Vienna: Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll. And food.

These two shots are taken from the same corner. On the left we see Cheese standing by his university-provided apartment complex. On the right we see Cheese next to Club Xema. That's right folks, I'm staying in a bona fida Europeon red light district with at least three brothels in a two-block radius. Of course this is all across the street from the State Fair-like amusement park. (Drop off the kids, and come take an adult ride!) Now I know what all of you are thinking: Awesome! (Ok, just Rob) but walking home past the Eastern bloc girls running down cars at every corner whilst various Guidos and West Si-eed pretenders kept an eye on the whole operation didn't really sit well with me. It's nice they are so liberated here, but I'm betting its more along the lines of simply ignoring the foreigners and their problems.

I did think our location could help out with one current issue facing the organizer of Cheese's conference. Held in stately Vienna, the organizer couldn't resist having a meeting-ending reception as a full on Ball. As in fancy dress and ballroom dancing. Attendees are even provided lessons every night this week for those who lack the required social education. Now, given that its a computer-geek conference, the organizer has aleady taken the step of forcing every female in his institute to attend. Even with this, I'm betting the ratio of men to women at the conference is going to be something like 3.14159 to 1. I suggested we then collect some of the local street walkers to help make up for this deficit. That way, every programmer gets a real live women and the girls get to go to a fancy ball. I know, I know, I'm brilliant at times aren't I? Of course, all of this assumes three hours perpindicular with a programmer is preferable to their regular horizontal routine.

Like most vegitarians, Cheese lives vicariously through others who still have the divine pleasure of eating flesh. So, the first thing we had to do in downtown Vienna, was go to Figlmuller for world's widest weinerschneitzel:

Sadly, not for use as a tortilla

Specially sliced to be so thin, and breaded with crumbled Emperor's rolls, it was quite a tasty treat and even Cheese couldn't resist momentarily forsaking his vegan vows. If you have a guidebook to Vienna, this place will be mentioned. Be sure and bring it to flip through whilst waiting on your weiner, or you'll look like an out-of-place dork.

After lunch we headed over to the Kunstmuseum which had an exhibit on, what else, Psychedelic art from the 60's and 70s. The art itself was groovy as expected, and your Mars was happy to see real albums being used as art (at least the covers). Plus, the exhibit was so complete as to feature actual arty acid tabs, my favorite being the sheet made out like a telegramm from Arthur Ginsberg. So this, along with the light-show projection room and booming 60's jam music (thankfully not the Dead) had all the ingredients for a full-on rave to break out at any moment. Unfortunately, I was already under observation for trying to read the liner notes on their very rare copy of Farewell Aldebaran by Judy Henske & Jerry Yester.

The exhibit shed some light on a recent confusing moment for me: the big visual sequence at the end of 2001:A Space Odyssey. By 1968, light shows were viewed as a new art-form in their own right, one that could provide a trip for those too square to drop acid. So Kubrick was merely using the lastest and greatest visual method to express some mind expansion. Guess its one of those moments that needs to be surrounded by the rest of the year to be fully appreciated and understood.

We followed this with a tour of that old Europeon standard, the Big Ol' Gothic Church. The cool part was walking through the catacombs beneath, where bones had been stacked like cordwood in the good days, and scattered Helter-Skelter during the Black Plague years. I should have snuck a couple of photos for posterity.

We walked through the downtown square (there are dozens of beautiful old buildings, I'll try and Flickr the lot of them) before heading off to dinner. Our destination was a restaurant called simply "Burrito". Nowadays, Burrito is a mixed African-Asian restaurant, and even in its heyday was simply an Austrian restaurant run by a local enamored with Mexico. The food was excellent though, and thankfully they took the time to create a veggie dish for Cheese. We assured the Ghannan owner that he could simply wrap up his meat and rice dishes in a tortilla, and the many who visited asking for burritos would be quite happy.

Tomorrow, I'm going back to the Video Game museum. You can even play the old games. If they didn't close at 6PM, this might be my last post.