Moving About

I'm not going to post more photos of Vienna--you can find ones taken by pros all over the web--but here's one of the Opera House, just to show we were there.

Our big projects for this weekend were practical. Last night we made the long trek on the bus to the enormous Ikea store near the even more enormous Europark mall, and bought some small things for the apartment. Today we trekked around town looking for used bikes, and that turned out to involve walking at least two or three miles on foot and a beautiful climb up a path over the ridge that separates the Old City from the rest of town. Along the way we found a poem called "Am Moenchsberg" by Georg Trakl, one of Salzburg's most famous poets, on a plaque, which was pretty cool. And we walked through a big open-air market where they were selling all kinds of food, flowers, and such--but no bicycles. So we walked some more, and out in a neighborhood to the west we finally found two stores selling used bikes--and each had one bike that fit our budget and our modest standards. (Marlyce's is definitely more stylish than mine.)


We promptly got on, made our way to the river, and took the path along it all the way home (including a fairly extensive detour, when we discovered that there were no more chances to turn either left or right for a half mile or so).

If I were really with it, I'd have taken pictures of the bikes already, I suppose. But you'll have to settle for a couple of shots of Salzburg in the snow, taken last week. The first one here is looking toward the foot/bike bridge that I usually take on the way to the university. The second is from my office window.

A last thought: if you're interested, you can see not just a map of Salzburg but quite good satellite photos just by searching for it on google maps. If you search for Resatzstrasse, you can even see the roof of our building . . . the second one back from the main road. My office and classes are in a university building on Akademiestrasse.