Vienna - More on the City

I have some time to kill before I head out to the airport so I thought I would fill you guys in on some slightly interesting observations-occurances of the last 24 hours.

To begin, last night I stayed at a hostel called Wombatz. It's a pretty nice hostel as the standards go, more like a hotel with minimal furnishings than a hostel. On the bottom floor of the hostel there is actually a bar, and when you check into the hostel you get a ticket for a free drink so I thought I would go down and check it out. I ended up striking up a chat with a nice German guy named Theo and after a bit of talking we decided to take the train to the center of the city (about 10 minutes) and check out a historical-heritage wine bar. Oddly enough, when we were leaving the train we ran into another group of folks from the hostel who were going in the same direction and since there is always more fun in a crowd we decided to hang out with these guys (2 americans, 2 aussies & 1 canadian). The two Aussie had guitars with them so we found an area near an empty bench and they started playing music and singing. It was really good...until...The Austrian Polizi showed up. You see, there is a law in Austria that you cannot play music outside after 10pm. The police informed them that they would have to pay a fine of 21 euro per person. And, they wanted to see the passports of those guys. When the Aussies told them they did not have their passports or 21 euros on their person the Politzi told them that thez would take them to jail for 21 hours instead. Wow, luckily for those guys the Politzi accepted their driver's license for identification and everyone loaned them enough euros to pay the fine so thez would not have to go to jail! I have pictures of this occasion (before and after the politzi, i'll post them later today)

Another interesting thing in Austria is the recycling. There are actually people who work in the dining room at KFC and it's their job to pick up the trays with the rubbish on them, and then rinse off the paper dishes and sort them, cups in one bin, food in another bin and plastic in the other bin. Isn't that pretty intense?

Something in Budapest that was interesting was the grocery store. It will cost you about 50 forint to use a buggy in the store or you can use a hand basket for free. When it comes time to checkout, you must purchase the bags to put your groceries in unless you brought some from home, and you take all of your purchases out of your cart and put them on the belt, then the cashier rings it all up and puts them back in your buggy, you pay and then you push the cart over to a counter area where you self-bag your groceries. Surprisingly enough, it's a rather efficient process and because people pay for their bags (which are big like shopping bags) they tend to be conservative and there is likely less waste as a result.

So, my time in Austria or (Österreich) is about up, so I will leave this blog for now.

Hope everyone is doing well. Take care.

Jennifer