Saturday, March 31, 2018
European Vacation
I just got back from my annual trip to Vienna with my law students. It's always a weird blend of sightseeing, helping people make oral arguments about bizarre made up factual scenarios, and waking up to a deluge of emails from a workplace that is seven hours behind me, but I enjoy it. It helps when, like this year, my students have basic life skills and therefore aren't emailing me to get directions from their hotels to the competition or asking me for wakeup calls. It's also nice that Austrian wine seems to be about twice the strength of your typical wine, at least if my level of buzz is any gauge, and I think we know that it is. It's just science, really.
This year got off to a not-so-great start thanks to Austrian Airlines, which cancelled my direct flight from Chicago to Vienna and did not bother to tell me, meaning that I only discovered that they had tried to re-book me on a flight getting in almost two days later when I went to check the flight status online before I left for the airport. After much telephonic shouting, I was booked on a flight arriving a mere eight hours later, but with a middle seat and a healthy layover in Frankfurt. It is truly not easy to sleep when you are wedged in between a giant fat man and a hyperactive German preteen for nine hours over the Atlantic. On the plus side, I finally saw The Shape of Water. Turns out United edits out the masturbation, btw and spoiler alert.
One I arrived, however, the highlights were plentiful. There was an amazing Keith Haring show playing at the Albertina, and the German tabloids were running ridiculous stories about Heidi Klum. We visited an old flak tower from WWII that has been turned into a surprisingly freewheeling aquarium, and discovered that Murder, She Wrote is called something that loosely translates to "Murder is Her Hobby." My students did not win, but that meant they got a couple of free days in Vienna, and I fit in a side trip to Bratislava, where the train station is kind of scary but the Old Town looks like something out of Beauty & the Beast (2017).
More tales to come, I am certain.
