That’s a drug store.  I needed more salt packets for rinsing my nose.  It is so DAMN smokey in Vienna.  Everywhere, people are smoking.  Cafes, restaurants, on the street.  So I’m being diligent about rinsing.  But… I mis-calculated how many packets to bring.  Doh!  So we went in search of a Walgreen’s, CVS, etc.  Well, they have McDonald’s, Burger King and a hundred other American stores and brands here.  But pharmacies work differently.  And maybe better too.

An apotheke is a pretty small store staffed by pharmacists, although I doubt they use that word.  It looks way too small to have much in stock at all.  It’s really like the part of the Walgreen’s behind the pharmacy glass, not the department store in front.  The pharmacists each have their own little counter and computer.  You tell them what you need, discuss the options, they enter it into the computer, and the product pops up out of a hole in the desk!  I don’t know if they have people in the basement or trained squirrels that can read computer screens.   But it works. 

So today, Saturday, was supposed to be rainy.  Instead it was a little overcast but otherwise very pleasent and mild.  We ate at a different hotel than the one we are staying because we read their breakfast was ‘superb’.  Well, it was good, but not at good as the breakfast where we are staying.  It was cheaper.   Only thirty-something dollars (20 euros each.)  Something is whacky when you start thinking breakfast is cheap at only thirty dollars. 

When I used to travel to London a lot, the rule of thumb was you’d pay the same number of pounds as you paid dollars in the US.  So if breakfast in the US was, say, 14 dollars, you’d expect to pay about 14 pounds.  Pounds cost a bunch more than one dollar each so you were paying a lot more.  Now, at least in Germany and Austria, things cost way more euros than dollars and euros cost way more than a dollar.  The breakfast that costs 30 euros here would  not cost 20 dollars in the US.  So we’re finding things are mostly 1.5 more euros than dollars and euros cost more than 1.5 dollars each.  And yet this city is packed.  But not so many Americans.  Which is not too hard to understand.

We went to the Kunstforum today to see the exhibit of Monet, Kandinsky and Rothko.  It was a bit of a rip-off in that they have one Monet, three Kandinsky’s and one Rothko.  We’ve been staying just three nights per city until now.  This is our first four night stop.  Not sure what we’re going to do Sunday, probably see one or two museums.  We’d really like to sit in a cafe and read,  but we get smoked out too quickly.

Sunday is supposed to reach the 70’s temperature-wise.  Finally shorts weather!