The Sound of Music

Wien. Back in the city of waltzes after a few days of incubator workshops in Graz. Even though the recorded info-voices in the subway still sound a bit scary, I've liked Vienna since the first time I came here, inter-railing with my pal Anders in 1988 (coming from France, we spent half a day being confused about how expensive everything was, until we remembered that an Austrian schilling was just half a French franc). I like it's compactness combined with the grandness of its buildings and squares, the way it's steeped in history in a contemporary way (with classical music spilling out of windows everywhere). I like its cafés, I like the sausage in the Albertina kiosk (especially in the evening, at Opera break, when the place gets packed by people in tuxedos and evening-gowns downing Käsewurst and Bier) and I like the notion that underneath the polished bourgeois facades of buildings and people, it's all over-analyzed Freudian insanity, barely controlled. And they still play "Life is life" on the radio.