, and Tyrol (particularly since we were planning a day trip to Salzburg). It was useful for the day trip, as well as for finding restaurants that I, as a student, was too cheap to ever eat at.

So, without much more ado, here are the things we did:

• Sunday: try and get dinner at Café Sperl. Find out the kitchen is closed, and go to the Asian restaurant around the corner.
• Monday: shopping on the Kärtnerstraße. We got some great new gloves and hats at Oberwalder, the sort of place that asks you what your glove size is and keeps everything in big deep drawers, plus a new ball gown for me at Peek & Cloppenburg. In the afternoon, we got tea and cake at Demel, then hit up the Hofburg to tour the Silberkammer, the Sisi Museum, and the Imperial Apartments.
• Tuesday: Braving the snow, we checked out the two temporary exhibitions at the Lower Belvedere. There was a really beautiful one about the history of the Baroque (and its contemporary incarnations), and an eye-rolling one about Friedenreich Hundertwasser and the influence of Japanese art on his work. Suffice it to say we were not fans. Then, in the afternoon, it was off to the main location of the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse for a look at their temporary exhibition on Jewish humor. After closing time, we dashed back to the hotel to get ready for our trip to the Staatsoper to see Tanzperspektiven, a collection of four contemporary ballet pieces. Afterwards, we grabbed some Käsekrainer hot dogs at a nearby stand and called it a night.
• Wednesday: we dedicated the morning largely to the running of errands (take the ball gown to be altered, dropping shoes off to be repaired) and prepping for our trip to Salzburg (including a—memorable—interaction at Westbahnhof). In the afternoon, we went to the other location of the Jewish Museum at Judenplatz, the site of the medieval synagogue, whose foundations are on view at the museum.
• Thursday: Salzburg! We got up early and took the train out to Salzburg, where we had time for a bit of wandering around the city squares (and accidentally heading up to Nonnberg Abbey, where Maria von Trapp had been a postulant) before grabbing a lunch at Fisch Krieg and meeting our bus for…the Sound of Music tour! Don’t you dare judge: it was actually a lot fun, and we got to see some cool stuff out in the countryside we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to see, like the lakes, or the church where they filmed the wedding scene. Yes, it was kind of schlocky and touristy, but that doesn’t have to make it any less fun.
• Friday: We hit up St. Stephen’s Cathedral, as well as the Easter markets! This was easily one of my favorite bits: hot pretzels, hot waffles, cute little wooden toys (that I manfully resisted buying en masse for my nephew), and the Easter eggs. They are so pretty! They’re terribly delicate, having had their insides blown out, but the shells are elaborately painted in all sorts of colorful designs. I even have a few hanging up on my very own Easter tree (pussywillow in a vase). After checking out the final Easter market at Schönbrunn, we decided to take the palace tour before going to the Musikverein to see the Vienna Mozart Orchestra. These are the guys who play Mozart while wearing 18^th century dress. I know what you’re thinking: “but that’s so gimmicky! They’re just appealing to ignorant tourists!” To which I say, “Baloney.” Yes, there were a lot of tourists at the performance. But you know what? Sometimes there are really good musicians who like playing great music and also like playing dress-up. Let’s be real: if I got to wear fun costumes in my daily life, you can bet I would wear the everloving tar out of those costumes. It’s just cool. So there.
• Saturday: we went to the Naschmarkt to pick up some groceries, gawk at the amazing assortment of produce, and grab falafel wraps at Dr. Falafel. We did more grocery shopping elsewhere (because my mom is awesome, and stocked me up before she left), and then just had a quiet rest of the day at the hotel: knitting, reading magazines, listening to BBC Radio 4 and watching old episodes of Midsomer Murders on YouTube. We were too lazy to go out for dinner, so I exercised my sweet ordering-take-out-in-German skills and got us some Chinese food from the place down the street.
• Sunday: Easter service at Christ Church, the Anglican church here in Vienna. Sadly, we had to ditch the linger-longer after the service to walk back to the hotel (through the Belvedere gardens), check out, and enjoy our last tea and cake (from Oberlaa) before getting Mom to the airport.

So that’s everything! It was a really successful visit, not just because I really like my mom. We paced ourselves, and only did the things we really wanted to do. Sure, we could have spent that Saturday visiting the Riesenrad and going to see The Third Man, but it was cold and rainy, and we knew it was more important to enjoy ourselves than it was to tick off every little box. And that, I think, is the most important part of successful travelling: do what you’ll actually enjoy. It’s your trip, after all.

Oh, and this is what it looked like that week. Thanks, spring!

 

Warm Weather Wanderings

Tags

apricot, children's books, First District, German, ice cream, language, reading, topfen, Vienna, wandering

I got out of class at 10 AM today (it’s a Wednesday, and it’s only for this term, so don’t judge me too harshly). It’s also been deliciously warm and sunny lately, and today was no exception. I had a few errands to run, and I figured I might as well use my own two feet to run them. After all, why not make the most of it?

The post office is right around the corner, and the bank is only a couple of block away, so I had thought this would be fairly straightforward. Sadly, “the best-laid plans of mice and men”, etc. The machine at the bank was being temperamental and refusing to cooperate, when all I wanted to do was make a simple transfer and pay my health insurance bill on time. Grrr. On the bright side, it means a trip to the bigger branch down in the first district, which is rarely unwelcome.

Off we go!

There are still a few vestiges of winter clinging to the city. On the shadier streets, there are still diminishing piles of snow, covered in gravel, with little rivulets flowing to lower ground. The covers haven’t come off the fountains yet, lest we get another cold spell and have the whole thing freeze over. Plenty of people are still wearing their winter coats, though to be fair, old Viennese women are to fur coats as Charleton Heston was to guns—you will pry them from their cold, dead hands.

Sorry. sir, but being Moses doesn’t mean you were right about everything.

All the same, the sun is shining, and there’s hardly a cloud in the sky. Over at the bank, the transfer goes much more smoothly—once I realize I’ve neglected to fill out a section of the necessary form. This happens often enough that I ought to be wise to it by now, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, now I’m downtown, and near the site of the greatest ice cream in the city, Zanoni & Zanoni. They have so many flavors, and the prices are really great—two scoops on a cone for only two Euro? That’s pretty much a directive from on high that you need to buy some ice cream. I went for a  Topfen-and-apricot ice cream cone (Topfen, for the non-Austrians, is apparently called quark cheese in English—at least, thus saith Wikipedia).

Don’t make that face. This is actually a delicious flavor for ice cream.

Once the ice cream cone was effectively demolished, I needed something else to do. But what? Thankfully, a nearby bookstore caught my eye. Sadly, it turned out to be all law and business books, and I wasn’t in the market for the newest edition of EU Pharmaceutical Law (though it looks like a page-turner). I did end up having a nice conversation with a kindly tax lawyer (if you can believe it), whose name was Johann. I decided that perhaps, it was time to look for a book I might actually buy. Since my sister had mentioned wanting some German-language children’s books for my nephew, I figured that I could devote my time to this and thus classify my wanderings as productivity.

I couldn’t seem to find one I liked, though. He’s only sixteen months old, so I feel like his books should be heavy on pictures and light on words, and everything I found just seemed so wordy. Plus, I just like children’s cooks that rhyme. That said, I did find a copy of The Gruffalo in German (fun fact: it’s called der Grüffalo), which was pretty cool. To my German-speaking friends: any suggestions on children’s books for the under-two set? I’ll be really grateful.

After all, he already has this in English.

My Life Lately

Tags

exams, Justified, mother, procrastination, schoolwork, springtime, sunshine, television

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve gone a while in between postings here. It’s been a hectic couple of weeks here chez Marillenbaum: we’ve been getting this term’s issue of Polemics ready for print (and I wrote an article!), plus I participated in a conference at the UN (which was, to put it diplomatically, a “valuable learning experience”), and of course, watching indecent amounts of television maintaining my working knowledge of popular culture.

For now, thankfully, things have quieted down. The conference is over, the magazine is at the printer’s, and I’m on season 3 of Justified, which may just be my new favorite TV show. It’s time to start ramping up for end-of-term exams and papers. This is not helped by the fact that it is absolutely gorgeous outside, meaning that I look out my window and realize how much more fun the rest of the world seems to be having. Naturally, I convince myself that I can study just as well outside, which works until I actually leave the building and realize that I don’t have a desk outside, but since we’re here maybe we should just go buy an ice cream cone?

However, I have powerful incentives to be disciplined. Not failing, for one. That’s big. Plus, my mother is coming to visit at the end of the month, which means that my paper on organ trafficking needs to be done before she arrives. Then, I can enjoy her visit—and this nifty new “sunshine” thing we’ve got going on here—with a clear conscience. 

Adventures in Domesticity: Ironing Edition

Tags

adventures in domesticity, domestic life, grown-up, ironing, laundry, problems, responsibility, stains

Today I had a little adventure with my laundry. I was trying to be responsible, actually folding my laundry and putting it away (!) instead of simply picking pieces off the drying rack as I needed them. since I had the time, and then they would be ready to wear later. See? Responsibility!

Watch me rock.

So, I wrangle the iron and ironing board in from the hallway, turn on RFI (no reason I can’t do housework and French at the same time), and get cracking. It has admittedly taken me a while to become competent at ironing. I never really did much of it as a kid, because my mother was sensible and just bought clothes that didn’t need to be ironed. Shirts are kind of the bane of my existence, because there are just so many parts. Collar, yoke, panels, sleeves—who has time for that?

You tell them, Sweet Brown.

But needs must. I finish one shirt, and move on to the second one. All is well, until I move the iron and notice a large orange-brown mark on the front of the shirt. Panic—and a bit of swearing—ensues. Was there something on the iron? What did I just do? Is this thing ruined?

I dash off a frantic Facebook message to my mother, and then I realize: it’s not even 11 AM here in Vienna, which means it’s not even 3 AM back home. There is no way she’s getting this message any time soon. I am on my own.

Oh, dear…

It’s time to turn to the bible of domesticity—Good Housekeeping. Seriously, these people are the best. One quick search (and an examination of the offending iron) reveals that there was nothing on the iron itself; I simply scorched the fabric. I feel slightly relieved, apart from the fact that the iron was on the “cotton” setting; it shouldn’t have been too hot! All the same, there are instructions. Place the clothing in cold water immediately. Done. This buys me some more time to peruse the directions. Their first recommendation is peroxide, which I don’t have. Next best thing: vinegar or lemon juice, the latter of which is mercifully in my fridge. Then, one must launder the affected garment and let it air dry. No heat—you don’t want to set the stain. Now, it seems like my luck is starting to turn; for once, no one is using the washing machine. I pluck my shirt from the sink, run it down the hall, and throw it into the washing machine. It’s still there. We’ll see how this goes.

Not doing this again for a while, though.

Holy Springtime, Batman!

Tags

spring, sunshine, Vienna, weather, winter

Guess what, guys? It was FIFTY DEGREES outside today! Coming smack in the middle of a Viennese winter, you know what this meant?

It’s basically spring! Now, I know, real spring is still a while away (March 20, if you want to be all precise about it), but I’m taking what I can get.

“But Victoria,” I hear you saying. “I thought you liked winter! Weren’t you coming over all enthusiastic about the sparkly lights and the hot punch?” True, and well done for paying attention. That said, I have a very simple feeling about snow and winter. Before Christmas, I love it! It’s pretty and sparkly and magical, and you can wear ugly sweaters and eat cookies and watch wonderful old movies. But after Christmas and New Year’s?

That’s when it’s time to take off the eggnog goggles and remember that winter is really incredibly cold. And it’s snowy, and icy, and that kind of windy that feels like a hundred little ice picks doing the Hopak on your face. Plus, between the blasting cold and the blasting heat we use to counteract it, your skin feels terrible. All of this was true before Christmas, but then, it’s atmospheric. It would be weird if it wasn’t icy and snowy, but once you don’t have a fantastic winter holiday to look forward to, the magic goes away pretty fast.

All of this is a very long way of saying that I got myself outside today to enjoy this nice warm weather. I wore my lightweight coat! I had to stuff my scarf and hat in my purse because it was too warm to wear them! I wished I had brought my sunglasses because it was so sunny!

Can you tell I’m excited? (Courtesy of fmgbain on flickr)

Right now, it’s five o’clock. Recently, that has meant that it was pitch black, and the wind would start to pick up. But today?

Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s only sunset. Still not dark. Soon, it will be warm out all of the time, and I can wear sundresses and buy some new sandals and hang out in shops just because they have air conditioning. There will be picnics! And ice cream! And…having to start shaving my legs again, but it’s a small price to pay in exchange for some good old Vitamin D.

Feels so good.