Vienna Police currently has a billboard-campaign going with the tagline »Police – more than a profession«. I am not sure about how to interpret this one (click to enlarge):

I can only think of two possibilities to bridge the gap between image and text (»FREEDOM – The POLICE. More than a profession.«), and I like neither:

1. The POLICE. More than the freedom to lash out without consequences.
2. The POLICE. More than protecting the freedom of the bourgeois from dangerous hairy people with torches, high visibility vests and a white flag (sneaky anarchists!).

Officially, Austria has been smoke free for well over a year now, yet there still is quite a smoke house blues going on.

There are several websites that list smoke free locations, yet a lot of them list the Sperl, which has three or four non-smoking tables in the middle of smoke hell. So the handpicked locations I list here are all

(a) either completely smoke free or the smokers are locked away nice and tight.

(b) offering a good experience to spend your time at. Sure people have different tastes, so maybe you don't fancy the places I do, but at least you're not going to end up in a place where the non-smoking area is next to the shitter. I'm not going to list Starbucks and the like either.

I for one am sick of the itchy eye, sick of the stink the morning after, and certainly sick of the headache, so I give you these:

Cafés

Restaurants

Lists

• http://www.nichtraucherlokale.net/
• http://da.stinkts.net/

On Thursady I bought a postcard with a picture of and an aphorism by Alfred Polgar:

I tried to find an image of said postcard on the web – with, a-hum, unexpected results:

When on Pfaffstättener Kogel (Anninger, near Baden (near Vienna)), you can visit the Rudolf-Proksch-Schutzhütte. It sports a platform 9m in height, offering a great view into the plains of the Burgenland.

There also comes a toilet with the Proksch-Hütte, which offers a very fine view while hanging your piss:

Never have I been to a city which is stinking of piss as utterly as Vienna does – dog piss, cat piss, human piss...And the vomit! All over the place there is vomit. Is there a collective malnutrition problem leading to constant vomit or what is wrong with these people?

Says Selma, in Vienna for two years.

Amazon provides it, Amazon dislikes it

It's been almost a year (exactly a year next Wednesday) since I lived in Britain and left for a trip to the summer and posted »Summer in the Vienna«.

Well, it's summer in the Vienna again - today we had just below 30° C.

I'm living in Vienna now and I'm going on another trip tomorrow. Have a look at the picture and guess know where I'm going to spend my holidays.

Yesterday I joined the monthly Vienna Critical Mass Bike Ride once again. At first it was so great that I couldn't remember why I hadn't been there since the first one I joined in November. Hundreds of cyclists populated the streets that reverberate with the noise of a thousand engines at all other times.

But the longer it took, the more I did remember why for months I hadn't felt the urge to be a part of Critical Mass again. Some of the reasons are people placing empty beer cans on the hoods of patiently waiting cars and  people blocking oncoming and otherwise uninvolved traffic for no other reason than spite. Also, later the same night I witnessed the weekly inline skate event. What I liked most about the hundreds of inline skaters was the sound: none. Once you take away the cars and replace them by wheels powered by humans, the sound of the city turns into a gentle wzzzzz. Not with Critical Mass though: Critical Mass needs boom bikes, blasting obnoxious music all over the place. After all, people could think cyclists aren't happy people when there's no noise involved.

Anyway, most of the time it was still great and I wouldn't want to have missed the opportunity to cycle along the Gürtel, which is a kind of Autobahn encircling centre Vienna.

I took some pictures and managed to find a spot in the back room but the bloody gallery is broken, prepared them fucking manually for the backroom and I also shot two short clips (left one static, capturing front to back, on the right overtaking the pack from back to front).

They're no great example of suspense in contemporary Viennese film, (in other words: pretty boring to watch), but the sheer mass still is impressive.

Vienna is not only way down South for somebody who came here from Britain, it also is way East. Metternich allegedly said that the Balkans begin at the Rennweg and the shared history of of Austria and the Balkans still is quite evident. Thus, somebody opened the »Ost Klub« – a club dedicated to South-Eastern European music, food, and vodka. Luckily it's only a 10-minute walk away from where we live, so last night we went to see (and listen to) Besh o DroM. Both A. and me are past 27 now, so unfortunately we had to pay the full admission but the boys and girl were worth every cent and we had a fantastic night out.

• Besh o droM. There is a playlist of mostly instrumental songs autostarting when you open the website. You can navigate through it in the top left corner. If you care to disclose your email address you can also download a handfull of songs.
• Ost Klub. Very nice club close to Vienna's Schwarzenbergplatz, charming location and as far as I see pretty good music.

I had to deal with Real Estate Inc. since mid December. I have been yelled at, told that with my attitude I would end in the last student's pit and that we were not at a Turkish Bazar when the price suddenly increased by 25 EUR/month.

Today I saw it through to the end and signed a contract for a nice and quite and bright and very cozy flat, hoping that everything will still turn out nicely. But not before another kick in the groin from the deity these people worship. Inc. (read: »incompetence«) also applies to the agent who is managing the flat. Although I had sent an email with nice and clear bullet points yesterday, one of them being »please send us the contract so we can read it before we get to your office and thus won't have to waste your valuable time reading it there«. Sure enough we didn't receive the contract and sure enough when we got there, he started sighing, rolling with his eyes and being very bossy in general once we started going through the contract.
Then he said yes, the date on the contract was in fact 1st of January (many a time we told them 1st of Febuary) but he wouldn't charge us any rent in January. And of course he started his eye-rolling-sighing-my-time-is-more-expensive-than-yours-and-I-am-important-and-powerful-and-you-are-clearly-not-routine again when I kindly asked if I could maybe have that in writing and possibly signed by him by any chance.

Long story short: after the agent all of a sudden became a different one, after the agency taking care of the flat all of a sudden also became a different one, after four weeks of communication hell, I signed the contract and got the keys.

But neither the keys to the house nor the elevator keys fit. So I can get into my flat but not into the container that houses it.
Instead I have a shitload of keyes that might fit some lock in the house, in Vienna, or in a chreese factory in the Austrian Alpes and unlock a great secret (click image for complete picture).

My nerves. And I'm so sick of getting kicked by this bloody deity.