Tidbits

A few things I wanted to mention that didn't make it into my regular posts over the last week and change.

• In Amsterdam, I saw a guy sitting on a street corner wearing two cowboy hats -- one of which was foam, neon-green, and comically oversized -- playing the didgeridoo. If it wasn't Amsterdam, it would have been the craziest f&!king thing I saw all week.



• In Budapest there seems to be a real business in what Cory Doctorow calls craphounding. All over town (or at least the neighbourhood around my hostel) there's these big piles of junk that people have thrown out, and I'd always be seeing people scavenging in them for useful stuff, like copper wire or repairable furniture. It was interesting until this morning when the pile outside the hostel's front entrance had grown to such an extent that it had taken over the entire sidewalk and I basically had to walk through it to get out.



• I've been really charmed weather-wise this trip. On several occasions -- the bus ride into Krakow from the airport and the ride out to Auschwitz come to mind -- I've observed really heavy rain from a safe dry place. The same thing happened this morning in Budapest; when I left the hostel it was grey and drizzly, and by the time I got on the train it was raining pretty hard, but somewhere on the train ride it cleared up and all day today in Vienna it's been beautiful.



• Twice now I've bought what I thought would be delicious grape Fanta and got some decidedly less delicious. First, in Amsterdam, I was eating at a pizza place and fointed at the purple Fanta sign on the fountain, assuming "purple = grape". It tasted kind of weird and not really grape-y, and later I figured out it was probably cassis. Today at the Budapest train station I grabbed some drinks to get rid of my last Hungarian coins, and one of them was a green Fanta, with a clear picture of grapes on the label. When I tried it, though, it was pretty disgusting and, again, not very grape-y. But, yet, it had grapes on the label. I figure it must have been some sort of weird sour grape or champagne flavoured Fanta, but I couldn't manage more than a handful of sips to figure it out.



• The Viennese computer I'm at is giving me Blogger in German, so I'm having to guess at all the commands. On top of that, it's a german keyboard, which thankfully Windows has let me remap to USEnglish, but still when I look at the keys there's umlauts and an "Einfg" key. Here's hoping that when I click "Post veroffentlichen" this will actually post...