Love, Vienna, and Books

While most of you would consider that for me love=books/books=love, that is not specifically what this post is about.  On the love part: isn’t amazing how you can just love people within minutes?  Vanessa, Robert, Gunter, and little Ellie are examples of this.  Just…boom.  I’ve heard about them for years (well not Ellie, she isn’t even two) from other members of my family.  But I didn’t think the connection would be there.  It is, and I am so pleased.  I haven’t had the chance to spend much time with children while travelling and Ellie was such a treat.  She’s so precise and patient.  Really, the whole weekend was fabulous.

So, having spent a wonderful weekend with the family in Munich I moved on today to Vienna.  I need to be in Budapest tomorrow and this seemed like the best way to make the journey.  I got into town with plenty of time to visit the one museum Lindsey and I missed in December (not a fine arts museum!  No Jesuses).  It’s actually a combination of three museums at the Hofburg Palace: the Imperial Porcelain and Silver Collection, the Sisi Museum, and the Imperial Apartments.  You wouldn’t think it, but the dishes are the best part of the display. 

But not all experiences here in Vienna are new.  I backtracked into Demel to repeat the wonderful Weinerschnitzel meal.  Oink.

As for books: I am reading away while railing around Europe.  My trusty Kindle proved untrustworthy in Belgium and had to be replaced in Greece (traumatic, but solvable.  And I had the history of Prague to see me through).   I am still working away on Innocents Abroad by Twain, but I find that reading things originally published serially as a novel puts me off.  I’ve had problems in the past with Dickens on this point.  David Copperfield and I were not on friendly terms due to incessant punch making.  But as most of you know I interleave my book reading by having 3-5 open at any given time.  Keeping track of them on the Kindle is a little trickier than the bedside table, but it leaves more room for a water glass.  Anyway, I just finished the latest effort by Elizabeth George.  I hated it.  Somehow I thought that since she wasn’t writing murder mysteries set in England but rather in her own Washington State it would be better.  Less minutiae about class differences and no one moaning on book after book after book about whatever in their life they weren’t going to get over.  Nope.  Yet another book where no one knows anything about anybody despite living on Whidbey Island which has a population of nothing.  Small towns really don’t work that way.  Big towns don’t either.  Oh, and it has a weird Twilight-esque protagonist and ends with a cliffhanger.  Augh!!  I’m going to bliss out on essays by Nick Hornby to scrub that out of my brain.  Then a chapter or two of Twain.  And I have two biographies to dip into sooner or later.