The end of last week was characterized by some Parisian visitors which Matt John and I spent a good amount of time taking to our favorite places to drink, eat and well drink some more. Sidenote: most of my time outside my room is spent with coffee in hand. One night on the way to our favorite/only Indian restaurant we emerged to be confronted by the dreaded u-bahn ticket checkers. While their threat is omnipresent, I've only had to show my ticket 3 times since I got here.
With my monthly ticket in hand and a friendly smile I approached the woman who had stopped us. She took my ticket, returned the smile and asked me a question I thought I understood. I said "No, not this night" in response and her smile disappeared faster than I realized facial muscles could move. I then gleaned that her response was something along the lines of "then I can't let you through".
This boggled my mind. See, the question I thought she asked me was "are you going out drinking tonight?" I was with 7 other people my age and I thought she was making friendly, though admittedly awkward, small talk. WRONG. She actually asked me for my student ID proving I had the right to use a student's semester u-bahn pass. The problem of the words I know for ID related things, I didn't hear any of them. I heard Trinken, to drink. So when I said no, I was essentially admitted to trying to cheat Vienna's dear old subway system. I eventually figured out what it was she really asked, showed her my school ID and continued through. Fortunately (for me at least) those traveling with me had much larger problems with their subway tickets meaning no one witnessed me make a fool of myself first hand. Still, I thought it was too funny to hide from the world.
A search of my ITunes library has yielded...
John Coltrane's Blue Train (we actually came off the orange line but disregard that)
and
M.Ward's (again i know) Chinese Translation
stay tuned for the beginning of a series highlighting some of vienna's fine establishments.
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