My first bloggable comment is that Vienna is much flatter than I thought it was – looking out of the plane, all you can see for miles is strip farming on relatively flat land. I still remember the lushness of Tyrol – green mountains - a lot of rain – which after being on a bus through the boring long autobahns of Germany was literally a breath of fresh air. This looks more like Holland.
The first thing I do is attend a pre-conference social dinner with project partners. This was on the top of a hill(Over ruling my entire first paragraph), over looking Vienna in a vineyard. It was quite nice. We had a buffet with many Germanic foods – roast pork, bbq – generally a lot of protein.
Apparently CummilBrat(?? – My German deteriorates by the day), which is roast pork with a cumin sprinkled rind is a specialty, it was certainly pretty tasty. We also had some sort of vegetable that is similar to asparagus, but not asparagus in a salad. To wash it all down it was white wine spritzers, while sitting among the grapes they came from. Some Italian members of the project consortium thought this was sacrilege, not just ruining the wine, but also ruining the water. We must take good water for granted in Scotland.
I think because spritzers are low in alcohol I had too many. My stomach didn’t feel the full schilling(Gedit???), for the rest of the trip.
The rest of the conference was mostly work. I never made it to the centre, where I’m sure there’s some very nice things to say. The chocolate cakes in the conference coffee sessions were wonderful, so I assume the real thing would be even better. I had Wiener schnitzel for dinner twice. I didn’t think it was anything special.
The only other worthy thing to report is some late night drinks I had in a small student pool hall called “impuls in sound”. It was really bizarre, sitting with people from the conference in the dingy type of bar which I really love.
I’m afraid that’s it. The only photo I took was from the hotel.
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